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Inactivation of SMARCA4/BRG1 (Brahma-related gene 1), a member of the switch/sucrose nonfermentable subfamily of adenosine triphosphate-dependent chromatin remodeling complexes, has been demonstrated in a subset of non–small cell lung carcinomas (NSCLCs). However, the cytomorphologic features of SMARCA4-deficient NSCLCs (SMARCA4-dNSCLC) have only rarely been reported. Eight cytology cases of SMARCA4-dNSCLC and eight SMARCA4-retained NSCLC (SMARCA4-rNSCLC) cases were retrieved from our institution's database. These were compared cytologically and immunophenotypically. All 8 patients with SMARCA4-dNSCLC had a smoking history, and 4 of 8 cases had a prior cancer history. Cytologically, the tumors demonstrated predominantly loosely cohesive and high-grade epithelioid cells with markedly pleomorphic nuclei and prominent nucleoli. Binucleated/multinucleated cells were seen in 5 cases. Six cases showed focal plasmacytoid morphology, and 2 cases showed necrosis. In contrast, in all 8 cases of SMARCA4-rNSCLC, the aspirates were predominantly cohesive with focal, loosely cohesive epithelioid cells showing mild to moderate pleomorphism and lacked necrosis. Only 1 case showed multinucleated cells. All 8 cases of SMARCA4-dNSCLC showed an immunoprofile similar to that of the SMARCA4-rNSCLC cases, including immunoreactivity for AE1/AE3, a lack of immunoreactivity for thyroid transcription factor-1/Napsin A, and p40/p63 but with a loss of BRG1 expression. SMARCA4-dNSCLCs exhibited high-grade cytologic features with marked pleomorphism and might show multinucleation and plasmacytoid morphology. In contrast, SMARCA4-rNSCLCs often show mild to moderate pleomorphism with round to polygonal shapes. Both characteristically lack expression of lung adenocarcinoma/squamous markers. Increased awareness of their cytomorphologic features on fine needle aspiration can ensure consideration of the diagnosis. • SMARCA4-dNSCLCs are being recognized as a distinct but clinically important subset. • SMARCA4-dNSCLCs appear to exhibit high-grade cytologic features. • Increased awareness of their cytomorphologic features can allow necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Aim: Serum pepsinogens (PGs) are biomarkers for gastric mucosal damage and have been reported to be associated with atherosclerosis. Its correlation with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) is still unknown. This study aimed to explore the association between serum PGs and ASCVD for providing physicians with an integrative picture to make rational plans in the diagnosis and treatment of ASCVD.Methods and Results: The concentrations of serum PGs and their distributions between ASCVD and non-ASCVD were compared by non-parametric test, Chi-squared test and Fisher exact test. The correlation between variables was analyzed by Spearman's correlation test. The association of serum PGs with ASCVD was analyzed by the binary logistic regression and two-piecewise linear regression. A total of 8355 recruited cases were eligible for the study. The concentrations of serum PGs were significantly different between the ASCVD and non-ASCVD groups (P = 0.025, P < 0.001). The lower PGI and PGR levels were significantly correlated with a high risk of ASCVD presence after adjustment for 26 potential covariates. Moreover, there was a linear relationship between the high level of PGII and the high risk of ASCVD [adjusted OR = 1.16 (1.00, 1.37), P = 0.07]. A nonlinear relationship of PGI/PGR and ASCVD (P = 0.08/<0.001) was also revealed. The risk of ASCVD increased with a range of log PGI ≥2.13 (PGI≥131 ng/mL) [adjusted OR = 4.67 (1.00, 23.17)], and decreased with a range of log PGR ≥0.22 (1.65) [adjusted OR = 0.59 (0.48, 0.74), P < 0.001].Conclusions: Serum PGI and PGR are nonlinearly correlated with ASCVD, while PGII is linearly correlated with ASCVD. Among all PGs, PGR may serve as a reliable biomarker for ASCVD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The lateral hypothalamic area (LHa) is an important brain site for the regulation of food intake. Central injection of opioids increases food intake, and the LHa contains mu and kappa opioid receptors, both of which are involved in feeding behavior. It is unclear whether opioids impact feeding when injected directly into the rostral portion of the LHa (rLHa) in rats. We performed a series of studies in which free-feeding rLHa-cannulated rats were injected with opioid agonists (DAMGO, morphine, dynorphin, U-50488H) followed by the measurement of food intake at 1, 2, and 4 h postinjection. To determine whether opioid receptor ligands administered into the rLHa affect neuronal activation in this brain site, we studied cFos immunoreactivity (cFos IR) in response to rLHa stimulation with naltrexone. We found that the only compound that stimulated feeding behavior was morphine. The other agonists had no effect on food consumption. Naltrexone injection into the rLHa increased neural activation in the LHa, indicating the presence of functional opioid receptors in this region. These data suggest that although neuronal activity is affected by opioid agents acting in the rLHa, administration of selective mu and kappa opioid ligands in this subdivision of the LHa does not have a reliable effect on feeding behavior. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Ghrelin stimulates feeding when administered centrally and peripherally. The lateral hypothalamus (LH) is thought to mediate ghrelin-induced hyperphagia. Thus, we examined central mechanisms underlying feeding generated by LH ghrelin. We determined that 0.3 nmol of LH-injected ghrelin was the lowest dose increasing food consumption and it induced Fos immunoreactivity (IR; a marker of neuronal activation) in feeding-related brain areas, including the hypothalamic paraventricular, arcuate, and dorsomedial nuclei, amygdala, and nucleus of the solitary tract. Also, LH ghrelin induced Fos IR in LH orexin neurons. We conclude that the LH, as part of larger central circuitry, integrates orexigenic properties of ghrelin. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

