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With the application of physiological and multi-omics technologies, they will be able to accurately analyse the mechanisms of salt tolerance and fermentation promotion of fermentation microorganisms under salt stress, which will lay the foundation for the effective regulation of salt brine fermentation and enhancement of the flavour of traditional fermented foods. The article reviews the common salt-tolerant microorganisms in fermented foods, the main salt-tolerant mechanisms, the fermentation-promoting properties in high-salt environments, and the methods to study the salt-tolerant and fermentation-promoting mechanisms, as well as the future direction of their development.

Teacher shortage is a major hindrance to China's rural education growth in underdeveloped areas, as well as one of the main causes of educational injustice. We conducted a survey of 5,554 teachers from 117 towns in H province in the Wuling Mountains Zone to investigate the issue of rural school teacher supply. From geographical, emotional, and institutional perspectives, we used a polynomial logit model to examine the validity of the "hometown effects" hypothesis. The findings showed that hometown effects exist in China in all three dimensions. The institutional hometown effects are the most pronounced; when compared to open recruitment, teachers sourced through teacher supply augmentation programs (such as the Secondary Normal Graduates Program, Special Position Program, and Targeted Position Program) are more likely to teach in rural schools, particularly more disadvantaged village primary schools or teaching sites. China's policy of increasing teacher supply has had a considerable positive influence on rural school staffing. Students from rural areas make better teacher candidates; feelings for hometowns should be encouraged among normal school or university students in pre-service education; and the implementation of teacher support policies should be emphasized to retain rural teachers and improve their teaching quality.

Background The concept of "patients-centered" has presented higher requirements doctor-patient communication and reconstructing doctor-patient relationship in public primary health care institutions. Objective To analyze the impact of "patients-centered" doctor-patient communication on the quality of primary care services, and provide scientific evidence to promote reforms in public primary health care institutions. Methods All public community health centers providing primary care services in the main urban area of a city in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region were selected as the study sites to conduct a field survey in 2021 using the standardized patient method, which included 118 items of doctor-patient communication data involving 26 medical institutions, 59 doctors, and 12 standardized patients. Common cold, asthma, and unstable angina were selected as the types of diseases to be portrayed by the standardized patients in this study. A combination of multiple regression model and Probit model was used to evaluate the impact of "patients-centered" doctor-patient communication on the quality of primary care services. Results Results obtained from the 118 items of doctor-patient communication data revealed that the median adherence rate for recommended consultation items was 17.6% (14.6%), and the median adherence rate for recommended examination items was 25.0% (40.0%), among them, 75 cases (63.6%) were correctly diagnosed, and 59 cases (50.0%) were correctly treated. The median total cost was 84.84 yuan (130.44 yuan), and the median drug cost was 37.62 yuan (47.38 yuan), among them, 66 (55.9%) involved unnecessary drugs, and 71 (60.2%) included unnecessary examinations. The median visit duration was 13.625 (10.850) min. The average score for "patients-centered" doctor-patient communication was (26.712±10.658), with the first dimension scoring (12.915±5.355) points, the second dimension scoring (7.492±2.867) points, and the third dimension scoring (6.305±3.465) points. The results of multiple linear regression model and Probit model indicated that for every one-point increase in the total score of patient-centered doctor-patient communication, the adherence rates for both recommended consultation items and recommended examinations items increased by 0.001 percentage points, the correct diagnosis rate increased by an average of 4.6 percentage points, the correct treatment rate increased by 4.2 percentage points, the total cost increased by 1.993 yuan, the drug cost increased by 0.517 yuan, the proportion of unnecessary drugs decreased by 3.4 percentage points, the proportion of unnecessary examinations increased by 0.2 percentage points, and the visit duration decreased by 0.291 minutes. Conclusion "Patients-centered" doctor-patient communication enhances the effectiveness and safety of medical services, while it also increases medical costs. It is necessary to promote "patients-centered" doctor-patient communication from the aspects of resource endowment, salary incentives, doctor-patient relationships, and collaborative services, thereby improving the quality of primary care services.

Complex natural tasks likely recruit many different functional brain networks, but it is difficult to predict how such tasks will be represented across cortical areas and networks. Previous electrophysiology studies suggest that task variables are represented in a low-dimensional subspace within the activity space of neural populations. Here we develop a voxel-based state space modeling method for recovering task-related state spaces from human fMRI data. We apply this method to data acquired in a controlled visual attention task and a video game task. We find that each task induces distinct brain states that can be embedded in a low-dimensional state space that reflects task parameters, and that attention increases state separation in the task-related subspace. Our results demonstrate that the state space framework offers a powerful approach for modeling human brain activity elicited by complex natural tasks.

