Horizontal heat flux between urban buildings and soil and its influencing factors

The soil temperature near four external walls with different orientations was investigated in spring and summer. In both seasons, the soil temperature was higher in the positions closest to the buildings, suggesting that the buildings were a heat source for the soil surrounding them. Therefore, it could be confirmed that there was lateral heat transfer between the soil and the buildings. Based on this, a soil heat flux plate was set between the soil and the buildings to investigate the horizontal heat flux. The data showed diurnal variations of the horizontal heat flux in both spring and summer. In order to determine the factors that influenced the horizontal heat flux and to provide a basis to understand its mechanism, the correlations between the data of several meteorological factors and the horizontal heat flux were analysed. The results showed that solar radiation was significantly correlated with the horizontal heat flux (p0.05), such as that for soil moisture. The stepwise regression results indicated that the relative importance of these meteorological factors was 48.63, 21.94, 14.44, 8.12 and 6.87% for solar radiation, soil temperature, air temperature, relative humidity and soil moisture, respectively, on a diurnal scale

Id1 induces apoptosis through inhibition of RORgammat expression

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Basic helix-loop-helix E proteins are transcription factors that play crucial roles in T cell development by controlling thymocyte proliferation, differentiation and survival. E protein functions can be repressed by their naturally occurring inhibitors, Id proteins (Id1-4). Transgenic expression of Id1 blocks T cell development and causes massive apoptosis of developing thymocytes. However, the underlying mechanisms are not entirely understood due to relatively little knowledge of the target genes regulated by E proteins.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We designed a unique strategy to search for genes directly controlled by E proteins and found RORγt to be a top candidate. Using microarray analyses and reverse-transcriptase PCR assays, we showed that Id1 expression diminished RORγt mRNA levels in T cell lines and primary thymocytes while induction of E protein activity restored RORγt expression. E proteins were found to specifically bind to the promoter region of RORγt, suggesting their role in activating transcription of the gene. Functional significance of E protein-controlled RORγt expression was established based on the finding that RORγt rescued apoptosis caused by Id1 overexpression. Furthermore, expression of RORγt prevented Id1-induced p38 MAP kinase hyper-activation.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These results suggest that E protein-dependent RORγt gene expression aids the survival of developing thymocytes, which provides a possible explanation for the massive apoptosis found in Id1 transgenic mice.</p

A Multi-Level Approach to Waste Object Segmentation

We address the problem of localizing waste objects from a color image and an optional depth image, which is a key perception component for robotic interaction with such objects. Specifically, our method integrates the intensity and depth information at multiple levels of spatial granularity. Firstly, a scene-level deep network produces an initial coarse segmentation, based on which we select a few potential object regions to zoom in and perform fine segmentation. The results of the above steps are further integrated into a densely connected conditional random field that learns to respect the appearance, depth, and spatial affinities with pixel-level accuracy. In addition, we create a new RGBD waste object segmentation dataset, MJU-Waste, that is made public to facilitate future research in this area. The efficacy of our method is validated on both MJU-Waste and the Trash Annotation in Context (TACO) dataset.Comment: Paper appears in Sensors 2020, 20(14), 381