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The introduction of autonomous vehicles in underground mine trackless transportation systems can significantly reduce safety risks for personnel in production operations and improve transportation efficiency. Current autonomous mining vehicle technology is characterized by complex algorithms and high deployment costs, which limit its widespread application in underground mines. This paper proposes a light-band-guided autonomous driving method for trackless mining vehicles, where a continuous, digitally controllable light band is installed at the tunnel ceiling to provide uninterrupted vehicle guidance. The light band is controlled by an independent hardware system and uses different colors to indicate vehicle movement status, enabling vehicles to navigate simply by following the designated light trajectory. We designed the necessary hardware and software systems and built a physical model for validation. The system enabled multiple vehicles to be guided simultaneously within the same area to perform diverse transportation tasks according to operational requirements. The model vehicles maintained a safe distance from tunnel walls. In GPS-denied environments, positioning was achieved using dead reckoning and periodic location updates at designated points based on the known light-band trajectory. The proposed method demonstrates high potential for practical applications.

The pore structure is one of the most important properties of soil, which can directly affect the other properties such as water content, permeability and strength. It is of great significance to study the soil pore structure for agricultural cultivation, water and soil conservation and engineering construction. This paper investigates the 3D pore characterization of intact loess and four kinds of compacted loess (with different dry density) in northwest China. Micro scale computed tomography and mercury intrusion porosimetry tests were performed to get the porosity, specific surface area, pore size distribution, connected pores content and isolated pores content of different samples. Results show that the intact loess has more connected pores than the compacted loess, and the compacted loess whose dry density appears to be modelled well still have different pore structure with the intact loess. In addition, as the compactness increasing, the large pores (>13 μm) were firstly broken into medium pores (8~13 μm) and some small pores (<8 μm) until the pore structure was close to the natural structure of the intact loess, after that medium pores began to be broken into small pores.

To address the safety challenges for personnel in the complex and hazardous environments of offshore drilling platforms, this paper introduces the Platform Safety Detection YOLO (PSD-YOLO), an enhanced, real-time object detection framework based on YOLOv10s. The framework integrates several key innovations to improve detection robustness: first, the Channel Attention-Aware (CAA) mechanism is incorporated into the backbone network to effectively suppress complex background noise interference; second, a novel C2fCIB_Conv2Former module is designed in the neck to strengthen multi-scale feature fusion for small and occluded targets; finally, the Soft-NMS algorithm is employed in place of traditional NMS to significantly reduce missed detections in dense scenes. Experimental results on a custom offshore platform personnel dataset show that PSD-YOLO achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP@0.5) of 82.5% at an inference speed of 232.56 FPS. The efficient and accurate detection framework proposed in this study provides reliable technical support for automated safety monitoring systems, holds significant practical implications for reducing accident rates and safeguarding personnel by enabling real-time warnings of hazardous situations, fills a critical gap in intelligent sensor monitoring for offshore platforms and makes a significant contribution to advancing their safety monitoring systems.

The Loess Plateau accounts more than 6% of China's land area and 45% of Shaanxi Province. The land-creation project could double the city’s current area. However, the behavior of loess, and in particular inadequate compacted loess, can have significant implications on the safe and reliable operation of man-made infrastructure. The mechanical behavior and collapsibility of intact, in situ compacted and remolded loess in lab, which are widely recognized as fundamentally different materials, were associated with the microstructure. There is limited understanding of micro–macro-relationships in the three fine-grained loess. This study focuses on the microstructural changes and micro–macro-relationships of an intact, compacted and remolded loess from complex land-creation project. A comprehensive microstructural comparisons about PSDs, micrographs and quantitative evaluation for intact and remolded loess from an 80-m-high section of the sedimentary strata, and compacted loess from a highly filled exploratory well are presented and discussed in this paper. The results show that both the intact and compacted loess exhibit trimodal characteristics in their PSDs, while there are bimodal/unimodal characteristics of the PSD for the remolded loess. The compressibility and the specific surface area of the remolded loess are far less than those of the intact or compacted loess. This is further evidence the remolded loess is not suitable to study the collapsibility and compressibility instead of intact loess. However, compared with the intact loess, the compacted loess shows the same pore and particle flocculation structure characteristics for samples at higher density (> 1710 kg/m3 + 10 kg/m3). Under high-energy impact load, particles perform the breakdown, from round, coarse and disordered particles gradually to flaky, fine and ordered particles, which are different from traditional research results. The threshold value of dry density 1710 kg/m3 + 10 kg/m3 can be defined the boundary and micro–macro-relationships among intact, compacted and remolded loess. The results are of great importance to understand the microstructure characteristics and improve the engineering construction safety in loess areas.

