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Currently, the seismic designs of reinforced concrete (RC) bridges with tall piers are often accomplished following the ductility-based seismic design method. Though the collapses of the RC bridges with tall piers can be avoided, they are likely to experience major damage and loss of functionality when subjected to strong near-fault ground motions. The objectives of this study are to put forward an innovative design concept of a tall-pier system and its application in tall-pier bridges. The concept of the innovative tall-pier system is derived from the principle of earthquake-resilient structures, and is to improve the seismic performances of the tall-pier bridges under strong near-fault ground motions. The proposed tall-pier system has a box section and is composed of four concrete-filled steel tubular (CFST) columns and energy dissipating mild steel plates (EDMSPs). Trial design of a bridge with the new composite tall-pier system is performed based on a typical continuous rigid frame highway bridge with conventional RC box section tall piers. Both static analysis and nonlinear time history analysis of both the bridges with the new composite tall piers and conventional RC tall piers under the near-fault velocity pulse-type ground motions were conducted in Midas Civil2019 and ABAQUS. The results show that: under the design-based earthquake (DBE), the CFST columns and connecting steel beams remain elastic in the bridge with the new composite tall piers, while the damage is found in the replaceable EDMSPs which help dissipate the seismic input energy. The displacement responses of the new bridge are significantly smaller than those of the conventional bridge under DBE. It is concluded that the bridge with the new composite tall piers is seismic resilient under near-fault ground motions.

Background Treatment of disorders of consciousness (DOC) remains a clinical challenge. Electroacupuncture (EA) was shown to have the potential to promote the recovery of consciousness. This trial aims to explore the therapeutic effects and mechanisms of EA in patients with DOC due to traumatic brain injury (TBI) through a multimodal approach. Methods A total of 50 adult patients with DOC due to TBI and 25 healthy subjects will be enrolled in the study. Patients enrolled in the study will be assigned to the EA group or the sham‐EA group through stratified randomization. All patients receive behavioral assessments (CRS‐R and brain–computer interface), neurophysiological evaluations (EEG, somatosensory evoked potentials, brainstem auditory evoked potentials), and neuroimaging evaluations (rs‐fMRI, amide proton transfer, intravoxel incoherent motion, neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging) before and after the 14‐day EA or sham‐EA treatment. Each healthy subject will receive a set of neurophysiological and neuroimaging examinations but no treatments. The practitioner administering EA and sham‐EA is the only one aware of the grouping results. In the sham‐EA group, sham‐acupoints, sham‐acupuncture, and sham‐wire are utilized. The primary outcome measurement is the change in CRS‐R score after 14 days of treatment compared with the baseline CRS‐R score. Discussion The AcuDoc trial will be the first randomized sham‐controlled study to investigate the clinical benefits of EA in patients with DOC. This trial will elucidate the role of EA in the treatment of DOC due to TBI and provide evidence of its therapeutic mechanisms. This randomized sham‐controlled trial aims to explore the therapeutic effects and mechanisms of electroacupuncture in patients with disorder of consciousness due to traumatic brain injury. It includes 50 patients and 25 healthy subjects. The primary outcome is the change in the CRS‐R score after 14 days of treatment.

As the central component in the complement system, complement component 3 (C3) plays essential roles in both the innate and adaptive immune responses. Here, a C3 gene (designated as pf-C3 ) was obtained from the pearl oyster Pinctada fucata by RT-PCR and rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE). The pf-C3 cDNA consists of 5,634 bp with an open reading frame (ORF) of 5,193 bp encoding a protein of 1,730 amino acids with a 19 residue signal peptide. The deduced pf-C3 protein possessed the characteristic structural features present in its homologs and contained the A2M_N_2, ANATO, A2M, A2M_comp, A2M_recep, and C345C domains, as well as the C3 convertase cleavage site, thioester motif, and conserved Cys, His, and Glu residues. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that pf-C3 is closely related to the C3s from other mollusks. Pf-C3 mRNA was expressed in all examined tissues including gill, digestive gland, adductor muscle, mantle and foot, while the highest expression was found in the digestive gland. Following the challenge with Vibrio alginolyticus , pf-C3 expression was significantly induced in hemocytes. Luciferase reporter assays indicated that pf-C3a could activate the NF- κ B signal pathway in HEK293T cells. Further knockdown of pf-C3 by specific siRNA could significantly reduce the phagocytosis of V. alginolyticus by hemocytes in vitro . These results would help increase understanding of the function of C3 in the invertebrate immune system and therefore provide new insights into the roles of the primitive complement system in invertebrates.

