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The current study involves an experimental as well as numerical study on the aerodynamic behavior of a flapping-wing rotor (FWR) with different feathering amplitudes (−20°–50°, −50°–20°, and −35°–35°). In order to fulfil the experimental test, an FWR which weighs 18.7 g is designed in this manuscript. According to the experimental and numerical results, it was observed that, compared with the cases under a zero average stroke angle, the cases under a positive average stroke angle or negative average stroke angle share a higher rotary speed given the same input voltage. Despite the fact that the negative average stroke angle would facilitate the generation of a higher rotary speed, the negative average stroke angle cases tend to generate the smallest lift-to-power ratio. On the other hand, the cases with a positive average stroke angle tend to share the largest lift-to-power ratio (about 1.25 times those of zero average stroke angle cases and about 1.6 times those of negative average stroke angle cases). The above study indicates that the application of a positive average stroke angle can provide an effective solution to further increase the aerodynamic performance of a bio-inspired FWR.

Existing environment modeling approaches and trajectory planning approaches for intelligent vehicles are difficult to adapt to multiple scenarios, as scenarios are diverse and changeable, which may lead to potential risks. This work proposes a cognitive spatial–time environment modeling approach for autonomous vehicles, which models a multi-scenario-adapted spatial–time environment model from a cognitive perspective and transforms the scenario-based trajectory planning problem into a unified spatial–time planning problem. The commonality of multiple typical Chinese road scenarios is analyzed, and a unified spatial–time environment model for multi-scenario adaptation is defined and established. The adaptability and trajectory planning potential of the spatial–time environment model are analyzed, and the planning results are obtained through a hybrid A* algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposal is effective in blurring the boundary between scenarios, allowing a single planning approach to adapt to multiple scenarios and plan optimal trajectories (optimal in both path and speed domains) and introducing more flexibility to the planning.

Background: Antimicrobial resistance of Salmonella enterica is a major global concern. Recent findings suggest that colistin as a last resort treatment for multidrug-resistant gram-negative bacteria is seriously threatened by the report of plasmid-mediated colistin resistance gene mcr-1 in China. Methods: A total of 827 S. Typhimurium isolates were recovered from 4 cities of China, including Henan, Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Hubei provinces. Subsequently, mcr-1 presence was identified by PCR screening. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing was performed by broth microdilution using a 96-well microtiter plate. Plasmid conjugation transfer experiments were conducted using Escherichia coli J53 as the recipient. Results: Only one mcr-1 positive strain from the stool sample of an infant with acute diarrhea was isolated. Apart from colistin, the mcr-1-positive isolate showed co-resistance to the third-generation cephalosporins, ampicillin, nalidixic acid, tetracycline, chloramphenicol, sulfisoxazole, gentamicin, and cefotaxime revealing a multidrug-resistant phenotype. This strain harbored mcr-1 on a 227 kb IncHI2 plasmid, termed pJZ26, which could be transferred to E. coli J53. In addition to mcr-1, pJZ26 coharbored other resistance genes, including aph(4)-Ia, aac(3)-IVa, fosA, floR, sul2, and blaCTX-M-14. Compared with p2474-MCR1 and pHYEC7-IncHI2, pJZ26 contains an additional 4.6 kb fragment harboring the resistance gene tet(A) and its regulator tetR located on TnAs1 transposable element, which could mediate resistance to tetracycline. Conclusions: These findings highlight that the fact the mcr-1–harboring plasmid pJZ26 has a high potential to disseminate the mcr-1 gene and further challenge the clinical treatment.

Abstract Background Intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) has negative impacts on the postnatal survival, growth and development of humans and animals, with not only on newborns but also adulthood. However, the characteristics for nutrient digestion and absorption in IUGR offspring are still largely unknown. Therefore, the normal birth weight (NBW) and IUGR growing pigs were used in this study to investigate their differences in nutrient utilization, with an expectition for further nutritional optimization of the IUGR offspring during their later life. Methods Twelve IUGR and 12 NBW growing pigs were fitted with catheters in their portal vein to measure blood flow rate as well as nutrients and metabolites in plasma. The digestibilities of nutrients in different intestinal segments, and bacterial fermentation in the large intestine were examined to reveal the characteristics of nutrients utilization in IUGR versus NBW pigs. Results The rate of portal venous blood flow did not differ beween IUGR and NBW pigs. Plasma concentrations of total cholesterol, triglycerides and glucose were much lower but those of urea were higher in the portal vein of IUGR pigs, compared with the NBW pigs. The ileal digestibility of dry matter, gross energy and starch were lower in IUGR pigs than in NBW pigs. IUGR increased hindgut microbial diversity and bacterial fermentation activity in the caecum. In vitro cross-fermentation of ileal digesta by caecal microbes of NBW and IUGR pigs showed that gas production was much higher for IUGR ileal digesta regardless of the source of caecal inocula. Conclusion IUGR impairs the nutrient digestion and absorption in small intestine, reduces caecal microbial diversity and promotes bacterial fermentation in the large intestine during the growing phase. These findings aid in our understanding of nutrient metabolism in IUGR pigs and provide the basis for future nutritional interventions.

To improve the mode and precision of wheelchair/nursing-bed automatic docking, a novel central embedded wheelchair/nursing-bed automatic docking method based on grid map is proposed. Firstly, Laplace operator and Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm are used to filter and match Lidar point cloud, and the linear features of V-shaped artificial landmark are fitted by Split-merge method and least square method. Then Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is used to fuse Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and odometer data to realize the localization of the bed and wheelchair. Meanwhile, the grid map is used for path planning. Based on the center-line of the two rear wheels and the angular bisector of V-shaped artificial landmark, the wheelchair pose is adjusted in real-time to ensure that the wheelchair gradually approaches the bed along the angular bisector of V-shaped artificial landmark. The yaw angle is reduced by using the improved Proportion Integration Differentiation (PID). 9 sets of experimental data, ie. (x, y, $\theta $ ) were collected at different starting positions during the docking process. The results show that the yaw angle of the wheelchair during the docking process is controlled within 2.5°, and the distance deviation between the final position and the ideal position of the wheelchair after docking is controlled within 0.02m. In the case of light interference with different luminous fluxes, the docking can still maintain good performance. The proposed docking algorithm has the robust performance of rapid response and low steady error, which can greatly improves the self-care ability of the bedridden elderly, and reduces the labor intensity of the nursing staff.

It is demonstrated that in this paper a peanut shaped structure cascaded with up-taper fiber structure can realize the inter mode interference between the Erbium doped fiber (EDF) core mode and cladding modes in fiber ring laser (FRL). A simple and inexpensive Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) based on this structure is proposed. Shown from experimental results, the optical intensity of the core mode can be coupled into the cladding modes in the first peanut-shaped structure. Then, the light in the cladding modes can be recoupled into the core mode in the up-taper structure. A high-quality interference spectrum with a signal to noise ratio about 50 dB was observed. Besides, the structure exhibits good mechanical stability when compared to MZIs based on taper or offset structure. The temperature sensitivity of the FRL sensor is 301 pm/°C and the RI sensitivity is 156 nm/RIU. This kind of MZI will have potential applications in remote sensing technique and the development of life and health.

