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BackgroundThe solute carrier family 30 A8 zinc transporter (SLC30A8) plays a crucial role in insulin secretion. This study aimed to investigate the impact of SLC30A8 gene polymorphisms on gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM).MethodsThe research objective was to select 500 patients with GDM and 502 control subjects. Rs13266634 and rs2466293 were genotyped using the SNPscan™ genotyping assay. Statistical tests, such as the chi-square test, t-test, logistic regression, ANOVA, and meta-analysis, were conducted to determine the differences in genotypes, alleles, and their associations with GDM risk.ResultsStatistically significant differences were observed in age, pregestational BMI, SBP, DBP, and parity between individuals with GDM and healthy subjects (P < 0.05). After adjusting for these factors, rs2466293 remained significantly associated with an increased risk of GDM in overall subjects (GG+AG vs. AA: OR = 1.310; 95% CI: 1.005-1.707; P = 0.046, GG vs. AA: OR = 1.523; 95% CI: 1.010-2.298; P = 0.045 and G vs. A: OR = 1.249; 95% CI: 1.029-1.516; P = 0.024). Rs13266634 was still found to be significantly associated with a decreased risk of GDM in individuals aged ≥ 30 years (TT vs. CT+CC: OR = 0.615; 95% CI: 0.392-0.966; P = 0.035, TT vs. CC: OR = 0.503; 95% CI: 0.294-0.861; P = 0.012 and T vs. C: OR =0.723; 95% CI: 0.557-0.937; P = 0.014). Additionally, the haplotype CG was found to be associated with a higher risk of GDM (P < 0.05). Furthermore, pregnant women with the CC or CT genotype of rs13266634 exhibited significantly higher mean blood glucose levels than those with the TT genotype (P < 0.05). Our findings were further validated by the results of a meta-analysis.ConclusionThe SLC30A8 rs2466293 polymorphism was found to be associated with an increased risk of GDM, while rs13266634 was associated with a decreased risk of GDM in individuals aged ≥ 30 years. These findings provide a theoretical basis for GDM testing.

The paper investigates two inertial extragradient algorithms for seeking a common solution to a variational inequality problem involving a monotone and Lipschitz continuous mapping and a fixed point problem with a demicontractive mapping in real Hilbert spaces. Our algorithms only need to calculate the projection on the feasible set once in each iteration. Moreover, they can work well without the prior information of the Lipschitz constant of the cost operator and do not contain any line search process. The strong convergence of the algorithms is established under suitable conditions. Some experiments are presented to illustrate the numerical efficiency of the suggested algorithms and compare them with some existing ones., Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures

Additional file 9: Table S7. Subgroup analysis of the relation between clinical factors and overall survival (OS)

Additional file 11: Table S9. Multivariate analysis of the correlation between biomarkers and progression-free survival (PFS)

Additional file 12: Table S10. Multivariate analysis of the correlation between biomarkers and overall survival (OS)

Additional file 10: Table S8. Subgroup analysis of the correlation between clinical factors and overall response rate (ORR)

Additional file 7: Table S5. Patients who achieved complete response (n = 4)

Additional file 8: Table S6. Subgroup analysis of the relation between clinical factors and progression-free survival (PFS)

Additional file 1: Table S1. All centers participating in the study

Additional file 3: Table S3. Detailed dose titration and delayed dose criteria of anlotinib

Additional file 4: Table S4. The information of primary antibodies

Additional file 2: Table S2. Detailed exclusion criteria

The paper presents four modifications of the inertial forward–backward splitting method for monotone inclusion problems in the framework of real Hilbert spaces. The advantages of our iterative sche...

