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Abstract: Cheese making has been inferred at several sites in northern Europe as early as the 6th millennium BC and was common in Egypt and Mesopotamia in 3rd millennium BC. However, the remains of ancient cheeses have never been found and recipes of ancient dairy, its production scale, social and economic impact remain poorly understood. Here we present direct proteomics evidence for the production of an earliest known cheese that was found as an organic mass associated with the mummies of Early Bronze Age cemetery of Xiaohe (1980–1450 BC) in Xinjiang, China. Kefir fermentation of ruminant milk by a symbiotic culture of Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens and other lactic acid bacteria and yeasts was the basis of robust, scalable, probiotic, lactose-free dairy and a key technological advance that introduced economic benefits of extensive herding into a semi-pastoral household of the Eastern Eurasia population already in the Early Bronze Age. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

ABSTRACT This article introduces a new miniaturized branch-line coupler for wideband applications. The coupler can be realized in microstripline with one layer of metal, without additional lumped elements. Significant size reduction is achieved using the proposed configurations. Explicit design formulas of the proposed coupler are analytically derived. Then it has been simulated with HFSS and fabricated. Return loss and isolation loss are both better than 20 dB in about 31% fractional bandwidth. Over this frequency band, the phase unbalance between two quadrature outputs is less than 2°. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 56:740-743, 2014 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different types of phytolith even when coming from the same plant react to high temperatures in different ways. To understand the behavior of phytoliths upon heating, we examined composition and distribution of some elements within different phytolith types using SEM-EDS and synchrotron radiation μ-X-ray fluorescence. By analyzing phytoliths from rice husk, rice leaf and Than tree leaf, we find that the compositions and distributions of metal oxides within different phytolith types are quite different. It is well known that metal oxides have been used as fluxing agent to reduce the melting temperature of SiO in the production of glass, and different metal oxides can be used to produce a variety of glass with diverse features. Similarly, metal elements including potassium, magnesium and calcium in phytoliths should also act as a fluxing agent under high temperature, and the differential compositions and distributions of these metal elements within the phytoliths resulted in the variable reaction to heating. In sum, there is a negative relationship between the flux elements composition in phytoliths, and the temperatures at which phytoliths deform; furthermore, potassium and calcium in the rice leaf phytolith are almost evenly distributed in all parts, which may cause the phytolith's shape to deform evenly. In comparison, Than tree leaf phytolith is found to have a high percentage of potassium and calcium located exclusively on the outside, which may explain why the deformation of Than tree leaf phytolith occurs firstly at the outside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic throttle valves are electromechanical systems which regulate the air flow inside gasoline engines. The objective of electronic throttle valve control is to ensure fast and accurate reference tracking of the valve plate angle. This control demands are hard to accomplish since the plant is burdened with strong nonlinear effects and parameters uncertainty. In this paper, a genetic algorithm-based adaptive fuzzy sliding mode controller (AFSMC) is proposed for an electronic throttle considering actuator nonlinearities. In the AFSMC approach, fuzzy logic system is applied to approximate the plant model and the actuator model, the sliding mode controller makes full use of the plant model to guarantee robust control even in the presence of parameters uncertainty, and genetic algorithm is developed to search the optimal control gains values of the AFSMC. The performance of the AFSMC is verified by computer simulation and experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] ITO nanocap arrays were prepared using PAA surface as templates. [•] Surface and interference co-enhanced Raman scattering was observed. [•] Raman enhancement is sensitive to the preparing parameters of PAA and ITO. [•] A low detecting line of R6G probes of 1×10−7 M or 50ng/mL was obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the application of the maintenance transmission line robot has been very popular in the power industry. However, difficulties in the control of maintenance transmission line robot exist due to multiple nonlinearities, plant parameter variations and external disturbances. This paper investigates the possibility of using neural network as a promising self-learning control alternative for the control problem of inspection and deicing transmission line robot. We first discuss the mechanical structure, as well as dynamic model of a deicing robot. And then, a neural network-based self-learning control strategy consists of a fuzzy neural network controller and an ELM-based single-layer-feedback neural networks identifier are proposed for this deicing transmission line robot. Both the structure and the learning algorithm of the control system are presented. The proposed controller is verified by computer simulations and experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Chaos optimization algorithm (COA), which has the features of easy implementation, short execution time and robust mechanisms of escaping from the local optimum, is a promising tool for the engineering applications. The design of approaches to improve the convergence of the COA is a challenging issue. Improved mutative-scale parallel chaotic optimization algorithm (MPCOA) are proposed in this paper, and three ways of improvements for MPCOA are investigated in detail: MPCOA combined with simplex search method, MPCOA based on competitive/cooperative inter-communication, MPCOA combined with harmony search algorithm. Several simulation results are used to show the effective performance of these chaos optimization algorithms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

