Search

Food occupies a central position in every culture and it is therefore of great interest to understand the evolution of food culture. The advent of the World Wide Web and online recipe repositories have begun to provide unprecedented opportunities for data-driven, quantitative study of food culture. Here we harness an online database documenting recipes from various Chinese regional cuisines and investigate the similarity of regional cuisines in terms of geography and climate. We find that geographical proximity, rather than climate proximity, is a crucial factor that determines the similarity of regional cuisines. We develop a model of regional cuisine evolution that provides helpful clues for understanding the evolution of cuisines and cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Micro-blogging systems have become one of the most important ways for information sharing. Network structure and users’ interactions such as forwarding behaviors have aroused considerable research attention, while mention, as a key feature in micro-blogging platforms which can improve the visibility of a message and direct it to a particular user beyond the underlying social structure, is seldom studied in previous works. In this paper, we empirically study the mention effect in information diffusion, using the dataset from a population-scale social media website. We find that users with high number of followers would receive much more mentions than others. We further investigate the effect of mention in information diffusion by examining the response probability with respect to the number of mentions in a message and observe a saturation at around 5 mentions. Furthermore, we find that the response probability is the highest when a reciprocal followship exists between users, and one is more likely to receive a target user’s response if they have similar social status. To illustrate these findings, we propose the response prediction task and formulate it as a binary classification problem. Extensive evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of discovered factors. Our results have consequences for the understanding of human dynamics on the social network, and potential implications for viral marketing and public opinion monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southern China is considered an important source of influenza virus pandemics because of the large, diverse viral reservoirs in poultry and swine. To examine the trend in influenza A virus of swine (IAV-S), an active surveillance program has been conducted from 2013 to 2015 in Guangdong, China. The phylogenetic analyses showed that the external genes of the isolates were assigned to the Eurasian avian-like swine (EA) H1N1 and/or human-like H3N2 lineages with multiple substitutions, indicating a notable genetic shift. Moreover, the internal genes derived from different origins (PB2, PB1, PA, NP: pdm/09 (pandemic influenza virus 2009)-origin, M: pdm/09- or EA-origin, NS: North American Triple Reassortant (TR)-origin have become the dominant backbone of IAV-S in southern China. According to the origins of the eight gene segments, the isolates can be categorized into five genotypes. The results of mice experiment showed that the YJ4 (genotype 1) and DG2 (genotype 4) are the most pathogenic to mice, and the viruses are observed in kidneys and brains, indicating the systemic infection. The alterations of the IAV-S gene composition supported the continued implementation of the intensive surveillance of IAV-S and the greater attention focused on potential shifts toward transmission to humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study was designed to evaluate the effects of Prunella Vulgaris (P. vulgaris) on the immune function in mice. The mice were randomly divided into one control group and three treatment groups of 10 mice each. The control group received pure water and the treatment groups received P. vulgaris extract at concentrations of 0.15, 0.30 and 0.90 g/kg BW orally for 30 days, respectively. Changes in cell immune function, non-specific immunity and humoral immunity function were evaluated. Active lymphocytes and T lymphocyte subsets were determined by fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS). Certain Serum concentrations of cytokines were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The results showed that, for cell immune function, compared with the control group, foot pad thickness in high dose group increased significantly (p<0.01), whereas no significant difference in the proliferative ability of splenic lymphocytes was observed among all groups (p>0.05). For non-specific immunity, NK cell activity increased significantly in a dose-dependent manner in P. vulgaris treated mice (p<0.01), mononuclear-macrophage function in medium and high dose P. vulgaris treated mice were significantly higher than that of the control group (p<0.05). For humoral immunity, no significant differences were observed in terms of the half value of hemolysis (HC50), number of hemolytic plaques and serum IgG level (p>0.05). The percentage of active T and Th lymphocytes of mice peripheral blood in high dose group were significantly higher than that of the control group (p<0.01). There was no significant difference in serum levels of IL-1β, IL-4, IL-10 and IFN-γ among all of the four groups (p>0.05). The data indicated that 0.90 g/kg BW P. vulgaris extract (equivalent to 7.5 g/kg BW crude drug) had some effect on cellular immune function and non-specific immune function in mice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]