[Purpose/Significance] Consumption is an important aspect of stimulating domestic demand. In the current development stage, the spatial and geographical distribution characteristics of our country indicate that domestic demand has great potential. However, the evaluation of consumption potential in the digital economy is a complex systematic project. Current research does not fully consider the correlation between evaluation indicators, and there are some problems such as low efficiency and too much reliance on the subjective experience of experts, which affect the scientific and reasonable evaluation results of consumption potential. [Method/Process] First of all, starting from each major work link that affects the consumption potential under the background of the digital economy, the preliminary evaluation index was determined through expert consultation and literature research and screening, and the primary evaluation index set of consumption potential under the background of the digital economy wasconstructed. Based on the consumption potential assessment data of Guangxi Zhongyan Industry Co., Ltd. from January to December 2021, the correlation and association rules among the assessment indicators were analyzed by using Apriori association rule mining algorithm, to streamline the assessment indicators and build an assessment index system of consumption potential in the context of the digital economy. The index system includes 11 secondary indicators and 19 tertiary indicators, such as user value, marketing communication effect, marketing ability, user participation, user influence, and channel effectiveness. Combining the influence relationship and influence degree between the quantitative evaluation indexes of DEMATEL and ANP, the weights of the evaluation indexes were calculated by the subjective and objective combination weighting method, to construct a multi-modal evaluation model of consumption potential in the digital economy. [Results/Conclusions] Taking six real dragon cigarette product marketing activities of Guangxi China Tobacco Industry Co., Ltd. from March to September 2021 as examples, the comprehensive scores of marketing activities in March, April, May, and June are 0.53, 0.52, 0.51 and 0.48, respectively, and the overall assessment result of consumption potential is "medium" level, among which the effect of marketing activities in August and September is better than that in March and June, and the comprehensive scores are 0.57 and 0.63, which are "medium to upper" level. On the whole, the impact of market influence ability, user value and marketing communication effect on the release of consumption potential decreases in turn. The analysis results are in good agreement with the actual situation, which verifies the feasibility and applicability of the multi-modal assessment model of consumption potential. In addition, due to the limited space, this paper only takes the tobacco industry as an example. In our future work, the specific index system can be adjusted according to the actual application needs.

The structure and dynamics of ferroelectric domain walls are essential for polarization switching in ferroelectrics, which remains relatively unexplored in two-dimensional ferroelectric α-In2Se3. Interlayer interactions engineering via selecting the stacking order in two-dimensional materials allows modulation of ferroelectric properties. Here, we report stacking-dependent ferroelectric domain walls in 2H and 3R stacked α-In2Se3, elucidating the resistance switching mechanism in ferroelectric semiconductor-metal junction devices. In 3R α-In2Se3, the in-plane movement of out-of-plane ferroelectric domain walls yield a large hysteresis window. Conversely, 2H α-In2Se3 devices favor in-plane domain walls and out-of-plane domain wall motion, producing a small hysteresis window. High electric fields induce a ferro-paraelectric phase transition of In2Se3, where 3R In2Se3 reaches the transition through intralayer atomic gliding, while 2H In2Se3 undergoes a complex process comprising intralayer bond dissociation and interlayer bond reconstruction. Our findings demonstrate tunable ferroelectric properties via stacking configurations, offering an expanded dimension for material engineering in ferroelectric devices. The lack of information on the ferroelectric domain walls motion characteristics in α-In2Se3 hampers the understanding of the ferroelectric semiconductor junction device mechanism. Here, the authors report that the stacking order of van der Waals α-In2Se3 determines its ferroelectric domain wall type and phase transition pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An auxiliary structure can significantly improve the wind-trapping capacity of the Savonius wind turbine. In this study, a novel auxiliary structure called a wind energy gathering structure (WEGS) is proposed, and its five parameters, namely the lengths of the shrinkage and diffusion tubes, the length of the centerboard, the length of the throat, the length of the wind board, and the shrinkage and diffusion angles, are investigated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and Taguchi's method. Meanwhile, Taguchi's method and ANOVA reveal that among the studied parameters, the shrinkage and diffusion angles, the length of the centerboard, and the lengths of the shrinkage and diffusion tubes have a more significant influence on the performance of the WEGS. At a tip speed ratio (TSR) value of 1 and a wind speed of 7 m/s, the optimized combination of the WEGS parameters obtained by Taguchi's method improves the mean torque coefficient of the turbine by 42.1%. Moreover, at other TSRs (0.6–1.2), the turbine with the WEGS also outperforms an open turbine in terms of aerodynamic (increases of 20.1–53%) and lifetime performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of computational drug repurposing aims to uncover novel therapeutic applications for existing drugs through high-throughput data analysis. However, there is a scarcity of drug repurposing methods leveraging the cellular-level information provided by single-cell RNA sequencing data. To address this need, we propose DrugReSC, an innovative approach to drug repurposing utilizing single-cell RNA sequencing data, intending to target specific cell subpopulations critical to disease pathology. DrugReSC constructs a drug-by-cell matrix representing the transcriptional relationships between individual cells and drugs and utilizes permutation-based methods to assess drug contributions to cellular phenotypic changes. We demonstrate DrugReSC's superior performance compared to existing drug repurposing methods based on bulk or single-cell RNA sequencing data across multiple cancer case studies. In summary, DrugReSC offers a novel perspective on the utilization of single-cell sequencing data in drug repurposing methods, contributing to the advancement of precision medicine for cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation Cell clustering is foundational for analyzing the heterogeneity of biological tissues using single-cell sequencing data. With the maturation of single-cell multi-omics sequencing technologies, we can integrate multiple omics data to perform cell clustering, thereby overcoming the limitations of insufficient information from single omics data. Existing methods for cell clustering often only consider the differences in data patterns during the analysis of multi-omics data, but the dependencies between omics features of different cell types also significantly influence cell clustering. Moreover, the high dropout rates in scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq data can impact the performance of cell clustering. Results We propose a cell clustering model based on a masked autoencoder, scDRMAE. Utilizing a masking mechanism, scDRMAE effectively learns the relationships between different features and imputes false zeros caused by dropout events. To differentiate the importance of various omics data in cell clustering, we dynamically adjust the weights of different omics data through an attention mechanism. Finally, we use the K-means algorithm for cluster analysis of the fused multi-omics data. On commonly used sets of 15 multi-omics datasets, our method demonstrates superior cell clustering performance on multiple metrics compared to other computational methods. In addition, when datasets exhibit varying degrees of dropout noise, our method shows better performance and stronger stability on multiple metrics compared to other methods. Moreover, by analyzing the cell clusters classified by scDRMAE, we identified several biologically significant biomarkers that have been validated, further confirming the effectiveness of scDRMAE in cell clustering from a biological perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continuous monitoring of the central-blood-pressure waveform from deeply embedded vessels, such as the carotid artery and jugular vein, has clinical value for the prediction of all-cause cardiovascular mortality. However, existing non-invasive approaches, including photoplethysmography and tonometry, only enable access to the superficial peripheral vasculature. Although current ultrasonic technologies allow non-invasive deep-tissue observation, unstable coupling with the tissue surface resulting from the bulkiness and rigidity of conventional ultrasound probes introduces usability constraints. Here, we describe the design and operation of an ultrasonic device that is conformal to the skin and capable of capturing blood-pressure waveforms at deeply embedded arterial and venous sites. The wearable device is ultrathin (240 μm) and stretchable (with strains up to 60%), and enables the non-invasive, continuous and accurate monitoring of cardiovascular events from multiple body locations, which should facilitate its use in a variety of clinical environments.

