There are two shortcomings existing in the current color image encryption. One is that high correlation between
R
,
G
,
B
components of the original image may be neglected, the other is that the ...encryption has little relationship with the plain image, and then it is vulnerable to be broken. In order to solve these two problems and present secure and effective image encryption scheme, we introduce a novel chaos-based image encryption algorithm for color images based on three-dimensional (3-D) bit-plane permutation. In the proposed algorithm, the color plain image is firstly converted to 24 bit planes by
RGB
splitting and bit plane decomposition, next three-dimensional bit-plane permutation is performed on bit planes, position sequences for permutation are obtained from the 3D Chen chaotic system, and then the three confused components are gotten. Secondly, three key matrices are generated by a 1D chaotic system and a multilevel discretization method, and finally, the color cipher image is obtained by diffusing the confused components using key matrices. The SHA 256 hash function value of the plain image is obtained and combined with the given parameters to calculate the parameters and initial values of the chaotic system, so that the proposed scheme highly depends on the plain image and it may effectively withstand known-plaintext and chosen-plaintext attacks. Simulation results and security analyses demonstrate that our algorithm not only has good encryption effect, but can also resist against common attacks, so it is reliable to be applied for image secure communications.
Stimulator-of-interferon genes (STING) is vital for sensing cytosolic DNA and initiating innate immune responses against microbial infection and tumors. Redox homeostasis is the balance of oxidative ...and reducing reactions present in all living systems. Yet, how the intracellular redox state controls STING activation is unclear. Here, we show that cellular redox homeostasis maintained by glutathione peroxidase 4 (GPX4) is required for STING activation. GPX4 deficiency enhanced cellular lipid peroxidation and thus specifically inhibited the cGAS-STING pathway. Concordantly, GPX4 deficiency inhibited herpes simplex virus-1 (HSV-1)-induced innate antiviral immune responses and promoted HSV-1 replication in vivo. Mechanistically, GPX4 inactivation increased production of lipid peroxidation, which led to STING carbonylation at C88 and inhibited its trafficking from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) to the Golgi complex. Thus, cellular stress-induced lipid peroxidation specifically attenuates the STING DNA-sensing pathway, suggesting that GPX4 facilitates STING activation by maintaining redox homeostasis of lipids.
Bicycle-sharing plays an important role in solving the “last mile” problem of Chinese people and promoting the construction of an environment-friendly society. This study assesses the carbon ...emissions generated in the life cycle of bicycle-sharing, examines the substitution effect of bicycle-sharing, and quantifies the depletion rate of bicycle-sharing in combination with the current rate of electric vehicles in China. The depletion rate of shared bicycles in China is high, roughly 5–15% per year. In addition, we discuss scenarios where the annual growth rate of electric vehicles is 40%, 50%, and 60%. Results show that when electric vehicles’ depletion rate is 5% and the annual growth rate of electric vehicles is 40%, the largest net emission reduction in 2025 is 1.96 million tons. Additionally, when electric vehicles’ depletion rate is 5% and the annual growth rate of electric vehicles is 60%, the smallest net emission reduction totals 1.7 million tons.
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•The microbial ecosystem of Chinese liquor cellar was studied as a whole.•Significantly distinctive microbial communities were identified in jiupei and pit mud.•The metabolic ...contribution in organic acid synthesis of jiupei and pit mud microbiota was explored.•Acetate and lactate accumulated in jiupei were further converted to butyrate and hexanoate by pit mud microbiota.•Synergistic cooperation within jiupei and pit mud microbiota drives baijiu’s typical flavor formation.
Mud cellars have long been used as anaerobic bioreactors for the fermentation of Chinese strong-flavor Baijiu, where starchy raw materials (mainly sorghum) are metabolized to ethanol and various flavor compounds by multi-species microorganisms. Jiupei (fermented grains) and pit mud are two spatially linked microbial habitats in the mud cellar, yet their metabolic division of labor remains unclear. Here, we investigated the changes in environmental variables (e.g., temperature, oxygen, pH), key metabolites (e.g., ethanol, organic acids) and microbial communities in jiupei and pit mud during fermentation. Jiupei (low pH, high ethanol) and pit mud (neutral pH) provided two habitats with distinctly different environmental conditions for microbial growth. Lactic acid accumulated in jiupei, while butyric and hexanoic acids were mainly produced by microbes inhabiting the pit mud. Biomass analysis using quantitative real-time PCR showed that bacteria dominated the microbial consortia during fermentation, moreover cluster and principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) analysis showed that the bacterial communities of jiupei and pit mud were significantly divergent. The bacterial community diversity of jiupei decreased significantly during the fermentation process, and was relatively stable in pit mud. Lactobacillus dominated the jiupei bacterial community, and its relative abundance reached 98.0% at the end of fermentation. Clostridia (relative abundance: 42.9–85.5%) was the most abundant bacteria in pit mud, mainly distributed in the genus Hydrogenispora (5.3–68.4%). Fungal communities of jiupei and pit mud showed a similar succession pattern, and Kazachstania, Aspergillus and Thermoascus were the predominant genera. PICRUSt analysis demonstrated that enzymes participating in the biosynthesis of acetic and lactic acid were mainly enriched in jiupei samples, while the bacterial community in the pit mud displayed greater potential for butyric and hexanoic acid synthesis. Assays from an in vitro simulated fermentation further validated the roles of jiupei microbiota in acetic and lactic acid production, and these acids were subsequently metabolized to butyric and hexanoic acid by the pit mud microbiota. This work has demonstrated the synergistic cooperation between the microbial communities of jiupei and pit mud for the representative flavor formation of strong-flavor Baijiu.
