Many breakthroughs in the laboratories often do not bridge the gap between research and commercialization. However, silicon photonics bucked the trend, with industry observers estimating the ...commercial market to close in on a billion dollars in 2020 <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref45">45 . Silicon photonics leverages the billions of dollars and decades of research poured into silicon semiconductor device processing to enable high yield, robust processing, and most of all, low cost. Silicon is also a good optical material, with transparency in the commercially important infrared wavelength bands, and is a suitable platform for large-scale photonic integrated circuits. Silicon photonics is therefore slated to address the world's ever-increasing needs for bandwidth. It is part of an emerging ecosystem which includes designers, foundries, and integrators. In this paper, we review most of the foundries that presently enable silicon photonics integrated circuits fabrication. Some of these are pilot lines of major research institutes, and others are fully commercial pure-play foundries. Since silicon photonics has been commercially active for some years, foundries have released process design kits (PDK) that contain a standard device library. These libraries represent optimized and well-tested photonic elements, whose performance reflects the stability and maturity of the integration platforms. We will document the early works in silicon photonics, as well as its commercial status. We will provide a comprehensive review of the development of silicon photonics and the foundry services which enable the productization, including various efforts to develop and release PDK devices. In this context, we will report the long-standing efforts and contributions that previously IME/A * STAR and now AMF has dedicated to accelerating this journey.
Aim
Brown and beige adipose tissues dissipate energy in the form of heat via mitochondrial uncoupling protein 1, defending against hypothermia and potentially obesity. The latter has prompted renewed ...interest in understanding the processes involved in browning to realize the potential therapeutic benefits. To characterize the temporal profile of cold‐induced changes and browning of brown and white adipose tissues in mice.
Methods
Male C57BL/6J mice were singly housed in conventional cages under cold exposure (4 °C) for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 days. Food intake and body weight were measured daily. Interscapular brown adipose tissue (iBAT), inguinal subcutaneous (sWAT) and epididymal white adipose tissue (eWAT) were harvested for histological, immunohistochemical, gene and protein expression analysis.
Results
Upon cold exposure, food intake increased, whilst body weight and adipocyte size were found to be transiently reduced. iBAT mass was found to be increased, whilst sWAT and eWAT were found to be transiently decreased. A combination of morphological, genetic (Ucp‐1, Pgc‐1α and Elov13) and biochemical (UCP‐1, PPARγ and aP2) analyses demonstrated the depot‐specific remodelling in response to cold exposure.
Conclusion
Our results demonstrate the differential responses to cold‐induced changes across discrete BAT and WAT depots and support the notion that the effects of short‐term cold exposure are achieved by expansion, activation and increasing thermogenic capacity of iBAT, as well as browning of sWAT and, to a lesser extent, eWAT.
Large-scale, highly integrated and low-power-consuming hardware is becoming progressively more important for realizing optical neural networks (ONNs) capable of advanced optical computing. ...Traditional experimental implementations need N
units such as Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) for an input dimension N to realize typical computing operations (convolutions and matrix multiplication), resulting in limited scalability and consuming excessive power. Here, we propose the integrated diffractive optical network for implementing parallel Fourier transforms, convolution operations and application-specific optical computing using two ultracompact diffractive cells (Fourier transform operation) and only N MZIs. The footprint and energy consumption scales linearly with the input data dimension, instead of the quadratic scaling in the traditional ONN framework. A ~10-fold reduction in both footprint and energy consumption, as well as equal high accuracy with previous MZI-based ONNs was experimentally achieved for computations performed on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets. The integrated diffractive optical network (IDNN) chip demonstrates a promising avenue towards scalable and low-power-consumption optical computational chips for optical-artificial-intelligence.
Urban soil and human health: a review Li, G.; Sun, G.‐X.; Ren, Y. ...
European journal of soil science,
January 2018, 2018-01-00, 20180101, Letnik:
69, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Summary
Rapid industrialization and urbanization during recent decades are having dramatic effects on urban soil properties and lead to large discharges of pollutants, which inevitably affect the ...health of the soil, ecosystems and human populations. This paper provides a systematic review of the relations between urban soil and human health. First, it summarizes the organic and inorganic pollutants in urban soil and their potential risks to human health. Second, the relations between urban greenbelt land, soil microbial diversity and human health are also explored. Third, we propose that future research should focus on the integration of assessments of health risks with exposure pathways and site characteristics. Bioavailability‐based risk assessment frameworks for pollutants in urban soil can elucidate the complicated relations between urban soil, pollutant exposure and human health in cities. Finally, management of urban soil and policy should be strengthened in the future to maintain its sustainable development and utilization. More effort should be directed to understanding the relations between soil microbial diversity, green space and human health in cities.
Highlights
Evidence indicates the importance of urban soil in maintaining human health.
Pollutants, green space and microbial biodiversity have been systematically summarized.
Urban vegetation and antibiotic resistance genes in urban soil have implications in human health.
Bioavailability of pollutants and antibiotic resistance genes should be considered for human risk assessment.