An undersampling free-space optical (FSO) communication system based on compressive sensing (CS) and in-fiber grating is proposed. Our proposal drastically mitigates the data scale unfavorable issue and reduces the great amount of required data. Also, our proposal employs low-bandwidth and low-cost photodetectors (PDs) and analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and decreases the cost of data detection. Besides, the data transmitted in the free space is encrypted, which enhances the security of the system. The in-fiber grating, which has the advantage of highly efficient thanks to its inherent compatibility with optical fiber links, plays the roles of light emitter, in-fiber polarizer, and light diffraction device, simultaneously. A sinusoidal radio frequency (RF) signal with a frequency of 1 GHz is utilized for a 2.4 m data transmission. And each PD with a bandwidth of 300 MHz is employed for detecting the transmitted signal on each channel. The proposal obtains data compression ratios of 25%, 15%, and 5% both in the temporal domain and frequency domain. Besides, a two-tone signal and a random RF signal are applied in the proposed FSO transmission for data transmission. Our proposal not only has the merits of secure, compact, stable, and highly efficient, but also has great potential in extremely secure situations, such as secured indoor and under water data communication.

Adipose tissue-resident T cells are known to regulate thermogenesis and energy expenditure. Here the authors report that deletion of mitochondria-localized protein DsbA-L in T cells promotes diet-induced thermogenesis via suppressing IFN-γ production.

In the present study, we describe the development of betaxolol hydrochloride and montmorillonite with ion exchange in a single formulation to create a novel micro-interactive dual-functioning sustained-release delivery system (MIDFDS) for the treatment of glaucoma. Betaxolol hydrochloride molecule was loaded onto the montmorillonite by ion exchange and MIDFDS formation was confirmed by XPS data. MIDFDS showed similar physicochemical properties to those of Betoptic, such as particle size, pH, osmotic pressure, and rheological properties. Nevertheless, the microdialysis and intraocular pressure test revealed better in vivo performance of MIDFDS, such as pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. With regards to wettability, MIDFDS had a larger contact angle (54.66 ± 5.35°) than Betoptic (36.68 ± 1.77°), enabling the MIDFDS (2.93 s) to spread slower on the cornea than Betoptic (2.50 s). Moderate spreading behavior and oppositely charged electrostatic micro-interactions had a comprehensive influence on micro-interactions with the tear film residue, resulting in a longer precorneal retention time. Furthermore, MIDFDS had a significant sustained-release effect, with complete release near the cornea. The dual-functioning sustained-release carrier together with prolonged pre-corneal retention time (80 min) provided sufficiently high drug concentrations in the aqueous humor to achieve a more stable and long-term IOP reduction for 10 h. In addition, cytotoxicity and hemolysis tests showed that MIDFDS had better biocompatibility than Betoptic. The dual-functioning microspheres presented in this study provide the possibility for improved compliance due to low cytotoxicity and hemolysis, which suggests promising clinical implications.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the causative virus of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. To establish a safe and convenient assay system for studying entry inhibitors and neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, we constructed a codon-optimized, full-length C-terminal mutant spike (S) gene of SARS-CoV-2. We generated a luciferase (Luc)-expressing pseudovirus containing the wild-type or mutant S protein of SARS-CoV-2 in the envelope-defective HIV-1 backbone. The key parameters for this pseudovirus-based assay, including the S mutants and virus incubation time, were optimized. This pseudovirus contains a Luc reporter gene that enabled us to easily quantify virus entry into angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2)-expressing 293T cells. Cathepsin (Cat)B/L inhibitor E−64d could significantly block SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirus infection in 293T-ACE2 cells. Furthermore, the SARS-CoV-2 spike pseudotyped virus could be neutralized by sera from convalescent COVID-19 patients or recombinant ACE2 with the fused Fc region of human IgG1. Thus, we developed a pseudovirus-based assay for SARS-CoV-2, which will be valuable for evaluating viral entry inhibitors and neutralizing antibodies against this highly pathogenic virus.

Climate warming, a serious environmental problem worldwide, is considered a major threat to aquatic ecosystems. A primary feature of climate warming is elevated temperatures which in shallow aquatic ecosystems might affect competition for light and nutrient between benthic algae on the sediment surface and planktonic algae in the water. The outcomes of such competition would not only affect the distribution of primary production, but also determine the fundamental character of shallow aquatic habitats as clear water or turbid water systems. We conducted a mesocosm study to evaluate the effects of elevated temperature on competition between planktonic algae and benthic algae for light and nutrients. We found that elevated temperature increased the concentrations of total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), and total suspended solids (TSS) in overlying water and enhanced the growth of planktonic algae (measured as chlorophyll a, Chl a), but decreased light intensity and benthic algal biomass (Chl a). Our results indicate that elevated temperature can increase the growth of planktonic algae and enhance their competitive advantage over the benthic algae in shallow lakes, thereby contributing to eutrophication and a decline in water quality. These findings shed further light on the effects of global warming on aquatic ecosystems.

Siniperca chuatsi feeds on live fry throughout their life. The sustainable development of its farming industry has urgently necessitated the development of artificial diets to substitute live baits. It has been demonstrated that gut microbiota assists in feed adaptation and improves the feed conversion rate in fish. Therefore, this study aimed to understand the potential role of intestinal microorganisms in the domestication of S. chuatsi with a compound diet. Accordingly, we performed 16S rRNA sequencing of the gut microbial communities in S. chuatsi groups that were fed a compound diet (including large and small individuals) and live baits. A total of 2,471 OTUs were identified, and the large individual group possessed the highest number of unique OTUs. The α-diversity index of the gut microbiota in groups that were fed a compound diet was significantly higher (p < 0.05) than that in the live bait group. There were no significant differences in the α-diversity between the large and small individual groups. However, relatively higher numbers of Lactococcus, Klebsiella, and Woeseia were observed in the intestines of the large individual group. Prediction of the metabolic function of the microbiota among these three fish groups by Tax4Fun revealed that most metabolic pathways, such as glycan metabolism and amino acid metabolism, were typically more enriched for the larger individuals. The results indicated that certain taxa mentioned above exist in large individuals and may be closely related to the digestion and absorption of compound diets. The present study provides a basis for understanding the utilization mechanism of artificial feed by S. chuatsi.

Mood disorders are ubiquitous mental disorders with familial aggregation. Extracting family history of psychiatric disorders from large electronic hospitalization records is helpful for further study of onset characteristics among patients with a mood disorder. This study uses an observational clinical data set of in-patients of Nanjing Brain Hospital, affiliated with Nanjing Medical University, from the past 10 years. This paper proposes a pretrained language model: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)–Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). We first project the electronic hospitalization records into a low-dimensional dense matrix via the pretrained Chinese BERT model, then feed the dense matrix into the stacked CNN layer to capture high-level features of texts; finally, we use the fully connected layer to extract family history based on high-level features. The accuracy of our BERT–CNN model was 97.12 ± 0.37% in the real-world data set from Nanjing Brain Hospital. We further studied the correlation between mood disorders and family history of psychiatric disorder.

