Search

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a transition state between normal aging and dementia, in which a person is still able to be independent in daily activities, but memory and logical thinking skills may have a distinctly decline. In clinical practice, MCI has a high risk of progressing to dementia, so early treatment of MCI is crucial in delaying the onset and progression to dementia. Drug treatment is now the primary approach for MCI, but long-term drug treatment can lead to strong addictive tendencies and produce toxic side effects. Therefore, it is extremely urgent to explore effective rehabilitation training methods. Rehabilitation training for MCI patients mainly includes cognitive training, aerobic exercise, non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS), and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, etc. Cognitive training is a kind of continuous stimulation of patients through multi-task combined pattern to rebuild the neural network in the brain so as to improve cognitive function. This intervention has been widely sought after by patients for its effectiveness in cognitive rehabilitation. Aerobic exercise is a kind of daily training mode, which aims to increase the perfusion of patients' brain tissue through the coordination of muscle groups, improve patients' reaction ability and cognitive function. Its training method is close to life which makes it easily accepted by patients. NIBS is an emerging technology characterized by simplicity and safety. It uses external devices to connect with the cerebral cortical areas and activate the corresponding functions in the brain, thereby improving cognitive function. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a relatively mature treatment method, which uses atmospheric pressure difference to effectively improve the oxygen content in brain tissue and blood flow, thereby stabilizing and controlling the blood oxygen saturation. It also has a significant therapeutic effect on brain tissue injury in MCI patients. Rehabilitation training has gradually caught the eye of the public due to its high safety and simple operation in clinical practice. Therefore, the common rehabilitation training methods have been summarized and generalized which could provide certain references for the development of clinical treatment programs.

The online learning practice has already demonstrated that the quality of interaction and motivation in collaborative learning is not as good as expected, due to the loneliness and burnout feeling spawned by inadequate learning status information about others. This study proposed a model on group awareness to feedback information of group learning status with charts or diagrams, including the cognitive awareness, social awareness and behavioural awareness, so as to support the self-regulated learning and group interaction. On the platform developed for teaching of computer science, an experiment that lasted for one semester was conducted on three classes (one experimental class and two control classes). And students' ability of learning strategies and self-efficacy were measured before and after the experiment. The group awareness tool embedded in the platform was applied to generate status about the interaction in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. The data analysis showed that the model had a significant effect on maintaining motivation, reducing the sense of loneliness and improving interaction quality.

This study evaluates the flotation performance of a novel combination collector, LCJ, on lepidolite from Jiangxi Province, China. A comparative analysis with the on-site collector EO demonstrates an economically efficient separation scheme for lepidolite. Results show that LCJ outperforms EO in capturing lepidolite. Employing 400 g/t sodium hexametaphosphate as an inhibitor and 290 g/t LCJ as a collector, a flotation process with one rougher, two cleaner, and two scavenger stages achieves a lepidolite concentrate with a Li2O grade of 2.10% and a recovery of 78.62%. LCJ also enhances foamability within conventional air-inflation ranges. Infrared testing, Zeta potential analysis, and contact angle measurements indicate similar organic adsorption on the lepidolite surface for both collectors. However, LCJ significantly influences the Zeta potential, increasing hydrophobicity. These findings confirm LCJ as an efficient and selective collector for lepidolite flotation, with promising application prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skin contact with cold objects can induce the perception of wetness, known as the wetness illusion, even in the absence of actual moisture. However, the differences between wetness perceived from moisture and cooled-dry soft materials and how the material parameters affect the wetness illusion from cooled-dry soft materials remain unclear. This study recruited 12 women and 12 men to touch paired moisture and dry fabrics to compare the prescription and