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In situ high-pressure Raman spectroscopy and synchrotron angular dispersive x-ray diffraction techniques, combined with first-principles calculations, have been performed to investigate the 1-methylhydantoin (C4H6N2O2, 1-MH) molecular crystal. High-pressure experiments have shown that phase I (monoclinic system) begins to transform into phase II (orthorhombic system) at pressures above 4.0 GPa, and the transformation range is from 4.0 to 14.2 GPa. It is proposed that the mechanism of phase transition is the interlayer contraction and rearrangement of the hydrogen-bonding network due to the enhanced strong hydrogen-bonded interactions at high pressures. This study provides some theoretical basis for this rare pressure-induced phase transition from low symmetry to high symmetry in organic supramolecular polymorphism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonpolar (100), polar (002), semipolar (101), and nonpolar (110) preferred oriented ZnO films were synthesized by regulated growth using the chemical bath deposition method. The crystallinity, surface morphology, and optical properties of ZnO films with different preferred orientations after annealing in different atmospheres were systematically investigated. The experimental results show an increase in crystallinity and a decrease in surface roughness of the films after annealing; in particular, the optical transmittance of semipolar (101) preferred oriented ZnO films was significantly higher than that of the other samples. XPS and PL spectra confirmed that annealing in argon effectively increased donor defects, whereas annealing in oxygen and ozone reduced donor defects in the films, and that ozone annealing was best suited to enhance acceptor defects in nonpolar (110) preferred oriented ZnO films. Argon annealing is the best for the enhancement of donor defects in polar (002) preferred oriented ZnO films. This work achieves modulation of optical properties and defects of ZnO films by annealing in different atmospheres, which provides new ideas for the application of ZnO materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Aims Although non-optimum ambient temperature is a major non-traditional risk factor for acute myocardial infarction, there is no prior knowledge on whether non-optimum ambient temperature could differentially affect myocardial infarction with obstructive coronary artery disease (MI-CAD) and myocardial infarction with non-obstructive coronary arteries (MINOCA). Methods Using the Chinese Cardiovascular Association database-Chest Pain Center Registry, a nationwide, time-stratified, case-crossover investigation was conducted from 2015 to 2021. Meteorological data were obtained from an established satellite-based model, and daily exposures were assigned according to the onset of myocardial infarction in each patient. A conditional logistic regression model combined with distributed lag non-linear models (10 days) was used to estimate the exposure–response relationships. Results A total of 83 784 MINOCA patients and 918 730 MI-CAD patients were included. The risk of MINOCA and MI-CAD associated with low temperature occurred at lag 2 day and lasted to 1 week. Extremely low temperature was associated with a substantially greater odds ratio (OR) of MINOCA [OR 1.58, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.31–1.90] than MI-CAD (unmatched: OR 1.32, 95% CI 1.23–1.43; equally matched by age and sex: OR 1.25, 95% CI 1.04–1.50), compared with the corresponding reference temperatures (30°C, 35°C, and 30°C). Stronger associations were observed for patients who were aged ≥65 years, female, or resided in the south. There was no significant difference for the impacts of high temperature on MINOCA and MI-CAD. Conclusions This nationwide study highlights the particular susceptibility of MINOCA patients to ambient low temperature compared with that of MI-CAD patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: Despite the tremendous improvement in therapeutic medication and intervention for coronary atherosclerotic disease (CAD), residual risks remain. Exome sequencing enables identification of rare variants and susceptibility genes for residual risks of early‐onset coronary atherosclerotic disease (EOCAD) with well‐controlled conventional risk factors. Methods: We performed whole‐exome sequencing of subjects who had no conventional risk factors, defined as higher body mass index, smoking, hypertension and dyslipidemia, screened from 1950 patients with EOCAD (age ≤ 45 years, at least 50% stenosis of coronary artery by angiography), and selected control subjects from 1006 elder (age ≥ 65 years) with < 30% coronary stenosis. Gene‐based association analysis and clinical phenotypic comparison were conducted. Results: Subjects without defined conventional risk factors accounted for 4.72% of young patients. Totally, 6 genes might be associated with residual risk of EOCAD, namely CABP1 (OR = 22.19, p = 0.02), HLA‐E (OR = 22.19, p = 0.02), TOE1 (OR = 33.6, p = 0.002), HPSE2 (OR = 11.1, p = 0.04), CHST14 (OR = 22.19, p = 0.02) as well as KLHL8 (OR = 22.19, p = 0.02). Phenotypic