No abstract

Three typical methanol-gasoline blends M10, M20, and M85 containing 10%, 20%, and 85% of methanol by volume, respectively, were used to investigate the effects of different methanol/gasoline ratios on engine power, thermal efficiency, and emissions, especially the exhaust methanol emission. A three-cylinder, port fuel injection engine was applied. Experimental results show that the engine power/torque ratio under the wide open throttle condition mainly depends on the amount of heat delivered to the engine. The addition of methanol significantly improves the brake thermal efficiency, while the methanol/gasoline ratio has a slight effect on it. Engine out CO and NO x emissions decrease with the increase of the methanol/gasoline ratio. The use of M85 leads to a reduction of CO and NO x by about 25% and 80%, respectively. A gas chromatograph is calibrated and used to measure the methanol emission. Measurement indicates that the addition of methanol in gasoline results in an increase of the unburnt CH 3 OH emission. And its concentration is nearly logarithmically proportional to the cyclically injected quantity. Because the response of the flame ionization detector to methanol is 40% that of hydrocarbon, the total hydrocarbon emission of the engine is revised. The nonmethanol hydrocarbons that resulted from gasoline are less affected by methanol addition, while the methanol emission is controlled independently by the cyclic quantity of fuel methanol injection.

Knowledge is indispensable to understanding. The ongoing information explosion highlights the need to enable machines to better understand electronic text in human language. Much work has been devoted to creating universal ontologies or taxonomies for this purpose. However, none of the existing ontologies has the needed depth and breadth for "universal understanding". In this paper, we present a universal, probabilistic taxonomy that is more comprehensive than any existing ones. It contains 2.7 million concepts harnessed automatically from a corpus of 1.68 billion web pages. Unlike traditional taxonomies that treat knowledge as black and white, it uses probabilities to model inconsistent, ambiguous and uncertain information it contains. We present details of how the taxonomy is constructed, its probabilistic modeling, and its potential applications in text understanding.

Because of its powerful genetics, the adult zebrafish has been increasingly used for studying cardiovascular diseases. Considering its heart rate of~100 beats per minute at ambient temperature, which is very close to human, we assessed the use of this vertebrate animal for modeling heart rhythm disorders such as sinus arrest (SA) and sick sinus syndrome (SSS). We firstly optimized a protocol to measure electrocardiogram in adult zebrafish. We determined the location of the probes, implemented an open-chest microsurgery procedure, measured the effects of temperature, and determined appropriate anesthesia dose and time. We then proposed an PP interval of more than 1.5 seconds as an arbitrary criterion to define an SA episode in an adult fish at ambient temperature, based on comparison between the current definition of an SA episode in humans and our studies of candidate SA episodes in aged wild-type fish and Tg(SCN5A-D1275N) fish (a fish model for inherited SSS). With this criterion, a subpopulation of about 5% wild-type fish can be considered to have SA episodes, and this percentage significantly increases to about 25% in 3-year-old fish. In response to atropine, this subpopulation has both common SSS phenotypic traits that are shared with the Tg(SCN5A-D1275N) model, such as bradycardia; and unique SSS phenotypic traits, such as increased QRS/P ratio and chronotropic incompetence. In summary, this study defined baseline SA and SSS in adult zebrafish and underscored use of the zebrafish as an alternative model to study aging-associated SSS.

Previously we showed the generation of a protein trap library made with the gene-break transposon (GBT) in zebrafish (Danio rerio) that could be used to facilitate novel functional genome annotation towards understanding molecular underpinnings of human diseases (Ichino et al, 2020). Here, we report a significant application of this library for discovering essential genes for heart rhythm disorders such as sick sinus syndrome (SSS). SSS is a group of heart rhythm disorders caused by malfunction of the sinus node, the heart's primary pacemaker. Partially owing to its aging-associated phenotypic manifestation and low expressivity, molecular mechanisms of SSS remain difficult to decipher. From 609 GBT lines screened, we generated a collection of 35 zebrafish insertional cardiac (ZIC) mutants in which each mutant traps a gene with cardiac expression. We further employed electrocardiographic measurements to screen these 35 ZIC lines and identified three GBT mutants with SSS-like phenotypes. More detailed functional studies on one of the arrhythmogenic mutants, GBT411, in both zebrafish and mouse models unveiled Dnajb6 as a novel SSS causative gene with a unique expression pattern within the subpopulation of sinus node pacemaker cardiomyocytes that partially overlaps with the expression of hyperpolarization activated cyclic nucleotide gated channel 4 (Hcn4), supporting heterogeneity of the cardiac pacemaker cells.

Recognizing metaphors and identifying the source-target mappings is an important task as metaphorical text poses a big challenge for machine reading. To address this problem, we automatically acquire a metaphor knowledge base and an isA knowledge base from billions of web pages. Using the knowledge bases, we develop an inference mechanism to recognize and explain the metaphors in the text. To our knowledge, this is the first purely data-driven approach of probabilistic metaphor acquisition, recognition, and explanation. Our results shows that it significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in recognizing and explaining metaphors.

We describe an automated three-axis BRDF measurement instrument that can help increase the physical realism of computer graphics images by providing light scattering data for the surfaces within a synthetic scene that is to be rendered. To our knowledge, the instrument is unique in combining wide angular coverage (beyond 85° from the surface normal), dense sampling of the visible wavelength spectrum (1024 samples), and rapid operation (less than ten hours for complete measurement of an isotropic sample). The gonioreflectometer employs a broadband light source and a detector with a diffraction grating and linear diode array. Validation was achieved by comparisons against reference surfaces and other instruments. The accuracy and spectral and angular ranges of the BRDFs are appropriate for computer graphics imagery, while reciprocity and energy conservation are preserved. Measured BRDFs on rough aluminum, metallic silver automotive paint, and a glossy yellow paint are reported, and an example rendered automotive image is included.

We describe an automated three-axis BRDF measurement instrument that can help increase the physical realism of computer graphics images by providing light scattering data for the surfaces within a synthetic scene that is to be rendered. To our knowledge, the instrument is unique in combining wide angular coverage (beyond 85° from the surface normal), dense sampling of the visible wavelength spectrum (1024 samples), and rapid operation (less than ten hours for complete measurement of an isotropic sample). The gonioreflectometer employs a broadband light source and a detector with a diffraction grating and linear diode array. Validation was achieved by comparisons against reference surfaces and other instruments. The accuracy and spectral and angular ranges of the BRDFs are appropriate for computer graphics imagery, while reciprocity and energy conservation are preserved. Measured BRDFs on rough aluminum, metallic silver automotive paint, and a glossy yellow paint are reported, and an example rendered automotive image is included.