intensity of wetness, suggesting that the wetness illusion focused more on roughness and stickiness while the wetness of moisture fabrics sensed more on coldness. Another 12 women touched cooled-dry materials with different temperatures (10°C and 15°C), thicknesses (0.75/0.73 and 1.99/1.96 mm), and dynamic friction coefficients (mean coefficient of friction) (0.17 and 1.88), rating on wetness dissimilarity and intensity of wetness, coldness, softness, and roughness. Data were illustrated in a two-dimensional space by multidimensional scaling, in which dimension 1 represented the haptic perception in wetness, most related to the mean coefficient of friction, and dimension 2 represented the coldness perception in wetness, most related to temperature. Overall, the mean coefficient of friction and the temperature of the material had a strong influence on the wetness illusion, while the thickness had less impact. This study improves the understanding of wetness illusion and sheds light on the reproduction of wetness perception in multisensory augmented virtual reality, such as immersive gaming and virtual dress fitting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, different doses of sodium hexametaphosphate (SHMP) were added as grinding aids in the process of muscovite grinding, and the effect of SHMP on the grinding efficiency of muscovite was studied. The grinding experiment results show that the grinding efficiency increases significantly with the increase in SHMP dosage. The mechanism of SHMP improving the grinding efficiency of muscovite was analyzed by various test methods. Experimental results showed that when SHMP was used as a grinding aid, the ordered structure of muscovite crystals was destroyed, the surface of muscovite was roughened, and obvious cracks appeared. SHMP was physically adsorbed on the muscovite powder, which effectively improved the pulp environment of muscovite powder during grinding, resulting in more dispersed muscovite powder, and improved the grinding efficiency. This study provides theoretical guidance for the efficient preparation of fine-grained muscovite powder and the action mechanism of grinding aids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Satellite laser altimetry has been widely used for monitoring surface height changes in inland waters. However, constructing time series of water levels is partially limited in temporal resolution only based on the individual orbit of altimeter observations. To densify and optimize the time series of altimetry-based water levels is crucial to the scientific understanding of lake hydrologic dynamics. This paper focuses on synthesizing the multi-orbit on-lake observations from the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2) to densify and refine the water level time series for large lakes. The approach of synthesizing water level time series has been validated through experiments applied to 18 large lakes worldwide, resulting in an average R of 0.93, RMSE of 0.14 m, MAE of 0.12 m, NSE of 0.67, and CV of 2.86, according to the hydrologic gauge stations. The evaluation results demonstrate that our approach can provide an effective solution for densifying the water level series of large lakes covered by multi-orbit ICESat-2 observations. Further, the approach can be extended to monitor the high-frequency variation of other lakes covered by the multiple ICESat-2 orbits. This approach provides the potential of generating higher-frequency estimates of water levels based on satellite altimetry, which could not only help to reveal the characteristics of the seasonal dynamics of lakes but also be used to investigate the abrupt water level changes due to hydrological extreme events (e.g., floods, droughts, etc.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glacier surges have been increasingly reported from the mountain and high-latitude cryosphere. They represent active glaciological processes that affect the evolution of natural landscapes, and they possibly lead to catastrophic consequences, such as ice collapse, which threatens the downstream communities. Identifying and monitoring surge-type glaciers has been challenging due to the irregularity of the behavior and limitations on the spatiotemporal coverage of remote-sensing observations. With a focus on the Karakoram region, with concentrated surge-type glaciers, we present a new method to efficiently detect glacier-surging activities by integrating the high temporal resolution of MODIS imagery and the long-term archived medium spatial resolution of Landsat imagery. This method first detects the location and initial time of glacier surges by trend analysis (trend and breakpoint) from MODIS data, which is implemented by the Breaks for Additive Seasonal and Trend (BFAST) tool. The initial location and time information is then validated with the detailed surging features, such as the terminus-position changes from Landsat, and the thickness-change patterns from surface-elevation-change