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Xinni Pan,1 Yi Lu,2 Shanshan Fan,1 Hao Tang,2 Haisong Tan,3 Cheng Cao,2 Yingsheng Cheng,1 Yanlei Liu2 1Department of Radiology, Shanghai Sixth People’s Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Instrument Science and Engineering, Institute of Nano Biomedicine and Engineering, Shanghai Engineering Research Centre for Intelligent Diagnosis and Treatment Instrument, School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Urology, Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Yingsheng Cheng, Department of Radiology, Shanghai Sixth People’s Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, 200235, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86-021-38297858, Email chengyingsheng@hotmail.com Yanlei Liu, Institute of Nano Biomedicine and Engineering, Shanghai Engineering Research Centre for Intelligent Diagnosis and Treatment Instrument, Department of Instrument Science and Engineering, School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai, 200240, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86-18721788078, Email liuyanlei@sjtu.edu.cnBackground: Radiotherapy is one of the main clinical methods for the treatment of malignant tumors at present. However, its application is limited by the radiation resistance of some tumor cells and the irradiation damage to the surrounding normal tissues, and the limitation of radiotherapy dose also affects the therapeutic effect. Therefore, developing diagnostic and therapeutic agents with imaging and radiosensitizing functions is urgently needed to improve the accuracy and efficacy of radiotherapy.Materials and Strategy: Herein, we synthesized multifunctional nanotheranostic FRNPs nanoparti

The origin and distribution of lunar water are among the most important issues in understanding the earth-moon system. After more than half a century of laboratory research and remote detection, only hydroxyl contained minerals and lunar ice (H2O) are identified. Here we report the discovery of a hydrous mineral (NH4)MgCl3(H2O)6 in the lunar soil returned by Chang'e-5 mission, which contains 417,000 parts per million H2O. The determined structure and composition are similar to novograblenovite-a terrestrial fumarole mineral formed by reaction of hot basalt in water-rich volcanic gases, whereas the measured isotope composition delta37Cl reached 20.4 parts per thousand, a high value that only found in lunar minerals. We rule out the possibility that this hydrate originated from terrestrial contaminants or rocket exhaust through analysis of its chemical, isotopic compositions as well as the formation conditions. Our finding indicates that water can exist on some parts of the sunlit Moon in the form of hydrate compounds. Moreover, this hydrate is rich in ammonium, providing new information in understanding the origin of the Moon., Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures

Anticipated growth in living standards has accentuated higher requirements for effluent quality from municipal wastewater treatment. In this study, an air-lifting internal circulating reactor with a high internal circulation ratio (36:1) was established to treat municipal wastewater with a long-term operation. In the bioreactor, the average effluent chemical oxygen demand, total nitrogen, and ammonium nitrogen could be 13.1, 5.7, and lower than 1 mg/L, respectively. Further analysis of nitrogen removal showed that traditional nitrification and denitrification, simultaneous nitrification and denitrification (SND), and nitrogen assimilation accounted for 27.4 %, 68.7 %, and 3.9 % respectively. The proportion of aerobic bacteria (Saprospiraceae) and facultative bacteria (Comamonadaceae) were significantly increased, indicating a higher capacity for organic degradation in the reactor. The relative abundance of denitrifying bacteria and bacterial groups with SND (Comamonadaceae) increased. These results suggested the air-lifting internal circulating reactor could be a viable and efficient option for superior nitrogen removal in wastewater treatment. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd

