An SVD-based image watermarking in wavelet domain using SVR and PSO

The paper presents a novel blind watermarking scheme for image copyright protection, which is developed in the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and is based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) and the support vector regression (SVR). Its embedding algorithm hides a watermark bit in the low–low (LL) subband of a target non-overlap block of the host image by modifying a coefficient of U component on SVD version of the block. A blind watermark-extraction is designed using a trained SVR to estimate original coefficients. Subsequently, the watermark bit can be computed using the watermarked coefficient and its corresponding estimate coefficient. Additionally, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) is further utilized to optimize the proposed scheme. Experimental results show the proposed scheme possesses significant improvements in both transparency and robustness, and is superior to existing methods under consideration here.     

Ionization of Porous Hypercrosslinked Polymers for Catalyzing Room-Temperature CO2 Reduction via Formamides Synthesis

Catalysis Letters - Porous materials with heterogeneous nature occupy a pivotal position in the chemical industry. This work described a facile pre- and post-synthetic approach to modify porous...     

Genome-Wide Analysis Identified a Set of Conserved lncRNAs Associated with Domestication-Related Traits in Rice

Crop domestication, which gives rise to a number of desirable agronomic traits, represents a typical model system of plant evolution. Numerous genomic evidence has proven that noncoding RNAs such as microRNAs and phasiRNAs, as well as protein-coding genes, are selected during crop domestication. However, limited data shows plant long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are also involved in this biological process. In this study, we performed strand-specific RNA sequencing of cultivated rice Oryza sativa ssp. japonica and O. sativa ssp. indica, and their wild progenitor O. rufipogon. We identified a total of 8528 lncRNAs, including 4072 lncRNAs in O. rufipogon, 2091 lncRNAs in japonica rice, and 2365 lncRNAs in indica rice. The lncRNAs expressed in wild rice were revealed to be shorter in length and had fewer exon numbers when compared with lncRNAs from cultivated rice. We also identified a number of conserved lncRNAs in the wild and cultivated rice. The functional study demonstrated that several of these conserved lncRNAs are associated with domestication-related traits in rice. Our findings revealed the feature and conservation of lncRNAs during rice domestication and will further promote functional studies of lncRNAs in rice.     

Enhanced anti-biofilm activity of facile synthesized silver oxide nanoparticles against K. pneumoniae

Journal of Inorganic and Organometallic Polymers and Materials - The silver oxide nanoparticle was successfully synthesized using floral waste by simple one pot, cost effective method. The complete...     

Structure and blood compatibility of tetrahedral amorphous hydrogenated carbon formed by a magnetic-field-filter plasma stream

Tetrahedral amorphous hydrogenated carbon (ta-C:H) films with various substrate bias voltages were prepared using a magnetic-field-filter plasma stream deposition system. The microstructural and optical properties were studied using ellipsometric spectra. The refractive index n of each sample was obtained by simulating their ellipsometric spectral using Tauc-Lorentz oscillator model, and then the relative sp³ C ratio of each sample was calculated using Bruggeman effective medium approximation. The sp³ C fraction of each sample was quantified by using electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS). The blood compatibility of the samples was evaluated by tests of platelet adhesion, kinetic clotting time and thrombin time. The quantity and morphology of the adherent platelets on the surface of these samples were investigated using scanning electron microscopy. Results show that the spectroscopic ellipsometry is a helpful method to evaluate the sp³ carbon fraction of the carbon films. The substrate bias voltage has an obvious effect on sp³ content and blood compatibility of ta-C:H films. The sample prepared with substrate bias voltage of − 20 V showed the best blood compatibility. A simple bio-physical hypothetical model was proposed to explain the experiment results.     

微波诱导稀土复合固体超强酸SO4^2-／ZrO2-Nd2O3催化合成乙酸苄酯

以新型稀土复合固体超强酸为催化剂，在微波辐射下苯甲醇和乙酸反应合成了乙酸苄酯，探索反应各因素对酯化率的影响。实验结果表明：SO4^2-／ZrO2-Nd2O3具有较高的催化活性。最佳反应条件为：醇酸摩尔比2．0（乙酸用量为0．2mol前提下），催化剂用量为1．8g，带水剂环己烷12mL，微波辐射功率550W，辐射时间25min，酯化率可达96．3％。该催化剂易于回收且可重复使用，具有良好的活性稳定性。     

