ABSTRACT
We present the first measurement of pulse scattering close to the eclipse region of PSR B1957+20, which is in a compact binary system with a low-mass star. We measured pulse scattering ...time-scales up to 0.2 ms close to the eclipse and showed that it scales with the dispersion measure (DM) excess roughly as τ ∝ ΔDM2. Our observations provide the first evidence of strong scattering due to multipath propagation effects in the eclipsing material. We show that Kolmogorov turbulence in the eclipsing material with an inner scale of ∼100 m and an outer scale of the size of the eclipse region can naturally explain the observation. Our results show that the eclipsing material in such systems can be highly turbulent and suggest that scattering is one of the main eclipsing mechanisms at around 1.4 GHz.
Summary
This study is to examine the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and osteoporosis in rural areas of China, and then explore whether this association was mediated by lipid profiles. ...Results showed that with the increasing of BMI, the risk of osteoporosis was reduced, and lipid profiles mediate this association.
Introduction
To examine the relationship between BMI and osteoporosis, and explore whether this association was mediated by lipid profiles.
Methods
A total of 8272 participants (18–79 years) were enrolled from the Henan Rural Cohort Study. The bone mineral density of the calcaneus was measured using an ultrasonic bone density apparatus. Logistic regression and restricted cubic splines were used to evaluate the odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI). Mediation analysis using bootstrap was performed to examine the contribution of lipid profiles to BMI-related osteoporosis.
Results
The crude and age-standardized prevalence of osteoporosis were 15.93% and 11.77%, respectively. The mean BMIs were 24.12 kg/m
2
for participants with osteoporosis and 25.06 kg/m
2
for non-osteoporosis participants (
P
< 0.001). After adjusting for potential confounders, subjects with obesity had a lower OR of osteoporosis (0.493 95% CI: 0.405–0.600,
P
trend
< 0.001) compared with normal-weight individuals. Mediation analysis showed that lipid profile partly mediated the relationship between BMI and osteoporosis with indirect effect OR (95% CI) of 0.985 (0.978–0.992), and the proportion explained of BMI was 15.48% for lipid profile.
Conclusion
With the increasing of BMI, the risk of osteoporosis was reduced in the Chinese adult population, and lipid profiles may be a potential mediator linking reduced risk of osteoporosis. Elucidating the underlying mechanisms will facilitate developing feasible preventive and therapeutic measures for osteoporosis.
Chinese clinical trial register: ChiCTR-OOC-15006699.
This paper presented a multi-axis synchronous motion-sensing platform with virtual reality (VR) to enhance the depth of immersion. Multidisciplinary technologies have been integrated in this system, ...such as interactive technology, spatial position, tactile stimulation, and scenario sensing, to build a complete system of multi-axis VR sensing mechanism. This platform was consisted of servo motors with precision planetary gear reducer, drivers, and three crank linkages under 3 degrees of freedom (DoF) for working on a larger range of motion and able to support higher loading with lower folding height. A servo motor with reducer was connected to each linkage to control and drive the platform directly. The kinematic analysis of motion types on a heave, roll, and pitch was applied to validate the motion of this platform. The target speeds of step response experiments were 1000 rpm, 800 rpm, and 600 rpm, respectively. The rising time was upgraded by 15–18% in the experiment of the position loop. The results show that Cascade design can improve the response of this system. In addition, Visual Studio C# and EtherCAT communication transmission with the motion control card were utilized to establish the motion control system and human machine interface (HMI) to check the system status immediately. Finally, the platform was combined with VR image content that we designed. The motion-sensing platform could receive fast dynamic response. The simulation and control feedback of the synchronous bi-directional control can be realized the immersion of the virtual image and real world motion interactively. This system could highly enhance the immersion experience.
The study was conducted to delineate fundamental mechanisms that initiate the deleterious effect of fuel overloading on reproductive efficacy of broiler breeder hens. Sixty hens at age 26 wk were fed ...recommended amounts of feed (160 g/d per hen) or allowed voluntary feeding (approximately 30% more than restriction). At age 35 and 50 wk, hens were sampled for further analyzes. Voluntary feeding resulted in poor egg production, high rate of mortality, and abnormal ovarian structure (mainly overt hierarchical follicle atresia at age 35 wk and ovarian involution at age 50 wk). In contrast to feed-restricted hens, voluntary feeding also induced metabolic dysregulations that comprised enhanced adiposity; hepatic triacylglycerol accumulation; and elevated concentrations of plasma glucose, NEFAs, very low density lipoprotein, triacylglycerol, phospholipids, and sphingomyelin (P < 0.05). Furthermore, hepatic and circulating ceramide and sphingomyelin accumulation, and up-regulation of proinflammatory IL-1β expression in liver and adipose tissues (P < 0.05) systemically manifested the development of lipotoxicity in feed-satiated hens. Lipotoxicity leading to impaired ovarian dysfunctions, including follicle atresia, ovarian regression, and a decline of circulating estradiol levels (P < 0.05) in feed-satiated hens, was further exemplified by ceramide accumulation and up-regulation of IL-1β, serine palmitoyltransferase, and sphingomyelinase transcript abundance, but suppressed protein kinase Akt activation (P < 0.1 to 0.05) within the hierarchical follicles. This study provides the first in vivo evidence of the actions of ceramide and IL-1β in mediating overfeeding-induced follicle atresia and progression of ovarian involution in broiler hens.
