ENSO and greenhouse warming

Cai, Wenju,Santoso, Agus,Wang, Guojian,Yeh, Sang-Wook,An, Soon-Il,Cobb, Kim M.,Collins, Mat,Guilyardi, Eric,Jin, Fei-Fei,Kug, Jong-Seong,Lengaigne, Matthieu,McPhaden, Michael J.,Takahashi, Ken,Timmerm Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan P 2015 Nature climate change Vol.5 No.9

The El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the dominant climate phenomenon affecting extreme weather conditions worldwide. Its response to greenhouse warming has challenged scientists for decades, despite model agreement on projected changes in mean state. Recent studies have provided new insights into the elusive links between changes in ENSO and in the mean state of the Pacific climate. The projected slow-down in Walker circulation is expected to weaken equatorial Pacific Ocean currents, boosting the occurrences of eastward-propagating warm surface anomalies that characterize observed extreme El Niño events. Accelerated equatorial Pacific warming, particularly in the east, is expected to induce extreme rainfall in the eastern equatorial Pacific and extreme equatorward swings of the Pacific convergence zones, both of which are features of extreme El Niño. The frequency of extreme La Niña is also expected to increase in response to more extreme El Niños, an accelerated maritime continent warming and surface-intensified ocean warming. ENSO-related catastrophic weather events are thus likely to occur more frequently with unabated greenhouse-gas emissions. But model biases and recent observed strengthening of the Walker circulation highlight the need for further testing as new models, observations and insights become available.

Kinetics of Transesterification of 1,4-Butanediol With Methyl Acetate by the Ion-exchange Resin

Fei Shi,Guo Bing Li,Hong Liang Sun,Wang Feng Cai 대한화학회 2017 Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society Vol.38 No.3

The dihydric alcohol transesterification of 1,4-butanediol with methyl acetate catalyzed by the ion-exchange resin is researched. The chemical system involves two transesterification reactions in series, with 1,4-butanediol monoacetate as an intermediate product. The effects of the catalyst type, catalyst size, catalyst loading, stirrer speed, the initial reactant ratio, and the reactive temperature have been meticulously studied. The results show that this consecutive transesterification is exothermic and the experimental values of reaction enthalpy are −8.50 and −6.85 kJ/mol, which are in good agreement with the values computed from the standard formation enthalpy. Three kinetic models (PH, LH, and ER) are applied to correlate the experimental data, of which ER model gives the best result with the lowest mean relative error. The activation energies are calculated to be 38.53 and 51.06 kJ/mol by ER model, demonstrating that the overall reaction rates are controlled by the reaction on the catalyst surface.

Compound K Suppresses Ultraviolet Radiation-induced Apoptosis by Inducing DNA Repair in Human Keratinocytes

Cai, Bao-Xiang,Luo, Dan,Lin, Xiang-Fei,Gao, Jie 대한약학회 2008 Archives of Pharmacal Research Vol.31 No.11

Ultraviolet (UV)-induced DNA damage is a crucial molecular trigger for sunburn cell formation and skin cancer. Nucleotide excision repair (NER) is the main mechanism in repairing UVB-induced DNA damage of mammalian cells. The purpose of this study is to investigate the functional role of ginsenoside compound K on HaCaT cells (a keratinocyte-derived permanent cell line) irradiated by UV. Hoechst 33258 staining were performed in analyzing UV-induced apoptosis on keratinocytes which were treated with compound K. ImmunoDotBlot assay was used in detecting cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers, the main DNA damage. Western blot analysis was applied for analyzing XPC and ERCC1, two of the NER proteins. Compound K inhibited UV-induced apoptosis of keratinocytes and caused a notable reduction in UV-specific DNA lesions which was due to induction of DNA repair. In agreement with this, compound K induced the expression of particular components of the NER complex, such as XPC and ERCC1. Our results demonstrate that compound K can protect cells from apoptosis induced by UV radiation by inducing DNA repair.

Robust estimation with a modified Huber’s loss for partial functional linear models based on splines

Cai Xiong,Xue Liugen,Lu Fei 한국통계학회 2020 Journal of the Korean Statistical Society Vol.49 No.4

In this article, we consider a new robust estimation procedure for the partial functional linear model (PFLM) with the slope function approximated by spline basis functions. This robust estimation procedure applies a modifed Huber’s function with tail function replaced by the exponential squared loss (ESL) to achieve robustness against outliers. A data-driven procedure is presented for selecting the tuning parameters of the new estimation method, which enables us to reach better robustness and efciency than other methods in the presence of outliers or non-normal errors. We construct robust estimators of both parametric coefcients and function coefcient in the PFLM. Moreover, some asymptotic properties of the resulting estimators are established. The fnite sample performance of our proposed method is studied through simulations and illustrated with a data example.

Inferring Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms in MicroRNA Binding Sites of Lung Cancer-related Inflammatory Genes

He, Fei,Zheng, Ling-Ling,Luo, Wen-Ting,Yang, Rong,Xu, Xiao-Qin,Cai, Lin Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention 2014 Asian Pacific journal of cancer prevention Vol.15 No.8

Single nucleotide polymorphisms located at microRNA (miRNA)-binding sites are likely to affect the expression of miRNA targets and may contribute to the susceptibility of humans to common diseases. Here 335 candidate lung cancer-related inflammatory genes were selected according to the existing literature and database. We identified putative miRNA-binding sites of 149 genes by specialised algorithms and screened SNPs in the 3'UTRs of these genes. By calculating binding free energy, we sorted 269 SNPs on the basis of the possibility of prediction. The proposed approach could help to easy the identification of functionally relevant SNPs and minimize the workflow and the costs.