To reduce the use of formaldehyde wood adhesives, a chemical modification of starch with chitosan was explored to prepare an adhesive film for plywood with good adhesive properties, low price, non-toxic, and convenient sizing. The effect of chitosan content of the adhesive film on the shear strength of plywood was studied. The modification mechanism and bonding mechanism of the film were analyzed by FTIR, XPS, XRD and SEM. The results showed that when the amount of chitosan was 30% of starch dry weight, the dry-wet shear strength of plywood met the requirements of Chinese national class Ⅱ plywood (≧ 0.80 MPa). FTIR and XPS analysis showed that –NH 2 in the chitosan reacted with –COOH on starch and wood surface to form amide bond, which specifies the chitosan's role as a coupling agent. XRD and SEM analysis showed that the addition of chitosan disturbed the otherwise orderly arrangement of a starch structure. The structure of the attained modified film is mostly amorphous. Sizing in the form of a adhesive film solves the disadvantage of difficulty in sizing starch adhesive. Compared with commercial adhesives on the market, this adhesive film has the advantages of low price, wide source of raw materials, non-toxic, and is expected to be a good substitute for formaldehyde adhesives on the market. • Raw starch and modifier chitosan are both sustainable resources. • Chitosan is used as a special coupling agent. • The mechanism is –NH 2 and –COOH condensation reaction. • The method of adhesive film sizing is more convenient and simple. • Adhesive film cost is lower than commercial adhesives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human activity and adaptation to the environmental changes on the Tibetan Plateau are under debate. Lhasa is the political and economic center of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and was founded in 633 CE. The potential influence of changes in the landscape on the city's development remains unclear. In this paper, Optically Stimulated Luminescence and radiocarbon dating techniques were applied to determine the ages at which landforms have changed since the Last Glacial Maximum. Combining these results with archaeological evidence taken from two sites (Changguogougou and Qugong) in the Lhasa area, the relation between river migration and human adaptation was discussed. The results showed that the two terraces (T1 and T2) of the Lhasa River are fill and fill-cut terraces, and that these were formed after ∼0.9 ka and 0.08 cal ka BP, respectively. Land below an altitude of ∼3650 m above sea level was lower than the contemporary river level before ∼0.9 ka. With the down cutting of the Lhasa River, more land became available for habitation, and the flood risk to the city was also reduced. The sediments of the lower land around the Changguogou area appear to be composed of fluvial-lacustrine facies during the Last Glacial Maximum to Late Glacial period. Humans occupied the Changguogou area between ∼3.255 and 3.059 cal ka BP when there was weaker aeolian activity, and abandoned this area when aeolian activity increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glucosinolates (GSLs) are specialized metabolites in plants of the order Brassicales. GSL transporters (GTRs) are essential for the redistribution of GSLs and also play a role in controlling the GSL content of seeds. However, specific inhibitors of these transporters have not been reported. In the current study, we described the design and synthesis of 2,3,4,6- t etrachloro-5- c yano p henyl G SL (TCPG), an artificial GSL bearing a chlorothalonil moiety as a potent inhibitor of GTRs, and evaluated its inhibitory effect on the substrate uptake mediated through GTR1 and GTR2. Molecular docking showed that the position of the β-D-glucose group of TCPG was significantly different from that of the natural substrate in GTRs and the chlorothalonil moiety forms halogen bonds with GTRs. Functional assays and kinetic analysis of the transport activity revealed that TCPG could significantly inhibit the transport activity of GTR1 and GTR2 (IC 50 values (mean ± SD) being 79 ± 16 μM and 192 ± 14 μM, respectively). Similarly, TCPG could inhibit the uptake and phloem transport of exogenous sinigrin by Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) Heynh leaf tissues, while not affecting that of esculin (a fluorescent surrogate for sucrose). TCPG could also reduce the content of endogenous GSLs in phloem exudates. Together, TCPG was discovered as an undescribed inhibitor of the uptake and phloem transport of GSLs, which brings novel insights into the ligand recognition of GTRs and provides a new strategy to control the GSL level. Further tests on the ecotoxicological