Toxic content detection is crucial for online services to remove inappropriate content that violates community standards. To automate the detection process, prior works have proposed varieties of machine learning (ML) approaches to train Language Models (LMs) for toxic content detection. However, both their accuracy and transferability across datasets are limited. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in toxic content detection due to their superior zero-shot and few-shot in-context learning ability as well as broad transferability on ML tasks. However, efficiently designing prompts for LLMs remains challenging. Moreover, the high run-time cost of LLMs may hinder their deployments in production. To address these challenges, in this work, we propose BD-LLM, a novel and efficient approach to Bootstrapping and Distilling LLMs for toxic content detection. Specifically, we design a novel prompting method named Decision-Tree-of-Thought (DToT) to bootstrap LLMs' detection performance and extract high-quality rationales. DToT can automatically select more fine-grained context to re-prompt LLMs when their responses lack confidence. Additionally, we use the rationales extracted via DToT to fine-tune student LMs. Our experimental results on various datasets demonstrate that DToT can improve the accuracy of LLMs by up to 4.6%. Furthermore, student LMs fine-tuned with rationales extracted via DToT outperform baselines on all datasets with up to 16.9\% accuracy improvement, while being more than 60x smaller than conventional LLMs. Finally, we observe that student LMs fine-tuned with rationales exhibit better cross-dataset transferability.

High quality transcription data is crucial for training automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. However, the existing industry-level data collection pipelines are expensive to researchers, while the quality of crowdsourced transcription is low. In this paper, we propose a reliable method to collect speech transcriptions. We introduce two mechanisms to improve transcription quality: confidence estimation based reprocessing at labeling stage, and automatic word error correction at post-labeling stage. We collect and release LibriCrowd - a large-scale crowdsourced dataset of audio transcriptions on 100 hours of English speech. Experiment shows the Transcription WER is reduced by over 50%. We further investigate the impact of transcription error on ASR model performance and found a strong correlation. The transcription quality improvement provides over 10% relative WER reduction for ASR models. We release the dataset and code to benefit the research community., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables, INTERSPEECH 2023

High-quality human transcription is essential for training and improving Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models. Recent study~\cite{libricrowd} has found that every 1% worse transcription Word Error Rate (WER) increases approximately 2% ASR WER by using the transcriptions to train ASR models. Transcription errors are inevitable for even highly-trained annotators. However, few studies have explored human transcription correction. Error correction methods for other problems, such as ASR error correction and grammatical error correction, do not perform sufficiently for this problem. Therefore, we propose HTEC for Human Transcription Error Correction. HTEC consists of two stages: Trans-Checker, an error detection model that predicts and masks erroneous words, and Trans-Filler, a sequence-to-sequence generative model that fills masked positions. We propose a holistic list of correction operations, including four novel operations handling deletion errors. We further propose a variant of embeddings that incorporates phoneme information into the input of the transformer. HTEC outperforms other methods by a large margin and surpasses human annotators by 2.2% to 4.5% in WER. Finally, we deployed HTEC to assist human annotators and showed HTEC is particularly effective as a co-pilot, which improves transcription quality by 15.1% without sacrificing transcription velocity., Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, 11 tables, AMLC 2023

In the version of the article initially published, capitalization was missing from the “late Permian” and “Early Triassic” periods in the title, while “late Permian” as now appears throughout the text was originally spelt “Late Permian,” in error. The changes have been made to the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

In the Precambrian, reverse weathering—a process consuming oceanic silica, metal cations and alkalinity to form marine clays—was a key control of the long-term carbon cycle. However, the appearance of marine silicifiers decreased the importance of this process in regulating climate in the Phanerozoic eon. Here, we present seawater lithium and strontium isotope records derived from bulk carbonates and fossil brachiopods spanning the Permian to Early Triassic, an interval of pronounced climatic fluctuations and widespread extinctions. We show that the lithium isotope composition of seawater remained constant for most of the Permian until a sharp decrease in the Late Permian (~254 Myr ago) with low seawater Li isotope values (~10‰) persisting throughout the Early Triassic. Based on box modelling, changes in chemical weathering and hydrothermal fluxes are unable to explain the abrupt decline in seawater Li isotopes. Rather, increased lithium output fluxes through enhanced reverse weathering are required to produce the low Li isotope values of the Late Permian and Early Triassic (253–247 Myr ago). Increased reverse weathering rates could explain the failure of chemical weathering to draw down atmospheric CO2 levels during the Early Triassic, leading to protracted biotic recovery from the Permian–Triassic mass extinction.