BackgroundPatients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) frequently complain of poor sleep quality, which is a condition that clinicians are typically neglecting. In this study, Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS), Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), and Athens Insomnia Scale (AIS) were used to assess the sleep status of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Simultaneously diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI) was applied to examine the white matter microstructure abnormalities in patients with TLE and sleep disorders.MethodsTLE patients who have been diagnosed in the cardio-cerebrovascular ward of the Yanan University Affiliated Hospital from October 2020 to August 2021 were recruited. Finally, 51 patients and 30 healthy controls were enrolled in our study, with all subjects completing the sleep evaluation questionnaire and undergoing a DKI examination. Using independent sample t-test, analysis of variance (ANOVA), and Mann-Whitney U test to compare groups.ResultsThirty patients (58.82%) complained of long-term sleep difficulties. The overall differences among the evaluation of AIS, ESS, and PSQI are significant (P = 0.00, P = 0.00, P = 0.03). The scores of AIS, ESS in Left and Right-TLE (L/R-TLE) with sleep disorders, as well as PSQI in L-TLE, are statistically higher than the control group (P = 0.00, P = 0.00, P = 0.00, P = 0.00, P = 0.02). L-TLE with sleep disorders showed decreased MK on affected sides (P = 0.01). However, statistical differences in MD and FA have not been observed (P = 0.34, P = 0.06); R-TLE with sleep disorders showed significantly decreased MK and increased MD on affected sides (P = 0.00, P = 0.00), but FA's statistical difference has not been observed (P = 0.20).ConclusionsTLE patients with sleep disorders have different DKI parameters than individuals who do not have sleep issues. During this process, the kurtosis parameter (MK) was more sensitive than the tensor parameters (MD, FA) in detecting the patient's aberrant white matter diffusion. DKI may be a better choice for in vivo investigation of anomalous craniocerebral water diffusion.

Abstract The ability to control interfacial tension electrochemically is uniquely available for liquid metals (LMs), in particular gallium‐based LM alloys. This imparts them with excellent locomotion and deformation capabilities and enables diverse applications. However, electrochemical oxidation of LM is a highly dynamic process, which often induces Marangoni instabilities that make it almost impossible to elongate LM and manipulate its morphology directly and precisely on a 2D plane without the assistance of other patterning methods. To overcome these limitations, this study investigates the use of an LM–iron (Fe) particle mixture that is capable of suppressing instabilities during the electrochemical oxidation process, thereby allowing for superelongation of the LM core of the mixture to form a thin wire that is tens of times of its original length. More importantly, the elongated LM core can be manipulated freely on a 2D plane to form complex patterns. Eliminating Marangoni instabilities also allows for the effective spreading and filling of the LM–Fe mixture into molds with complex structures and small features. Harnessing these excellent abilities, a channel‐less patterning method for fabricating elastomeric wearable sensors is demonstrated to detect motions. This study shows the potential for developing functional and flexible structures of LM with superior performance.

Invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCI) have made great progress in the reconstruction of fine hand movement parameters for paralyzed patients, where superficial measurement modalities including electrocorticography (ECoG) and micro-array recordings are mostly used. However, these recording techniques typically focus on the signals from the sensorimotor cortex, leaving subcortical regions and other cortical regions related to the movements largely unexplored. As an intracranial recording technique for the presurgical assessments of brain surgery, stereo-encephalography (SEEG) inserts depth electrodes containing multiple contacts into the brain and thus provides the unique opportunity for investigating movement-related neural representation throughout the brain. Although SEEG samples neural signals with high spatial-temporal resolutions, its potential of being used to build BCIs has just been realized recently, and the decoding of SEEG activity related to hand movements has not been comprehensively investigated yet. Here, we systematically evaluated the factors influencing the performance of movement decoding using SEEG signals recorded from 32 human subjects performing a visually-cued hand movement task. Our results suggest that multiple regions in both lateral and depth directions present significant neural selectivity to the task, whereas the sensorimotor area, including both precentral and postcentral cortex, carries the richest discriminative neural information for the decoding. The posterior parietal and prefrontal cortex contribute gradually less, but still rich sources for extracting movement parameters. The insula, temporal and occipital cortex also contains useful task-related information for decoding. Under the cortex layer, white matter presents decodable neural patterns but yields a lower accuracy (42.0 ± 0.8%) than the cortex on average (44.2 ± 0.8%, p

In this study, we investigated the effects of Nano-SiO2, ultraviolet (UV) irradiation, and hydrogen peroxide on the growth of four marine aquatic pathogens as well as on their polysaccharide, biofilm formation, protein, and DNA. The results indicated that among all concentrations, 100 μg/L Nano-SiO2 demonstrated the most inhibition of Edwardsiella tarda, Vibrio anguillarum, and Vibrio parahaemolyticus. Ultraviolet irradiation for 3 min had the most obvious inhibitory effect on E. tarda, but neither inhibitory nor promoting effects on the other three strains. High hydrogen peroxide concentrations had obvious inhibitory effects on all bacterial growth. Moreover, Nano-SiO2 had some influence on bacterial polysaccharide properties and some amount of DNA splicing effect, but no effect was noted on proteins. At present, the recognized pathogenic genes of V. parahaemolyticus include tdh, trh, and tlh. We thus studied the effect of Nano-SiO2 on these genes and then conducted infection experiments. The results showed that Nano-SiO2 further reduced infection with V. parahaemolyticus in shrimp.

Objectives To verify whether a simplified method based on age, body mass index (BMI) and glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) is feasible in classifying patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D), and evaluate the predictive ability of subgroups in several health and mortality outcomes.Design Retrospective cohort study.Setting The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 1999–2014 cycle.Participants A total of 1960 participants with diabetes and the age at diagnosis greater than 30.Primary and secondary outcome measures Participants with T2D were assigned to previously defined (by Ahlqvist) subgroups based on five variables: age, BMI, HbA1c, homoeostasis model assessment (HOMA) 2 estimates of β-cell function (HOMA2-B), and insulin resistance (HOMA2-IR), and on three variables: age, BMI and HbA1c. The classification performances of the three variables were evaluated based on 10-fold cross validation, with accuracy, precision and recall as evaluation criteria. Outcomes were assessed using logistic regression and Cox regression analysis.Results Without HOMA measurements, it is difficult to identify severe insulin-resistant diabetes, but other subgroups can be ideally identified. There is no significant difference between the five variables and the three variables in the ability to predict the prevalence of poor cardiovascular health (CVH), chronic kidney disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and advanced liver fibrosis, and the risk of all-cause, cardiovascular disease and cancer-related mortality (p>0.05), except the prevalence of poor CVH in mild age-related diabetes (p

