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Advances in many isolation studies have revealed that pure Dehalococcoides grow stably, although the large‐scale pure cultivation of Dehalococcoides has yet to be established. In this study, 7 L‐culturing of Dehalococcoides mccartyi strain NIT01 was first performed using vessels made of glass and stainless alloy SUS304. All batches cultured in the glass vessel successfully dechlorinated >95% of 1 mM trichloroethene (TCE) to ethene (ETH), whereas only 5 out of 13 batches cultured in the SUS304 vessel did the same. The difference in dechlorination efficiency suggested the possible inhibition of dechlorination by SUS304. Also, the strain NIT01 showed long delays in dechlorination with pieces of SUS316, steel, and a repeatedly used SUS304, but not with titanium. The repeatedly used SUS304 cracked and increased the Fe2+ concentration to ≥76 μM. Dechlorination by this strain was also inhibited with ≥1000 μM Fe2+ and ≥23 μM Cr3+ but not with ≤100 μM Ni2+, suggesting that Cr3+ eluted from solid stainless alloys inhibited the dechlorination. Culturing in a titanium vessel instead of a stainless alloy showed the complete dechlorination of 1 mM TCE within 12–28 days with a growth yield of 2.7 × 107 cells/μmol‐released Cl−, even after repeating use of the vessels six times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growths of monoclinic (AlxGa1−x)2O3 thin films up to 99% Al contents are demonstrated via metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) using trimethylgallium (TMGa) as the Ga precursor. The utilization of TMGa, rather than triethylgallium, enables a significant improvement of the growth rates (>2.5 μm h−1) of β‐(AlxGa1−x)2O3 thin films on (010), (100), and (2¯01) β‐Ga2O3 substrates. By systematically tuning the precursor molar flow rates, growth of coherently strained phase pure β‐(AlxGa1−x)2O3 films is demonstrated by comprehensive material characterizations via high‐resolution X‐ray diffraction (XRD) and atomic‐resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) imaging. Monoclinic (AlxGa1−x)2O3 films with Al contents up to 99, 29, and 16% are achieved on (100), (010), and (2¯01) β‐Ga2O3 substrates, respectively. Beyond 29% of Al incorporation, the (010) (AlxGa1−x)2O3 films exhibit β‐ to γ‐phase segregation. β‐(AlxGa1−x)2O3 films grown on (2¯01) β‐Ga2O3 show local segregation of Al along (100) plane. Record‐high Al incorporations up to 99% in monoclinic (AlxGa1−x)2O3 grown on (100) Ga2O3 are confirmed from XRD, STEM, electron nanodiffraction, and X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy measurements. These results indicate great promises of MOCVD development of β‐(AlxGa1−x)2O3 films and heterostructures with high Al content and growth rates using TMGa for next‐generation high‐power and high‐frequency electronic devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the influence of micron‐sized diatomite dosage on the physical, mechanical, rheological, and creep properties of poplar wood/polypropylene (PW/PP) composites to enhance their toughness and practicality. The diatomite‐PW/PP composites were prepared using the melt extrusion method, replacing different proportions of PW with diatomite, and subsequently evaluated for their properties. The results indicate that adding diatomite enhances the density while reducing the brightness and water absorption of the composites. Scanning electron microscopy, analysis reveals a uniform distribution of diatomite in the range of 5–10 wt%, which effectively serves as a filler and reinforcing agent, consequently improving the toughness of the composite system. Specifically, the impact strength, tensile strength, and elongation at break are enhanced by 25.9%, 9.5%, and 35.7%, respectively. Furthermore, creep rheological analysis demonstrates improved processability and creep resistance in the composite system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because most research about laypeople and genetic testing (GT) has been conducted in other nations than China, we conducted a study in urban China (a) to determine the perceived knowledge of, attitude toward, and use of GT there; (b) to identify influencing factors associated with the public's perceived knowledge, attitudes, and use of GT; and (c) to explore the relationship among public knowledge of, attitude toward, and use of GT. Our data came from a community‐based survey in urban Dalian of 868 individuals. We used generalized ordered logit and logit models to examine factors associated with perceived knowledge of, attitude toward, and use of GT. We found that 67% of community members knew about GT, that 45% had a positive opinion of GT, and that only 4% accessed GT. Older people were more likely to have less perceived knowledge of GT and less likely to have a negative attitude toward it; these relationships were especially stronger among those aged ≥60 years. We also found that socially disadvantaged people were more likely to have less perceived knowledge of GT and more likely to have a negative opinion of it. Having a greater level of perceived knowledge was significantly correlated with increased odds of having a more positive or neutral attitude toward GT and of being more likely to access GT. Our findings may help policy makers design