The Burstein-Moss shift and band gap narrowing of sputtered indium-doped zinc oxide (IZO) thin films are investigated as a function of carrier concentrations. The optical band gap shifts below the ...carrier concentration of 5.61 × 1019 cm-3 are well-described by the Burstein-Moss model. For carrier concentrations higher than 8.71 × 1019 cm-3 the shift decreases, indicating that band gap narrowing mechanisms are increasingly significant and are competing with the Burstein-Moss effect. The incorporation of In causes the resistivity to decrease three orders of magnitude. As the mean-free path of carriers is less than the crystallite size, the resistivity is probably affected by ionized impurities as well as defect scattering mechanisms, but not grain boundary scattering. The c lattice constant as well as film stress is observed to increase in stages with increasing carrier concentration. The asymmetric XPS Zn 2p3/2 peak in the film with the highest carrier concentration of 7.02 × 1020 cm-3 suggests the presence of stacking defects in the ZnO lattice. The Raman peak at 274 cm-1 is attributed to lattice defects introduced by In dopants.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Three principal granite provinces are defined across SE Asia, as follows. (1) The Western Thailand-Myanmar/Burma province consists of hornblende-biotite I-type granodiorite-granites and felsic ...biotite-K-feldspar (± garnet ± tourmaline) granites associated with abundant tin mineralization in greisen-type veins. New ion microprobe U-Pb dating results from Phuket Island show zircon core ages of 212 ± 2 and 214 ± 2 Ma and a thermal overprint with rims of 81.2 ± 1.2 and 85-75 Ma. (2) The North Thailand-West Malaya Main Range province has mainly S-type biotite granites and abundant tin mineralization resulting from crustal thickening following collision of the Sibumasu plate with Indochina during the Mid-Triassic. Biotite granites around Kuala Lumpur contain extremely U-rich zircons (up to 38000 ppm) that yield ages of 215 ± 7 and 210 ± 7 Ma. (3) The East Malaya province consists of dominantly Permian-Triassic I-type hornblende-biotite granites but with subordinate S-type plutons and A-type syenite-gabbros. Biotite-K-feldspar granites from Tioman Island off the east coast of Malaysia also yield a zircon age of 80 ± 1 Ma, showing Cretaceous magmatism in common with province 1. Geological and U-Pb geochronological data suggest that two east-dipping (in present-day coordinates) subduction zones are required during the Triassic, one along the Bentong-Raub Palaeo-Tethyan suture, and the other west of the Phuket-Burma province 1 belt. SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: A full description of U-Pb analytical methods used and data tables are available at www.geolsoc.org.uk/SUP18523.
Technology linked with reduced physical activity (PA) in occupational work, home/domestic work, and travel and increased sedentary activities, especially television viewing, dominates the globe. ...Using detailed historical data on time allocation, occupational distributions, energy expenditures data by activity, and time‐varying measures of metabolic equivalents of task (MET) for activities when available, we measure historical and current MET by four major PA domains (occupation, home production, travel and active leisure) and sedentary time among adults (>18 years). Trends by domain for the United States (1965–2009), the United Kingdom (1961–2005), Brazil (2002–2007), China (1991–2009) and India (2000–2005) are presented. We also project changes in energy expenditure by domain and sedentary time (excluding sleep and personal care) to 2020 and 2030 for each of these countries. The use of previously unexplored detailed time allocation and energy expenditures and other datasets represents a useful addition to our ability to document activity and inactivity globally, but highlights the need for concerted efforts to monitor PA in a consistent manner globally, increase global PA and decrease sedentary behavior. Given the potential impact on weight gain and other cardiometabolic health risks, the differential declines in MET of activity and increases in sedentary time across the globe represent a major threat to global health.
•An urban railway network is constructed to examine network robustness.•A linear threshold model is developed to imitate cascading failure propagation.•The robustness of temporal urban railway ...network is found to vary over time.•Network robustness is affected by cascading failure induced by passenger flow.
