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This study investigated the perceptions of Chinese physical therapy students on use of the Health Improvement Card (HIC) as a clinical tool to assess lifestyle and prescribe health education to others. The biometrics and health indices/attributes/lifestyles of these students were also evaluated with self-administration of the HIC. After a tutorial on the HIC and its clinical application, physical therapy students (n = 82) from two Chinese universities, completed the Chinese translation of the HIC followed by a questionnaire on students' perceptions of it. Second, they invited a friend/relative to complete the HIC. Then, they provided feedback on the HIC's strengths and challenges related to its administration. The data were analyzed with descriptive statistics and content thematic analysis. Response rate of self-completed HICs was 100% (n = 82) and that of questionnaires was 99% (n = 81). Participants' age range was 20-34 years; mean body mass index (BMI) was 23.9±5.4 for men and 20.5±2.6 kg/m2 for women. Generally, participants had low-risk BMIs (82%) and blood pressures (BPs) (91%), moderate-risk dietary habits (90%), but fewer had low-risk exercise habits (41%). Of 81 friends/relatives who participated, 25% had high-risk exercise habits. Student participants concurred the HIC is useful in developing lifestyle education programs. Challenges included uncertainty about obtaining laboratory data, serving-size quantities and confidence to effect lifestyle change in others. Although students appeared receptive to assessing health and lifestyle behaviors using the HIC, they reported being unconfident to prescribe long-term effective lifestyle advice. We recommend introducing the HIC in physical therapy curricula as an effective way of sensitizing emerging physical therapists to their responsibility to assess health/attributes/lifestyle non-communicable diseases (NCDs) risk factors. Prescribing lifestyle education/counselling warrants greater curricular focus. Further research will establish how HIC data and information can be effectively used as a clinical assessment and education tool to target health and lifestyle, and track behavior change over time.

Summary: Plants coordinate their growth and developmental programs with various endogenous signals and environmental challenges. Phytochrome interacting factor 4 (PIF4) plays a critical positive role in thermoresponsive gene expression and hypocotyl growth in Arabidopsis, whereas early flowering 3 (ELF3) negatively regulates the activity of PIF4 at elevated temperatures. However, it is unknown how ELF3 activity is regulated at warm temperatures. Here, we report the identification of B-box 18 (BBX18) and BBX23 as important thermomorphogenesis regulators in Arabidopsis. BBX18 and BBX23 mutations result in reduced thermoresponsive hypocotyl elongation. In contrast, BBX18 overexpression promotes hypocotyl growth at elevated temperatures, which depends on either PIF4 or constitutive photomorphogenic 1 (COP1). BBX18 and BBX23 interact with ELF3 or COP1. Knocking out BBX18 and BBX23 increases ELF3 abundance under normal and warm temperature conditions. The expression of multiple thermoresponsive genes is impaired in both a PIF4 mutant and a BBX18/BBX23 double mutant. Thus, our findings reveal an important role of B-box proteins during thermomorphogenesis and provide insights into our understanding of how warm temperature signals regulate ELF3 activity and PIF4-dependent genes. : Ding et al. show that BBX18 and BBX23 are important for hypocotyl elongation during plant thermomorphogenesis. They show that BBX18 and BBX23 interact with ELF3 and reduce the protein accumulation of ELF3, a negative regulator of PIF4, at elevated temperatures. Keywords: B-box, BBX28, BBX23, COP1, ELF3, PIF4, thermomorphogenesis

This document is an editorial published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. It discusses the sensory control of posture and gait and the integration and mechanisms involved in maintaining balance under different sensory conditions. The editorial highlights the importance of sensory integration and sensory reweighting in maintaining postural stability during movement. It also discusses how aging and neurological disorders can disrupt these mechanisms, leading to functional impairments and an increased risk of falls. The editorial presents nine studies that focus on postural responses in different sensory conditions and analyze the mechanisms of sensory integration in various populations, aiming to improve balance and regain postural stability. [Extracted from the article]

