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Reducing the parasitic absorption of intrinsic hydrogenated amorphous silicon [a-Si:H(i)] films is crucial for enhancing the short-circuit current density (Jsc) of silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells. Herein, a-Si:H(i) films were replaced by intrinsic hydrogenated amorphous silicon oxide [a-SiOx:H(i)] films with wider band gap at the front of rear-emitter SHJ solar cells and the microstructure of a-SiOx:H(i) films was modified with the flow ratio of carbon dioxide to silane. A-SiOx:H(i) films showed lower absorption coefficients at short wavelengths and led to a 0.13 mA/cm2 absolute increase of Jsc. Additionally, higher open-circuit voltages (Voc) were achieved thanks to the better interface passivation and the fill factors (FF) almost kept constant due to avoiding the impediment of hole transport. However, the higher oxygen content in a-SiOx:H(i) films associated with the worse electrical performance hence carbon dioxide-to-silane flow ratio should be adjusted at a low value. Finally, a conversion efficiency (Eff) gain of 0.12%abs was obtained for the optimized SHJ solar cells as a result of the improvements of both Voc and Jsc. More importantly, a-SiOx:H(i) layer exhibited better damp-heat stability than a-Si:H(i) layer in sodium environment. This work clearly interpreted the functions of oxygen atoms in a-SiOx:H(i) films and offered a valid approach to reducing the parasitic absorption losses of SHJ solar cells.

Using the dataset of the 2015 wave of the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS), this paper examines how urbanization influences individuals’ financial literacy. We demonstrate that the financial k...

In this study, we use an evidence-based approach to examine the factors that determine the competitive advantage of dairy supply chains using evidence from the Chinese dairy industry. We focus on the quality assurance of dairy products, which is considered one of the fundamental influential factors. We investigate interrelationships among the identified determinants, which include dairy production behavior, dairy cow culture model, government regulations, corporate social responsibility, and quality assurance, and examine how these determinants influence the competitive advantage of dairy supply chains. We employ the structural equation modeling approach in which grouped observable variables that represent the identified determinants are extrapolated from primary data collected through a questionnaire survey. Our key findings show that by mediating the effects of dairy production behavior and the dairy cow culture model, government regulation and corporate social responsibility significantly affect the quality assurance of dairy products. In turn, dairy production behavior and the dairy cow culture model significantly affect the competitive advantage of the dairy supply chain via the fully mediated effects of the quality assurance of dairy products. Specifically, the dairy cow culture model helps ensure the safety and quality of milk supply, allowing core dairy firms to control product quality throughout the dairy supply chain. Our empirical study shows that the identified determinants interact to assure the quality of dairy products and enhance the competitive advantage of the dairy supply chain in China.

Objectives: To evaluate the pregnancy outcomes in the patients diagnosed with Gestational Diabetes Mellitus. Materials and Methods: A retrospective study conducted on ninety-two patients, delivered in the First Affiliated Hospital of Liaoning Medical University, China from February 2014 to June 2015. Results: The rate of Cesarean section was 36.95%, polyhydramnios 27.17%, macrosomia 21.73% and preterm delivery was14.13% respectively. Conclusion: Gestational Diabetes Mellitus is recognized to be associated with increased rate of adverse pregnancy outcomes. This study demonstrated that the GDM has higher risk for polyhydramnios and macrosomia.

Objective: The striatum is unevenly impaired bilaterally in Parkinson's disease (PD). Because the striatum plays a key role in cortico-striatal circuits, we assume that lateralization affects cortico-striatal functional connectivity in PD. The present study sought to evaluate the effect of lateralization on various cortico-striatal circuits through resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).Methods: Thirty left-onset Parkinson's disease (LPD) patients, 27 right-onset Parkinson's disease (RPD) patients, and 32 normal controls with satisfactory data were recruited. Their demographic, clinical, and neuropsychological information was collected. Resting-state fMRI was performed, and functional connectivity changes of seven subdivisions of the striatum were explored in the two PD groups. In addition, the associations between altered functional connectivity and various clinical and neuropsychological characteristics were analyzed by Pearson's or Spearman's correlation.Results: Directly comparing the LPD and RPD patients demonstrated that the LPD patients had lower FC between the left dorsal rostral putamen and the left orbitofrontal cortex than the RPD patients. In addition, the LPD patients showed aberrant functional connectivity involving several striatal subdivisions in the right hemisphere. The right dorsal caudate, ventral rostral putamen, and superior ventral striatum had decreased functional connectivity with the cerebellum and parietal and occipital lobes relative to the normal control group. The comparison between RPD patients and the controls did not obtain significant difference in functional connectivity. The functional connectivity between the left dorsal rostral putamen and the left orbitofrontal cortex was associated with contralateral motor symptom severity in PD patients.Conclusions: Our findings provide new insights into the distinct characteristics of cortico-striatal circuits in LPD and RPD patients. Lateralization of motor symptoms is associated with lateralized striatal functional connectivity.

