Non-canonical function of an Hif-1α splice variant contributes to the sustained flight of locusts.

The hypoxia inducible factor (Hif) pathway is functionally conserved across metazoans in modulating cellular adaptations to hypoxia. However, the functions of this pathway under aerobic physiological conditions are rarely investigated. Here, we show that Hif-1α2, a locust Hif-1α isoform, does not induce canonical hypoxic responses but functions as a specific regulator of locust flight, which is a completely aerobic physiological process. Two Hif-1α splice variants were identified in locusts, a ubiquitously expressed Hif-1α1 and a muscle-predominantly expressed Hif-1α2. Hif-1α1 that induces typical hypoxic responses upon hypoxia exposure remains inactive during flight. By contrast, the expression of Hif-1α2, which lacks C-terminal transactivation domain, is less sensitive to oxygen tension but induced extensively by flying. Hif-1α2 regulates physiological processes involved in glucose metabolism and antioxidation during flight and sustains flight endurance by maintaining redox homeostasis through upregulating the production of a reactive oxygen species (ROS) quencher, DJ-1. Overall, this study reveals a novel Hif-mediated mechanism underlying prolonged aerobic physiological activity.

Robust Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection by Multipath Frame Prediction.

Video anomaly detection is commonly used in many applications, such as security surveillance, and is very challenging. A majority of recent video anomaly detection approaches utilize deep reconstruction models, but their performance is often suboptimal because of insufficient reconstruction error differences between normal and abnormal video frames in practice. Meanwhile, frame prediction-based anomaly detection methods have shown promising performance. In this article, we propose a novel and robust unsupervised video anomaly detection method by frame prediction with a proper design which is more in line with the characteristics of surveillance videos. The proposed method is equipped with a multipath ConvGRU-based frame prediction network that can better handle semantically informative objects and areas of different scales and capture spatial-temporal dependencies in normal videos. A noise tolerance loss is introduced during training to mitigate the interference caused by background noise. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the CUHK Avenue, ShanghaiTech Campus, and UCSD Pedestrian datasets, and the results show that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. Remarkably, our proposed method obtains the frame-level AUROC score of 88.3% on the CUHK Avenue dataset.

Full scale study of Class A biosolids produced by thermal hydrolysis pretreatment and anaerobic digestion.

Biosolids are the solid by-product of wastewater treatment and contain high-organic matter and nutrient content, which can be utilized in food production and gardening. In 2014, this study's target nutrient recovery facility (NRF) in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. adopted thermal hydrolysis pretreatment (THP) and anaerobic digestion (AD) to upgrade biosolids from Class B (lime-stabilized) to Class A. The pathogen, nutrients, and metals contents were compared with that of Class B biosolids from the same facility throughout a one-year period. Following optimization and equilibrium, stable biosolids were produced that satisfied all Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Class A biosolids standards. Class A biosolids produced had fecal coliform density consistently below the 1000 MPN/g d.w. limit set by the EPA, at 35.85 ±â€¯81.10 MPN/g d.w. (n = 301). Metal concentrations were greater in Class A than Class B biosolids as a result of biosolids mass reduction, but these levels were substantially lower than regulatory limits. Metal concentrations were (in mg/kg d.w.): As = 6.43 ±â€¯0.400 (n = 141), Cd = 3.39 ±â€¯0.117 (n = 147), Cr = 88.4 ±â€¯2.00 (n = 148), Cu = 401 ±â€¯9.81 (n = 148), Pb = 68.1 ±â€¯2.19 (n = 148), Hg = 1.21 ±â€¯0.116 (n = 148), Mo = 14.9 ±â€¯0.321 (n = 148), Ni = 23.8 ±â€¯0.911 (n = 146), Se = 10.0 ±â€¯0.573 (n = 140), Zn = 778 ±â€¯14.9 (n = 148), K = 850 ±â€¯21.7 (n = 134). In addition, Class A biosolids were rich in total nitrogen (N) and higher in total phosphorus (TP), but low in potassium (K) content. Concentration of K was 850 ±â€¯21.7 mg/kg d.w. (n = 134), TKN was 52,000 ±â€¯13,300 mg/kg d.w. (n = 43), TP was 34,500 ±â€¯6130 mg/kg d.w. (n = 42), and ammonia-N was 7860 ±â€¯1350 mg/kg d.w. (n = 43).