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Fish phenotyping serves as a cornerstone for refined management and sustainable development in industrialized aquaculture. High-precision instance segmentation for high-density fish is a key step in obtaining fish phenotypic data; however, it remains challenging in practical production. Given this, an innovative instance segmentation method that synergistically integrates fish body surface features with motion features was developed in this study to tackle the complex issue of high-density fish segmentation in real production effectively. In this method, the Gunnar Farnebäck optical flow is leveraged to express the motion features of fish quantitatively, following which a convolutional neural network of different depths is used to extract the depth feature information of the optical flow images. Simultaneously, the body features output by the backbone network are fused with the motion features. Subsequently, the final fish instance segmentation model was constructed based on SOLOv2. The results of experiments conducted on a self-built dataset of tiger puffer (Takifugu rubripes) revealed that integrating the body surface and motion features resulted in an enhancement of over 12% in the segmentation accuracy of the fish (APm = 48.0%, APl = 84.5%, AP = 84.5%) compared with the baseline (SOLOv2). Compared with other mainstream models of instance segmentation, the AP of the proposed method was improved by 8.3 to 12.8%. Thus, the proposed method can provide technical support for fish phenotypic data in industrialized aquaculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to further promote the application of cementitious sand gravel (CSG), the mechanical properties and variation rules of CSG material under triaxial test were studied. Considering the influence of fly ash content, water-binder ratio, sand rate and lateral confining pressure, 81 cylinder specimens were designed and made for conventional triaxial test, and the influence laws of stress–strain curve, failure pattern, elastic modulus, energy dissipation and damage evolution of specimens were analyzed. The results showed that the peak of stress–strain curve increased with the increase of confining pressure, and the peak stress, peak strain and energy dissipation all increased significantly, but the damage variable D decreased with the increase of confining pressure. Under triaxial compression, the specimen was basically sheared failure from the bonding surface, and the aggregate generally did not break. Sand rate had a significant effect on the peak stress of CSG, and decreased with the increase of sand rate. Under the conditions of the same cement content, fly ash content and confining pressure, the optimal water-binder ratio 1.2 existed when the sand rate was 0.2 and 0.3. After analyzing and processing the stress–strain curve of triaxial test, a Cuckoo Search-eXtreme Gradient Boosting (CS-XGBoost) curve prediction model was established, and the model was evaluated by evaluation indexes R2, RMSE and MAE. The average R2 of the XGBoost model based on initial parameters under 18 different output features was 0.8573, and the average R2 of the CS-XGBoost model was 0.9516, an increase of 10.10%. Moreover, the prediction curve was highly consistent with the test curve, indicating that the CS algorithm had significant advantages. The CS-XGBoost model could accurately predict the triaxial stress–strain curve of CSG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: SHP2 is a non-receptor protein tyrosine phosphatase to remove tyrosine phosphorylation. Functionally, SHP2 is an essential bridge to connect numerous oncogenic cell-signaling cascades including RAS-ERK, PI3K-AKT, JAK-STAT, and PD-1/PD-L1 pathways. This study aims to discover novel and potent SHP2 inhibitors using a hierarchical structure-based virtual screening strategy that combines molecular docking and the fragment molecular orbital method (FMO) for calculating binding affinity (referred to as the Dock-FMO protocol). For the SHP2 target, the FMO method prediction has a high correlation between the binding affinity of the protein–ligand interaction and experimental values (R2 = 0.55), demonstrating a significant advantage over the MM/PBSA (R2 = 0.02) and MM/GBSA (R2 = 0.15) methods. Therefore, we employed Dock-FMO virtual screening of ChemDiv database of ∼2,990,000 compounds to identify a novel SHP2 allosteric inhibitor bearing hydroxyimino acetamide scaffold. Experimental validation demonstrated that the new compound (E)-2-(hydroxyimino)-2-phenyl-N-(piperidin-4-ylmethyl)acetamide (7188–0011) effectively inhibited SHP2 in a dose-dependent manner. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation analysis revealed the binding stability of compound 7188–0011 and the SHP2 protein, along with the key interacting residues in the allosteric binding site. Overall, our work has identified a novel and promising allosteric inhibitor that targets SHP2, providing a new starting point for further optimization to develop more potent inhibitors. Methods: All the molecular docking studies were employed to identify potential leads with Maestro v10.1. The protein–ligand binding affinities of potential leads were further predicted by FMO calculations at MP2/6-31G* level using GAMESS v2020 system. MD simulations were carried out with AmberTools18 by applying the FF14SB force field. MD trajectories were analyzed using VMD v1.9.3. MM/GB(PB)SA binding free energy analysis was carried out with the mmpbsa.py tool of AmberTools18. The docking and MD simulation results were visualized through PyMOL v2.5.