Anthropogenic activities alter the underlying surface conditions and arrangements of landscape features in a drainage basin, interfering with the pollutant (e.g., dissolved nitrogen, phosphorus) ...transport network configuration and altering the hydrological response. Assessing the impact of anthropogenic activities on hydrological connectivity for natural-artificial catchment is critical to understand the hydrological-driven ecosystem processes, services and biodiversity. However, quantifying this impact at catchment scale remains challenging. In this study, a new framework was proposed to quantify the impact of anthropogenic activities on hydrological connectivity combined with graph theory and network analysis. This framework was exemplified in a natural-artificial catchment of the Yangtze River basin of China. Based on remote sensing and field-investigated data, three transport networks were constructed, including natural transport network (N1), ditch–road transport network (N2), and terrace–dominated transport network (N3), which reflected the different human intervention. The results showed that human intervention improved the connectivity of the nodes and enhanced the complexity of the catchment transport network structure. Anthropogenic activities significantly decreased the hydrological structural connectivity of the catchment. In particular, compared with the N1 network, the critical nodes for hydrological connectivity which were judged by connectivity indexes were reduced by 92.94% and 95.29% in the N2 and N3 network, respectively. Furthermore, the ditch–road construction had a greater impact than terraces in decreasing hydrological structural connectivity at catchment scale. This framework has proven effective in quantifying the hydrological connectivity analysis under different human intervention at the catchment scale and facilitates the improvement of catchment management strategies.
•A new framework was proposed to identify catchment hydrological connectivity.•Graph theory combined with network analysis were integrated into the framework.•Three transport networks were constructed to exemplify the framework.•Ditches, roads, and terraces significantly decreased hydrological connectivity.
This paper proposes a wavelet-tree-based blind watermarking scheme for copyright protection. The wavelet coefficients of the host image are grouped into so-called super trees. The watermark is ...embedded by quantizing super trees. The trees are so quantized that they exhibit a large enough statistical difference, which will later be used for watermark extraction. Each watermark bit is embedded in perceptually important frequency bands, which renders the mark more resistant to frequency based attacks. Also, the watermark is spread throughout large spatial regions. This yields more robustness against time domain geometric attacks. Examples of various attacks will be given to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed technique.
Summary
We investigated the effects of integrin‐linked kinase (ILK) on the in vitro attachment, spreading, migration and microfilament dynamics of human corpus cavernosum smooth muscle cells. ILK ...small interfering RNA (siRNA) was used to transfect human corpus cavernosum smooth muscle cells; and cell attachment, spreading and migration were assessed. Additionally, microfilament dynamics were evaluated using Alexa Fluor 488 and phalloidin staining. We found that ILK gene knock‐down significantly inhibited human corpus cavernosum smooth muscle cell attachment, spreading and migration. Moreover, blocking the expression of ILK disturbed actin cytoskeleton reorganisation and morphology in human corpus cavernosum smooth muscle cells. These results show that the targeting of ILK with siRNA significantly inhibited cell attachment, spreading, migration and microfilament dynamics in human corpus cavernosum smooth muscle cells. These findings indicate that ILK might be a potential therapeutic molecular target for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.
We perform photometric analyses of a bright early-type galaxy sample with 2949 galaxies (M sub(r) < -22.5 mag) in the redshift range of 0.05-0.15, drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR7 ...with morphological classification from Galaxy Zoo 1. We measure the Petrosian and isophotal magnitudes, as well as the corresponding half-light radius for each galaxy. We find that for the brightest galaxies (M sub(r) < -23 mag), our Petrosian magnitudes and isophotal magnitudes to 25 mag arcsec super(-2) and 1 % of the sky brightness are on average 0.16 mag, 0.20 mag, and 0.26 mag brighter than the SDSS Petrosian values, respectively. In the first case, the underestimations are caused by overestimations in the sky background by the SDSS PHOTO algorithm, while the latter two are also due to deeper photometry. Similarly, the typical half-light radii (r sub(50)) measured by the SDSS algorithm are smaller than our measurements. As a result, the bright end of the r-band luminosity function is found to decline more slowly than previous works. Our measured luminosity densities at the bright end are more than one order of magnitude higher than those of Blanton et ah, and the stellar mass densities at M sub(*) ~ 5 x 10 super(11) M sub(middot in circle) and M sub(*) ~ 10 super(12) M sub(middot in circle) are a few tenths and a factor of a few higher than those of Bernardi et al. These results may significantly alleviate the tension in the assembly of massive galaxies between observations and predictions of the hierarchical structure formation model.