and environmental safety of TCPG are needed before using it as an agricultural or horticultural chemical in the future. An artificial glucosinolate bearing a chlorothalonil moiety was synthesized, and its inhibitory effect on the glucosinolate uptake mediated through GTR1 and GTR2 transporters was evaluated. [Display omitted] • GTR1 and GTR2 are key targets for glucosinolate content modulation. • An artificial GSL bearing a chlorothalonil as an inhibitor of GTRs was synthesized. • The inhibitor was named 2,3,4,6-tetrachloro-5-cyanophenyl GSL (TCPG). • The R moiety of TCPG could form halogen bonds with GTRs. • TCPG could inhibit the GTR-mediated influx of GSLs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of COVID-19 brings almost the biggest explosions of scientific literature ever. Facing such volume literature, it is hard for researches to find desired citation when carrying out COVID-19 related research, especially for junior researchers. This paper presents a novel neural network based method, called c itation r elational B ERT with h eterogeneous d eep g raph c onvolutional n etwork (CRB-HDGCN), for COVID-19 inline citation recommendation task. The CRB-HDGCN contains two main stages. The first stage is to enhance the representation learning of BERT model for COVID-19 inline citation recommendation task through CRB. To achieve the above goal, an augmented citation sentence corpus, which replaces the citation placeholder with the title of the cited papers, is used to lightly retrain BERT model. In addition, we extract three types of sentence pair according citation relation, and establish sentence prediction tasks to further fine-tune the BERT model. The second stage is to learn effective dense vector of nodes among COVID-19 bibliographic graph through HDGCN. The HDGCN contains four layers which are essentially all sub neural networks. The first layer is initial embedding layer which generates initial input vectors with fixed size through CRB and a multilayer perceptron. The second layer is a heterogeneous graph convolutional layer. In this layer, we expand traditional homogeneous graph convolutional network into heterogeneous by subtly adding heterogeneous nodes and relations. The third layer is a deep attention layer. This layer uses trainable project vectors to reweight the node importance simultaneously according to both node types and convolution layers, which further promotes the performance of learnt node vectors. The last decoder layer recovers the graph structure and let the whole network trainable. The recommendation is finally achieved by integrating the high performance heterogeneous vectors learnt from CRB-HDGCN with the query vectors. We conduct experiments on the CORD-19 and LitCovid datasets. The results show that compared with the second best method CO-Search, CRB-HDGCN improves MAP, MRR, P@100 and R@100 with 21.8%, 22.7%, 37.6% and 21.2% on CORD-19, and 29.1%, 25.9%, 15.3% and 11.3% on LitCovid, respectively. • A neural based citation recommendation method is proposed for COVID-19 papers. • A new solution to retrain and fine-tune PLMs is proposed. • A new heterogeneous deep graph convolutional network is proposed. • CRB-HDGCN achieves state-of-art on CORD-19 and LitCovid datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The energy internet analysis method based on energy flow analysis can be used to analyze complex flow phenomena of material and energy effectively. However, there is a lack of general conservation principles for energy flow modeling when analyzing the coupling of energy flow with different types of material and energy. Hence, it is necessary to explore the general transmission principles of energy flows based on the physical mechanism. The objective of this paper is to obtain the conservation principles of energy flow at the node and the state parameters characteristics, then develop an effective energy flow calculation method. Firstly, concepts of potential parameters are extended to the general physical potentials, such as voltage, pressure, temperature, and concentration. Then, the application limitations of Kirchhoff's loop law from circuit calculation to energy network analysis are analyzed. The nodal conservation principle of potential energy flow (PEF) and the nodal mixing principle of potential is proposed. Finally, a general PEF calculation method suitable for energy internet is proposed. The results of the 14-node heating solution network show that the general PEF calculation method can effectively analyze the heating solution network, and the number of iterations does not increase with the increase of PEF types. • Pressure, temperature and concentration are uniformly defined as physical potential. • Potential energy flow and transmission flow are defined for energy internet. • Each type of potential energy flow and network flow is conserved at branch node. • Potential after mixing equals the average of inflows' potential before mixing. • Iterations not increase with potential types for potential energy flow calculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extrapolation chambers are widely used to detect the weakly-penetrating types of radiation beams. Normally, the sensitive volume of them is limited, only a few cubic centimeters. Their collecting electrodes use sheet structure, which lead to more backscattering photons. In this work, a large volume extrapolation chamber with (235–1413) cm3 