Abstract Settlement of roads or railway caused by traffic loading has a serious effect on the safety and service performance of transport infrastructures constructed on soft marine clay. While simple ...cyclic triaxial test with constant confining pressure (CCP) were used in most of the previous studies, a series of cyclic triaxial tests with variable confining pressure (VCP) were carried out on normally consolidated (NC) and overconsolidated (OC) reconstituted Wenzhou soft clay in this paper to study the undrained behavior of soft marine clay due to surcharge preloading as well as cyclic traffic loading. VCP test is able to approximate the complicated stress path than CCP test caused by traffic loading. The test results indicate that NC specimens show significantly different pore water pressure ( u ) evolution compared with OC specimens. However, a change in the overconsolidation ratio (OCR) of OC specimens does not have a significant influence on variation of u with identical cyclic stress ratio (CSR) and total stress path ( η ). The slope of the effective stress path is dependent on the total stress path under which the specimen was loaded cyclically, regardless of the OCR and whether variable confining pressure was applied. The slope of the effective stress path is broadly in line with the slope of corresponding total stress path. In addition, the development of permanent axial strain ( ε p a ) due to one-way cyclic loading was shown to depend significantly on the values of η and OCR. Both the variable confining pressure and OCR limited the strain accumulation of saturated marine clay under undrained one-way cyclic loading. Finally, the effects of η and OCR on the magnitude of ε p a after 1000 loading cycles are quantified and incorporated in a power law function for the permanent deformation prediction of soft marine clay due to traffic loading.
The aim of this study is to investigate the physicochemical properties, biosafety, and biocompatibility of the collagen extract from the skin of Nile tilapia, and evaluate its use as a potential ...material for biomedical applications. Two extraction methods were used to obtain acid-soluble collagen (ASC) and pepsin-soluble collagen (PSC) from tilapia skin. Amino acid composition, FTIR, and SDS-PAGE results showed that ASC and PSC were type I collagen. The molecular form of ASC and PSC is (α₁)₂α₂. The FTIR spectra of ASC and PSC were similar, and the characteristic peaks corresponding to amide A, amide B, amide I, amide II, and amide III were 3323 cm
, 2931 cm
, 1677 cm
, 1546 cm
, and 1242 cm
, respectively. Denaturation temperatures (Td) were 36.1 °C and 34.4 °C, respectively. SEM images showed the loose and porous structure of collagen, indicting its physical foundation for use in applications of biomedical materials. Negative results were obtained in an endotoxin test. Proliferation rates of osteoblastic (MC3T3E1) cells and fibroblast (L929) cells from mouse and human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) were increased in the collagen-treated group compared with the controls. Furthermore, the acute systemic toxicity test showed no acute systemic toxicity of the ASC and PSC collagen sponges. These findings indicated that the collagen from Nile tilapia skin is highly biocompatible in nature and could be used as a suitable biomedical material.
Purpose: To systematically evaluate the effects of blood flow restriction training (BFRT) on anthropometric indicators and blood lipids in overweight/obese adults.
A literature search was conducted ...on PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, Scopus, SPORTDiscus and Cochrane Library databases to determine the final literature based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. Review Manager 5.4.1 was used to evaluate the quality of the literature based on the Cochrane bias risk assessment tool, and Stata 17.0 software was used for Meta-analysis.
A total of 3,985 articles were screened, and five of the studies were included in the Meta-analysis, with a total 66 participants. In each study, subjects were measured before and after BFRT. Meta-results showed that BFRT significantly reduced BMI, lowered body weight, body fat % and waist circumference, significantly reduced total cholesterol (TC) and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) level, lowered triglycerides, and increased high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) level in overweight/obese adults.
BFRT can be used as a safe and effective exercise prescription for personalized weight/fat loss. BFRT significantly reduces BMI by reducing body weight, body fat %, and waist circumference and has the effect of improving body composition. It also significantly reduced TC and LDL-C and tends to decrease TG and increase HDL-C in overweight/obese adults, potentially reducing the incidence of cardiovascular disease.