Ke Zeng,1,&ast; Jia-Mo Zhang,2,&ast; Xiao-Bin Li,1 Sheng-Xian Peng,3 Su-Chuan Zhang,4 Wen-Xian Xie,5 Chun-Fang Xi,1 Cheng-Jian Cao6 1Department of Urology, First People’s Hospital of Zigong City, Zigong, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Urology, YongChuan Hospital Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China; 3Scientific Research Department, First People’s Hospital of Zigong City, Zigong, People’s Republic of China; 4Laboratory Department, First People’s Hospital of Zigong City, Zigong, People’s Republic of China; 5Department of Basic Medicine, Sichuan Vocational College of Health and Rehabilitation, Zigong, People’s Republic of China; 6Zigong Academy of Medical Sciences, First People’s Hospital of Zigong City, Zigong, People’s Republic of China&ast;These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Cheng-Jian CaoZigong Academy of Medical Sciences, First People’s Hospital of Zigong City, Zigong, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail cccjj2011@163.comObjective: To analyze the bacterial biofilm (BF) formation in patients with malignancy undergoing double J stent indwelling and its influencing factors.Methods: A total of 167 patients with malignant tumors who received double J stent indwelling in the hospital from January 2018 to January 2021 were included in the study. The urine and double J stent samples were collected for bacterial identification and observed for BF formation on the surface of the urinary catheter under a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to analyze the influencing factors of BF.Results: The BF formation rate was 34.73% (58/167). The BF formation rate of positive specimens cultured in urine and double J stent was significantly higher than that of negative ones (P< 0.05). Staphylococcus was the main BF bacteria in double J stent and urine culture specimens, followed by Enterococcus, Pseudomonas, Enterobacte

Fujun Zhou,1,* Cheng Cao,2,* Huiping Chai,2 Jingfang Hong,3 Min Zhu1 1Department of Health and Nursing, Anhui Vocational College of City Management, Hefei City, Anhui Province, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Thoracic Surgery, 4th Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei City, Anhui Province, People’s Republic of China; 3School of Nursing, Anhui Medical University, Hefei City, Anhui Province, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Cheng CaoDepartment of Thoracic Surgery, 4th Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, No. 100 Huaihai Avenue, Hefei, 230022, Anhui Province, People’s Republic of ChinaTel/Fax +86 0551-66331040 Email caochengaysfy@163.comBackground: Smoking is the most common cause of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and the early diagnosis for COPD remains poor. Exploring the molecular mechanism and finding feasible biomarkers will be beneficial for clinical management of COPD. Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are noncoding RNAs that act as miRNA sponges to regulate the expression levels of genes, leading to the changes of cellular phenotypes and disease progression. CircRNA HECT domain and ankyrin repeat containing E3 ubiquitin protein ligase 1 (circ-HACE1) was abnormally expressed after the induction of cigarette smoke extract (CSE) in cell model. This study was performed to explore its function and mechanism in COPD.Methods: Circ-HACE1, microRNA-485-3p (miR-485-3p) and toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) detection was performed by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). Cell viability and apoptosis/cell cycle were respectively examined using cell counting kit-8 (CCK-8) and flow cytometry. Inflammatory cytokines were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Oxidative stress was evaluated through the measurement of malondialdehyde (MDA) and superoxide dismutase (SOD). The target binding analysis was co

In order to study the vibration response of reducer of electric vehicle, a model for the reducer is established in ANSYS Motion, a multi-body dynamics software. Firstly, a 3D model of the reducer is built, including such assemblies as its shaft, gears, bearing, and its case. Secondly, based on the finite element model, the modal simulation is carried out. Finally, under the specified operating condition when the motor speed increases from 0 rpm to 10000 rpm, with using the STFT method, the vibration response of the reducer is obtained through the multi-body dynamics simulation. After comparing the simulation results between different marked nodes, the conclusion indicates that this process can calculate the vibration characteristics of the reducer quickly and accurately and can lay the foundation for the structural optimization in terms of vibration and acoustic properties.