Objective
To assess the efficacy of metformin in megestrol acetate (MA)‐based fertility‐sparing treatment for patients with atypical endometrial hyperplasia (AEH) and endometrioid endometrial cancer ...(EEC).
Design
A randomised, single‐centre, open‐label, controlled trial conducted between October 2013 and December 2017.
Setting
Shanghai OBGYN Hospital of Fudan University, China.
Population
A total of 150 patients (18–45 years old) with primary AEH or well‐differentiated EEC were randomised into an MA group (n = 74) and an MA plus metformin group (n = 76).
Methods
Patients with AEH or EEC were firstly stratified, then randomised to receive MA (160 mg orally, daily) or MA (160 mg orally, daily) plus metformin (500 mg orally, three times a day).
Main outcomes and measures
The primary efficacy parameter was the cumulate complete response (CR) rate within 16 weeks of treatment (16w‐CR rate); the secondary efficacy parameters were 30w‐CR rate and adverse events.
Results
The 16w‐CR rate was higher in the metformin plus MA group than in the MA‐only group (34.3 versus 20.7%, odds ratio OR 2.0, 95% confidence interval CI 0.89–4.51, P = 0.09) but the difference was more significant in 102 AEH patients (39.6 versus 20.4%, OR 2.56, 95% CI 1.06–6.21, P = 0.04). This effect of metformin was also significant in non‐obese (51.4 versus 24.3%, OR 3.28, 95% CI 1.22–8.84, P = 0.02) and insulin‐sensitive (54.8 versus 28.6%, OR 3.04, 95% CI 1.03–8.97, P = 0.04) subgroups of AEH women. No significant result was found in secondary endpoints.
Conclusion
As a fertility‐sparing treatment, metformin plus MA was associated with a higher early CR rate compared with MA alone in AEH patients.
Tweetable
For AEH patients, metformin plus MA might be a better fertility‐sparing treatment to achieve a higher early CR rate compared with MA alone.
Tweetable
For AEH patients, metformin plus MA might be a better fertility‐sparing treatment to achieve higher early CR rate compared with MA alone.
Macroscopic fibres made up of carbon nanotubes exhibit properties far below theoretical predictions and even much lower than those for conventional carbon fibres. Here we report improvements of ...mechanical and electrical properties by more than one order of magnitude by pressurized rolling. Our carbon nanotubes self-assemble to a hollow macroscopic cylinder in a tube reactor operated at high temperature and then condense in water or ethanol to form a fibre, which is continually spooled in an open-air environment. This initial fibre is densified by rolling under pressure, leading to a combination of high tensile strength (3.76-5.53 GPa), high tensile ductility (8-13%) and high electrical conductivity ((1.82-2.24) × 10(4) S cm(-1)). Our study therefore demonstrates strategies for future performance maximization and the very considerable potential of carbon nanotube assemblies for high-end uses.
Compared to non-cavitating flow, cavitating flow is much complex owing to the numerical difficulties caused by cavity generation and collapse. In this paper, the cavitating flow around a NACA66 ...hydrofoil is studied numerically with particular emphasis on understanding the cavitation structures and the shedding dynamics. Large Eddy Simulation (LES) was coupled with a homogeneous cavitation model to calculate the pressure, velocity, vapor volume fraction and vorticity around the hydrofoil. The predicted cavitation shedding dynamics behavior, including the cavity growth, break-off and collapse downstream, agrees fairly well with experiment. Some fundamental issues such as the transition of a cavitating flow structure from 2D to 3D associated with cavitation-vortex interaction are discussed using the vorticity transport equation for variable density flow. A simplified one-dimensional model for the present configuration is adopted and calibrated against the LES results to better clarify the physical mechanism for the cavitation induced pressure fluctuations. The results verify the relationship between pressure fluctuations and the cavity shedding process (e.g. the variations of the flow rate and cavity volume) and demonstrate that the cavity volume acceleration is the main source of the pressure fluctuations around the cavitating hydrofoil. This research provides a better understanding of the mechanism driving the cavitation excited pressure pulsations, which will facilitate development of engineering designs to control these vibrations.
Whether the critical state friction angle of granular materials depends on grading is a fundamental question of both academic and practical interest. The present study attempts to address this ...question through a specifically designed experimental program where the influence of particle grading was carefully isolated from other influencing factors. The laboratory experiments show that under otherwise similar conditions, the angle of friction at critical state is a constant independent of grading, but, for a given grading, the angle of friction at critical state is highly dependent on particle shape. This finding suggests that the commonly adopted practice of separately allowing for the effect of particle shape and the effect of grading on critical state friction angle is conceptually inappropriate and, hence, should be taken with caution in geotechnical design to avoid the risk of underestimating safety requirements. The study also reveals that varying particle gradation can impose a marked impact on liquefaction susceptibility of granular soils: Under the same post-consolidation state in terms of void ratio and confining pressure, a well-graded soil tends to be more susceptible to liquefaction than a uniformly graded soil. This variation of liquefaction susceptibility is shown to be consistent with the variation of location of the critical state locus in the compression space and is explainable by the critical state theory.
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