Fanconi anaemia (FA) has recently become an attractive model to study breast cancer susceptibility (BRCA) genes, as three FA genes, FANCD1, FANCN and FANCJ, are identical to the BRCA genes BRCA2, ...PALB2 and BRIP1. Increasing evidence shows that FA proteins function as signal transducers and DNA-processing molecules in a DNA-damage response network. This network consists of many proteins that maintain genome integrity, including ataxia telangiectasia and Rad3 related protein (ATR), Bloom syndrome protein (BLM), and BRCA1. Now that the gene that is defective in the thirteenth and last assigned FA complementation group (FANCI) has been identified, I discuss what is known about FA proteins and their interactive network, and what remains to be discovered.
The occurrence and removal of 19 antibiotics (including four macrolides, eight sulfonamides, three fluoroquinolones, three tetracyclines, and trimethoprim) were investigated in two ecological ...(constructed wetland (CW) and stabilization pond (SP)) and two conventional wastewater treatment processes (activated sludge (AS) and micro-power biofilm (MP)) in a county of eastern China. All target antibiotics were detected in the influent and effluent samples with detection frequencies of >90%. Clarithromycin, ofloxacin, roxithromycin and erythromycin-H2O were the dominant antibiotics with maximum concentrations reaching up to 6524, 5411, 964 and 957 ng/L, respectively; while the concentrations of tiamulin, sulfamerazine, sulfathiazole, sulfamethazine, sulfamethizole and sulfisoxazole were below 10 ng/L. Although the mean effluent concentrations of target antibiotics were obviously lower than the influent ones (except ciprofloxacin), their removals were usually incomplete. Principal component analysis showed that the AS and CW outperformed the MP and SP processes and the AS performed better than the CW process in terms of antibiotics removal. Both the AS and CW processes exhibited higher removal efficiencies in summer than in winter, indicating biological degradation could play an important role in antibiotics removal. Because of the incomplete removal, the total concentration of detected antibiotics increased in the mixing and downstream sections of a local river receiving the effluent from a typical wastewater treatment facility practicing AS process. Nowadays, ecological wastewater treatment processes are being rapidly planned and constructed in rural areas of China; however, the discharge of residual antibiotics to the aquatic environment may highlight a necessity for optimizing or upgrading their design and operation.
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•The removal of antibiotics was examined in four wastewater treatment processes.•The AS and CW outperformed the SP and MP for antibiotics removal.•The ecological processes had notable seasonal variations in removing antibiotics.•The WWTF effluent impacted obviously the water quality of a receiving river.
Dynamic resource allocation (DRA) is the key technology to improve the network performance in resource-limited multibeam satellite (MBS) systems. The aim is to find a policy that maximizes the ...expected long-term resource utilization. Existing iterative metaheuristics DRA optimization algorithms are not practical due to the high computational complexity. To solve the problem of unknown dynamics and prohibitive computation, a deep reinforcement learning-based framework (DRLF) is proposed for DRA problems in MBS systems. A novel image-like tensor reformulation on the system environments is adopted to extract traffic spatial and temporal features. A use case of dynamic channel allocation in DRLF is simulated and shows the effectiveness of the proposed DRLF in time-varying scenarios.
The paper comparatively investigates the microstructures and mechanical properties of Inconel 718 superalloy manufactured by selective laser melting (SLM) and casting. The finite element analysis ...(FEA) method is used to simulate the temperature fields during SLM and casting processes. Driven by ultra-high temperature gradient and ultra-fast cooling rate during SLM process, the fine grains (average grain size of 48 µm) and dispersed fine precipitation in SLM-ed sample even after HSA (homogenization + solution + aging) and HA (homogenization + aging) heat treatment significantly enhance its mechanical properties, which far exceeds that of casting with average grain size of 1300 µm, and is comparable to that of forging. The microstructure of casting with coarse irregular Laves phases, acicular δ precipitates and globular carbides in the interdendritic zones after HSA heat treatment and some defects existed possibly result in premature failure of tensile samples. The microstructure without δ phases but only some globular carbides in the grain boundary of SLM-ed sample after HA heat treatment possesses higher mechanical properties than that after HSA heat treatment, in which there is only some finer needle-like δ phase and few carbides are precipitated in the grain boundaries. The analysis shows the large amounts of δ phase precipitated in the matrix will deteriorate the plasticity of SLM-ed IN718 superalloy, the appropriate reduction of the δ phase will improve the strength and plasticity of material simultaneously.