maps. Our method identified 74 surging events during 2000–2020 in the Karakoram, including three tributary-glacier surges, and seven newly detected surge-type glaciers. The surge-type glaciers tend to have longer lengths and smaller mean slopes compared with nonsurge-type glaciers. A comparison with previous studies demonstrated the method efficiency for detecting the surging of large-scale and mesoscale glaciers, with limitations on small and narrow glaciers due to the spatial-resolution limitation of MODIS images. For the 38 surge-type nondebris-covered glaciers, we provide details of the surging, which depict the high variability (heavy-tailed distribution) in the surging parameters in the region, and the concentration of the surge initiation during 2008–2010 and 2013–2015. The updated glacier-surging information solidifies the basis for a further investigation of the surging processes at polythermal glaciers, and for an improved assessment of the glacier-mass balance and monitoring of glacier hazards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With rapid population growth and socioeconomic development over the last century, a great number of dams/reservoirs have been constructed globally to meet various needs. China has strong economical and societal demands for constructing dams and reservoirs. The official statistics reported more than 98 000 dams/reservoirs in China, including nearly 40 % of the world's largest dams. Despite the availability of several global-scale dam/reservoir databases (e.g., the Global Reservoir and Dam database (GRanD), the GlObal geOreferenced Database of Dams (GOODD), and the Georeferenced global Dams And Reservoirs (GeoDAR)), these databases have insufficient coverage of the reservoirs in China, especially for small or newly constructed ones. The lack of reservoir information impedes the estimation of water budgets and the evaluation of dam impacts on hydrologic and nutrient fluxes for China and its downstream countries. Therefore, we presented the China Reservoir Dataset (CRD), which contains 97 435 reservoir polygons and fundamental attribute information (e.g., name and storage capacity) based on existing dam/reservoir products, national basic geographic datasets, multi-source open map data, and multi-level governmental yearbooks and databases. The reservoirs compiled in the CRD have a total maximum water inundation area of 50 085.21 km 2 and a total storage capacity of about 979.62 km 3 (924.96–1060.59 km 3). The quantity of reservoirs decreases from the southeast to the northwest, and the density hotspots mainly occur in hilly regions and large plains, with the Yangtze River basin dominating in reservoir count, area, and storage capacity. We found that these spatial accumulations of reservoirs are closely related to China's socioeconomic development and the implementation of major policies. Finally, we presented the comparison of the CRD with GOODD, GeoDAR, and GRanD databases. The CRD has significantly increased the reservoir count, area, and storage capacity in China, especially for reservoirs smaller than 1 km 2. The CRD database provides more comprehensive reservoir spatial and attribute information and is expected to benefit water resources managements and the understanding of ecological and environmental impacts of dams across China and its affected transboundary basins. The CRD database is publicly available at 10.5281/zenodo.6984619 (Song et al., 2022). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tableland areas, featured by flat and broad landforms, provide precious land resources for agricultural production and human settlements over the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP). However, severe gully erosion triggered by extreme rainfall and intense human activities makes tableland areas shrink continuously. Preventing the loss of tableland areas is of real urgency, in which generating its accurate distribution map is the critical prerequisite. However, a plateau-scale inventory of tableland areas is still lacking across the Loess Plateau. This study proposed a large-scale approach for tableland area mapping. The Sentinel-2 imagery was used for the initial delineation based on object-based image analysis and random forest model. Subsequently, the drainage networks extracted from AW3D30 DEM were applied for correcting commission and omission errors based on the law that rivers and streams rarely appear on the tableland areas. The automatic mapping approach performs well, with the overall accuracies over 90% in all four investigated subregions. After the strict quality control by manual inspection, a high-quality inventory of tableland areas at 10 m resolution was generated, demonstrating that the tableland areas occupied 9507.31 km2 across the CLP. Cultivated land is the dominant land-use type on the tableland areas, yet multi-temporal observations indicated that it has decreased by approximately 500 km2 during the year of 2000 to 2020. In contrast, forest and