An Integrated Energy System (IES) integrates electricity, heat, and natural gas, optimizing energy use and management efficiency. These systems connect to a Virtual Power Plant (VPP) for demand response dispatch in the electricity market. However, the impact of VPP load on the IES is often overlooked, which can limit the IES’s effective market participation and stability. To address this issue, this study introduces a two-layer collaborative model to coordinate VPP scheduling for multiple IES units, aiming to improve collaboration efficiency. The upper level involves the VPP setting electricity prices based on load conditions, guiding IES units to adjust their market strategies. At the lower level, the model encourages integration and optimization of different energy types within the IES through enhanced energy interactions. Additionally, the application of the Shapley value method ensures fair benefit distribution among all IES members. This approach supports equitable economic outcomes for all participants in the energy market. The model employs a multi-strategy improved Dung Beetle Optimizer (FSGDBO) combined with commercial solver techniques for efficient problem-solving. Experimental results demonstrate that the model significantly enhances the VPP’s peak-shaving and valley-filling capabilities while preserving the economic interests of the IES alliances, thereby boosting overall energy management effectiveness.

Several members of the tripartite motif-containing (TRIM) protein family have been reported to serve as vital regulators of tumorigenesis. Recent studies have demonstrated an oncogenic role of TRIM 14 in multiple human cancers; however, the importance of this protein in glioblastoma remains to be elucidated. The expression levels of TRIM14 were analyzed in a series of database and were examined in a variety of glioblastoma cell lines. Two independent TRIM14 shRNA were transfected into LN229 and U251 cells, and the effect of TRIM14 depletion was confirmed. Transwell assay and wound healing assay assay were carried out to assess the effect of TRIM14 depletion on glioblastoma cell invasion and migration. Western blotting was performed to screen the downstream gene of TRIM14. The stability analysis and Ubiquitylation assays and Orthotopic xenograft studies were also performed to investigate the role of TRIM14 and the relationship with downstream gene. Human glioblastoma tissues were obtained and immunohistochemical staining were carried out to confirm the clinical significance of TRIM14. In this study, we showed that TRIM14 was upregulated in human glioblastoma specimens and cell lines, and correlated with glioblastoma progression and shorter patient survival times. Functional experiments showed that decreased TRIM14 expression reduced glioblastoma cell invasion and migration. Furthermore, we identified that zinc finger E-box binding homeobox 2 (ZEB2), a transcription factor involved in epithelial-mesenchymal transition, is a downstream target of TRIM14. Further investigation revealed that TRIM14 inactivation significantly facilitated ZEB2 ubiquitination and proteasomal degradation, which led to aggressive invasion and migration. Our findings provide insight into the specific biological role of TRIM14 in tumor invasion. Our findings provide insight into the specific biological role of TRIM14 in tumor invasion, and suggest that targeting the TRIM14/ZEB2 axis might be a novel therapeutic approach for blocking glioblastoma.

With the development of human society, mega engineering projects of removing the tops of hills to infill valleys began to appear in the loess region. The thickness of the manual filling compacted loess can reach tens of meters. For such large-scale construction projects, studying the properties of compacted loess is essential to ensure the safety and reliability of land creation and artificial infrastructure. In this paper, the specimens from two exploration well profiles were carried out to study the physical properties of natural loess and compacted loess from the Loess Plateau. Here the natural loess selected was deposited in old ages (Q2 and Q1) and had strong stability. The natural water content, dry density, specific gravity, liquid limit, plastic limit, plasticity index, clay fraction, silt fraction, sand fraction, compression modulus, and permeability coefficient have been determined. Statistical theories such as t test and correlation coefficient checks were used to describe the difference between the two kinds of loess, and the degree of correlation among various indicators. Besides, 14 groups of exploration well data in 8 studies were collected. The variation of natural water content and dry density with well depth was analyzed to supplement the existing data. Results have shown that the manual filling compacted loess is significantly different from the natural loess. On the whole, the liquid limit, plastic limit, plasticity index, clay fraction, silt fraction, sand fraction and compression modulus of the compacted loess are smaller. In addition, compared with the natural sedimentary loess with strong stability, it deforms more easily. The difference of compression modulus between the compacted loess and natural loess is mainly controlled by the dry density and the particle composition. Moreover, the heterogeneous level of the manual filling compacted loess is greater than that of the natural loess in the horizontal direction and smaller than that of the natural loess in the vertical direction. Under a combination of external hydrologic conditions and dead weight, the compacted loess will become more stable.