A rational rheology model is critical for the numerical simulation of debris-flow behavior. The Bingham model commonly used in many current studies has failed to simulate the shear thickening and ...thinning phenomenon in experiments. We report an alternative solution by incorporating the Herschel-Bulkley-Papanastasiou (HBP) model with the smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) method. The SPH simulation is based on the open-source DualSPHysics scheme, upon which we built a development by the Bingham-based rheology model in our previous study. In this paper, a straightforward improvement is made such that the HBP model is incorporated to describe the constitutive law between particles, extending the compatibility of the simulation to dilatant and pseudoplastic fluids. To illustrate the performance of the HBP-based SPH method, first, a sensitivity analysis was performed to investigate the influence of important rheological coefficients. The proposed method was then verified by a dam-break experiment of water-clay mixtures and the case study of the 2010 Yohutagawa debris-flow event in Japan. The results indicate a good accordance between simulation and observation. A discussion regarding the potential and limitations of the current method concludes the paper.
•An HBP-based SPH method is proposed for numerical simulation of debris flows.•Shear thickening and thinning phenomenon of debris-flow mixture can be simulated.•A sensitivity analysis on the HBP rheological model is conducted.•The performance of the proposed method has been verified by experiment and case study.
Underlying modern Chinese sanwen (or prose) are long-established wenzhang traditions. Emerging in the transformation from traditional wenzhang to modern literature, modern Chinese sanwen had gone ...through a complicated process before acquiring its atypical stylistic characteristics and being relegated to a marginal place in modern literature. Nevertheless, this has also provided it with the possibility of breaking through its current dilemma. A reconstructed theory of Chinese sanwen must center on the core of "the person-the writings," to build a four-level theoretical structure comprised of knowledge and experience, thought and emotion, spirit and mind realm, and style and form. It should also draw on the wisdoms of traditional Chinese thought and art and incorporate the historical characteristics of wenzhang (its basis on the Dao or Way, connection with history, engagement with reality, and manifestation in literature), so as to pave a path between the person and the writings and establish a viable evaluative sanwen discourse system with Chinese characteristics.
•A two steps analytical approach is presented to analyze the interaction mechanics for excavation–soil–tunnels.•3D numerical analysis is conducted and the simplified analytical method can overcome ...complex simulation.•Galerkin’s method is used to convert the differential equation into finite element equation.•The excavation unloading effects of bottom and surrounding walls can be fully considered.•The parametric analyses are presented to investigate the effects of excavation-induced unloading on tunnels.
A major challenge in the design and construction of soil excavation and foundation pit engineering in urban areas is the protection of adjacent underground structures, such as existing tunnels. Excavation-induced soil unloading can adversely affect and even damage the tunnels in the vicinity. A simplified analytical approach is presented to analyze the deformation response for adjacent tunnels due to excavation-induced soil unloading in excavation engineering. Firstly, the green soil unloading stress due to adjacent excavation is estimated at the existing tunnel location. Secondly, the deformation response of the tunnel subjected to green soil unloading stress is calculated by the Galerkin’s method, which can be used to obtain the finite element equation converted from the differential equation. The accuracy of the proposed method is verified by comparisons with 3D finite element numerical simulation, centrifuge model tests provide by Kusakabe et al. (1985) and measured data in situ. Finally, the parametric analysis for deformation influence factors of the existing tunnel, including the tunnel buried depth, the distance from the excavation site, the soil geo-characters and the outer diameter of the tunnel, is presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. This proposed method may provide certain basis to make protective measures of existing tunnels influenced by excavation engineering and enables a quick estimate of the deformation behavior of excavation-induced adjacent tunnels, resulting in savings in time and costs.
To examine the association between temperature and cause specific mortality, and to quantify the corresponding disease burden attributable to non-optimum ambient temperatures.
