The Age-Sensitive Efficacy of Calorie Restriction on Mitochondrial Biogenesis and mtDNA Damage in Rat Liver

Calorie restriction (CR) is the most efficacious treatment to delay the onset of age-related changes such as mitochondrial dysfunction. However, the sensitivity of mitochondrial markers to CR and the age-related boundaries of CR efficacy are not fully elucidated. We used liver samples from ad libitum-fed (AL) rats divided in: 18-month-old (AL-18), 28-month-old (AL-28), and 32-month-old (AL-32) groups, and from CR-treated (CR) 28-month-old (CR-28) and 32-month-old (CR-32) counterparts to assay the effect of CR on several mitochondrial markers. The age-related decreases in citrate synthase activity, in TFAM, MFN2, and DRP1 protein amounts and in the mtDNA content in the AL-28 group were prevented in CR-28 counterparts. Accordingly, CR reduced oxidative mtDNA damage assessed through the incidence of oxidized purines at specific mtDNA regions in CR-28 animals. These findings support the anti-aging effect of CR up to 28 months. Conversely, the protein amounts of LonP1, Cyt c, OGG1, and APE1 and the 4.8 Kb mtDNA deletion content were not affected in CR-28 rats. The absence of significant differences between the AL-32 values and the CR-32 counterparts suggests an age-related boundary of CR efficacy at this age. However, this only partially curtails the CR benefits in counteracting the generalized aging decline and the related mitochondrial involvement.     

Influence of temperature on acoustic emission source location accuracy in underground structure

An acoustic emission (AE) experiment was carried out to explore the AE location accuracy influenced by temperature. A hollow hemispherical specimen was used to simulate common underground structures. In the process of heating with the flame, the pulse signal of constant frequency was stimulated as an AE source. Then AE signals received by each sensor were collected and used for comparing localization accuracy at different temperatures. Results show that location errors of AE keep the same phenomenon in the early and middle heating stages. In the later stage of heating, location errors of AE increase sharply due to the appearance of cracks. This provides some beneficial suggestions on decreasing location errors of structural cracks caused by temperature and improves the ability of underground structure disaster prevention and control.     

爆破位置对深凹露天矿山炮烟扩散的影响研究

深凹露天矿山由于其特殊的结构,爆破产生的炮烟扩散稀释较为困难,严重危害生产作业人员的生命安全与健康。基于实际矿山构建了深凹露天矿山的二维物理及数学模型,采用非稳态数值分析方法研究了不同爆破位置下,深凹露天矿山采坑内爆破炮烟的扩散规律。研究结果表明：不同爆破位置下,露天采坑内均出现复环流,爆破点位置是影响露天采坑内风流结构特征的重要因素；露天采坑内的炮烟最高浓度均随着时间变化而逐渐下降,但下降的速率逐步减小,呈现三个阶段的下降趋势；爆破位置位于背风侧时露天采坑内的炮烟最高浓度和降至安全浓度所需时间远高于迎风侧三个爆破位置；随着背风侧爆破点距采坑底部距离的减小,炮烟最高浓度及降至安全浓度所需时间先降低后增加,炮烟最高浓度及降至安全浓度所需时间随着迎风侧爆破位置距采坑底部距离的减小而增加。研究结果对于指导深凹露天矿山企业合理组织爆破后的生产作业和保障作业人员安全具有重要意义。     

The effect of biomass feeding location on rice husk gasification for hydrogen production

The objective of this study is to investigate the impact of biomass feeding location on rice husk gasification for hydrogen production. By comparing the results between top-feed and bottom-feed of the feedstock of the fluidized bed biomass gasification at the reaction temperature between 600～1000 °C and ER = 0.2, 0.27, and 0.33 without steam, the optimum low heating value was increase by 2.35 kJ/g-rice husk by the top-feed to gasifier. Although the yield of hydrogen was decreased by 42% for the rice husk gasification by the top-feed operation, the yield of CO, CO2, and CH4 were highly increased, which enhancing the heating value of the effluent gas. The study results suggested the potential route of the biomass gasification at the different feeding location.     