This paper constructs an urban railway network (URN) as a directed weighted network at different times and studies the dynamic network robustness against the fluctuation of passenger flow-induced cascading failures under different failure modes. The propagation of cascading failure is then imitated through the linear threshold (LT) model, where the influence parameter of edges is defined. In the light of network topology and functionality, two robustness indices, which include the change of edge size in the most connected component (RGCSe) and operational efficiency (ROEt) are employed. By coalescing these two indices, a synthetic operator Rt is proposed to quantify the dynamic TURN robustness comprehensively. The simulation results show that the TURN robustness varies over time. Besides, an increase in the volume of passenger flow can exacerbate the sizes of cascading failure and the impacts on network robustness under different scenarios. Consequently, it is imperative to examine the impacts of time-varying cascading failure on URN robustness. The findings of this research are widely applicable to other networked systems.
Using microRNA (miRNA) expression array, we identified that miR-7 was deregulated in colorectal cancer (CRC). We studied the biological role and molecular target of miR-7 in CRC. miR-7 was ...downregulated in six out of seven colon cancer cell lines. Ectopic expression of miR-7 suppressed colon cancer cell proliferation (P<0.05), induced apoptosis (P<0.05) and caused cell-cycle arrest in G1 phase (P<0.05). The tumor suppressive function of miR-7 was further confirmed in nude mice (P<0.05). The 3'-untranslated region (3'UTR) of Yin Yang 1 (YY1) mRNA contains an evolutionarily conserved miR-7 binding site using in silico searches, luciferase reporter assay and western blot analysis confirmed that miR-7 directly bound to YY1 3'UTR to negatively regulate the protein expression of YY1 in colon cancer cell lines HCT116 and LOVO. Intriguingly, knock-down of YY1 in three colon cancer cell lines (HCT116, LOVO and DLD1) consistently suppressed cell proliferation (P<0.01) and induced apoptosis (P<0.01), indicating the opposite functions of miR-7 and YY1 in CRC. Consistent with these data, ectopic expression of YY1 promoted cell growth by increasing proliferation (P<0.01) and suppressing apoptosis (P<0.001). The tumorigenic ability of YY1 was further confirmed in vivo in xenograft-nude mouse model (P<0.01). In addition, pathway analyses revealed that the oncogenic effect by YY1 was associated with inhibiting p53 and modulating its downstream effectors p15, caspase cascades and C-Jun, and activating Wnt signaling pathway through activating β-catenin, anti-apoptotic survivin and fibroblast growth factor 4. Furthermore, multivariate analysis revealed that patients with YY1 protein high expression had a significant decrease in overall survival, and Kaplan-Meier survival curves showed that these patients had significantly shorter survival than others (P<0.0001). In conclusion, MiR-7 is a novel miRNA with tumor suppressive function in colon cancer by targeting oncogenic YY1. YY1 promotes colon cancer growth through inhibiting p53 and promoting Wnt signaling pathways and serves as an independent prognostic biomarker for CRC patients.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to offer great potential in the diagnosis of cancer. We investigated whether plasma miRNAs could discriminate between patients with and without colorectal cancer ...(CRC).
This study was divided into three phases: (1) marker discovery using real-time PCR-based miRNA profiling on plasma, corresponding cancerous and adjacent non-cancerous colonic tissues of five patients with CRC, along with plasma from five healthy individuals as controls; (2) marker selection and validation by real-time quantitative RT-PCR on a small set of plasma; and (3) independent validation on a large set of plasma from 90 patients with CRC, 20 patients with gastric cancer, 20 patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and 50 healthy controls.
Of the panel of 95 miRNAs analysed, five were upregulated both in plasma and tissue samples. All the five miRNAs were validated on the plasma of 25 patients with CRC and 20 healthy controls. Both miR-17-3p and miR-92 were significantly elevated in the patients with CRC (p<0.0005). The plasma levels of these markers were significantly reduced after surgery in 10 patients with CRC (p<0.05). Further validation with an independent set of plasma samples (n = 180) indicated that miR-92 differentiates CRC from gastric cancer, IBD and normal subjects. This marker yielded a receiver operating characteristic curve area of 88.5%. At a cut-off of 240 (relative expression in comparison to RNU6B snRNA), the sensitivity was 89% and the specificity was 70% in discriminating CRC from control subjects.
MiR-92 is significantly elevated in plasma of patients with CRC and can be a potential non-invasive molecular marker for CRC screening.
•Critically considered waste materials generated at different stages of building.•Influence of waste materials on building environmental impacts was comprehensively evaluated.•About 20% GHGs emission ...was underestimated for avoiding these in building assessment.•Adopting resource recovery principle can lead to 37% GHGs reduction from building.
