Radiant heating and cooling (RHC) systems are being increasingly applied not only in residential but also in non-residential buildings such as commercial buildings, education facilities, and even ...large scale buildings such as airport terminals. Furthermore, with the combined ventilation system used to handle latent load, the radiant cooling system has proven applicable in hot and humid climates. It is well known that the RHC system has advantages of low draught risk, quiet operation, low energy consumption, and ability for design integration with building elements. These merits have motivated numerous studies on RHC systems in terms of comfort, heat transfer analysis, energy simulation, control strategy, system configurations and so on. Many studies have demonstrated that the RHC system is a good solution to improve indoor environmental quality while reducing building energy consumption for heating and cooling. On the other hand, the RHC system has limitations such as complicated control of Thermally Activated Building System (TABS), acoustical issues, higher capital cost and cooling load than conventional air systems, and so on. For now, the required mitigation of these limitations and the need to extend the applicability of the RHC system are providing the continuous impetus for research on RHC systems. This paper summarizes the important issues involved in the research on RHC system, whereby ten questions and answers concerning the RHC system are discussed, which will help researchers to conduct relevant studies.
•The paper addresses ten essential questions on radiant heating and cooling systems.•Advantages and limitations of the radiant heating and cooling system are discussed.•Previous studies on the evaluation of system performance are revisited.•Current issues on controls for reducing energy and condensation risk are raised.•The authors suggest future research topics on the radiant heating and cooling systems.
Gastric wall abscess is a rare condition characterized by a purulent inflammatory process resulting in the formation of a pocket of pus in the stomach. As the mucosa is usually intact, it requires ...various tools such as endoscopic ultrasonography or computed tomography for the differential diagnosis to rule out more common subepithelial tumors. Even after the diagnosis, the treatment for gastric wall abscess was previously restricted to surgical resection in combination with antibiotics. Currently, in order to avoid unnecessary surgery, the alternative method of initial treatment with an endoscopic approach is recommended. It also helps to choose appropriate antibiotics with confirmation of the pathogen by drainage. There are few reports that describe the detailed processing of the endoscopic drainage, and there is no consensus on the treatment. The pathogens that cause gastric wall abscess are usually Streptococci, Staphylococci, and Escherichia coli. There is only one case reported to be caused by Candida albicans. This is the first report of Elizabethkingia anopheles as the pathogen of the gastric wall abscess. Here, we report a case of gastric wall abscess in a 75-year-old man, safely treated by endoscopic drainage and antibiotics, confirmed by isolating the contents of the abscess.
The hard X-ray free-electron laser at the Pohang Accelerator Laboratory (PAL-XFEL) in the Republic of Korea achieved saturation of a 0.144 nm free-electron laser beam on 27 November 2016, making it ...the third hard X-ray free-electron laser in the world, following the demonstrations of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) and the SPring-8 Angstrom Compact Free Electron Laser (SACLA). The use of electron-beam-based alignment incorporating undulator radiation spectrum analysis has allowed reliable operation of PAL-XFEL with unprecedented temporal stability and dispersion-free orbits. In particular, a timing jitter of just 20 fs for the free-electron laser photon beam is consistently achieved due to the use of a state-of-the-art design of the electron linear accelerator and electron-beam-based alignment. The low timing jitter of the electron beam makes it possible to observe Bi(111) phonon dynamics without the need for timing-jitter correction, indicating that PAL-XFEL will be an extremely useful tool for hard X-ray time-resolved experiments. The Pohang Accelerator Laboratory X-ray Free Electron Laser (PAL-XFEL) in South Korea has now entered operation with a timing jitter of just 20 fs.
Abstract Kaempferol, a natural dietary flavonoid, is well known to possess chemopreventive and therapeutic anticancer efficacy; however, its antimetastatic effects have not been mechanistically ...studied so far in any cancer model. This study was aimed to investigate the inhibitory effect and accompanying mechanisms of kaempferol on epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and cell migration induced by transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1). In human A549 non–small lung cancer cells, kaempferol strongly blocked the enhancement of cell migration by TGF-β1–induced EMT through recovering the loss of E-cadherin and suppressing the induction of mesenchymal markers as well as the upregulation of TGF-β1–mediated matrix metalloproteinase-2 activity. Interestingly, kaempferol reversed TGF-β1–mediated Snail induction and E-cadherin repression by weakening Smad3 binding to the Snail promoter without affecting its C-terminus phosphorylation, complex formation with Smad4, and nuclear translocation under TGF-β1 stimulation. Mechanism study revealed that the phosphorylation of Smad3 linker region induced by TGF-β1 was required for the induction of EMT and cell migration, and selective downregulation of the phosphorylation of Smad3 at Thr179 residue (not Ser204, Ser208, and Ser213) in the linker region was responsible for the inhibition by kaempferol of TGF-β1–induced EMT and cell migration. Furthermore, Akt1 was required for TGF-β1–mediated induction of EMT and cell migration and directly phosphorylated Smad3 at Thr179, and kaempferol completely abolished TGF-β1–induced Akt1 phosphorylation. In summary, kaempferol blocks TGF-β1–induced EMT and migration of lung cancer cells by inhibiting Akt1-mediated phosphorylation of Smad3 at Thr179 residue, providing the first evidence of a molecular mechanism for the anticancer effect of kaempferol.
