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One person declares to another: 'For a hundred years, I've loved you with all my heart.' He then pledges: 'I'm ready to love you even more for another hundred years.' [...]

This study was aimed to alleviate water deficiency and improve soil fertility in orchards in a semi‐arid region. The Brassica napusL. winter varieties (including the varieties V6 and V7) (V6 and V7 belong to the Brassica napusL. winter variety 1721‐1B, and Qin‐you‐7) generally had higher aboveground biological yield, lower root yield, and main root length compared to the Brassica campestrisL. winter or spring varieties. By mulching root area of apple tree with aboveground part of these rape varieties in later autumn, the water contents in 0–20, 20–40, and 40–60 cm soil were enhanced or changed at following March and positively correlated with the mulching‐plant biomass. Similarly, under treatments of the V6‐I and V7‐I (V6‐I and V7‐I belong to mulching root area of apple tree with aboveground part of the variety V6 and V7) (the variety V6 and V7 mulching), and the V6‐II and V7‐II (V6‐II and V7‐II belong to mulching root area of apple tree with aboveground part of the V6 and V7 + 5% soil), the average water content in 0–150 cm soil was significantly increased by about 12%, 8%, 18%, and 15% at following spring, respectively; meanwhile, the treatment V6‐II and V7‐II induced significant increase in water contents in 0–25, 25–50, 50–75, 75–100, 100–125, and 125–150 cm soil profile; these treatments were conducted over 2 years; the available K, total N, and organic matter in 0–20 cm soil was significantly increased by 39.3%–151.8%, 10.0%–17.9%, and 22.7%–34.2%, the apple tree growth was promoted, and the fruit yield per plant was significantly enhanced by 16.9%–95.5%. In conclusion, the Brassica napusL. winter variety mulching, especially the mulching with the aboveground part of the Brassica napusL. winter variety + 5% soil, showed significant effect in improving soil moisture, soil fertility, and fruit yield in orchards in semi‐arid regions. The oilseed rape mulching application in orchard in later autumn increased soil water content at following spring.The enhanced soil water content was positively correlated with the biomass of mulching crops.The oilseed rape mulching application in orchards improved soil fertility and apple yield.Mulching with rape plant aboveground part + 5% soil had the highest effect in improving soil water content.

The reverse design of photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) using AI has received significant attention in recent years. To quickly optimize the fundamental optical properties of PCFs and obtain the optimal design combination, researchers have favored machine learning algorithms. However, relying solely on the knowledge provided by a few experts has limited the versatility and performance of these models. To address these issues, we propose a collaborative PCF property optimization framework as a new paradigm for reverse design. This framework allows experts from different institutions to share their design knowledge and collaboratively optimize the fundamental optical properties of PCFs without direct data interaction. Additionally, this framework can adapt to low-resourced computing devices that only use a small dataset without any data augmentation methods to achieve excellent optimization performance. Our proposed framework provides a novel and practical platform for global collaboration among research institutions for the reverse design of micro-structured fibers.

Myocardial infarction (MI) can cause acute and permanent damage to the myocardial muscle. Vectorcardiogram (VCG) is formed by the time-varying coordinates of cardiac electrical activity in space. According to different infarct locations, the ring of VCG in the three orthogonal planes has pathological morphological changes. Yet the existing algorithms only extract the pathological information of three-lead VCG signals, but they do not fully consider the correlation information between different orthogonal planes. We proposed a depthwise separable convolution network (DSC-Net) for automatic MI localization from 2D-VCG tensor. Using the orthogonality between the lead axes, we first combine the three leads in pairs to form a 2D-VCG, and then construct a 2D-VCG tensor that captures the correlation information between leads. DSC-Net extracts spatial features related to MI obtained in 2D-VCG before Softmax is applied to classify MIs. The proposed method was validated on the benchmark Physikalisch Technische-Bundesanstalt dataset, which includes VCG of 11 types of MI. We demonstrated, with the cardiac electrical activity spatial features obtained from the 2D-VCG tensor, that the accuracy of 11 categories of MI and normal is higher than 99.92%. The proposed model effectively realized the localization of MI with competitively high accuracy for all 11 categories.

