Considerable attentions have been attracted to the implement of electromagnetic (EM) absorbing metamaterial in the past decade. Most of EM absorbing metamaterials focused on the design methods of ...increasing the broadband performance. However, high-efficient tunable EM absorbing metamaterials still remain a significant challenge. In this work, a 3D-printed high-efficient tunable liquid metal-based EM absorbing metamaterial was designed and demonstrated successfully. A square cavity with four gradient-depth T-shaped microchannels structure was considered as the unit cell of absorbing metamaterial. By taking advantage of the extraordinary fluidity and high conductivity of liquid metal, the high-efficient tunable capability with nearly perfect absorbance from 4.42 to 10.45 GHz and the absorbance over 95% from 3.13 to 4.44 GHz were obtained numerically and experimentally. The simulated results of absorbance agreed well with the measured ones. The designed absorbing metamaterial provides an outstanding way to achieve continuously tunable work frequency in a broadband frequency range, promoting potential application in multi-frequency microwave filters and electromagnetic shielding fields.
Document scanning often suffers from skewing, which may seriously influence the efficiency of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Therefore, it is necessary to correct the skewed document before ...document image information analysis. In this article, we propose a novel adaptive deskewing algorithm for document images, which mainly includes Skeleton Line Detection (SKLD), Piecewise Projection Profile (PPP), Morphological Clustering (MC), and the image classification method. The image type is determined firstly based on the image’s layout feature. Thus, adaptive correcting is applied to deskew the image according to its type. Our method maintains high accuracy on the Document Image Skew Estimation Contest (DISEC’2013) and PubLayNet datasets, which achieved 97.6% and 80.1% accuracy, respectively. Meanwhile, extensive experiments show the superiority of the proposed algorithm.
Virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) technology was applied to silence
VvANR
in cv. Zaoheibao grape berries, and the effects of
VvANR
silencing on berries phenotype; gene expression level of
ANS
,
...LAR1
,
LAR2
, and
UFGT
; enzyme activity of ANS; and accumulations of anthocyanin and flavan-3-ol were investigated. At the third day after treatment, the
VvANR
silenced grape berries began to turn red slightly, which was 2 days earlier than that of the control group. And the flavan-3-ol content in
VvANR
-silenced grape berries had been remarkable within 1 to 5 days, the ANR enzyme activity in
VvANR
-silenced grapes extremely significantly decreased in 3 days, and LAR enzyme activity also decreased, but the difference was not striking. The ANS enzyme activity of the transformed berries was significantly higher than that of the control after 3 days of infection, and it was exceedingly significantly higher than that of the control after 5 to 10 days. The content of anthocyanin in transformed berries increased of a very marked difference within 3 to 15 days. pTRV2-
ANR
infection resulted in an extremely significant decrease in the expression of
VvANR
gene, and the expression of
VvLAR1, VvLAR2, VvMYBPA1, VvMYBPA2
, and
VvDFR
were also down-regulated. However, the expression of
VvANS
and
VvUFGT
was up-regulated significantly. After
VvANR
silencing via VIGS,
VvANR
expression in grape berries was extremely significantly decreased, resulting in decreased ANR enzyme activity and flavan-3-ol content; berries turned red and deeper in advance. In addition,
VvANR
silencing can induce up-regulation of
VvANS
and
VvUFGT
expression, significantly increase ANS enzyme activity, and increase of anthocyanin accumulation.
In this paper, we designed an efficient network structure by combining multiple scale convolution shuffle (MSCS) module and attention features spatial aggregation (ASA) module. MSCS module can obtain ...local and global multiple receptive fields feature information, and it contains the structure idea of the lightweight network convolution block. Moreover, we have proposed ASA module to reducing the information loss of different features in spatial dimension reduction. Meanwhile, we introduce the joint loss function to strengthen the ability of the model to distinguish the difference of attention features between inter-class and intra-class. The experimental results tested on offline HCCR competition dataset ICDAR-2013 show that our network model trained only on handwritten dataset only takes 3.97 ms to recognize a character image and achieves 97.63% accuracy just requires 22.9 MB for storage. Therefore, our method reaches the state-of-the-art in efficient single networks particularly in view of the storage space and inference time.