artificial surfaces increased by 57.53% and 73.10%, respectively. Additionally, we detected 455 vulnerable hotspots of the tableland with a width of less than 300 m. Particular attention should be paid to these areas to prevent the potential split of a large tableland, accompanied by damage on roads and buildings. This plateau-scale tableland inventory and erosion-vulnerable hotspots are expected to support the environmental protection policymaking for sustainable development in the CLP region severely threatened by soil erosion and land degradation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dams and reservoirs are among the most widespread human-made infrastructures on Earth. Despite their societal and environmental significance, spatial inventories of dams and reservoirs, even for the large ones, are insufficient. A dilemma of the existing georeferenced dam datasets is the polarized focus on either dam quantity and spatial coverage (e.g., GlObal geOreferenced Database of Dams, GOODD) or detailed attributes for a limited dam quantity or region (e.g., GRanD (Global Reservoir and Dam database) and national inventories). One of the most comprehensive datasets, the World Register of Dams (WRD), maintained by the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD), documents nearly 60 000 dams with an extensive suite of attributes. Unfortunately, the WRD records provide no geographic coordinates, limiting the benefits of their attributes for spatially explicit applications. To bridge the gap between attribute accessibility and spatial explicitness, we introduce the Georeferenced global Dams And Reservoirs (GeoDAR) dataset, created by utilizing the Google Maps geocoding application programming interface (API) and multi-source inventories. We release GeoDAR in two successive versions (v1.0 and v1.1) at 10.5281/zenodo.6163413 (Wang et al., 2022). GeoDAR v1.0 holds 22 560 dam points georeferenced from the WRD, whereas v1.1 consists of (a) 24 783 dam points after a harmonization between GeoDAR v1.0 and GRanD v1.3 and (b) 21 515 reservoir polygons retrieved from high-resolution water masks based on a one-to-one relationship between dams and reservoirs. Due to geocoding challenges, GeoDAR spatially resolved ∼ 40 % of the records in the WRD, which, however, comprise over 90 % of the total reservoir area, catchment area, and reservoir storage capacity. GeoDAR does not release the proprietary WRD attributes, but upon individual user requests we may provide assistance in associating GeoDAR spatial features with the WRD attribute information that users have acquired from ICOLD. Despite this limit, GeoDAR, with a dam quantity triple that of GRanD, significantly enhances the spatial details of smaller but more widespread dams and reservoirs and complements other existing global dam inventories. Along with its extended attribute accessibility, GeoDAR is expected to benefit a broad range of applications in hydrologic modeling, water resource management, ecosystem health, and energy planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lake water storage changes are important factors that influence the climate, hydrological cycle, and environments. However, long‐term estimation of global lake storage changes is challenging because historical in‐situ hydrological observations worldwide are rarely available. Benefiting from the laser altimeter ICESat and ICESat‐2, we comprehensively assessed water level and volume changes in global natural lakes larger than 10 km2 during 2003–2020. The 6,567 lakes observable by ICESat/ICESat‐2, which account for ∼94% of the total global lake volume, showed a total water storage increase of 10.88 ± 16.45 Gt/yr during 2003–2020, and the estimate reaches 16.12 ± 20.41 Gt/yr when also taking account of the remaining unobserved lakes. Despite water gains in most natural lakes, large lakes under dry and high water‐stress conditions experienced dramatic water loss in general. Presumably, these drying lakes may continue to shrink with a warming climate and continuously increasing water demands in the future without further action. Plain Language Summary: The development of satellite techniques allows monitoring long‐term lake water storage changes in extended regions. Particularly, laser altimetry satellites (i.e., ICESat/ICESat‐2) that provide high precision elevation data show the potential to estimate lake water level changes globally. Totally 6,567 global lakes were observed by the ICESat/ICESat‐2, revealing a total lake water storage increase of 10.88 ± 16.45 Gt/yr from 2003 to 2020. Assuming that lakes show similar changes in the same climate zone and basin, we extrapolated the estimates of water storage changes to the entirety of 14,705 natural lakes larger than 10 km2 in the world. The water storage in these lakes globally increased at 16.12 ± 20.41 Gt/yr during the past near‐two decades. We found that lake changes are highly different in different climate zones and basins. Lakes in dry climate conditions shrank