Objective: Myocardial infarction (MI) causes rapid and permanent damage to the heart muscle. Therefore, it can deteriorate the myocardial structure and function if not timely diagnosed and treated. However, it is difficult to determine the precise localization of MI based on vectorcardiogram (VCG) due to the existing studies ignore the spatiotemporal features of VCG. Methods: In this paper, a precise MI localization method was proposed based on Tucker decomposition. The multi-scale characteristics of wavelet transform and the spatiotemporal characteristics of VCG were used to construct the VCG tensor containing the local and the spatiotemporal information. The VCG tensor was compressed in the time dimension based on Tucker decomposition to remove redundant information and extract the local spatiotemporal features. The features were fed back to the TreeBagger classifier. Results: The proposed method achieved a total accuracy of 99.80% for 11 types of MI on the benchmark Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt database. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curves and precision-recall curves of each kind of VCG signal was more than 0.88. Conclusion: The proposed algorithm effectively realized the classification of normal and 11 categories of MI using VCG. Significance: Therefore, this study provides new ideas for the intelligent diagnosis of MI based on VCG.

Characterized by strong acidity, chelating ability, and reducing ability, oxalic acid, a low molecular weight dicarboxylic organic acid, plays important roles in the regulation of plant growth and development, the response to both biotic and abiotic stresses such as plant defense and heavy metals detoxification, and food quality. The metabolism of oxalic acid has been well-studied in microorganisms, fungi, and animals but remains less understood in plants. However, excessive accumulation of oxalic acid is detrimental to plants. Therefore, the level of oxalic acid has to be precisely controlled in plant tissues. In this review, we summarize the metabolism, function, and regulation of oxalic acid in plants, and we discuss solutions such as agricultural practices and plant biotechnology to manipulate oxalic acid metabolism to regulate plant responses to both external stimuli and internal developmental cues.

Bulky fiber spectrum analyzers constrain the application of white light interference-based demodulation of Fabry-Perot interferometric (FPI) sensors in practical measurement scenarios. The key to the miniaturization of the fiber Spectrometer is the reconstruction of the fiber spectrum. However, advances in this field are often characterized by a reliance on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) that cannot have both excellent frequency and resolution. This letter presented a neural network-based systematic scheme to achieve fiber optic sensor’s spectral reconstruction with high-frequency and high-resolution potential. The solution can reconstruct the FPI sensor spectrum consisting of hundreds of points based on extremely sparse (even single-digit) sampling points, with MHz-level frequency, and supports custom tuning the reconstructed wavelength range. This solution can provide a novel platform for designing compact, high-performance fiber spectrum analyzers.

Obesity is thought to significantly impact the quality of life. In this study, we sought to evaluate the health consequences of obesity on the risk of a broad spectrum of human diseases. The causal effects of exposing to obesity on health outcomes were inferred using Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses using a fixed effects inverse-variance weighted model. The instrumental variables were SNPs associated with obesity as measured by body mass index (BMI) reported by GIANT consortium. The spectrum of outcome consisted of the phenotypes from published GWAS and the UK Biobank. The MR-Egger intercept test was applied to estimate horizontal pleiotropic effects, along with Cochran’s Qtest to assess heterogeneity among the causal effects of instrumental variables. Our MR results confirmed many putative disease risks due to obesity, such as diabetes, dyslipidemia, sleep disorder, gout, smoking behaviors, arthritis, myocardial infarction, and diabetes-related eye disease. The novel findings indicated that elevated red blood cell count was inferred as a mediator of BMI-induced type 2 diabetes in our bidirectional MR analysis. Intriguingly, the effects that higher BMI could decrease the risk of both skin and prostate cancers, reduce calorie intake, and increase the portion size warrant further studies. Our results shed light on a novel mechanism of the disease-causing roles of obesity.

The article considers the populism and nationalism ideology of the four-in-one Chinese empire consisting of leader Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Chinese people and the state. Topics discussed include the call of the leader for the continuation of the sinification of Marxism in his speech at the centennial celebration of the CCP founding on July 1, adaptability and pragmatism of the CCP as shown in its ideologies, and the basis of the legitimacy of the Chinese empire.

