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Image restoration under adverse weather conditions poses a challenging task. Previous research efforts have predominantly focused on eliminating rain and fog phenomena from images. However, snow, being another common atmospheric occurrence, also significantly impacts advanced computer vision tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Recently, there has been a surge of methods specifically targeting snow removal, with the majority employing visual Transformers as the backbone network to enhance restoration effectiveness. Nevertheless, due to the quadratic computations required by Transformers to model long-range dependencies, this significantly escalates the time and space consumption of deep learning models. To address this issue, this paper proposes an efficient snow removal Transformer with a global windowing network (SGNet). This method forgoes the localized windowing strategy of previous visual Transformers, opting instead to partition the image into multiple low-resolution subimages containing global information using wavelet sampling, thereby ensuring higher performance while reducing computational overhead. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that our approach achieves outstanding performance across a wide range of benchmark datasets and can rival methods employing CNNs in terms of computational cost.

Abstract As a member of Xenes family, germanene has excellent nonlinear saturable absorption characteristics. In this work, we prepared germanene nanosheets by liquid phase exfoliation and measured their saturation intensity as 0.6 GW/cm2 with a modulation depth of 8%. Then, conventional solitons with a pulse width of 946 fs and high-energy noise-like pulses with a pulse width of 784 fs were obtained by using germanene nanosheet as a saturable absorber for a mode-locked Erbium-doped fiber laser. The characteristics of the two types of pulses were investigated experimentally. The results reveal that germanene has great potential for modulation devices in ultrafast lasers and can be used as a material for creation of excellent nonlinear optical devices to explore richer applications in ultrafast photonics. Graphical Abstract

A system-ancilla bipartite state capable of containing the complete information of an unknown quantum channel acting on the system is called faithful. In this work, we extend the applicability and generality of faithfulness significantly by introducing its local variant and examining their relationship when applied to various classes of quantum channels. In doing so, we discovered that, in the original proof by D'Ariano and Presti, only sufficiency was shown, not the full equivalence between faithfulness of state and invertibility of the corresponding Jamiołkowski map. We complete the proof by showing necessity and examine how far this characterization of faithfulness can be generalized by applying it to various classes of quantum channels. We also explore a more general notion we call sensitivity, the property of quantum state being altered by any nontrivial action of quantum channel. We study their relationship by characterizing both properties for important classes of quantum channels such as unital channels, random unitary operations, and unitary operations. Unexpected (non)equivalence results among them shed light on the structure of quantum channels by showing that we need only two classes of quantum states for characterizing quantum states faithful or sensitive to various subclasses of quantum channels.

Background: To adopt a healthy lifestyle is considered an essential component of nursing education. Self-rated health is a subjective assessment of health status and is consistent with objective health status. Previous studies have shown an association between self-rated health and engagement in a healthy lifestyle. Nursing students need to feel good about their subjective health status and to be able to adopt health improvements in their lifestyle before attempting to disseminate health messages to clients. The aims of this study were to compare the difference in self-rated health and health promotion lifestyle profile between senior and junior nursing students, describe correlations between self-rated health and health promotion lifestyle profile, and identify the predictors of self-rated health., Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive survey was adopted. The study sample consisted of 314 junior and senior year nursing students from a tertiary institution. The self-reported questionnaire consisted of a single-item question to examine their self-rated health. The Health Promoting Lifestyle Profile-II: Chinese version short form (HPLP-IICR) was used to investigate the health-promoting lifestyles of the students. Descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney U test, Chi-square test, Fisher's exact test, Spearman's correlation, and ordinal logistic regression were used to analyze the data., Results: The median scores for self-rated health were 3 (Mean 3.26, IQR 3-4) and 3 (Mean 3.19, IQR 3-4) out of 5 for Year 2 and Year 5 students, respectively, with no significant difference between the two groups. The two groups of students showed no significant differences in overall score and in most subscales of the HPLP-IICR. An ordinal logistic regression showed that those students with higher health management score (OR: 1.12, 95% CI: 1.04-1.21) and who had experienced no family conflicts in the recent month than having family conflict (OR: 1.64, 95% CI: 1.01-2.66) were more likely to have higher self-rated health., Conclusion: Nursing education and clinical practice can undoubtedly increase the health knowledge of students, but may not lead to changes in actual health-promoting behaviours. Students with a higher health management score and no family conflicts are more likely to give a positive appraisal of their health status., Competing Interests: SKYC is the Associate Dean and Associate Professor of School of Nursing, Tung Wah College, 31 Wylie Road, Homantin, Kowloon, Hong Kong.Ethical approval for the study was granted by the Research Committee of the participating tertiary institution (Ref. No. NUR/SRC/20171220/031). Each nursing student who participated in this study was given a verbal explanation of the objectives, procedures, and potential benefits of the study, supplemented by a written information sheet with the contact information of the principal investigator. To maintain anonymity, verbal consent to participate in this study was obtained instead of written consent and approved by the ethics committee. All of the participants were informed that they had the right to withdraw from the study without having to give a reason.Not applicable, as no details on individuals were presented in this report.The authors declare that they have no competing interests.Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Introduction: Muscles can adapt their fiber properties to accommodate to new conditions. We investigated the extent to which a decrease in muscle activation can cause an adaptation of fiber properties in synergistic and antagonistic jaw muscles., Methods: Three months after the injection of botulinum toxin type A in one masseter (anterior or posterior) muscle changes in fiber type composition and fiber cross-sectional areas in jaw muscles were studied at the microscopic level., Results: The injected masseter showed a steep increase in myosin type IIX fibers, whereas fast fibers decreased by about 50% in size. Depending on the injection site, both synergistic and antagonistic muscles showed a significant increase in the size of their fast IIA fibers, sometimes combined with an increased number of IIX fibers., Conclusion: Silencing the activity in the masseter not only causes changes in the fibers of the injected muscle but also leads to changes in other jaw muscles., (Copyright © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)