effective action plans and regulations regarding GT and genetic counseling services for laypersons in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Modern smartphone platforms offer a multitude of useful features to their users, but at the same time, they highly affect privacy, which may lead to unnecessary personal data being collected. In this paper, we proposed an evolutionary game model to study permission request strategies of the bounded rational application providers. We study the proposed model with detailed simulations. Initial results demonstrate that evolution processes are influenced by four factors: revenue increase ratio, market share, credit cost, and market attraction. It also suggests that establishing a privacy alarm mechanism not only can improve the users' privacy awareness but also decrease the market share when providers over‐request permissions and push them request permissions properly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: A major concern of the deployment of location based services (LBSs) is the safeguards of the user's location data collected by service providers, since personal location data may imply sensitive private information. However, most available works proposed so far rely on syntactic privacy models such as k‐anonymity and location perturbation, which are proved to quiver in the balance with privacy and usability requirements. In this article, we provide a new γ‐map mechanism to help users better understand the privacy/accuracy tradeoff process and preserve location data. In our γ‐map model, the user can specify a geographic region to hide her precise location and suppress the following queries in the same area to meet her privacy requirement, while maintaining and understanding its usability. In addition, we propose a new notion of εΔt‐privacy based on differential privacy to account for the temporal‐spatial correlation and history correlation in the case of crossing region, which is the major privacy concern of a moving user's trace. Finally, we evaluate our framework by using an online LBS with real‐world data sets. The results not only indicate that the γ‐map is significantly useful for identifying the privacy and utility tradeoffs but also show the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed εΔt‐privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Endoscopic sphincterotomy (EST) can destroy sphincter of Oddi (SO) structure and function. The purpose of this study was to assess the feasibility of endoscopic endoclip papilloplasty (EEPP) in restoring SO function after EST. Methods: Seven 26‐week‐old domestic pigs were divided into control and EEPP groups. Necropsy and haematoxylin‐eosin staining plus anti‐α‐smooth muscle actin (α‐SMA) staining of papilla and sphincter of Oddi manometry (SOM) were conducted in animals at three independent time points. Results: EST and EEPP were safely performed in all 7 pigs without serious adverse events. For primary outcome, compared to the controls, EEPP generated smaller dilation and less inflammation. Fibrous repair of the papilla was observed at 24 weeks after EEPP. For secondary outcome, in the control group, SO basal pressure (17.25 ± 18.14 to 5.50 ± 0.71 mmHg), SO contraction amplitude (46.00 ± 19.20 to 34.50 ± 48.79 mmHg), peak (4.50 ± 4.04 to 1.50 ± 2.12) and frequency (3.05 ± 3.29 to 1.41 ± 2.19/min) were reduced after EST. Further reductions to almost 0 of these SOM parameters were observed 3 weeks later, including common bile duct pressure and SO contraction period. In contrast, in the EEPP group, these manometric data were recovered to pre‐EST levels, including CBD pressure (11.5 ± 7.31 vs 11 ± 2.16 mmHg), SO pressure (17.50 ± 17.75 vs 18.20 ± 21.39 mmHg) and SO contraction amplitude (53.67 ± 21.54 vs 60.00 ± 36.08 mmHg). However, no significant differences were observed between control and EEPP groups by Student t test. Conclusions: In this porcine study, EEPP accelerated and improved papillary healing after EST, further preserved SO function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved impressive progress in multi‐focus image fusion (MFF). However, it always fails to capture sufficient discrimination features due to the local receptive field limitations of the convolutional operator, restricting most current CNN‐based methods' performance. To address this issue, by leveraging self‐attention (SA) mechanism, the authors propose Siamese SA network (SSAN) for MFF. Specifically, two kinds of SA modules, position SA (PSA) and channel SA (CSA) are utilised to model the long‐range dependencies across focused and defocused regions in the multi‐focus image, alleviating the local receptive field limitations of convolution operators in CNN. To search a better feature representation of the input image for MFF, the captured features obtained by PSA and CSA are further merged through a learnable 1 × 1 convolution operator. The whole pipeline is in a Siamese network fashion to reduce the complexity. After training, the authors SSAN can accomplish well the fusion task with no post‐processing. Experiments demonstrate that their approach outperforms other current state‐of‐the‐art methods, not only in subjective visual perception but also in the quantitative assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]