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Forest fires are one of the most severe natural disasters facing global ecosystems, as they have a significant impact on ecological security and social development. As remote sensing technology has developed, burned areas can now be quickly extracted to support fire monitoring and post-disaster recovery. This study focused on monitoring forest fires that occurred in Chongqing, China, in August 2022. The burned area was identified using various satellite images, including Sentinel-2, Landsat8, Environmental Mitigation II A (HJ2A), and Gaofen-6 (GF-6). The burned area was extracted using visual interpretation, differenced Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (dNDVI), and differenced Normalized Burnup Ratio (dNBR). The results showed that: (1) The results of the three monitoring methods were very consistent, with a coefficient of determination R2 > 0.96. (2) A threshold method based on the dNBR-extracted burned area was used to analyze fire severity, with moderate-severity fires making up the majority (58.05%) of the fires. (3) Different topographic factors had some influence on the severity of the forest fires. High elevation, steep slopes and the northwestern aspect had the largest percentage of burned area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the more available acoustic information or the polarization information provided, vector sensor arrays outperform the scalar sensor arrays in accuracy of localization. However, the cost of a vector sensor array is higher than that of a scalar sensor array. To reduce the cost of a two-dimensional (2-D) vector sensor array, a hybrid T-shaped sensor array consisting of two orthogonal uniform linear arrays (ULAs) is proposed, where one ULA is composed of acoustic vector sensors and the other is composed of scalar sensors. By utilizing the cross-correlation tensor between the received signals from the two ULAs, two virtual uniform rectangular arrays (URAs) of acoustic vector sensors are obtained, and they can be combined into a larger URA. It is shown that a larger acoustic vector sensor URA with M2+1 degrees of freedom (DOFs) can be obtained from the specially designed T-shaped array with M acoustic vector sensors and 2M scalar sensors. Furthermore, by means of the proposed tensor model for the larger URA, the inter-sensor spacing can be allowed to exceed greatly a half-wavelength. Accordingly, the proposed method can achieve both a high DOF and a large array aperture. Simulation results show that the proposed method has a better performance in 2-D direction-of-arrival estimation than some existing methods under the same array cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotion regulation plays a vital role in human beings daily lives by helping them deal with social problems and protects mental and physical health. However, objective evaluation of the efficacy of emotion regulation and assessment of the improvement in emotion regulation ability at the individual level remain challenging. In this study, we leveraged neurofeedback training to design a real-time EEG-based brain-computer interface (BCI) system for users to effectively regulate their emotions. Twenty healthy subjects performed 10 BCI-based neurofeedback training sessions to regulate their emotion towards a specific emotional state (positive, negative, or neutral), while their EEG signals were analyzed in real time via machine learning to predict their emotional states. The prediction results were presented as feedback on the screen to inform the subjects of their immediate emotional state, based on which the subjects could update their strategies for emotion regulation. The experimental results indicated that the subjects improved their ability to regulate these emotions through our BCI neurofeedback training. Further EEG-based spectrum analysis revealed how each emotional state was related to specific EEG patterns, which were progressively enhanced through long-term training. These results together suggested that long-term EEG-based neurofeedback training could be a promising tool for helping people with emotional or mental disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cell heterogeneity has impeded the accurate interpretation of the bulk transcriptome data from patients with diabetic nephropathy (DN). We performed an analysis by integrating bulk and single‐cell transcriptome datasets to uncover novel mechanisms leading to DN, especially in the podocytes. Microdissected glomeruli and tubules transcriptome datasets were selected from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). Then the consistency between datasets was evaluated. The analysis of the bulk dataset and single‐nucleus RNA dataset was integrated to reveal the cell type‐specific responses to DN. The candidate genes were validated in kidney tissues from DN patients and diabetic mice. We compared 4 glomerular and 4 tubular datasets and found considerable discrepancies among datasets regarding the deferentially expressed genes (DEGs), involved signaling pathways, and the hallmark enrichment profiles. Deconvolution of the bulk data revealed that the variations in cell‐type proportion contributed greatly to this discrepancy. The integrative analysis uncovered that the dysregulation of spermatogenesis‐related genes, including TEKT2 and PIAS2, was involved in the development of DN. Importantly, the mRNA level of TEKT2 was negatively correlated with the mRNA levels of NPHS1 (r = −.66, p <.0001) and NPHS2 (r = −.85, p <.0001) in human diabetic glomeruli. Immunostaining confirmed that the expression of TEKT2 and PIAS2 were up‐regulated in podocytes of DN patients and diabetic mice. Knocking down TEKT2 resisted high glucose‐induced cytoskeletal remodeling and down‐regulation of NPHS1 protein in the cultured podocyte. In conclusion, the integrative strategy can help us efficiently use the publicly available transcriptomics resources. Using this approach and combining it with classical research methods, we identified TEKT2 and PIAS2, two spermatogenesis‐related genes involved in the pathogenesis of DN. Furthermore, TEKT2 is involved in this pathogenesis by regulating the podocyte cytoskeleton. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]