As a kind of rare archeological founding in China, red decorative beads (300-400 ad) were discovered in Leijiaping, Badong County, Hubei, China. For the first time, this paper reports an advanced structural analysis of glass beads using micro synchrotron X-ray near-edge absorption spectroscopy. The results show that in spite of being opaque, the red bead is made of glass containing two forms of copper atoms, including 0+ and 1+. In combination with X-ray diffraction results, it is advised that the mechanism of red coloration mainly comes from metallic copper. This paper indicates that micro synchrotron X-ray near-edge absorption spectroscopy is an outstanding and advanced technology to study ancient glass objects with nondestructive mode. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Much research on Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been focusing on exploring various potential applications of intelligent systems. In most cases, the researches attempt to model human intelligence by mimicking the brain structure and function, but they ignore an important aspect in human learning and decision making: the artificial emotion. In this paper, we present a new unconstrained global optimization method, hybrid chaos optimization algorithm with artificial emotion (HCOAAE), which avoids trapping to local minima, and improves convergence in large space and high-dimension optimization problems. The main purpose of artificial emotion is to mimic decision making behavior process of humans, to choose most suitable parameters of HCOAAE and decide whether to change current search strategy or not in the next iteration. Numerical simulations of 13 benchmark functions with different dimensions are used to test the performance of HCOAAE. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the existing methods in terms of convergence speed, computational effectiveness, and numerical stability. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Ancient foodstuffs, including noodles, cakes, and common millet, were excavated from the Subeixi Cemeteries (cal. 500–300 years BC), Turpan District in Xinjiang, China. Starch grain and phytolith analyses were undertaken to identify the plant species involved. These indicate that the noodles and cakes were made from Panicum miliaceum. Ancient food preparation technologies were also investigated by cooking experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Ru ware and Jun ware belong to the five most famous porcelains of the Song dynasty (AD 960–AD 1276), China. Their relationship is one of the focuses of research in ancient ceramic circle. In this article, some shards of Ru ware, its modern copies and Jun ware were analyzed by using SEM, UV–VIS spectrometer. Under SEM, Ru ware has different micromorphological structure to Jun ware, and Ru modern copies are more similar to Jun ware. These differences could explain the reflectance spectrum difference between Ru modern copies, Jun ware and Ru ware. So the UV–VIS method has the potential to answer Ru–Jun confusion problem and be a reference in nondestructive authentication of Ru ware. Special optical phenomena may illuminate that the glaze color of Ru ware is the combined result of physical and chemical effects. However, more determinate conclusions need more samples. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

As a special kind of glazed ceramic, faience has an important role to play in the technological trajectory that eventually leads to the development of ancient glass. In China, faience products first emerged in early Western Zhou Dynasty (1046BC–771BC), and their great significance as well as brilliant colors varying between blue and green attracted a lot of scholars. However, scientific researches on the color source of Chinese faience in view of microstructure characterization are quite few. In the present work, analyses by energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) and X-ray absorption near edge spectroscopy (XANES) were carried out on two faience beads with relatively blue and green color, respectively, both of which were excavated from Peng State archaeological cemetery site in Western Zhou Dynasty. The results show that the coloring element in both beads is copper with +2 valence, and the color divergence of these two beads may originate from different local chemical environments of Cu 2+ . It is suggested that the faience in this period is the earliest glaze with copper colorant in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • A continuous change of the hydration environment, from dilute solution to condensed phase, is conducted in the desolvation process. • Real-time resonance Raman spectra are used to monitor the protein structure and redox state. • The final stage of the desolvation process displays with crowding effect, which prevents large protein deformations. • Rapid reduction of free- and adsorbed-state ferricytochrome c is observed during their solution to condensed phase transitions. • The reduction mechanism is found to be thermal reduction and photoreduction, induced or catalyzed by laser illumination. Stability of the structure and redox state of ferricytochrome c during continuous changing of the hydration environment from dilute solution to condensed phase was studied based on real-time resonance Raman measurement. Our experimental results indicated that the structure and redox state of ferricytochrome c were sufficiently maintained during the entire desolvation process, which reflected that the stabilizing excluded-volume effect was stronger than the destabilizing crowder-protein interaction, at the case of globular mini-protein itself acting as the crowder. Rapid reduction of ferricytochrome c was observed at measurement sites at the time of solution to condensed phase transition. Similar phenomenon was observed on cytochrome c adsorbed on indium tin oxide surface. At present conditions, the rapid reduction was found to be derived mainly from thermal reduction under laser illumination and secondarily from photoreduction induced by the residual adsorbed ferrocyanide anions. After re-dissolved, the protein which had undergone sufficient desolvation recovered the structure and redox state in the initial solution phase, suggesting that the crowding effect in solution prevented large protein deformations observed in gas phase condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) is the only extant species of the genus Crocuta, which once occupied a much wider range during the Pliocene and Pleistocene. However, its origin and evolutionary history is somewhat contentious due to discordances between morphological, nuclear, and mitochondrial data. Due to the limited molecular data from east Asian Crocuta, also known as cave hyena, and the difficulty of extracting ancient DNA from this area, here we present proteomic analysis of cave hyenas from three locations in northern China. This marks the first proteomic data generated from cave hyenas, adding new molecular data to the east Asian populations. Phylogenetic analysis based on these protein sequences reveals two different groups of cave hyenas in east Asia, one of which could not be distinguished from modern spotted hyenas from northern Africa, tentatively the result of previously suggested gene flow between these lineages. With developments of instrumentation and analytical methods, proteomics holds promising potential for molecular phylogenetic reconstructions of ancient fauna previously thought to be unreachable using ancient DNA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hu, D. and Yang, Y., 2020. The development of marine sports tourism industry based on low-carbon economy. In: Li, L. and Huang, X. (eds.), Sustainable Development in Coastal Regions: A Perspective of Environment, Economy, and Technology. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 112, pp. 97-99. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. With the deep implementation of ocean strategy, ocean sports tourist industry has obtained rapid growth, and the low-carbon concept economy puts forward higher requirements for the growth of ocean sports tourist industry. Based on this, this paper first studies the concept and basis of ocean sports tourism based on low-carbon concept, then analyzes the growth status and constraints of ocean sports tourist industry from the perspective of low-carbon concept, and finally puts forward the growth path and countermeasures of ocean sports tourist industry based on low-carbon concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Characterization of ancient food remains could reflect how people exploited biological resources and interacted with different cultures in antiquity. In this study, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), starch grain, phytolith, stable isotope analysis and proteomics were adopted to characterize the composition of the food remains including three cereal foodstuffs, some meat strips and a kebab discovered at the Changle Cemetery (202 BCE–220 CE), Ningxia, northwest China, a key area on the Silk Road. The results show that the cereal foods were baked cakes, primarily made from foxtail millet (Setaria italica). One cake was simply made of millet grains, the others were more elaborately comprised of millet flour with the addition of barley flour and meat from cattle (Bos taurus) and chicken (Gallus gallus). These findings indicate that grinding and baking technologies, which were considered as the culinary tradition in western Eurasia, had been adopted at the latest by the inhabitants in Ningxia region at that time. The large-scale migration from central China to Ningxia and the opening up of the Silk Road during the Han Dynasty gave rise to the diet communication and assimilation in this border area. Moreover, the meat strips were identified as dried beef, and the kebab was likely to be made from sheep/goat meat, wherein the latter is the earliest scientific evidence of mutton kebab in ancient China up to our knowledge. The analytical strategy could be widely applied in characterizing ancient visible food remains in order to better understand their preparation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their paper "The beginning of faience in China: A review and new evidence", Lin et al. (2019) conclude that the Kayue people in Qinghai began making faience with a high potash content during the second half of the second millennium BC, prior to the Zhou people (1046-771BC). Based on a thorough assessment of the archaeological evidence, especially concerning the dates of the Kayue tombs, I conclude there is a lack of solid evidence that these faience beads predate the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046-771BC) so it cannot be inferred that the Zhou people learned production technologies for high potash faience from the Kayue people. A possible faience road for the transfer of production technologies from Xinjiang to Central China is further proposed. In this transfer process, some typology and production technologies for faience beads were adopted by the Western Zhou people, but the glaze recipe of most faience changed greatly in Central China due to adaptation to local resources. • The spread of faience is the earliest case of globalization in ceramic history. • A faience road is proposed between East Xinjiang and Central China during the late Bronze Age/early Iron Age. • Copper has been used as a glaze colorant in China since the introduction of faience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) has become the cornerstone of maritime surveillance because of its low-cost maintenance and coverage of wide area. However, when it comes to the extraction of key areas, such as vessel-target detection and vessel-path tracking, the HFSWR signal is strongly interfered by clutters and noise, which makes maritime surveillance a challenging task. This article proposes a hierarchical key-area perception model for maritime surveillance harnessing range-Doppler (RD) image from HFSWR, Laplacian kernel, a linear classifier (LC), and a subnet-based multilayer representation learning framework (SMRLF). First, a weak LC with a Laplacian kernel is utilized to capture the plausible vessel regions (PVRs). Then, a novel SMRLF is proposed to localize the vessel targets from the PVRs. To handle the noise, a maximum correntropy criterion with variable centers (MCC-VC) is incorporated in the subnet-based learning model. A thorough experimental analysis on cross-domain samples from radar dataset to scene classification dataset shows that the proposed HKPM performs competitively. The model shows a superior performance over most of the state-of-the-art vessel-target detection algorithms with a vessel-target detection accuracy of 94%. The extended analysis on image classification problem proves that the proposed model has great adaptivity and scalability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial neural network training algorithms aim to optimize the network parameters regarding the pre-defined cost function. Gradient-based artificial neural network training algorithms support iterative learning and have gained immense popularity for training different artificial neural networks end-to-end. However, training through gradient methods is time-consuming. Another family of training algorithms is based on the Moore–Penrose inverse, which is much faster than many other gradient methods. Nevertheless, most of those algorithms are non-iterative and thus do not support mini-batch learning in nature. This work extends two non-iterative Moore–Penrose inverse-based training algorithms to enable online sequential learning: a single-hidden-layer autoencoder training algorithm and a sub-network-based classifier training algorithm. We further present an approach that uses the proposed autoencoder for self-supervised dimension reduction and then uses the proposed classifier for supervised classification. The experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves satisfactory classification accuracy on many benchmark datasets with extremely low time consumption (up to 50 times faster than the support vector machine on CIFAR 10 dataset). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bronze mou was an important artifact commonly used in the Ba-Shu region (now in Chongqing and Sichuan Province) during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Han Dynasty. Although extensive archaeological study of the bronze mou has been conducted, scientific analysis of the bronze mou has been limited, and no organic residue analysis has been performed on the bronze mou. In this study, four bronze mous dated to the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) with organic residues unearthed in three archaeological sites in Wushan, Chongqing, were selected for analysis by portable X-ray fluorescent spectrometer (P-XRF) and liquid chromatograph-tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS). The results of the alloy composition indicated that all the samples are copper-tin-lead ternary alloys. The proteomic analysis results confirmed that the bronze mou had been used as cooking utensils or containers. At the Tuchengpo Cemetery, soybeans were found in both bronze mou M32:27 and M38:39, and vigna was discovered in M32:27. No useful protein was discovered in the bronze mou from the Shennvmiao Cemetery. Proteins of ginkgo and chicken were found in M16:12 at the Gaotangguan Cemetery. The discovery indicated that residents in Wushan, Chongqing, had access to a diverse range of food sources around 2000 years ago. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that proteomic analysis is highly effective in studying archaeological organic residues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study takes stock of business and economics research on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and provides a dynamic panorama of the overall knowledge structure of this ever-growing body of work ever since its inception in 1966. Our bibliometric analysis based on the full archive of 1024 studies identifies the main trends of and the major intellectual contributors to the extant knowledge of AI in business and economics research. Specifically, our results show that (1) AI-focused business and economics research wintnessed growth over three stages, particularly with a sharp increase after 2017. (2) While this body of research has gained tremendous momentum across the globe, the United States is by far the center of knowledge generation. (3) Research collaborations are still limited in this area. (4) Research topics flourished, ranging from early decision support systems, neural networks, and scheduling methods to more recent machine learning, automation, and big data. This study also identifies fruitful avenues for further business and economics research with an AI focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experimental results on five public gene expression profile datasets verify that the proposed algorithm outperforms other methods in terms of diversity, distribution stability, and quality of generated samples. The fifth paper by I Tingyu Ye i et al. on "Artificial bee colony algorithm with an adaptive search manner and dimension perturbation" proposes a modified artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm with an adaptive search manner and dimension perturbation (ASDABC). The tenth paper by I Fei Han i et al. on "Gene-CWGAN: A Data Enhancement Method for Gene Expression Profile Based on Improved CWGAN-GP" tackles the problem of high dimension and small sample size of gene expression profile data classification. [Extracted from the article]

This paper proposes a design of dual‐band coaxial filter with high stopband rejection. By setting the half‐window coupling structures and loaded resonators, the stopband rejection of the dual‐band coaxial filter can be significantly improved. An L band coaxial dual‐band filter is designed and measured as an example. The stopband rejection of the design is increased from 2.7 times to 3.52 times the center frequency of the filter, which verifies the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method plays a central role in training deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). The recent advances in the field of optimization methods for DCNNs follow the direction of gradients. The innovations mainly lie in adopting different techniques to manage the history of gradients or automatically adapt the step size. In contrast, in this paper we propose a novel optimization approach for training the top dense layer of DCNN. It primarily utilizes the orientation directly pointing to the optimal values of parameters instead of the direction of gradients to navigate the parameters updates. The Moore–Penrose inverse method has been adopted to determine the difference between the current parameters and the optimal parameters, and the parameter updates are driven along this direction to compensate such a difference. Subsequently, the parameters have been fine-tuned along the direction of the classical gradient. Experiments have been conducted on extensively selected benchmark datasets. The results indicate that the proposed approach obtains a higher convergence rate and lower minimum loss compared to other state-of-the-art optimization methods. Furthermore, with the same DCNN architectures, the performance improvement margin between the proposed optimization method and other state-of-the-art optimization approaches is highly significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a novel approach to realize dual-polarized diplexers (DPDIPs), which can duplex horizontally and vertically polarized signals separately. The proposed device is composed of a turnstile junction (TJ) and four-channel filters. Compared with conventional orthomode transducer (OMT) and two diplexers scheme, it has an ultracompact size and comparable performance. A new arrangement for the TJ that is suitable for the DPDIP is analyzed and simulated accordingly. A Ka-band DPDIP is designed and fabricated as a verification example. Simulated and measured results have verified the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discovery of Hamipterus tianshanensis had important scientific significance because three-dimensional preserved fossils can provide unique information about the reproduction, development, and evolution of pterosaurs. However, the pterosaur fossils exhibited violent weathering, including noticeable cracking and spalling, since the preservation environment changed dramatically after excavation, which severely influenced the preservation of these fossils and the scientific research conducted on them. To determine the weathering mechanism of these fossil bones, the samples were analyzed using X-ray fluorescence (XRF), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive spectrometry (SEM-EDS). The results indicate that calcite is the main mineral in the hollow bones, but it is mixed with a small amount of other minerals, such as quartz, feldspar, and other debris particles. Moreover, the main component of the pterosaur bones is hydroxyapatite, and carbonate has substituted for some of the phosphate (B-type carbonated apatite) in the fossil bones. A small amount of calcite and manganese oxides has precipitated in the vascular canals. The phosphate crystallinity index (PCI) is 4.17. These results indicate that the fossils have undergone severe diagenesis. Apart from these alterations, the fossil bones have high contents of anions and cations such as Cl−, NO3−, SO42−, Na+, and Ca2+, and the total content of soluble salts is 35584.41 µg g−1. Based on these results, it is inferred that the weathering mechanism of the fossil bones is as follows. First, the fragile hollow bones cracked easily because of the enormous thermal stress caused by the dramatic temperature changes in the Gobi Desert and the differences in the thermal expansion coefficients (TEC) of the surrounding rocks, the fossil bones, and the different