•The revised model predicts overshoot successfully.•The occurrence of overshoot is analyzed.•An algebraic intermittency factor is proposed.•The intermittency factor is revised to achieve ...acceleration.
An intermittency factor weighted laminar kinetic energy transition model appropriate for the prediction of overshoot in the transition region is proposed. Based on the hypersonic laminar kinetic energy transition model, study finds that the model predicts the overshoot when the transition onset is near the front of the configuration with a short transition zone, and greater gradients of relevant variables account for this circumstance. Therefore, the thought that accelerating the forming process of turbulent boundary layer in the late transition region to make greater variable gradients comes into being. Considering the convective and diffusive timescales of disturbances, an algebraic intermittency factor is presented and involved in the small-scale viscosity. In order to achieve the acceleration, compared with the DNS data as well, the intermittency factor is revised for a further step. Finally, the large-scale and small-scale viscosities are weighted by the revised intermittency factor. The revised model has been applied to flat plate boundary layer and boundary layer transitions over a blunt cone at different Reynolds numbers test cases. The results demonstrate the capacity of the model to reproduce overshoot with a reasonable degree of accuracy and reflect the effect of Reynolds number successfully. The revision originates from the perspective of transition model construction. A more sophisticated physics-based description of transition would be more preferable.
Mucormycosis usually presents as a progressive infection with significant angio-invasion. Mucormycosis due to Mucor irregularis (formerly Rhizomucor variabilis var. variabilis), however, is ...exceptional in causing chronic cutaneous infection in immunocompetent humans,
ultimately leading to severe morbidity if left untreated. More than 90 % of the cases known to date were reported from Asia, mainly from China. The nearest neighbour of M. irregularis is the saprobic species M. hiemalis. The aim of this study was to evaluate the taxonomic position,
epidemiology, and intra- and inter-species diversity of M. irregularis based on 21 strains (clinical n = 17) by multilocus analysis using ITS, LSU, RPB1 and RPB2 genes, compared to results of cluster analysis with amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) data. By
combining MLST and AFLP analyses, M. irregularis was found to be monophyletic with high bootstrap support, and consisted of five subgroups, which were not concordant in all partitions. It was thus confirmed that M. irregularis is a single species at 96.1-100 % ITS similarity
and low recombination rates between populations. Some geographic structuring was noted with some localised populations, which may be explained by limited air-dispersal. The natural habitat of the species is likely to be in soil and decomposing plant material.
Epidemiological observations have demonstrated that ambient fine particulate matter with d
< 2.5 μm (PM
) as the major factor responsible for the increasing incidence of lung cancer in ...never-smokers. However, there are very limited experimental data to support the association of PM
with lung carcinogenesis and to compare PM
with smoking carcinogens.
To study whether PM
can contribute to lung tumorigenesis in a way similar to smoking carcinogen 4-methylnitrosamino-l-3-pyridyl-butanone (NNK) via 15-lipoxygenases (15-LOXs) reduction, normal lung epithelial cells and cancer cells were treated with NNK or PM
and then epigenetically and post-translationally examined the cellular and molecular profiles of the cells. The data were verified in lung cancer samples and a mouse lung tumor model.
We found that similar to smoking carcinogen NNK, PM2.5 significantly enhanced cell proliferation, migration and invasion, but reduced the levels of 15-lipoxygenases-1 (15-LOX1) and 15-lipoxygenases-2 (15-LOX2), both of which were also obviously decreased in lung cancer tissues. 15-LOX1/15-LOX2 overexpression inhibited the oncogenic cell functions induced by PM2.5/NNK. The tumor formation and growth were significantly higher/faster in mice implanted with PM2.5- or NNK-treated NCI-H23 cells, accompanied with a reduction of 15-LOX1/15-LOX2. Moreover, 15-LOX1 expression was epigenetically regulated at methylation level by PM2.5/NNK, while both 15-LOX1 and 15-LOX2 could be significantly inhibited by a set of PM2.5/NNK-mediated microRNAs.
Collectively, PM2.5 can function as the smoking carcinogen NNK to induce lung tumorigenesis by inhibiting 15-LOX1/15-LOX2.
This paper describes a fuzzy modeling framework based on support vector machine, a rule-based framework that explicitly characterizes the representation in fuzzy inference procedure. The support ...vector learning mechanism provides an architecture to extract support vectors for generating fuzzy IF-THEN rules from the training data set, and a method to describe the fuzzy system in terms of kernel functions. Thus, it has the inherent advantage that the model does not have to determine the number of rules in advance, and the overall fuzzy inference system can be represented as series expansion of fuzzy basis functions. The performance of the proposed approach is compared to other fuzzy rule-based modeling methods using four data sets.
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