Tropical cyclones (TC) are dangerous weather events and accurate monitoring and forecasting can provide significant early warning to reduce loss of life and property. However, the study of tropical cyclone intensity remains challenging, both in terms of theory and forecasting. ERA5 reanalysis is benchmark data set for tropical cyclone studies, yet the maximum wind speed error is very large (68 kts) and still 19 kts after simple linear correction even in the better sampled North Atlantic. Here, we develop an adaptive learning approach to correct the intensity in the ERA5 reanalysis, by optimising the inputs to overcome the problems because of the poor data quality and updating the features to improve the generalisability of the deep learning-based model. Specifically, we use TC knowledge to increase the representativeness of the inputs so that the general features can be learned with deep neural networks in the sample space, and then use domain adaptation to update the general features from the known domain with historical storms to the specific features for the unknown domain of new storms. This approach can reduce the error to only 6 kts which is within the uncertainty of the best track data in IBTrACS in the North Atlantic. The method may have wide applicability, such as extending it to the correction of intensity estimation from satellite imagery and intensity prediction from dynamical models.

As we all know, many more dynamic objects appear almost continuously in real world, which are immensely able to impair the performance of the majority of vision-based SLAM systems that are based on the static-world assumption. In order to improve the robustness and accuracy of visual SLAM in the high dynamic environment, a real-time and robust stereo SLAM system for dynamic scenes was proposed. To weaken influences of dynamic content, the moving object detection method was put forward in our visual odometry, then the semantic segmentation network was combined into our stereo SLAM to extract pixel-level contours of dynamic objects. Then influences of dynamic objects were extremely weaken and the performance of our system was increased markedly in dynamic, complex and crowed city spaces. Experiment with both on KITTI Odometry dataset and in a real-life scene, the results show that our method can dramatically decrease the tracking error or drift, improve the robustness and stability of our stereo SLAM in high dynamic outdoor scenarios.

Curcumin is the main secondary metabolites of Curcuma longa and other Curcuma spp, and has been reported to have some potential in preventing and treating some physiological disorders. This study investigated the effect curcumin in inhibiting high-fat diet and streptozotocin (STZ)-induced hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia in rats. Twenty-six male Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats (170-190 g) were randomly divided into a standard food pellet diet group (Control group), a high-fat diet and streptozotocin group (HF+STZ group), and a high-fat diet combined with curcumin and STZ group (HF+ Cur +STZ group). Compared with the HF+STZ group, the HF+Cur+STZ group exhibited significantly reduced fasting blood glucose (FBG), total cholesterol (TC), triglyceride (TG), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), alanine aminotransferase (AST) and aspartate transaminase (ALT) levels, and liver coefficients; in the livers of these rats, the expression of malondialdehyde (MDA) and Bax was downregulated, whereas that of superoxide dismutase (SOD) and Bcl-2 was upregulated. Moreover, the liver histology of these rats was improved and resembled that of the control rats. These results suggest that curcumin prevents high-fat diet and STZ-induced hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia, mainly via anti-oxidant and anti-apoptotic mechanisms in the liver.

Activated carbon (AC) is an effective adsorbent for creatinine removal in hemoperfusion. However, the hemocompatibility and adsorption capacity of AC was required to be improved furthermore. Heparin, a widely used anticoagulant biomacromolecule, could improve the hemocompatibility of the absorbents in different ways based on its molecular weight. Thus, it was necessary to study the surface modification with unfractionated heparin (UFH) or low molecular weight heparin (LMWH) on improvement of hemocompatibility and adsorption. In this study, UFH and LMWH were respectively grafted on AC through polyethyleneimine as an intermediate layer. The modification of AC about morphology, mechanical strength and pore structure was characterized by XPS, SEM, TA and BET. It was found that compared with AC, the morphology and mechanical strength AC-UFH and AC-LMWH could be well maintained, but the BET surface was decreased due to the grafting of macromolecules. Furthermore, AC-UFH and AC-LMWH showed the better hemocompatibility on protein adsorption, APTT and platelet activation compared with AC, in which AC-LMWH had lower fibrinogen adsorption and longer APTT than AC-UFH. Besides, it was found that AC, AC-UFH and AC-LMWH had no significant effect on blood cell composition. Finally, the adsorption capacity of adsorbents for creatinine was evaluated. Although there was no significant difference between AC-UFH and AC-LMWH, it was found that heparin could be interacted with creatinine to enhance the adsorption capacity when compared with AC-PEI. This study deepened the understanding of anticoagulation of heparinized surface and provided a theoretical basis for adsorbents in hemoperfusion.

We investigate and discuss in detail the structure of the restricted singular value decomposition for a tensor triplet under t-product (T-RSVD). The algorithm is provided with a numerical example illustrating the main result. For applications, we consider color image watermarking processing with T-RSVD.

We report an all-optical radio-frequency (RF) spectrum analyzer with a bandwidth greater than 5 terahertz (THz), based on a 50-cm long spiral waveguide in a CMOS-compatible high-index doped silica platform. By carefully mapping out the dispersion profile of the waveguides for different thicknesses, we identify the optimal design to achieve near zero dispersion in the C-band. To demonstrate the capability of the RF spectrum analyzer, we measure the optical output of a femtosecond fiber laser with an ultrafast optical RF spectrum in the terahertz regime.

Background: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been demonstrated to be the cause of pneumonia. Nevertheless, it has not been reported as the cause of acute myocarditis or fulminant myocarditis. Case presentation: A 63-year-old male was admitted with pneumonia and cardiac symptoms. He was genetically confirmed as having COVID-19 according to sputum testing on the day of admission. He also had elevated troponin I (Trop I) level (up to 11.37 g/L) and diffuse myocardial dyskinesia along with a decreased left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) on echocardiography. The highest level of interleukin-6 was 272.40 pg/ml. Bedside chest radiographs showed typical ground-glass changes indicative of viral pneumonia. Laboratory test results for viruses that cause myocarditis were all negative. The patient conformed to the diagnostic criteria of the Chinese expert consensus statement for fulminant myocarditis. After receiving antiviral therapy and mechanical life support, Trop I was reduced to 0.10 g/L, and interleukin-6 was reduced to 7.63 pg/ml. Moreover, the LVEF of the patient gradually recovered to 68%. The patient died of aggravation of secondary infection on the 33^rd day of hospitalization. Conclusion: COVID-19 patients may develop severe cardiac complications such as myocarditis and heart failure. This is the first report of COVID-19 complicated with fulminant myocarditis. The mechanism of cardiac pathology caused by COVID-19 needs further study.

The branch prediction units (BPUs) generally have security vulnerabilities, which can be used by attackers to obtain the execution status, jump directions, and jump address of conditional branches, and the existing protection methods cannot defend against these attacks. Therefore, this article proposes a hardware security protection method for conditional branches of embedded systems. This method calculates the number of updates to the branch target buffer (BTB). When it exceeds the threshold, BTB is locked to prevent attackers from analyzing the execution status of branches based on the time difference of whether BTB is updated. Moreover, the hybrid physical unclonable function (PUF) circuit is designed to provide confidentiality protection for the jump directions, jump addresses, and their indexes, preventing attackers from stealing these critical data. If these mechanism fails and attackers successfully tamper with conditional branches, this paper proposes a control flow integrity (CFI) protection mechanism based on branch labels to timely detect tampering with instruction codes, jump addresses, and jump directions. The proposed method is implemented and tested on FPGA. The experimental results show that this method can achieve fine-grained security protection for conditional branches, with about 5.4% resource overhead and less than 5.5% performance overhead.