fillers. Second, a large amount of stress is generated by salt crystallization when the temperature and humidity change, and the pterosaur fossils will be damaged when the crystallization pressure exceeds the tensile strength of the fossils. These results suggest that the preservation of pterosaur fossils requires suitable desalination and consolidation conditions. Moreover, they should be preserved in a constant temperature and humidity environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the prognostic implications of higher pulmonary artery systolic pressure (PASP) are well established, few data exist regarding longitudinal change in pulmonary pressure in late life. The aim of this study was to quantify changes in PASP over 6 years and determine the relative contributions of cardiac and pulmonary dysfunction. Among 1,420 participants in the ARIC (Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities) study with echocardiographic measures of PASP at both the fifth (2011-2013) and seventh (2018-2019) visits, longitudinal changes in PASP over about 6.5 years were quantified. Multivariable regression was used to determine the extent to which cardiac and pulmonary dysfunction were associated with changes in PASP and to define the relationship of changes in PASP with dyspnea development. The mean age was 75 ± 5 years at visit 5 and 81 ± 5 years at visit 7, 24% of subjects were Black adults, and 68% were women. Over the 6.5 years, PASP increased by 5 ± 8 mm Hg, from 28 ± 5 to 33 ± 8 mm Hg. PASP increased more in older participants. Predictors of greater increases in PASP included worse left ventricular (LV) systolic and diastolic function, pulmonary function, and renal function. Increases in PASP were associated with concomitant increases in measures of LV filling pressure, including E/e′ ratio and left atrial volume index. Each 5 mm Hg increase was associated with 16% higher odds of developing dyspnea (OR: 1.16; 95% CI: 1.07-1.27; P < 0.001). Pulmonary pressure increased over 6.5 years in late life, was associated with concomitant increases in LV filling pressure, and predicted the development of dyspnea. Interventions targeting LV diastolic function may be effective at mitigating age-related increases in PASP. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In practice, correction fluid to mask text errors has been continuously in demand since papers began to be predominantly used since the late fourth century AD in ancient China. However, research on the trajectory of correction fluid composition has been largely overlooked and has not been revealed currently. In this study, a multianalytical approach was used to investigate a thin whiteout layer, used as correction fluids applied in 1890, on a book page from the famous Imperial Encyclopedia (1726 bronze‐type repaint version). The results showed that the white layer was composed of hydrocerussite ((PbCO3)2·Pb (OH)2) in mixture with plant oil and a tiny portion of calcium carbonate, which had been applied to conceal the originally printed Chinese characters upon which they were rewritten in preparing photographic negatives for reprinting using photolithography. The analysis results also suggest that lead white was likely domestically made using a local lead ore source by the wet synthetic process. Considering the prolonged use of orpiment (As2S3) as a correction fluid ingredient in Chinese tradition, a trajectory to lead white suggests not only advances in pulping and papermaking technology but also a shift in cultural habits and aesthetic psychology in the late Qing Dynasty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Birch bark tar is one of the oldest man-made organic materials, which was most commonly served as adhesives in ancient Eurasia, but little is known about its usage in personal ornaments. In this study, we present the earliest direct evidence for the specific use of birch bark tar in the production of ornaments through chemical investigation (including FTIR, GC/MS, and Py-GC/MS) and imaging examination (including SEM and micro-CT). The chemical and microscopic analyses indicate that some beads and bracelets unearthed from a public cemetery (the Dayuanzi site) of an ancient state or tribe (Xinan Yi) on the eastern Yunnan plateau in southwest China dated to approximately 475 BCE–8 CE were exclusively made with birch bark tar. These ornaments represent a unique cultural phenomenon among ethnic groups in this region, which may contribute to a better understanding of plant exploitation and the related birch bark culture among different cultural groups and their interrelationships in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image-based food pattern classification poses new challenges for mainstream computer vision algorithms. Recent works on feature fusion technique have significantly boosted the generalization performances of food categorization tasks. However, the use of representation learning in the training process of feature fusion has rarely been explored. This study addresses the issue through a new supervised subnetwork-based feature encoding and pattern classification model, termed a wide hierarchical subnetwork-based neural network (Wi-HSNN). In particular, Wi-HSNN is a subnet-based iterative training process in which one pair of subnets is added to the framework in each iteration. Furthermore, instead of learning the optimal representations with the whole dataset, this paper introduces a batch-by-batch parallel scheme of Wi-HSNN to process large-scale datasets, such as Place365 set with more than 1.8 million samples. Extensive evaluations on eight benchmark datasets from food classification to scene image recognition demonstrated that the proposed solution has better representation learning capacity compared to existing encoding methods, and achieves stronger performance than existing approaches for food image classification tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the phenomenon that the decoding weights of a well-trained autoencoder contain the information of the training samples, we proposed a data augmentation method by utilizing the decoding weights. Given a batch of training data, the autoencoder is trained and the decoding weights are activated; the decoding weights are then combined with the raw samples to generate augmented samples. Furthermore, we probe its working mechanism in three ways: (i) we prove that the decoding weights and the raw samples are of linear relationship under the transformation of a certain invertible function; (ii) the proposed method can sample from a larger range in both feature dimensions and label dimension, which can be interpreted as a broader distribution vicinity compared with those by other approaches; (iii) the model trained with our data augmentation approach has better representation capability, which is reflected by the higher Fisher's criteria value in deep feature space. We conduct extensive experiments on image and tabular dataset with multiple network architectures. The proposed method provides significant generalization performance improvement compared with the baseline and