Objective
This study aimed to identify potential biomarkers associated with the occurrence of minor ischaemic stroke.
Methods
Four hundred patients hospitalized with minor ischaemic stroke were ...enrolled in the department of neurological internal medicine in Taiyuan Central Hospital, and 210 healthy subjects examined at the Taiyuan Central Hospital Medical Center during the same period were selected. We collected information on the general demographic characteristics and fasting blood samples of the subjects. We then used untargeted metabolomic assay to measure blood glucose, blood lipids, homocysteine, and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein.
Results
There were statistically significant differences between the mild ischemic stroke group and the healthy control group in smoking, hypertension, and physical activity (P< 0.05). Compared with the healthy group, the minor ischaemic stroke group showed increased lactate, pyruvate, trimetlylamine oxide levels, and lactic acid, pyruvic acid, and trimethylamine N-oxidation (TMAO) levels were statistically significant (P< 0.001). In the minor ischaemic stroke risk model, hypertension, physical activity, smoking, and elevated TMAO levels influenced the occurrence of minor stroke.
Conclusion
Increased levels of lactic acid, pyruvate, and TMAO may be related to the pathophysiological changes in the minor ischaemic stroke population. High blood pressure, a lack of physical activity, smoking, and increased TMAO level were the influencing factors for the occurrence of minor ischaemic stroke. The serum metabolite TMAO may be associated with MS occurrence
Phosphorus (P) is a crucial macronutrient for plant growth and development, and low-Pi stress poses a significant limitation to maize production. While the role of the SPX domain in encoding proteins ...involved in phosphate (Pi) homeostasis and signaling transduction has been extensively studied in other model plants, the molecular and functional characteristics of the SPX gene family members in maize remain largely unexplored. In this study, we identified six SPX members, and the phylogenetic analysis of ZmSPX s revealed a close relationship with SPX genes in rice. The promoter regions of ZmSPX s were abundant in biotic and abiotic stress-related elements, particularly associated with various hormone signaling pathways, indicating potential intersections between Pi signaling and hormone signaling pathways. Additionally, ZmSPX s displayed tissue-specific expression patterns, with significant and differential induction in anthers and roots, and were localized to the nucleus and cytoplasm. The interaction between ZmSPX s and ZmPHR s was established via yeast two-hybrid assays. Furthermore, overexpression of ZmSPX1 enhanced root sensitivity to Pi deficiency and high-Pi conditions in Arabidopsis thaliana . Phenotypic identification of the maize transgenic lines demonstrated the negative regulatory effect on the P concentration of stems and leaves as well as yield. Notably, polymorphic sites including 34 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and seven insertions/deletions (InDels) in ZmSPX1 were significantly associated with 16 traits of low-Pi tolerance index. Furthermore, significant sites were classified into five haplotypes, and haplotype5 can enhance biomass production by promoting root development. Taken together, our results suggested that ZmSPX family members possibly play a pivotal role in Pi stress signaling in plants by interacting with ZmPHR s. Significantly, ZmSPX1 was involved in the Pi-deficiency response verified in transgenic Arabidopsis and can affect the Pi concentration of maize tissues and yield. This work lays the groundwork for deeper exploration of the maize SPX family and could inform the development of maize varieties with improved Pi efficiency.
Flavane-3-ol monomers are the precursors of proanthocyanidins (PAs), which play a crucial role in grape resistance. Previous studies showed that UV-C positively regulated leucoanthocyanidin reductase ...(LAR) enzyme activity to promote the accumulation of total flavane-3-ols in juvenile grape fruit, but its molecular mechanism was still unclear. In this paper, we found that the contents of flavane-3-ol monomers increased dramatically at the early development stage grape fruit after UV-C treatment, and the expression of its related transcription factor
was also enhanced significantly. The contents of (-)-epicatechin and (+)-catechin, the expression level of
and
, and the activities of LAR and anthocyanidin reductase (ANR) were improved significantly in the
overexpressed grape leaves compared to the empty vector. Both VvMYBPA1 and VvMYC2 could interact with VvWDR1 using bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC) and yeast two hybrid (Y2H). Finally,
was proven to bind with the promoters of
and
by yeast one hybrid (Y1H). To sum up, we found that the expression of
increased in the young stage of grape fruit after UV-C treatment. VvMYBPA1 formed a trimer complex with VvMYC2 and VvWDR1 to regulate the expression of
and
, thus positively promoting the activities of LAR and ANR enzyme, and eventually improved the accumulation of flavane-3-ols in grape fruit.