analysis displayed the levels of low‐density lipoprotein cholesterol in carriers of mutations from CABP1, HLA‐E, TOE1, and HPSE2 were significantly elevated compared to noncarriers. Notably, extracellular matrix‐associated CHST14 and fibrinogen‐associated KLHL8 both displayed possible correlation with increased neutrophil proportion and decreased monocyte percentage (both p < 0.05), exerting potential effects on the residual inflammatory risks of EOCAD. Conclusion: The study identified six genes related to dyslipidemia and inflammation pathways with potential association with residual risk of EOCAD, which will contribute to precision‐based prevention in these patients. Trial Registration: The GRAND study was registered at www.clinicaltrials.gov on July 14, 2015, and the registry number is NCT 02496858. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using zinc chloride as an additive assisted with conventional solutions of zinc acetate dihydrate and hexamethylenetetramine, the synthesis of ZnO films by chemical bath deposition was investigated and characterized by x-ray diffraction, field emission scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscope, photoluminescence (PL) and UV-Vis spectrophotometry. ZnO films with (0002), (10 1 ̄ 2), (11 2 ̄ 2), (11 2 ̄ 0), and (10 1 ̄ 0) preferential growth orientation were prepared by changing the concentration of the introduced zinc chloride. The results of UV-Vis spectrophotometry show that the ZnO films with different preferential growth orientations have optical transmittance of more than 80% in the visible light region. Results from PL show that compared to the typical polar (0002) preferential growth orientation of ZnO, other films with different preferential growth orientations have different visible emissions. It was also confirmed that the concentration of Cl− can affect the defects and preferred orientations of ZnO films. This work enriches the fabrication of ZnO films with different preferential growth orientations and also provides new ideas for the fabrication of ZnO-based transparent nanodevices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pan-vascular diseases, based on systems biology theory, explore the commonalities and individualities of important target organs such as cardiovascular, cerebrovascular and peripheral blood vessels, starting from the systemic and holistic aspects of vascular diseases. The purpose is to understand the interrelationships and results between them, achieve vascular health or sub-health, and comprehensively improve the physical and mental health of the entire population. Post-translational modification (PTM) is an important part of epigenetics, including phosphorylation, acetylation, ubiquitination, methylation, etc., playing a crucial role in the pan-vascular system. Crotonylation is a novel type of PTM that has made significant progress in the research of pan-vascular related diseases in recent years. Based on the review of previous studies, this article summarises the various regulatory factors of crotonylation, physiological functions and the mechanisms of histone and non-histone crotonylation in regulating pan-vascular related diseases to explore the possibility of precise regulation of crotonylation sites as potential targets for disease treatment and the value of clinical translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transformer-based networks have revolutionized visual tasks with their continuous innovation, leading to significant progress. However, the widespread adoption of Vision Transformers (ViT) is limited due to their high computational and parameter requirements, making them less feasible for resource-constrained mobile and edge computing devices. Moreover, existing lightweight ViTs exhibit limitations in capturing different granular features, extracting local features efficiently, and incorporating the inductive bias inherent in convolutional neural networks. These limitations somewhat impact the overall performance. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient ViT called Dual-Granularity Former (DGFormer). DGFormer mitigates these limitations by introducing two innovative modules: Dual-Granularity Attention (DG Attention) and Efficient Feed-Forward Network (Efficient FFN). In our experiments, on the image recognition task of ImageNet, DGFormer surpasses lightweight models such as PVTv2-B0 and Swin Transformer by 2.3% in terms of Top1 accuracy. On the object detection task of COCO, under RetinaNet detection framework, DGFormer outperforms PVTv2-B0 and Swin Transformer with increase of 0.5% and 2.4% in average precision (AP), respectively. Similarly, under Mask R-CNN detection framework, DGFormer exhibits improvement of 0.4% and 1.8% in AP compared to PVTv2-B0 and Swin Transformer, respectively. On the semantic segmentation task on the ADE20K, DGFormer achieves a substantial improvement of 2.0% and 2.5% in mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) over PVTv2-B0 and Swin Transformer, respectively. The code is open-source and available at: https://github.com/ISCLab-Bistu/DGFormer.git. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]