better or comparable performance compared with the other state-of-the-art data augmentation approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes an ultra‐compact orthomode transducer (OMT) with novel taper branching structure. By combing the taper section and split part, the overall OMT can be implemented in a monoblock, which is as small as waveguide flanges. Furthermore, the good matching effect achieved by ridge and split makes the OMT maintaining the most compact structure with high performance. The whole structure can be fabricated using the conventional computer numerical control milling technique. A K‐band OMT is designed and tested. The measured results compared with the simulated results validated the proposed design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a computer-aided tuning approach for Butler matrices (BMs). It is implemented in two stages. First, extract the amplitude imbalance of each individual coupler from the overall BM measurement results using the proposed diagnosis procedure. The extracted results led to the instructions for fine adjustments. After that, each coupler is adjusted using the proposed method. As a result, the nonideal effect of a BM can be tuned out to achieve significant performance improvement. An $8 \times 8$ BM was designed, fabricated, and tuned using the proposed approach. The final results show excellent amplitude imbalance performance, which is improved by more than 80% relative to the initial results. For the first time, a systematic tuning method is demonstrated to achieve excellent amplitude imbalance for a BM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common chronic degenerative joint disease characterized by articular cartilage degeneration and synovitis. CircRNAs are increasingly being recognized as functional endogenous RNAs with a stable structure and high tissue specificity. Recent studies have shown that some circRNAs may be involved in the initiation and progression of OA and that there is differential expression of circRNAs in chondrocytes in vitro isolated from patients with OA. Purpose: In this study, we aimed to determine if circRNA levels in the peripheral blood of Chinese Han patients with OA would be diagnostic based on the previous in vitro studies. Methods: We collected peripheral blood samples from 25 patients suffering from OA and 25 healthy controls and measured hsa_circ_0032131_CBC1 RNA levels through quantitative RT-PCR (qRT-PCR). The statistical basis for evaluating the diagnostic value was to calculate the area under the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve. Results: The results of the qRT-PCR for hsa_circ_0032131_CBC1 were consistent with those of the microarray analysis. The ROC curve shows that hsa_circ_0032131 holds diagnostic value for OA (0.8455, p < 0.01). Conclusions: Our research indicates that differentially expressed circRNAs may be involved in the development of OA and could be used diagnostically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the world's earliest pottery origins in Eurasia, the role of pottery during Neolithic period in South China remains unclear. Here, we present a new understanding on the utilization pattern of early pottery from the Neolithic sites of Dayan, Dingsishan and Zengpiyan in Guangxi province, China. Compound-specific stable isotope analysis of pottery and bone lipids show that a persistent use of terrestrial C3 and C4 resources throughout the pottery utilization history highlight the culinary practice and terrestrial exploitation during Neolithic period. Contrary to the traditional view that the primary use of these pottery was closely linked with aquatic resource processing, no aquatic biomarkers were found in the potsherds, yet these compounds were detected in the cooking experiments in this study, indicating that aquatic resources in these sites were probably processed or consumed in other ways. Moreover, a remarkable diachronic change from extensive use of C3 and C4 resources to the intensive use of certain kinds of C3 resources in different Neolithic stages, further indicating that an ecological tradition rooted in the subtropical and tropical environments as well as the Neolithic social evolution exerted great influence upon the initial production and the subsequent utilization of early pottery in prehistoric South China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the crossroads of prehistoric cultures, the Beijing region is an important area for studying the exchange of prehistoric culture and the spread of millet agriculture. Although millet remains have been found in the Donghulin site during the Early Neolithic Age, there is little millet remains during the Middle and Late Neolithic Age, so there is a gap of approximately 2,000 years since the time of the Donghulin site. The Shangzhai site is located in the Pinggu Basin in eastern Beijing, and it has a large time span with sequential strata; however, there are few large animals and plant remains found at this site, thus the subsistence strategy of ancient people remains unclear. In this study, the absorbed lipids of pottery sherds unearthed in the Neolithic cultural layer of the Shangzhai site were extracted and analysed. The results show that these potteries were used to process millet, the meat of terrestrial non-ruminants and wild ruminants, and dairy of wild ruminants, providing new insights for the subsistence strategy and the development of millet agriculture in the Middle and Late Neolithic Age of Beijing. In addition, the food processing in pottery may be an internal heating method, such as stone boiling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ventral striatum (VS) processes rewarding and punishing stimuli. Women and men vary in externalizing and internalizing traits, which may influence neural responses to reward and punishment. To investigate sex differences in how individual traits influence VS responses to reward and punishment, we curated the data of the Human Connectome Project and identified 981 (473 men) subjects evaluated by the Achenbach Adult Self-Report Syndrome Scales. We processed the imaging data with published routines and extracted VS response (β) to win and to loss vs. baseline in a gambling task for correlation with externalizing and internalizing symptom severity. Men vs. women showed more severe externalizing symptoms and higher VS response to monetary losses (VS-loss β) but not to wins. Men but not women showed a significant, positive correlation between VS-loss β and externalizing traits, and the sex difference was confirmed by a slope test. The correlations of VS-loss vs. externalizing and of VS-win vs. externalizing and those of VS-loss vs. externalizing and of VS-loss vs. internalizing traits both differed significantly in slope, confirming its specificity, in men. Further, the sex-specific relationship between VS-loss β and externalizing trait did not extend to activities during exposure to negative emotion in the face matching task. To conclude, VS responses to loss but not to win and their correlation with externalizing rather than internalizing symptom severity