Since the late 1990s, lakes in the southern Tibetan Plateau (TP) have shrunk considerably, which contrasts with the rapid expansion of lakes in the interior TP. Although these spatial trends have been well documented, the underlying hydroclimatic mechanisms are not well understood. Since 2013, we have carried out comprehensive water budget observations at Paiku Co, an alpine lake in the central Himalayas. In this study, we investigate water storage and lake level changes on seasonal to decadal time scales based on extensive in-situ measurements and satellite observations. Bathymetric surveys show that Paiku Co has a mean and maximum water depth of 41.1 m and 72.8 m, respectively, and its water storage was estimated to be 109.3 x 10(8) m(3) in June 2016. On seasonal scale between 2013 and 2017, Paiku Co's lake level decreased slowly between January and May, increased considerably between June and September, and then decreased rapidly between October and January. On decadal time scale, Paiku Co's lake level decreased by 3.7 +/- 0.3 m and water storage reduced by (10.2 +/- 0.8) x 10(8) m(3) between 1972 and 2015, accounting for 8.5% of the total water storage in 1972. This change is consistent with a trend towards drier conditions in the Himalaya region during the recent decades. In contrast, glacial lakes within Paiku Co's basin expanded rapidly, indicating that, unlike Paiku Co, glacial meltwater was sufficient to compensate the effect of the reduced precipitation.

Epigenetic modifications, including DNA methylation, play an important role in the pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases. In this study, we characterized the DNA methylome in primary T cells of patients with systemic sclerosis. Genome-wide DNA methylation assays of CD4(+) and CD8(+) T cells from 24 systemic sclerosis patients and 24 matched controls were conducted and differentially methylated regions were validated. In the discovery stage, we found that hypomethylation of genes involved in the type I IFN signaling pathway was significantly enriched in both CD4(+) (P = 7.59 x 10(-)6) and CD8(+) (P = 2.10 x 100(-8)) differentially methylated regions. In the validation stage, we confirmed these changes for five type I IFN-associated genes. In addition, protein levels of both type I IFN-alpha (P < 0.0001) and beta (P = 0.002) were significantly elevated in the sera of systemic sclerosis patients. Moreover, significant associations between type I IFN-alpha/beta protein levels with the DNA methylation status as well as the expression profiles of these IFN-associated genes were confirmed. In conclusion, the type I IFN pathway is dysfunctional at the epigenetic level in systemic sclerosis patients, indicating that hypomethylation and upregulation of type I IFN-associated genes might be critical in systemic sclerosis pathogenesis.

Triazole contaminants in water and soil environments can form complexes with metal ions, and therefore affect the bioavailability and toxicity of some heavy metals. In present study, significant increase of copper (Cu) uptake by earthworm (Eisenia fetida) was observed when combined pollution of benzotriazole (BTR) presented in soil. For instance, Cu accumulation in earthworms increased 55% approximately when BTR presented at the BTR/Cu molar ratio of 1:2.5. While the single Cu exposure (at 32 mg kg(-1) in soil) resulted in increased malondialdehyde (MDA) content in earthworms from 0.319 to 0.668 nmol mg protein(-1), joint exposure to BTR at BTR/Cu molar ratio of 1:10 significantly decreased the MDA content to 0.405 nmol mg protein(-1). This indicates a potential detoxification effect of BTR to Cu induced oxidative damage in earthworms. Varied Cu subcellular distribution can be observed in earthworms of the single and combined exposure treatments. With the combined exposure of BTR, the proportion of Cu associated with granular fraction, the toxically inert fraction in earthworms, increased from 25% to 39%. This phenomenon can be used to explain the protective effects of BTR against oxidative damage.

In this study, the generalized Nose Hoover oscillator is analyzed rigorously. We show that all trajectories not belonging to the two one-dimensional invariant manifolds (one is a straight line and the other is a unit circle) must traverse a two-dimensional unit disk infinitely many times transversally along the same direction in the state space. Consequently, all of the trajectories not located in the straight line invariant manifold have at least one omega-limiting point. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

To achieve a low computational cost when performing online metric learning for large-scale data, we present a one-pass closed-form solution namely OPML in this paper. Typically, the proposed OPML first adopts a one-pass triplet construction strategy, which aims to use only a very small number of triplets to approximate the representation ability of whole original triplets obtained by batch-manner methods. Then, OPML employs a closed-form solution to update the metric for new coming samples, which leads to a low space (i.e., O(d)) and time (i.e., O(d(2))) complexity, where d is the feature dimensionality. In addition, an extension of OPML (namely COPML) is further proposed to enhance the robustness when in real case the first several samples come from the same class (i.e., cold start problem). In the experiments, we have systematically evaluated our methods (OPML and COPML) on three typical tasks, including UCI data classification, face verification, and abnormal event detection in videos, which aims to fully evaluate the proposed methods on different sample number, different feature dimensionalities and different feature extraction ways (i.e., hand-crafted and deeply-learned). The results show that OPML and COPML can obtain the promising performance with a very low computational cost. Also, the effectiveness of COPML under the cold start setting is experimentally verified. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

To explore mechanical properties of multilayer TiAlSiN coatings deposited on turning tools and their cutting performance against Inconel 718, TiAlSiN coatings with five different multilayer configurations, including single layer TiAlSiN-A (with higher adhesion strength), single layer TiAlSiN-B (with higher hardness), bilayer, four layer, and eight-layer, were deposited using high power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS). The microstructure, chemical composition, hardness, adhesion, toughness and surface roughness of those coatings are measured and the cutting performance against Inconel 718 is analyzed. It is demonstrated that the multilayer structure results in an increase of both toughness and compressive stress of TiAlSiN coatings, and the one with eight-layer configuration shows the highest toughness among the five coatings. The results of the cutting experiment showed that eight layer coatings have maximum life while the TiAlSiN-A has minimum. This improvement of multilayer structure is believed to be due to the increasing toughness, which alleviates the damage caused by the frequent impact of Inconel 718 hard particles during cutting. This study also shows there is a negative correlation between spalling area of flank surface and adhesion of coatings.