Additional file 1: Figure S1. Knockdown of ALKBH5 does not affect the proliferation and migration of 16HBE cells in vitro. A CCK-8 assays were performed to evaluate the proliferation of 16HBE cells after knocking down ALKBH5. B Transwell assays were performed to evaluate migration in 16HBE cells after knocking down ALKBH5. Figure S2. The correlation of expression between ALKBH5 and VEGFA in lung cancer was analyzed using the GEPIA website. Figure S3. Three replicates of tube formation with conditioned medium from A549 or H1975 cells transfected with si-ALKBH5 or NC. Red boxes represent the typical cases which are used in Fig.4. Figure S4. The overall survival of lung cancer patients with high PVT1 expression and low PVT1 expression in the GSE30219 dataset was analyzed using the lnCAR website. Figure S5. The overexpression efficiency of ALKBH5 in A549 cells after transfection with the pcDNA3.1-ALKBH5 or pcDNA3.1 plasmid was measured by qRT‒PCR. **: P < 0.01. Figure S6. The expression of PVT1 was measured by qRT‒PCR in four lung cancer cell lines (A549, H1299, H1975, PC9) and 16HBE human bronchial epithelial cells. *: P < 0.05, **: P < 0.01. Figure S7. A The knockdown efficiency of PVT1 in A549 and H1975 cells after transfection with si-PVT1 or NC was measured by qRT‒PCR. B The overexpression efficiency of PVT1 in A549 cells after transfection with the pcDNA3.1-PVT1 or pcDNA3.1 plasmid was measured by qRT‒PCR. **: P < 0.01, ***: P < 0.001. Figure S8. Colony formation assays were performed to evaluate the proliferation of lung cancer cells when PVT1 was knocked down in A549 (A) or H1975 (B) cells or overexpressed in A549 cells (C). **: P < 0.01. Figure S9. The correlation of expression between PVT1 and VEGFA was analyzed in lung cancer using the GEPIA website. Figure S10. Three replicates of tube formation with conditioned medium from A549 cells transfected with si-PVT1 or NC. Red boxes represent the typical cases which are used in Fig.6. Figure S11. Three replicates of tube formation with conditioned medium from A549 cells transfected with si-ALKBH5 or NC and pcDNA3.1-PVT1 or pcDNA3.1. Red boxes represent the typical cases which are used in Fig. 7.

The lead-bismuth eutectic(LBE)-cooled nuclear systems have significant natural circulation due to its large thermal expansion. Therefore, the passive safety of the reactor in postulated accidents is greatly improved. Moreover, the flow resistance and heat transfer characteristics are important to natural circulation ability of LBE-cooled system. In this paper, the natural circulation capability, the flow resistance and heat transfer characteristics were experimentally studied in the Natural Circulation Capability Loop(NCCL) facility. The research mainly includes four aspects: 1) start-up process of natural circulation; 2) capability of natural circulation; 3) flow resistance of LBE in an annular channel and 4) heat transfer in an annular channel. The results showed that a significant natural convection flow was generated in the experiment. Due to high thermal expansion of LBE, the natural circulation is quickly established and stabilized. The flow rate of natural circulation depends on the loop resistance and the temperature between heating section and cooling section. In our experiment, the maximum natural circulation flow rate was measured to be ∼0.81 kg/s. A new friction coefficient correlation was fitted and the results is slightly larger than the value calculated by the Blasius formula. For the convection heat transfer of liquid LBE in an annular channel, the heat conduction term is dominant, and the Nusselt number increases with the increase of Peclet number. Fitted experimental correlation of convection heat transfer of liquid LBE in annular channel is given.

To simulate the working process of EPDM PSD of dual-pulse solid rocket motor from beginning to failure, we use a hyperelastic model with erergy limiter to model this working process. In traditional practice, the consistent tangent moduli of mechanical model is derived by analytic method, however, the analytic method is tedious and fallible. To solve this problem, we introduce numerical approximate method (complex-step derivative, which is proved to be of second-order for suitably small perturbation and does not suffer from inherent subtractive cancellations ) to derive the consistent tangent moduli, which is simple, robust, and efficient, and can be easily implemented into commercial finite element software. Finally, we simulate a case of unixial tension of a dumbbell-shape and compare the simulation results with the analytic results, a good agreement between the two kinds of results is observed.

The objective of this research is to explore a convex feasibility problem, which consists of a monotone variational inequality problem and a fixed point problem. We introduce four inertial extragradient algorithms that are motivated by the inertial method, the subgradient extragradient method, the Tseng's extragradient method and the Mann-type method endowed with a simple step size. Strong convergence theorems of the algorithms are established under some standard and suitable conditions enforced by the cost operators. Finally, we implement some computational tests to show the efficiency and advantages of the proposed algorithms and compare them with some existing ones., Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures

This paper is to analyze the approximation solution of a split variational inclusion problem in the framework of infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces. For this purpose, several inertial hybrid and shrinking projection algorithms are proposed under the effect of self-adaptive stepsizes which does not require information of the norms of the given operators. Some strong convergence properties of the proposed algorithms are obtained under mild constraints. Finally, an experimental application is given to illustrate the performances of proposed methods by comparing existing results.