The general solution of the axial symmetry elastic space problem in cement concrete pavement is an elementary question. Combining the Love method and the Southwell method, the Southwell operator was ...used in the variable selection process, the displacement function was introduced to express the displacement component by the Love method, the expression of stress indicated by the displacement function was obtained by combining the displacement components, geometric equations, and physical equations, then the stress was substituted into the equilibrium equation, the biharmonic equation of displacement function was obtained by mathematical operation, and finally, a new general solution of the axisymmetric elastic space problem in cement concrete pavement was obtained. According to the proposed general solution, mechanical calculation for a cement concrete pavement slab on Winkler foundation was carried out, the displacement curve at the top surface of the slab and the stress curve at the top, middle, and bottom surface of the slab were derived, and the results showed that the method is feasible in the calculation of cement concrete pavement. The general solution provided a new method for solving the axisymmetric elastic space problem of cement concrete pavement.
Resource flow supports the delivery of products and services and plays a vital role in the low-carbon urban distribution grid. Therefore, reasonable forecasting of the resource flow is essential for ...financial decision-making. Through the trained model, the resource flow forecasting process can be simplified and one-click forecasting can be realized. However, this method relies on the selection and optimization of model parameters, where poor parameter choices can significantly impact the forecasting accuracy. This paper first introduces a model for identifying key influencing factors in resource flow data, incorporating an elastic network and gray correlation analysis. Subsequently, a resource flow forecasting method based on improved support vector machines–long- and short term memory (SVM-LSTM) is proposed. Finally, the superior performance of the proposed method is validated through simulations.
3D point cloud registration ranks among the most fundamental problems in remote sensing, photogrammetry, robotics and geometric computer vision. Due to the limited accuracy of 3D feature matching ...techniques, outliers may exist, sometimes even in very large numbers, among the correspondences. Since existing robust solvers may encounter high computational cost or restricted robustness, we propose a novel, fast and highly robust solution, named VOCRA (VOting with Cost function and Rotating Averaging), for the point cloud registration problem with extreme outlier rates. Our first contribution is to employ the Tukey's Biweight robust cost to introduce a new voting and correspondence sorting technique, which proves to be rather effective in distinguishing true inliers from outliers even with extreme (99%) outlier rates. Our second contribution consists in designing a time-efficient consensus maximization paradigm based on robust rotation averaging, serving to seek inlier candidates among the correspondences. Finally, we apply Graduated Non-Convexity with Tukey's Biweight (GNC-TB) to estimate the correct transformation with the inlier candidates obtained, which is then used to find the complete inlier set. Both standard benchmarking and realistic experiments with application to two real-data problems are conducted, and we show that our solver VOCRA is robust against over 99% outliers (exceeding traditional GNC by nearly 10% and RANSAC by nearly 4%) and more time-efficient than the state-of-the-art competitors.
CircRNAs are a class of endogenous RNA that regulates gene expression at the post-transcriptional or transcriptionallevel through interacting with other molecules or microRNAs. Increasing studies ...have demonstrated that circRNAs play a crucial role in biology processes. CircRNAs are proved as potentialbiomarkers in many diseases including cancers. However, the role of Cdr1as in Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remains to be elucidated. We demonstrated that Cdr1as expression was upregulated in HCC tissues compared with the adjacent non-tumor tissues. In addtion, miR-7 expression was downregulated in HCC tissues compared with the adjacent non-tumor tissues. Moreover, the expression level of miR-7 was inversely correlated with that in HCC tissues. Knockdown of Cdr1as suppressed the HCC cell proliferation and invasion. Overexpression of miR-7 inhibited the HCC cell proliferation and invasion. Overexpression of miR-7 could suppress the direct target gene CCNE1 and PIK3CD expression. Knockdown of Cdr1as suppressed the expression of miR-7 and also inhibited the CCNE1 and PIK3CD expression. Furthermore, knockdown of Cdr1as suppressed the HCC cell proliferation and invasion through targeting miR-7. These data suggested that Cdr1as acted as an oncogene partly through targeting miR-7 in HCC.
