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In this work, an analytical model describing liquid wicking phenomenon in porous media was constructed, based on the statistical geometry theory and the fractal theory. In the model, a new structure-property relationship, depicted by specific surface, porosity, tortuosity, pore fractal dimension, maximum pore size of the porous media, was introduced into the energy conservation equation. According to the theoretical model, the accumulated imbibition weight in porous media was achieved, and the predictions were verified by available experimental data published in different literatures. Besides, structure parameters influencing the imbibition process upon approaching equilibrium height were discussed. The model and results in this work are useful for the application of porous media in scientific research and industry.

Background: Long‐term exposure to UVB induces DNA damage, inflammatory response, mitochondrial dysfunction, and apoptosis in skin cells, thus causing skin photodamage. Research has demonstrated the noteworthy antioxidant, anti‐inflammatory, DNA repair, and mitochondrial protective properties of keratinocyte growth factor‐2 (KGF‐2). Methods: To examine the impact of KGF‐2 on UVB‐triggered skin photodamage in mice, hair‐removed mice were initially exposed under UVB radiation and subsequently treated with KGF‐2 hydrogel and repeated for 6 days. On day 7, the assessment of histopathological alterations, inflammation, DNA damage, mitochondrial function, and apoptosis in mouse skin was assessed. Results: It was found that KGF‐2 could effectively relieve cutaneous photodamage symptoms and inhibit epidermal proliferation in mice. Meanwhile, KGF‐2 was found to significantly reduce DNA damage, attenuate the inflammatory response, and inhibit the mitochondria‐mediated intrinsic apoptotic pathway in the UVB‐exposed mouse skin photodamage model. Conclusion: To summarize, our results indicated that KGF‐2 reduces the severity of mouse skin photodamage caused by UVB rays by attenuating DNA damage and the inflammatory response, besides inhibiting the mitochondria‐mediated intrinsic apoptosis pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Magnetic nanomaterials typically exhibit good solid–liquid separation properties and surface modifiability, making them widely used in the separation and purification of highly toxic pollutants despite the problem of magnetic agglomeration. Herein, pure Fe3O4 nanoparticles, graphene oxide (GO)-modified Fe3O4 nanocomposites, polypyrrole (PPy)-modified Fe3O4 nanocomposites, and GO and PPy-comodified Fe3O4 nanocomposites were used as adsorbents to explore the universal and effective dispersion methods of functionalized magnetic nanoadsorbents from the perspective of acoustic parameters. System tests have shown that regardless of whether the surface of magnetic nanomaterials is modified or not, ultrasound radiation can significantly enhance the adsorption of Cr-(VI) (2.1–7.3-folds). Detailed performance tests, ultrasonic parameters, and color development experiments show that the enhanced adsorption characteristics of magnetic nanomaterials with improved dispersion have a strong frequency/power dependence. Interestingly, a single modification layer, especially a combined modification layer, weakens this effect. After 5 cycles, the nanomaterial still has more than 90% adsorption efficiency, indicating that the nanoadsorbent has good cycle stability. In addition, this method exhibits excellent removal activity for Cr-(VI) and other heavy metal ions (such as Pb2+) in actual wastewater. This work confirms that ultrasound-assisted dispersion is a simple, efficient, and sustainable way to fully demonstrate the application characteristics of magnetic-based nanoadsorbents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Singerocybe alboinfundibuliformis (Seok et al.) Yang, Qin & Takah 2014 is an edible mushroom distributed in several East or Southeast Asian countries. Herein, we report the mitochondrial genome of S. alboinfundibuliformis based on Illumina sequencing data. The overall length of the mitochondrial genome is 64,279 bp, with a GC content of 29.0%. It contains 14 typical protein-coding genes, 27 tRNA genes, two rRNA genes, and 13 intergenic ORFs. Most of these genes (39 out of 56) are transcribed at the forward strand, and few (17 out of 56) are transcribed at the reverse strand. Among these genes, only the rnl gene is invaded by an intron, and all other genes are intron-free. Phylogenetic analysis based on mitochondrial amino acid sequences supports the phylogenetic position of S. alboinfundibuliformis in Clitocybaceae, being close to Lepista sordida (Schumach.) Singer 1951. This study serves as a springboard for future investigation on fungal evolution in Clitocybaceae. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: As a medicinal and food homologous plant, Rosa damascena is not only highly ornamental, but also rich in a variety of active ingredients such as polyphenols and flavonoids. It is widely used in cosmetics, food and pharmaceutical industries. Objective: To study the in vitro efficacy of Rosa damascena solid state fermentation liquid (RDF) and water extract (RDE). Methods: Firstly, the effect of RDF and RDE on the proliferation rate of B16F10 cells was detected by CCK‐8 method, and the melanin content was measured by sodium hydroxide lysis method to evaluate the whitening effect of them. Finally, the antioxidant, anti‐wrinkling and soothing effects of RDF and RDE were evaluated by biochemical methods in vitro. Results: RDF and RDE within a certain concentration range (0.05%–0.5%) had no effect on the proliferation of B16F10 cells. Compared with Rosa damascena extract (RDE), RDF showed significant effects on bleaching, antioxidant, anti‐wrinkling and soothing, among which 0.5% RDF showed the best effect. Conclusion: Both RDF and RDE at a certain concentration have effect on skin care in vitro, but the effect of RDF is more significant than that of RDE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trial difficulty prediction (TDP) is the task of automatically predicting the difficulty of a trial given the case text, which has a broad application prospect in judicial intelligent system. In practice, the tools of TDP rely heavily on the experience of experts, which leads different conclusions in predicting the difficulty of the trial. However, there are few related research work. To address these issues, this paper regards it as a text classification problem in natural language processing. Through the analysis, it is found that, traditional text classification methods don??t consider the structural uniqueness and logical dependence among trial elements in complaint, which makes it difficult to predict the difficulty of a trial accurately. In order to solve the mentioned challenges, this paper carefully studies indictments and considers the complex and simple trial elements for judging cases, presents an end-to-end model, MAT-TAN (mask-attention and topological association network). Specifically, this paper proposes a novel mask-attention network (MAT), to carry out fine-grained analysis of a case description text in indictments. The masking mechanism plays a role of the intelligent gatekeeper, focusing on the specific position of the trial elements in indictments. Together with the self-attention mechanism, it extracts the comprehensive and accurate characteristics of each trial element. This paper proposes a novel topological association network (TAN), which models the judicial logic dependency relationship between different elements, and effectively integrates the characteristics of different elements. Finally, the TDP is realized. The experimental results conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that the MAT-TAN can improve the macro averaged F1 up to 0.036 compared with baselines, showing that it has a better performance in TDP.

Chinese has been taking sorghum rice as food for centuries. Gas chromatography ion mobility spectroscopy (GC-IMS) was applied to analyze the changes of volatile compounds in sorghum rice during cooking process. It was found that the main volatile compounds in sorghum rice included ketones, aldehydes and esters. The aromatic components of cooked sorghum rice included phenylacetaldehyde, hexanal,2-pentaylfuran and hexyl acetate. The strongest aroma was marked when cooked between 40 and 60 minutes with the highest number of volatile species being detected. The result of variance analysis showed that sorghum rice could demonstrate more flavor information after cooking. Therefore, it was suggested to analyze volatile compounds of sorghum after cooking to improve the resolution.