Adversarial attacks have proved to be the major impediment in the progress on research towards reliable machine learning solutions. Carefully crafted perturbations, imperceptible to human vision, can be added to images to force misclassification by an otherwise high performing neural network. To have a better understanding of the key contributors of such structured attacks, we searched for and studied spatially co-located patterns in the distribution of pixels in the input space. In this paper, we propose a framework for segregating and isolating regions within an input image which are particularly critical towards either classification (during inference), or adversarial vulnerability or both. We assert that during inference, the trained model looks at a specific region in the image, which we call Region of Importance (RoI); and the attacker looks at a region to alter/modify, which we call Region of Attack (RoA). The success of this approach could also be used to design a post-hoc adversarial defence method, as illustrated by our observations. This uses the notion of blocking out (we call neutralizing) that region of the image which is highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks but is not important for the task of classification. We establish the theoretical setup for formalising the process of segregation, isolation and neutralization and substantiate it through empirical analysis on standard benchmarking datasets. The findings strongly indicate that mapping features into the input space preserves the significant patterns typically observed in the feature-space while adding major interpretability and therefore simplifies potential defensive mechanisms., Comment: Submitted for review

The gas lift pump has been used in the development of an Accelerator Driven System (ADS) nuclear reactor instead of mechanical pumps due to its simple mechanical structure. The two phase flow of Lead Bismuth eutectic (LBE)-inert gas in rising pipe could remarkably increase natural circulation capacity. This study aims to evaluate the performance of the gas lift pump and to conduct the relevant parametric study. As a result, the Natural Circulation Capability Loop (NCCL) test facility was designed and constructed. The height of the experimental loop is 4.5 m and the rising height is 3.5 m. The maximum temperature of the loop is 500 °C. The experiments about the gas lift pump in LBE were performed with risers of three different heights. The results showed that the LBE mass flow rate increases rapidly with an increase of argon flow rate when it is less than 300 NL/h. When the argon flow rate is larger than 300 NL/h, the growth of the LBE mass flow rate is reduced. The LBE mass flow rate increased process is accompanied by the transformation of the flow pattern. The variation trend of the LBE flow rate is consistent with the trend of the void friction in the riser. Under the same amount of argon gas injection, the LBE circulation ability increases as the height of the riser increased. Based on the experimental data and drift-flow model of Zuber and Findlay, a new correlation of the void fraction is obtained and the relative error between the calculated and the experimental value is within 30%. The purpose of this study is to reveal the enhancement mechanism of the natural circulation capacity of gas lift pump and to provide experimental data and model support for the design of ADS in China.

Chronic hepatitis B (CHB) infection is a typical inflammatory disease characterized by a dysregulated expression of cytokines, which contributes to the pathogenesis of chronic Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection. IL-36 cytokines (IL-36α, IL-36β, IL-36γ and IL-36Ra) are important players in infection and immunity. However, their roles in the pathogenesis of chronic HBV infection remain unknown. Here the circulating concentrations of IL-36 cytokines from 50 CHB patients and 30 healthy controls were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Sera concentrations of IL-36α were found to be significantly elevated in CHB patients, while the concentrations of IL-36β, IL-36γ and IL-36Ra were not significantly different in comparison to healthy donors. Furthermore, increased IL-36α concentrations correlated positively with HBV-DNA levels in CHB patients. Our study suggests that IL-36α production was up-regulated during CHB infection, which could be directly related to HBV-DNA loads in CHB patients. The immunoregulatory role of IL-36α in the pathogenesis of chronic HBV infection should be further studied.

In order to investigate the thermal-hydraulic characteristics of LBE in Accelerator Driven System (ADS), the Natural Circulation Capability Loop (NCCL) test facility was designed and constructed at Xi’An Jiaotong university in 2015. NCCL is a middle-scale experimental loop designed for investigating the natural circulation capacity, gas-lift pump enhancing circulation capacity and heat-transfer characteristic of LBE. For the natural circulation capability experiment, the loop is filled with argon gas at 0.2 MPa before filling LBE from store tank. The maximum temperature of LBE is 500 C°, while the normal operation temperature was maintained at 400 C°. In this paper, the LBE natural circulation characteristics were investigated with experiments in NCCL test facility. The study includes measurements on start-up of natural circulation and capability of natural circulation. Significant natural convection flow was observed in the experiments. It was found that the natural circulation was quickly established and stabilized due to LBE high thermal expansion property. It took only a few minutes to have a stable natural circulation prevailing from cold conditions. At the same time, the temperature difference between heating section and cooling section increase quickly and reach to the maximum value. And in the range of 10 minutes, a steady circulation can be performed. The natural circulation flowrate depends on the loop resistance, and the temperature difference between the hot leg and the cold leg, as determined by the power level and the heat sink capacity. The experiments show that the maximum flowrate for the natural circulation is 0∼0.81 kg/s.

