The Fukushima nuclear disaster has significantly changed public attitudes toward nuclear energy. It is important to understand how this change has occurred in different countries before the global ...community revises existing nuclear policies. This study examines the effect of the Fukushima disaster on public acceptance of nuclear energy in 42 countries. We find that the operational experience of nuclear power generation which has significantly affected positive public opinion about nuclear energy became considerably negative after the disaster, suggesting fundamental changes in public acceptance regardless of the level of acceptance before the disaster. In addition, contrary to our expectation, the proportion of nuclear power generation is positively and significantly related to public acceptance of nuclear energy after the Fukushima accident and government pressure on media content led to a greater decrease in the level of public acceptance after the accident. Nuclear energy policymakers should consider the varied factors affecting public acceptance of nuclear energy in each country depending on its historical, environmental, and geographical circumstances before they revise nuclear policy in response to the Fukushima accident.
•Fukushima accident has negatively changed public attitudes toward nuclear energy.•Effect of operational experience became considerably negative after the accident.•Effect of proportion of nuclear power generation is positive after the accident.•Effect of government pressure on media content became negative after the accident.•Country specific policy responses on nuclear public acceptance are required.
Accurate identification of the boundaries of organs or abnormal objects (e.g., tumors) in medical images is important in surgical planning and in the diagnosis and prognosis of diseases. In this ...study, we propose a deep learning-based method to segment lung areas in chest X-rays. The novel aspect of the proposed method is the self-attention module, where the outputs of the channel and spatial attention modules are combined to generate attention maps, with each highlighting those regions of feature maps that correspond to "what" and "where" to attend in the learning process, respectively. Thereafter, the attention maps are multiplied element-wise with the input feature map, and the intermediate results are added to the input feature map again for residual learning. Using X-ray images collected from public datasets for training and evaluation, we applied the proposed attention modules to U-Net for segmentation of lung areas and conducted experiments while changing the locations of the attention modules in the baseline network. The experimental results showed that our method achieved comparable or better performance than the existing medical image segmentation networks in terms of Dice score when the proposed attention modules were placed in lower layers of both the contracting and expanding paths of U-Net.
Across the globe, public acceptance of nuclear power is a crucial factor for governmental establishment of a nuclear energy program. Therefore, it is important to understand the determinants of ...public acceptance of nuclear power. This study examines the effects of knowledge, trust, risk, and benefit related factors on public acceptance of nuclear power across 19 countries. We consider three levels of public acceptance – strongly accept, reluctantly accept, and oppose – and classify countries into four groups according to the ratio of those three levels of public acceptance. Our results indicate that knowledge of nuclear inspection is more effective than trust in inspection authorities in creating stronger public acceptance among people in the countries with a high level of reluctant acceptance and a low level of strong acceptance, while trust in inspection authorities is more important than knowledge of nuclear inspection for the selection between opposition and reluctant acceptance in countries with a low level of reluctant acceptance and a high level of strong acceptance. Without grouping the countries, we found that trust in inspection authorities is crucial for the decision between opposition and reluctant acceptance. Additionally, the generation of electricity has the most positive effect on public acceptance of nuclear power.
•We examine public acceptance (PA) of nuclear power across 19 countries.•Three levels of PA – strongly accept, reluctantly accept, and oppose – are considered.•Knowledge is most effective in creating stronger PA.•Trust is effective in shifting PA from opposition to reluctant acceptance.•Low risk and benefit of electricity generation enhance PA the most.
•A heterogeneity in the monolayer explains the nonlinear MAHPS performance.•Nonlinear thermal resistance is analyzed with monolayer meniscus transitions.•Homogeneous close-packed particles ( 30–50μm) ...show the best figure of merit.
For high heat flux and low thermal resistance, the multiple-artery heat-pipe spreader uses distributed high-permeability arteries (posts) for liquid supply and high-capillary pressure monolayer wick for liquid spreading and evaporation. Experiments indicate the receding meniscus transitions in monolayer play a role in sudden drop in thermal resistance prior to dryout. Using monolayer SEM images and the minimum surface energy principles, the meniscus dynamics up to dryout is analyzed, and the meniscus location, capillary pressure, effective thermal conductivity, and permeability are also predicted for heterogeneous, periodic sintered copper-particle (including bimodal particle size) unit cells. The liquid thickness is nonuniform within the heterogeneous unit cell, and with increase in the wick superheat local dryout occurs (meniscus snaps) in the loose-packed region influencing the wet-wick properties and the occurrence of the minimum thermal resistance. The monolayer wick continues to function under local dryout (away from post) until a receding dry front is formed followed by complete dryout. These predictions are in good agreement with experiments. The optimal wick thermal-hydraulic performance, i.e., dimensionless ratio of heat flux to thermal resistance (wick figure of merit Zm) is sought through analysis. The uniform, sintered, close-packed 30–50μm particles give the highest Zm over a range of superheat in the wet regime, and 30μm particles give a record low resistance near 2.5μK/(W/m2)
Genetically engineered mouse models are commonly preferred for studying the human disease due to genetic and pathophysiological similarities between mice and humans. In particular, Cre-
system is ...widely used as an integral experimental tool for generating the conditional. This system has enabled researchers to investigate genes of interest in a tissue/cell (spatial control) and/or time (temporal control) specific manner. A various tissue-specific Cre-driver mouse lines have been generated to date, and new Cre lines are still being developed. This review provides a brief overview of Cre-
system and a few commonly used promoters for expression of tissue-specific Cre recombinase. Also, we finally introduce some available links to the Web sites that provides detailed information about Cre mouse lines including their characterization.
