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Simple Summary: Given the low incidence, heterogeneous behavior, and diverse anatomical sites of salivary gland cancer (SGC), there are a limited number of clinical studies on its management. This is the first systematic review and meta-analysis to report the cumulative evidence on postoperative radiotherapy (PORT) for SGC of the head and neck. Based on 2962 patients with SGC from 26 studies, this study demonstrated the long-term survival and toxicities of PORT as a local treatment modality for SGC. Considering the suboptimal disease-free survival and distant metastasis-dominant recurrent patterns, however, an intensified treatment strategy is needed. Background: Because of the rarity, heterogeneous histology, and diverse anatomical sites of salivary gland cancer (SGC), there are a limited number of clinical studies on its management. This study reports the cumulative evidence of postoperative radiotherapy (PORT) for SGC of the head and neck. Methods: A systematic review was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. We searched the PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, and Web of Science databases between 7th and 10th November 2023. Results: A total of 2962 patients from 26 studies between 2007 and 2023 were included in this meta-analysis. The median RT dose was 64 Gy (range: 56–66 Gy). The median proportions of high-grade, pathological tumor stage 3 or 4 and pathological lymph node involvement were 42% (0–100%), 40% (0–77%), and 31% (0–75%). The pooled locoregional control rates at 3, 5, and 10 years were 92% (95% confidence interval [CI], 89–94%), 89% (95% CI, 86–93%), and 84% (95% CI, 73–92%), respectively. The pooled disease-free survival (DFS) rates at 3, 5, and 10 years were 77% (95% CI, 70–83%), 67% (95% CI, 60–74%), and 61% (95% CI, 55–67%), respectively. The pooled overall survival rates at 3, 5, and 10 years were 84% (95% CI, 79–88%), 75% (95% CI, 72–79%), and 68% (95% CI, 62–74%), respectively. Severe late toxicity ≥ grade 3 occurred in 7% (95% CI, 3–14%). Conclusion: PORT showed favorable long-term efficacy and safety in SGC, especially for patients with high-grade histology. Considering that DFS continued to decrease, further clinical trials exploring treatment intensification are warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: In current pig farming, pigs are susceptible to stress-induced adverse emotions. Emotional contagion may propagate these emotions within a herd, potentially affecting overall welfare. Typically, treatments of individual pigs should be conducted separately from the group. Thus, after separation from treatment on an individual pig, the behavioral responses and heart rate changes of the companion pig were recorded to determine if the sensory avoidance was effective. It was found that peers were still affected by the treated pigs after sensory avoidance. Separation from treatment does not eliminate the effects of the treated pig on companion pigs, which can still be affected in post-treatment contact. In the pig farming industry, it is recommended to avoid groups when treating individuals to reduce adverse reactions in the group. However, can this eliminate the adverse effects effectively? Piglets were assigned to the Rewarding Group (RG), the Punishing Group (PG), and the Paired Control Group (PCG). There were six replicates in each group, with two paired piglets per replicate. One piglet of the RG and PG was randomly selected as the Treated pig (TP), treated with food rewards or electric shock, and the other as the Naive pig (NP). The NPs in the RG and PG were unaware of the treatment process, and piglets in the PCG were not treated. The behavior and heart rate changes of all piglets were recorded. Compared to the RG, the NPs in the PG showed longer proximity but less contact behavior, and the TPs in the PG showed more freezing behavior. The percentage change in heart rate of the NPs was synchronized with the TPs. This shows that after sensory avoidance, the untreated pigs could also feel the emotions of their peers and their emotional state was affected by their peers, and the negative emotions in the pigs lasted longer than the positive emotions. The avoidance process does not prevent the transfer of negative emotions to peers via emotional contagion from the stimulated pig. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a complex mental disorder that involves alterations in signal transmission across multiple scales and structural abnormalities. The development of effective antidepressants (ADs) has been hindered by the dominance of monoamine hypothesis, resulting in slow progress. Traditional ADs have undesirable traits like delayed onset of action, limited efficacy, and severe side effects. Recently, two categories of fast-acting antidepressant compounds have surfaced, dissociative anesthetics S-ketamine and its metabolites, as well as psychedelics such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). This has led to structural research and drug development of the receptors that they target. This review provides breakthroughs and achievements in the structure of depression-related receptors and novel ADs based on these. Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has enabled researchers to identify the structures of membrane receptors, including the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) and the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2A (5-HT2A) receptor. These high-resolution structures can be used for the development of novel ADs using virtual drug screening (VDS). Moreover, the unique antidepressant effects of 5-HT1A receptors in various brain regions, and the pivotal roles of the α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid receptor (AMPAR) and tyrosine kinase receptor 2 (TrkB) in regulating synaptic plasticity, emphasize their potential as therapeutic targets. Using structural information, a series of highly selective ADs were designed based on the different role of receptors in MDD. These molecules have the favorable characteristics of rapid onset and low adverse drug reactions. This review offers researchers guidance and a methodological framework for the structure-based design of ADs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transient stability and frequency stability of virtual synchronous generator (VSG)-controlled converters during grid faults are critical for the stable operation of high-share renewable energy power systems. However, the existing transient stability methods often overlook the consideration of frequency stability. This paper presents a method to improve both frequency stability and transient stability of VSGs during grid faults. The influence mechanism of inertia and damping on transient stability and frequency stability is comprehensively analyzed under two types of faults, with or without stable equilibrium points. To address the conflict between frequency stability and transient stability of VSGs with large inertia under the first type of fault, an improved VSG control with angular frequency deviation feedback is proposed. The transient response of this control method is analyzed using small-signal and large-signal models. Furthermore, to achieve optimal dynamic performance, this improved VSG control introduces the optimal damping ratio and presents a parameter design method. Finally, the correctness of the proposed method and its theoretical analysis is verified through experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent advancements in artificial intelligence have brought about significant changes in education. In the context of intelligent campus development, target detection technology plays a pivotal role in applications such as campus environment monitoring and the facilitation of classroom behavior surveillance. However, traditional object detection methods face challenges in open and dynamic campus scenarios where unexpected objects and behaviors arise. Open-World Object Detection (OWOD) addresses this issue by enabling detectors to gradually learn and recognize unknown objects. Nevertheless, existing OWOD methods introduce two major uncertainties that limit the detection performance: the unknown discovery uncertainty from the manual generation of pseudo-labels for unknown objects and the known discrimination uncertainty from perturbations that unknown training introduces to the known class features. In this paper, we introduce a Parallel OWOD Framework with Uncertainty Mitigation to alleviate the unknown discovery uncertainty and the known discrimination uncertainty within the OWOD task. To address the unknown discovery uncertainty, we propose an objectness-driven discovery module to focus on capturing the generalized objectness shared among various known classes, driving the framework to discover more potential objects that are distinct from the background, including unknown objects. To mitigate the discrimination uncertainty, we decouple the learning processes for known and unknown classes through a parallel structure to reduce the mutual influence at the feature level and design a collaborative open-world classifier to achieve high-performance collaborative detection of both known and unknown classes. Our framework provides educators with a powerful tool for effective campus monitoring and classroom management. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate the framework's superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, showcasing its transformative potential in intelligent educational environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Emotional contagion and social support are common phenomena in animals. The study evaluated whether pigs that did not observe the stimulus process could also perceive the negative emotions of their companions and provide social support. Here, the research compared differences in behavioral responses between treated individuals and naive companions by measuring the frequency/duration and latency of behaviors occurring in pigs under different test conditions to determine whether there were behavioral responses of the companions with emotional contagion to support the treated individuals. Whether or not the companions were aware of the source of the negative emotions of the treated pigs, they were able to respond to it in an appropriate emotional way and provide social support to the treated individual. This study expects to confirm the existence of emotional transmission in pigs from multiple perspectives and to provide theoretical references for improving animal welfare in livestock farming. A group that could directly observe (DO) and a group that could not directly observe (NO) were created based on whether or not their peers observed the treatment process, as the treated pig (TP) was treated with electrical shock and the companion pig (CP) either witnessed the treatment inflicted upon TP or not, and a third group was a control group, in which neither pig was stimulated. The behavioral responses of both the TPs and CPs were recorded to evaluate the emotional reaction. The results found that in both the DO and NO groups, the frequency of TP freezing was significantly higher than that of CP, and CP was significantly higher than that of the control group. Interestingly, although the social interaction responses of the CPs were not similar in the DO and NO groups, there were no significant differences between the behaviors of TPs in the DO and NO groups, except for nose–nose contact and a single approach to the partition, which allowed us to conclude that, whether or not the pigs directly observed the negative treatment, they were able to respond accordingly to fear and provide similar social support to their companions who were treated negatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heat stress response of broilers will adversely affect the large-scale and welfare of the breeding of broilers. In