Search Results (2,876)

Based on urban subway foundation pit projects in typical limestone areas, this paper employs 3DEC numerical simulation to investigate the effects of the thickness and burial depth of weak interlayers on the deformation characteristics and stability of the dip slope and anti-dip sides of rock foundation pits. The results reveal asymmetric deformation responses between the two slope types. The anti-dip side undergoes bending and toppling deformation; the displacement within the weak interlayer is greater than that of the overlying rock mass, and the spatial position of the weak interlayer governs the maximum deformation of the anti-dip side. In comparison, the thickness and burial depth of the weak interlayer exert a significant influence on the horizontal displacement of the dip slope side. Two quantitative critical thresholds are identified: (1) an interlayer thickness threshold—when t ≥ 4 m, the extrusion displacement of the weak interlayer is distinctly larger than that of the adjacent hard rock, while t ≤ 3 m shows no obvious displacement difference due to the clamping effect of surrounding rock—and (2) a burial depth threshold—slope displacement rises sharply when interlayer burial depth reaches 22.66~26.15 m, while shallow-buried interlayers (12.20~19.18 m) only cause limited deformation. Additionally, the existence of weak interlayers leads to substantially larger displacement in the upper hard rock stratum relative to the lower stratum. These findings provide a reliable reference for the supporting optimization and stability design of rock foundation pits. Full article

Soil moisture content (SMC) is critical for crop growth and precision irrigation. Multi-angular remote sensing can capture directional reflectance variations that may provide additional information related to crop water status. However, the potential of hotspot-sensitive multi-angular observations for root-zone SMC estimation remains insufficiently explored, particularly in winter wheat. This study evaluated the potential of hotspot-sensitive multi-angular observations for root-zone SMC estimation using UAV observations and the LESS (LargE-Scale remote sensing data and image Simulation framework) radiative transfer model. Multispectral imagery of winter wheat was acquired under four irrigation treatments (T1–T4). The LESS model was parameterized using field-measured canopy characteristics to simulate bidirectional reflectance factors (BRFs) across the observation hemisphere. The simulated and observed datasets were used to analyze hotspot dynamics and evaluate the contribution of hotspot-sensitive observations to SMC estimation. Among the investigated bands, hotspot characteristics at 560 nm exhibited the strongest response to water stress. LESS-simulated BRFs showed greater angular variability (CV ≈ 0.30) than UAV-observed BRFs (CV ≈ 0.18). The highest SMC estimation performance was obtained in hotspot-sensitive backscattering directions, with an R² ≈ 0.60 and an RMSE ≈ 0.022 m³ m⁻³. These findings indicate that hotspot-sensitive multi-angular observations provide useful complementary information for SMC estimation. Full article

This study aimed to develop and evaluate a deep learning diagnostic model integrating a convolutional autoencoder (CAE) and ResNet18 for the early and accurate diagnosis of developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) in children, addressing the subjectivity of traditional methods. This study began with the construction of a CAE network. By introducing a multi-layer compression structure and a Dropout layer, the network was forced to learn the low-dimensional and robust feature representations of the input X-ray images (frog-leg lateral view). The CAE was used to reconstruct the input images and generate enhanced images that highlight abnormal regions. Subsequently, the original and enhanced images were concatenated along the channel dimension to form an information-rich enhanced input. Finally, the pretrained ResNet18 was adopted as the backbone classification network, and its input layer was modified to adapt to multi-channel input to conduct training and classification for the stitched images. Compared to those achieved by the four benchmark models (ResNet18, DarkNet19, AlexNet, and MobileNetV2), the CAE-ResNet18 model achieves excellent performance on the test set. The accuracy, recall rate, and F1-score of the Normal class are 0.9890, 1.0000, and 0.9945, respectively. The accuracy, recall rate, and F1-score of the DDH class were 1.0000, 0.9912, and 0.9956, respectively. Visual analysis shows that the t-SNE visualization of the fully connected layer feature of this model presents a more obvious inter-class separation. The CAE-ResNet18 model effectively leverages both original image information and abnormal features, significantly improving the accuracy and reliability of DDH diagnosis. It provides a potential intelligent tool for clinical auxiliary diagnosis, which may enhance patient prognosis. Full article