showed sex differences in young adults. The findings highlight the relationship of externalizing traits and VS response to monetary loss and may have implications for psychological models of externalizing behaviors in men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 is a highly infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which primarily affects the respiratory system and can lead to severe illness. The virus is extremely contagious, early and accurate diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 is crucial to contain its spread, to provide prompt treatment, and to prevent complications. Currently, the reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is considered to be the gold standard for detecting COVID-19 in its early stages. In addition, loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LMAP), clustering rule interval short palindromic repeats (CRISPR), colloidal gold immunochromatographic assay (GICA), computed tomography (CT), and electrochemical sensors are also common tests. However, these different methods vary greatly in terms of their detection efficiency, specificity, accuracy, sensitivity, cost, and throughput. Besides, most of the current detection methods are conducted in central hospitals and laboratories, which is a great challenge for remote and underdeveloped areas. Therefore, it is essential to review the advantages and disadvantages of different COVID-19 detection methods, as well as the technology that can enhance detection efficiency and improve detection quality in greater details. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The agro-pastoral ecotone in northern China has long been an essential interaction between the Central Plains and the Eurasian steppe. The Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BCE), with the Central Plains as its political core area, occupied parts of the agro-pastoral ecotone around 3000 BP during its early extensive territorial expansion. However, little is known about the subsistence strategies of the agro-pastoral ecotone subordinated to the Western Zhou. In this study, lipid analysis was performed on potsherds from the Yaoheyuan site in northwest China. The results show that ancient people consumed millet, ruminant meat and dairy products, together with possible equine products. The low proportion of dairy exploitation indicates that ruminant animal management was meat-oriented, which may be related to lactase intolerance and cultural habits. The people at Yaoheyuan lived on an agro-pastoral economy with domesticated herbivores and rare pig consumption, revealing a turning point for the intensified pastoralism in the agro-pastoral ecotone around 3000 BP impacted by nomadic pastoralism in the Eurasian steppe and climate change. In particular, the lipid signals in Yaoheyuan pottery and the previously published data likely reflect that the heterogeneity of Zhou culture between the Central Plains and the agro-pastoral ecotone, and provide important insights into the multiple interactions between the Zhou and indigenous cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition of the energy model dominated by centralized fossil energy use and the emergence of the Energy Internet and the Integrated Community Energy System (ICES) has gained attention. ICES involved the connection of electricity, heat, gas, and other kinds of energy, and was a significant form of the targeted transformation of conventional single energy networks. Within this system, the traditional demand response (DR) was transformed into an integrated demand response (IDR) in which all energy consumers could participate. The purpose of this study is to discuss the important technologies and models along with assessment and optimization strategies for the implementation of ICES and IDR, based on an extensive literature review. The analysis results show the "IDR + ICES" ecosystem proved to hold great potential for achieving renewable energy penetration, energy efficiency, and climate change control goals, while there are still many limitations in the coordination and reliability of the model and the design of the market mechanism. To conclude, the challenges and opportunities that ICES and IDR face were summarized, and future avenues for research are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fetal movement (FM) is an important indicator of fetal health. However, the current methods of FM detection are unsuitable for ambulatory or long-term observation. This paper proposes a non-contact method for monitoring FM. We recorded abdominal videos from pregnant women and then detected the maternal abdominal region within each frame. FM signals were acquired by optical flow color-coding, ensemble empirical mode decomposition, energy ratio, and correlation analysis. FM spikes, indicating the occurrence of FMs, were recognized using the differential threshold method. FM parameters including number, interval, duration, and percentage were calculated, and good agreement was found with the manual labeling performed by the professionals, achieving true detection rate, positive predictive value, sensitivity, accuracy, and F1_score of 95.75%, 95.26%, 95.75%, 91.40%, and 95.50%, respectively. The changes in FM parameters with gestational week were consistent with pregnancy progress. In general, this study provides a novel contactless FM monitoring technology for use at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple enzymes perform moonlighting functions distinct from their main roles. UDP-glucose epimerases (UGEs), a subclass of isomerases, catalyze the interconversion of UDP-glucose (UDP-Glc) and UDP-galactose (UDP-Gal). We identified a rice male-sterile mutant, osuge1 , with delayed tapetum degradation and abortive pollen. The mutant osuge1 protein lacked UDP-glucose epimerase activity, resulting in higher UDP-Gal content and lower UDP-Glc levels in the osuge1 mutant compared with the wild type. Interestingly, we discovered that OsUGE1 participates in the TIP2/bHLH142–TDR–EAT1/DTD transcriptional regulatory cascade involved in tapetum degradation, in which TIP2 and TDR regulate the expression of OsUGE1 while OsUGE1 regulates the expression of EAT1. In addition, we found that OsUGE1 regulates the expression of its own gene by directly binding to an E-box element in the OsUGE1 promoter. Collectively, our results indicate that OsUGE1 not only functions as a UDP-glucose epimerase but also moonlights as a transcriptional activator to promote tapetum degradation, revealing a novel regulatory mechanism of rice reproductive development. This study reveals that OsUGE1 not only functions as a UDP-glucose epimerase but also moonlights as a transcriptional activator to promote tapetum degradation. OsUGE1 catalyzes the interconversion of UDP-Glc and UDP-Gal and also participates in the TIP2/bHLH142-TDR-EAT1/DTD pathway to show moonlighting transcriptional activation activity by directly regulating the expresson of EAT1 during tapetum development.