New climate change scenarios for the Netherlands.

A new set of climate change scenarios for 2050 for the Netherlands was produced recently. The scenarios span a wide range of possible future climate conditions, and include climate variables that are of interest to a broad user community. The scenario values are constructed by combining output from an ensemble of recent General Climate Model (GCM) simulations, Regional Climate Model (RCM) output, meteorological observations and a touch of expert judgment. For temperature, precipitation, potential evaporation and wind four scenarios are constructed, encompassing ranges of both global mean temperature rise in 2050 and the strength of the response of the dominant atmospheric circulation in the area of interest to global warming. For this particular area, wintertime precipitation is seen to increase between 3.5 and 7% per degree global warming, but mean summertime precipitation shows opposite signs depending on the assumed response of the circulation regime. Annual maximum daily mean wind speed shows small changes compared to the observed (natural) variability of this variable. Sea level rise in the North Sea in 2100 ranges between 35 and 85 cm. Preliminary assessment of the impact of the new scenarios on water management and coastal defence policies indicate that particularly dry summer scenarios and increased intensity of extreme daily precipitation deserves additional attention in the near future.     

Functional study of the rat cortical microcircuitry with voltage-sensitive dye imaging of neocortical slices

The computations performed within cortex are likely to be determined by its internal dynamics in addition to its pattern of afferent input. As a step toward characterizing these dynamics, we have imaged electrical activity in slices from rat primary visual cortex stained with the voltage-sensitive dye di-4-ANEPPS. In response to electrical stimulation two fluorescence signals of similar maximum amplitude are elicited, (i) A fast signal that peaks in a few milliseconds, is dependent on membrane voltage, and has a significant presynaptic component. This signal can be used to image electrical activity ratiometrically. (ii) A slow signal that peaks a few seconds after stimulation, does not reflect voltage changes, and may originate from changes in scattering properties of the slice and from interactions of the dye with the cells. The spatial pattern of fast signals obtained in response to focal stimulation of coronal slices is consistent with known interlaminar projection patterns. In tangential slices, imaging of fast signals reveals clustered horizontal responses. Finally, imaging of fast signals during epileptiform activation of the disinhibited circuit reveals propagating responses, without evidence for modular activation.     

Small cell carcinoma of gallbladder: report of two cases

Extrapulmonary small cell carcinoma has been reported from multiple sites, including the gallbladder. Small cell carcinoma of the gallbladder is a very rare tumor, found usually in elderly women and associated with cholelithiasis. It carries a grave prognosis, metastasizing early and causing death shortly after diagnosis. Treatment of metastatic disease with two different chemotherapeutic regimens has been shown to improve survival. To the best of our knowledge, this tumor has not been previously reported in a black individual, or in any subject less than 49 yr or more than 79 yr old. We report two cases: one is the first black and youngest reported case. The second is the oldest person reported with this rare malignancy. Radiological studies such as ultrasound and CT scan were useful in evaluating tumor spread and follow-up.     

A staging system for forelimb regeneration in the axolotl, Ambystoma mexicanum

A staging system has been devised for normal regeneration from the upper arm in the mature axolotl. It consists of seven externally definable stages: (1) Wound healing (WH): (2) Dedifferentiation (DD); (3) Early bud (EB); (4) Medium bud (MB); (5) Late bud (LB); (6) Palette (Pal), and (7) Digital outgrowth (DO). Serial histological sections of 38 regenerating limbs were used to correlate gross stages with microscopic events in the regenerative process.     

A convenient one step preparation of crosslinked polystyrene mercaptomethyl resin

A highly convenient and efficient one step procedure for the synthesis of polystyrene thiol resin from Merrifield resin is described. Potassium O,O-diethyl thionophosphate is used as a thiolating reagent for the conversion of halogen (chloro) group to thiol functionality in refluxing DMF. By a simple procedure chloro methylated cross-linked polystyrene was thiolated through a nucleophilic substitution reaction. The modified beads were characterized by IR, laser Raman spectroscopy and elemental analysis. Evaluations of the functionalized beads were done by their halide scavenging and chelating efficiency. The novel feature of this method is simple and safe reaction, shorter reaction time and efficient loading of thiol functionality.     

液压支架的自动反冲洗过滤系统的设计

自动反冲洗过滤系统实现了井下液压支架二级过滤器反冲洗的自动化。该系统利用过滤器前后的压力差来得到反馈信号以控制液压阀,实现液压支架的自动反冲洗过滤,具有更好的安全性和可靠性。     

高度逾百米的钢筋砼烟囱爆破拆除

阐述了120m高钢筋砼烟囱爆破拆除技术和安全设计方法,对爆破过程中可能出现的问题提出了自己的看法,为此类爆破工程提供借鉴．     

Adaptive recurrent nonnegative matrix factorization with phase compensation for Single-Channel speech enhancement

The speech signals are affected by the background noise distortion that is unfavorable to both the intelligibility as well as the speech quality. Most of the speech processing algorithms function with the spectral magnitude without consideration of the spectral phase by leaving them unexplored and unstructured. The proposed single channel speech enhancement model called the Adaptive Recurrent Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (AR-NMF) is designed based on the phase compensation strategy with deep learning. The two major phases considered here are the training phase and the testing phase. During the process of training, the noisy speech signal is decomposed by the Hurst exponent-based Empirical Mode Decomposition (HEMD) and is converted into the frequency domain using Short Time Fourier Transform. Further, the new AR-NMF is used for denoising, where the tuning factor is optimally generated by the optimized RNN. Here, the hidden neurons are optimized using the proposed Adaptive Attack Power-based Sail Fish Optimization (AAP-SFO) with consideration of minimizing the Mean Absolute Error between the actual value and the predicted value. Finally, this phase compensated speech signal is given to the ISTFT that results in the final denoised clean speech signal. From the analysis, the CSED of AAP-SFO-AR-NMF for the street noise is 58.24%, 57.34%, 56.72%, and 77.37% more than RNMF, esHRNR, esTSNR, and Vuvuzela respectively. The performance of the proposed deep enhancement method is extensively evaluated and compared to diverse adverse noisy environments that describe the superiority of the proposed method.