A common engineering challenge is that a single sound-absorbing material cannot adequately cover the full frequency range in broadband noise control of commercial vehicle cabs; with the aim of addressing this challenge, this study employs a synergistic noise reduction method integrating hybrid finite element–statistical energy analysis (FE–SEA) with foam mixture design. A hybrid FE–SEA cab model is first established, and panel contribution analysis is used to identify key radiating areas such as the floor and rear panel, as well as their corresponding energy-concentrated frequency bands. High- and low-flow-resistance polyurethane foams and melamine foam are selected as base materials. A simplex-centroid mixture design is adopted to construct a Scheffé regression model using the average noise reduction contribution in frequency bands as the response, and Derringer–Suich multi-response optimization is applied to obtain the optimal proportions. Full-vehicle simulation results show that the optimized formulation achieves noise reduction contributions of 13.87, 16.42, and 10.84 dB in the 200–500 Hz, 800–1600 Hz, and 2000–3150 Hz bands, respectively, without evident weak-band performance, reducing the overall SPL to 68.25 dB(A). The proposed method establishes a bidirectional linkage between vehicle acoustic response and material formulation, providing a reproducible framework for the forward design and broadband acoustic optimization of commercial vehicle acoustic packages. Full article

Background/Objectives: Nasopharyngeal cancer generally has a good survival rate with chemoradiotherapy, but a significant side effect is irreversible hearing loss, for which there is currently no preventive intervention. Given that dexamethasone (Dex) and D-methionine (dMet) have individually shown potential to prevent hearing loss in in vitro and animal studies, we hypothesized that combining Dex and dMet may offer greater protection against cytotoxicity induced by cisplatin and radiation treatments. Methods: Organ-of-Corti-derived OC-k3 cells exposed to cisplatin and/or radiation were used as an in vitro model of treatment-induced cytotoxicity to investigate the protective mechanisms of Dex and dMet. Results: Dex was associated with reduced apoptosis, accompanied by decreased p53 phosphorylation and increased Bcl-XL expression. Dex also reduced COX2 expression and showed trends toward attenuation of ERK1/2 and NFκB signaling. Conversely, dMet effectively blocked cisplatin-induced apoptosis but did not protect against radiation-induced cytotoxicity. Conclusions: The combination of Dex and dMet provided greater protection against cisplatin- and radiation-induced cytotoxicity in the OC-k3 cells than either agent alone. These findings support further investigation of combined Dex and dMet as a potential strategy to mitigate treatment-induced ototoxicity. Full article

Rutin is a flavonoid glycoside with well-documented antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities in preclinical models, but its oral bioavailability is poor due to extensive presystemic metabolism. Following oral administration, intact rutin reaches the colon largely unabsorbed, where gut microbiota convert it to quercetin aglycone, which is further metabolized to circulating conjugated metabolites and local phenolic acid derivatives. Accumulating evidence, derived predominantly from preclinical studies, suggests this metabolic activation can be usefully conceptualized as a microbiota-activated prodrug system. This challenges conventional formulation strategies that only increase parent compound exposure. In this review, we propose a metabolism-oriented conceptual framework for oral rutin delivery design. We compare nano-delivery systems and structural modifications strategies across pharmacokinetics, metabolic regulation, safety, manufacturability, and translational feasibility. Nano-delivery systems are functionally reclassified into four absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion (ADME) -oriented categories based on their primary pharmacokinetic objectives. While numerous preclinical studies report improved bioavailability and efficacy, human metabolite-resolved pharmacokinetic data remain extremely limited, and no European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) -authorized health claims exist for rutin. This review provides a new conceptual framework for selecting oral rutin delivery strategies based on metabolic objectives rather than solely on improving solubility or systemic exposure. Full article

