Episodic tremor and accompanying slow slip, together called ETS, is most often observed in subduction zones of young and warm subducting slabs. ETS should help us to understand the mechanics of ...subduction megathrusts, but its mechanism is still unclear. It is commonly assumed that ETS represents a transition from seismic to aseismic behaviour of the megathrust with increasing depth, but this assumption is in contradiction with an observed spatial separation between the seismogenic zone and the ETS zone. Here we propose a unifying model for the necessary geological condition of ETS that explains the relationship between the two zones. By developing numerical thermal models, we examine the governing role of thermo-petrologically controlled fault zone rheology (frictional versus viscous shear). High temperatures in the warm-slab environment cause the megathrust seismogenic zone to terminate before reaching the depth of the intersection of the continental Mohorovičić discontinuity (Moho) and the subduction interface, called the mantle wedge corner. High pore-fluid pressures around the mantle wedge corner give rise to an isolated friction zone responsible for ETS. Separating the two zones is a segment of semi-frictional or viscous behaviour. The new model reconciles a wide range of seemingly disparate observations and defines a conceptual framework for the study of slip behaviour and the seismogenesis of major faults.
Subduction faults, called megathrusts, can generate large and hazardous earthquakes. The mode of slip and seismicity of a megathrust is controlled by the structural complexity of the fault zone. ...However, the relative strength of a megathrust based on the mode of slip is far from clear. The fault strength affects surface heat flow by frictional heating during slip. We model heat-flow data for a number of subduction zones to determine the fault strength. We find that smooth megathrusts that produce great earthquakes tend to be weaker and therefore dissipate less heat than geometrically rough megathrusts that slip mainly by creeping.
Safe and clean water is of pivotal importance to all living species and the ecosystem on earth. However, the accelerating economy and industrialization of mankind generate water pollutants with much ...larger quantity and higher complexity than ever before, challenging the efficacy of traditional water treatment technologies. The flourishing researches on nanomaterials and nanotechnologies in the past decade have generated new understandings on many fundamental processes and brought revolutionary upgrades to various traditional technologies in almost all areas, including water treatment. An indispensable step toward the real application of nanomaterials in water treatment is to confine them in large processable substrate to address various inherent issues, such as spontaneous aggregation, difficult operation and potential environmental risks. Strikingly, when the size of the spatial restriction provided by the substrate is on the order of only one or several nanometers, referred to as nanoconfinement, the phase behavior of matter and the energy diagram of a chemical reaction could be utterly changed. Nevertheless, the relationship between such changes under nanoconfinement and their implications for water treatment is rarely elucidated systematically. In this Critical Review, we will briefly summarize the current state-of-the-art of the nanomaterials, as well as the nanoconfined analogues (i.e., nanocomposites) developed for water treatment. Afterward, we will put emphasis on the effects of nanoconfinement from three aspects, that is, on the structure and behavior of water molecules, on the formation (e.g., crystallization) of confined nanomaterials, and on the nanoenabled chemical reactions. For each aspect, we will build the correlation between the nanoconfinement effects and the current studies for water treatment. More importantly, we will make proposals for future studies based on the missing links between some of the nanoconfinement effects and the water treatment technologies. Through this Critical Review, we aim to raise the research attention on using nanoconfinement as a fundamental guide or even tool to advance water treatment technologies.
Osteoarthritis (OA), the most prevalent age-related joint disorder, is characterized by chronic inflammation, progressive articular cartilage destruction, and subchondral bone sclerosis. Accumulating ...evidences indicate that circular RNAs (circRNAs) play a critical role in various diseases, but the function of circRNAs in OA remains largely unknown. Here we showed that circRNA.33186 was significantly upregulated in IL-1β)-treated chondrocytes and in cartilage tissues of a destabilized medial meniscus (DMM)-induced OA mouse model. Knockdown of circRNA.33186 increased anabolic factor (type II collagen) expression and decreased catabolic factor (MMP-13) expression. Knockdown of circRNA.33186 also promoted proliferation and inhibited apoptosis in IL-1β-treated chondrocytes. Silencing of circRNA.33186 in vivo markedly alleviated DMM-induced OA. Mechanistic study showed that circRNA.33186 directly binds to and inhibits miR-127-5p, thereby increasing MMP-13 expression, and contributes to OA pathogenesis. Taken together, our findings demonstrated a fundamental role of circRNA.33186 in OA progression and provide a potential drug target in OA therapy.