Time series analysis.
...272 main cities in China.
Non-accidental deaths in 272 cities covered by the Disease Surveillance Point System of China, from January 2013 to December 2015.
Daily numbers of deaths from all non-accidental causes and main cardiorespiratory diseases. Potential effect modifiers included demographic, climatic, geographical, and socioeconomic characteristics. The analysis used distributed lag non-linear models to estimate city specific associations, and multivariate meta-regression analysis to obtain the effect estimates at national and regional levels.
1 826 186 non-accidental deaths from total causes were recorded in the study period. Temperature and mortality consistently showed inversely J shaped associations. At the national average level, relative to the minimum mortality temperature (22.8°C, 79.1st centile), the mortality risk of extreme cold temperature (at -1.4°C, the 2.5th centile) lasted for more than 14 days, whereas the risk of extreme hot temperature (at 29.0°C, the 97.5th centile) appeared immediately and lasted for two to three days. 14.33% of non-accidental total mortality was attributable to non-optimum temperatures, of which moderate cold (ranging from -1.4 to 22.8°C), moderate heat (22.8 to 29.0°C), extreme cold (-6.4 to -1.4°C), and extreme heat (29.0 to 31.6°C) temperatures corresponded to attributable fractions of 10.49%, 2.08%, 1.14%, and 0.63%, respectively. The attributable fractions were 17.48% for overall cardiovascular disease, 18.76% for coronary heart disease, 16.11% for overall stroke, 14.09% for ischaemic stroke, 18.10% for haemorrhagic stroke, 10.57% for overall respiratory disease, and 12.57% for chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases. The mortality risk and burden were more prominent in the temperate monsoon and subtropical monsoon climatic zones, in specific subgroups (female sex, age ≥75 years, and ≤9 years spent in education), and in cities characterised by higher urbanisations rates and shorter durations of central heating.
This nationwide study provides a comprehensive picture of the non-linear associations between ambient temperature and mortality from all natural causes and main cardiorespiratory diseases, as well as the corresponding disease burden that is mainly attributable to moderate cold temperatures in China. The findings on vulnerability characteristics can help improve clinical and public health practices to reduce disease burden associated with current and future abnormal weather.
It is necessary to improve the accuracy of the prediction on landslide displacement owing to its danger to the local environment and residents. However, it is difficult for the constant weight ...combination models widely used now to apply to the actual situation because of the complexity of the coupling relationship between the actual displacement and prediction model. Therefore, we develop a novel combination model using variable weights. The variable weight combination (VWC) model is proposed using the autoregressive (AR) model, long short-term memory (LSTM) model, and support vector machine (SVM) model, and the weights of the three individual models are comprehensively analyzed by the errors between the actual displacements and their prediction results. The weights are continuously optimized as the periods increase to optimize the VWC model, and it retains the advantages of the individual models and useful information in the individual models. Taking the Xinming landslide as an example, displacements data of nine sites are collected. The prediction displacements are obtained using the AR model, LSTM model, SVM model, and VWC model and compared with monitoring displacements using nine performance measures. The comparison results show the prediction precision using the VWC model is more satisfactory than that of individual models, and the VWC model is, therefore, more applicable to the study landslide.
The coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic reported for the first time in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019, which has caused 4648 deaths in China as of July 10, 2020. This study explored the temporal ...correlation between the case fatality rate (CFR) of COVID-19 and particulate matter (PM) in Wuhan. We conducted a time series analysis to examine the temporal day-by-day associations. We observed a higher CFR of COVID-19 with increasing concentrations of inhalable particulate matter (PM) with an aerodynamic diameter of 10 μm or less (PM10) and fine PM with an aerodynamic diameter of 2.5 μm or less (PM2.5) in the temporal scale. This association may affect patients with mild to severe disease progression and affect their prognosis.
•The daily PM2.5 and PM10 concentrations and the daily CFR exhibited great similarity with respect to their temporal variation curves, besides, with an obvious time lag existing between them.•The association still exists after adjusted for all possible confounders (e.g., temperature and relative humidity, SO2, NO2, CO, and O3).
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