Background: Influenza-associated encephalopathy, encephalitis, and acute necrotizing encephalopathy (ANE) are rare but potentially life-threatening neurological complications of influenza. Adult cases remain poorly characterized because the available literature is largely limited to isolated case reports and small case series. Methods: A PRISMA-guided scoping review of the MEDLINE database was conducted through 31 May 2026. Published adult cases of influenza-associated encephalopathy, encephalitis, and ANE were identified and analyzed for demographic characteristics, clinical presentation, neuroimaging findings, treatment, and outcomes. Results: Eighty-three adult cases reported between 1958 and 2026 were included. The mean age was 45.6 ± 17.8 years, and 57.8% were male. Two-thirds did not have any underlying comorbidities. Neurological symptoms developed a mean of 4.6 days after influenza onset, with influenza A accounting for 80.7% of infections. Fever (91.6%), altered mental status (86.7%), and seizures (36.1%) were the most common manifestations. Encephalitis was the predominant presentation (44.5%), followed by encephalopathy (31.3%) and ANE (24.1%). MRI most frequently demonstrated cerebral hemispheric lesions (53.0%) and bilateral thalamic involvement (36.4%), while EEG abnormalities were reported in 69.6% of patients. Overall mortality was 22.9%, highest among patients with ANE (45.0%). Among survivors, 28.9% experienced persistent neurological sequelae. Conclusions: Influenza-associated encephalopathy, encephalitis, and ANE are rare in adults but are associated with substantial morbidity and mortality. This review represents the largest adult cohort reported to date and provides important insights into the clinical spectrum, neurodiagnostic findings, and outcomes of these uncommon complications. This review highlights significant gaps in knowledge and the need for collaborative multicenter studies to improve the diagnosis, treatment, and outcome of these severe complications of influenza infection. Full article

Against accelerating urban expansion, climate risks, and green transition, fortifying urban ecological resilience (UER) has become central to global urban sustainability. However, there is as yet no systematic evidence to suggest how the National Innovative City Pilot Policy (NICPP) promotes green technology innovation (GTI) and strengthens UER. To address this gap, this paper builds upon the traditional resistance–adaptability–resilience (RAR) paradigm and its extension, the driving force–resistance–adaptability–resilience (DRAR) framework to formulate a comprehensive driving force–pressure–resistance–adaptability–resilience (DPRAR) assessment system. Moreover, this paper investigates a dataset of 271 cities in China spanning the period from 2006 to 2023. By treating the NICPP as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper integrates an entropy balancing technique into a staggered difference–in–differences (DID) model to identify its effect on UER. The results are outlined below. (1) From 2006 to 2023, UER across Chinese municipalities generally increased, though spatial imbalances persisted. (2) The NICPP enhanced urban UER, with effects characterized by time-lagged and cumulative patterns. (3) Both the quantity and quality structure of urban GTI served as channels through which the NICPP affected UER. (4) The NICPP effects are strongest in the central region, followed by those in the western and eastern regions, as well as in resource-dependent cities and cities with stricter environmental regulation. This research provides novel empirical perspectives linking innovation-driven development, GTI, and UER, with implications for NICPP optimization and UER enhancement in China. Full article