Abstract: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that mainly affects older adults. Although the global burden of AD is increasing year by year, the causes of AD remain largely unknown. Numerous basic and clinical studies have shown that interleukin-17A (IL-17A) may play a significant role in the pathogenesis of AD. A comprehensive assessment of the role of IL-17A in AD would benefit the diagnosis, understanding of etiology and treatment. However, over the past decade, controversies remain regarding the expression level and role of IL-17A in AD. We have incorporated newly published researches and point out that IL-17A expression levels may vary along with the development of AD, exercising different roles at different stages of AD, although much more work remains to be done to support the potential role of IL-17A in AD-related pathology. Here, it is our intention to review the underlying mechanisms of IL-17A in AD and address the current controversies in an effort to clarify the results of existing research and suggest future studies.

Groundwater resources play a vital role in production, human life and economic development. Effective prediction of groundwater levels would support better water resources management. Although machine learning algorithms have been studied and applied in many domains with good enough results, the researches in hydrologic domains are not adequate. This paper proposes a novel deep learning algorithm for groundwater level prediction based on spatiotemporal attention mechanism. Short-term (one month ahead) and long-term (twelve months ahead) prediction of groundwater level are conducted with observed groundwater levels collected from several boreholes in the middle reaches of the Heihe River Basin in northwestern China. Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and several baseline models (i.e., SVR, Support Vector Regression; FNN, Feedforward Neural Networks; LSTM, Long Short-Term Memory neural network). The results show that the proposed model can effectively improve the prediction accuracy compared to the baseline models with MAE of 0.0754, RMSE of 0.0952 for short-term prediction and MAE of 0.0983, RMSE of 0.1215 for long-term prediction. This study provides a feasible and accurate approach for groundwater prediction which may facilitate decision making for water management.

Objective: Motor asymmetry is characteristic in Parkinson disease (PD). This phenomenon is originated from uneven degeneration of bilateral substantia nigra. However, this asymmetry may not restrict to substantia nigra or striatum. We aimed to determine the effect of asymmetry on spontaneous brain activity across the whole brain. Methods: We consecutively recruited 71 patients with PD, as well as 35 healthy controls, and collected relevant demographic, clinical, and neuropsychological information. The PD patients were divided into two groups according to the side of motor symptom onset. All the participants underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, and spontaneous brain activity was assessed using amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF). The associations between areas showing significant group differences and various clinical and neuropsychological measures were analyzed. Results: Finally, the data of 30 PD patients with left-onset (LPD), 27 PD patients with right-onset (RPD), and 32 healthy controls were obtained. The three groups had similar age and gender ratios. Our results demonstrated that LPD patients had increased ALFF in the left inferior temporal gyrus and decreased ALFF in bilateral thalamus and cerebellum anterior lobes than the control group. The value of ALFF of the left inferior temporal gyrus was correlated with motor function, and ALFF value of the thalamus was associated with cognition. Comparisons between LPD and RPD patients and between RPD patients and the controls did not yield significant difference. Conclusions: The present study provides new insights into the distinct characteristics of spontaneous brain activity in LPD, which may be associated with motor and cognitive function.

The skin, which serves as the first barrier of the human body, is particularly susceptible to exogenous injuries. Skin wounds, including acute burns and chronic non-healing ulcers, are commonly observed in clinics. Healing of skin wounds is a complex process, consisting of infiltration of inflammatory cells, cellular proliferation, and tissue remodeling phases, which restore the integrity and functions of the skin. Epithelialization is involved in wound healing through re-establishing an intact keratinocyte layer. Epidermal stem cells are indispensable for epithelialization, and they are regulated by multiple proinflammatory cytokines or growth factors. In this review, we summarize recent advances in the effect of these cytokines on migration, proliferation, and differentiation processes of epidermal stem cells. We also introduce promising therapeutic strategies targeting epidermal stem cells or related proinflammatory cytokines for patients with skin wounds.

To investigate the hormone-like activities of Kuntai capsule (KTC) in the uteri of ovariectomized rats and immature rabbits.Following bilateral ovariectomy, rats were randomly divided into six groups including sham group, control group, estradiol valerate group, KTC 0.24, 0.6, and 1.5 g/kg groups. The rats were treated with 0.5% CMC-Na, estradiol valerate and KTC (0.24, 0.6, and 1.5 g/kg), respectively for 28 consecutive days. Then the estrous cycle, uterine changes and pathological changes were examined. Serum levels of estradiol (E2), and progesterone (P4) were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Protein levels of estradiol receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) and nuclear-associated antigen-67 (Ki-67) in uterine tissues were detected by western blot. Immature rabbits were estrogen-primed prior to intragastric administration with KTC for 6 d consecutively. Then, the uteri underwent hematoxylin-eosin staining to observe endometrial transformation.Compared with the control group, 0.6 and 1.5 g/kg KTC markedly decreased the uterine organ coefficient and endometrial thickness (P0.05). The serum level of P4 was increased in the KTC 0.6 g/kg group (P0.05). There were no significant variations in the serum level of E2 in the KTC groups compared with the control group. ER¦Â, but not ER¦Á, was markedly upregulated after KTC administration (P0.05). Furthermore, 1.5 g/kg KTC significantly decreased the protein level of PRA (P0.05) and 0.6 g/kg KTC increased the protein level of PRB in the uteri (P0.05). VEGF was highly expressed after treatment with 0.24 and 0.6 g/kg KTC, and Ki-67 was markedly reduced in ovariectomized rats treated with 1.5 g/kg KTC. No difference was found in the expression of PCNA. KTC 0.24 and 0.6 g/kg promoted endometrial transformation in immature rabbit uteri.KTC does not demonstrate obvious estrogen-like effect on uteri after ovariectomy, but it does exhibit weak progestogen-like effect, by which mechanism of action is yet to be further investigated.

