PROGRESS IN “APPLIED RESEARCH ON DROUGHT & DESERTIFICATION”——A fruitful cooperative program between China and the World Laboratory

World Laboratory (WL) is an international organ financed by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its operation is exclusively for the Third World countries, where basic research projects are carried out and research results are applied to the benefit of the local areas and the world as a whole. The Project of"Applied Research on Drought &

Reasons Behind the Growing Popularity of Sino-Foreign Cooperative Educational Programs

The continuously expanding program scale and increasing student enrollment number of Sino-foreign cooperative educational programs in recent years have demonstrated their increasing acceptance among Chinese students.This paper aims to explore and analyze the reasons behind the growing popularity of Sino-foreign joint educational programs.

Cooperative path planning for multi-AUV in time-varying ocean flows

For low-speed underwater vehicles, the ocean currents has a great influence on them, and the changes in ocean currents is complex and continuous, thus whose impact must be taken into consideration in the path planning. There are still lack of authoritative indicator and method for the cooperating path planning. The calculation of the voyage time is a difficult problem in the time-varying ocean, for the existing methods of the cooperating path planning, the computation time will increase exponentially as the autonomous underwater vehicle（AUV） counts increase, rendering them unfeasible. A collaborative path planning method is presehted for multi-AUV under the influence of time-varying ocean currents based on the dynamic programming algorithm. Each AUV cooperates with the one who has the longest estimated time of sailing, enabling the arrays of AUV to get their common goal in the shortest time with minimum timedifference. At the same time, they could avoid the obstacles along the way to the target. Simulation results show that the proposed method has a promising applicability.

New partial cooperation model for ill-posed bilevel programming problem via satisfactory degree

Partial cooperation formulation is a more viable option than optimistic＇s and pessimistic＇s to solve an ill-posed bilevel programming problem.Aboussoror＇s partial cooperation model uses a constant as a cooperation index to describe the degree of follower＇s cooperation.The constant only indicates the leader＇s expectation coefficient for the follower＇s action,not the follower＇s own willingness.To solve this situation,a new model is proposed by using the follower＇s satisfactory degree as the cooperation degree.Then,because this new cooperation degree is a function which is dependent on the leader＇s choice and decided by the follower＇s satisfactory degree,this paper proves such proposed model not only leads an optimal value between the optimistic value and pessimistic＇s,but also leads a more satisfactory solution than Aboussoror＇s.Finally,a numerical experiment is given to demonstrate the feasibility of this new model.

Satellite SAR observation of shallow bottom topography of the east Australia Sea

A preliminary account of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging mechanisms of oceanic bottom topographic features and a description of the principles of the information extracted from SAR images and the processing and the analysis technology of SAR images are made. Some results were obtained from researching shallow topography and its bathymetric features of the regions of offshore in the east Australia Sea by ERS-1 SAR images. The preliminary research indicates that these features covered with SAR have never been reported before and some results of them are yielded for the first time in Australia. This information is very valuable in a great number of applications to oceanic engineering, shipping navigation, marine fishery and environment, as well as oceanographic research and development. The paper comes to the conclusion that SAR remote sensing of oceanography and its applications are of great potential.

Sciatic nerve repair using adhesive bonding and a modified conduit

When repairing nerves with adhesives, most researchers place glue directly on the nerve stumps, but this method does not fix the nerve ends well and allows glue to easily invade the nerve ends. In this study, we established a rat model of completely transected sciatic nerve injury and re- paired it using a modified 1 cm-length conduit with inner diameter of 1.5 mm. Each end of the cylindrical conduit contains a short linear channel, while the enclosed central tube protects the nerve ends well Nerves were repaired with 2-octyl-cyanoacrylate and suture, which complement the function of the modified conduit. The results demonstrated that for the same conduit, the av- erage operation time using the adhesive method was much shorter than with the suture method. No significant differences were found between the two groups in sciatic function index, motor evoked potential latency, motor evoked potential amplitude, muscular recovery rate, number of medullated nerve fibers, axon diameter, or medullary sheath thickness. Thus, the adhesive method for repairing nerves using a modified conduit is feasible and effective, and reduces the operation time while providing an equivalent repair effect.

Celanese Joins U.S.-China Energy Cooperation Program as Founding Management Board Member

Celanese Corporation has become a foundingcorporate member of the U.S.-China EnergyCooperation Program (ECP) and joined theentity’s founding management board.Celaneseannounced on December 23rd,2009.This reaffirms the company’s commitmentto environmentally sustainable growth inChina,the company’s fastest-growingregion.The mission of ECP,a private-sectorinitiated,managed and financedorganization,is to facilitate the adoption