YOLSO: You Only Look Small Object

Small object detection is challenging and far from satisfactory. Most general object detectors suffer from two critical issues with small objects: (1) Feature extractor based on classification network cannot express the characteristics of small objects reasonably due to insufficient appearance information of targets and a large amount of background interference around them. (2) The detector requires a much higher location accuracy for small objects than for general objects. This paper proposes an effective and efficient small object detector YOLSO to address the above problems. For feature representation, we analyze the drawbacks in previous backbones and present a Half-Space Shortcut(HSSC) module to build a background-aware backbone. Furthermore, a coarse-to-fine Feature Pyramid Enhancement(FPE) module is introduced for layer-wise aggregation at a granular level to enhance the semantic discriminability. For loss function, we propose an exponential L1 loss to promote the convergence of regression, and a focal IOU loss to focus on prime samples with high classification confidence and high IOU. Both of them significantly improves the location accuracy of small objects. The proposed YOLSO sets state-of-the-art results on two typical small object datasets, MOCOD and VeDAI, at a speed of over 200 FPS. In the meantime, it also outperforms the baseline YOLOv3 by a wide margin on the common COCO dataset.     

Location Privacy in Device-Dependent Location-Based Services: Challenges and Solution

With the evolution of location-based services (LBS), a new type of LBS has already gain a lot of attention and implementation, we name this kind of LBS as the Device-Dependent LBS (DLBS). In DLBS, the service provider (SP) will not only send the information according to the user’s location, more significant, he also provides a service device which will be carried by the user. DLBS has been successfully practised in some of the large cities around the world, for example, the shared bicycle in Beijing and London. In this paper, we, for the first time, blow the whistle of the new location privacy challenges caused by DLBS, since the service device is enabled to perform the localization without the permission of the user. To conquer these threats, we design a service architecture along with a credit system between DLBS provider and the user. The credit system tie together the DLBS device usability with the curious behaviour upon user’s location privacy, DLBS provider has to sacrifice their revenue in order to gain extra location information of their device. We make the simulation of our proposed scheme and the result convince its effectiveness.     

The location and sizing of urban freight loading/unloading lay-by areas

The volume of freight vehicles operating within city boundaries is steadily increasing, which contributes to road congestion, especially in urban areas with a parking deficit. The proper identification of the location and size of commercial parking lay-by areas, where delivery vehicles can park for a limited time to perform loading/unloading operations, can relieve road congestion. Compared to the existing literature, this paper presents an improved two-stage approach, which includes a mathematical programme and a simulation model for determining the location and sizing of lay-by areas. The robustness and soundness of the results from a methodological and practical point of view are discussed using an example application.     

The generalized discrete ‐centroid problem

The ‐centroid problem or leader–follower problem is generalized considering different customer choice rules where a customer may use facilities belonging to different firms, if the difference in travel distance (or time) is small enough. Assuming essential goods, some particular customer choice rules are analyzed. Linear programming formulations for the generalized ‐medianoid and ‐centroid problems are presented and an exact solution approach is applied. Some computational examples are included.     

Precipitation location of secondary phase and microstructural evolution during static recrystallization of as-cast Ti-25V-15Cr-0.3Si titanium alloy

The microstructural evolution and precipitation location of the secondary phase of an as-cast Ti-25V-15Cr-0.3Si titanium alloy were investigated via isothermal compression experiments and heat treatment. The average aspect (length-to-width) ratio, average area and size of the grains at different heat treatment temperatures and holding time were analyzed and the effects of deformation and annealing time on the grain area and size were considered. It was found that the grain size was strongly influenced by the height reduction and holding time. Grain growth was significant when annealing time increased from 10 min to 2 h at 950 °C and height reduction of 30%; however, grain growth was minimal at annealing time between 2 and 4 h. Many dispersion particles were observed to form in continuous chains; the precipitation location was confirmed to be along initial grain boundaries, and the dispersion particles were identified to be Ti₅Si₃ phase by TEM.