order to detect the heat stress state of broilers in time, make reasonable adjustments, and reduce losses, this paper proposed an improved Cascade R-CNN (Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks) model based on visual technology to identify the behavior of yellow-feathered broilers. The improvement of the model solved the problem of the behavior recognition not being accurate enough when broilers were gathered. The influence of different iterations on the model recognition effect was compared, and the optimal model was selected. The final average accuracy reached 88.4%. The behavioral image data with temperature and humidity data were combined, and the heat stress evaluation model was optimized using the PLSR (partial least squares regression) method. The behavior recognition results and optimization equations were verified, and the test accuracy reached 85.8%. This proves the feasibility of the heat stress evaluation optimization equation, which can be used for reasonably regulating the broiler chamber. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Endangered language generally has low-resource characteristics, as an immaterial cultural resource that cannot be renewed. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is an effective means to protect this language. However, for low-resource language, native speakers are few and labeled corpora are insufficient. ASR, thus, suffers deficiencies including high speaker dependence and over fitting, which greatly harms the accuracy of recognition. To tackle the deficiencies, the paper puts forward an approach of audiovisual speech recognition (AVSR) based on LSTM-Transformer. The approach introduces visual modality information including lip movements to reduce the dependence of acoustic models on speakers and the quantity of data. Specifically, the new approach, through the fusion of audio and visual information, enhances the expression of speakers' feature space, thus achieving the speaker adaptation that is difficult in a single modality. The approach also includes experiments on speaker dependence and evaluates to what extent audiovisual fusion is dependent on speakers. Experimental results show that the CER of AVSR is 16.9% lower than those of traditional models (optimal performance scenario), and 11.8% lower than that for lip reading. The accuracy for recognizing phonemes, especially finals, improves substantially. For recognizing initials, the accuracy improves for affricates and fricatives where the lip movements are obvious and deteriorates for stops where the lip movements are not obvious. In AVSR, the generalization onto different speakers is also better than in a single modality and the CER can drop by as much as 17.2%. Therefore, AVSR is of great significance in studying the protection and preservation of endangered languages through AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning technology has been widely applied in emitter identification. With the deepening research, the problem of emitter identification under the few-shots condition has become a frontier research direction. As a special communication signal, OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) signal is of high complexity so emitter identification technology under OFDM is extremely challenging. In this paper, an emitter identification method based on contrastive learning and residual network is proposed. First, according to the particularity of OFDM, we adjust the structure of ResNet and propose a targeted data preprocessing method. Then, some data augmentation strategies are designed to construct positive samples. We conduct self-supervised pretraining to distinguish features of positive and negative samples in hidden space. Based on the pretrained feature extractor, the classifier is no longer trained from scratch. Extensive experiments have validated the effectiveness of our proposed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to identify the chemical components in aerial parts of Hypecoum erectum. A new 1,3-benzodioxole derivative, identified as Hypecoumic acid (1), was isolated, together with the three known compounds: protopine (2), coptisine (3), and cryptopine (4). Their structures were identified based on extensive spectroscopic experiments, including nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and high-resolution electrospray ionization mass spectra (HR-ESI-MS), as well as comparison with those reported in the literature. Meanwhile, the in vitro antioxidative activity of all compounds was determined using a DPPH-scavenging assay, and compound 1 (IC50 = 86.3 ± 0.2 μM) was shown to have moderate antioxidative activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been reported that attending to stimuli in visual modality can spread to task-irrelevant but synchronously presented stimuli in auditory modality, a phenomenon termed the cross-modal spread of attention, which could be either stimulus-driven or representation-driven depending on whether the visual constituent of an audiovisual object is further selected based on the object representation. The stimulus-driven spread of attention occurs whenever a task-irrelevant sound synchronizes with an attended visual stimulus, regardless of the cross-modal semantic congruency. The present study recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether the stimulus-driven cross-modal spread of attention could be modulated by audio-visual emotional congruency in a visual oddball task where emotion (positive/negative) was task-irrelevant. The results first demonstrated a prominent stimulus-driven spread of attention regardless of audio-visual emotional congruency by showing that for all audiovisual pairs, the extracted ERPs to the auditory constituents of audiovisual stimuli within the time window of 200–300 ms were significantly larger than ERPs to the same auditory stimuli delivered alone. However, the amplitude of this stimulus-driven auditory Nd component during 