Bi-layer gelatin active films with “Pitanga” leaf hydroethanolic extract and/or natamycin in the second layer

Research on biopolymers-based active films produced with natural antioxidants and/or antimicrobials has gained attention over the last few years; however, anti-mold activity has been less studied than those of anti-bacteria. The aim of this work was the development and characterization of bi-layer films based on gelatin with natamycin and/or “Pitanga” leaf hydroethanolic extract in the second thin layer in order to determine the effects of these bioactive compounds on bi-layered film properties. The films were characterized regarding their moisture content and solubility in water, optical properties, microstructure, mechanical and thermal properties, water contact angle, water vapor permeability, UV/visible light transmission, X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and antioxidant and anti-mold activities. Active films presented activity against Penicillium spp and Aspergillus niger and demonstrated antioxidant activity, as measured by ABTS ^•+ and DPPH ^• methods. Neither additive used in the films' second layer significantly affected the films' moisture content, thermal properties or the molecular interactions of the polymer matrix, assessed by FTIR, although some mechanical properties were affected, and the water contact angle. In conclusion, bi-layer films have reduced the quantity of additives required to maintain the antioxidant and anti-mold activities, as compared to similar monolayer films of the same thickness.     

A novel grating matching method for 3D reconstruction

Automatic 3D surface reconstruction has been an important research topic in digital photogrammetry for many years. Shaping from stereoscopic information is one of the widely studied topics in computer vision. Its central part is to solve the stereo matching problem automatically. Most algorithms used to solve the matching problem can be categorized as either area-base techniques or feature-based techniques. Feature-based techniques have gained more and more popularity for and it is the method that supports activities in object recognition and image understanding. But none of the former research can ensure the 100% matching exactness, thus, cannot complete high precision 3D surface measurement. In order to improve the precision of 3D measurement, we design a novel grating matching method, which can ensure 100% matching accuracy. It does not need any other assistant symbol or flag, only select one of the gratings which have to be projected to the objects. On the beginning of the measurement, the background of the object is captured by a CCD camera. Later gratings include single grating and group gratings will be projected to the object in sequence. All the images include gratings will make a subtraction with the background. The difference of the two images will be treated as 3D cues to acquire the 3D shape. Because no recognizing work is needed, the location of the single grating and each one in the group can be positioned exactly. From a lot of experiments, the proposed grating matching method is proved and it is a technique with high precision, low costs, easy operation, and an automatically matching method. Furthermore, it can be widely used in most of 3D vision recovery systems.     

管理史对MBA的边际效用

近年来 ,我国MBA的社会评价不高 ,其根本原因是MBA毕业生不能满足市场要求。本文通过分析管理史的功能 ,得出学习管理史对MBA的边际效用大 ,MBA培养方案中有必要增设管理史类的课程。     

铸钢件冒口离开热节动态顺序凝固补缩特性的研究

采用正交设计现场浇注，试验研究了铸钢件冒口离开热节动态补缩特性。结果表明，冒口位置对补缩效果影响显著，铸钢件冒口在离开铸件的几何热节处，实施动态顺序凝固补缩，提高了冒口补缩效率和工艺出品率。在试验条件下，冒口离开何热节的距离为一倍热节圆直径时，补缩效果良好。     

急弯段闸孔出流的弯道水流特性研究

在河弯处修建水工建筑物时,研究弯道水流特性对水工建筑物布置的影响十分重要。采用RNCκ-ε紊流模型对急弯段闸孔出流的弯道水流进行了三维数值模拟。通过模拟计算,比较分析了急弯段不同闸位、不同流量条件下闸孔过流时的流速分布、紊流动能、压强分布和环流等相关水流特性与变化规律。分析研究结果表明,闸坝位于弯道上游时,弯道对闸坝过流的影响最小,但需对闸坝下流弯道凸岸岸坡附近区域采取一定的防护措施;闸坝布置在弯道中游时,过闸水流受弯道的影响最小,闸室水流的稳定性、闸门的工作安全以及闸墩的空蚀破坏都是实际工程中需要注意的重点。数值模拟验证与物理模型试验结果吻合较好,计算精度较高,能够满足相关计算研究要求。     

Single-view-based 3D facial reconstruction method robust against pose variations

The 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) and the Structure from Motion (SfM) methods are widely used for 3D facial reconstruction from 2D single-view or multiple-view images. However, model-based methods suffer from disadvantages such as high computational costs and vulnerability to local minima and head pose variations. The SfM-based methods require multiple facial images in various poses. To overcome these disadvantages, we propose a single-view-based 3D facial reconstruction method that is person-specific and robust to pose variations. Our proposed method combines the simplified 3DMM and the SfM methods. First, 2D initial frontal Facial Feature Points (FFPs) are estimated from a preliminary 3D facial image that is reconstructed by the simplified 3DMM. Second, a bilateral symmetric facial image and its corresponding FFPs are obtained from the original side-view image and corresponding FFPs by using the mirroring technique. Finally, a more accurate the 3D facial shape is reconstructed by the SfM using the frontal, original, and bilateral symmetric FFPs. We evaluated the proposed method using facial images in 35 different poses. The reconstructed facial images and the ground-truth 3D facial shapes obtained from the scanner were compared. The proposed method proved more robust to pose variations than 3DMM. The average 3D Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) between the reconstructed and ground-truth 3D faces was less than 2.6 mm when 2D FFPs were manually annotated, and less than 3.5 mm when automatically annotated.     