Identification of coronary atherosclerotic plaques and vulnerable plaques is of great clinical significance in the diagnosis and treatment of coronary artery diseases, such as myocardial infarction and sudden death. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a catheter-based intracoronary imaging technique with high resolution (<20μm) adopted to study the morphology of atherosclerotic plaques and identification of the composition of plaques. Nevertheless, manual characterization and quantification of plaques by clinicians is a labor-intensive and subjective procedure. This study aimed to propose a novel plaque characterization algorithm to automatically characterize and classify the atherosclerotic plaques (fibrous, calcific, and lipid-rich). First, nongeometric features such as Fisher vector, principal component analysis, histogram of the oriented gradient, and local binary pattern were investigated and adapted to two geometric features (basic feature and texture feature) to characterize the plaques. Second, for automated classification of the plaques, a hard example mining strategy was introduced to train support vector machine classifier and improve the effectiveness of training data. Third, to demonstrate the relationship between the selected features and the plaque classification accuracy, different feature compositions and comparisons were presented. The contribution of key features to the final classification was revealed. Datasets from 20 OCT pullbacks of 9 patients were used in the training and testing using the proposed algorithm. The overall classification accuracy reached 96.8%, and that of fibrous, calcific, and lipid-rich plaques was 94%, 97.2%, and 99.2%, respectively.

Antipsychotic-induced metabolic disturbance (AIMD) is a common adverse effect of antipsychotics with genetics partly underpinning variation in susceptibility among schizophrenia patients. Melanocortin4 receptor (MC4R) gene, one of the candidate genes for AIMD, has been under-studied in the Chinese patients. We conducted a pharmacogenetic study in a large cohort of Chinese patients with schizophrenia. In this study, we investigated the genetic variation of MC4Rin Chinese population by genotyping two SNPs (rs489693 and rs17782313) in 1,991 Chinese patients and examined association of these variants with the metabolic effects that were often observed to be related to AIMD. Metabolic measures, including body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC), glucose, triglyceride, high-density lipoprotein (HDL), and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) levels were assessed at baseline and after 6-week antipsychotic treatment. We found that interaction of SNP×medication status (drug-naïve/medicated) was significantly associated with BMI, WC, and HDL change %, respectively. Both SNPs were significantly associated with baseline BMI and WC in the medicated group. Moderate association of rs489693 with WC, Triglyceride, and HDL change % were observed in the whole sample. In the drug-naïve group, we found recessive effects of rs489693 on BMI gain more than 7%, WC and Triglyceride change %, with AA incurring more metabolic adverse effects. In conclusion, the association between rs489693 and the metabolic measures is ubiquitous but moderate. Rs17782313 is less involved in AIMD. Two SNPs confer risk of AIMD to patients treated with different antipsychotics in a similar way.

To understand the role of hydrogen donation from solvents to the coal-generated free-radical fragments (coal radicals) in direct coal liquefaction (DCL), a coal with 72.4 wt % carbon was reacted at 440 °C for 10 and 30 min in fast-heating microreactors under a nitrogen atmosphere without or with a solvent, including the non-hydrogen donor solvents naphthalene, 1-methylnaphthalene, and cetane, as well as the hydrogen donor solvents (HDSs) 9,10-dihydrophenanthrene (DHP) and tetrahydronaphthalene (THN). The coal conversion (XC), the yields of oil (YO), asphalt (YA), and gas (YG), as well as the amounts of electron spin resonance (ESR)-measured stable radicals (NR-ESR) and active free radicals acquired hydrogen radicals (NRH) from DHP and THN were studied. A two-step free-radical kinetics for the DCL in DHP and THN was established. The nature of kinetics parameters and their variation with DHP and THN were discussed. It is found that the coal generated a large amount of coal radicals, more than 2.0 × 10–2mol/g in 10 min. These coal radicals coupled and condensed with each other extensively in the absence of a solvent or in the presence of a non-HDS to form tetrahydrofuran insoluble matters, leading the low XC, YO, YA, and YGand a high ESR radical concentration. However, the coupling and condensation of coal radicals are inhibited by DHP or THN, leading to the high XC, YO, YA, and YG, as well as a low ESR radical concentration. A two-step kinetics model was established to model the reaction of active coal radicals in DHP and THN, and three important kinetics parameters were obtained, including the total amount of cleavable covalent bond in coal at 440 °C (NB,0), the rate constant for the bond cleavage in the coal (k1), and rate constant for reaction of coal radicals with a HDS (k2). The variation of these parameters is discussed per solvent type and solvent-to-coal ratio.