Zhu and colleagues demonstrate that circRNA.33186 regulates chondrocyte functions, including ECM catabolism, proliferation, and apoptosis. Silencing of circRNA.33186 alleviated OA by acting as a sponge of miR-127-5p. These findings reveal a fundamental role of circRNA.33186 in OA progression and provide a potential drug target in OA therapy.
High-strength aluminum alloys are important for lightweighting vehicles and are extensively used in aircraft and, increasingly, in automobiles. The highest-strength aluminum alloys require a series ...of high-temperature "bakes" (120° to 200°C) to form a high number density of nanoparticles by solid-state precipitation. We found that a controlled, room-temperature cyclic deformation is sufficient to continuously inject vacancies into the material and to mediate the dynamic precipitation of a very fine (1- to 2-nanometer) distribution of solute clusters. This results in better material strength and elongation properties relative to traditional thermal treatments, despite a much shorter processing time. The microstructures formed are much more uniform than those characteristic of traditional thermal treatments and do not exhibit precipitate-free zones. These alloys are therefore likely to be more resistant to damage.
This paper is concerned of the loop closure detection problem for visual simultaneous localization and mapping systems. We propose a novel approach based on the stacked denoising auto-encoder (SDA), ...a multi-layer neural network that autonomously learns an compressed representation from the raw input data in an unsupervised way. Different with the traditional bag-of-words based methods, the deep network has the ability to learn the complex inner structures in image data, while no longer needs to manually design the visual features. Our approach employs the characteristics of the SDA to solve the loop detection problem. The workflow of training the network, utilizing the features and computing the similarity score is presented. The performance of SDA is evaluated by a comparison study with Fab-map 2.0 using data from open datasets and physical robots. The results show that SDA is feasible for detecting loops at a satisfactory precision and can therefore provide an alternative way for visual SLAM systems.
Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic oxygen-evolving prokaryotes that are distributed in diverse habitats. They synthesize the ultraviolet (UV)-screening pigments, scytonemin (SCY) and mycosporine-like ...amino acids (MAAs), located in the exopolysaccharide (EPS) matrix. Multiple roles for both pigments have gradually been recognized, such as sunscreen ability, antioxidant activity, and heat dissipation from absorbed UV radiation. In this study, a filamentous terrestrial cyanobacterium Nostoc flagelliforme was used to evaluate the potential stabilizing role of SCY on the EPS matrix. SCY (~3.7 %) was partially removed from N. flagelliforme filaments by rinsing with 100 % acetone for 5 s. The physiological damage to cells resulting from this treatment, in terms of photosystem II activity parameter Fv/Fm, was repaired after culturing the sample for 40 h. The physiologically recovered sample was further desiccated by natural or rapid drying and then allowed to recovery for 24 h. Compared with the normal sample, a relatively slower Fv/Fm recovery was observed in the SCY-partially removed sample, suggesting that the decreased SCY concentration in the EPS matrix caused cells to suffer further damage upon desiccation. In addition, the SCYpartially removed sample could allow the release of MAAs (~25 %) from the EPS matrix, while the normal sample did not. Therefore, damage caused by drying of the former resulted from at least the reduction of structural stability of the EPS matrix as well as the loss of partial antioxidant compounds. Considering that an approximately 4 % loss of SCY led to this significant effect, the structurally stabilizing potential of SCY on the EPS matrix is crucial for terrestrial cyanobacteria survival in complex environments.