Flavan-3-ols are monomers of Proanthocyanidins (PAs), which are important polyphenolic compounds in grapes. Previous studies had shown that VvMYBPA2 was closely related to grape flavan-3-ol monomers ...biosynthesis, but its regulatory network is still unclear. Here, we found that the contents of (+)-catechin and (−)-epicatechin, the enzyme activities of anthocyanidin reductase (ANR) and leucoanthocyanidin reductase (LAR) and the expression of VvANR and VvLAR1 were increased in the VvMYBPA2 overexpression grape leaves compared to the control. It was proved that VvMYBPA2 protein interacted with VvWDR1 and VvWDR1 protein interacted with VvMYC2 by yeast two-hybrid (Y2H) and bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC). The promoters of VvANR and VvLAR1 were bound by VvMYBPA2 using yeast one-hybrid (Y1H) assay. These results suggested that VvMYBPA2 could form a trimeric complex with VvWDR1 and VvMYC2 and jointly regulated the expression of flavan-3-ol monomers related genes VvANR and VvLAR1, thereby affecting the enzyme activities of ANR and LAR and ultimately regulating the contents of flavan-3-ols.
Due to the variety of documents and people's different stamping habits, it is difficult for current models to achieve satisfactory results in the process of extracting and removing rubber stamps. ...Most current methods cannot extract or remove rubber stamps without destroying the background text information. To solve the above problems, we propose a neural network that uses a double-cycle structure, named stamp extraction and removal generative adversarial network (SERGAN). In detail, we improve SERGAN's cycle-consistency by simultaneously recombining the generated rubber stamp image and unstamped image into a stamped image, which enables SERGAN to have multi-domain image conversion capability. To prove the model's generalization ability, we compare it with current mainstream methods on the public watermark dataset CLWD, and the experimental results show the excellence of our model. In addition, there is no publicly available dataset for rubber stamp extraction and removal experiments. To address the scarcity of rubber stamp datasets, we construct a large-scale rubber stamp dataset named LRSD.
•A network with strong cycle-consistency which can simultaneously extract and remove rubber stamps from documents is proposed.•A multi-domain image conversion structure which can reduce the number of parameters is proposed.•A large-scale rubber stamp dataset for stamp extraction and removal task is constructed.
Novel BaMg2Al6Si9O30-based ceramics were prepared using the traditional solid-phase reaction method, and this paper presents the fabrication procedure, crystal structure, microstructure, microwave ...dielectric properties and temperature coefficient of thermal expansion of BaMg2Al6Si9O30-based ceramics. BaMg2Al6Si9O30-based ceramics were found to possess a hexagonal crystal structure with the P6/mcc space group. The BaAl2Si2O8 and BaMg2Al6Si9O30 phases coexisted in BaMg2Al6Si9O30 ceramic given that raw MgO material reacted easily with water vapour in the air, and the BaMg2Al6Si9O30 single-phase ceramic could be synthesized with calcined raw MgO material. The BaMg2Al6Si9O30 single-phase ceramic exhibited ultralow εr (5.68 at 14.05 GHz), moderate Q×f value (28534 GHz at 14.05 GHz), a self near-zero τf value (7.35 ppm/°C), a near-zero average temperature coefficient of thermal expansion (+1.89 ppm/°C) at 30 °C1000 °C and a rare negative temperature coefficient of thermal expansion (9.43 ppm/°C) at 655 °C710 °C. The rare near-zero and negative thermal expansions of the BaMg2Al6Si9O30 single-phase ceramic were mainly related to the strong Si/Al-O bonds with high relative covalency and 2 coordinate O(1) allowing longitudinal vibrations.
