5,267 research outputs found
A miniature triaxial apparatus for investigating the micromechanics of granular soils with in situ X-ray micro-tomography scanning
The development of a miniature triaxial apparatus is presented. In conjunction with an X-ray microtomography (termed as X-ray μCT hereafter) facility and advanced image processing techniques, this apparatus can be used for in situ investigation of the micro-scale mechanical behavior of granular soils under shear. The apparatus allows for triaxial testing of a miniature dry sample with a size of 8 mm × 16 mm (diameter × height). In situ triaxial testing of a 0.4–0.8 mm Leighton Buzzard sand (LBS) under a constant confining pressure of 500 kPa is presented. The evolutions of local porosities (i.e., the porosities of regions associated with individual particles), particle kinematics (i.e., particle translation and particle rotation) of the sample during the shear are quantitatively studied using image processing and analysis techniques. Meanwhile, a novel method is presented to quantify the volumetric strain distribution of the sample based on the results of local porosities and particle tracking. It is found that the sample, with nearly homogenous initial local porosities, starts to exhibit obvious inhomogeneity of local porosities and localization of particle kinematics and volumetric strain around the peak of deviatoric stress. In the post-peak shear stage, large local porosities and volumetric dilation mainly occur in a localized band. The developed triaxial apparatus, in its combined use of X-ray μCT imaging techniques, is a powerful tool to investigate the micro-scale mechanical behavior of granular soils
Expandable and Rapidly Differentiating Human Induced Neural Stem Cell Lines for Multiple Tissue Engineering Applications
Limited availability of human neurons poses a significant barrier to progress in biological and preclinical studies of the human nervous system. Current stem cell-based approaches of neuron generation are still hindered by prolonged culture requirements, protocol complexity, and variability in neuronal differentiation. Here we establish stable human induced neural stem cell (hiNSC) lines through the direct reprogramming of neonatal fibroblasts and adult adipose-derived stem cells. These hiNSCs can be passaged indefinitely and cryopreserved as colonies. Independently of media composition, hiNSCs robustly differentiate into TUJ1-positive neurons within 4 days, making them ideal for innervated co-cultures. In vivo, hiNSCs migrate, engraft, and contribute to both central and peripheral nervous systems. Lastly, we demonstrate utility of hiNSCs in a 3D human brain model. This method provides a valuable interdisciplinary tool that could be used to develop drug screening applications as well as patient-specific disease models related to disorders of innervation and the brain
Plasma MMP1, MMP8 and MMP13 expression in breast cancer: protective role of MMP8 against lymph node metastasis
Image Quality Evaluation of HDR Displays
Psychophysical experiments were conducted to investigate the impacting factors on the image quality of HDR displays. The results indicate that the OLED display has advantages over IPS and VA LCDs due to its lower minimum luminance level and less pixel interaction, thus being an appropriate choice to display HDR contents
Computational Complexity of Atomic Chemical Reaction Networks
Informally, a chemical reaction network is "atomic" if each reaction may be
interpreted as the rearrangement of indivisible units of matter. There are
several reasonable definitions formalizing this idea. We investigate the
computational complexity of deciding whether a given network is atomic
according to each of these definitions.
Our first definition, primitive atomic, which requires each reaction to
preserve the total number of atoms, is to shown to be equivalent to mass
conservation. Since it is known that it can be decided in polynomial time
whether a given chemical reaction network is mass-conserving, the equivalence
gives an efficient algorithm to decide primitive atomicity.
Another definition, subset atomic, further requires that all atoms are
species. We show that deciding whether a given network is subset atomic is in
, and the problem "is a network subset atomic with respect to a
given atom set" is strongly -.
A third definition, reachably atomic, studied by Adleman, Gopalkrishnan et
al., further requires that each species has a sequence of reactions splitting
it into its constituent atoms. We show that there is a to decide whether a given network is reachably atomic, improving
upon the result of Adleman et al. that the problem is . We
show that the reachability problem for reachably atomic networks is
-.
