Search Results (206)

Late-spring frost events severely damage low-chill peach blossoms, causing significant yield losses. Although 5-aminolevulinic acid (ALA) enhances cold tolerance through the PpC3H37-PpWRKY18 module, the regulatory mechanism of ALA on PpC3H37 remains to be elucidated. Using yeast one-hybrid screening with the PpC3H37 promoter as bait, we identified PpDof9 as a key interacting transcription factor. A genome-wide analysis revealed 25 PpDof genes in peaches (Prunus persica). These genes exhibited variable physicochemical properties, with most proteins predicted as nuclear-localized. Subcellular localization experiments in tobacco revealed that PpDof9 was localized to the nucleus, consistent with predictions. A synteny analysis indicated nine segmental duplication pairs and tandem duplications on chromosomes 5 and 6, suggesting duplication events drove family expansion. A conserved motif analysis confirmed universal presence of the Dof domain (Motif 1). Promoter cis-element screening identified low-temperature responsive (LTR) elements in 12 PpDofs, including PpDof1, PpDof8, PpDof9, and PpDof25. The quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) results showed that PpDof1, PpDof8, PpDof9, PpDof15, PpDof16, and PpDof25 were significantly upregulated under low-temperature stress, and this upregulation was further enhanced by ALA pretreatment. Our findings demonstrate ALA-mediated modulation of specific PpDof TFs in cold response and provide candidates (PpDof1, PpDof9, PpDof8, PpDof25) for enhancing floral frost tolerance in peaches. Full article

The strategic construction of heterojunctions through a simple and efficient strategy is one of the most effective means to boost the photocatalytic activity of semiconductor materials. Herein, a thiazole-linked covalent organic framework (TZ-COF) with large surface area, well-ordered pore structure, and high stability was developed. To further boost photocatalytic activity, the TZ-COF was synthesized in situ on the surface of Cu₂O through a simple multicomponent reaction, yielding an encapsulated composite material (Cu₂O@TZ-COF-18). In this composite, the outermost COF endows the material with abundant redox active sites and mass transfer channels, while the innermost Cu₂O exhibits unique photoelectric properties. Notably, the synthesized Cu₂O@TZ-COF-18 was proven to have the heterojunction structure, which can efficiently restrain the recombination of photogenerated electron–hole pairs, thereby enhancing the photocatalytic performance. The photocatalytic degradation of tetracycline demonstrated that 3-Cu₂O@TZ-COF-18 had the highest photocatalytic efficiency, with the removal rate of 96.3% within 70 min under visible light, which is better than that of pristine TZ-COF-18, Cu₂O, the physical mixture of Cu₂O and TZ-COF-18, and numerous reported COF-based composite materials. 3-Cu₂O@TZ-COF-18 retained its original crystallinity and removal efficiency after five cycles in photodegradation reaction, displaying high stability and excellent cycle performance. Full article

Zearalenone (ZEN), a mycotoxin commonly found in cereal crops and foods, induces testicular damage and disrupts gut microbial composition. Curcumin (CUR), a bioactive compound derived from turmeric, is known to enhance intestinal microbial balance and exhibit anti-inflammatory properties. This study aimed to investigate the mechanism by which CUR alleviates ZEN-induced reductions in sperm quality through the modulation of the gut microbiota–testis axis. Forty-eight 6-week-old Balb/c male mice were randomly assigned to four treatment groups: control (CON), CUR (200 mg/kg body weight CUR), ZEN (40 mg/kg body weight ZEN), and ZEN + CUR (200 mg/kg CUR + 40 mg/kg ZEN). The degree of sperm damage was quantified by assessing both the survival rate and the morphological integrity of the spermatozoa. CUR was found to mitigate ZEN-induced reductions in the testosterone levels, testicular structural damage, and disrupted spermatogenesis. Exposure to ZEN markedly perturbed the gut microbiota, characterized by increased relative abundances of Prevotella and Bacteroides and a concomitant reduction in Lactobacillus. These alterations were accompanied by pronounced activation of the IL-17A–TNF-α signaling axis, as demonstrated by elevated transcriptional and translational expression of pathway-associated genes and proteins. Co-administration of CUR effectively reinstated microbial homeostasis and mitigated ZEN-induced IL-17A pathway activation. In conclusion, ZEN induces testicular inflammation and reduced sperm quality by lowering testosterone levels and disrupting gut microbial balance, which drives the testicular IL-17A signaling pathway. CUR alleviates ZEN-induced testicular inflammation and sperm quality reduction by restoring beneficial gut microbes and testosterone levels. Full article