200–300 ms was significantly larger for emotionally incongruent than congruent audiovisual stimuli when their visual constituents' emotional valences were negative. Moreover, the Nd was sustained during 300–400 ms only for the incongruent audiovisual stimuli with emotionally negative visual constituents. These findings suggest that although the occurrence of the stimulus-driven cross-modal spread of attention is independent of audio-visual emotional congruency, its magnitude is nevertheless modulated even when emotion is task-irrelevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building energy usage has been an important issue in recent decades, and energy prediction models are important tools for analysing this problem. This study provides a comprehensive review of building energy prediction models and uncertainties in the models. First, this paper introduces three types of prediction methods: white-box models, black-box models, and grey-box models. The principles, strengths, shortcomings, and applications of every model are discussed systematically. Second, this paper analyses prediction model uncertainties in terms of human, building, and weather factors. Finally, the research gaps in predicting building energy consumption are summarised in order to guide the optimisation of building energy prediction methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Respimat®Soft MistTM is a newly developed spray inhaler. Different from traditional nebulizers, metered-dose inhalers, and dry powder inhalers, this new type of inhaler can produce aerosols with long duration, relatively slow speed, and a high content of fine particles. Investigating the effect of the key geometric parameters of the device on the atomization is of great significance for generic product development and inhaler optimization. In this paper, a laser high-speed camera experimental platform is built, and important parameters such as the geometric pattern and particle size distribution of the Respimat®Soft MistTM are measured. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and the volume of fluid method coupled with the Shear Stress Transport (SST) k-ω turbulence model are applied to simulate the key geometric parameters of the device. The effects of geometric parameters on the spray velocity distribution and geometric pattern are obtained. The angle of flow collision, the sphere size of the central divider and the length and width of the flow channel show significant impacts on the spray atomization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the cold winters in northeast China, the energy consumption of the rural residential buildings is much higher in this region than in other regions. In this study, the energy sustainability of bio-based wall construction is examined through applications in rural residential buildings. Comparisons of the energy sustainability of the bio-based wall constructions and the conventional wall constructions are evaluated using IESVE-2019 computational simulation. The results show notable reductions in heating energy requirements and coal use, which is the major heating source for rural residential buildings in China. The results show that reductions of 45.82–204.07 kWh/m2/year in heating energy requirements and more than 40% in coal use are possible through application of bio-based wall constructions. The application of bio-based wall construction will result in lower seasonal air pollution and coal use through straw burning in northeast China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research analyses straw degradation inside straw bale walls in the region and develops the prediction of degradation inside straw bale walls. The results show that the straw inside straw bale walls have no serious concerns of degradation in the high hygrothermal environment in the region with only moderate concerns of degradation in the area 2–3 cm deep behind the lime render. The onsite investigations indicate that the degradation isopleth model can only predict straw conditions behind the rendering layer, whereas the isothermal model fits the complete situation inside straw bale walls. This research develops the models for predicting straw degradation levels inside a straw bale building in a warm (humid) continental climate. The impact of this research will help the growth of low carbon energy efficient straw bale construction with confidence pertaining to its long-term durability characteristics both in the region and regions sharing similar climatic features globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extraordinary heavy rain event caused by Typhoon Mangkhut occurred in the Yangtze River Delta region on 16 September 2018, with the maximum of 24-h accumulated rainfall at a single station reaching 297 mm. However, numerical models and subjective forecast failed to predict this typhoon remote rainstorm accurately. In this study, multiple observational data, an analysis dataset, and a trajectory model are used to analyze the causes of this severe rainstorm. The results show that the circulation situation provides a favorable large-scale background condition for the generation of the rainstorm. The coupling of the upper-level westerly jet and the low-level southerly jet is beneficial to the development of strong convections. In the rainstorm area there is a positive vorticity center connected to the main body of the typhoon. The cooling and humidifying effect of dry-cold air saturates the formerly unsaturated wet air, leading to the increase of precipitation. Besides, there is a lower-tropospheric moisture transport path connecting the typhoon and the rainstorm area, providing abundant moisture for the development of rainstorms. The backward trajectory simulation shows that the moisture mainly originates from the lower troposphere over the Philippine Sea, the southern South China Sea, and the sea south of the Philippines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Prefabricated Straw