Buildings are responsible for a significant natural resources diminution and emissions to the environment. Thus, the building industry has become a global target for reducing environmental impacts and curbing resource depletion. Concerning the rapidly growth of buildings, life cycle assessment (LCA) is increasingly used for assessing and mitigating the associated environmental impacts from material selection to the whole building systems. However, many of the previous studies have focused on the impacts assessment from buildings within a restricted system boundary, especially lack of consideration of several critical factors when assessing the whole building, such as wastage level of raw materials during building construction and the disposal impacts, renovation and replacement of components of building and their treatment, and waste treatments during building demolition. As the industry is shifting from linear to circular, the consideration of those factors are essential for ensuring waste reduction, resources recovery and resource-efficient construction, not to mention about increasing the accuracy of such assessment. Therefore, the present study was conducted to assess the environmental impacts of the mentioned aspects at different life cycles of building by LCA. The results were then critically discussed after identifying the contribution of waste materials at different stages of building to the total impacts. The potential sustainable strategies for waste treatments during the construction, operation and end-of-life stages of building were then highlighted to help lay important foundation for adopting circular economy principle in the building industry and establishing benchmark for future reduction.
The building industry is a sector of great importance to human beings and at the same time responsible for significant environmental degradations. In the past decades, life cycle assessment (LCA) has ...been increasingly applied to the building sector. To understand the life cycle environmental impacts of buildings, the emission levels of different environmental impact categories should be quantitatively analyzed by comparing LCA results of different case studies. In this study, comparative analyses of the impact assessment results of building case studies are conducted according to a systematic review approach. A total of 105 building cases published in the last decade are examined with a harmonized comparison. The whole life cycle of building, i.e., production, use and end-of-life are analyzed. Statistics for 7 impact categories and 3 damage categories are provided. Analysis is further conducted for different building structures: concrete, timber, and metal (steel or aluminum), as well as for different building types: residential and commercial. It is noted that the results of previous studies have large discrepancies. Nonetheless, the statistical medians of the selected building cases are found to be comparable with the recently published benchmarks. It is also found that climate change and energy depletion are not always the most significant impact categories. This study improves our understanding on the LCA outcomes of buildings and the results should help build a solid foundation for LCA practice in the building sector.
•A total of 105 building cases published in the last decade are analyzed.•The statistics and distribution for 7 individual categories are examined.•Large discrepancies in results are observed for all the impact categories.•The medians are found to compare favorably with existing benchmarks of buildings.
Motivation: The clustering of gene profiles across some experimental conditions of interest contributes significantly to the elucidation of unknown gene function, the validation of gene discoveries ...and the interpretation of biological processes. However, this clustering problem is not straightforward as the profiles of the genes are not all independently distributed and the expression levels may have been obtained from an experimental design involving replicated arrays. Ignoring the dependence between the gene profiles and the structure of the replicated data can result in important sources of variability in the experiments being overlooked in the analysis, with the consequent possibility of misleading inferences being made. We propose a random-effects model that provides a unified approach to the clustering of genes with correlated expression levels measured in a wide variety of experimental situations. Our model is an extension of the normal mixture model to account for the correlations between the gene profiles and to enable covariate information to be incorporated into the clustering process. Hence the model is applicable to longitudinal studies with or without replication, for example, time-course experiments by using time as a covariate, and to cross-sectional experiments by using categorical covariates to represent the different experimental classes. Results: We show that our random-effects model can be fitted by maximum likelihood via the EM algorithm for which the E(expectation)and M(maximization) steps can be implemented in closed form. Hence our model can be fitted deterministically without the need for time-consuming Monte Carlo approximations. The effectiveness of our model-based procedure for the clustering of correlated gene profiles is demonstrated on three real datasets, representing typical microarray experimental designs, covering time-course, repeated-measurement and cross-sectional data. In these examples, relevant clusters of the genes are obtained, which are supported by existing gene-function annotation. A synthetic dataset is considered too. Availability: A Fortran program blue called EMMIX-WIRE (EM-based MIXture analysis WIth Random Effects) is available on request from the corresponding author. Contact:gjm@maths.uq.edu.au Supplementary information:. Colour versions of Figures 1 and 2 are available as Supplementary material on Bioinformatics online.
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