Ultrasonic imaging has been implemented as a powerful tool for noninvasive subsurface inspections of both structural and biological media. Current ultrasound probes are rigid and bulky and cannot readily image through nonplanar three-dimensional (3D) surfaces. However, imaging through these complicated surfaces is vital because stress concentrations at geometrical discontinuities render these surfaces highly prone to defects. This study reports a stretchable ultrasound probe that can conform to and detect nonplanar complex surfaces. The probe consists of a 10 × 10 array of piezoelectric transducers that exploit an "island-bridge" layout with multilayer electrodes, encapsulated by thin and compliant silicone elastomers. The stretchable probe shows excellent electromechanical coupling, minimal cross-talk, and more than 50% stretchability. Its performance is demonstrated by reconstructing defects in 3D space with high spatial resolution through flat, concave, and convex surfaces. The results hold great implications for applications of ultrasound that require imaging through complex surfaces.

Carbonate cements are primary cement types formed in deep sandstone reservoirs of Dongying Sag. We have proposed three stages of carbonate cements with different origin and material sources: carbonate cements in early stage are rim-shaped high-Mg calcite, which is the product of quasi-contemporaneous period; and calcite filled with primary pores without obvious compaction and diagenetic transformation is mudstone compaction during the drainage process. Carbonate cements in middle stage are calcite and dolomite filled with feldspar secondary dissolved pores. The rich Ca2+, Mg2+, and CO32−{\text{CO}}_{3}^{2-} in overpressure fluid enter the reservoir and mix with Ca2+ in the original formation water. Carbonate cements in late stage are ferrocalcite and ankerite that filled the dissolution pores of early- and middle-stage carbonate cements. They were products of CO32−{\text{CO}}_{3}^{2-} formed by organic acid splitting decomposition in late diagenesis and CO32−{\text{CO}}_{3}^{2-} formed by dissolution of carbonate cements in early and middle stages, combined with Mg2+, Ca2+, Fe2+ plasma in pore fluid. Dissolution–reprecipitation of the lacustrine carbonate rocks is responsible for obvious positive drift in the δ 13CPDB‰ values of carbonate cements. Carbonate cements in middle stage and late stage, respectively, represent the early hydrocarbon charging of Dongying Formation and the end of Guantao Formation to the present.

The aim of this study is to investigate the status of laboratory practice of organic acid (OA) analysis using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry in China.