Conventional Pancharatnam–Berry (PB) phase metasurfaces operate within the two-dimensional SU(2) polarization space of the electric field, fundamentally limiting holographic multiplexing to two independent channels. Here, we propose and numerically demonstrate a four-channel holographic metasurface exploiting the recently discovered Riemann–Silberstein (RS) geometric phase arising from SU(4) polarization evolution in the full electromagnetic field space. The RS vector Ψ = E + icB unifies electric and magnetic fields into a four-dimensional polarization state space. By engineering bianisotropic Huygens meta-atoms with independently controllable electric-dipole orientation angle α and magnetic-dipole orientation angle ψ, four geometric-phase channels—labeled by the joint spin eigenstates |σ,κ⟩∈{|+,+⟩,|+,−⟩,|−,+⟩,|−,−⟩}—are simultaneously addressed from a single aperture. We develop the complete SU(4) transfer-matrix formalism and optimize four quasi-independent phase profiles using an extended Gerchberg–Saxton algorithm with a three-parameter (α,ψ,h) design library, where the pillar height h serves as a third degree of freedom to overcome the linear phase constraint inherent to the two-angle parameterization. Numerical simulations at 0.8 THz demonstrate simultaneous projection of four independent holographic images with mean diffraction efficiency 60.4% and inter-channel crosstalk below 3.2%, doubling the information capacity of conventional dual-channel PB holograms. An intrinsic ~24× common-mode noise suppression arising from electromagnetic duality symmetry is also demonstrated. This work establishes a direct link between fundamental electromagnetic symmetry and high-capacity wavefront engineering. Full article

Efficient coordination between harvesters and grain trucks is essential for reducing operating cost, machinery waiting time, unnecessary travel, and carbon emissions in large-scale harvesting operations. This study develops a multi-objective cooperative scheduling framework for harvesters and grain trucks, with the objectives of minimizing total operating cost and total carbon emissions. The model integrates field operation sequencing, harvester assignment, harvester–truck service matching, machinery capacity constraints, waiting cost, and weather-dependent operational efficiency. To solve the resulting discrete and nonlinear scheduling problem, an artificial lemming algorithm with adaptive behavior selection and neighborhood cooperation (ALA-AN) is proposed. The algorithm uses a three-layer encoding structure to represent field sequences, harvester assignments, and grain truck service relationships and incorporates adaptive search, neighborhood cooperation, fast non-dominated sorting, and crowding-distance-based selection to improve Pareto-front quality. Computational experiments were conducted using real farm data and scheduling instances of different scales. The results show that the ALA-AN achieves better Pareto-front performance than the benchmark algorithms in terms of convergence, diversity, operating cost, and carbon emissions, with more evident advantages in medium- and large-scale scenarios. In the retrospective case-based comparison using Jianbian Farm records, the ALA-AN-based scheduling scheme reduced the estimated total operating cost by 5.85% and estimated total carbon emissions by 3.07% compared with the experience-based scheduling scheme. These results indicate that the proposed framework can support cost-effective and low-carbon decision making for cooperative agricultural machinery scheduling. Full article

The exterior frame of super-high-rise steel structures with inclined columns and dense beams contains numerous welded joints and complex constraints, making field welding prone to residual stress and cumulative displacement. Taking the 19th erection segment of the Tianjin China Overseas City Plaza main tower as an example, this study monitored welding-induced stress and column-top displacement using vibrating-wire strain gauges and BeiDou GNSS, and established a finite element model based on the equivalent indirect action method to evaluate different welding sequences. The results show that stresses near welds evolve in stages during lower-flange, web, and upper-flange welding. Adjacent welding causes limited disturbance after the completed joint has stabilized, whereas lower-layer welding can induce secondary shrinkage in upper-layer welded regions. The simulated residual stresses and column-top offsets show reasonable agreement with the monitoring results in terms of overall magnitude and distribution trend, with mean values 2.50% and 6.22% lower than the measurements, respectively. Welding sequence significantly influences deformation. Horizontal grouped skip welding improves construction efficiency by about 30%, and vertical reverse welding further reduces the mean column-top offset by 53.31% and controls the maximum column-top offset within the project-specific limit. Therefore, under the studied structural configuration and construction conditions, the combined sequence of horizontal grouped skip welding and vertical reverse welding is recommended as a practical welding-sequence scheme. Full article