Background
Horner syndrome often occurs with cervical myelopathies and might provide insight into the underlying disease and prognosis.
Objectives
To describe the clinical and imaging features of ...dogs with cervical myelopathy and concurrent Horner syndrome and to determine association of Horner syndrome with diseases or magnetic resonance images (MRI).
Animals
Ninety‐three client‐owned dogs with cervical myelopathy and concurrent Horner syndrome and 99 randomly selected client‐owned dogs with cervical myelopathy without Horner syndrome (control cases).
Methods
Retrospective study. Medical records were reviewed to identify Horner and control cases and clinical findings recorded. MRI were reviewed, and lesions characterized and recorded. Descriptive and comparative statistics were performed.
Results
Non‐compressive disease occurred more frequently in the Horner group compared with controls (58%; 95% CI: 48‐68 vs 9%; 95% CI: 5‐16; P < .0001). The most common diseases were fibrocartilaginous embolism in the Horner group (44/93; 47%) and intervertebral disc extrusion (76/99; 77%) amongst controls. On MRI, parenchymal hyperintensity was seen more commonly in the Horner group (95%; 95% CI: 88‐98) compared with controls (51%; 95% CI: 41‐60; P < .0001). In the Horner group, dogs that did not survive to discharge (N = 13) had more extensive MRI lesions relative to the adjacent vertebral length (200%; IQR 110%‐575%) compared with survivors (N = 80; 110%; IQR 40%‐250%; P = .02). Lateralization of Horner signs and MRI changes matched in 54% of cases. The overall survival rate was high in both Horner (80/93; 86%) and control (95/99; 96%) groups.
Conclusions and Clinical Importance
Horner syndrome in cervical myelopathy is commonly associated with noncompressive intraparenchymal disease.
Since high-order relationships among multiple brain regions-of-interests (ROIs) are helpful to explore the pathogenesis of neurological diseases more deeply, hypergraph-based brain networks are more ...suitable for brain science research. Unlike the existing hypergraph based brain network (brain hypernetwork), where hyperedges containing the same number of ROIs are assumed to have equal weights (to some extent, the network is unweighted), and the underlying structure is described only by an incidence/adjacency matrix, in this paper, we propose a framework for constructing a truly weighted brain hypernetwork described by an adjacency tensor. Considering the relationships among vertices within a hyperedge, we propose a novel hyperedge weight estimation method and convert the incidence matrix into a weighted adjacency tensor. On the basis of tensor decomposition, we apply hypergraph signal processing tools, such as hypergraph Fourier transform, to analyze and compare the spectrum between schizophrenia patients and normal controls. It is found that there are more high frequency components in the spectrum of patients than controls, and the average amplitude is significantly greater than that of controls. Instead of extracting some simple topological features from brain hypernetworks for classification, we innovatively use the hypergraph spectrum and the spectral signal as classification features, and the classification results on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Humans have mastered high-salinity fermentation techniques for bean-based fermented product preparation over thousands of years. High salinity was used to select the functional microbiota and ...conducted food fermentation production with unique flavor. Although a high-salinity environment is beneficial for suppressing harmful microbes in the open fermentation environment, the fermentation efficiency of functional microbes is partially inhibited. Therefore, application of defined starter cultures for reduced-salt fermentation in a sterile environment is an alternative approach to improve the fermentation efficiency of bean-based fermented foods and guide the transformation of traditional industry. However, the assembly and function of self-organized microbiota in an open fermentation environment are still unclear. This study provides a comprehensive understanding of microbial function and the mechanism of community succession in a high-salinity environment during the fermentation of broad bean paste so as to reconstruct the microbial community and realize efficient fermentation of broad bean paste in a sterile environment.