In this thesis, the main objective is to understand the relationship between the physicochemical properties and the biological activities of nanoparticles based on the self-assembled block glycopolymers and the zwitterionic poly(2-methacryloyloxyethyl phosphorycholine) (MPC) block copolymers. In addition to the physicochemical properties of nanoparticles such as size, shape, and surface chemistry, drug effects on the nanoparticles’ structure and function are investigated. Due to the interaction between the hydrophobic drugs and hydrophilic polymers, hydrophobic drugs might unexpectedly locate in the hydrophilic environment (hydrophilic shell) which can not only induce morphological transitions, but also influence the internal structure of nanoparticles, such as hydration and grafting density. These factors affect the cellular uptake in vitro. Generally, higher hydration of nanoparticles’ shells is correlated with an enhanced cellular uptake in MCF-7 cells, MDA-MB-231 cells, and RAW 264.7 cells due to the bioactive group more efficiently contacting to cells in a water environment. Moreover, nanoparticles with higher grafting density polymers suggest a lower cellular uptake due to their increased ability to adsorb protein, and the adsorbed protein not only influences the internal structure change (e.g. thickness of shell and core radius) but also induces an overall shape transition from sphere to oblate. All these factors may lead to lower cellular uptake. Additionally, higher grafting density does not afford an enhanced cellular uptake when the nanoparticles do not adsorb proteins, such as the zwitterionic poly(2-methacryloyloxyethyl phosphorycholine) (MPC) nanoparticles. Small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and small angle neutron scattering (SANS), with the help of DLS and TEM, play important roles in not only characterizing the size and shape, but also providing information on the internal structure of nanoparticles (e.g. hydration, aggregation number, and grafting

In nature, self-assembly processes based on amphiphilic molecules play an integral part in the design of structures of higher order such as cells. Among them, amphiphilic glycoproteins or glycolipids take on a pivotal role due to their bioactivity. Here we show that sugars, in particular, fructose, are capable of directing the self-assembly of highly insoluble curcumin resulting in the formation of well-defined capsules based on non-covalent forces. Simply by mixing an aqueous solution of fructose and curcumin in an open vessel leads to the generation of capsules with sizes ranging between 100 and 150 nm independent of the initial concentrations used. Our results demonstrate that hydrogen bonding displayed by fructose can induce the self-assembly of hydrophobic molecules such as curcumin into well-ordered structures, and serving as a simple and virtually instantaneous way of making nanoparticles from curcumin in water with the potential for template polymerization and nanocarriers.

The lightweight design of the electric vehicle motor brought about more serious vibration and noise problem of the motor. An accurate modal calculation was the basis for the study of the vibration and noise characteristics of the electric vehicle motor. The finite element method was used to perform the modal simulation of the PMSM. Through the reasonable simplification and equivalence of the motor stator model, the first 7 orders natural frequencies and corresponding modes of the motor stator under the free state were calculated. After that, the accuracy of the finite element model was verified by the hammering modal experiment of the prototype. Furthermore, the above results will provide the theoretical basis for the electric vehicle motor’s vibration control and NVH improvement.

Novel biomarkers and non-invasive diagnostic methods are urgently needed for the screening of gastric cancer to reduce its high mortality. We employed quantitative proteomics approach to develop discriminatory biomarker signatures from human saliva for the detection of gastric cancer. Salivary proteins were analyzed and compared between gastric cancer patients and matched control subjects by using tandem mass tags (TMT) technology. More than 500 proteins were identified with quantification, and 48 of them showed significant difference expression (p < 0.05) between normal controls and gastric cancer patients, including 7 up-regulated proteins and 41 down-regulated proteins. Five proteins were selected for initial verification by ELISA and three were successfully verified, namely cystatin B (CSTB), triosephosphate isomerase (TPI1), and deleted in malignant brain tumors 1 protein (DMBT1). All three proteins could differentiate gastric cancer patients from normal control subjects, dramatically (p < 0.05). The combination of these three biomarkers could reach 85% sensitivity and 80% specificity for the detection of gastric cancer with accuracy of 0.93. This study provides the proof of concept of salivary biomarkers for the non-invasive detection of gastric cancer. It is highly encouraging to turn these biomarkers into an applicable clinical test after large scale validation.