Continuum electrostatic approach for evaluating positions and interactions of proteins in a bilayer membrane

Orientations of proteins in the membranes are crucial to their function and stability. Unfortunately the exact positions of these proteins in the lipid bilayer are mostly undetermined. Here, the spatial orientation of membrane proteins within the lipid membrane was evaluated using a Poisson–Boltzmann solvent continuum approach to calculate the electrostatic free energy of the protein solvation at various orientations in an implicit bilayer. The solvation energy was obtained by computing the difference in electrostatic energies of the protein in water and in lipid/water environments, treating each as an implicit solvent model. The optimal position of transmembrane proteins (TMP) in a lipid bilayer is identified by the minimum in the “downhill” pathway of the solvation energy landscape. The energy landscape pattern was considerably conserved in various TMP classes. Evaluation of the position of 1060 membrane proteins from the orientations of proteins in membranes (OPM) database revealed that most of the polytopic and β-barrel proteins were in good agreement with those of the OPM database. The study provides a useful scheme for estimating the membrane solvation energy made by lipid-exposed amino acids in membrane proteins. In addition, our results tested with the bacterial potassium channel model demonstrated the potential usefulness of the approach in assessing the quality of membrane protein models. The present approach should be applicable for constructing transmembrane proteins–lipid configuration suitable for membrane protein simulations and will have utility for the structural modeling of membrane proteins.     

引洮7~#隧洞含水疏松砂岩地层冻结法施工数值模拟

为探究含水疏松砂岩地层引水隧洞冻结施工中冻土帷幕的形成过程及力学特性,对引水隧洞的冻结施工及开挖过程进行三维数值模拟。研究了冻土帷幕的温度场、应力及位移的分布,计算出冻土帷幕完全形成所需的时间及其压、拉、剪应力极值并确定极值发生的位置。结合现场监测数据,分析了冻结过程中冻土的温度变化规律及冻土帷幕的形成机理,最后提出了相应的措施及建议。     

The contribution of proteomics towards deciphering the enigma of Coxiella burnetii

Coxiella burnetii, the causative agent of Q fever, is an intracellular bacterium and a potential weapon for bioterrorism. The widespread throughout the world, zoonosis is manifested clinically as a self-limited febrile illness, as pneumonia (acute Q fever) or as a chronic illness with endocarditis being its major complication. The recent Netherlands Q fever outbreak has driven the bacterium from a relatively cryptic, underappreciated, “niche” microorganism on the sideline of bacteriology, to one of possibly great impact on public health. Advances in the study of this microorganism proceeded slowly, primarily due to the, until recently, obligatory intracellular nature of the pathogen that in its virulent phase I must be manipulated under biosafety level-3 conditions. Proteomic studies, in particular, have generated a vast amount of information concerning several aspects of the bacterium such as virulence factors, detection/diagnostic and immunogenic biomarkers, inter-/intraspecies variation, resistance to antibiotics, and secreted effector proteins with significant clinical impact. The phenomenon observed following the genomics era, that of generation and accumulation of huge amount of data that ultimately end up unexploited on several databases, begins to emerge in the proteomics field as well. This review will focus on the advances in the field of C. burnetii proteomics through MS, attempting in parallel to utilize some of the proteomics findings by suggesting future directions for the improvement of Q fever diagnosis and therapy.     

EM-GPA: Generalized Procrustes analysis with hidden variables for 3D shape modeling

Aligning shapes is essential in many computer vision problems and generalized Procrustes analysis (GPA) is one of the most popular algorithms to align shapes. However, if some of the shape data are missing, GPA cannot be applied. In this paper, we propose EM-GPA, which extends GPA to handle shapes with hidden (missing) variables by using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. For example, 2D shapes can be considered as 3D shapes with missing depth information due to the projection of 3D shapes into the image plane. For a set of 2D shapes, EM-GPA finds scales, rotations and 3D shapes along with their mean and covariance matrix for 3D shape modeling. A distinctive characteristic of EM-GPA is that it does not enforce any rank constraint often appeared in other work and instead uses GPA constraints to resolve the ambiguity in finding scales, rotations, and 3D shapes. The experimental results show that EM-GPA can recover depth information accurately even when the noise level is high and there are a large number of missing variables. By using the images from the FRGC database, we show that EM-GPA can successfully align 2D shapes by taking the missing information into consideration. We also demonstrate that the 3D mean shape and its covariance matrix are accurately estimated. As an application of EM-GPA, we construct a 2D + 3D AAM (active appearance model) using the 3D shapes obtained by EM-GPA, and it gives a similar success rate in model fitting compared to the method using real 3D shapes. EM-GPA is not limited to the case of missing depth information, but it can be easily extended to more general cases.