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Macroautophagy is a process that cells engulf cytosolic materials by autophagosomes and deliver them to lysosomes for degradation. The biogenesis of autophagosomes requires ATG2 as a lipid transfer protein to transport lipids from existing membranes to phagophores. It is generally believed that endoplasmic reticulum is the main source for lipid supply of the forming autophagosomes; whether ATG2 can transfer lipids from other organelles to phagophores remains elusive. In this study, we identified a new ATG2A-binding protein, ANKFY1. Depletion of this endosome-localized protein led to the impaired autophagosome growth and the reduced autophagy flux, which largely phenocopied ATG2A/B depletion. A pool of ANKFY1 co-localized with ATG2A between endosomes and phagophores and depletion of UVRAG, ANKFY1 or ATG2A/B led to reduction of PI3P distribution on phagophores. Purified recombinant ANKFY1 bound to PI3P on membrane through its FYVE domain and enhanced ATG2A-mediated lipid transfer between PI3P-containing liposomes. Therefore, we propose that ANKFY1 recruits ATG2A to PI3P-enriched endosomes and promotes ATG2A-mediated lipid transfer from endosomes to phagophores. This finding implicates a new lipid source for ATG2A-mediated phagophore expansion, where endosomes donate PI3P and other lipids to phagophores via lipid transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Premature ovarian failure (POF) caused by chemotherapy is a growing concern for female reproductive health. The use of metformin (MET), which has anti-oxidative and anti-inflammatory effects, in the treatment of POF damaged by chemotherapy drugs remains unclear. In this study, we investigated the impact of MET on POF caused by cyclophosphamide (CTX) combined with busulfan (BUS) and M1 macrophages using POF model mice and primary granule cells (GCs). Our findings demonstrate that intragastric administration of MET ameliorates ovarian damage and alleviates hormonal disruption in chemotherapy-induced POF mice. This effect is achieved through the reduction of inflammatory and oxidative stress-related harm. Additionally, MET significantly relieves abnormal inflammatory response, ROS accumulation, and senescence in primary GCs co-cultured with M1 macrophages. We also observed that this protective role of MET is closely associated with the AMPK/PPAR-γ/SIRT1 pathway in cell models. In conclusion, our results suggest that MET can protect against chemotherapy-induced ovarian injury by inducing the expression of the AMPK pathway while reducing oxidative damage and inflammation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The highly in-plane mechanical anisotropic black phosphorus (BP) has widely used in nanoelectromechanical systems. The dynamic behavior and thermoelastic damping of circular single-layered BP-based (CSLBP-based) mass sensor are investigated. Molecular dynamic (MD) simulations and circular orthotropic elastic plate (COEP) attached a concentrate mass are adopted to obtain the natural frequency of CSLBP attached atomic mass. Thermoelastic damping of CSLBP attached atomic mass is calculated by COEP attached a concentrate mass considering thermal effect. The effect of attachment mass and CSLBP size on the natural frequency of CSLBP attached atomic mass are discussed. The natural frequency of CSLBP-based mass sensor is very sensitive to the attachment mass. Thermoelastic damping of CSLBP-based attached atomic mass depends on the radius of CSLBP-based mass sensor, the attachment mass and the environmental temperature. The thermoelastic damping of CSLBP-based mass sensor decreased with increasing the attachment mass and the radius of CSLBP. The COEP can predict the dynamic behavior of CSLBP-based mass sensor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human pose estimation is viewed as a crucial step for understanding human behaviour. Although significant progress has been made in this area in recent years, most studies have focused on feature-level information fusion, while decision-level information fusion has rarely been explored. Compared with feature-level information, decision-level information contains more semantic and interpretable information and can help improve the performance of pose estimation in occluded and crowded scenes. In this paper, we focus on the fusion of decision-level information. We propose a View Fusion module for aggregating decision-level information from different stages to generate a more comprehensive estimation. An Auxiliary Task module is introduced to bridge the gap between the feature extractor and the View Fusion module and to provide prior information about the form of the decision-level information. Considering that the precision of predictions from different stages varies, we use different strategies to guide the learning process. Experiments show that our models outperform previous methods and achieve competitive results on the CrowdPose test set. Further experiments indicate that our method is flexible and can improve the performance of various backbones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In e-commerce scenarios, frauds events such as telecom fraud, insurance fraud, and fraudulent