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glioma treatment remains a challenge owing to unsatisfactory targeted chemotherapy, where the blood–brain barrier (BBB) hinders the efficient uptake of therapeutics into the brain. Vasculogenic mimicry (VM) formed by invasive glioma cells negatively affects the treatment of glioma. Herein, we developed a targeted biomimetic drug delivery system comprising a doxorubicin-loaded platelet membrane-coated nanogel (DOX@PNGs). The nanogels provide great redox/pH dual responsiveness, while the platelet membrane (PLTM) promotes stability and circulation time. In vitro cellular uptake and in vivo imaging experiments demonstrated that the DOX@PNGs delivery system could penetrate the BBB, target gliomas, and destruct VM. DOX@PNGs increased drug penetration and prolonged mouse survival time during the treatment of orthotopic gliomas. These results indicate this biomimetic drug delivery system to be promising for glioma treatment and may be clinically translated in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provenance of nephrite excavated from the capital of the late Shang dynasty is an important concern. Some nephrites with yellow-green color might have the same provenance. In this study, the provenance of three nephrite artifacts with yellow-green hue was determined by nondestructive multispectral imaging. The results show that they are very similar to nephrite from Xiuyan in northeastern China, suggesting that the Shang dynasty had some connection to regional cultures more than a thousand kilometers away. Of particular importance is the fact that the multispectral imaging method opens a new avenue for the study of the ancient jade circulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human action recognition (HAR) is one of most important tasks in video analysis. Since video clips distributed on networks are usually untrimmed, it is required to accurately segment a given untrimmed video into a set of action segments for HAR. As an unsupervised temporal segmentation technology, subspace clustering learns the codes from each video to construct an affinity graph, and then cuts the affinity graph to cluster the video into a set of action segments. However, most of the existing subspace clustering schemes not only ignore the sequential information of frames in code learning, but also the negative effects of noises when cutting the affinity graph, which lead to inferior performance. To address these issues, we propose a sequential order-aware coding-based robust subspace clustering (SOAC-RSC) scheme for HAR. By feeding the motion features of video frames into multi-layer neural networks, two expressive code matrices are learned in a sequential order-aware manner from unconstrained and constrained videos, respectively, to construct the corresponding affinity graphs. Then, with the consideration of the existence of noise effects, a simple yet robust cutting algorithm is proposed to cut the constructed affinity graphs to accurately obtain the action segments for HAR. The extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed SOAC-RSC scheme achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the datasets of Keck Gesture and Weizmann, and provides competitive performance on the other 6 public datasets such as UCF101 and URADL for HAR task, compared to the recent related approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Kyphoplasty is widely used for Osteoporotic Vertebral Compression Fracture (OVCF) under general or local anesthesia, more attention was paid to its post-operative efficacy. Patients' pain and discomfort control strategies during surgery have not been taken seriously.Objective: This study aimed at assessing the efficacy of preoperative preemptive analgesia combined with intraoperative sedation for pain and tension relief in OVCF patients undergoing kyphoplasty under local anesthesia.Methods: We enrolled 128 patients with single-level OVCF who underwent kyphoplasty in our hospital from July 2013 to July 2016. The patients were randomly allocated into three groups: conventional group (i.e., local anesthesia with 0.5% lidocaine (1); n = 42), preemptive group (i.e, (1) + oral 200 mg Celecoxib on the night before surgery with intravenous 40 mg parecoxib sodium an hour before surgery (2); n = 43), and combined group (i.e., (1) + (2) + continuous intravenous 0.5 μg/kg/h dexmedetomidine intraoperatively; n = 43). Hemodynamic variations (heart rate, blood pressure, pulse oxygen saturation (SpO2)), Pain Visual Analogue Score (VAS), Ramsay score, and adverse events were recorded during perioperative period.Results: Blood pressure and heart rate were more stable with significantly smaller values in the combined group than in the conventional and preemptive groups both intra- and postoperatively. In contrast, SpO2 showed no significant difference among the groups throughout the perioperative period. Intraoperative VAS scores revealed significant differences among the groups with the combined group having the smallest values followed by the preemptive group. Similarly, intraoperative Ramsay scores reflected significantly more favorable effects of sedation in the combined than in conventional group. Both VAS and Ramsay scores showed no significant differences among the groups postoperatively, and no differences in complication incidences were noted among the groups as well.Conclusions: For kyphoplasty under local anesthesia for single-level OVCF, intraoperative sedation combined with preemptive analgesia worked better in mitigating pain and tension intraoperatively and in preventing hemodynamic changes intra- and post-operatively, as compared to local anesthesia alone or additional preemptive analgesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese ink, generally produced in a stick form, was often like pellets before the Western Han dynasty (202 bce–8 ce) according to literary records and a few archaeological discoveries. However, their composition and manufacture have not been scientifically analysed to date. In this study, the ink pellets roughly dated to 2000 years ago from two royal tombs of the Han dynasty (the Nanyue King's tomb and the Marquis of Haihun's tomb) were analyzed by micro‐/non‐destructive methods, including synchrotron radiation‐based micro‐computed tomography (SR‐μCT), Fourier‐transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and pyrolysis gas chromatography mass spectrometry (Py‐GC/MS). The results reveal that they were made from pine soot, and the production technology of the later Haihun ink was more complex than that of the earlier Nanyue King ink. The microstructure of the ink pellets indicated that some kind of glue should be used in the Haihun ink, which is the earliest case of glue addition. Moreover, plant extracts, including borneol and cedar oil, were detected in the Haihun ink, reflecting another aspect of progress in ink production history. These technical breakthroughs imply that the Western Han dynasty is a critical period for the development of traditional ink manufacture, and the shape transformation of Chinese ink is closely related to the evolution of ink production technology during this specific period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]