To address multiple disturbance threats such as system anomalies and cyberattacks faced by power systems, an intelligent optimized secure filter method is developed in this paper for state estimation of power systems with the aid of the improved sparrow search algorithm–optimized unscented Kalman filter (ISSA-UKF). Firstly, the problem of insufficient robustness in noise modeling and parameter selection of the conventional unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is analyzed. Secondly, an intelligent optimization method is adopted to adaptively update the UKF’s process and measurement noise covariances in real time, and an ISSA-UKF fusion framework is constructed to improve the estimation accuracy and system response capability. Thirdly, an adaptive weight function based on disturbance observation differences is provided to strengthen the stability of the algorithm in response to abnormal measurements at edge nodes and dynamic system changes. Finally, simulation analysis under a typical power system model shows that compared with the conventional UKF method, the developed ISSA-UKF algorithm demonstrates significant improvements in estimation accuracy, robustness, and dynamic response performance and can effectively cope with non-ideal disturbances that may occur in power systems. Full article

CO₂ transport is a crucial part of CCUS. Nonetheless, due to the physical property differences between CO₂ and natural gas and oil, CO₂ pipeline transport is distinct from natural gas and oil transport. Gaseous CO₂ transportation has become the preferred scheme for transporting impurity-containing CO₂ tail gas in purification plants due to its advantages of simple technology, low cost, and high safety, which are well suited to the scenarios of low transportation volume and short distance in purification plants. The research on its physical property and state parameters is precisely aimed at optimizing the process design of gaseous transportation so as to further improve transportation efficiency and safety. Therefore, it has important engineering practical significance. Firstly, this paper collected and analyzed the research cases of CO₂ transport both domestically and internationally, revealing that phase state and physical property testing of CO₂ gas containing impurities is the basic condition for studying CO₂ transport. Subsequently, the exhaust gas captured by the purification plant was captured after hydrodesulfurization treatment, and the characteristics of the exhaust gas components were obtained by comparing before and after treatment. By preparing fluid samples with varied CO₂ content and conducting the flash evaporation test and PV relationship test, the compression factor and density of natural gas under different temperatures and pressures were obtained. It is concluded that under the same pressure in general, the higher the CO₂ content, the smaller the compression factor. Except for pure CO_2, the higher the CO₂ content, the higher the density under constant pressure, which is related to the content of C₂ and heavier hydrocarbon components. At the same temperature, the higher the CO₂ content, the higher the viscosity under the same pressure; the lower the pressure, the slower the viscosity growth slows down. The higher the CO₂ content at the same temperature, the higher the specific heat at constant pressure. With the decrease in temperature, the CO₂ content reaching the highest specific heat at the identical pressure gradually decreases. Finally, BWRS, PR, and SRK equations of state were utilized to calculate the compression factor and density of the gas mixture with a molar composition of 50% CO₂ and the gas mixture with a molar composition of 100% CO₂. Compared with the experimental results, the most suitable equation of state is selected as the PR equation, which refers to the parameter setting of critical nodes of CO₂ gas transport. Full article

Underwater image enhancement (UIE) technology plays a vital role in marine resource exploration, environmental monitoring, and underwater archaeology. However, due to the absorption and scattering of light in underwater environments, images often suffer from blurred details, color distortion, and low contrast, which seriously affect the usability of underwater images. To address the above limitations, a lightweight transformer-based model (LITM) is proposed for improving underwater degraded images. Firstly, our proposed method utilizes a lightweight RGB transformer enhancer (LRTE) that uses efficient channel attention blocks to capture local detail features in the RGB domain. Subsequently, a lightweight HSV transformer encoder (LHTE) is utilized to extract global brightness, color, and saturation from the hue–saturation–value (HSV) domain. Finally, we propose a multi-modal integration block (MMIB) to effectively fuse enhanced information from the RGB and HSV pathways, as well as the input image. Our proposed LITM method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 26.70 and a structural similarity index (SSIM) of 0.9405 on the LSUI dataset. Furthermore, the designed method also exhibits good generality and adaptability on unpaired datasets. Full article

Due to the sparse distribution of ship targets in wide-area offshore scenarios, the typical cascade mode of imaging and detection for space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) echo data would consume substantial computational time and resources, severely affecting the timeliness of ship target information acquisition tasks. Therefore, we propose a ship target integrated imaging and detection framework (ST-IIDF) for SAR oceanic region data. A two-step filtering structure is added in the SAR imaging process to extract the potential areas of ship targets, which can accelerate the whole process. First, an improved peak-valley detection method based on one-dimensional scattering characteristics is used to locate the range gate units for ship targets. Second, a dynamic quantization method is applied to the imaged range gate units to further determine the azimuth region. Finally, a lightweight YOLO neural network is used to eliminate false alarm areas and obtain accurate positions of the ship targets. Through experiments on Hisea-1 and Pujiang-2 data, within sparse target scenes, the framework maintains over 90% accuracy in ship target detection, with an average processing speed increase of 35.95 times. The framework can be applied to ship target detection tasks with high timeliness requirements and provides an effective solution for real-time onboard processing. Full article