In this paper, a dynamic model for long-term on-orbit operation of the tethered solar power satellite (Tethered-SPS) is established. Because the Tethered-SPS is a super-large and super-flexible structure, the coupling among the orbit, attitude, and structure vibration of the system should be considered in comparison with the traditional spacecraft dynamic models. Based on the absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF), the dynamic equation of the Tethered-SPS is established by Hamiltonian variational principle, and the dual equations of the Hamiltonian system are established by introducing generalized momentum through Legendre transformation. The symplectic Runge–Kutta method is used for numerical simulation, and the validation of the modeling method is verified by a numerical example. The effects of orbital altitude, initial attitude angle, length of solar panel, and orbital eccentricity on the orbit and attitude of the Tethered-SPS are analyzed. The numerical simulation results show that the effect of orbital altitude and length of solar panel on the orbital error of midpoint of beam is small. However, the initial attitude angle has a significant effect on the orbital error of midpoint of solar panel. The effect of the length of solar panel on the attitude angle of the system is not significant, but orbital altitude, orbital eccentricity, and initial attitude angle of the system severely affect the attitude angle of the system. Then, the stability of the system is affected.

The novel COVID-19 outbreak has affected more than 200 countries and territories as of March 2020. Given that patients with cancer are generally more vulnerable to infections, systematic analysis of diverse cohorts of patients with cancer affected by COVID-19 is needed. We performed a multicenter study including 105 patients with cancer and 536 age-matched noncancer patients confirmed with COVID-19. Our results showed COVID-19 patients with cancer had higher risks in all severe outcomes. Patients with hematologic cancer, lung cancer, or with metastatic cancer (stage IV) had the highest frequency of severe events. Patients with nonmetastatic cancer experienced similar frequencies of severe conditions to those observed in patients without cancer. Patients who received surgery had higher risks of having severe events, whereas patients who underwent only radiotherapy did not demonstrate significant differences in severe events when compared with patients without cancer. These findings indicate that patients with cancer appear more vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Significance: Because this is the first large cohort study on this topic, our report will provide much-needed information that will benefit patients with cancer globally. As such, we believe it is extremely important that our study be disseminated widely to alert clinicians and patients. This article is highlighted in the In This Issue feature, p. 747

Hydrogenated nanocrystalline silicon oxide (nc-SiOx:H) is promising to replace hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) as the window layer of silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells due to its lower parasitic absorption at short wavelength. In this work, by varying the growth conditions of nc-SiOx:H, we prepared highly conductive, highly transparent phosphorus-doped nc-SiOx:H film, and successfully applied as the window layer of SHJ cells. The short-circuit current density gains 0.5 mA/cm2, together with an improvement of power conversion efficiency by 0.3%, whose average value reaches 24.09% on 6-inch total-area wafers. More importantly, we find these devices show better stability in sodium environment at 85°C and 85% relative humidity.

The unambiguous range of a radar is the maximum range at which a target can be located so as to guarantee that the reflected signal/pulse from that target corresponds to the most recent transmitted pulse. It is an important factor for radar. Different modulation patterns of Linear Frequency Modulator Continuous Wave (LFMCW) have different maximum unambiguous range. For an easy way to calculate the factor, Single Period Ambiguity Function (SPAF) is proposed to analyze the unambiguous range of LFMCW radar. The receiver of a LFMCW radar can be analysed with SPAF. By analyzing cuts of SPAF along small Doppler shifts of symmetrical sawtooth LFMCW radar, it is demonstrated that its maximum unambiguous range will correspond to the shift equal to half of the modulation period. And the maximum unambiguous range of arbitrary LFMCW radar is αT (T is the period, and α is the symmetrical factor, 0

Skin-like sensors have attracted considerable attention in recent years owing to their important applications in intelligent robots, advanced medical equipment, and bionic technologies. However, most sensing skins are based on electronic systems that have many constraints and application limitations since their electronics-based structures have the disadvantages of complex structure, cannot withstand harsh environments, power supply needed, and so on. In this study, a transparent phosphorescence-based, flexible temperature-tactile multi-functional sensing skin was developed by arranging temperature-sensitive and mechanoluminescent microparticles in a polyimide. Based on the thermal-quenching of phosphorescence and mechanoluminescence, the temperature and stress signals are sensing wirelessly in the form of light. And due to the different phosphor materials, the temperature and stress signals are optically sensed and separated by wavelength. To enhance the sensitivity of tactile sensing, a unique sensor structure with protruding was constructed based on the tension effect of the polyimide solution to achieve effective tactile sensing. The temperature and tactile sensing functions of the skin were successfully demonstrated. In addition, its application to robot skin has also been verified. The current study shows the potential of the phosphorescence- based flexible sensing skin, indicating that it is a possible development direction for flexible sensing skin.