Fabrication of miniaturized titanium thin-walled products directly using sheet metals is proven to be a promising approach with high productivity. In this process, however, there are many unknowns in ...terms of size effect and its affected fracture behavior. This study is thus aimed at investigating the effect of grain size on the fracture behavior of commercially pure titanium (CP–Ti) sheets with a thickness of 0.1 mm. Tensile tests combined with a digital image correlation (DIC) measurement system were conducted to determine the critical fracture stress of the specimens with different grain sizes. The fracture morphologies of the stretched specimens were further characterized by a scanning electron microscope (SEM). According to the experimental observation, an evident transition from ductile to brittle fracture as the grain size increases from 33.1 to 107.7 μm is revealed. Macroscopically, the elongation and critical fracture stress decrease with the increase of grain size. While according to the microscopic observations, the number of dimples decreases with the increase of grain size. Meanwhile the cleavage planes and river patterns gradually appear in the coarse grain fracture surface. To explore the fracture mechanism, transmission electron microscope (TEM) observations were made utilizing the specimens with fine and coarse grains. Significant dislocation emission from crack-tips was revealed at different grain sizes. Moreover, evident dislocation pile-up at grain boundaries was observed in the specimen with a grain size of 33.1 μm. Those intense dislocations reduce the effective stress at the crack tip resulting in higher crack propagation resistance. Nevertheless, the dislocation density at crack-tip decreases strongly with the increase of grain size leading to high crack-tip effective stress and less crack plasticity. Thus cleavage fracture was dominated in coarse grain CP-Ti sheets. A dislocation shielding model was developed to capture the dislocation observation in various grain sizes. The critical stress onset of CP-Ti sheets fracture during the tensile test was also predicted for validation.
To study the impact of active galactic nuclei (AGN) feedback on their galactic ISM, we present Magellan long-slit spectroscopy of 12 luminous nearby obscured AGN ( , z ∼ 0.1). These objects are ...selected from a parent sample of spectroscopically identified AGN to have high O iiiλ5007 and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mid-IR luminosities and extended emission in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey r-band images, suggesting the presence of extended O iiiλ5007 emission. We find spatially resolved O iii emission (2-35 kpc) in 8 out of 12 of these objects. Combined with samples of higher luminosity obscured AGN, we confirm that the size of the narrow-line region (RNLR) scales with the mid-IR luminosity until the relation flattens at RNLR ∼ 10 kpc. Nine out of 12 objects in our sample have regions with broad O iii line widths (w80 > 600 km s−1), indicating outflows. We define these regions as the kinematically disturbed region (KDR). The size of the KDR ( ) is typically smaller than RNLR by few kiloparsecs but also correlates strongly with the AGN mid-IR luminosity. Given the uncertain outflow mass, we derive a loose constraint on the outflow energy efficiency . We find no evidence for an AGN luminosity threshold below which outflows are not launched. To explain the sizes, velocity profiles, and high occurrence rates of the outflows in the most luminous AGN, we propose a scenario in which energy-conserving outflows are driven by AGN episodes with ∼108 year durations. Within each episode, the AGN is unlikely to be constantly luminous but could flicker on shorter timescales ( 107 yr) with a moderate duty cycle (∼10%).
Object detection plays an important role in the field of computer vision. The purpose of object detection is to identify the objects of interest in the image and determine their categories and ...positions. Object detection has many important applications in various fields. This article addresses the problems of unclear foreground contour in moving object detection and excessive noise points in the global vision, proposing an improved Gaussian mixture model for feature fusion. First, the RGB image was converted into the HSV space, and a mixed Gaussian background model was established. Next, the object area was obtained through background subtraction, residual interference in the foreground was removed using the median filtering method, and morphological processing was performed. Then, an improved Canny algorithm using an automatic threshold from the Otsu method was used to extract the overall object contour. Finally, feature fusion of edge contours and the foreground area was performed to obtain the final object contour. The experimental results show that this method improves the accuracy of the object contour and reduces noise in the object.
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