transactions, bring a huge amount of loss to merchants or users. Identification of fraudsters helps regulators take measures for targeted control. Given a set of fraudsters and suspicious users observed from victims' reports, how can we effectively distinguish risky users closely related to them from the others for further investigation by human experts? Fraudsters take camouflage actions to hide from being discovered; complex features on users are hard to deal with; patterns of fraudsters are sometimes difficult to explain by human knowledge; and real-world applications involve millions of users. All this makes the question hard to answer. To this end, we design eRiskCom, an e-commerce risky community detection platform to detect risky groups containing identified fraudsters and other closely related users. With the hypothesis that users who interact frequently with fraudsters are more likely to come from the same "risky community," we construct a connected graph expanded from the identified fraudsters and suspicious users. Next, graph partition is employed to get knowledge of assignment of identified users to potential risky communities, followed by pruning to discover the core members of each community. Finally, top-K users with a high risk score in the neighborhood of core members of each potential community form a final risky community. The extensive experiments are conducted to analyze the effect of our platform components on the alignment with requirements of practical scenarios, and experimental results further demonstrate that eRiskCom is effective and easy to deploy for real-world applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two-dimensional MoS2 has wide application in the nanoelectromechanical device. In this paper, the large amplitude vibration of circular single-layered MoS2 (CSLMoS2) is investigated under the temperature excitation. The nonlinear circular plate model (NCPM) considering the temperature stress is proposed to study the large amplitude vibration of heated CSLMoS2. The nonlinear dynamic equation of CSLMoS2 with stochastic excitation is established. The stationary probability density of heated CSLMoS2 is obtained from NCPM, which shows the both case of pre-buckling and post-buckling. The damping ratio of CSLMoS2 is obtained from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The MD simulation results show that the damping ratio of CSLMoS2 increases with an increase in the temperature. The displacement and phase trajectories of heated CSLMoS2 is presented through NCPM considering the temperature stress using fourth-order Runge–Kutta algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental infrastructure investment (EII) is an important environmental policy instrument on responding to greenhouse gas (GHG) emission and air pollution. This paper employs an improved stochastic impact by regression on population, affluence and technology (STRIPAT) model by using panel data from 30 Chinese provinces and municipalities for the period of 2003–2015 to investigate the effect of EII on CO2 emissions, SO2 emissions, and PM2.5 pollution. The results indicate that EII has a positive and significant effect on mitigating CO2 emission. However, the effect of EII on SO2 emission fluctuated although it still contributes to the reduction of PM2.5 pollution through technology innovations. Energy intensity has the largest impact on GHG emissions and air pollution, followed by GDP per capita and industrial structure. In addition, the effect of EII on environmental issues varies in different regions. Such findings suggest that policies on EII should be region-specific so that more appropriate mitigation policies can be raised by considering the local realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, two-dimensional nanostructures have caught much attention because of their magnificent physical characteristics. The vibrational behavior of typical multi-layered two-dimensional nanostructures (TMLTNs) is extraordinary significant to TMLTN-based nanoresonantors. In this investigation, the vibrational behavior of TMLTNs, taking black phosphorus (BP), graphene and BN as examples, is studied adopting molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and the sandwich plate model (SPM). The MD results show that the fundamental resonant frequency of multi-layered BP (MLBP) and multi-layered BN (MLBN) increase obviously with the number of layers. However, the fundamental resonant frequency of a multi-layered graphene sheet (MLGS) rise slightly when the number of layers increases. This phenomenon is caused by the shear modulus in the xz-plane and yz-plane resulted by the vdW force. Hence, an SPM considering the shear modulus in the xz-plane and yz-plane caused by the vdW force is used to investigate the vibration of the TMLTN. Compared with the MD results, it is shown that the SPM can better predict the vibration of the TMLTN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is likely to have significant effects on the water cycle in glacierized basins. Here, the glacier-enhanced Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was employed to simulate glacio-hydrological processes and to estimate the potential hydrological changes driven by downscaled future climate projections of five Global Circulation Models (GCMs) under three Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) in the headwaters of the Urumqi River, Tianshan