To screen the high-quality germplasm resources of vegetable fennel (Foeniculum vulgare Mill.), 133 fennel accessions were systematically evaluated. Eleven agronomic traits were comprehensively analyzed using variation analysis, correlation analysis, principal component analysis (PCA), gray relational analysis (GRA), and cluster analysis. Results revealed that the coefficient of variation among accessions (CV_among) for quantitative traits ranged from 27.40% to 72.93%. The largest variation was observed in plant weight, indicating substantial potential for genetic improvement in this trait. Highly significant or extremely significant correlations were detected among most traits, especially between the leaf length and plant weight. PCA extracted the first six principal components. Their cumulative contribution rate reached 83.536%. The stem diameter, leaf length, leaf width and plant weight were the main traits that deserved attention. Based on comprehensive evaluation and weighted gray relational ranking, seven germplasm accessions consistently ranked within the top ten, showing higher composite scores under the conditions of this trial. Cluster analysis categorized all fennel accessions into four groups, among which Group IV exhibited the highest yield potential. Groups I and II, meanwhile, comprised individuals characterized by smaller plant size and distinct leaf morphology. These findings provide a preliminary methodological reference for the multivariate evaluation of vegetable fennel germplasm, and serve as a data basis for subsequent multi-environment trials and molecular marker-assisted selection. Full article

Freeze–thaw (F/T) processes play a critical role in the regulation of soil hydrothermal dynamics, land–atmosphere energy exchange, and ecosystem functioning. The spaceborne global navigation satellite system reflectometry (GNSS-R) has shown great potential for land surface F/T state detection; however, its monitoring capability remains limited by spatial resolution, revisit interval, observation coverage, and complex land surface conditions. In this study, Tianmu-1 (TM-1) multi-GNSS-R observations were used to detect daily land surface F/T states over the mid-to-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. First, surface reflectivity observations from multi-GNSS, including the Global Positioning System (GPS), BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), Galileo, and GLONASS, were fused using a weighted averaging method based on the number of specular reflection points. Then, TM-1 multi-GNSS-R reflectivity was used as the primary remote-sensing input, while vegetation water content (VWC), surface roughness, and snow cover information were introduced as auxiliary environmental variables. The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) F/T product was used to provide supervised reference labels for developing Bayesian-optimized extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) models for F/T state classification. Evaluation against SMAP F/T reference labels showed that the multi-GNSS fusion model achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.853 and an overall accuracy of 77.3% without incorporating snow cover information, outperforming the single-GNSS models. After incorporating snow cover information, the AUC increased to 0.959, and the overall accuracy reached 89.3%. Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) analysis further showed that snow cover made the largest contribution to the final model output, suggesting that its improvement effect may reflect both physical snow-related surface information and seasonal contextual information. An independent point-based comparison with in situ observations from the international soil moisture network (ISMN) showed that the TM-1 F/T classification accuracy reached 85.2% after incorporating snow cover information, which was comparable to that of the SMAP product. These results demonstrate that TM-1 multi-GNSS-R observations have promising potential for detecting land surface F/T states during the autumn–winter freezing development period, and that integrating multi-GNSS-R reflectivity with snow cover information can substantially improve classification performance and spatial consistency within the available observation period. Full article

A Orhan Pamuk’s first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons (Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları), published in 1982, follows three generations of an Istanbul bourgeois family from the late Ottoman period to the 1970s. Set during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey, the novel explores the social and cultural tensions accompanying Turkish modernization. This article examines father–child relationships in the novel through the theoretical framework of multiple modernities. Rejecting the assumption that modernization follows a singular Western model, the study approaches Turkish modernization as a historically specific and layered experience shaped by local social and cultural dynamics. Within this context, the article focuses on paternal authority, masculine identity, intergenerational expectation, and memory across three generations of the family. The study further analyzes how photographs, domestic spaces, rituals, and everyday narratives preserve the symbolic presence of the father after death, allowing paternal authority to persist across generations. The article argues that the novel presents a representative portrait of an Istanbul bourgeois family negotiating the tensions between tradition and modernity during the Ottoman–Republican transition. Full article