Novel biomarkers and non-invasive diagnostic methods are urgently needed for the screening of gastric cancer to reduce its high mortality. We employed quantitative proteomics approach to develop discriminatory biomarker signatures from human saliva for the detection of gastric cancer. Salivary proteins were analyzed and compared between gastric cancer patients and matched control subjects by using tandem mass tags (TMT) technology. More than 500 proteins were identified with quantification, and 48 of them showed significant difference expression (p < 0.05) between normal controls and gastric cancer patients, including 7 up-regulated proteins and 41 down-regulated proteins. Five proteins were selected for initial verification by ELISA and three were successfully verified, namely cystatin B (CSTB), triosephosphate isomerase (TPI1), and deleted in malignant brain tumors 1 protein (DMBT1). All three proteins could differentiate gastric cancer patients from normal control subjects, dramatically (p < 0.05). The combination of these three biomarkers could reach 85% sensitivity and 80% specificity for the detection of gastric cancer with accuracy of 0.93. This study provides the proof of concept of salivary biomarkers for the non-invasive detection of gastric cancer. It is highly encouraging to turn these biomarkers into an applicable clinical test after large scale validation.

Given a large number of low-level heterogeneous categorical alerts from an anomaly detection system, how to characterize complex relationships between different alerts, filter out false positives, and deliver trustworthy rankings and suggestions to end users? This problem is motivated by and generalized from applications in enterprise security and attack scenario reconstruction. While existing techniques focus on either reconstructing abnormal scenarios or filtering out false positive alerts, it can be more advantageous to consider the two perspectives simultaneously in order to improve detection accuracy and better understand anomaly behaviors. In this paper, we propose CAR, a collaborative alerts ranking framework that exploits both temporal and content correlations from heterogeneous categorical alerts. CAR first builds a tree-based model to capture both short-term correlations and long-term dependencies in each alert sequence, which identifies abnormal action sequences. Then, an embedding-based model is employed to learn the content correlations between alerts via their heterogeneous categorical attributes. Finally, by incorporating both temporal and content dependencies into one optimization framework, CAR ranks both alerts and their corresponding alert patterns. Our experiments, using real-world enterprise monitoring data and real attacks launched by professional hackers, show that CAR can accurately identify true positive alerts and successfully reconstruct attack scenarios at the same time., Comment: We want to withdraw the paper due to some error in it. We don't want to confuse the readers

This project uses fast, high-throughput in vitro approach to study new nanomaterials applicable to Chemical Biological Defense (CBD) for their environmental and human related toxicity. Four CBD nanomaterials were evaluated for their aquatic toxicity by Microtox test and human cytotoxicity by NRU assay. These studies fill the data gaps and provide toxicity information useful in risk assessment when the environmental and human exposure to these new CBD nanomaterials. In addition, Transepithelial Electrical Resistance (TER) and Transepithelial Permeability (TEP) assays were developed and tested on EpiAirway, a 3-D human tracheal/bronchial epithelial equivalent. Further evaluation of the effects of these CBD nanomaterials on tissue tight junction and barrier function is the on-going study. This project supports the efforts of USAPHC/OTSG in CBRN incident response for protecting the work force, civilian and military, from the unintended consequences of nanotechnology processes and materials exposure.