Bale Construction (PSBC) has been proven as one of the most efficient construction methods to achieve low-energy buildings with low environmental impacts. This research presents analysis of the rationale for using straw bale constructions in northern China and a discussion of feasible constructions of PSBC to meet the local building codes following evaluations of potential energy performance of domestic buildings with PSBC in severe cold regions and cold regions in China. The results show that the buildings with PSBC reduce both heating and cooling energy uses, as well as heating intensities across the severe cold and cold regions, compared to the domestic buildings with conventional constructions. The findings of this research will contribute to reducing energy consumption in building industries in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to use a material library to investigate the effect of raw material properties on ribbon tensile strength (TS) and solid fraction (SF) in the roll compaction (RC) process. A total of 81 pharmaceutical materials, including 53 excipients and 28 natural product powders (NPPs), were characterized by 22 material descriptors and were compacted under five different hydraulic pressures. The transversal and longitudinal splitting behaviors of the ribbons were summarized. The TS-porosity and TS-pressure relationships were used to explain the roll compaction behavior of powdered materials. Through defining the target ribbon quality (i.e., 0.6 ≤ SF ≤ 0.8 and TS ≥ 1 MPa), the roll compaction behavior classification system (RCBCS) was built and 81 materials were classified into three categories. A total of 24 excipients and five NPPs were classified as Category I materials, which fulfilled the target ribbon quality and had less occurrence of transversal splitting. Moreover, the multivariate relationships between raw material descriptors, the hydraulic pressure and ribbon quality attributes were obtained by PLS regression. Four density-related material descriptors and the cohesion index were identified as critical material attributes (CMAs). The multi-objective design space summarizing the feasible material properties and operational region for the RC process were visualized. The RCBCS presented in this paper enables a formulator to perform the initial risk assessment of any new materials, and the data modeling method helps to predict the impact of formulation ingredients on strength and porosity of compacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) proposed to reduce the total CO2 emissions of the maritime sector by 50% by 2050, and strive to gradually achieve the zero-carbon target. Therefore, shipping companies need to consider environmental impacts while pursuing benefits. In view of the tramp ship scheduling with speed optimization problem, considering carbon emissions, the configuration of owner ships and charter ships, and the impact of sailing speed on ship scheduling with the target of minimizing the total costs of shipping companies, multi-type tramp ship scheduling and speed optimization considering carbon emissions is established. A genetic simulated annealing algorithm based on a variable neighborhood search is proposed to solve the problem. Firstly, the ship type is matched with the cargo. Then the route is generated according to the time constraint, and finally, the neighborhood search strategy is adopted to improve the solution quality. The effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm is verified by an example, which also confirms that ship scheduling and sailing speed joint optimization can reduce costs and carbon emissions. Research results can not only deepen the study of the theory of tramp scheduling but also to effectively solve the tramp shipping schedule considering carbon emissions problems faced by companies to provide theoretical guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With improvements in light-emitting diode (LED) performance and a sharp decline in price, a light source with the irradiance of a laser and the cost of an LED is worthy of further study. We demonstrated a LED-pumped Nd:YVO4 laser in quasi-continuous-wave (QCW) and passively Q-switched (PQS) regime. With an incident pump energy of 6.28 mJ (150 μs pulses at 1 Hz), the Nd:YVO4 laser has an energy of 206 μJ at 1064 nm in the QCW regime. The optical conversion efficiency of the system is 4.1%, and the slope efficiency is 9.0%. A pulsed energy of 2.5 μJ was obtained with a duration of 897 ns (FWHM) in the PQS regime, which means the peak power is 2.79 W. The output energy stability is 97.54%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asperlin is a marine-derived, natural product with antifungal, anti-inflammatory and anti-atherosclerotic activities. In the present study, we showed that asperlin effectively prevented the development of obesity in high-fat diet (HFD)-fed mice. Oral administration of asperlin for 12 weeks significantly suppressed HFD-induced body weight gain and fat deposition without inhibiting food intake. Hyperlipidemia and liver steatosis were also substantially ameliorated. A respiratory metabolism monitor showed that asperlin efficiently increased energy expenditure and enhanced thermogenic gene expression in adipose tissue. Accordingly, asperlin-treated mice showed higher body temperature and were more tolerant of cold stress. Meanwhile, asperlin also increased the diversity and shifted the structure of gut microbiota. Oral administration of asperlin markedly increased the relative abundance of Bacteroidetes, leading to a higher Bacteroidetes-to-Fimicutes ratio. The HFD-induced abnormalities at both phylum and genus levels were all remarkably recovered by asperlin. These results demonstrated that asperlin is effective in preventing HFD-induced obesity and modulating gut microbiota. Its anti-obesity properties may be attributed to its effect on promoting energy expenditure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]