The gas-bearing Longmaxi Formation (Fm.) records a complex tectonic history in which variations in structural and burial history directly effect the hydrocarbon maturation process. Through analysis of the tectonic-burial history, hydrocarbon maturity, and EASY% R o numerical simulations we examine three areas representing the full spectrum of geological variability in the southern Sichuan Basin, the Changning area, the Luzhou area and the Zigong area (Zishen well-1). Following deposition of the Longmaxi Fm., all three areas underwent five major tectonic events of subsidence and uplift, showing an overall long-term oscillation of the basin. The Longmaxi Fm. has undergone three major heating stages, Caledonian- Hercynian orogenesis time, the high geothermal gradient field of Hercynian and Indosinian time (approximately 200–300 Ma), and the Yanshanian-Himalayan stage. The high geothermal gradient stage is associated with extensive Emeishan flood basalts or concealed basalts, which could have played an important role in hydrocarbon maturation. The maturation process can be divided into five stages: Caledonian, Hercyninan, Indosinian, Yanshanian, and Himalayan. In the Yanshan period, the highest heating temperature of organic matter exceeded 200 °C and the maturation level was more than 2.4%, producing large amounts of natural gas, which is the main accumulation period of shale gas in the Longmaxi Fm. Due to the large amount of hydrocarbon generated, a large number of micropores were formed from organic matter evolution, especially nanoscale pores, during the middle diagenesis stage. The Longmaxi Fm. shale gas accumulation process is divided into four periods: the source-reservoir-cap deposition period, the initial accumulation period, the main accumulation period, and the adjustment period. In the main accumulation period, pyrolysis gas was dominant, which was stored within the pores, diagenetic fractures, and structural fractures in adsorbed and free state ways, forming the basic pattern of the Longmaxi Fm. shale gas. The current burial depth and structural stability of the Longmaxi Fm. are critical to gas reservoir protection.

Cadmium based chalcogenides (CdS, CdSe, CdTe) quantum dots exhibited ultrahigh photoluminescence (PL), quantum yields (QYs) and multicolor luminescence. However, the usual synthesis needs high temperature, inert gas protection, and localized injection operation, which hinder applications seriously. Here, we synthesized CdS QDs and a series of metal-ions-doped QDs using low temperature synthesis (30–80 °C). The synthesis was designed according to supersaturated recrystallization. It was operated under air atmosphere, in DMF solution, free from inert gas protection and used non-injection operation. The obtained QDs exhibit strong and stable luminescence. They have a monodisperse, uniform morphology and good crystallinity. With increasing synthesis temperature, the emission center of the CdS QDs shifts from 500 nm to 550 nm. The metal ions doped in the CdS substrate form a deep level. The emission energy decreases and the emission center shifts to longer wavelengths. The emission peaks located at 520 nm, 534 nm, 540 nm, 578 nm and 625 nm correspond to CdS QDs doped with Sn2+, Sb3+, Ni2+, Mn2+ and Cu2+, respectively. The increased synthesis temperature also results in a red shift of the emission peak. The tunable optical properties and the suitability for large scale production endow the metal-ions-doped CdS QDs with promising potential for lighting and displays, which was demonstrated by white light-emitting diodes with a high CRI value, power efficiency and good stability.

As an important part of the air conditioning system, the operating performance of the cooling tower has a direct impact on heating and refrigeration of the air conditioning system. Now the cooling towers are placed in the room in many high-end buildings, which results in poor ventilation of the cooling towers. In order to improve the efficiency of the cooling towers, the organized air exhaust scheme of cooling towers should be adopted to reduce or prevent the back-mixing of humid air around the cooling towers. A design method of tower group operation performance in semi-closed space was proposed and the air distribution around the cooling towers in semi-closed space under the organized air exhaust scheme was simulated numerically in this paper. The object of this study is a super high-rise building with 10 layers podium and 164 layers main building. The cooling tower room is 67.3m long, 65m wide and 21.6m high, 13 sets of cooling towers are installed in the cooling tower room. The complicated actually physical structure is simplified and the areas of inlet and outlet are established according to the actual area of 50% in the process of numerical simulation. The airflow distribution and flow resistance characteristics around the cooling towers were obtained through the numerical simulation of air-flow organization around cooling towers. The numerical results show that the exhaust air of cooling towers can be expelled from the semi-closed space smoothly with the organization of air exhaust and the airflow in cooling tower machine room is relatively stable, the inlet air volume of cooling towers can reach rated air flow rate and the cooling towers can run efficiently under the rated condition.

