Photocatalysis holds great promise as an efficient and sustainable oxidation technology for application in wastewater treatment. Rapid progress developing novel materials has propelled photocatalysis ...to the forefront of sustainable wastewater treatments. This review presents the latest progress on applications of photocatalytic wastewater treatment. Our focus is on strategies for improving performance. Challenges and outlooks in this promising field are also discussed. We hope this review will help researchers design low-cost and high-efficiency photocatalysts for water treatment.
Vehicle exhaust has been acknowledged as an essential factor affecting human health due to the extensive use of cars. Its main components include volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and nitrogen oxides ...(NOx), which can cause acute irritation and chronic diseases, and significant research on the treatment of vehicle exhaust has received increasing attention in recent decades. Recently, photocatalytic technology has been considered a practical approach for eliminating vehicle emissions. This review highlights the crucial role of photocatalytic technology in eliminating vehicle emissions using semiconductor catalysts. A particular emphasis has been placed on various photocatalytic materials, such as TiO2-based materials, Bi-based materials, and Metal–Organic Frameworks (MOFs), and their recent advances in the performance of VOC and NOx photodegradation. In addition, the applications of photocatalytic technology for the elimination of vehicle exhaust are presented (including photocatalysts combined with pavement surfaces, making photocatalysts into architectural coatings and photoreactors), which will offer a promising strategy for photocatalytic technology to remove vehicle exhaust.
As the most ordinary metabolic disorder during pregnancy, gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) has become a severe risk for the health of both pregnant female and fetus. Astragaloside IV (AS-IV) is ...the dominant active component in Astragalus membranaceus. It has been proved that AS-IV has anti-inflammation and immune-regulation function. We aimed to demonstrate the function of AS-IV in the therapy of GDM and the molecular mechanism in this process.
C57BL/KsJ-Lepdb/+ female mice were used as GDM model. The mRNA levels of relative genes in this research were detected by qRT-PCR. The protein levels of relative genes were analyzed by western blot. Serum concentration of interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) were analyzed by ELISA.
Glucose and insulin levels in GDM mice model were decreased by AS-IV treatment. AS-IV down-regulated the expression of inflammatory gene IL-6 and TNF-α in GDM mice model. AS-IV treatment inhibited the expression of NLR family pyrin domain containing-3 (NLRP3) inflammasome relative proteins in the pancreas of GDM mice.
This study demonstrated that AS-IV treatment has an effective therapeutic function of GDM in mice model through the inhibition of NLRP3 inflammasome in the pancreas.
The mechanical properties of porcupine quills have attracted the interest of researchers due to their unique structure and composition. However, there is still a knowledge gap in understanding how ...these properties can be utilized to design biomimetic structures with enhanced performance. This study delves into the nanomechanical and macro-mechanical properties of porcupine quills, unveiling varied elastic moduli across different regions and cross sections. The results indicated that the elastic moduli of the upper and lower epidermis were higher at 8.13 ± 0.05 GPa and 7.71 ± 0.14 GPa, respectively, compared to other regions. In contrast, the elastic modulus of the mid-dermis of the quill mid-section was measured to be 7.16 ± 0.10 GPa. Based on the micro- and macro-structural analysis of porcupine quills, which revealed distinct variations in elastic moduli across different regions and cross sections, various biomimetic porous structures (BPSs) were designed. These BPSs were inspired by the unique properties of the quills and aimed to replicate and enhance their mechanical characteristics in engineering applications. Compression, torsion, and impact tests illustrated the efficacy of structures with filled hexagons and circles in improving performance. This study showed enhancements in maximum torsional load and crashworthiness with an increase in filled structures. Particularly noteworthy was the biomimetic porous circular structure 3 (BPCS_3), which displayed exceptional achievements in average energy absorption (28.37 J) and specific energy absorption (919.82 J/kg). Finally, a response surface-based optimization method is proposed to enhance the design of the structure under combined compression-torsion loads, with the goal of reducing mass and deformation. This research contributes to the field of biomimetics by exploring the potential applications of porcupine quill-inspired structures in fields such as robotics, drive shafts, and aerospace engineering.
Programmable logic controllers (PLCs) are widely used in industrial electronic systems. With the augmenting complexity of system, the reliability poses a crucial challenge in safety critical ...applications. This paper proposes a formal modeling and verification approach for programming function block diagrams. Function block diagrams are formalized in a logic specification system. We consider the equivalence checking problem which occurs frequently between design implementations under different performance constraints. We present a novel method to harness a powerful co-induction proof strategy with bisimulation to establish the equivalence in a higher-order logic theorem proving system. We validate the effectiveness of our approach by a real industry application example with key scenarios. The soundness and the completeness of our approach are substantiated.
