Characterizing pathological imperfections in macromolecular crystals: lattice disorders and modulations

Macromolecular crystal structure determination can be complicated or brought to a halt by crystal imperfections. These issues motivated us to write up what we affectionately call ‘The Definitive Hitchhiker’s Guide to Pathological Macromolecular Crystals: Lattice Disorders and Modulations’. Perhaps the most challenging imperfections are lattice order–disorder phenomena and positional modulations. Many of these types of crystals have been solved, and progress has been made on the more challenging forms. Diagnostic tools and how to solve many of these problem crystal structures are reviewed. New avenues are provided for approaching the solution of incommensurately modulated crystals. There are a good number of case studies in the literature of lattice order–disorder phenomena and crystallographic modulations that make it timely to write a review. This review concludes with a projected pathway for solving incommensurately modulated crystals, personal views of future directions and needs of the crystallographic community.     

POPS: an off-peak precomputing scheme for privacy-preserving computing

Emerging privacy-preserving technologies help protect sensitive data during application executions. Recently, the secure two-party computing (TPC) scheme has demonstrated its potential, especially for the secure model inference of a deep learning application by protecting both the user input data and the model parameters. Nevertheless, existing TPC protocols incur excessive communications during the program execution, which lengthens the execution time. In this work, we propose the precomputing scheme, POPS, to address the problem, which is done by shifting the required communications from during the execution to the time prior to the execution. Particular, the multiplication triple generation is computed beforehand with POPS to remove the overhead at runtime. We have analyzed the TPC protocols to ensure that the precomputing scheme conforms the existing secure protocols. Our results show that POPS takes a step forward in the secure inference by delivering up to \(20\times \) and \(5\times \) speedups against the prior work for the microbenchmark and the convolutional neural network experiments, respectively.

     

Groundwater problems in surface coal mining in Scotland

The paper reviews the problems encountered with groundwater in surface mining in Scotland. The problems which occur at various stages of the mining process from initial exploration to mine planning and final restoration are referred to. Special consideration is given to mine drainage and pumping methods.     

中等含水层下留设防砂煤柱开采的试验与研究

百善煤矿主采煤层上方直接覆盖有22－27m的砂砾石含水层,严重威胁矿井的安全生产。为了安全合理地开采,进行了矿区水文地质和上覆岩层岩石力学、水理性质以及“两带”高度试验。结果表明：含水层内含黏量较高,垂直渗透能力较弱;所留煤柱属软弱或极软弱类型;风化带内黏土矿物含量较大;吸水后体积膨胀,再生隔水能力强;受采动影响后,具阻水和抑制导水裂隙带继续发展的双重作用;根据以上研究结果,取得了将垂高50m的防水煤柱缩小到12－20m防砂、防塌煤柱的技术突破,安全地多采煤600多万t,经济效益显著。     

The stability of a balloon support subjected to blasting

Journal of Mining Science -     

凹凸棒石粘土干燥剂的制备与性能研究

本文就利用凹凸棒石粘土制作干燥剂的实验研究作一介绍，通过加入一种或多种改性剂，有效的改善了凹凸棒石粘土的吸湿性能，并且在加入粘结剂制成球形颗粒后仍然能保持较高的吸湿率，吸湿后不变形，具有较高的强度，成本低，无污染，能反复再生使用。