Antipsychotic drugs improve schizophrenia symptoms and reduce the frequency of relapse, but treatment response is highly variable. Little is known about the genetic factors associated with treatment response. We did a genome-wide association study of antipsychotic treatment response in patients with schizophrenia.

Iron (Fe) is an essential micronutrient for all organisms, including plants, whose limited bioavailability restricts plant growth, yield, and nutritional quality. While the transcriptional regulation of plant responses to Fe deficiency have been extensively studied, the contribution of epigenetic modulations, such as DNA methylation, remains poorly understood. Here, we report that treatment with a DNA methylase inhibitor repressed Fe deficiency-induced responses in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) roots, suggesting the importance of DNA methylation in regulating Fe deficiency responses. Dynamic changes in the DNA methylome in tomato roots responding to short-term (12 hours) and long-term (72 hours) Fe deficiency identified many differentially methylated regions (DMRs) and DMR-associated genes. Most DMRs occurred at CHH sites under short-term Fe deficiency, whereas they were predominant at CG sites following long-term Fe deficiency. Furthermore, no correlation was detected between the changes in DNA methylation levels and the changes in transcript levels of the affected genes under either short-term or long-term treatments. Notably, one exception was CG hypermethylation at the bHLH39promoter, which was positively correlated with its transcriptional induction. In agreement, we detected lower CG methylation at the bHLH39promoter and lower bHLH39expression in MET1-RNA interference lines compared with wild-type seedlings. Virus-induced gene silencing of bHLH39and luciferase reporter assays revealed that bHLH39is positively involved in the modulation of Fe homeostasis. Altogether, we propose that dynamic epigenetic DNA methylation in the CG context at the bHLH39promoter is involved in its transcriptional regulation, thus contributing to the Fe deficiency response of tomato.

Efficient recovery of coal liquids from direct coal liquefaction residue (DCLR) is beneficial for improving the economics of the direct coal liquefaction process. An attempt was made to evaluate the possibility of extracting coal liquids from DCLR using subcritical water (SBCW). The properties of water are compared with those of typical organic solvents. With regard to the ability of dissolving/emulsifying organic components, SBCW compares favorably with some typical organic solvents under certain conditions. This is evidenced by the fact that the SBCW3 (320 °C/11.7 MPa) extraction yield is similar to the n-hexane extraction yield, although the SBCW1 (250 °C/5.2 MPa) and SBCW2 (300 °C/8.9–11.6 MPa) extraction yields are lower than the n-hexane extraction yields under comparable conditions. The recovery rate of coal liquids from DCLR by SBCW3 extraction can be higher than the maximum recovery rate by n-hexane or methanol extraction when the (SBCW3/DCLR)massis high enough. In comparison with n-hexane-extractable, SBCW-extractable contains more high-molecular-weight and heteroatom-containing components. The group composition balances of several SBCW extractions reveal that SBCW-extractable is mainly from the n-hexane-extractable fraction of the parent DCLR, with a small amount of components from the asphaltene-type materials. The solvent utilization index decreases with the increase of extraction yield, indicating that the overall solubility/emulsibility of coal liquids in SBCW3 decreases as the extraction proceeds. This implies that more and more high-molecular-weight and low-solubility/emulsibility components are extracted from DCLR with the increase of extraction yield. Similar phenomena are found when n-hexane and methanol are used as the extraction solvents. It is also found that the SBCW3 extraction yield can be higher than the 320 °C-pyrolysis extraction yield when the (SBCW3/DCLR)massis high enough.

Aims and background Human malignant melanoma is a very aggressive and highly angiogenesis-dependent tumor. Basic fibroblast growth factor and angiogenin are the potentially important angiogenic factors for melanoma progression and metastasis. Many studies have mainly focused on how they induce angiogenesis. In the present study, we investigated the effects of basic fibroblast growth factor on the expression of angiogenin and melanoma cell growth.Methods and study design Angiogenin mRNA and protein expression were investigated by means of semi-quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction assay and western blotting. We analyzed cell proliferation using MTT, flow cytometry and soft agar assay. Immunofluorescence staining was applied to investigate co-localization and nuclear translocation.Results We found that basic fibroblast growth factor negatively affected the expression of angiogenin in A375 cells. The result showed that down-regulation of basic fibroblast growth factor induced decreased cell proliferation of A375 cells, and in basic fibroblast growth factor up-regulated cells, cell proliferation was increased. We demonstrated that basic fibroblast growth factor protein was co-localized with angiogenin and that it underwent nuclear translocation in A375 cells.Conclusion These findings suggest that there is a cooperation mechanism between basic fibroblast growth factor and angiogenin in A375 cells, and the cooperation mechanism affects the progress of tumor cell proliferation and angiogenesis. Free full text available at www.tumorionline.it