Safety-based availability assessment at design stage

The availability of a system or equipment is one of the crucial characteristics that measures the customer satisfaction and strongly influences his final choice decision between concurrent products. The aim of this work is to provide an approach to improve the products availability assessment by taking into account the safety criteria by considering the use situations at design stage. Our work focuses on the routine design of complex products. The availability is often simply estimated considering reliability and maintainability. Basically, the intrinsic availability is the probability that it is operating satisfactorily at any point in time when used under conditions stated by design specifications. The time considered includes operating time and active repair time. Thus, intrinsic availability excludes from consideration all other times in the product lifecycle such as: accident management time, storage time, administrative time or logistic time. But many studies show that the loss of availability performance is also due to accidents that occur in different unforeseeable utilization situations. This engenders stops of the system to ensure the users safety according to standards recommendations. In this purpose, we consider the structural product architecture and the different use cases that correspond to the operational states and downtimes due to stop events that may happen during the utilization like failures, maintenance tasks and accidents. Then, we propose a product behavioral analysis including the use cases to describe interactions between the product and users or maintenance operators. We use Markov chains to model the use cases corresponding to operating time (OT), maintenance time (MT) and preparing time after accidents (RT). Then these three parameters are considered to specify a generic approach to improve the availability assessment. Such an approach provides the traceability of the product behavior along its lifecycle. In this way, the main causes of stop can be identified and this may guide the designer for improving the availability of the product future versions. To validate our approach, an application is presented considering a printing line. The comparison of our simulation considering an industrial case study shows a good agreement about the influence of safety on the availability.     

LiNO3-NaNO3-KNO3三元熔盐材料的设计及热稳定性研究

采用共形离子溶液模型(conformalionic solution model, CIS) 在二元熔盐体系相图的基础上，对三元熔盐体系LiNO₃-NaNO₃-KNO₃进行了相图计算，得到该三元体系最低共熔点为117.7℃，相应的摩尔分数组成分别为x(LiNO₃) = 0.375，x(NaNO₃) = 0.075，x(KNO₃) = 0.550。按照热力学最低共熔点计算结果，采用熔融法制备了三元硝酸熔盐，通过DSC和TG实验测定其最低共熔点为118.3℃，这与计算得到的结果(117.7℃)基本一致。TG测试结果表明当温度低于587.2℃时，该三元熔盐体系较为稳定，其工作温度范围为118.3~587.2℃，该三元硝酸熔盐适合在太阳能热发电中作为高温传热蓄热材料使用。     

Aerosol deposition of dense lead zirconate titanate thin films at room temperature

Lead zirconate titanate (Pb(Zr,Ti)O₃, PZT) films were grown on silicon 1 0 0 substrate by aerosol deposition, using solid-state reacted powder containing donor oxide Nb₂O₅, while the substrate was maintained at room temperature. The PZT films were simultaneously sintered upon deposition on a highly densified ceramic layer. Crystalline phases of the deposited films have been determined by X-ray diffractometry (XRD), and microstructures analysed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The cross-section microstructure consisted of several thin layers, including the PZT film and the platinum electrode and titanium-buffered layers on the substrate. High-resolution images revealed that the PZT layer contained a mixture of randomly oriented grains of nanometre size, which were embedded in an amorphous matrix. In contrast to the conventional liquid-phase sintering mechanism, sintering of the PZT films involved amorphised phases generated by pressure-induced amorphisation (PIA) from plastic deformation when the initial powder particles collided amongst one another upon reaching the silicon substrate during aerosol deposition. An analogy may be drawn to the impact of extraterrestrial meteorites in which diaplectic glass, i.e., amorphised phase, was formed and retained metastably at room temperature. The individual PZT grains were joined with the amorphised phase(s) and sintered to become a dense, thin film on the silicon substrate.     

Morphologic study of electrochemically formed lead dioxide

Various electrochemical methods with different conditions were used to prepare lead dioxide (PbO₂). The observation revealed that the morphology of deposited PbO₂ could be controlled by simply changing deposition parameters. Under the condition of oxygen evolution, which dominates the electrode process, uniformly distributed high porous structured PbO₂ was formed. The results indicated that large current density or high potential polarization should be one of the most important and necessary factors for forming high surface area PbO₂ deposit. Only β-PbO₂ was identified by X-ray diffraction measurement for the deposit prepared by present methods and solution. One potential application of this method is to prepare nanoscaled PbO₂ parallel lines.