Finally, we demonstrate equivalence relationships between our definitions and
some special cases of another existing definition of atomicity due to Gnacadja
Bi-local Construction of Sp(2N)/dS Higher Spin Correspondence
We derive a collective field theory of the singlet sector of the Sp(2N) sigma
model. Interestingly the hamiltonian for the bilocal collective field is the
same as that of the O(N) model. However, the large-N saddle points of the two
models differ by a sign. This leads to a fluctuation hamiltonian with a
negative quadratic term and alternating signs in the nonlinear terms which
correctly reproduces the correlation functions of the singlet sector. Assuming
the validity of the connection between O(N) collective fields and higher spin
fields in AdS, we argue that a natural interpretation of this theory is by a
double analytic continuation, leading to the dS/CFT correspondence proposed by
Anninos, Hartman and Strominger. The bi-local construction gives a map into the
bulk of de Sitter space-time. Its geometric pseudospin-representation provides
a framework for quantization and definition of the Hilbert space. We argue that
this is consistent with finite N grassmanian constraints, establishing the
bi-local representation as a nonperturbative framework for quantization of
Higher Spin Gravity in de Sitter space.Comment: 1 figur
ITI-007 demonstrates brain occupancy at serotonin 5-HT2A and dopamine D2 receptors and serotonin transporters using positron emission tomography in healthy volunteers
© 2015 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Rationale: Central modulation of serotonin and dopamine underlies efficacy for a variety of psychiatric therapeutics. ITI-007 is an investigational new drug in development for treatment of schizophrenia, mood disorders, and other neuropsychiatric disorders. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine brain occupancy of ITI-007 at serotonin 5-HT2A receptors, dopamine D2 receptors, and serotonin transporters using positron emission tomography (PET) in 16 healthy volunteers. Methods: Carbon-11-MDL100907, carbon-11-raclopride, and carbon-11-3-amino-4-(2-dimethylaminomethyl-phenylsulfanyl)-benzonitrile) (carbon-11-DASB) were used as the radiotracers for imaging 5-HT2A receptors, D2 receptors, and serotonin transporters, respectively. Brain regions of interest were outlined using magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) with cerebellum as the reference region. Binding potentials were estimated by fitting a simplified reference tissue model to the measured tissue-time activity curves. Target occupancy was expressed as percent change in the binding potentials before and after ITI-007 administration. Results: Oral ITI-007 (10-40 mg) was safe and well tolerated. ITI-007 rapidly entered the brain with long-lasting and dose-related occupancy. ITI-007 (10 mg) demonstrated high occupancy (>80 %) of cortical 5-HT2A receptors and low occupancy of striatal D2 receptors (~12 %). D2 receptor occupancy increased with dose and significantly correlated with plasma concentrations (r 2∈=∈0.68, p∈=∈0.002). ITI-007 (40 mg) resulted in peak occupancy up to 39 % of striatal D2 receptors and 33 % of striatal serotonin transporters. Conclusions: The results provide evidence for a central mechanism of action via dopaminergic and serotonergic pathways for ITI-007 in living human brain and valuable information to aid dose selection for future clinical trials
Design of Impeller Wheel and Idler Pulley With CNC Machining Process and Tooling Design
Design of three-axis and four-axis part is one of important process before machining process. To begin the machining process for three-axis part and four-axis part, the process has must begin from design the product so can produce the product which can be accepted by many people’s. There are many software who provide the processing aplication for design the product. One of the software aplication for design is UG Siemens NX. The latest of UG NX is NX 10.0. Moreover, The type of tools also have the important role in the process of machining. Many types of tool like as cutting tool, milling tools (ball mill, 5 parameters) and drilling tool. So the process will produce the product which the data of process will be processed in the production parameters as the final conclusion
A Tree-structure Convolutional Neural Network for Temporal Features Exaction on Sensor-based Multi-resident Activity Recognition
With the propagation of sensor devices applied in smart home, activity
recognition has ignited huge interest and most existing works assume that there
is only one habitant. While in reality, there are generally multiple residents
at home, which brings greater challenge to recognize activities. In addition,
many conventional approaches rely on manual time series data segmentation
ignoring the inherent characteristics of events and their heuristic
hand-crafted feature generation algorithms are difficult to exploit distinctive
features to accurately classify different activities. To address these issues,
we propose an end-to-end Tree-Structure Convolutional neural network based
framework for Multi-Resident Activity Recognition (TSC-MRAR). First, we treat
each sample as an event and obtain the current event embedding through the
previous sensor readings in the sliding window without splitting the time
series data. Then, in order to automatically generate the temporal features, a
tree-structure network is designed to derive the temporal dependence of nearby
readings. The extracted features are fed into the fully connected layer, which
can jointly learn the residents labels and the activity labels simultaneously.
Finally, experiments on CASAS datasets demonstrate the high performance in
multi-resident activity recognition of our model compared to state-of-the-art
techniques.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure
Microstructural evolution in solution heat treatment of gas- atomised Al alloy (7075) powder for cold spray
Cold gas dynamic spray is being explored as a repair technique for high-value metallic components, given its potential to produce pore and oxide-free deposits of between several micrometers and several millimeters thick with good levels of adhesion and mechanical strength. However, feedstock powders for cold spray experience rapid solidification if manufactured by gas atomization and hence can exhibit non-equilibrium microstructures and localized segregation of alloying elements. Here, we used sealed quartz tube solution heat treatment of a precipitation hardenable 7075 aluminum alloy feedstock to yield a consistent and homogeneous powder phase composition and microstructure prior to cold spraying, aiming for a more controllable heat treatment response of the cold spray deposits. It was shown that the dendritic microstructure and solute segregation in the gas-atomized powders were altered, such that the heat-treated powder exhibits a homogeneous distribution of solute atoms. Micro-indentation testing revealed that the heat-treated powder exhibited a mean hardness decrease of nearly 25% compared to the as received powder. Deformation of the powder particles was enhanced by heat treatment, resulting in an improved coating with higher thickness (* 300 lm compared to * 40 um for untreated feedstock). Improved particle–substrate bonding was evidenced by formation of jets at the particle boundaries
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