FBLN5, a member of the short fibulins in the fibulin family of extracellular matrix/matricellular proteins, is involved in interactions with components of the basement membrane and extracellular matrix proteins. It plays key roles in endothelial tissues in many vascular diseases. In this study, the relationship between FBLN5 and carotid atherosclerotic plaque stability as well as the regulatory roles of miRNAs were evaluated. Differential gene expression analyses and weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) based on the GSE163154 dataset (including 16 samples without intraplaque hemorrhage and 27 samples with intraplaque hemorrhage) in GEO revealed that FBLN5 is related to plaque stability and is the most significantly differentially expressed gene. LASSO regression was used to evaluate genes obtained from the intersection of differentially expressed genes and clinically significant modules identified by WGCNA. A prediction model based on eight genes, including FBLN5, was constructed and showed an accuracy of 0.951 based on an ROC analysis. Low FBLN5 expression in plaque tissues was confirmed by immunohistochemistry and western blotting. GO (Gene Ontology) and KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) enrichment analyses showed that FBLN5 acted mainly by the maintenance of the cellular matrix and reactive oxygen species production. miRNAs upstream of these eight predictive genes, including FBLN5, were identified and used to construct a network diagram. These results revealed that hsa-mir-128 and hsa-mir-532–3p were upstream regulatory factors of FBLN5, as verified by PCR assays of human plaque tissues demonstrating that both miRNAs were significantly up-regulated. Therefore, FBLN5 may play an important role in carotid atherosclerosis via hsa-mir-128 and hsa-mir-532–3p as well as become an essential target for treatment.

As a minimally invasive recording technique, stereo-electroencephalography (SEEG) measures intracranial signals directly by inserting depth electrodes shafts into the human brain, and thus can capture neural activities in both cortical layers and subcortical structures. Despite gradually increasing SEEG-based brain-computer interface (BCI) studies, the features utilized were usually confined to the amplitude of the event-related potential (ERP) or band power, and the decoding capabilities of other time-frequency and time-domain features have not been demonstrated for SEEG recordings yet. In this study, we aimed to verify the validity of time-domain and time-frequency features of SEEG, where classification performances served as evaluating indicators. To do this, using SEEG signals under intermittent auditory stimuli, we extracted features including the average amplitude, root mean square, slope of linear regression, and line-length from the ERP trace and three traces of band power activities (high-gamma, beta, and alpha). These features were used to detect the active state (including activations to two types of names) against the idle state. Results suggested that valid time-domain and time-frequency features distributed across multiple regions, including the temporal lobe, parietal lobe, and deeper structures such as the insula. Among all feature types, the average amplitude, root mean square, and line-length extracted from high-gamma (60–140 Hz) power and the line-length extracted from ERP were the most informative. Using a hidden Markov model (HMM), we could precisely detect the onset and the end of the active state with a sensitivity of 95.7 ± 1.3% and a precision of 91.7 ± 1.6%. The valid features derived from high-gamma power and ERP in this work provided new insights into the feature selection procedure for further SEEG-based BCI applications.

BackgroundCurrent reference systems using body mass index (BMI) or BMI z-scores to estimate overweight and obesity risk in adolescents are complex to use. An easy and effective measure and cutoffs such as the tri-ponderal mass index (TMI) are in need for parents and grassroots health workers.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to test whether cohort-derived TMI could be efficient for obesity prediction and to find out whether simplified TMI cutoffs could be used in the prediction.MethodsData were obtained from a 12-year retrospective growth cohort generated in Guangdong, China. A total of 17,815 children (53.9% were boys) with 151,879 follow-ups conducted annually between 2005 and 2016 were involved. Late adolescent overweight and obesity were defined based on the BMI z-score (WHO 2007 growth reference) of the last measurement, which happened at the mean age of 17.2 (SD: 0.7) for both sexes. Analysis of the area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic curves was used to find the most appropriate cutoff.ResultsIn total, 9,604 boys and 8,211 girls were included in the final analysis. TMI cutoffs performed better than WHO BMI cutoffs in the prediction of late adolescent overweight and obesity, with all corresponding AUCs

Abstract Background Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) play an important role in tumor progression; concomitantly, MSCs also undergo profound changes in the tumor microenvironment (TME). These changes can directly impact the application and efficacy of MSC-based anti-tumor therapy. However, few studies have focused on the regulation of MSC fate in TME, which will limit the progress of MSC-based anti-tumor therapy. Herein, we investigated the effects of conditioned medium from human hepatocellular carcinoma cells (HCC-CM) on the phenotype and glucose metabolism of human adipose tissue-derived MSCs (hAT-MSCs). Methods The passage 2 (P2) to passage 3 (P3) hAT-MSCs were exposed to conditioned medium from Hep3B, Huh7 and HCCLM3 cells for 4–8 weeks in vitro. Then, immunofluorescent, CCK-8 assay, EdU assay, Transwell assay, and flow cytometry were used to assess the alterations in cell phenotype in terms of cell morphology, secretory profiles, proliferation, migration, invasion, cell cycle, and apoptosis. In addition, glucose metabolism was evaluated by related kits. Next, the treated hAT-MSCs were subjected to withdrawal from HCC-CM for 2–4 weeks, and alterations in phenotype and glucose metabolism were reevaluated. Finally, the molecular mechanism was clarified by Western blotting. Results The results revealed that after exposure to HCC-CM, hAT-MSCs developed a stellate-shaped morphology. In association with cytoskeleton remodeling, hAT-MSCs showed enhanced capacities for migration and invasion, while cell proliferation was inhibited by regulating the cell cycle by downregulating cyclins and cyclin-dependent kinases and activating the mitochondrial apoptosis pathway. In terms of glucose metabolism, our results showed mitochondrial dysfunction and elevated glycolysis of hAT-MSCs. However, interestingly, when the treated hAT-MSCs were subjected to withdrawal from HCC-CM, the alterations in phenotype and glucose metabolism could be reversed, but secretory phenotype and tumor-promoting properties appear to be permanent. Further studies showed that these changes in hAT-MSCs may be regulated by the ROS/MAPK/HIF-1α signaling pathway. Conclusion Taken together, the effects of long-term HCC-CM treatment on phenotype and glucose metabolism in hAT-MSCs are modest and largely reversible after withdrawal, but HCC-CM endow hAT-MSCs with permanent secretory phenotype and tumor-promoting properties. This is the first report on the reversal of phenotype and glucose metabolism in tumor-associated MSCs (TA-MSCs), it is anticipated that new insights into TA-MSCs will lead to the development of novel strategies for MSC-based anti-tumor therapy.