Improved Function Augmented Sliding Mode Control of Uncertain Nonlinear Systems with Preassigned Settling Time

Guangbin Cai,Xinyu Li,Ming-Zhe Hou,Guang Ren Duan,Fei Han 제어·로봇·시스템학회 2021 International Journal of Control, Automation, and Vol.19 No.2

This paper investigates the robust tracking control of second-order uncertain nonlinear systems by adopting the function augmented sliding mode control approach. An improved version of this approach is proposed such that the exact information of the initial tracking error is not required when generating the desired trajectory of the tracking error. This evidently enlarges the application scope of the function augmented sliding mode control approach. Performance functions are introduced to form the performance envelopes for the sliding mode variables. A robust sliding mode controller is constructed such that the sliding mode variables are confined within their performance envelopes. This further guarantees that the tracking error converges to the given neighbourhood of zero within the preassigned settling time provided that proper control parameters are selected. An application example on the rendezvous control of spacecraft is also employed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control approach.

Sensitive Vector Search for Logic Circuit Failure Probability based on Improved Adaptive Cuckoo Algorithm

Shuo Cai,Sicheng Wu,Weizheng Wang,Fei Yu,Lairong Yin 대한전자공학회 2022 Journal of semiconductor technology and science Vol.22 No.2

With the development of microelectronics technology, the feature size of integrated circuit continues to shrink, and circuit performance has been improved. At the same time, however, factors such as process disturbance, power noise, and particle radiation are having an increasingly serious influence on the Failure Probability of Circuits (FPC). Searching the input vectors that are sensitive to FPC can assist circuit designers in selectively reinforcing the circuit to reduce the fault-tolerant overhead and improve the fault-tolerant efficiency. In this paper, an Improved Adaptive Cuckoo Search (IACS) algorithm is proposed to search sensitive circuit vectors. The vector segmentation strategy is used to change the dimension of the input vector, the hill climbing algorithm is used to improve the quality of the initial population, and the adaptive strategy is used to control parameters such as power-law index, discovery probability and scaling factor. At the same time, a Correlation Separation Approach (COSEA) is proposed to calculate the FPC under specific vector excitation. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has higher accuracy and better efficiency compared with existing algorithms.

3D Focused Inversion of Near-bottom Magnetic Data from Autonomous Underwater Vehicle in Rough Seas

Zhou Fei,Tao Chunhui,Wu Tao,Zeng Zhaofa,Liu Cai 한국해양과학기술원 2018 Ocean science journal Vol.53 No.2

The observation area of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) often contains undulating terrain in which the shallow portions make a great contribution to near-bottom magnetic data. Magnetic information from varying terrain may be inadvertently removed when traditional topographic correction methods are used to reduce the effect of undulating terrain on inversion results. In this study, we introduce a terrain-weighting matrix into the focused inversion process to overcome this problem. To counteract the natural decay of the potential field, we used the focused inversion with a minimum support function to obtain focused results and depth-weighting function. We also used the interpolation-iteration method to mitigate the influence of the fluctuating observation surface on the inversion results. We verified the effectiveness of the proposed method by conducting model tests using near-bottom data measured along the Southwest Indian Ridge (SWIR) by the AUV, Qianlong II. We obtained the 3D magnetization structure of the oceanic core complex (OCC) area at the 28th segment along the SWIR and concluded that the OCC was primarily composed of gabbroic rock.

Shear Resistance Prediction of Post-fire Reinforced Concrete Beams Using Artificial Neural Network

Bin Cai,Long-Fei Xu,Feng Fu 한국콘크리트학회 2019 International Journal of Concrete Structures and M Vol.13 No.6

In this paper, a prediction method based on artificial neural network was developed to rapidly determine the residual shear resistance of reinforced concrete (RC) beams after fire. Firstly, the temperature distribution along the beam section was determined through finite element analysis using software ABAQUS. A residual shear strength calculation model was developed and validated using the test data. Using this model, 384 data entries were derived for training and testing. The input layer of neural network involved parameters of beam height, beam width, fire exposure time, cross-sectional area of stirrup, stirrup spacing, concrete strength, and concrete cover thickness. The output was the shear resistance of RC beams. It was found that use of BP neural network could precisely predict the post-fire shear resistance of RC beams. The predicted data were highly consistent with the target data. Thus, this is a novel method for computing post-fire shear resistance of RC beams. Using this new method, further investigation was also made on the effects of different parameters on the shear resistance of the beams.

Oligopeptides derived from rice protein hydrolysates: absorption, bioactivity, preparation, debittering, and application

Zheng-Fei Yan,Yi-Mei Cai,Yong-Kun Xiao,Shuai Yuan,Xue-Yi Qiao,Bo Xu,Jing Wu 한국생물공학회 2024 Biotechnology and Bioprocess Engineering Vol.29 No.3

Rice protein, a high-quality protein, contains all of its essential amino acids, and its amino acid composition is consistent with the ideal pattern recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization/World Health Organization. Rice protein-derived products as feed additives have rather low added value. Rice protein hydrolysates (RPHs) are valuable products that can be generated from underutilized rice protein. In the RPH, oligopeptide-enriched RPH and its oligopeptides have been proposed as superior candidates for improving absorption and bioavailability and have potential broad application. Thus, this review outlines the absorption behavior, bioactivity, and preparation of rice oligopeptides. The structure-bitterness relationships and debittering of these materials are discussed in detail, as are their safety and allergenicity. Additionally, the applications of rice oligopeptides in the food and pharmaceutical industries as functional ingredients are also highlighted.