Control of vibration in helicopters has always been a complex and challenging task. The fluidlastic isolators become more and more widely used because the fluids are non-toxic, non-corrosive, nonflammable, and compatible with most elastomers and adhesives. For the fluidlastic isolators design, higher stiffness systems have been required to allow retrofit to helicopters with "rigid" structure that did not provide for vibration isolators in the original design. Based on current research, some problems in fluidlastic isolators design are studied. A dynamic equation is set up based on the theory of dynamics. And the dynamic analysis is carried out. The influences of design parameters on the property of fluidlastic isolator are calculated. Dynamic analysis has shown that fluidlastic isolator can reduce the vibration effectively. Analysis results also showed that the design parameters such as length, fluid density, and area coefficient (R1, R2) have obvious influence on the performance of isolator. The integration of these parameters is very important when selecting parameter for fluidlastic isolators design.

With rapid construction and development of the distribution network, the hybrid network, composed of optical fiber and wireless private network, has become the major communication method for medium and low-voltage power distribution electric power business. In order to reduce the blind spot and extend coverage of current electric power communication networks, this article designs wireless communication network scheme and data acquisition equipment for power communication networks, based on low power wide area network technology. The scheme can realize the many kinds of equipment accessing to electric power communication networks, and satisfy the access control demands of electric power system. The communication capability experiments show that the wireless scheme has the advantages of long transmission distance, strong signal penetration and high scalability.

To understand the distribution of Parkinson's disease questionnaire-39 (PDQ-39) scores in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients with or without depression, and to analyze the factors that influence the quality of life of PD patients.300 PD patients were enrolled. Patients' general information and the results of assessments including UPDRS, H-Y, HAMD, HAMA, ADL and PDQ-39 were collected. They were divided into depression group and non-depression group according to HAMD score. The relationship between PD-related depression and quality of life and the factors that influence the quality of life of PD patients were analyzed based on PDQ-39 score.111 patients with depression (37.0 %) and 189 patients without depression (63.0 %) were enrolled. The scores of PDQ-39 summary index (PDQ-39 SI) in the depression group were significantly higher than those in the non-depression group in all domains (P0.05). Patients in the depression group had a longer disease duration (6.89 ± 4.70 vs. 5.52 ± 4.12, P0.038), a higher UPDRS-III score (30.1 ± 13.55 vs. 25.2 ± 11.73, P0.001), and a higher H-Y stage level (2.41 ± 0.853 vs. 2.13 ± 0.707, P0.001), compared with patients in the non-depression group. All factors including age, disease duration, UPDRS-III, H-Y stage, HAMD score and HAMA score, may independently affected PDQ-39SI in PD patients, among which HAMD had the greatest effect. HAMD and HAMA were correlated with PDQ-39 in its all eight domains.PD patients with psychological problems such as anxiety and depression may lead to a significant decline in the quality of life of patients in all domains.

The high morbidity and mortality of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) seriously affects the quality of human life. How to asses cardiac function, assist in the diagnosis and treatment of clinical CVDs and evaluate prognosis is a problem to be solved urgently. In response to this issue, based on previous work of Cardiac Cine Magnetic Resonance (CCMR) image segmentation of the left myocardium (LVM), a robust and accurate LVM motion tracking method (DispFlow_UNet_Flow) with using the displacement flow UNet (DispFlow_UNet) and biomechanics-informed variational autoencoder (VAE) is proposed in this paper. The following are the main research contents: (1) building a compressed excitation residual U-net network to accurately segment LVM, calculating the ventricular volume and myocardial mass according to the segmentation results, and then evaluating the overall cardiac function; (2) reconstructing the dense displacement field (DDF) based on the proposed motion tracking method, and obtaining the LVM dense displacement field by combining the LVM segmentation mask; (3) contrasting and evaluating the motion tracking results by using the true displacement vector field of simulated data and clinical data sets. All the results show that the tracking algorithm proposed in this paper has high precision and generalization capability.