Sustainable use of training ranges requires the development of compounds that have a minimal impact on the environment when used in a weapon system. Triaminoguanidinium-1-methyl-5- nitriminotetrazolate (TAG-MNT) is a novel, explosive, military compound of interest for application in some weapon systems. Little is known of its toxicologic properties. To ensure the health of potentially exposed personnel and the environment, several initial toxicity investigations were conducted and the results compared with another widely used energetic (hexahydro-1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazine; RDX). In a novel microplate Ames assay, TAG-MNT was a weak mutagen only at the limit concentration of 2 g/L. However, TAG-MNT was cytotoxic to bacteria and a human liver cell line at 250 mg/L and greater. Unlike RDX, TAG-MNT did not have an affinity for the GABAa receptor convulsant site, and was predicted not to induce seizure. After acute oral dosing in female rats, TAG-MNT had no apparent adverse effect up to the limit dose of 2 g/kg. However, daily oral dosing for 14 days at exposures of 1000 mg/kg-d and above caused reduction in food intake, weight loss, increased kidney weight, leucopenia, and elevated blood urea nitrogen and creatinine levels. Leucopenia, increased liver mass, evidence of liver hepatocyte necrosis and centrilobular hypertrophy were observed at 500 mg/kg-d and above. TAG-MNT was negative in the rat micronucleus assay of blood samples. Based on these data, the 14-day oral No observed adverse effect level (NOAEL) and the lowest observed adverse effect level (LOAEL) is 250 and 500 mg/kg/day, respectively., Published in Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health Sciences, v3 n3 p80-94, March 2011.

Environmental consequences of using specific compounds in military applications have lead to undesirable outcomes. Examples include expensive clean up operations, off-site groundwater migrations, and closing of operational ranges. Additionally, the use of specific weapon systems containing compounds with unknown or limited toxicity data may lead to adverse health consequences to soldiers and civilians. Often incomplete health information has led to inaccurate full life cycle cost estimates. The Army is currently exploring replacement substances for compounds identified as hazardous to health from an environmental and/or occupational (ESOH) perspective. To evaluate the environmental and occupational health consequences of new replacement compounds, a tiered approach has been developed and used within the program. Early in the research stage models are primarily relied upon (e.g. QSAR approaches) and as the technology progresses, a greater reliance is placed on experimental data beginning with in vitro techniques. As greater investment is devoted to system development, less uncertain in vivo data are collected. Together, these data and weighted lines of evidence are used to help guide life cycle decisions in the development of new systems. Examples will be provided., Presented at the Annual Partners in Environmental Technology Technical Symposium & Workshop (15th), Washington, DC, 30 Nov - 2 Dec 2010. Sponsored by SERDP and ESTCP. U.S. Government or Federal Rights License

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is an exquisitely sensitive method for the amplification and detection of genetic material (DNA and RNA sequences). We have developed several assays using a variation of PCR that proceeds very quickly and allows the monitoring of the progress of the reaction in real time. We describe here assays for the detection of the gene encoding staphylococcal enterotoxin A (SEA), a toxin produced by the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus and an agent responsible for a significant fraction of food poisoning incidents worldwide. We also describe several assays for the detection of a simulant of viral pathogens, the bacteriophage MS2., See also ADM001523.

Antibodies are essential components in biosensors and enable the detection of biological warfare agents with both sensitivity and selectivity. A biomanufacturing process was developed for the production of a monoclonal antibody (mAb) specific for detecting the Frencisella tularensls organism in the environment. This report describes a process for the production of 12 g of monocional antibody from an in vitro call culture system. Hybridoma calls were grown in 2-L gas permeable call culture bags. The numbers of both total and live calls in culture media were measured throughout the process and correlated with antibody concentration over time. Antibody concentrations in samples collected during culture were monitored and during the purification process were analyzed by analytical high-performance liquid chromatography. Antibodies were purified from spent culture media, using a single-step Protein-A affinity chromatography procedure. The overall yield for the downstream purification process is approximately 78%. The purifies of the purified mAb lots were around 94 - 99%, as determined by an analytical gel permeation chromatographic method. The purified mAb was active as reference lots of the antibody produced elsewhere, as determined by direct enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays.