The instability of the thermally grown oxide is the fundamental source leading to failure relevant to spallation and delamination of top coat. A finite element model is developed to understand ...failure mechanism of thermal barrier coating systems. Lateral and normal growth strains are stimulated by ABAQUS field variable expansion. Our results show that the valley region of top coat/thermally grown oxide interface and the peak region of thermally grown oxide/bond coat interface are the initiation locations of cracks. The creep can suppress downward displacement at the valley and promote the upward displacement at the periphery. Large material creep induced by further enhanced residual stress can restrain the increasing trend of the tensile stress within top coat and contribute to changes of thermally grown oxide morphology. Conversely, the applied load can promote the downward displacement at the valley and suppress the upward displacement at the periphery. The larger mechanical loads enhance the displacement rate toward bond coat layer, implying that the larger extension rate of thermally grown oxide instability accelerates the coating failure.
Cortical long-term potentiation (LTP) serves as a cellular model for chronic pain. As an important subtype of adenylyl cyclases (ACs), adenylyl cyclase subtype 1 (AC1) is critical for the induction ...of cortical LTP in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Genetic deletion of AC1 or pharmacological inhibition of AC1 blocked behavioral allodynia in animal models of neuropathic and inflammatory pain. Our previous experiments have identified a lead candidate AC1 inhibitor, NB001, which is highly selective for AC1 over other AC isoforms, and found that NB001 is effective in inhibiting behavioral allodynia in animal models of chronic neuropathic and inflammatory pain. However, previous experiments were carried out in adult male animals. Considering the potential gender difference as an important issue in researches of pain and analgesia, we investigated the effect of NB001 in female chronic pain animal models. We found that NB001, when administered orally, has an analgesic effect in female animal models of neuropathic and inflammatory pain without any observable side effect. Genetic deletion of AC1 also reduced allodynia responses in models of neuropathic pain and chronic inflammation pain in adult female mice. In brain slices of adult female mice, bath application of NB001(20 μM) blocked the induction of LTP in ACC. Our results indicate that calcium-stimulated AC1 is required for injury-related cortical LTP and behavioral allodynia in both sexes of adult animals, and NB001 can be used as a potential therapeutic drug for treating neuropathic and inflammatory pain in man and woman.
Introduction
Compared with traditional fundus examination techniques, ultra-widefield fundus (UWF) images provide 200° panoramic images of the retina, which allows better detection of peripheral ...retinal lesions. The advent of UWF provides effective solutions only for detection but still lacks efficient diagnostic capabilities. This study proposed a retinal lesion detection model to automatically locate and identify six relatively typical and high-incidence peripheral retinal lesions from UWF images which will enable early screening and rapid diagnosis.
Methods
A total of 24,602 augmented ultra-widefield fundus images with labels corresponding to 6 peripheral retinal lesions and normal manifestation labelled by 5 ophthalmologists were included in this study. An object detection model named You Only Look Once X (YOLOX) was modified and trained to locate and classify the six peripheral retinal lesions including rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (RRD), retinal breaks (RB), white without pressure (WWOP), cystic retinal tuft (CRT), lattice degeneration (LD), and paving-stone degeneration (PSD). We applied coordinate attention block and generalized intersection over union (GIOU) loss to YOLOX and evaluated it for accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision,
F
1 score, and average precision (AP). This model was able to show the exact location and saliency map of the retinal lesions detected by the model thus contributing to efficient screening and diagnosis.
Results
The model reached an average accuracy of 96.64%, sensitivity of 87.97%, specificity of 98.04%, precision of 87.01%,
F
1 score of 87.39%, and mAP of 86.03% on test dataset 1 including 248 UWF images and reached an average accuracy of 95.04%, sensitivity of 83.90%, specificity of 96.70%, precision of 78.73%,
F
1 score of 81.96%, and mAP of 80.59% on external test dataset 2 including 586 UWF images, showing this system performs well in distinguishing the six peripheral retinal lesions.
Conclusion
Focusing on peripheral retinal lesions, this work proposed a deep learning model, which automatically recognized multiple peripheral retinal lesions from UWF images and localized exact positions of lesions. Therefore, it has certain potential for early screening and intelligent diagnosis of peripheral retinal lesions.
Human and animal studies indicate that some brain regions are activated during painful and pleasant situations, such as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). In the present study, we wanted to ...determine if some of the same neurons in the ACC may be activated by both pain and pleasure. We labeled neurons activated by two stimuli by using two immediate early genes (IEGs), Arc and Homer1a, and detected the intranuclear transcription of the IEG mRNA in situ. We found that there are double-labeling neurons in the ACC after the mice received pain and sexual attraction stimulation. The double-labeling ACC neurons were higher in male mice exposed to female mice (attractive stimulus) than the group exposed to male mice (normal stimulus). The IEG, which indicates the sexual attraction, were also higher in the female exposing group, while the IEG indicating pain showed no significant variance between two groups. Our findings suggest that ACC neurons play important roles in the process of both pain and pleasure.
Underground coal gasification is a promising technology for low carbon utilization of coal, while the importance of influencing factors for UCG performance is rarely evaluated quantitatively, which ...limits the optimization of UCG. In this work, the effects of flow rate, gasification agent, ignition position and initial channel size on temperature distribution and gas products were investigated through ex-situ UCG experiments. The effect of increasing flow rate has two sides, promoting oxidization and cooling down the reaction zone. Compared to air gasification, oxygen gasification features with a higher temperature and reaction zone is closer to upstream; at the same time, effective gas products are obviously more. Compared to ignition at 1/2 L0, the temperature is higher for ignition at 3/4 L0, and the effective gas production time (te) is shorter. When the initial gasification channel size increases from 1 cm to 2 cm, the reaction zone is closer to the upstream, and the te is longer. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method is adopted to compare the importance of these factors. Increasing oxygen concentration in the gasification agent is the most effective way to increase the maximum heating value, while increasing the flow rate is the most effective way to increase the te.
•Effect of inlet gas, ignition position and channel size on UCG product was studied.•Increasing oxygen concentration is the most effective way to increase heating value.•Increasing flow rate is the most effective way to increase gas production time.
•Tar samples from different positions were compared in UCG experiment.•Effects of gasification agent and flow rate on tar behaviors were studied.•Carbon emission and tar pollution were discussed ...based on carbon footprint.
Underground coal gasification is a promising technology for exploiting deep coal seams, while the evolution behaviors of pollutants such as tar in the reaction zone are still not clear. In this work, an ex-situ experimental system of UCG was built, and a series of experiments were carried out with different gasification agents and flow rates to study the concentration and composition of tar samples from different positions and time. Shenmu bituminous coal is cut into specific blocks with drilled holes as initial gasification channel and sampling channels. Tar concentration is calculated according to the weight of tar samples and the corresponding gas flow volume during sampling, while tar composition is analyzed by GC–MS. For the involved conditions, the maximum relative gap of tar concentrations between L = 36 cm and 102 cm is around 296% under 10 L/min oxygen case. The maximum relative gap of PAH percentage in tar between L = 36 cm and 102 cm is around 84% under 10 L/min air case. For oxygen gasification, increasing flow rate from 10 L/min to 15 L/min causes a lower tar concentration at reaction zone and a higher tar concentration at outlet, as well as a lower PAH percentage for all positions. For air gasification, increasing flow rate from 10 L/min to 50 L/min leads to a more uniform distribution of tar concentration and composition. Tar concentration for air gasification is far smaller than that for oxygen gasification. Changing from 10 L/min to 15 L/min for oxygen gasification decreases the carbon emission in gases and increases the percentage of product tar. Changing from 10 L/min to 50 L/min for air gasification decreases the carbon emission in gases but increases the percentage of pollutant tar.
Iron is an essential element for crucial biological function; whereas excess iron sedimentation impairs the main functions of tissues or organs. Cumulative researches have shown that the disturbances ...in iron metabolism, especially iron overload is closely concatenating with bone loss. Nevertheless, the specific process of iron overload-induced apoptosis in osteoblasts has not been thoroughly studied. In this study, our purpose is to elucidate the mechanism of osteoblast apoptosis induced by iron overload via the MC3T3-E1 cell line. Ferric ammonium citrate (FAC) was utilized to simulate iron overload conditions in vitro. These results showed that treatment with FAC dose-dependently induced the apoptosis of MC3T3-E1 cells at 48 h, dysfunction of iron metabolism, and increased intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels. Following, FAC does-dependently caused the calcium dyshomeostasis, decreased the calcium concentration in endoplasmic reticulum (ER), but increased the crosstalk between ER and mitochondria, and calcium concentration in the mitochondria. Moreover, FAC dose-dependently decreased mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP) and enhanced the expression of apoptosis related proteins (Bax, Cyto-C and C-caspase3). We furthermore revealed that FAC treatment activated the ER-mediated cell apoptosis via p-eIF2α/ATF4/CHOP pathway in MC3T3-E1 osteoblasts cells. In addition, pretreatment with the N-acetylcysteine (NAC) or Tauroursodeoxycholate Sodium (TUDC) attenuated cell apoptosis, ROS levels, mitochondria fragmentation and ER stress-related protein expression, and recovered the protein expression related to iron metabolism. In conclusion, our finding suggested that iron overload induced apoptosis via eliciting ER stress, which resulted in mitochondrial dysfunction and activated p-eIF2α/ATF4/CHOP pathway.
•Iron overload triggers ER stress via breaking calcium homeostasis in MC3T3-E1 osteoblast cells.•Prolong ER stress induces mitochondrial dysfunction, resulting in cell apoptosis.•Activation ER stress induces cell apoptosis via p-eIF2α/ATF4/CHOP pathway in MC3T3-E1 osteoblast cells.
Here, we first use CdS nanoparticles to sensitize ferroelectric BaTiO3 nanostructures to construct the BaTiO3/CdS heterostructure photoanodes by a facile hydrothermal method and subsequent successive ...ionic layer adsorption and reaction. Combining the measurements of the valence band and core-level X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy spectra with energy band calculation, the type-II energy structure established at the BaTiO3 and CdS interface is confirmed. Benefiting from the type-II band alignment of the heterostructures, the spontaneous polarization electric field induced by BaTiO3, and the remarkable visible light absorption ability of CdS, the as-prepared BaTiO3/CdS heterostructure photoanode exhibits significantly improved and stable photoelectrochemical water-splitting activity. The highest photocurrent density of the constructed BaTiO3/CdS heterostructure photoanode with optimized CdS nanoparticle loading reaches up to 0.5 mA cm–2 at 0 V versus Ag/AgCl, which is about 12-fold that of the pure BaTiO3 photoanode. Additionally, the solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency of the BaTiO3/CdS heterostructure photoanode is 0.48% at 0.13 V versus reversible hydrogen electrode, 24-fold that of the bare BaTiO3 photoanode. In contrast with the photoelectrochemical performance of the other reported BaTiO3-based heterostructure photoanodes, the photocurrent density (0 V versus Ag/AgCl) and the solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency (0.13 V versus reversible hydrogen electrode) achieved by the present BaTiO3/CdS photoanode are the highest.
The field of interdisciplinary art education, particularly through digital game-based learning, lacks empirical research on the art learning process and the competencies gained along the process. To ...address this research gap, this study collects data through experiment and post-experiment interviews from 20 science and engineering college students who participated in a 1-month digital game-based art learning program. The findings reveal three learning process cycles involved during art educational digital gameplay, namely the game action cycle, the experiential learning process cycle, and the game response cycle. Throughout the three process cycles, 29 learning outcomes were identified based on students’ gameplay experiences. These outcomes are then categorized into three themes, including enhanced self-management, enhanced learning experience, and refinement of proprioceptive competencies. Overall, this study highlights the digital learning process in the context of interdisciplinary art education and emphasizes the importance of valuing the outcomes gained from digital game-based learning in art education.
Here, we first use a facile electrochemical deposition method to load Cu2O nanoparticles onto the BaTiO3 (BTO) surface to prepare BTO/Cu2O heterostructure photoanodes. Compared to the pure BTO ...photoanode, all BTO/Cu2O heterostructure photoanodes show outstanding visible light harvesting ability and greatly improved photoelectrochemical water splitting performance. By optimizing the loading amount of Cu2O nanoparticles, the photocurrent density achieved by BTO/Cu2O-100 photoanode is 0.26 mA/cm2 at 0 V versus Ag/AgCl, which is 2.6 times that of the bare BTO photoanode. In contrast with the photocurrent densities of the other reported BTO-based heterostructure photoanodes, the photocurrent density achieved by the present BTO/Cu2O-100 photoanode without bias voltage is much higher. Additionally, the maximum solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency of the BTO/Cu2O-100 heterostructure photoanode is 0.11% at 0.72 V versus reversible hydrogen electrode, approximately double that of BTO photoanode. The measurements of diffuse reflectance spectra, photoelectrochemical impedance and the room temperature photoluminescence spectra demonstrate that the improved photoelectrochemical performance contributes from the visible light absorption ability of Cu2O nanoparticles, efficient transport and separation of photogenerated electron-hole pairs, which are induced by the spontaneous polarization electric field of ferroelectric BTO, p-n junction and type-II band alignment of BTO/Cu2O heterostructure photoanode. A possible mechanism for the improved photoelectrochemical water splitting performance and charge transfer process is proposed.
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