Early Triassic wrinkle structures on land:stressed environments and oases for life

Wrinkle structures in rocks younger than the Permian-Triassic (P-Tr) extinction have been reported repeatedly in marine strata, but rarely mentioned in rocks recording land. Here, three newly studied terrestrial P-Tr boundary rock succession in North China have yielded diverse wrinkle structures. All of these wrinkles are preserved in barely bioturbated shore-shallow lacustrine siliciclastic deposits of the Liujiagou Formation. Conversely, both the lacustrine siliciclastic deposits of the underlying Sunjiagou Formation and the overlying Heshanggou Formation show rich bioturbation, but no wrinkle structures or other microbial-related structures. The occurrence of terrestrial wrinkle structures in the studied sections reflects abnormal hydrochemical and physical environments, presumably associated with the extinction of terrestrial organisms. Only very rare trace fossils occurred in the aftermath of the P-Tr extinction, but most of them were preserved together with the microbial mats. This suggests that microbial mats acted as potential oases for the surviving aquatic animals, as a source of food and oxygen. The new finds suggests that extreme environmental stresses were prevalent both in the sea and on land through most of the Early Triassic

A business plan: TCM health-preservation club

This master project has the objective to develop a Business Plan which will enable the launch of a TCM health-preservation club which will offer TCM method servicess for modern female consumers in Anyang area, Henan Province, China. The health problems of modern females are rising rapidly due to the unhealthy lifestyle and environmental problems and the TCM in this area has highly potential market, especially targeting for females. However, based on a ground study, we quickly realised that all clinic or club look alike and propose the same local specialties with less professional and services level. By catching the markt opportunities, we analyse the current market with macro data and comparing them with field data I acquired with a questionnaire and a field trip, I decided to launch a TCM club - the new serves intends to change female relationship with TCM consumption providing them a solution specifically designed to satisfy their needs. It is aiming to use TCM therapy to not only solve females’ health problems, but also improve females' life quality, even achieve longevity. We show in this business plan that our business are low capital requirement business that become quickly profitable and we do not need to have a loan. It should reach a turnover of 47,617€ and a profit of 4,130€ the first year.O objetivo deste projeto de mestre é desenvolver um Plano de Negócios que poderá abrir um clube de preservação da saúde da Medicina Tradicional Chinesa (MTC), que oferecerá os serviços de métodos da MTC para as consumidoras femininas modernas na área da cidade de Anyang, Província de Henan, China. Devido ao estilo da vida pouco saudável e aos problemas ambientais, os problemas de saúde das mulheres modernas estão a aumentar rapidamente, por isso, a MTC nesta área tem um grande mercado potencial, especialmente direcionada para as mulheres. No entanto, de acordo com um estudo preliminar, percebemos rapidamente que todas clínicas ou clubes locais são parecidos e consideram que eles faltam as especialidades e têm um nível mais baixo. Para aproveitar as oportunidades do mercado, analisamos o mercado atual pelos dados macroeconómicos e comparamos os dados macroeconómicos com os dados adquiridos pelo inquérito e pela viagem de campo, decidi organizar um clube da MTC - os serviços novos que pretendem mudar o relacionamento entre as mulheres e o consumo da MTC a qual lhes fornecerá especificamente as soluções projetadas para satisfazer as suas necessidades. O Clube visa utilizar a terapia da MTC para não só resolver os problemas de saúde das mulheres, mas também para melhorar a qualidade de vida delas, até mesmo prolongar a vida. Manifestamos neste plano de negócios que o nosso negócio é capital baixa, ganha rapidamente o benefício e não precisa empréstimo. No primeiro ano, deve atingir um volume de negócios de 47.617 € e um lucro de 4.130€

Gut stem cell aging is driven by mTORC1 via a p38 MAPK-p53 pathway.