considerably and may continue to decline in the future. Key Points: Globally 6,567 natural lakes >10 km2 observed by ICESat/ICESat‐2 show an increased volume of 10.88 ± 16.45 Gt/yrThe total water storage of global lakes increased at 16.12 ± 20.41 Gt/yr with remarkable spatial heterogeneityAmong hotspots of lake volume changes, the negative trends in dryland areas call for special attention for sustainable water management [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drainage reorganization generally occurs on geological time scales under unstable river network conditions. A few local‐scale studies indicate that recent climatic changes might accelerate the drainage reorganization process. However, large‐scale drainage reorganization during the modern era is rarely documented. This study examines ongoing drainage reorganization on the endorheic Tibetan Plateau (TP) as a primary result of drastic lake expansion. A total of 11 drainage system reorganization events comprising 24 different lake basins and covering a total area of 61,115 km2 occurred between 2000 and 2018. Assuming the continued growth rate of TP lakes, we project another 20 basins will be reorganized before 2030. These drainage basin reorganizations not only alter hydrological processes in the endorheic TP but may also cause the endorheic‐exorheic transition, leading to the upstream sprawl of the Yangtze River Basin and posing outburst flooding risks on China's key infrastructure such as the Qinghai‐Tibet Railway. Plain Language Summary: Recent climatic changes have intensified the global hydrologic cycle, and have likely accelerated drainage system evolution. We have provided a holistic picture of ongoing drainage reorganization driven by drastic lake expansions on the Tibetan Plateau (TP). Our results indicate that 24 different lake drainage systems have undergone reorganization between 2000 and 2018, and the number of basins is expected to increase to 44 by the year 2030. One notable drainage reorganization is between the endorheic Lake Yanhu and the exorheic Chumaer river, resulting in the upstream expansion of the Yangtze River Basin. These findings provide an increased understanding of ongoing drainage reorganization events driven by climatic changes. Further, this work advances our understanding of the connections between ongoing hydrologic changes and their effect on related geological disasters (e.g., outburst floods) within the TP. Key Points: Rapid lake growths drive large‐scale drainage reorganizations on the Tibetan Plateau24 lake drainage systems have undergone reorganization from 2000 to 2018 and this number is expected to increase to 44 by the year 2030The northern portion of the upstream Yangtze basin has expanded by around 8,400 km2 due to an endorheic‐exorheic transition [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To evaluate the performance of serum procalcitonin (PCT) concentrations to diagnose fungal infection in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Patients and Methods: From January 2017 to October 2020, SLE patients hospitalized for serious infection with an identified single bacterial or fungal pathogen, as well as PCT measured within 24h after admission were included. The diagnostic performance of PCT was evaluated independently and in combination with the white blood cell (WBC) count, C-reactive protein (CRP) level, and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR). The analysis included the sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values, positive and negative likelihood ratios, and the crude and adjusted area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC). Results: Sixty-nine patients were included; 26 had a fungal infection (38%) and 43 had a bacterial infection (22 gram-positive and 21 gram-negative). Fungal infection patients were mainly distributed in the respiratory group (88.5%), and bacterial infection distribution were more prevalent in respiratory group (44.2%) and abdominal/urinary group (23.3%). The PCT concentration was significantly lower in fungal infections than bacterial infections (fungal: 0.22 ng/mL, interquartile range [IQR], 0.09– 0.44 vs bacterial: 0.60 ng/mL, IQR, 0.16– 5.74; p = 0.016) and differed significantly between different infection sites (p = 0.022). PCT had better diagnostic performance for predicting fungal infection (AUROC = 0.731) than the WBC count (AUROC = 0.581), the CRP level (AUROC = 0.716), and ESR (AUROC = 0.583). PCT and ESR together had the best diagnostic performance, with 46.2% sensitivity and 88.4% specificity. Further, the AUROC increased compared to PCT alone but was statistically insignificant (p = 0.693). Conclusion: For SLE patients with serious infection, the PCT concentration had better diagnostic accuracy for predicting fungal infection than the WBC count, the CRP level, and ESR. Combining PCT and ESR obtained the highest AUROC and provided an acceptable discrimination performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]