74 research outputs found
More microbial manipulation and plant defense than soil fertility for biochar in food production: A field experiment of replanted ginseng with different biochars
No full textThe role of biochar–microbe interaction in plant rhizosphere mediating soil-borne disease suppression has been poorly understood for plant health in field conditions. Chinese ginseng (Panax ginseng C. A. Meyer) is widely cultivated in Alfisols across Northeast China, being often stressed severely by pathogenic diseases. In this study, the topsoil of a continuously cropped ginseng farm was amended at 20 t ha(–1), respectively, with manure biochar (PB), wood biochar (WB), and maize residue biochar (MB) in comparison to conventional manure compost (MC). Post-amendment changes in edaphic properties of bulk topsoil and the rhizosphere, in root growth and quality, and disease incidence were examined with field observations and physicochemical, molecular, and biochemical assays. In the 3 years following the amendment, the increases over MC in root biomass were parallel to the overall fertility improvement, being greater with MB and WB than with PB. Differently, the survival rate of ginseng plants increased insignificantly with PB but significantly with WB (14%) and MB (21%), while ginseng root quality was unchanged with WB but improved with PB (32%) and MB (56%). For the rhizosphere at harvest following 3 years of growing, the total content of phenolic acids from root exudate decreased by 56, 35, and 45% with PB, WB, and MB, respectively, over MC. For the rhizosphere microbiome, total fungal and bacterial abundance both was unchanged under WB but significantly increased under MB (by 200 and 38%), respectively, over MC. At the phyla level, abundances of arbuscular mycorrhizal and Bryobacter as potentially beneficial microbes were elevated while those of Fusarium and Ilyonectria as potentially pathogenic microbes were reduced, with WB and MB over MC. Moreover, rhizosphere fungal network complexity was enhanced insignificantly under PB but significantly under WB moderately and MB greatly, over MC. Overall, maize biochar exerted a great impact rather on rhizosphere microbial community composition and networking of functional groups, particularly fungi, and thus plant defense than on soil fertility and root growth
Exploring the nature of soil organic matter from humic substances isolation to SOMics of molecular assemblage
No full textIn this review, the evolution of Soil Organic Matter(SOM) research was traced back to outline the
main achievement of understanding SOM in relation to its ecological functioning, particularly of carbon
sequestration against climate change. The short-coming of soil humus theory, knowledge of SOM protection and
stabilization, framework of newly emerged Humeomics as well as the increasingly active study of molecular
organics in soils were analyzed and discussed, highlighting the importance of re-visiting SOM in term of structureproperty-functions for the main mission of modern soil science. There were limitations of soil forming conditions,
fraction separation procedure and single molecule identification for understanding the huge complex humus of
larger sized synthesized molecules. Thanks to the ever-active studies of soil(organic) carbon sequestration and
stabilization focusing on the association status of SOM with soil components, SOM has been increasingly
recognized as an assemblage of metabolites from life activities on or in soil, with different allocation or protected in
mineral/organic complex phases, which could be traced by biomarker molecules. Using such biomarker molecules
as a target(like primer in molecular microbiology), all the molecules of SOM could be digested and isolated for
qualitative or quantitative identification with GC/MS high resolution technologies. Such development has emerged a
new paradigm of molecular SOM study, finally as SOMics as a modern soil science frontier. The functioning of
SOM for stabilizing soil structure, enhancing reactivity and promoting biological resistance could be correlated to
the paradigm of abundance, composition, structure and functions rather than the content and recalcitrance of SOM.
