Effects of qufeng xuanfei formula in guinea pig model of airway hyperergy.

This work aimed to clarify the potential regulating effects of Qufeng Xuanfei formula (QFXF) on airway neurogenic inflammation and its underlying target signal pathway. Guinea pig model of airway hyperergy (AHR) was used. The relative susceptibility of major proteins to airway neurogenic inflammation was assessed using Western blot immunoassay followed by being separated by SDS-PAGE. Compared to the model group, QFXF of all concentrations effectively depressed the capsaicin enhanced cough in guinea pigs and the peak values of airway resistance significantly decreased. The results illustrated that QFXF alleviated cough symptom in guinea pigs and reduced airway neurogenic inflammation when compared to AHR model group. Airway inflammation and damage, as well as the levels of NGF, SP and c-Fos in QFXF decreased the most in the high-dose group. The mechanism of antitussive activity may be associated with reducing airway inflammation. QFXF displayed effect on chronic cough through reducing the levels of neuropeptides, attenuating airway inflammation and promoting recovery from disease to decrease the airway neuro sensitivity, suggesting that the potential mechanism may be related to Ras/ERK/c-Fos pathway.

Using Machine Learning Methods to Provision Virtual Sensors in Sensor-Cloud.

The advent of sensor-cloud technology alleviates the limitations of traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in terms of energy, storage, and computing, which has tremendous potential in various agricultural internet of things (IoT) applications. In the sensor-cloud environment, virtual sensor provisioning is an essential task. It chooses physical sensors to create virtual sensors in response to the users' requests. Considering the capricious meteorological environment of the outdoors, this paper presents an measurements similarity-based virtual-sensor provisioning scheme by taking advantage of machine learning in data analysis. First, to distinguish the changing trends, we classified all the physical sensors into several categories using historical data. Then, the k-means clustering algorithm was exploited for each class to cluster the physical sensors with high similarity. Finally, one representative physical sensor from each cluster was selected to create the corresponding virtual sensors. The experimental results show the reformation of our scheme with respect to energy efficiency, network lifetime, and data accuracy compared with the benchmark schemes.

Patrol detection for replica attacks on wireless sensor networks.

Replica attack is a critical concern in the security of wireless sensor networks. We employ mobile nodes as patrollers to detect replicas distributed in different zones in a network, in which a basic patrol detection protocol and two detection algorithms for stationary and mobile modes are presented. Then we perform security analysis to discuss the defense strategies against the possible attacks on the proposed detection protocol. Moreover, we show the advantages of the proposed protocol by discussing and comparing the communication cost and detection probability with some existing methods.

[Research and application advances on vegetative filter strip].

Water resources have been increasingly polluted, while vegetative filter strip (VFS) is accepted as one of the best management practices to reduce water body pollution, especially non-point source pollution. A vegetative filter strip is a vegetated strip of land, which separates the runoff and pollutant contributing areas from surface water bodies and allows the runoff and associated pollutants to be attenuated before reaching surface waters via infiltration, adsorption, uptake, decay, filtering, and deposition. In this paper, the research and application advances on VFS were reviewed, including the history, structure, mechanisms of pollution control, design, management, and cost effectiveness of VFS. The studies on VFS in China started recently, and very few results of experiments and applications had been achieved. In order to efficiently promote and use this ecological technique in China, more studies on VFS are needed to obtain relative experimental data and results.