Abstract The global pandemic of COVID-19 has attracted extensive drug searching interets for the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Although currently several of clinically used “old” drugs have been repurposed to this new disease for the urgent clinical investigation, there is still great demand for more effective therapies for the anti-infections. Here we report the discovery that an “old” drug Emetine could potently inhibit SARS-CoV-2 virus replication and displayed virus entry blocking effect in Vero cells at low dose. In addition, Emetine could significantly reduce the lipopolysaccharide (LPS) induced interleukin-6 (IL-6) protein level and moderately reduce the tumor necrosis factor (TNF-α) protein level in the M1 polarized THP-1 macrophages. In vivo animal pharmacokinetics (PK) study revealed that Emetine was enriched in the lung tissue and had a long retention time (over 12 h). With 1 mg/kg single oral dose, the effective concentration of Emetine in lung was up to 1.8 μM (mice) and 1.6 μM (rats) at 12 h, which is over 200-fold higher than the EC50 of the drug. The potent in vitro antiviral replication efficacy and the high enrichment in target tissue, combining with the well documented safety profiles in human indicate that low dose of Emetine might be a potentially effective anti-SARS-CoV-2 infection therapy.

Abstract Background The impact of corticosteroid therapy on outcomes of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is highly controversial. We aimed to compare the risk of death between COVID-19-related ARDS patients with corticosteroid treatment and those without. Methods In this single-center retrospective observational study, patients with ARDS caused by COVID-19 between January 20, 2020, and February 24, 2020, were enrolled. The primary outcome was 60-day in-hospital death. The exposure was prescribed systemic corticosteroids or not. Time-dependent Cox regression models were used to calculate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for 60-day in-hospital mortality. Results A total of 382 patients [60.7 ± 14.1 years old (mean ± SD), 61.3% males] were analyzed. The median of sequential organ failure assessment (SOFA) score was 2.0 (IQR 2.0–3.0). Of these cases, 94 (24.6%) patients had invasive mechanical ventilation. The number of patients received systemic corticosteroids was 226 (59.2%), and 156 (40.8%) received standard treatment. The maximum dose of corticosteroids was 80.0 (IQR 40.0–80.0) mg equivalent methylprednisolone per day, and duration of corticosteroid treatment was 7.0 (4.0–12.0) days in total. In Cox regression analysis using corticosteroid treatment as a time-varying variable, corticosteroid treatment was associated with a significant reduction in risk of in-hospital death within 60 days after adjusting for age, sex, SOFA score at hospital admission, propensity score of corticosteroid treatment, comorbidities, antiviral treatment, and respiratory supports (HR 0.42; 95% CI 0.21, 0.85; p = 0.0160). Corticosteroids were not associated with delayed viral RNA clearance in our cohort. Conclusion In this clinical practice setting, low-dose corticosteroid treatment was associated with reduced risk of in-hospital death within 60 days in COVID-19 patients who developed ARDS.

Abstract Background Precise disease module is conducive to understanding the molecular mechanism of disease causation and identifying drug targets. However, due to the fragmentization of disease module in incomplete human interactome, how to determine connectivity pattern and detect a complete neighbourhood of disease based on this is still an open question. Results In this paper, we perform exploratory analysis leading to an important observation that through a few intermediate nodes, most separate connected components formed by disease-associated proteins can be effectively connected and eventually form a complete disease module. And based on the topological properties of these intermediate nodes, we propose a connect separate connected components (C3) method to detect a succinct disease module by introducing a relatively small number of intermediate nodes, which allows us to obtain more pure disease module than other methods. Then we apply C3 across a large corpus of diseases to validate this connectivity pattern of disease module. Furthermore, the connectivity of the perturbed genes in multi-omics data such as The Cancer Genome Atlas also fits this pattern. Conclusions C3 tool is not only useful in detecting a clearly-defined connected disease neighbourhood of 299 diseases and cancer with multi-omics data, but also helpful in better understanding the interconnection of phenotypically related genes in different omics data and studying complex pathological processes.

Aviation kerosene will go through numerous storage and transportation links from production to use. As the fuel of jet aircrafts, the aviation kerosene will follow the high requirements on the quality index specified in national standards. All aviation kerosene production and transportation entities attach great importance to the inspection of oil quality changes. In this paper, typical storage and transportation process of aviation kerosene from production to use was introduced, quality and safety accidents of aviation kerosene occurred in China and abroad in recent years were presented, and quality problems including foreign pollutants, mixed oil transported in sequence, quality attenuation of oil products, etc. that may occur in aviation kerosene storage and transportation were reviewed. The quality and safety assurance measures in aviation kerosene storage and transportation were additionally summarized, so as to provide reference for engineers and researchers committed to assuring the aviation kerosene quality and reducing the cost of aviation kerosene transportation.

Abstract Background Heat stroke (HS) is a serious, life-threatening disease. However, there is no scoring system for HS so far. This research is to establish a scoring system that can quantitatively assess the severity of exertional heat stroke (EHS). Methods Data were collected from a total of 170 exertional heat stroke (EHS) patients between 2005 and 2016 from 52 hospitals in China. Univariate statistical methods and comparison of the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) were used to screen exertional heat stroke score (EHSS) parameters, including but not limited body temperature (T), Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) and others. By comparing the sizes of the AUCs of the APACHE II, SOFA and EHSS assessments, the effectiveness of EHSS in evaluating the prognosis of EHS patients was verified. Results Through screening with a series of methods, as described above, the present study determined 12 parameters – body temperature (T), GCS, pH, lactate (Lac), platelet count (PLT), prothrombin time (PT), fibrinogen (Fib), troponin I (TnI), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), total bilirubin (TBIL), creatinine (Cr) and acute gastrointestinal injury (AGI) classification – as EHSS parameters. It is a 0–47 point system designed to reflect increasing severity of heat stroke. Low (EHSS 35) showed 100% survival and 100% mortality, respectively. We found that AUCEHSS > AUCSOFA > AUCAPACHE II. Conclusion A total of 12 parameters – T, GCS, pH, Lac, PLT, PT, Fib, TnI, AST, TBIL, Cr and gastrointestinal AGI classification – are the EHSS parameters with the best effectiveness in evaluating the prognosis of EHS patients. As EHSS score increases, the mortality rate of EHS patients gradually increases.

Abstract Background Acute renal injury (AKI) caused by hypotension often occurs in elderly patients after gastrointestinal tumor surgery. Although vasoactive drugs can increase effective filtration pressure, they may increase renal vascular resistance and reduce renal blood flow. The effect of methoxamine on renal function is not clear. Methods After obtaining written informed consent, 180 elderly patients undergoing elective gastrointestinal tumor surgery were randomly allocated into two groups: M group (continuous infusion of methoxamine at 2 μg/kg/min) and N group (continuous infusion of normal saline). The patients’ mean arterial pressure was maintained within 20% of baseline by a continuous infusion of methoxamine or normal saline. Maintenance fluid was kept at 5 mL/kg/h. According to Kidney disease improve global outcome (KDIGO) guidelines, creatinine was measured at 1, 2 and 7 days after operation, and urine volume at 6, 12 and 24 h after operation was measured to evaluate the occurrence of AKI. 162 patients were included in the final data analysis. Results Significant differences in the incidence of postoperative Acute kidney injury (M group: 7.5%; N group: 18.3%; P