This may deserve urgent studies to quantify and parameterize the defined paradigm based on the molecular
composition of SOM. Again, such theory and technology development could provide a tool to manage SOM in
term of carbon sequestration but revalorizing bioactivity in ecosystems, especially in agroecosystems. We believe
such studies could rather depict the nature of SOM and of soil in relation to its ecological services and functioning,
which will be the focus of soil science in serving the sustainable development of human society
Stress potentiates decision biases: A stress induced deliberation-to-intuition (SIDI) model
No full textAbstractHumans often make decisions in stressful situations, for example when the stakes are high and the potential consequences severe, or when the clock is ticking and the task demand is overwhelming. In response, a whole train of biological responses to stress has evolved to allow organisms to make a fight-or-flight response. When under stress, fast and effortless heuristics may dominate over slow and demanding deliberation in making decisions under uncertainty. Here, I review evidence from behavioral studies and neuroimaging research on decision making under stress and propose that stress elicits a switch from an analytic reasoning system to intuitive processes, and predict that this switch is associated with diminished activity in the prefrontal executive control regions and exaggerated activity in subcortical reactive emotion brain areas. Previous studies have shown that when stressed, individuals tend to make more habitual responses than goal-directed choices, be less likely to adjust their initial judgment, and rely more on gut feelings in social situations. It is possible that stress influences the arbitration between the emotion responses in subcortical regions and deliberative processes in the prefrontal cortex, so that final decisions are based on unexamined innate responses. Future research may further test this ‘stress induced deliberation-to-intuition’ (SIDI) model and examine its underlying neural mechanisms
Biochar has no effect on soil respiration across Chinese agricultural soils
No full textThis work was supported by NSFC (41371298 and 41371300), Ministry of Science and Technology (2013GB23600666 and 2013BAD11B00), and Ministry of Education of China (20120097130003). The international cooperation was funded under a “111” project by the State Agency of Foreign Expert Affairs of China and jointly supported under a grant for Priority Disciplines in Higher Education by the Department of Education, Jiangsu Province, China; The work was also a contribution to the cooperation project of “Estimates of Future Agricultural GHG Emissions and Mitigation in China” under the UK-China Sustainable Agriculture Innovation Network (SAIN). Pete Smith contributed to this work under a UK BBSRC China Partnership Award. The authors are grateful to Yuming Liu, Bin Zhang, Xiao Li, Gang Wu, Jinjin Qu and Yinxin Ye and Dongqi Liu for their contribution to field experiments, and to Rongjun Bian and Qaiser Hussain for their participation in discussions of the data analysis and interpretation, and to Xinyan Yu and Jiafang Wang for their assistance in lab works.Peer reviewe
Research on Lowering Actuating Pressure of Injection Wells of Ultra-Low Permeable Reservoirs
No full textAbstractWith the improving skills of oil exploration and exploitation, the proportion of the production of ultra-low permeable reservoirs is increasing. But the developing process has encountered many problems, such as poor reservoir properties, high injection actuating pressure, etc. Aimed at lowering the injection actuating pressure of ultra-low permeable oilfield, author has finished the indoor gradient test of actuating pressure, selected and evaluated a system of surface acting agent which later applied in the X oilfield as well. The results show that the gradient actuating pressure of Z reservoir in X oilfield ranges between 0.0308MPa/cm to 0.2215MPa/cm. And because the SAA system could largely reduce the surface tension between fluid and rock, the injection actuating pressure then can be reduced by 40%-50%. And its application efficiency was 75%. As a result, it is feasible to use SAA to lower the injection actuating pressure of ultra-low permeable reservoirs
Research on slide-film damping effect to achieve a high-performance resonant pressure senor
No full textPedestrian trajectory prediction via physical-guided position association learning
No full textPedestrian trajectory prediction possesses huge application value in automatic driving, robots, and video surveillance. Due to the complexity of the environment and the uncertainty of pedestrians, predicting pedestrian trajectories is a challenging task. Previous studies simply employ the LSTM or transformer structure to construct the deep model, which hardly adequately mines the dependency relationship among different pedestrian positions from different views. In addition, directly employing the deep model to output the prediction results is easy to be disturbed by the external factor. To this end, we propose the Physical-guided Position Association Learning (PPAL) method to adequately explore the inter-position dependency relationship with the guidance of the physical motion rule. Specifically, to build the long/short-distance relationship, we develop the position association learning module (PAL) to deeply correlate different position coordinates by utilizing