was designed for the absolute measurement of air kerma strength of 125I brachytherapy seeds. The developed chamber has the following innovation: large sensitive volume and the Aluminized Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) collecting electrode foil. In order to give a more comprehensive performance evaluation for the designed chamber, a series of experiments were conducted. Evaluation parameters include leakage current, saturation curve, polarity effect, ion collecting efficiency, linearity of response, collecting area and zero point. Those tests were measured in the standard X-ray radiation field. A comparative experiment with the primary standard free air chamber (FAC) was performed. Moreover, extrapolation curve was measured in 125I radiation field. Evaluation results show a good behavior of the extrapolation chamber. The Al-coated PET collecting electrode influence the response of the chamber to 0.07% with the simulation of MCNP5 Monte Carlo. All the results indicate the usefulness of the extrapolation chamber for the absolute measurement for 125I seeds. • A large volume extrapolation chamber with (235–1413) cm3 was designed and fabricated. • A new design method of the collecting electrode is adopted. It is etched as the collecting electrode and the potential guard. • The Al-coated PET foil can be employed for fabricating the collecting electrode to replace the PMMA sheet structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heating flow calculation method can determine the temperature and pressure of each node and the mass flow of each branch in the energy network. Since the heating network flow is coupling network flow, it is difficult to deal with discontinuous nodal parameters at the mixing node. The objective of this paper is to obtain characteristics in meshed heating networks based on the physical mechanism analysis and develop a decoupling calculation method for network flow. First, pressure and temperature are proved as two types of physical potentials, for thermal potential energy flow and pressure potential energy flow, respectively. Then, nodal potential energy flow conservation is obtained as the basic rule for the potential energy flow. Due to the transmission speed differences between pressure and thermal potential energy flow, the inflow temperature is different. Using the nodal pressure differences to describe the flow direction of the coupling network flow, temperatures of inflows and outflows at the mixing node are determined. Finally, the directional nodal potential method (DNPM) is developed. The results show that the proposed DNPM can deal with the complex networks containing several potential energy flows with higher convergence speed and more concise modeling formulation. • Temperature and pressure are physical potentials in heating networks. • Thermal energy flow and pressure energy flow are potential energy flows. • Heating flow is decoupled as thermal energy flow and pressure energy flow. • Nodal potential energy flow conservation is the basic rule for network analysis. • DNPM can be applied for coupling network flow rather than BFM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The effects of grain size on nonlinear dielectric properties of as-deposited SrTiO3(STO) thin films were studied by using interdigital capacitor. C-axis-oriented STO thin films with different grain size were deposited onto interdigital electrodes made from YBa2Cu3O7−x thin films by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) technique. The grain size of as-deposited STO thin films increased with substrate temperature, and reached a maximum value at 700 °C. With further increase of substrate temperature, the grain size decrease rapidly because of the negative oxygen supersaturation and the high nucleation density. The nonlinear dielectric properties measurements showed to be highly correlated with the grain size of STO thin films; the zero-bias dielectric constant, the dielectric dissipation, and the tunability decreased with the decrease of the grain size. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread globally and the meteorological factors vary greatly across the world. Understanding the effect of meteorological factors and control strategies on COVID-19 transmission is critical to contain the epidemic. Using individual-level data in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and the number of confirmed cases in other regions, we explore the effect of temperature, relative humidity, and control measures on the spread of COVID-19. We find that high temperature mitigates the transmission of the disease. High relative humidity promotes COVID-19 transmission when temperature is low, but tends to reduce transmission when temperature is high. Implementing classical control measures can dramatically slow the spread of the disease. However, due to the occurrence of pre-symptomatic infections, the effect of the measures to shorten treatment time is markedly reduced and the importance of contact quarantine and social distancing increases. Unlabelled Image • High temperature mitigates the transmission of COVID-19. • High relative humidity promotes COVID-19 transmission when temperature is low. • High relative humidity reduces COVID-19 transmission when temperature is high. • Contact quarantine and social distancing are critical to contain the epidemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]