Field measurements of 42 in-service reinforced concrete bridges in coastal environments of Southeast China, covering a wide range of service year, span length, and concrete mixture, were carried out to investigate the chloride penetration. 323 sets of chloride measurement data were collected in total and then analysed to optimize the parameters involved in the common chloride diffusion model derived based on Fick’s second law. A modified chloride diffusion model was then proposed, taking into consideration a range of influencing factors including ambient temperature, relative humidity, stress state, carbon dioxide, chloride binding, and ageing. Verification of the modified model with field measurement data was performed. The sensitivity of the chloride diffusion to variations of each parameter was discussed in detail eventually.

Long-span cable-stayed bridges often have a design service life of more than a hundred years, during which they may experience multiple earthquake events and accumulate seismic damage if they are located in seismic-prone regions. Earthquake occurrence is discretely and randomly distributed over the life cycle of a long-span cable-stayed bridge and often causes sudden drops in the structural performance instead of yearly fixed seismic performance degradation. This study thus proposes a digital twin-based life-cycle seismic performance assessment method for long-span cable-stayed bridges. The major components of this method include: (1) a seismic hazard analysis-based generation method of earthquake occurrence sequence; (2) a digital twin-based structural response prediction method considering lifetime earthquake occurrence and sequence; and (3) a service life quantification method. The proposed method is applied to a scaled long-span cable-stayed bridge with a series of shake table tests. The results show that the digital twin can closely reproduce the life-cycle seismic response of the bridge under sequential earthquakes. The proposed assessment method provides a more intuitive presentation of the life-cycle seismic damage accumulation process and a more accurate estimation of the service life of a long-span cable-stayed bridge.

Tall‐pier bridges are commonly employed in mountainous or deep‐water regions. Ensuring the postearthquake serviceability is crucial for the seismic design of tall‐pier bridges. Buckling‐restrained braces (BRBs), serving as prevalent replaceable energy‐dissipating components, can effectively enhance the seismic performance of such bridges. For the seismic design of tall‐pier bridges, the objective is typically to minimize their structural responses under small to moderate earthquakes to maintain serviceability. Under rare or extremely rare earthquakes, efforts should be made to reduce seismic damage to the piers, thereby ensuring their postearthquake repairability. This study proposes a novel capacity‐adjustable BRB (CABRB) to improve the seismic performance of double‐column tall‐pier bridges. The mechanical behavior of the CABRB is initially investigated through experimental studies and numerical simulations. Building upon these, a representative tall‐pier bridge is selected as the research object. Comparative analyses of its seismic performance are conducted under three distinct pier configurations: prototype pier, BRB pier, and CABRB pier. The results indicate that the installation of CABRBs effectively reduces the displacement response at the pier top and the curvature response at the pier base, significantly enhancing the seismic performance of tall‐pier bridges.

