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Abstract Coastal areas have the most obvious ocean–land interaction and experience the most frequent human activities. As the development of coastal areas has a high degree of spatiotemporal variability, local governments bear direct responsibility for marine governance, yet accurately evaluating and analyzing local governments’ marine governance efficiency in coastal areas is challenging. This study constructs a spatiotemporal coupling coordination model to comprehensively evaluate local governments’ marine governance efficiency in six coastal cities in Liaoning Province from 2004 to 2019. A complex system was necessary to obtain the development level, discrete degree, and development speed of each subsystem. The construction of the evaluation index system was the foundation, and the construction of the spatiotemporal weight matrix was the key. The results show that overall, the local governments’ marine governance efficiency level is generally increasing, and the agglomeration effect is obvious. The efficiency of each cities’ economic, ecological, and social governance subsystem is in a process of continuous and dynamic change. The coupling and coordination degrees of the six governance systems have continuously improved and the spatial and temporal differences have decreased; each city shows different coupling and coordination degrees in each subsystem. Regarding the factors affecting comprehensive marine management, Liaoning’s coastal areas fail to attract foreign tourists; the discharge and treatment of industrial wastewater restricts ecological governance; and the reduction of fisheries hinders the social governance system’s efficiency. The results contribute to the understanding of costal cities’ marine governance and promote the sustainable development of coastal areas.

Data mining student information helps to understand the compulsory education population size, structure, distribution and flow characteristics. Here, the spatial evolution, regional disparity, and emerging spatiotemporal distribution patterns are analyzed based on statistical data of primary and secondary education in Liaoning Province from 2010 to 2020. Demographic and spatial analysis methods, population size and structural changes were used in the assessments. The scale of primary and secondary school students in Liaoning Province declined, the gender imbalance was alleviated, and the proportion of migrant students increased. The distribution of students in primary and secondary schools is clearly unbalanced, and an increasingly evident central direction of flow from the countryside to the city exists. The overall difference in distribution of primary and secondary school students in Liaoning Province exhibits a trend of narrowing and then expanding, which is largely due to the uneven distribution among the non-agricultural municipal district, agriculture-related municipal district, and agriculture-related county. The emerging hot spot analysis patterns were dominated by consecutive and intensifying cold spots, spatiotemporal persistent and intensifying hot spots. Overall, these educational statistics and spatial analysis results provide important insights into population and educational geography.

The long-term effects of administrative division adjustments on economic development in Dalian City, China, is presently unclear. Therefore, we employed a geographically and temporally weighted regression model to construct an index assessment system using the annual number of newly registered enterprises as the dependent variable. We empirically studied the effects of administrative division adjustments of townships in Dalian City from 2010 to 2020. The results showed that: (i) adjustments in townships administrative divisions negatively affected regional enterprise concentrations and economic development in general, whereas industrial and transportation factors demonstrated positive effects to variable degrees, and the effects of policy, location, and population factors were not significant. (ii) Over time, the effects of townships administrative division adjustments changed from positive to negative, and the negative effects displayed an increasing trend, revealing that (iii) the effect of administrative division adjustments in Dalian City was positive and negative over time. This further reveals the objective problem that administrative division adjustment in recent years was effective over the short term, but not over the long term. (iv) During the study period, administrative division adjustments positively affected regional enterprise concentrations and economic development solely during a short time frame and in a small geographical area. However, its negative effects increased extensively, which infers that maintaining a relatively stable administrative division is more beneficial for promoting economic development in Dalian City.

Staphylococcus aureus is the major pathogen causing nosocomial human infections and produces a variety of virulence factors that contribute to its ability to colonize and cause diseases. This study was conducted to investigate the virulence genes in S. aureus isolated from sterile body fluid samples and their correlation with clinical symptoms and outcomes. The VITEK 2® Compact system was used to perform biochemical identification and antimicrobial susceptibility tests on 33 S. aureus isolates. Virulence genes were amplified using multiplex PCR. The virulence gene patterns were analyzed by systematic cluster analysis. The frequency of methicillin-resistant S. aureus was 45.45%, and 17 virulence genes were identified. Genes encoding hemolysins showed high frequencies. The frequencies of hla, hlb, hld, and hlgB were 93.94% and that of the luk-F/S-PV was 21.21%. Except for the frequency of splB (51.52%), the remaining genes encoding invasive proteases showed frequencies greater than 81.82%. Among the patients, 100.00% had undergone invasive medical procedures and 24.00% had been treated with more than three types of antibiotic drugs. Invasive medical procedures are the main causes of infection. Resistance to antibiotic drugs and the status of carrying virulence genes were highly related to clinical symptoms and outcomes.

Quantitative analysis through image processing is a key step to gain information regarding the microstructure of materials. In this paper, we develop a deep learning-based method to address the task of image segmentation for microscopic images using an Al–La alloy. Our work makes three key contributions. (1) We train a deep convolutional neural network based on DeepLab to achieve image segmentation and have significant results. (2) We adopt a local processing method based on symmetric overlap-tile strategy which makes it possible to analyze the microscopic images with high resolution. Additionally, it achieves seamless segmentation. (3) We apply symmetric rectification to enhance the accuracy of results with 3D information. Experimental results showed that our method outperforms existing segmentation methods.

To search for more effective tuberculosis (TB) subunit vaccines, antigens expressed in different growth stages of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis), such as RpfE (Rv2450c) produced in the stage of resuscitation, Mtb10.4 (Rv0288), Mtb8.4 (Rv1174c), ESAT6 (Rv3875), Ag85B (Rv1886c) mainly secreted by replicating bacilli, and HspX (Rv2031c) highly expressed in dormant bacilli, were selected to construct six fusion proteins: ESAT6-Ag85B-MPT64190-198-Mtb8.4 (EAMM), Mtb10.4-HspX (MH), ESAT6-Mtb8.4, Mtb10.4-Ag85B, ESAT6-Ag85B, and ESAT6-RpfE. The six fusion proteins were separately emulsified in an adjuvant composed of N,N'-dimethyl-N, N'-dioctadecylammonium bromide (DDA), polyribocytidylic acid (poly I:C) and gelatin to construct subunit vaccines, and their protective effects against M. tuberculosis infection were evaluated in C57BL/6 mice. Furthermore, the boosting effects of EAMM and MH in the adjuvant of DDA plus trehalose 6,6'-dimycolate (TDM) on BCG-induced immunity were also evaluated. It was found that the six proteins were stably produced in E. coli and successfully purified by chromatography. Among them, EAMM presented the most effective protection against M. tuberculosis. Interestingly, the mice that received EAMM+MH had significantly lower bacterial counts in the lungs and spleens than the single protein vaccinated groups, and had the same effect as those that received BCG. In addition, EAMM and MH could improve BCG-primed protective efficacy against M. tuberculosis infection in mice. In conclusion, the combination of EAMM and MH containing antigens from both replicating and dormant stages of the bacilli could induce robust immunity against M. tuberculosis infection in mice and may serve as promising subunit vaccine candidate.