Topology optimization of flexure hinges with a prescribed compliance matrix based on the adaptive spring model and stress constraint

This paper focuses on the configuration design of flexure hinges with a prescribed compliance matrix and preset rotational center position. A new method for the topology optimization of flexure hinges is proposed based on the adaptive spring model and stress constraint. The hinge optimization model is formulated by maximizing the bending displacement with a spring while optimizing the compliance matrix to a prescribed value. To avoid numerical instability, an artificial spring is used as an auxiliary calculation, and a new strategy is developed for adaptively adjusting the spring stiffness according to the prescribed compliance matrix. The maximum stress of flexure hinge is limited by using a normalized P-norm of the effective von Mises stress, and a position constraint of rotational center is proposed to predetermine the position of the rotational center. In addition, to reduce the error of the stress measurement, a simple but effective filtering method is presented to obtain a complete black-and-white design. Numerical examples are used to verify the proposed method. Topology results show that the obtained flexure hinges have the prescribed compliance matrix and preset rotational center position while also meeting the stress requirements.     

Computational Investigation Identified Potential Chemical Scaffolds for Heparanase as Anticancer Therapeutics

Heparanase (Hpse) is an endo-β-D-glucuronidase capable of cleaving heparan sulfate side chains. Its upregulated expression is implicated in tumor growth, metastasis and angiogenesis, thus making it an attractive target in cancer therapeutics. Currently, a few small molecule inhibitors have been reported to inhibit Hpse, with promising oral administration and pharmacokinetic (PK) properties. In the present study, a ligand-based pharmacophore model was generated from a dataset of well-known active small molecule Hpse inhibitors which were observed to display favorable PK properties. The compounds from the InterBioScreen database of natural (69,034) and synthetic (195,469) molecules were first filtered for their drug-likeness and the pharmacophore model was used to screen the drug-like database. The compounds acquired from screening were subjected to molecular docking with Heparanase, where two molecules used in pharmacophore generation were used as reference. From the docking analysis, 33 compounds displayed higher docking scores than the reference and favorable interactions with the catalytic residues. Complex interactions were further evaluated by molecular dynamics simulations to assess their stability over a period of 50 ns. Furthermore, the binding free energies of the 33 compounds revealed 2 natural and 2 synthetic compounds, with better binding affinities than reference molecules, and were, therefore, deemed as hits. The hit compounds presented from this in silico investigation could act as potent Heparanase inhibitors and further serve as lead scaffolds to develop compounds targeting Heparanase upregulation in cancer.     

Heteroalleles in Common Wheat: Multiple Differences between Allelic Variants of the Gli-B1 Locus

The Gli-B1-encoded γ-gliadins and non-coding γ-gliadin DNA sequences for 15 different alleles of common wheat have been compared using seven tests: electrophoretic mobility (EM) and molecular weight (MW) of the encoded major γ-gliadin, restriction fragment length polymorphism patterns (RFLPs) (three different markers), Gli-B1-γ-gliadin-pseudogene known SNP markers (Single nucleotide polymorphisms) and sequencing the pseudogene GAG56B. It was discovered that encoded γ-gliadins, with contrasting EM, had similar MWs. However, seven allelic variants (designated from I to VII) differed among them in the other six tests: I (alleles Gli-B1i, k, m, o), II (Gli-B1n, q, s), III (Gli-B1b), IV (Gli-B1e, f, g), V (Gli-B1h), VI (Gli-B1d) and VII (Gli-B1a). Allele Gli-B1c (variant VIII) was identical to the alleles from group IV in four of the tests. Some tests might show a fine difference between alleles belonging to the same variant. Our results attest in favor of the independent origin of at least seven variants at the Gli-B1 locus that might originate from deeply diverged genotypes of the donor(s) of the B genome in hexaploid wheat and therefore might be called “heteroallelic”. The donor’s particularities at the Gli-B1 locus might be conserved since that time and decisively contribute to the current high genetic diversity of common wheat.     

Effect of α-Lipoic Acid on the Development of Human Skin Equivalents Using a Pumpless Skin-on-a-Chip Model

Owing to the prohibition of cosmetic animal testing, various attempts have recently been made using skin-on-a-chip (SOC) technology as a replacement for animal testing. Previously, we reported the development of a pumpless SOC capable of drug testing with a simple drive using the principle that the medium flows along the channel by gravity when the chip is tilted using a microfluidic channel. In this study, using pumpless SOC, instead of drug testing at the single-cell level, we evaluated the efficacy of α-lipoic acid (ALA), which is known as an anti-aging substance in skin equivalents, for skin tissue and epidermal structure formation. The expression of proteins and changes in genotyping were compared and evaluated. Hematoxylin and eosin staining for histological analysis showed a difference in the activity of fibroblasts in the dermis layer with respect to the presence or absence of ALA. We observed that the epidermis layer became increasingly prominent as the culture period was extended by treatment with 10 μM ALA. The expression of epidermal structural proteins of filaggrin, involucrin, keratin 10, and collagen IV increased because of the effect of ALA. Changes in the epidermis layer were noticeable after the ALA treatment. As a result of aging, damage to the skin-barrier function and structural integrity is reduced, indicating that ALA has an anti-aging effect. We performed a gene analysis of filaggrin, involucrin, keratin 10, integrin, and collagen I genes in ALA-treated human skin equivalents, which indicated an increase in filaggrin gene expression after ALA treatment. These results indicate that pumpless SOC can be used as an in vitro skin model similar to human skin, protein and gene expression can be analyzed, and it can be used for functional drug tests of cosmetic materials in the future. This technology is expected to contribute to the development of skin disease models.     