Sea ice motion (SIM) plays a crucial role in setting the distribution of the ice cover in the Arctic. Limited by images’ spatial resolution and tracking algorithms, challenges exist in obtaining coastal sea ice motion (SIM) based on passive microwave satellite sensors. In this study, we developed a method based on random forest (RF) models to obtain Arctic SIM in winter by incorporating wind field and coastal geographic location information. These random forest models were trained using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) SIM data. Our results show good consistency with SIM data retrieved from satellite imagery and buoy observations. With respect to the SAR data, compared with SIM estimated with RF model training using reanalysis surface wind, the results by additional coastal information input had a lower root mean square error (RMSE) and a higher correlation coefficient by 31% and 14% relative improvement, respectively. The latter SIM result also showed a better performance for magnitude, especially within 100 km of the coastline in the north of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. In addition, the influence of coastline on SIM is quantified through variable importance calculation, at 22% and 28% importance of all RF variables for east and north SIM components, respectively. These results indicate the great potential of RF models for estimating SIM over the whole Arctic Ocean in winter.

Loess is widely distributed in northern China on the Loess Plateau, which is well known for its serious soil erosion and shortage of urban land. Undertaking filling construction under the conditions of an optimum water content is very difficult for so many mega-engineering projects in loess regions because of the (1) moisture loss that occurs over a certain transport distance, (2) water shortage, and (3) construction costs. Consequently, the inadequate compaction behaviors of such compacted loess without improvement may have significant effects on the safety and reliability of man-made structures. This study focuses on the compaction mechanism of large-scale and high-fill compacted soil under complex construction conditions by comparing intact loess with in-situ compacted loess from a microstructural perspective. The morphological characteristics of the particles and pores of (1) intact soil obtained from a typical 75-m high loess–paleosol section, and (2) compacted soil obtained from a 30-m-deep filling section are described. The main experimental comparisons between the intact soil and compacted soil are discussed with respect to the pore size distribution (PSD), microstructural micrographs, and characteristics of the particle/pore structure. The results showed that both the intact soil and compacted soil exhibited trimodal characteristics in their PSDs; hence, a new pore classification is presented to agree with the pore name. The compaction mechanism of compacted loess was mainly attributed to two aspects: one is the progressive and ordered transformation of different pore sizes, and the other is the gradual rearrangement of order and close cementation of particles under dynamic loading. The results of the present study are very useful for better understanding the properties of loess soil and improving engineering construction safety in loess areas.

On the Loess Plateau of China, the number of projects involving the excavation of mountains and the filling of valleys to create new land is rising. The loess excavated from the mountain is directly used as building material. After being filled into the valley and remolded, it serves as the foundation for overlying structures. However, significant differences in mechanical behavior exist between intact and remolded loess, leading to various issues such as differential settlement. Understanding the microstructure of loess is essential for improving our comprehension of its macro-level hydrological and mechanical behavior. Due to the inherent limitation of the conventional methods (e.g., scanning electron microscopy and mercury intrusion porosimetry) for microstructure investigation, an in-depth understanding of the three-dimensional (3D) microstructural differences between intact and remolded loess remains elusive. To address this gap, this study employs advanced X-ray micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) to investigate the 3D microstructure of both intact and remolded loess from two typical man-made new land creation projects. The three-dimensional microstructures are segmented into a series of cubes of varying dimensions to identify the structure’s representative volume element (RVE) and assess the uniformity of both loess types. The pore network of the RVE is quantitatively analyzed to characterize the microstructure. The results reveal significant disparities between the microstructure of intact and remolded loess, particularly in terms of uniformity, pore size distribution, and pore connectivity. Remolded loess exhibits a denser structure with poorer pore connectivity and greater heterogeneity compared to intact loess. These microstructural differences are attributed to the distinct formation processes of the two types of loess.