Massive MIMO, also known as very-large MIMO or large-scale antenna systems, is a new technique that potentially can offer large network capacities in multi-user scenarios. With a massive MIMO system, ...we consider the case where a base station equipped with a large number of antenna elements simultaneously serves multiple single-antenna users in the same time-frequency resource. So far, investigations are mostly based on theoretical channels with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) complex Gaussian coefficients, i.e., i.i.d. Rayleigh channels. Here, we investigate how massive MIMO performs in channels measured in real propagation environments. Channel measurements were performed at 2.6 GHz using a virtual uniform linear array (ULA), which has a physically large aperture, and a practical uniform cylindrical array (UCA), which is more compact in size, both having 128 antenna ports. Based on measurement data, we illustrate channel behavior of massive MIMO in three representative propagation conditions, and evaluate the corresponding performance. The investigation shows that the measured channels, for both array types, allow us to achieve performance close to that in i.i.d. Rayleigh channels. It is concluded that in real propagation environments we have characteristics that can allow for efficient use of massive MIMO, i.e., the theoretical advantages of this new technology can also be harvested in real channels.
Gamma-ray Burst (GRB) collimation has been inferred with the observations of achromatic steepening in GRB light curves, known as jet breaks. Identifying a jet break from a GRB afterglow light curve ...allows a measurement of the jet opening angle and true energetics of GRBs. In this paper, we re-investigate this problem using a large sample of GRBs that have an optical jet break that is consistent with being achromatic in the X-ray band. Our sample includes 99 GRBs from 1997 February to 2015 March that have optical and, for Swift GRBs, X-ray light curves that are consistent with the jet break interpretation. Out of the 99 GRBs we have studied, 55 GRBs are found to have temporal and spectral behaviors both before and after the break, consistent with the theoretical predictions of the jet break models, respectively. These include 53 long/soft (Type II) and 2 short/hard (Type I) GRBs. Only 1 GRB is classified as the candidate of a jet break with energy injection. Another 41 and 3 GRBs are classified as the candidates with the lower and upper limits of the jet break time, respectively. Most jet breaks occur at 90 ks, with a typical opening angle θj = (2.5 1.0)°. This gives a typical beaming correction factor f b − 1 ∼ 1000 for Type II GRBs, suggesting an even higher total GRB event rate density in the universe. Both isotropic and jet-corrected energies have a wide span in their distributions: log(Eγ,iso/erg) = 53.11 with = 0.84; log(EK,iso/erg) = 54.82 with = 0.56; log(Eγ/erg) = 49.54 with = 1.29; and log(EK/erg) = 51.33 with = 0.58. We also investigate several empirical correlations (Amati, Frail, Ghirlanda, and Liang-Zhang) previously discussed in the literature. We find that in general most of these relations are less tight than before. The existence of early jet breaks and hence small opening angle jets, which were detected in the Swfit era, is most likely the source of scatter. If one limits the sample to jet breaks later than 104 s, the Liang-Zhang relation remains tight and the Ghirlanda relation still exists. These relations are derived from Type II GRBs, and Type I GRBs usually deviate from them.
With the development of AI technology, the parameters and calculation overhead of advanced models have increased exponentially, resulting in the existing low-end GPU(Graphic Processing Unit) being ...unable to meet the computing power required for model operation. In order to speed up the inference speed in edge scenarios, various manufacturers have launched NPU(Neural Processor Unit), a special chip for neural networks, which can improve the overall inference efficiency and reduce energy consumption through a certain loss of precision. However, in the current common edge-side solutions, the problem of CPU+GPU+NPU co-processing is not well considered. At the same time, edge-side devices are more easily affected by the ambient temperature. In this paper, CPU+GPU+NPU is used to jointly process edge-side inference tasks, and we first established a heterogeneous device temperature perception model based on the ambient temperature of the edge device, then proposed a TAS(temperature-aware schedule) algorithm to control the running speed of the heterogeneous device, and then proposed a task scheduling algorithm for the heterogeneous device, namely TASTS(TAS-based task schedule). At the same time, we also use a hungarian matching algorithm to optimize the final result. This paper finally verified several models in real edge environment, found that it can improve the performance by 20-50% compared with conventional methods under temperature constraints.
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