Abstract
Phosphatases, together with kinases and transcription factors, are key components in cellular signalling networks. Here, we present a systematic functional analysis of the phosphatases in
...Cryptococcus neoformans
, a fungal pathogen that causes life-threatening fungal meningoencephalitis. We analyse 230 signature-tagged mutant strains for 114 putative phosphatases under 30 distinct in vitro growth conditions, revealing at least one function for 60 of these proteins. Large-scale virulence and infectivity assays using insect and mouse models indicate roles in pathogenicity for 31 phosphatases involved in various processes such as thermotolerance, melanin and capsule production, stress responses,
O-
mannosylation, or retromer function. Notably, phosphatases Xpp1, Ssu72, Siw14, and Sit4 promote blood-brain barrier adhesion and crossing by
C. neoformans
. Together with our previous systematic studies of transcription factors and kinases, our results provide comprehensive insight into the pathobiological signalling circuitry of
C. neoformans
.
MicroRNAs (miRNA) are a class of small (∼22 nucleotides) noncoding RNAs that regulate diverse biological processes at the post‐transcriptional level. MiRNAs have great potential for forensic body ...fluid identification because they are expressed in a tissue specific manner and are less prone to degradation. Previous studies reported several miRNAs as body fluid specific, but there are few overlaps among them. Here, we used a genome‐wide miRNA microarray containing over 1700 miRNAs to assay 20 body fluid samples and identify novel miRNAs useful for forensic body fluid identification. Based on Shannon Entropy and Q‐statistics, 203 miRNAs specifically expressed in each body fluid were first selected. Eight miRNAs were then selected as novel forensically relevant miRNA markers: miR‐484 and miR‐182 for blood, miR‐223 and miR‐145 for saliva, miR‐2392 and miR‐3197 for semen, and miR‐1260b and miR‐654–5p for vaginal secretions. When the eight selected miRNAs were evaluated in 40 additional body fluid samples by qRT‐PCR, they showed high sensitivity and specificity for the identification of the target body fluid. We suggest that the eight miRNAs may be candidates for developing an effective molecular assay for forensic body fluid identification.
In recent years, deep learning (DL) has been widely studied using various methods across the globe, especially with respect to training methods and network structures, proving highly effective in a ...wide range of tasks and applications, including image, speech, and text recognition. One important aspect of this advancement is involved in the effort of designing and upgrading neural architectures, which has been consistently attempted thus far. However, designing such architectures requires the combined knowledge and know-how of experts from each relevant discipline and a series of trial-and-error steps. In this light, automated neural architecture search (NAS) methods are increasingly at the center of attention; this paper aimed at summarizing the basic concepts of NAS while providing an overview of recent studies on the applications of NAS. It is worth noting that most previous survey studies on NAS have been focused on perspectives of hardware or search strategies. To the best knowledge of the present authors, this study is the first to look at NAS from a computer vision perspective. In the present study, computer vision areas were categorized by task, and recent trends found in each study on NAS were analyzed in detail.
In South Korea, the stand-alone microgrid on an island has synchronous diesel generators and multiple distributed generations (DG) based on renewable energy, and energy storage systems (ESS). ...According to the active policy of government to develop eco-friendly microgrids with zero carbon emission, many diesel generators in stand-alone microgrids are being replaced by the DGs. It brings challenges on the operation and control of multiple DGs because this causes the lack of inertia, which is originally provided from the diesel generators.
This paper proposes a new decoupled frequency and voltage controller for DGs, which is able to keep the grid frequency and voltage magnitude constant. For frequency control, a frequency recovery control loop is newly added to conventional droop and inertia control loops for both effective power sharing and stabilization of frequency response after a disturbance. For voltage control, the proposed controller regulates the grid voltage in an inertia-free mode, in which all diesel generators are disconnected, while providing the conventional reactive power-voltage droop control under a normal condition. Moreover, the adaptive power sharing strategy is newly proposed to avoid the overcharge/discharge conditions of ESSs. As the result, the proposed controller can enhance the resilience and increase the penetration of renewable energies to the stand-alone microgrid. To verify the effectiveness of proposed controller, several case studies are being carried out by using the practical data of a real stand-alone microgrid in South Korea.
Highlights • Age-correlated CpGs of cg16867657 ( ELOVL2 ), cg04208403 ( ZNF423 ), and cg19283806 ( CCDC102B ), were selected from public HumanMethylation DB. • Three CpG sites were evaluated in a ...535-sample training and a 230-sample validation set from Korean individuals using a pyrosequencing platform. • By the multiple linear regression, the standard error of estimate and MAD were 6.320 and 3.156 years in training set and 6.853 and 3.346 years in validation set. • These DNA methylation markers may be useful for age prediction in blood samples from Asian populations.
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