// Daqiong Jiang 1, * , Huiyan Wang 2, * , Zhuyan Li 1 , Zhen Li 1 , Xin Chen 1 , Hongbing Cai 1 1 Department of Gynecological Oncology, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Hubei Key Laboratory of Tumor Biological Behaviors, Hubei Cancer Clinical Study Center, Wuhan 430071, Hubei, P.R. China 2 Department of Gynecological Oncology, Hospital of Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, Hubei, P.R. China * These authors contributed equally to this work and co-first authors Correspondence to: Hongbing Cai, email: caihbwuhan@163.com Keywords: miR-142, HMGB1, cervical cancer Received: October 11, 2016 Accepted: October 28, 2016 Published: November 05, 2016 ABSTRACT It has been reported that miRNAs is deregulated in diverse human cancers, involving human cervical cancer. However, the clinical significances and potential mechanisms of miR-142 in the development and progression of cervical cancer were not elucidated completely till now. In this study, we found that the expression of miR- 142 was obviously down-regulated in human cervical cancer tissues and a panel of cell lines. According to statistics, the expression of miR-142 was negatively related to advanced FIGO stage and lymphatic metastasis ( p < 0.001). Furthermore, our functional analysis revealed the overexpression of miR-142 affected cell proliferation and invasiveness, and enhanced cell apoptosis in representative SiHa and HeLa cells. Based on the molecular level, our findings showed the 3' untranslated region (3’-UTR) of high-mobility group box 1 protein (HMGB1) was a direct target of miR-142, and determined an inverse correlation with the expression of miR-142. Ectopic expression of HMGB1 could attenuate the inhibitory impact of miR-142 on the proliferation and invasiveness of cervical cancer cells. In conclusion, the present work suggested that miR-142 affects cervical cancer cell proliferation and invasiveness, and enhances cell apoptosis via directly targeting the expression of HMGB1, and these findings may lay a novel foundation for the promising therapy target of cervical cancer.

Background Acute liver failure (ALF) is a severe and life-threatening clinical syndrome resulting in a high mortality and extremely poor prognosis. Recently, a water-soluble CO-releasing molecule (CORM-3) has been shown to have anti-inflammatory effect. The present study was to investigate the effect of CORM-3 on ALF and elucidate its underlying mechanism. Methods ALF was induced by a combination of LPS/D-GalN in mice which were treated with CORM-3 or inactive CORM-3 (iCORM-3). The efficacy of CORM-3 was evaluated based on survival, liver histopathology, serum aminotransferase activities (ALT and AST) and total bilirubin (TBiL). Serum levels of inflammatory cytokines (TNF-α, IL-6, IL-1β and IL-10) and liver immunohistochemistry of NF-κB-p65 were determined; the expression of inflammatory mediators such as iNOS, COX-2 and TLR4 was measured using Western blotting. Results The pretreatment with CORM-3 significantly improved the liver histology and the survival rate of mice compared with the controls; CORM-3 also decreased the levels of ALT, AST and TBiL. Furthermore, CORM-3 significantly inhibited the increased concentration of pro-inflammatory cytokines (TNF-α, IL-6 and IL-1β) and increased the anti-inflammatory cytokine (IL-10) productions in ALF mice. Moreover, CORM-3 significantly reduced the increased expression of iNOS and TLR4 in liver tissues and inhibited the nuclear expression of NF-κB-p65. CORM-3 had no effect on the increased expression of COX-2 in the ALF mice. An iCORM-3 failed to prevent acute liver damage induced by LPS/D-GalN. Conclusion These findings provided evidence that CORM-3 may offer a novel alternative approach for the management of ALF through anti-inflammatory functions.

Ultra-compact TE/TM polarization splitters in LiNbO 3 photonic wires with same bending waveguide in input and output transition regions at 1.31 μm and 1.55 μm wavelengths have been proposed, respectively. Their operating principles are based on the directional coupling mode. Their optimization designs are achieved by using commercial software COMSOL Multiphysics. Calculated steady-state field distributions indicate that guided lightwaves in both quasi-TM and quasi-TE polarizations can be spatially separated from different output waveguides ports. The transmittances of quasi-TE and quasi-TM polarization at 1.31 μm wavelength are 90% and 88.5%, respectively. And that at 1.55 μm are 88.6% and 84.7%, respectively. The total lengths of the devices for 1.31 μm and 1.55 wavelengths are 47 μm and 36.52 μm, respectively. Moreover, the coupling length dependences of the transmittances, the optical transmission bandwidths, and fabrication sensitivities are evaluated, respectively. The simple and compact polarization splitters are expected to be applied to highly dense LN photonic integrated circuits.