Abstract Background Involuntary treatment for individuals who lack sufficient capacity to make informed decisions regarding treatment has been associated with increased rates of injectable antipsychotics, antipsychotic polytherapy, and/or high doses. However, little is known about non-antipsychotic psychotropic prescription, or psychotropic medication burden as a more encompassing approach for people treated involuntarily. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between Mental Health Act (MHA) status and psychotropic polypharmacy and/or high-dose medication prescribing practices in an Australian inpatient mental health unit. Methods A retrospective cohort study of 800 adults discharged from a large metropolitan Queensland mental health unit was undertaken. Data was collected for 200 individuals, discharged on at least one psychotropic medicine, at four time periods; Cohort 1 (on or before 31st January 2014), Cohort 2 (2015), Cohort 3 (2016) and Cohort 4 (2017). The number of prescribed medicines and total daily doses were recorded and reviewed for alignment with current clinical guidelines. Participant demographics and clinical characteristics were compared by individual MHA status using chi-square test for categorical variables and analysis of variance for continuous variables. Associations between MHA status and prescribing practices (psychotropic polypharmacy and/or high-dose prescribing) were assessed using bivariate and multivariate binomial logistic regression models. Age, gender, birth country, year of admission, admissions in previous 12 months, primary diagnosis, ECT/clozapine treatment, and other psychotropic medications were adjusted as covariates. Results Regression analysis found that compared to their voluntary counterparts, individuals treated involuntarily were 2.7 times more likely to be prescribed an antipsychotic at discharge, 8.8 times more likely to be prescribed more than one antipsychotic at discharge and 1.65 times more likely to be prescribed high-dose antipsychotic treatment at discharge. The adjusted model also found that they were half as likely to be prescribed an antidepressant at discharge. Conclusion Implicit review of justifications for increased psychotropic medication burden (antipsychotic polypharmacy and high-doses) in those treated involuntarily is required to ensure clinical outcomes and overall quality of life are improved in this vulnerable group. Clearly documented medication histories, reconciliation at discharge and directions for medication management after discharge are necessary to ensure quality use of medicines.

Abstract Retina nociceptor, as a key sensory receptor, not only enables the transport of warning signals to the human central nervous system upon its exposure to noxious stimuli, but also triggers the motor response that minimizes potential sensitization. In this study, the capability of two-dimensional all-oxide-heterostructured artificial nociceptor as a single device with tunable properties was confirmed. Newly designed nociceptors utilize ultra-thin sub-stoichiometric TiO2–Ga2O3 heterostructures, where the thermally annealed Ga2O3 films play the role of charge transfer controlling component. It is discovered that the phase transformation in Ga2O3 is accompanied by substantial jump in conductivity, induced by thermally assisted internal redox reaction of Ga2O3 nanostructure during annealing. It is also experimentally confirmed that the charge transfer in all-oxide heterostructures can be tuned and controlled by the heterointerfaces manipulation. Results demonstrate that the engineering of heterointerfaces of two-dimensional (2D) films enables the fabrication of either high-sensitive TiO2–Ga2O3 (Ar) or high-threshold TiO2–Ga2O3 (N2) nociceptors. The hypersensitive nociceptor mimics the functionalities of corneal nociceptors of human eye, whereas the delayed reaction of nociceptor is similar to high-threshold nociceptive characteristics of human sensory system. The long-term stability of 2D nociceptors demonstrates the capability of heterointerfaces engineering for effective control of charge transfer at 2D heterostructured devices.

Abstract Nanoscale Au-ZnO heterostructures were fabricated on 4-in. SiO2/Si wafers by the atomic layer deposition (ALD) technique. Developed Au-ZnO heterostructures after post-deposition annealing at 250 °C were tested for amperometric hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) detection. The surface morphology and nanostructure of Au-ZnO heterostructures were examined by field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), Raman spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy (AFM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), etc. Additionally, the electrochemical behavior of Au-ZnO heterostructures towards H2O2 sensing under various conditions is assessed by chronoamperometry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The results showed that ALD-fabricated Au-ZnO heterostructures exhibited one of the highest sensitivities of 0.53 μA μM−1 cm−2, the widest linear H2O2 detection range of 1.0 μM–120 mM, a low limit of detection (LOD) of 0.78 μM, excellent selectivity under the normal operation conditions, and great long-term stability. Utilization of the ALD deposition method opens up a unique opportunity for the improvement of the various capabilities of the devices based on Au-ZnO heterostructures for amperometric detection of different chemicals. Graphical abstract

Abstract Introduction Extracellular vesicles (EVs), especially stem cell-derived EVs, have emerged as a potential novel therapy for acute kidney injury (AKI). However, their effects remain incompletely understood. Therefore, we performed this meta-analysis to systematically review the efficacy of EVs on AKI in preclinical rodent models. Methods We searched PubMed, EMBASE, and the Web of Science up to March 2019 to identify studies that reported the treatment effects of EVs in a rodent AKI model. The primary outcome was serum creatinine (Scr) levels. The secondary outcomes were the blood urea nitrogen (BUN) levels, renal injury score, percentage of apoptotic cells, and interleukin (IL)-10 and tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-α levels. Two authors independently screened articles based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The meta-analysis was conducted using RevMan 5.3 and R software. Results Thirty-one studies (n = 552) satisfied the inclusion criteria. Pooled analyses demonstrated that the levels of Scr (SMD = − 3.71; 95% CI = − 4.32, − 3.10; P

In this work, a detailed study on volume and surface refractive index (RI) sensitivity of cladding modes for a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) based sensor is presented. Surface RI sensitivity of the cladding mode of FBGs has been illustrated and quantified with the concept of add-layer sensitivity for the first time to the best of our knowledge. A detailed investigation of mode transition of higher-order cladding modes has been revisited and important characteristics of the cladding modes are observed which could open a new designing path of fabrication and innovative way of the use of this family of optical fiber grating-based sensors. The effect of “mode transition” of higher-order cladding modes, higher operating wavelength for respective cladding mode and “mode stretching” effects are combined together to achieve higher volume and surface RI sensitivity of cladding mode of FBG. It has been shown numerically that with proper designing, sub-nanometer (~0.04 nm) attachment of target analyte could be recognized by cladding mode of FBG which is quite promising for application in optical fiber grating bio-sensors. This critical designing method of FBG based surface refractometer would be very helpful in case of the fabrication of highly sensitive sensors for distinct biochemical applications.

Recently, two special photonic jets, photonic hooks and twin photonic jets, have been proposed to deal with complex conditions in nanoscale manipulation. Photonic hooks are generated by a single light plane wave and an asymmetric microparticle, while the twin photonic jets are produced by two incident light beams. In this letter, we presented and demonstrated a method to combine photonic hooks and twin photonic jets. A single light plane wave and a symmetric microparticle, twin-ellipse microcylinder, are used in this research. The curvature degree, length and maximum E2 field enhancement of twin photonic hooks are varied significantly, with the change of refractive indices and shape of twin-ellipse microcylinder. And a liquid-immersed core-shell is built to achieve a flexible tunability.