the advantages of the LSTM and transformer structure, which could stimulate the deep model to better perceive the pedestrian intention. In addition, the future motion trajectory has a strong correlation with the previous position and speed. Its physical motion rules provide much prior knowledge and increase the reasonability of trajectory predictions. Hence, we design the physical position modeling (PPM) to utilize the motion rule for trajectory prediction. Finally, we integrate PAL and PPM into a framework to deeply learn the inter-position dependency relationship. Abundant experiments on three mainstream databases demonstrate that the proposed PPAL significantly improves the prediction performance and surpasses other advanced methods. A large number of quantitative analyses show that the predicted trajectory is very close to the real trajectories, indicating that the proposed method has a better forecasting ability
Model Predictive Control-Assisted Energy Management Strategy for Hybrid Mining Dump Trucks Based on Speed and Slope Prediction
No full textThis article proposes an innovative energy management strategy for hybrid multi-source dump trucks operating under real slope conditions in mining areas. Although previous studies have addressed the energy management issues of hybrid vehicles, few studies have taken into account complex environmental factors such as slopes under actual working conditions. The article overcomes this limitation by integrating a radial basis function (RBF) neural network to directly and accurately predict future vehicle demand power, thereby optimizing the DP-MPC strategy and improving energy efficiency. The results indicate that, compared with the traditional MPC strategy, the proposed strategy reduces fuel consumption by 3.34% and engine start-stop events by 76.2%. Additionally, when compared with another strategy that uses historical data to predict future speed and slope, calculates the vehicle’s future power demand, and incorporates it into the DP-MPC algorithm, the proposed strategy achieves comparable fuel consumption while also reducing engine start-stop events by 69.7%. Notably, the average calculation time for each step is 43.85 ms, which is substantially less than the sampling time of 1 s. To further confirm the real-time performance of the strategy, a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test is conducted
Self-healing and corrosion-sensing coatings based on pH-sensitive MOF-capped microcontainers for intelligent corrosion control
No full textOrganic coatings are one of the most used and versatile technologies to mitigate corrosion of metals. However, organic coatings are susceptible to defects and damages that may not be easily detected. If not repaired timely, these defects may develop into major coating failures due to corrosion occurring in the damaged region, thereby limiting the lifetime of the to be protected structure. Thus, the development of smart coatings that can accurately identify corrosion location and reliably recover the damage autonomously is of particular interest. Herein, we reported a robust, corrosion-sensing and self-healing coating which incorporated pH-sensitive ZIF-8-capped CaCO3 microcontainers containing the healing agent tung oil (TO) and the corrosion indicator/inhibitor 1,10-phenanthrolin-5-amine (APhen). The spontaneous leakage of incorporated TO and APhen was restrained, and the release initiated when local pH variation occurred. The corrosion protection performance of the coatings implanted with different contents of smart microcontainers were evaluated. The intact epoxy coating containing 7.5 wt% of the microcontainers exhibited the best protection performance with low water absorption (0.65 wt%), low O2 permeability (0.21 × 10–15 cm3 cm cm−2 s−1 Pa−1), and a high storage modulus (3.0 GPa). Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements in 3.5 wt% NaCl solution demonstrated superior durability of the composite coating after self-healing. The immersion test and neutral salt spray test confirmed the coating can accurately report corrosion sites via coloration.</p
Regional grey and white matter changes in heavy male smokers.
No full textCigarette smoking is highly prevalent in the general population but the effects of chronic smoking on brain structures are still unclear. Previous studies have found mixed results regarding regional grey matter abnormalities in smokers. To characterize both grey and white matter changes in heavy male smokers, we investigated 16 heavy smokers and 16 matched healthy controls, using both univariate voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and multivariate pattern classification analysis. Compared with controls, heavy smokers exhibited smaller grey matter volume in cerebellum, as well as larger white matter volume in putamen, anterior and middle cingulate cortex. Further, the spatial patterns of grey matter or white matter both discriminated smokers from controls in these regions as well as in other brain regions. Our findings demonstrated volume abnormalities not only in the grey matter but also in the white matter in heavy male smokers. The multivariate analysis suggests that chronic smoking may be associated with volume alternations in broader brain regions than those identified in VBM analysis. These results may better our understanding of the neurobiological consequence of smoking and inform smoking treatment
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