The novel COVID-19 outbreak has affected more than 200 countries and territories as of March 2020. Given that patients with cancer are generally more vulnerable to infections, systematic analysis of diverse cohorts of patients with cancer affected by COVID-19 are needed. We performed a multi-center study including 105 cancer patients and 536 age-matched non-cancer patients confirmed with COVID-19. Our results showed COVID-19 patients with cancer had higher risks in all severe outcomes. Patients with hematological cancer, lung cancer, or with metastatic cancer (stage IV) had the highest frequency of severe events. Non-metastatic cancer patients experienced similar frequencies of severe conditions to those observed in patients without cancer. Patients who received surgery had higher risks of having severe events, while patients with only radiotherapy did not demonstrate significant differences in severe events when compared to patients without cancer. These findings indicate that cancer patients appear more vulnerable to SARS-COV-2 outbreak. Since this is the first large cohort study on this topic, our report will provide the much-needed information that will benefit global cancer patients. As such, we believe it is extremely important that our study be disseminated widely to alert clinicians and patients. Citation Format: Meng-Yuan Dai, Dian-bo Liu, Miao Liu, Fu-Xiang Zhou, Gui-Ling Li, Zhen Chen, Zhi-An Zhang, Hua-You Md, Meng Wu, Qi-Chao Zheng, Yong Xiong, Hui-Hua Xiong, Chun Wang, Chang-Chun Chen, Fei Xiong, Yan Zhang, Ya-Qin Peng, Si-Ping Ge, Bo Zhen, Ting-Ting Yu, Ling Wang, Hua Wang, Yu Liu, Ye-Shan Chen, Jun-Hua Mei, Xiao-Jia Gao, Zhu-Yan Li, Li-Juan Gan, Can He, Zhen Li, Yu-Ying Shi, Yu-Wen Qi, Jing Yang, Daniel G. Tenen, Li Chai, Lorelei Ann Mucci, Mauricio Santillana, Hongbing Cai. Patients with cancer appear more vulnerable to SARS-COV-2: A multi-center study during the COVID-19 outbreak [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research 2020; 2020 Apr 27-28 and Jun 22-24. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2020;80(16 Suppl):Abstract nr CT406.

For multi-view viewpoint planning research, Firstly, using the UAV aerial multi-view image, the viewpoint view is first to establish a candidate view area according to the shooting distance. Secondly, the sub-viewpoint set is filtered and the view points are complemented by the region where the candidate view cannot be photographed, so that the three-dimensional reconstruction data has better integrity. Thirdly, the influence of camera incident angle on image pixel error is analyzed, and the corresponding 3D model is established. Finally, the stereoscopic overlap is used to perform viewpoint screening under the premise of ensuring image quality and shooting coverage. The experimental results show that the proposed viewpoint planning method has high coverage and the reconstruction accuracy is below 0.1% of the target size.

This paper proposes a measure of reinforcing concrete frames with rocking steel truss to strengthen an existing building and reduce future seismic loss without excessively increasing reinforcing costs. The particular rocking and dissipating construction of the bottom joint of the rocking steel truss enables it to improve the lateral deformation mode of the RC frame, to dissipate the input energy of the earthquake, and to recentre the frame after the earthquake. First, the configurations of the truss and rocking joints are presented, and the rocking mechanism of the truss is illustrated. Secondly, the numerical method for modelling the rocking steel truss is proposed and realised in OpenSees. Lastly, a three-story school building is taken as a case, and the influences of the added rocking truss on the seismic performances of the structure are discussed by considering three factors, including stiffness of the steel truss, friction force, and prestressed force. Then the optimal design of the rocking steel truss is determined, and the seismic performances of the RC frame with and without rocking steel truss are compared. The results show that the truss stiffness, friction force, and prestressed force significantly affect the seismic performance of the structure with rocking steel truss. The lateral distribution mode of RC frame is improved by adding the rocking steel truss, and maximum drift and residual drift can be reduced by 66.93% and 98.15%, respectively.

In embedded microkernel, memory management directly affects the real-time, security and stability of the system. The main factors affecting the efficiency of memory management are time of memory allocation and memory space utilization. Therefore, the memory mechanism designed in this paper is mainly from such two aspects as time and space. In this paper, the memory prediction allocation mechanism based on historical information is used to reduce the time, and the memory combination allocation mechanism is used to improve the space utilization, so as to improve the overall performance of the embedded microkernel operating system. In addition, due to some drawbacks existing in the current task scheduling strategy for multi-core processor, this paper, combining the merits of task scheduling of global queue and local queue, designs a scheduling strategy based on task-slot, a strategy which not only considers load-balancing control but also parallel performance of the system. Finally, this paper conducts the modification on the μ C / OS-II open-source operating system with the help of the microkernel memory prediction combination model, which creates an operating system suitable for heterogeneous multi-core processor architecture. Moreover, experimental test and result analysis have been conducted, which proves that the microkernel memory prediction combination mechanism designed in this paper has good performance in accord with the development needs of the current embedded system.

A historical review of the remediation industry of China and the United States is summarized, while the common issues between the two countries are discussed. A side-by-side comparison analysis was carried out in terms of site remediation challenges, environmental policies, management guidelines, funding mechanism, and remediation processes. The key finding is that the remediation industry in China has been experiencing a fast growth since 2004, and the international experiences and lessons primarily derived from the US Superfund program may contribute to China. It is concluded that the solution to address the challenges must be a concerted effort aiming at the formulation of industrial practice code, further emphasis of environmental impact assessment, as well as the establishment of diverse funding mechanisms.