The contamination status and health risks of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene (BTEX) in air, soil, dust and groundwater were evaluated in a pesticide chemical region located in Hebei province, China. The concentrations of BTEX in air ranged from 7.80 to 238ug/m(3) and those in soil and dust ranged from lower than limit of detection (LOD) to 32,360ng/g dw, and those in groundwater varied from 2.68 to 98.6ug/L. Generally, the levels of BTEX in multimedia matrixes were all below the standards established in China. Health risk assessment was performed based on the monitoring data via inhalation, dermal contact and ingestion pathways and hazard quotient (HQ) was calculated to be on the order of 10(-7), below 10(-6), and Hazard index (HI) levels of BTEX were lower than 1.0. However, both HQ and HI ascended with an increase in work experience/exposure. Integrated risk management was proposed to eliminate BTEX pollution and to protect occupational health of workers in those industries.

Surface elevation data for sea ice in the northwesternty - Weddell Sea, Antarctica, collected by a helicopter-borne laser altimeter during the Winter Weddell Outflow Study 2006, were used to estimate the form drag on pressure ridges and its contribution to the total wind drag, and the air-ice drag coefficient at a reference height of 10 m under neutral stability conditions (Cdn(10)). This was achieved by partitioning the total wind drag into two components: form drag on pressure ridges and skin drag over rough sea-ice surfaces. The results reveal that for the compacted ice field, the contribution of form drag on pressure ridges to the total wind drag increases with increasing ridging intensity Ri (where Ri is the ratio of mean ridge height to spacing), while the contribution decreases with increasing roughness length. There is also an increasing trend in the air-ice drag coefficient Cdn(10) as ridging intensity Ri increases. However, as roughness length increases, Cdn(10) increases at lower ridging intensities (Ri < 0.023) but decreases at lower ridging intensities (0.023 < Ri < 0.05). These opposing trends are mainly caused by the dominance of the form drag on pressure ridges and skin drag over rough ice surfaces. Generally, the form drag becomes dominant only when the ridging intensity is sufficiently large, while the skin drag is the dominant component at relatively larger ridging intensities. These results imply that a large value of Cdn(10) is caused not only by the form drag on pressure ridges, but also by the skin drag over rough ice surfaces. Additionally, the estimated drag coefficients are consistent with reported measurements in the northwestern Weddell Sea, further demonstrating the feasibility of the drag partition model.

Water formation test loop was constructed with a scale ratio of 1:1 to investigate the condensation and analogous U-shaped tube water seal in front of pressurizer safety valve. The water seal features were investigated under different pressure and various concentrations of non-condensable gases. The test data reveals that water seal can completely formed even in the presence of non-condensable gases in high content. Water formation time reduced when increased system pressure and refilling of the pipe is much more rapid than the initial one due to a lower content of non-condensable gases remaining in the steam phase. A simple criterion to determine the water seal starting point has been put forward in this paper. The strong natural convection in the water seal keeps the temperature difference lower than 20K.

Predicted genes of WIV19 and comparison to those of known adenoviruses. (DOCX 20Â kb)

Guangzhou's population has been rapidly aging, while corresponding problems in endowment have been growing increasingly severe. Given this situation, Guangzhou has formed a model of diversified endowment that mainly focuses on endowment at home. The city's endowment policies have also gradually formed a policy framework that is mostly focused on endowment security and endowment services, which involve economic support, living care, and the spiritual needs of the elderly. This article systematically looks at Guangzhou's endowment policy system and on this foundation further analyzes the specific contents of Guangzhou's endowment policy model, endowment policy authorities, basic endowment insurance policies, and family endowment service policies.

A dynamic data updating algorithm for image superesolution is proposed. On the basis of Delaunay triangulation and its local updating property, this algorithm can update the changed region directly under the circumstances that only a part of the source images has been changed. For its high efficiency and adaptability, this algorithm can serve as a fast algorithm for image superesolution reconstruction.