Behavioural stress facilitates long-term depression in Schaffer collaterals-CA1 pathway, but it is unknown whether it influences long-term depression in temporoammonic fibres-CA1. Here, we report that low-frequency stimulation induced long-term depression and foot shock stress before slice preparation facilitated long-term depression in both pathways of young rat slices. When the field excitatory postsynaptic potentials were recorded by stimulating the two pathways alternately and low-frequency stimulation was given to the two pathways simultaneously, a reliable long-term depression was induced in Schaffer collaterals-CA1 but a reliable long-term potentiation took place in temporoammonic fibres-CA1. Interestingly, foot shock stress now enabled low-frequency stimulation to induce reliable long-term depressions in both pathways. These findings suggested that acute behavioural stress facilitated long-term depressions in both pathways and disrupted the interactions between pathways.

Transformation behavior of trace elements during pyrolysis of three Chinese coals at temperatures up to 1000 °C was studied. Effects of temperature, atmosphere (N 2 and H 2 ), and coal type on release of As, Pb, Cr, Cd and Mn were examined. Experiments were carried out in a fixed bed quartz reactor with a heating rate of 20 °C/min. Results show that bleeding ratios of As, Pb, Cr, Cd and Mn increase with increasing pyrolysis temperature. H 2 atmosphere promotes the release of these elements. Among the trace elements studied, Pb is the most volatile element; Cr and Mn are relatively non-volatile. However, the volatility of these elements varies with coal type. This suggests that these elements are present in various compounds in the coals and the distribution of the element in the compounds is different. Distribution of the forms for these elements in Yima coal and char was analyzed.

N -methyl pyrrolidone (NMP) raw coal extract (EXT), hydrogenated coal extract (HEXT) and the blend of EXT and HEXT in NMP (BLD), from two bituminous coals, were studied. The extracts were carbonized in both tube-bomb and a temperature programmable furnace. Elemental analysis, FTIR spectroscopy and optical microscopy techniques were employed to characterize the extracts and the carbonization residues. It was found that the extracts resembled petroleum-derived pitches in the hydrogen content and (C/H) atomic ratio. Higher oxygen and nitrogen contents differentiated the coal extracts from commercial petroleum pitch. More carbon and hydrogen, and lesser oxygen and sulfur differentiated HEXT from EXT. The ratios of integrated IR band intensity for aromatic and aliphatic CH stretching indicate that the relative content of aliphatic hydrogen in EXT is higher than in HEXT. HEXT contains comparatively more aromatic hydrogen, a feature necessary for thermal stability and fluidity during carbonization. BLD materials are at a place somewhere in between. Kinetic modeling of the aliphatic hydrogen change during carbonization reveals that EXT has high carbonization rate and low apparent activation energy. This can be related to the optical texture size of carbonization residues. The residues made from EXTs exhibited fine mosaic optical texture and limited mesophase development. HEXTs were readily converted into highly anisotropic coke. BLDs produced carbonization residues with intermediate properties. Extracts with similar activation energies produced similar residues in the same coal series. The degree or extent of anisotropy displayed by the carbonization residues was found to be dependent on the relative distribution of aromatic and aliphatic hydrogen.

The article discusses United States foreign policy toward China. The author, released from a Chinese prison in April 2007, states that many think the reputation of the United States has diminished in the eyes of the world, yet the author does not think this is true. The author does think that the U.S. has a consistency issue when dealing with China.

The author discusses the case of his blind colleague, Chen Guangcheng who upholds a vision of universal human rights, reflecting the need for Chinese people to support political activists in entering and leaving the country freely.

The author elaborates on how to help people determine how best to pressure the Chinese Communist Party to make improvements to their human rights record especially in the advent of the 2008 Olympics. He presents the four types of nationalism in China namely the Communist Party's pragmatic nationalism, the vassal nationalism of China's elite, popular nationalism and human rights patriotism. He advocates conditional participation in the Olympics which must be predicated on some minimum standard of human rights.