Recent studies have found that face masks affect social cognition and behaviour in the context of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The eyes, the only part of the face not covered by face masks, are an important spatial attention cue that can trigger social attention orienting. Here, we adopted a spatial gaze-cueing task to investigate whether face masks affect social attention orienting triggered by eye gaze cues. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to determine the orientation of a target line under two types of cues—masked and non-masked faces—and two stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) conditions (300 ms and 1000 ms). The results showed that masked faces induced a smaller gaze-cueing effect (GCE) compared to non-masked faces at 300 ms SOA, while two face types induced similar GCEs at 1000 ms SOA. Experiment 2 used mouth-obscured faces and non-masked faces as cues and found that no significant difference in GCE between the two types at either 300 ms or 1000 ms SOA, indicating that the reduction of GCE caused by the masked face was due to the social meaning expressed by the mask rather than a physical effect of masking. The present study extends previous findings to support the idea that high-level social information affects the processing of eye gaze direction and provides evidence that face masks affect social cognition and behaviour in the context of COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study used the coordinated development of the regional economy and ecological environment in the Yellow River basin as the research object and selected 13 indicators representing the regional economic subsystem that reflect economic scale, economic structure, and economic efficiency in order to explore a path of high-quality economic development suitable for China's national conditions and realize the modernization of China with common prosperity for all people. The coupling weights of each indicator were then calculated separately, along with the degree of orderliness between the two subsystems of the regional economy and ecological environment. Finally, the degree of synergy between the two subsystems was calculated. The subjective weights and objective weights of each indicator were first estimated using hierarchical analysis (AHP) and conflicting correlation among criteria (CRITIC). The findings reveal a strong growth tendency in the regional economic development of the Yellow River basin and a wave-like growth pattern in ecological environment indicators. Since it overtook the ecological economy in 2017, the orderliness of the regional economic subsystem has continued this growth trend, demonstrating that the regional economy is in front of the ecological environment and is in a dominant position. The Yellow River basin's composite system of regional economic and natural environment exhibits a low-level synergy stage and an M-shaped development pattern of alternating increases and decreases. As a result, many solutions are suggested, including promoting high-quality growth with greater levels of opening, modifying the regional economic structure, and stepping up ecological environmental protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel structural design of a wave energy converter (WEC) is proposed, utilizing a gyroscope as the main component for energy absorption. A vacuum-sealed, high-speed flywheel is implemented within the gyroscope to convert energy and reduce energy loss from air resistance. A dynamic model that considers the response of the floater, gyroscope, and power take-off (PTO) system with multi-degree-of-freedom (DoF) wave excitations is created. The primary parameters such as flywheel speed, damping, and stiffness of the WEC system that affect the gyroscope and PTO on energy absorption are analyzed through numerical simulations. The simulation results demonstrate that changes to these parameters can significantly impact the energy-absorption peak value. Furthermore, an improved multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on the decomposition (MOEA/D) algorithm is applied to optimize key parameters, such as the power conversion and gyro precession of the WEC system, using a hybrid constraint handling strategy for enhanced diversity and the HV value as the evaluation criterion. The optimal design solution is selected from the Pareto solution set using a technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) method based on entropy weighting so that technical guidance can be provided for the design and control of the WEC system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background The current World Health Organization (WHO) classification of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) conveys little prognostic information. This study aimed to propose an NPC histopathologic classification that can potentially be used to predict prognosis and treatment response. Methods We initially developed a histopathologic classification based on the morphologic traits and cell differentiation of tumors of 2716 NPC patients who were identified at Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center (SYSUCC) (training cohort). Then, the proposed classification was applied to 1702 patients (retrospective validation cohort) from hospitals outside SYSUCC and 1613 patients (prospective validation cohort) from SYSUCC. The efficacy of radiochemotherapy and radiotherapy modalities was compared between the proposed subtypes. We used Cox proportional hazards models to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) for overall survival (OS). Results The 5-year OS rates for all NPC patients who were diagnosed with epithelial carcinoma (EC; 3708 patients), mixed sarcomatoid-epithelial carcinoma (MSEC; 1247 patients), sarcomatoid carcinoma (SC; 823 patients), and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC; 253 patients) were 79.4%, 70.5%, 59.6%, and 42.6%, respectively (P