Mountains, China. The evaluation indices indicated that the model performed well at simulating streamflow during the calibration and validation. The GCM-predicted mean temperature and precipitation both increase. The periods of 1966-1995, 2016-2045 and 2066-2095 were used as the baseline, the near future, and the far future periods, respectively. The results showed different runoff characteristics under various scenarios in the Urumqi Glacier No. 1 (UG1) sub-basin and Urumqi River Basin (URB) due to distinct melt water contributions. In the UG1 sub-basin, the ice melt and glacier melt are expected to reach peak water in the near future and sharply decline in the far future, and the sub-basin runoff would gradually decrease under all RCPs. In the URB, the ice melt and glacier melt rapidly decrease but the river runoff remains stable under RCP 2.6 and RCP 4.5, with a slight decrease under RCP 8.5. The grouped glacier area with small size class shows a rapid retreat rate. It was also found that melt water from three grouped glaciers exhibit different responses to future scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two cucumber genotypes were chosen that differ in Fusarium wilt resistance and inoculated with Fusarium oxysporum (Schlechtend, Fr) f. sp. cucumerinum (Owen) Snyder & Hansen (FO) in a hydroponic nutrient solution system to determine whether differences in plant genotype affected rhizosphere microbial community and its involvement in resistance to root-borne pathogens. Response of the FO population and microbial communities were compared in the nutrient solution and on root surfaces. Results demonstrated that FO inoculation resulted in a higher FO population on root surfaces and a lower population in the nutrient solution for the susceptible genotype JinYan NO. 4 (JYan); however, an inverse pattern was observed in the resistant JinYou NO. 1 (JYou). Similarly, promotive effects on FO spore germination and germ-tube elongation were only observed in root exudates from FO-inoculated susceptible JYan. FO inoculation resulted in overall increases in cultivable fungi and oomycetes, and actinomycete populations on root surfaces of the resistant JYou compared to the JYan counterpart. PCR-DGGE analysis of 16S rDNA fragments indicated that following FO inoculation, significant changes in the bacterial structure isolated from the root surfaces of susceptible plants were observed, such as an increased diversity index, a decreased evenness index, and the occurrence of several types of bacteria that decomposed organic substances. These results suggest that a complex interaction between plant genotypes and pathogen affected the rhizosphere microbial community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uncontrollable bleeding is a major problem in surgical procedures and after major trauma. Existing hemostatic agents poorly control hemorrhaging from traumatic arterial and cardiac wounds because of their weak adhesion to wet and mobile tissues. Here we design a photo-reactive adhesive that mimics the extracellular matrix (ECM) composition. This biomacromolecule-based matrix hydrogel can undergo rapid gelling and fixation to adhere and seal bleeding arteries and cardiac walls after UV light irradiation. These repairs can withstand up to 290 mm Hg blood pressure, significantly higher than blood pressures in most clinical settings (systolic BP 60–160 mm Hg). Most importantly, the hydrogel can stop high-pressure bleeding from pig carotid arteries with 4~ 5 mm-long incision wounds and from pig hearts with 6 mm diameter cardiac penetration holes. Treated pigs survived after hemostatic treatments with this hydrogel, which is well-tolerated and appears to offer significant clinical advantage as a traumatic wound sealant. Uncontrollable bleeding is a major problem in surgery and after trauma. Here the authors design a photo-reactive adhesive that mimics the composition of connective tissue and is able to stop high pressure bleeding within half a minute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The glacierized Tien Shan - Pamir - Karakoram mountain complex supplies water to about 42 million people. Yet, the knowledge about future glacial runoff in response to future climate is limited. Here, we address this issue using a hydrological model, that includes the three components of glacial runoff: ice melt, snowmelt and the runoff of rainfall over ice. The model is forced by climate projections of the CMIP5 models. We find that the three components exhibit different long-term trajectories, sometimes opposite in sign to the long-term trend in glacier impacts. For the eastern slope basins, streamflow is projected to increase by 28% (ranging from 9 to 44%, from climate model variation (CMV)) by the late 21st century, under the representative concentration pathway, RCP8.5. Ice melt contributes 39% (25 to 65%, CMV) of the total streamflow increase. However, streamflow from the western slopes is projected to decrease by 5% (−24 to 16%, CMV), due to the smaller contribution of ice melt, less precipitation and higher evapotranspiration. Increasing water supply from the eastern slopes suggests more water availability for currently degraded downstream ecosystems in the Xinjiang province of China, while the likely decreasing streamflow in Central Asian rivers on the western slopes indicates new regulations will be needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]