A number of studies have investigated the association between tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α gene polymorphisms and ischemic stroke susceptibility. However, results of different individual studies are often inconsistent. To provide a more robust evaluation of the association between polymorphisms of the TNF-α gene and ischemic stroke risk, we performed a systematic review with multivariate meta-analyses. PubMed, Embase, CNKI, and WanFang databases were searched up to December 20, 2014. Two reviewers independently extracted information and assessed quality of included studies after all the eligible studies were identified. Afterward, multivariate meta-analyses were performed using Stata 13. The estimation of polymorphisms and disease risk was presented by odds ratios (ORs) and corresponding 95 % confidence intervals (CIs). Forty-nine eligible case-control studies from 25 articles that explored the association between 10 TNF-α polymorphisms and ischemic stroke were indentified from aforementioned databases. The results of multivariate meta-analysis showed a significant association between -238G/A polymorphism (4760 patients and 4389 controls) and ischemic stroke risk in heterozygotes compared with wild genotype (AG vs. GG: OR 1.44, 95 % CI 1.11-1.87; AA vs. GG: OR 1.98, 95 % CI 0.73-5.40). No significant association of -308G/A, -857C/T, and -1031T/C polymorphisms was observed. The results of stratification analyses of -238G/A polymorphism showed that the AG genotype only increased the risk of ischemic stroke in Asians compared to GG genotype. No additional significant association was observed in this study. In conclusion, the present systematic review and meta-analysis support a prominent role of the TNF-α -238G/A polymorphism in the risk of ischemic stroke in Asian adults only, but do not support the role of -308G/A, -857C/T, -1031T/C, -244G/A, -367G/A, -646G/A, -806C/T, -863C/A, and +448G/A in the risk of ischemic stroke. The current evidence warrants further studies with high quality and large sample size to confirm.

One of the core objectives of machine learning is to instruct computers to use data or past experience to solve a given problem. A good number of successful applications of machine learning exist already, including classifier to be trained on email messages to learn in order to distinguish between spam and non-spam messages, systems that analyze past sales data to predict customer buying behavior, fraud detection etc. Machine learning can be applied as association analysis through Supervised learning, Unsupervised learning and Reinforcement Learning but in this study we will focus on strength and weakness of supervised learning classification algorithms. The goal of supervised learning is to build a concise model of the distribution of class labels in terms of predictor features. The resulting classifier is then used to assign class labels to the testing instances where the values of the predictor features are known, but the value of the class label is unknown. We are optimistic that this study will help new researchers to guiding new research areas and to compare the effectiveness and impuissance of supervised learning algorithms.

The capability of existing MV metal enclosed switchgear is restrained by its poor short circuit making performance of earthing switch. A new type of direct acting earthing switch with rated voltage 12kV is designed for better short circuit making capability in this paper. A series of different springs which supply different forces and different main circuit arrangement patterns which produce different electro-dynamic forces are manufactured in order to supply different closing speeds. Therefore corresponding experiment switch peak current of 80kA are performed to study the relationship between closing speed and making capability. The results of experiments show that the capability of short circuit making increases with the rising of closing speed and the electrical durability of the earthing switch is at least 8 times when the max measuring closing speed is 3.82 m/s especially. The research on direct acting earthing switch in this paper is meaningful for large capacity MV metal enclosed switchgear.

In the Big Data era, personal metadata may will become a new type of corporate asset, however there have already been a growing public concern about user’s privacy mined from metadata. In this paper we address the problem of implementing the self-sovereignty of personal metadata on the existing OpenPDS/SafeAnswers framework according to the Windhover Principle. In order to do that, we propose a new framework, called BlocakChain-based Personal Data Store (BCPDS), to realize two basic properties: notary and autonomy. This framework, firstly introduces the BlockChain as a notary, into OpenPDS/SafeAnswers for secure storage of personal meta-data instead of the original database. Next, we present an AutoNomybased Access Control (ANAC) to improve the SafeAnswers module, where ANAC is a new mechanism that enforces access based on the relationship among all authorized users and metadata’s owner. In addition, we also propose General Access Structure (GAS) and threshold secret sharing scheme in BlockChain as an implementation method for our BC-PDS framework.

Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) and histamine-2-receptor antagonists (H2RAs) are used for gastro-esophageal reflux disease (GERD); however, the clinical evidence for treatment is poor. We evaluated the effectiveness and tolerability of different doses of PPIs, H2RAs and placebo in adults with GERD. Six online databases were searched through September 1, 2016. All related articles were included and combined with a Bayesian network meta-analysis from randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The GRADE systems were employed to assess the main outcome. Ninety-eight RCTs were identified, which included 45,964 participants. Our analysis indicated that the full/standard dose of esomeprazole at 40 mg per day was the most efficient in healing among nine different dosages of PPIs and H2RAs. The main efficacy outcome did not change after adjustments for the area, age, level of disease from endoscopy, year of publication, pharmaceutical industry sponsorship, Intention-to-treat (ITT)/per-protocol (PP), withdrawal rate, pre-set select design bias, single blinded and unblinded studies, study origination in China, study arms that included zero events, inconsistency node or discontinued drug were accounted for in the meta-regressions and sensitivity analyses. This research suggests that the full/standard doses (40 mg per day) of esomeprazole should be recommended as first-line treatments for GERD in adults for short-term therapy.