To investigate the morphology and distR(i)bution of pressure R(i)dges in the northwestern Weddell Sea, ice surface elevation profiles were measured by a helicopter-borne laser altimeter duR(i)ng Winter Weddell Outflow Study with the German R/V Polarstern in 2006. An optimal cutoff height of 0.62 m, deR(i)ved from the best fits between the measured and theoretical R(i)dge height and spacing distR(i)butions, was first used to separate pressure R(i)dges from other sea ice surface undulations. It was found that the measured R(i)dge height distR(i)bution was well modeled by a negative exponential function, and the R(i)dge spacing distR(i)bution by a lognormal function. Next, based on the R(i)dging intensity R-i (the ratio of mean R(i)dge sail height to mean spacing), all profiles were clustered into three regimes by an improved k-means clusteR(i)ng algoR(i)thm: R-i 0.026 (denoted as C-1, C-2, and C-3 respectively). Mean (and standard deviation) of sail height was 0.99 (+/- 0.07) m in Regime C1, 1.12 (+/- 0.06) m in C-2, and 1.17 (+/- 0.04) m in C-3, respectively, while the mean spacings (and standard deviations) were 232 (+/- 240) m, 54 (+/- 20) m, and 31 (+/- 5.6) m. These three ice regimes coincided closely with distinct sea ice regions identified in a satellite radar image, where C-1 corresponded to the broken ice in the marginal ice zone and level ice formed in the Larsen Polynya, C-2 corresponded to the deformed first-and second-year ice formed by dynamic action in the center of the study region, and C-3 corresponded to heavily deformed ice in the outflowing branch of the Weddell Gyre. The results of our analysis showed that the relationship between the mean R(i)dge height and frequency was well modeled by a logaR(i)thmic function with a correlation coefficient of 0.8, although such correlation was weaker when consideR(i)ng each regime individually. The measured R(i)dge height and frequency were both greater than those reported by others for the Ross Sea. Compared with reported values for other parts of the Antarctic, the present R(i)dge heights were greater, but the R(i)dge frequencies and R(i)dging intensities were smaller than the most extreme of them. Meanwhile, average thickness of R(i)dged ice in our study region was significantly larger than that of the Coastal Ross Sea showing the importance of deformation and ice age for ice conditions in the northwestern Weddell Sea.

PCs in computing labs at institution of higher learning are often if not always underutilized. These PCs are usually not used at night and early morning (i.e. between 10pm–8am), during semester breaks, weekends and during final examinations. At other times most of the lab PCs are not utilized up to the available capacity. This underutilization scenario provides an excellent opportunity for researchers to utilize these lab PCs for research work that requires immense computing power. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that the life cycle of a PC is about 5 years which comes to about 1826 days (1 year = 365.25 days). At the end of its life cycle, new PCs are often purchased to replace the older ones. Thus, using these PCs effectively before being rendered obsolete should be given high priority. The use of distributed computing for compute intensive problems is not new. However, with the availability of improved hardware, fast interconnects and user friendly middleware, the use of distributed computing has become even more popular now. In this paper, we discuss our experience in using Condor middleware on lab PCs at Faculty of Information Science and Technology. We have recorded good speedups from our experiments for embarrassingly parallel problem that we executed on the lab PCs. A script and programs were written to automate the process of preparing input files, merging output files, and displaying output. The single command execution provided by the script offers user friendly environment for the users. We hope the outcome of this experiment will encourage more faculty members to use the available resources at the computing labs for their research work.

The World Wide Web has brought about a tremendous and overwhelming amount of information that would fulfill the information needs of almost all its users. This research aims at investigating, designing, implementing and evaluating a web information monitoring system, known as WebMon, to track and deliver web information according to users’ interest. Master of Applied Science

Being located along the southeast coast of China, Fujian Province belongs to south and middle subtropical zone, mild in climate and abundant in rainfall. About 80% of the total area of the province are covered with mountains and hilly land. Its topographical features are complicated and varied, lower in the southeast and higher towards the northwest. It can be divided into three categories, namely, the northwest mountain area, the south hilly land and the coastal plain. The fertile paddy soils are distributed mainly over the coastal plain and the valley basins in the hilly area. The annual yield per ha of rice in the area under study was more than 12 tons for the past three years. According to the different level in agricultural management, an order can be listed as follows: coastal plain > south hilly land > northwest mountain area. Differences of hydrothermal conditions in these regions are shown in Table 1. The temperature of mountain area is lower than that of the coastal plain and hilly land, while the rainfall, the humidity and the temperature range are higher in the mountain area. However, both the temperature and the humidity of coastal plain and hilly land are similar, only with lesser rainfall in the coastal plain.