Knot detection is an important aspect of timber grading. Reducing the false-positive frequency of knot detection will improve the accuracy of the predicted grade, as well as the utilization of the ...graded timber. In this study, a framework for timber knot detection was proposed. Faster R-CNN, a state-of-the-art defect identification algorithm, was first employed to detect timber knots because of its high true-positive frequency. Then, an overlapping bounding box filter was proposed to lower the false positive frequency achieved by Faster R-CNN, where a single knot is sometimes marked several times. The filter merges the overlapping bounding boxes for one actual knot into one box and ensures that each knot is marked only once. The main advantage of this framework is that it reduces the false positive frequency with a small computational cost and a small impact on the true positive frequency. The experimental results showed that the detection precision improved from 90.9% to 97.5% by filtering the overlapping bounding box. The framework proposed in this study is competitive and has potential applications for detecting timber knots for timber grading.
As a top leading cause of cancer death in many countries, colorectal cancer (CRC) has drawn increasing attention to the study of the pathological mechanism. According to the "cancer stem cell ...hypothesis", malignancies originate from a small fraction of cancer cells that show self-renewal properties to initiate and sustain tumor growth and tumor metastasis. Therefore, these cancer stem cells (CSC) probably play important roles in tumor recurrence, metastasis, and drug resistance. Previous research reported that lysine-specific histone demethylase 1 (LSD1) maintains cancer stemness through up-regulating stemness markers SOX2 and OCT4. CD133 is believed to be the most robust surface marker for CRC stem cells, however the regulatory effect of LSD1 on stemness of CD133+ CRC has never been reported. In this study, our objectives included: 1) to isolate pure CD133+ and CD133- cells from SW620 cell line; 2) to investigate the effect of LSD1 on the characteristics of CD133+ stem cancer cells by knocking down the target gene. Results suggested that the SW620 cell line had both CD133+ and CD133- subsets. The CD133+ subset exhibited more CSC-like characteristics compared with the CD133- subset with higher viability, colony formation rate, migration and invasion rate, resistance to anti-cancer drugs, and apoptosis in vitro. The CD133+ also induced faster tumor formation and larger tumors in vivo. In the LSD1-knockdown CD133+ cells, the CSC-like characteristics had been all weakened. We conclude that LSD1 was important for CSCs to maintain their "stemness" features, which could be a potential therapeutic target of CRC. Key words: Lysine-specific histone demethylase 1; Colorectal cancer; Stemness features
The hand is a body part which is constantly in view thus the second toe-to-thumb transfer needs to be aesthetically pleasing. Our study measures the absolute values of second toes, big toes, thumbs ...and their nails with regards to their width, length and circumference and analyses the ratios of between these relative values. With this anatomical data we intend to discover a way to enhance a more aesthetic second toe-to-thumb transfer surgery.
Objectives
Emerging studies have demonstrated that microRNAs (miRNAs) play crucial roles in carcinogenesis of many developing human tumours. However, the functions and mechanisms of miR‐297 in lung ...cancer have, up to now, been largely undefined.
Materials and methods
Here, miR‐297 expression was measured in lung adenocarcinoma tissues and cell lines, using qRT‐PCR. Lung adenocarcinoma cell line was treated with an miR‐297 mimic. MTT and colony analysis were performed to detect cell proliferation and colony formation. The direct target gene of miR‐297 was assessed by qRT‐PCR, Western blotting and luciferase assays.
Results
We demonstrated that miR‐297 expression was upregulated in lung adenocarcinomas compared to adjacent normal tissues. Expression of miR‐297 was also upregulated in tested lung adenocarcinoma cell lines. Ectopic expression of miR‐297 enhanced lung adenocarcinoma cell proliferation and colony formation. Furthermore, overexpression of miR‐297 promoted cell migration and invasion. In addition, we identified Glypican‐5 (GPC5) as a direct target gene of miR‐297 in lung adenocarcinoma cells. Expression of GPC5 was downregulated in both lung adenocarcinoma tissues and cell lines. Moreover, expression of GPC5 was inversely associated with expression of miR‐297 in lung adenocarcinoma tissues.
Conclusions
These results suggest that miR‐297 acted as an oncogenic miRNA, partly by targeting GPC5, adenocarcinoma of the lung.
The number of intelligent applications available for IIoT environments is growing, but when the time-series data these applications rely on are incomplete, their performance suffers. Unfortunately, ...incomplete data are all too frequent to a phenomenon in the world of IIoT. A common workaround is to use imputation. However, the current methods are largely designed to reconstruct a single missing pattern, where a robust and flexible imputation framework would be able to handle many different missing patterns. Hence, the framework presented in this study, RAEF, is capable of processing multiple missing patterns. Based on a recurrent autoencoder, RAEF houses a novel neuron structure, called a gated regulator, which reduces the negative impact of different missing patterns. In a comparison of the state-of-the-art time-series imputation frameworks at a range of different missing rates, RAEF yielded fewer errors than all its counterparts.
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