ABSTRACT
Humans have used high salinity for the production of bean-based fermented foods over thousands of years. Although high salinity can inhibit the growth of harmful microbes and select functional microbiota in an open environment, it also affects fermentation efficiency of bean-based fermented foods and has a negative impact on people’s health. Therefore, it is imperative to develop novel defined starter cultures for reduced-salt fermentation in a sterile environment. Here, we explored the microbial assembly and function in the fermentation of traditional Chinese broad bean paste with 12% salinity. The results revealed that the salinity and microbial interactions together drove the dynamic of community and pointed out that five dominant genera (
Staphylococcus
,
Bacillus
,
Weissella
,
Aspergillus
, and
Zygosaccharomyces
) may play different key roles in different fermentation stages. Then, core species were isolated from broad bean paste, and their salinity tolerance, interactions, and metabolic characteristics were evaluated. The results provided an opportunity to validate
in situ
predictions through
in vitro
dissection of microbial assembly and function. Last, we reconstructed the synthetic microbial community with five strains (
Aspergillus oryzae
,
Bacillus subtilis
,
Staphylococcus gallinarum
,
Weissella confusa
, and
Zygosaccharomyces rouxii
) under different salinities and realized efficient fermentation of broad bean paste for 6 weeks in a sterile environment with 6% salinity. In general, this work provided a bottom-up approach for the development of a simplified microbial community model with desired functions to improve the fermentation efficiency of bean-based fermented foods by deconstructing and reconstructing the microbial structure and function.
IMPORTANCE
Humans have mastered high-salinity fermentation techniques for bean-based fermented product preparation over thousands of years. High salinity was used to select the functional microbiota and conducted food fermentation production with unique flavor. Although a high-salinity environment is beneficial for suppressing harmful microbes in the open fermentation environment, the fermentation efficiency of functional microbes is partially inhibited. Therefore, application of defined starter cultures for reduced-salt fermentation in a sterile environment is an alternative approach to improve the fermentation efficiency of bean-based fermented foods and guide the transformation of traditional industry. However, the assembly and function of self-organized microbiota in an open fermentation environment are still unclear. This study provides a comprehensive understanding of microbial function and the mechanism of community succession in a high-salinity environment during the fermentation of broad bean paste so as to reconstruct the microbial community and realize efficient fermentation of broad bean paste in a sterile environment.
With the rapid development of distributed energy resources, an increasing number of residential and commercial users have been switched from pure electricity consumers to prosumers who can both ...consume and produce energy. To properly manage these emerging prosumers, the peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity market has been explored and extensively studied. In this article, a scalable energy management mechanism is proposed for the P2P electricity market. First, the multibilateral economic dispatch problem that maximizes social welfare is formulated, considering product differentiation and network constraints. Then, an energy management mechanism is devised to improve the scalability from two aspects as follows. i) An accelerated distributed clearing algorithm with fewer optimization variables and communication messages and a faster convergence rate. ii) A novel selection strategy to reduce the computational and communication overheads per player. Finally, the convergence rate of the proposed clearing algorithm is given, and the effectiveness of the proposed energy management mechanism is illustrated through numerical simulations.
In the past decades, food consumption in China has undergone a rapid increase and a significant structure transition, as a result of population growth and economic development. The food system is ...increasingly threatening the environment by depleting water resources, deteriorating water bodies, aggravating climate change, degrading ecosystems, etc. It is significant to understand how food consumption affected the environment and how its impacts were driven in the historical period. This study reveals the environmental impacts of China's food system from 1961 to 2017 from a consumption perspective by assessing water, carbon, and ecological footprints. The logarithmic mean Divisia index method was used to examine the drivers of the growing environmental footprints. The assessment results show that all three environmental footprints have had a drastic increase of more than two times during the studied period, which indicates the high environmental pressure posed by food consumption. We also found that, before the 1980s, the main driving forces of the increasing footprints were population and per capita energy intake. From 1984, the diet pattern started to take a positive effect and then became the dominant driver of the growing environmental footprints after the end of the 1990s.
Low count PET (positron emission tomography) imaging is often desirable in clinical diagnosis and biomedical research, but its images are generally very noisy, due to the very weak signals in the ...sinograms used in image reconstruction. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel kernel graph filtering method for dynamic PET sinogram denoising. This method is derived from treating the dynamic sinograms as the signals on a graph, and learning the graph adaptively from the kernel principal components of the sinograms to construct a lowpass kernel graph spectrum filter. The kernel graph filter thus obtained is then used to filter the original sinogram time frames to obtain the denoised sinograms for PET image reconstruction. Extensive tests and comparisons on the simulated and real life in-vivo dynamic PET datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in sinogram denoising and image enhancement of dynamic PET at all count levels, especially at low count, with a great potential in real life applications of dynamic PET imaging.
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