Deep learning-based visuomotor control for manipulation are studied recently, which uses a neural network to learn the mapping from images to robotic actions directly. Most previous methods assume there is only one target object in the image. When multiple target objects are present, they are normally regarded as multi-task problems. One-hot vectors are often used to denote different tasks in the visuomotor framework. Nonetheless, these one-hot vector-based methods are easily disturbed and non-extendable. In this paper, a location instruction is used to guide the robot to generate different trajectories in the situation with multiple targets. The proposed framework mainly consists of three modules: the AutoEncoder (AE) network, the motion generation network and the location detection network. AE tries to process the perception information into small-scale feature maps. The location detection network gives the pixel coordinates of the center of the target object in the image. The motion generation network combines the location instruction and the preprocessed perception information and generates an entire motion trajectory to finish the specified manipulation task. For the object stacking tasks with distractors, the proposed method could obtain a success rate of 98%, while the one-hot vector-based method only has a success rate of 56%.

A fiber optic dual-cavity Fabry-Perot interferometer(DFPI) for simultaneous high- temperature and high-gas-pressure measurements is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The proposed sensing structure consists of an extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometer (EFPI) with a short piece of hollow core fiber (HCF) for gas pressure sensing, and an intrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometer (IFPI) made of photonic crystal fiber (PCF) for temperature sensing. The composite interference signal is filtered in the frequency domain to obtain two independent interference spectra, and then is demodulated by using white light interferometry (WLI). The experimental results show that the sensor exhibits good linearity over a temperature range from 40 to 1000°C with a cavity-length temperature sensitivity of 25.3 nm/°C, and a pressure range from 0 to 10 MPa with a cavity-length pressure sensitivity of 1460 nm/MPa at 40°C. This proposed sensor are light-weight and small, and it has a compact structure and a high temperature resistance.

A novel mechanism of sensitivity enhancement of D-shaped fiber-based surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors for the optofluidic device has been proposed. The sandwiched structure optofluidic platform is developed with metal-coated D-shaped fiber as the sensing device, while another thin metal layer is situated under the inner wall of the substrate as a second metal layer to construct the sandwiched microchannel. It has been found that the sensitivity of the D-type fiber SPR sensor is enhanced significantly with the sandwiched metal-coated structure of microchannel. In the proposed structure, the measurand analyte is considered as a sandwich channel layer between two thin metal layers. The sensitivity of the proposed structure is dependent on the volume of the measurand and the thickness of the metal layers. The computed sensitivity with a double metal layer and sandwich measurand layer concept is 4085 nm/RIU in the region of 1.33 to 1.36. The sensitivity is enhanced by more than a factor of `2.3' in comparison with the sensitivity of the normal D-shape fiber SPR sensor. It can be enhanced further up to ~12,500 nm/RIU by the deposition of higher RI polymeric overlay just above the second metal layer. The computed resolution of the proposed sensor with standard interrogation technique is ~1 × 10-7 which is quite competitive within the optical fiber sensor domain. A detailed numerical analysis has been accomplished. This structure will be useful in distinct chemical and biological sensing applications where the volume of an analyte is critical. This new concept of enhancement of sensitivity with limited measurand volume will open a new designing methodology for optical fiber biosensors.

Limited driving range is one of the major obstacles to the widespread application of electric vehicles (EVs). Accurately predicting the remaining driving range can effectively reduce the range anxiety of drivers. In this paper, a blended machine learning model was proposed to predict the remaining driving range of EVs based on real-world historical driving data. The blended model fuses two advanced machine learning algorithms of Extreme Gradient Boosting Regression Tree (XGBoost) and Light Gradient Boosting Regression Tree (LightGBM). The proposed model was trained to “learn” the relationship between the driving distance and the proposed features such as cumulative output energy of the motor and the battery, different driving patterns, and temperature of the battery). In addition, an “anchor (baseline) based” strategy was proposed and was seen to be able to effectively eliminate the unbalance distribution of dataset. The results of experiments suggest that our proposed anchor-based blended model has better performances with a smaller prediction error range of [-0.8, 0.8] as compared with previous methods.

Cardiac myxoma is a common benign primary intracardiac tumor in the general population, and it is generally characterized as a benign tumor, and the morbidity of biatrial myxoma is low. Cases of biatrial myxoma in young patients are extremely rare. Furthermore, severe complications of cardiac myxoma, such as cerebral embolism, can have fatal consequences. Imaging can effectively assist in making a correct diagnosis and a safe and efficient surgical treatment plan. In this case report, we describe a unique case of a young woman who presented with biatrial myxoma accompanied by pulmonary embolism and cerebral embolism. Computed tomography pulmonary angiography (CTPA) detected multiple filling defects in the bilateral cardiac and bilateral inferior pulmonary artery basal branches. Transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) revealed irregular isoechoic masses in the bilateral atrium. Postoperative histopathology confirmed a biatrial myxoma. The patient was discharged on the ninth day after surgery.

ObjectiveIn this study, we aimed to disentangle the mediating effect of sleep disorder between mental health literacy (MHL) and depressive symptoms in Chinese medical students, especially focusing on the impact of gender and grade.MethodsPooled longitudinal data of 5,504 medical students was collected between November 2019 and June 2020 to assess the MHL, sleep disorder and mental health of medical students in Anhui province, China. Mediation analyses were tested by using bootstrapping procedures.ResultsSleep disorder were negatively correlated with adequate MHL, but positively correlated with depressive symptoms. The relationships between MHL and depressive symptoms were mediated by sleep disorder in total samples and the indirect effect accounted for 13.59% of the total effect. However, the ratio was 20.82% in female students, whereas no mediating effect was found in the male students. Moreover, the ratio was found higher in freshmen (15.11%) than that in sophomores (11.56%).ConclusionImproving the sleep disorder by enhancing MHL is an effective way to reduce depressive symptoms in Chinese medical students. Further investigations elaborately considered by using more gender-balanced population with higher grade and lower level of education.

As oil and chemical spills pose a significant threat to the water environment, the need to develop efficient sorbent materials to remove oil and organic pollutants from water has arisen. This study aimed to develop a simple modification scheme to impart oil and water selective absorption capacity to a common three-dimensional porous material. Commercially available polyurethane sponges were used as the base material, and vinyl silica aerogel particles were loaded onto the sponges using polydimethylsiloxane as an adhesion agent. As a result, the water contact angle of the modified sponge increased from 118° to 149.2°, and the water absorption decreased from 106.5 g/g to 0.2 g/g; it could absorb oil in oil-water mixtures without absorbing water and maintain an excellent level of selective absorption ability after 20 cycles. This modification scheme is easy to operate and robust and is a scheme of practical application.