Cardiovascular diseases prevail among modern societies and underdeveloped countries, and a high mortality rate has also been reported by the World Health Organization affecting millions of people ...worldwide. Hyperactive platelets are the major culprits in thrombotic disorders. A group of drugs is available to deal with such platelet-related disorders; however, sometimes, side effects and complications caused by these drugs outweigh their benefits. Ginseng and its nutraceuticals have been reported to reduce the impact of thrombotic conditions and improve cardiovascular health by antiplatelet mechanisms. This review provides (1) a comprehensive insight into the available pharmacological options from ginseng and ginsenosides (saponin and nonsaponin fractions) for platelet-originated cardiovascular disorders; (2) a discussion on the impact of specific functional groups on the modulation of platelet functions and how structural modifications among ginsenosides affect platelet activation, which may further provide a basis for drug design, optimization, and the development of ginsenoside scaffolds as pharmacological antiplatelet agents; (3) an insight into the synergistic effects of ginsenosides on platelet functions; and (4) a perspective on future research and the development of ginseng and ginsenosides as super nutraceuticals.
Recently, deep learning has been employed in medical image analysis for several clinical imaging methods, such as X-ray, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and pathological tissue ...imaging, and excellent performance has been reported. With the development of these methods, deep learning technologies have rapidly evolved in the healthcare industry related to hair loss. Hair density measurement (HDM) is a process used for detecting the severity of hair loss by counting the number of hairs present in the occipital donor region for transplantation. HDM is a typical object detection and classification problem that could benefit from deep learning. This study analyzed the accuracy of HDM by applying deep learning technology for object detection and reports the feasibility of automating HDM. The dataset for training and evaluation comprised 4492 enlarged hair scalp RGB images obtained from male hair-loss patients and the corresponding annotation data that contained the location information of the hair follicles present in the image and follicle-type information according to the number of hairs. EfficientDet, YOLOv4, and DetectoRS were used as object detection algorithms for performance comparison. The experimental results indicated that YOLOv4 had the best performance, with a mean average precision of 58.67.
We present extensions of the colorful Helly theorem for d-collapsible and d-Leray complexes, providing a common generalization to the matroidal versions of the theorem due to Kalai and Meshulam, the ...‘very colorful’ Helly theorem introduced by Arocha, Bárány, Bracho, Fabila and Montejano and the ‘semi-intersecting’ colorful Helly theorem proved by Montejano and Karasev. As an application, we obtain the following extension of Tverberg’s theorem: Let A be a finite set of points in
${\mathbb R}^d$
with
$|A|>(r-1)(d+1)$
. Then, there exist a partition
$A_1,\ldots ,A_r$
of A and a subset
$B\subset A$
of size
$(r-1)(d+1)$
such that
$\cap _{i=1}^r \operatorname {\mathrm {\text {conv}}}( (B\cup \{p\})\cap A_i)\neq \emptyset $
for all
$p\in A\setminus B$
. That is, we obtain a partition of A into r parts that remains a Tverberg partition even after removing all but one arbitrary point from
$A\setminus B$
.
Nearly all biosensing platforms can be described using two fundamental steps-collection and detection. Target analytes must be delivered to a sensing element, which can then relay the transduced ...signal. For point-of-care technologies, where operation is to be kept simple, typically the collection step is passive diffusion driven-which can be slow or limiting under low concentrations. This work demonstrates an integration of both active collection and detection by using resonant wireless power transfer coupled to a nanogap capacitor. Nanoparticles suspended in deionized water are actively trapped using wireless dielectrophoresis and positioned within the most sensitive fringe field regions for wireless impedance-based detection. Trapping of 40 nm particles and larger is demonstrated using a 3.5 V
, 1 MHz radiofrequency signal delivered over a distance greater than 8 cm from the nanogap capacitor. Wireless trapping and release of 1 µm polystyrene beads is simultaneously detected in real-time over a distance of 2.5 cm from the nanogap capacitor. Herein, geometric scaling strategies coupled with optimal circuit design is presented to motivate combined collection and detection biosensing platforms amenable to wireless and/or smartphone operation.
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