As the key non-electric protection equipment of an oil-immersed transformer, the gas relay plays an important role in ensuring the safe operation of the transformer. To further enhance the sensitivity of gas relays for the heavy gas alarm, this paper takes the BF type double float gas relay as the research object and proposes a new method for heavy gas setting, which is based on the internal oil flow acceleration characteristics of the gas relay. Firstly, the analytical derivation of the force acting on the gas relay baffle is carried out, and through theoretical analysis, the internal mechanism of heavy gas action under transient oil flow excitation is revealed. Then, the numerical simulation and experimental research on the variation of oil flow velocity and acceleration under different fault energies are carried out. The results show that with the increase of fault energy, the oil flow velocity fluctuates up and down during heavy gas action, but the oil flow acceleration shows a linear correlation. The oil flow acceleration can be set as the threshold of heavy gas action, and the severity of the fault can be judged. At the same time, the alarm time of the heavy gas setting method based on the oil flow acceleration characteristics is greatly shortened, which can reflect the internal fault of the transformer in time and significantly improve the sensitivity of the heavy gas alarm. Full article

Plasma electrolytic oxidation (PEO) is an advanced electrochemical surface treatment technology. It can effectively improve the corrosion resistance of magnesium and its alloys. This paper aims to form protective PEO coatings on an AZ31 substrate with different electrolytes, while monitoring the micro-discharge evolution by noise intensity and morphology analysis. By setting the PEO parameters and monitoring process characteristics, such as current density, spark appearance, and noise intensity, it was deduced that the PEO process consists of the following three stages: anodic oxidation, spark discharge, and micro-arc discharge. The PEO oxide coating formed on the AZ31 alloy exhibits various irregular volcano-like structures. Oxygen species are uniformly distributed along the coating cross-section. Phosphorus species tend to be enriched inwards to the coating/magnesium substrate interface, while aluminum piles up towards the surface region. Surface roughness of the PEO coating formed in the silicate-based electrolyte was the lowest in an arithmetic average height (Sa) of 0.76 μm. Electrochemical analysis indicated that the corrosion current density of the PEO coating decreased by about two orders of magnitude compared to that of untreated blank AZ31 substrate, while, at the same time, the open-circuit potential shifted significantly to the positive direction. The corrosion current density of the 10 min/400 V coating was 1.415 × 10⁻⁶ A/cm², approximately 17% lower than that of the 2 min/400 V coating (1.738 × 10⁻⁶ A/cm²). For a fixed 10 min treatment, the longer the PEO duration time, the lower the corrosion current density. Finally, the tested potentiodynamic polarization curve reveals the impact of different types of PEO electrolytes and different durations of PEO treatment on the corrosion resistance of the oxide coating surface. Full article

The report of the first room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductivity in copper-doped lead apatite Pb_10−xCu_x(PO₄)₆O has attracted lots of attention. However, subsequent studies revealed the presence of numerous impurity phases in the polycrystalline sample, and the sharp superconducting-like transition is not due to a superconducting transition but most likely due to a reduction in resistivity caused by the first-order structural phase transition of Cu₂S at around 385 K from the β phase at high temperature to the γ phase at low temperature. Before now, only bulk measurements have been performed on a Pb_10−xCu_x(PO₄)₆O powder sample, which could be affected by the impurity phases, masking the intrinsic properties of Pb_10−xCu_x(PO₄)₆O. In this study, ³¹P and ^63/65Cu nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements have been performed on a Pb_10−xCu_x(PO₄)₆O powder sample to investigate its physical properties from a microscopic point of view. Our NMR data evidence the non-magnetic insulating nature of Pb_10−xCu_x(PO₄)₆O without any trace of electron correlation effects. Furthermore, the ^63/65Cu NMR results suggest that no copper or very little copper is substituted for Pb in Pb₁₀(PO₄)₆O prepared by sintering Pb₂SO₅ and Cu₃P. Full article