At present, non-fuel utilization as alternative chemical feedstocks becomes very important and significant for the efficient conversion of lignite. To reduce CO
2
production, an oxy-cracking ...technique in weak alkaline aqueous was conducted to selectively depolymerize Xilinguole lignite (XL) into humic acid (HA) under mild condition in this paper. The results indicated that XL has high reactivity, and can be depolymerized into HA with very little CO
2
. Elevated temperature is favorable for cracking of XL and converting HA into small molecular water-soluble acids and CO
2
. KOH mainly catalyzes the oxidative depolymerization of XL macromolecular structure. Lower temperature can reduce the formation of CO
2
and the usage of alkali. Under 80°C, KOH/XL = 0.33 and 2 h, HA weight yield was the highest, reaching 81%, as well as no CO
2
detected. Further, the obtained HA was separated and characterized by FTIR, CPMAS
13
C-NMR, TG/DTG and element analyses. Compared to XL and oxidized residue, HA contains more OH and COOH groups and aromatic rings, and less aliphatic groups. Due to low alkali usage and negligible CO
2
, the oxidative depolymerization of XL to produce HA shows high utilization efficiency of carbon, and is a promising clean and efficient utilization approach.
InPBi was predicted to be the most robust infrared optoelectronic material but also the most difficult to synthesize within In-VBi (V = P, As and Sb) 25 years ago. We report the first successful ...growth of InPBi single crystals with Bi concentration far beyond the doping level by gas source molecular beam epitaxy. The InPBi thin films reveal excellent surface, structural and optical qualities making it a promising new III-V compound family member for heterostructures. The Bi concentration is found to be 2.4 ± 0.4% with 94 ± 5% Bi atoms at substitutional sites. Optical absorption indicates a band gap of 1.23 eV at room temperature while photoluminescence shows unexpectedly strong and broad light emission at 1.4-2.7 μm which can't be explained by the existing theory.
The interaction of non-covalently bound monomeric protein subunits forms oligomers. The oligomeric proteins are superior to the monomers within the scope of functional evolution of biomacromolecules. ...Such complexes are involved in various biological processes, and play an important role. It is highly desirable to predict oligomer types automatically from their sequence. Here, based on the concept of pseudo amino acid composition, an improved feature extraction method of weighted auto-correlation function of amino acid residue index and Naive Bayes multi-feature fusion algorithm is proposed and applied to predict protein homo-oligomer types. We used the support vector machine (SVM) as base classifiers, in order to obtain better results. For example, the total accuracies of A, B, C, D and E sets based on this improved feature extraction method are 77.63, 77.16, 76.46, 76.70 and 75.06% respectively in the jackknife test, which are 6.39, 5.92, 5.22, 5.46 and 3.82% higher than that of G set based on conventional amino acid composition method with the same SVM. Comparing with Chou's feature extraction method of incorporating quasi-sequence-order effect, our method can increase the total accuracy at a level of 3.51 to 1.01%. The total accuracy improves from 79.66 to 80.83% by using the Naive Bayes Feature Fusion algorithm. These results show: 1) The improved feature extraction method is effective and feasible, and the feature vectors based on this method may contain more protein quaternary structure information and appear to capture essential information about the composition and hydrophobicity of residues in the surface patches that buried in the interfaces of associated subunits; 2) Naive Bayes Feature Fusion algorithm and SVM can be referred as a powerful computational tool for predicting protein homo-oligomer types.
•The intelligent control module for the ECEI system in J-TEXT tokamak can remote control the key parameters, such as the locations of the lenses, the radial zoom, the attenuation and the bandwidth of ...the electronics.•The application of low-cost Arduino microcontrollers forms an efficient and economical solution to the control issues.•The ECEI system parameter settings can be tuned between adjacent discharges without the physical presence of the technicians inside the machine hall.
An Electron Cyclotron Emission Imaging (ECEI) system has been developed on the J-TEXT tokamak and employed for the multi-dimensional electron temperature fluctuation imaging measurement in 2019 campaign. The intelligent control module has been developed and been used to flexibly setup the 256-channel ECEI system configurations for different plasma scenarios. The adjustments of key parameters are merged in this module including size and position of the geometric observation window, and the dynamic range of the signal and image resolution. The user-friendly interface is also developed for the tokamak operator to set the ECEI system focusing on physics interested region. This module is installed close to the diagnostic system around the J-TEXT tokamak, which can be remotely controlled by authorized operators in the control room. It significantly improves ECEI flexibility and stability, and also keeps the operation technician away from the harsh radiation environment.
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