Nutrients are absorbed solely by the intestinal villi. Aging of this organ causes malabsorption and associated illnesses, yet its aging mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we show that aging-caused intestinal villus structural and functional decline is regulated by mTORC1, a sensor of nutrients and growth factors, which is highly activated in intestinal stem and progenitor cells in geriatric mice. These aging phenotypes are recapitulated in intestinal stem cell-specific Tsc1 knockout mice. Mechanistically, mTORC1 activation increases protein synthesis of MKK6 and augments activation of the p38 MAPK-p53 pathway, leading to decreases in the number and activity of intestinal stem cells as well as villus size and density. Targeting p38 MAPK or p53 prevents or rescues ISC and villus aging and nutrient absorption defects. These findings reveal that mTORC1 drives aging by augmenting a prominent stress response pathway in gut stem cells and identify p38 MAPK as an anti-aging target downstream of mTORC1

Uncovering the spatial heterogeneity of Ediacaran carbon cycling

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here under a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license granted to WHOI. It is made available for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geobiology 15 (2017): 211–224, doi:10.1111/gbi.12222.Records of the Ediacaran carbon cycle (635 to 541 million years ago) include the Shuram excursion (SE), the largest negative carbonate-carbon isotope excursion in Earth history (down to -12 ‰). The nature of this excursion remains enigmatic given the difficulties of interpreting a perceived extreme global decrease in the δ13C of seawater dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC). Here, we present carbonate and organic carbon isotope (δ13Ccarb and δ13Corg) records from the Ediacaran Doushantuo Formation along a proximal-to-distal transect across the Yangtze Platform of South China as a test of the spatial variation of the SE. Contrary to expectations, our results show that the magnitude and morphology of this excursion and its relationship with coexisting δ13Corg are highly heterogeneous across the platform. Integrated geochemical, mineralogical, petrographic, and stratigraphic evidence indicates that the SE is a primary marine signature. Data compilations demonstrate that the SE was also accompanied globally by parallel negative shifts of δ34S of carbonate-associated sulfate (CAS) and increased 87Sr/86Sr ratio and coastal CAS concentration, suggesting elevated continental weathering and coastal marine sulfate concentration during the SE. In light of these observations, we propose a heterogeneous oxidation model to explain the high spatial heterogeneity of the SE and coexisting δ13Corg records of the Doushantuo, with likely relevance to the SE in other regions. In this model, we infer continued marine redox stratification through the SE but with increased availability of oxidants (e.g., O2 and sulfate) limited to marginal near-surface marine environments. Oxidation of limited spatiotemporal extent provides a mechanism to drive heterogeneous oxidation of subsurface reduced carbon mostly in shelf areas. Regardless of the mechanism driving the SE, future models must consider the evidence for spatial heterogeneity in δ13C presented in this study.We thank the National Key Basic Research Program of China (Grant 2013CB955704) and the State Key R&D project of China (Grant 2016YFA060104) as well as the NSF-ELT program and the NASA Astrobiology Institute (TWL) for funding

Weakly-supervised 3D Pose Transfer with Keypoints

The main challenges of 3D pose transfer are: 1) Lack of paired training data with different characters performing the same pose; 2) Disentangling pose and shape information from the target mesh; 3) Difficulty in applying to meshes with different topologies. We thus propose a novel weakly-supervised keypoint-based framework to overcome these difficulties. Specifically, we use a topology-agnostic keypoint detector with inverse kinematics to compute transformations between the source and target meshes. Our method only requires supervision on the keypoints, can be applied to meshes with different topologies and is shape-invariant for the target which allows extraction of pose-only information from the target meshes without transferring shape information. We further design a cycle reconstruction to perform self-supervised pose transfer without the need for ground truth deformed mesh with the same pose and shape as the target and source, respectively. We evaluate our approach on benchmark human and animal datasets, where we achieve superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches and even comparable performance with the fully supervised approaches. We test on the more challenging Mixamo dataset to verify our approach's ability in handling meshes with different topologies and complex clothes. Cross-dataset evaluation further shows the strong generalization ability of our approach.Comment: Accepted to ICCV 2023, Project page: https://jinnan-chen.github.io/ws3dpt

Development and Characterization of Supercooled Polyethylene Naphthalate

The utilization of undercooled or supercooled polymers presents a promising approach for the creation of single-polymer composites (SPCs), applicable not only to compaction processing but also to extrusion, injection molding, and 3D printing techniques. This study focuses on the development and characterization of supercooled polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) through differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and rheological measurements. By employing predetermined conditions, a supercooling degree of 50 ˚C for PEN was achieved. The impact of maximum heating temperature, cooling rate, and shear rate on the supercooling degree was examined, revealing that higher supercooling degrees of PEN can be attained by increasing these factors. Additionally, the flow behavior of supercooled polymer melts at various temperatures was analyzed. The supercooling state of PEN exhibited remarkable stability for a minimum duration of half an hour at temperatures exceeding 250 ˚C