Rubber Tree (Hevea brasiliensis) phenology critically influences tropical plantation productivity and carbon cycling, yet topography and climate impacts remain unclear. By integrating multi-sensor remote sensing (2001–2020) and Google Earth Engine, this study analyzed spatiotemporal dynamics in Hainan Island, China. Results reveal that both the start (SOS occurred between early and late March: day of year, DOY 60–81) and end (EOS occurred late January to early February: DOY 392–406, counted from the previous year) of the growing season exhibit progressive delays from the southeast to northwest, yielding a 10–11 month growing season length (LOS). Significantly, LOS extended by 4.9 days per decade (p < 0.01), despite no significant trends in SOS advancement (−1.1 days per decade) or EOS delay (+3.7 days per decade). Topographic modulation was evident: the SOS was delayed by 0.27 days per 100 m elevation rise (p < 0.01), while the EOS was delayed by 0.07 days per 1° slope increase (p < 0.01). Climatically, a 100 mm precipitation increase advanced SOS/EOS by approximately 1.0 day (p < 0.05), preseasonally, a 1 °C February temperature rise advanced the SOS and EOS by 0.49 and 0.53 days, respectively, and a 100 mm January precipitation increase accelerated EOS by 2.7 days (p < 0.01). These findings advance our mechanistic understanding of rubber phenological responses to climate and topographic gradients, providing actionable insights for sustainable plantation management and tropical forest ecosystem adaptation under changing climatic conditions. Full article

Apple mosaic disease (AMD) is a widespread viral disease affecting apple-growing regions around the world. Recent studies have identified a novel ilarvirus, apple necrotic mosaic virus (ApNMV), as the major causal agent of AMD in China. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying AMD pathogenesis and the global gene expression changes during mosaic symptom development remain largely unknown. In this study, we performed transcriptome analysis to investigate apple gene responses to AMD. A total of 815 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified in mosaic leaves compared to healthy controls, while 1050 DEGs were found between symptomless leaves (infected with ApNMV) and mosaic leaves. Functional enrichment analysis revealed that these DEGs were predominantly involved in carbohydrate metabolism, oxidation-reduction processes, secondary metabolite biosynthesis, and plant hormone signal transduction. Further biological assays demonstrated that the manifestation of mosaic symptoms in apple leaves was associated with reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation and downregulation of ROS-scavenging genes. Collectively, our findings provide new insights into the molecular basis of ApNMV-induced mosaic symptom development in apple and offer potential targets for the management of AMD. Full article

To address the issue of rockburst in deep return airways caused by thick, hard sandstone roofs in the Hulusu Coal Mine, this study proposes a deep borehole pressure relief technique based on hydraulic fracturing. The goal is to proactively weaken the hard roof structure and effectively mitigate rockburst hazards. The research integrates numerical modeling, theoretical analytics, and field application to systematically delve into the unstable mechanism of deep hard rock and determine the crack propagation patterns and optimal borehole parameters. Engineering validation was carried out at the 21,103 mining face. Results indicate that when the borehole inclination is 45°, the spacing is 15 m, the diameter is 65 mm, the borehole depth is 24 m over the coal pillar (CP) and 30 m on the operating face, the pressure relief effect is optimal. This configuration effectively forms a pressure relief zone in the roof, significantly reduces surrounding rock stress concentration, and enhances structural stability. Field monitoring shows that the roof energy is released stably through crack propagation, effectively reducing the risk of rockburst. The proposed technique provides theoretical and engineering support for rockburst prevention in deep hard rock mining conditions. Full article

This study proposed a selective leaching method to address the challenge of excessive iron (Fe) leaching during a sulfuric acid treatment of magnetite pellets, which complicates the subsequent extraction and precipitation of vanadium (V). The approach involved constant-pH sulfuric acid leaching of calcined and roasted vanadium–titanium (V–Ti) magnetite pellets to enhance V recovery while minimizing Fe dissolution. A comparison between constant-pH leaching and conventional heap leaching was conducted. The results showed that, under optimal leaching conditions, the V leaching rate remained largely unchanged, while the Fe leaching rate was significantly reduced compared with conventional heap leaching. Specifically, under optimal conditions—acid concentration of 2 mol/L, liquid–solid ratio of 1:3, temperature of 90 °C, and leaching time of 360 h—the V leaching rate reached 72.21%, while the Fe leaching rate remained as low as 0.91%. Additionally, the valence states of V and Fe in the pellets before and after leaching, as well as the main phase compositions during the leaching process, were analyzed. The results indicated that the primary phases in the calcined and roasted pellets remain unchanged before and after leaching, and most of the V and nearly all divalent Fe were effectively leached. Full article

We show that a $P{L}_{\infty }$-algebra V can be described by a nilpotent coderivation of degree $-1$ on coalgebra $P^{*}V$. Based on this result, we can generalise the result of Lada to show that every $A_{\infty }$-algebra carries a $P{L}_{\infty }$-algebra structure and every $P{L}_{\infty }$-algebra carries an $L_{\infty }$-algebra structure. In particular, we obtain a pre-Lie n-algebra structure on an arbitrary partially associative n-algebra and deduce that pre-Lie n-algebras are n-Lie admissible. Full article