The high temperature forecast of the sub-season is a severe challenge. Currently, the residual structure has achieved good results in the field of computer vision attributed to the excellent feature extraction ability. However, it has not been introduced in the domain of sub-seasonal forecasting. Here, we develop multi-module daily deterministic and probabilistic forecast models by the residual structure and finally establish a complete set of sub-seasonal high temperature forecasting system in the eastern part of China. The experimental results indicate that our method is effective and outperforms the European hindcast results in all aspects: absolute error, anomaly correlation coefficient, and other indicators are optimized by 8–50%, and the equitable threat score is improved by up to 400%. We conclude that the residual network has a sharper insight into the high temperature in sub-seasonal high temperature forecasting compared to traditional methods and convolutional networks, thus enabling more effective early warnings of extreme high temperature weather.

BackgroundBilateral cerebral palsy (BCP) is the most common type of CP in children and is often accompanied by different degrees of communication impairment. Several studies have attempted to identify children at high risk for communication impairment. However, most prediction factors are qualitative and subjective and may be influenced by rater bias. Individualized objective diagnostic and/or prediction methods are still lacking, and an effective method is urgently needed to guide clinical diagnosis and treatment. The aim of this study is to develop and validate an objective, individual-based model for the prediction of communication impairment in children with BCP by the time they enter school.MethodsA multicenter prospective cohort study will be conducted in four Chinese hospitals. A total of 178 children with BCP will undergo advanced brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at baseline (corrected age, before the age of 2 years). At school entry, communication performance will be assessed by a communication function classification system (CFCS). Three-quarters of children with BCP will be allocated as a training cohort, whereas the remaining children will be allocated as a test cohort. Multivariate lesion- and connectome-based approaches, which have shown good predictive ability of language performance in stroke patients, will be applied to extract features from MR images for each child with BCP. Multiple machine learning models using extracted features to predict communication impairment for each child with BCP will be constructed using data from the training cohort and externally validated using data from the test cohort. Prediction accuracy across models in the test cohort will be statistically compared.DiscussionThe findings of the study may lead to the development of several translational tools that can individually predict communication impairment in children newly diagnosed with BCP to ensure that these children receive early, targeted therapeutic intervention before they begin school.Trial registrationThe study has been registered with the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR2100049497).

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) play a crucial role in the pathogenesis of various fibrotic diseases, but the potential biological function and expression profile of circRNAs in keloids remain unknown. Herein, microarray technology was applied to detect circRNA expression in four patient-derived keloid dermal fibroblasts (KDFs) and normal dermal fibroblasts (NDFs). A total of 327 differentially expressed (DE) circRNAs (fold change > 1.5, p < 0.05) were identified with 195 upregulated and 132 downregulated circRNAs. Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analyses showed that the upregulated circRNAs were mainly enriched in the cytoskeleton and tight junctions, while the downregulated circRNAs were related to morphogenesis of the epithelium and axonal guidance. To explore the function of DE circRNAs, a circRNA-miRNA-mRNA network, including five circRNAs, nine miRNAs, and 235 correlated mRNAs, was constructed using bioinformatics analyses. The expression of five DE circRNAs was validated by qRT–PCR in 18 pairs of KDFs and NDFs, and hsa_circ_0006867 showed promising regulatory function in keloids in vitro. Silencing hsa_circ_00006867 suppressed the proliferation, migration, and invasion of keloid fibroblasts. RNA-binding protein immunoprecipitation (RIP) assays indicated that hsa_circ_00006867 may serve as a platform for miRNA binding to Argonaute (AGO) 2. In addition, hsa-miR-29a-5p may be a potential target miRNA of hsa_circ_00006867. Taken together, our research provided multiple novel clues to understand the pathophysiologic mechanism of keloids and identified hsa_circ_0006867 as a biomarker of keloids.

Paddy rice cropping patterns (PRCPs) play important roles in both agroecosystem modeling and food security. Although paddy rice maps have been generated over several regions using satellite observations, few studies have focused on mapping diverse smallholder PRCPs, which include crop rotation and are dominant cropping structures in South China. Here, an approach called the feature selection and hierarchical classification (FSHC) method was proposed to effectively identify paddy rice and its rotation types. Considering the cloudy and rainy weather in South China, a harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) surface reflectance product was employed to increase high-quality observations. The FSHC method consists of three processes: cropping intensity mapping, feature selection, and decision tree (DT) model development. The FSHC performance was carefully evaluated using crop field samples obtained in 2018 and 2019. Results suggested that the derived cropping intensity map based on the Savitzky–Golay (S-G) filtered normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series was reliable, with an overall accuracy greater than 93%. Additionally, the optimal spectral (i.e., normalized difference water index (NDWI) and land surface water index (LSWI)) and temporal (start-of-season (SOS) date) features for distinguishing different PRCPs were successfully identified, and these features are highly related to the critical growth stage of paddy rice. The developed DT model with three hierarchical levels based on optimal features performed satisfactorily, and the identification accuracy of each PRCP can be achieved approximately 85%. Furthermore, the FSHC method exhibited similar performances when mapping PRCPs in adjacent years. These results demonstrate that the proposed FSHC approach with HLS data can accurately extract diverse PRCPs over fragmented croplands; thus, this approach represents a promising opportunity for generating refined crop type maps.

Object detection and instance segmentation have been successful on benchmarks with relatively balanced category distribution (e.g. MSCOCO). However, state-of-the-art object detection and segmentation methods still struggle to generalize on long-tailed datasets (e.g. LVIS), where a few classes (head classes) dominate the instance samples, while most classes (tailed classes) have only a few samples. To address this challenge, we propose a plug-and-play module within the Mask R-CNN framework called dynamic instance memory (DIM). Specifically, we augment Mask R-CNN with an auxiliary branch for training. It maintains a dynamic memory bank storing an instance-level prototype representation for each category , and shares the classifier with the existing instance branch. With a simple metric loss, the representations in DIM can be dynamically updated by the instance proposals in the mini-batch during training. Our DIM introduces a bias toward tailed classes to the classifier learning along with a class frequency reversed sampler, which learns generalizable representations from the original data distribution, complementing the existing instance branch. Comprehensive experiments on LVIS demonstrate the effectiveness of DIM, as well as the significant advantages of DIM over the baseline Mask R-CNN.

A direct regioselective C-H cyanation of purines was developed through a sequential triflic anhydride activation, nucleophilic cyanation with TMSCN, followed by a process of base-mediated elimination of triflous acid (CF3SO2H). In most cases, the direct C-H cyanation occurred on the electron-rich imidazole motif of purines, affording 8-cyanated purine derivatives in moderate to excellent yields. Various functional groups, including allyl, alkynyl, ketone, ester, nitro et al. were tolerated and acted as a C8 directing group. The electron-donating 6-diethylamino, as C2-directing group substituent, can switch the regioselectivity of purine from 8- to 2-position, enabling the synthesis of 8- and 2-cyano 6-dialkylaminopurines from corresponding 6-chloropurine in different reaction order. Further functional manipulations of the cyano group allow the conversions of 8-cyanopurines to corresponding purine amides, imidates, imidothioates, imidamides, oxazolines, and isothiazoles.