高稳高效海上风电安装平台关键制造技术研究

海上风电作为可再生清洁能源之一,受到世界各国的高度重视与大力发展。我国将海上风电提升至解决能源危机、减缓气候变化、调整能源结构的国家战略高度,到2030年我国单位国内生产总值二氧化碳排放将比2005年下降65%以上,非化石能源占一次能源消费比重将达到25%左右。安装平台不足将是我国海上风电场无法如期建成投产的主要障碍。对自升自航式海上风电安装平台系列高端装备及其设计制造的三大技术难题——腿站立作业易“失稳”、大平台大跨距大倾覆力矩自升易“失控”、高空吊装巨型叶片逾百螺栓精准定位易“失准”,以及焊缝缺陷修复和局部裂纹损伤的激光锻造修复再制造进行了介绍,研制的具有不同规格的系列装备在中国、英国、丹麦、德国等国家的著名海上风电场建设应用情况良好。     

Understanding the asymmetric perceptions of smartphone security from security feature perspective: A comparative study

Smartphones are being used and relied on by people more than ever before. The open connectivity brings with it great convenience and leads to a variety of risks that cannot be overlooked. Smartphone vendors, security policy designers, and security application providers have put a variety of practical efforts to secure smartphones, and researchers have conducted extensive research on threat sources, security techniques, and user security behaviors. Regrettably, smartphone users do not pay enough attention to mobile security, making many efforts futile. This study identifies this gap between technology affordance and user requirements, and attempts to investigate the asymmetric perceptions toward security features between developers and users, between users and users, as well as between different security features. These asymmetric perceptions include perceptions of quality, perceptions of importance, and perceptions of satisfaction. After scoping the range of smartphone security features, this study conducts an improved Kano-based method and exhaustively analyzes the 245 collected samples using correspondence analysis and importance satisfaction analysis. The 14 security features of the smartphone are divided into four Kano quality types and the perceived quality differences between developers and users are compared. Correspondence analysis is utilized to capture the relationship between the perceived importance of security features across different groups of respondents, and results of importance-satisfaction analysis provide the basis for the developmental path and resource reallocation strategy of security features. This article offers new insights for researchers as well as practitioners of smartphone security.     

Underwater image super-resolution using multi-stage information distillation networks

Recently, single image super-resolution (SISR) has been widely applied in the fields of underwater robot vision and obtained remarkable performance. However, most current methods generally suffered from the problem of a heavy burden on computational resources with large model sizes, which limited their real-world underwater robotic applications. In this paper, we introduce and tackle the super resolution (SR) problem for underwater robot vision and provide an efficient solution for near real-time applications. We present a novel lightweight multi-stage information distillation network, named MSIDN, for better balancing performance against applicability, which aggregates the local distilled features from different stages for more powerful feature representation. Moreover, a novel recursive residual feature distillation (RRFD) module is constructed to progressively extract useful features with a modest number of parameters in each stage. We also propose a channel interaction & distillation (CI&D) module that employs channel split operation on the preceding features to produce two-part features and utilizes the inter channel-wise interaction information between them to generate the distilled features, which can effectively extract the useful information of current stage without extra parameters. Besides, we present USR-2K dataset, a collection of over 1.6K samples for large-scale underwater image SR training, and a testset with an additional 400 samples for benchmark evaluation. Extensive experiments on several standard benchmark datasets show that the proposed MSIDN can provide state-of-the-art or even better performance in both quantitative and qualitative measurements.     

WavNet — Visual saliency detection using Discrete Wavelet Convolutional Neural Network

In the recent advancements in image and video analysis, the detection of salient regions in the image becomes the initial step. This plays a crucial role in deciding the performance of such algorithms. In this work, a Multi-Resolution Feature Extraction (MRFE) technique that makes use of Discrete Wavelet Convolutional Neural Network (DWCNN) for generating features is employed. An Enhanced Feature Extraction (EFE) module extracts additional features from the high level features of the DWCNN, which are used to frame both channel as well as spatial attention models for yielding contextual attention maps. A new hybrid loss function is also proposed, which is a combination of Balanced Cross Entropy (BCE) loss and Edge based Structural Similarity (ESSIM) loss that effectively identifies and segments the salient regions with clear boundaries. The method is tested exhaustively with five different benchmark datasets and is proved superior to the existing state-of-the-art methods with a minimum Mean Absolute error (MAE) of 0.03 and F-measure of 0.956.     

Modeling Sialidosis with Neural Precursor Cells Derived from Patient-Derived Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

Sialidosis, caused by a genetic deficiency of the lysosomal sialidase gene (NEU1), is a systemic disease involving various tissues and organs, including the nervous system. Understanding the neurological dysfunction and pathology associated with sialidosis remains a challenge, partially due to the lack of a human model system. In this study, we have generated two types of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) with sialidosis-specific NEU1^G227R and NEU1^V275A/R347Q mutations (sialidosis-iPSCs), and further differentiated them into neural precursor cells (iNPCs). Characterization of NEU1^G227R- and NEU1^V275A/R347Q- mutated iNPCs derived from sialidosis-iPSCs (sialidosis-iNPCs) validated that sialidosis-iNPCs faithfully recapitulate key disease-specific phenotypes, including reduced NEU1 activity and impaired lysosomal and autophagic function. In particular, these cells showed defective differentiation into oligodendrocytes and astrocytes, while their neuronal differentiation was not notably affected. Importantly, we found that the phenotypic defects of sialidosis-iNPCs, such as impaired differentiation capacity, could be effectively rescued by the induction of autophagy with rapamycin. Our results demonstrate the first use of a sialidosis-iNPC model with NEU1^G227R- and NEU1^V275A/R347Q- mutation(s) to study the neurological defects of sialidosis, particularly those related to a defective autophagy–lysosome pathway, and may help accelerate the development of new drugs and therapeutics to combat sialidosis and other LSDs.