Chronic kidney disease affects approximately 14.3% of people worldwide. Tubulointerstitial fibrosis is the final stage of almost all progressive CKD. To date, the pathogenesis of renal fibrosis remains unclear, and there is a lack of effective treatments, leading to renal replacement therapy. Mitophagy is a type of selective autophagy that has been recognized as an important way to remove dysfunctional mitochondria and abrogate the excessive accumulation of mitochondrial-derived reactive oxygen species (ROS) to balance the function of cells. However, the role of mitophagy and its regulation in renal fibrosis need further examination. In this study, we showed that mitophagy was induced in renal tubular epithelial cells in renal fibrosis. After silencing BNIP3, mitophagy was abolished in vivo and in vitro, indicating the important effect of the BNIP3-dependent pathway on mitophagy. Furthermore, in unilateral ureteral obstruction (UUO) models and hypoxic conditions, the production of mitochondrial ROS, mitochondrial damage, activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome, and the levels of αSMA and TGFβ1 increased significantly following BNIP3 gene deletion or silencing. Following silencing BNIP3 and pretreatment with mitoTEMPO or MCC950, the protein levels of αSMA and TGFβ1 decreased significantly in HK-2 cells under hypoxic conditions. These findings demonstrated that HIF1α-BNIP3-mediated mitophagy played a protective role against hypoxia-induced renal epithelial cell injury and renal fibrosis by reducing mitochondrial ROS and inhibiting activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used to handle many difficult tasks, such as image classification and malware detection, and achieve outstanding performance. However, recent studies on adversarial examples, which have maliciously undetectable perturbations added to their original samples that are indistinguishable by human eyes but mislead the machine learning approaches, show that machine learning models are vulnerable to security attacks. Though various adversarial retraining techniques have been developed in the past few years, none of them is scalable. In this paper, we propose a new iterative adversarial retraining approach to robustify the model and to reduce the effectiveness of adversarial inputs on DNN models. The proposed method retrains the model with both Gaussian noise augmentation and adversarial generation techniques for better generalization. Furthermore, the ensemble model is utilized during the testing phase in order to increase the robust test accuracy. The results from our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach increases the robustness of the DNN model against various adversarial attacks, specifically, fast gradient sign attack, Carlini and Wagner (C&W) attack, Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) attack, and DeepFool attack. To be precise, the robust classifier obtained by our proposed approach can maintain a performance accuracy of 99% on average on the standard test set. Moreover, we empirically evaluate the runtime of two of the most effective adversarial attacks, i.e., C&W attack and BIM attack, to find that the C&W attack can utilize GPU for faster adversarial example generation than the BIM attack can. For this reason, we further develop a parallel implementation of the proposed approach. This parallel implementation makes the proposed approach scalable for large datasets and complex models.

Halides are promising solid electrolytes due to their high ionic conductivity and high oxidation potential. Here we report a superionic chloride material, NaTaCl 6 , which exhibits a high ionic conductivity of 3.3 mS cm −1 at 27 °C, being two-orders of magnitude higher than that of NaNbCl 6 (0.01 mS cm −1 ). The considerably higher conductivity exhibited by NaTaCl 6 vs. NaNbCl 6 arises from the more facile rotational/reorientational dynamics of the [TaCl 6 ] polyanions in comparison to the [NbCl 6 ] anions. [TaCl 6 ] polyanion rotation is readily activated while [NbCl 6 ] polyanion reorientation is hindered at room temperature but can be turned on as the temperature increases or under prolonged mechanical milling. The higher degree of structural disorder exhibited by NaTaCl 6 compared to NaNbCl 6 —likely attributed to its greater mechanical and phonon softness—is found to contribute to the more pronounced [TaCl 6 ] anion rotation. Anion rotation is coupled with, and facilitates, macroscopic Na + -ion diffusion. As a result, enhanced rotational dynamics are directly correlated with the higher Na + -ion conductivity observed in NaTaCl 6 . The high ionic conductivity, combined with its electrochemical stability against positive electrode materials, enables good rate capability and long-term cycling performance in solid-state cells. These findings provide insights into ion transport mechanism in the newly emerging halide solid electrolytes. Advancing solid-state batteries relies on high performance solid electrolytes. Here, the authors report a family of superionic halides (e.g., NaTaCl 6 ) driven by the paddle-wheel mechanism, emphasizing the key role of anion dynamics in facilitating fast cation transport.