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The timing of high-pressure (HP) metamorphism in the eastern Himalayan syntaxis is important for understanding the India-Asia collisional processes, but it remains elusive. To reveal the metamorphic history of the eastern Himalayan syntaxis, we performed a study of geochronology, trace elements, and mineral inclusions of detrital zircon and monazite from modern stream sediments in the eastern Himalayan syntaxis. Detrital zircon comprise magmatic and metamorphic domains with different zoning. Inherited magmatic zircon domains have high Th/U, low (Dy/Yb)N, and retain ages of 1798−360 Ma. Metamorphic zircon domains with low Th/U, high (Dy/Yb)N, and inclusions of garnet, kyanite, and/or clinopyroxene probably formed under HP conditions. They yield age groups of 49−35 Ma, 33−17 Ma, and 12−7 Ma. The low Th/U and low (Dy/Yb)N metamorphic zircon domains probably formed during retrogression and yield age groups of 27−16 Ma and 10−6 Ma. Detrital monazite yield age distributions similar to those of the low (Dy/Yb)N metamorphic zircon except for the 821−402 Ma inherited cores. The (Dy/Yb)N of 31.6−5.7 Ma monazite decreases with increasing Y content, which indicates that it likely formed under the retrograde stage during garnet breakdown. Based on the oldest metamorphic ages, the initial India-Asia collision occurred no later than 50−44 Ma in the eastern Himalayan syntaxis. The multimodal age patterns of the metamorphic zircon and monazite indicate that the Indian continent underwent multistage HP and retrograde metamorphism in the eastern Himalayan syntaxis. The nearly contemporaneous HP and retrograde metamorphism indicate that the Indian continent continued subducting while the earlier HP metamorphic slices detached and exhumed.

Figure S1: Locations and Raman spectra of mineral inclusions in detrital zircons from modern river sands in the eastern Himalayan syntaxis. Figure S2: Chondrite-normalized REE patterns for the Paleoproterozoic to Paleozoic zircon domains and the Cenozoic metamorphic zircon domains. Table S1: Zircon U-Pb isotopic data analyzed by LA-ICP-MS. Table S2: Zircon trace-element data analyzed by LA-ICP-MS. Table S3: Monazite U(-Th)-Pb isotopic data analyzed by LA-ICP-MS. Table S4: Monazite trace-element data analyzed by LA-ICP-MS. Table S5: Compiled zircon trace-element data.

Meixuan Liu,1,2 Mengtian Shan,1 Yunxuan Zhang,3 Zhongliang Guo1,2 1Department of Respiratory Medicine, Shanghai East Hospital, School of Medicine, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200123, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Respiratory Medicine, Shanghai East Clinical Medical College, Nanjing Medical University, Shanghai, 200123, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Pharmacy, Huadong Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200040, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Zhongliang Guo Tel +86 18901681968Email drguozhl@163.comPurpose: Airway remodeling is an important feature of chronic asthma, and yet there are few effective therapeutic strategies. Progranulin (PGRN) has been shown to have lung protective functions, but the role of PGRN in asthmatic airway remodeling is unclear. We aim to explore the protective potential of PGRN on house dust mite (HDM)-induced airway remodeling and the underlying mechanisms.Methods: In this study, a murine model of chronic asthma was established by HDM sensitization and challenge. Recombinant PGRN was intranasally administrated to mice during the phase of HDM challenge. TGF-β 1-treated human airway epithelial BEAS-2B cells were utilized to explore the effect of PGRN on airway epithelia exposed to profibrotic conditions and molecular mechanisms.Results: We found that PGRN treatment attenuated HDM-induced airway remodeling, as evidenced by the suppression of collagen accumulation, mucus overproduction and airway smooth muscle synthesis in HDM-challenged asthmatic mice lungs. Meanwhile, PGRN also reversed the increased levels of autophagy markers and autophagosomes in airway epithelia under mimic asthmatic conditions, thereby controlling the fibrotic process in vivo and in vitro. Specifically, overexpressed HMGB1 and the subsequent RAGE/MAPKs signaling activation due to HDM exposure were abrogated in PGRN-treated asthmatic mice. Furthermore, knockdown of HMGB1 expression significantly restrained the fibrosis formation in TGF-β 1-induced airway epithelia accompanied by the downregulation of autophagic activity. However, enhancement of extracellular HMGB1 levels blunted the inhibition of autophagic flux by PGRN in airway epithelia, thereby resulting in the augmentation of collagen synthesis and fibrosis.Conclusion: Taken together, our data revealed that PGRN protected against asthmatic airway remodeling by negatively regulating autophagy via HMGB1 suppression, which might provide new insights into the therapeutic options for HDM-induced chronic asthma.Keywords: house dust mite-induced asthma, airway remodeling, progranulin, autophagy, HMGB1

One of the main elements of the lock’s mooring equipment is the floating bollard. Failure of this element of the mooring equipment always leads to great difficulties in organizing ship passes in the lock, in terms of the arrangement of vessels in the lock chamber and the forced withdrawal of locks from work to bring the floating bollards into working condition. Therefore, the analysis of the performance of this element, both at the design stage and during operation, taking into account various options for its loading under the action of changing external conditions, is an urgent task. The article presents the results of a study of one of the structures of a floating bollard of a ship’s lock, which is in real operation. The studies were carried out using the finite element method, in which 3D modeling of the device under consideration was carried out and its stress-strain state was analyzed under various loading options, taking into account the dynamics of mooring operations and weather conditions. A comparative analysis of the created finite element model of the device under consideration with its simplified model in the form of an elastic beam system with a uniform cross section is carried out. A graphic interpretation of the results of the analysis of the stress-strain state of the device under consideration is given, in which the most loaded structural elements are distinguished. The identified location of the places of the largest stress-strain state is proposed to be used as a theoretical basis for the deployment of sensors of the system for alerting the state of the loading of the floating bollard of the ship lock.

TCDD (2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin) is a ubiquitous environmental toxicant and a notable teratogenic agent for cleft palate (CP), a common congenital structural malformation that can result from abnormalities during palatal shelf connection and/or fusion. The development of the palate requires precise coordination between mesenchymal and epithelial cells. Exosomes are vesicles secreted by cells and participate in organ development by transferring various bioactive molecules between cells and regulating cell proliferation, migration, apoptosis, and epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT); these vesicles represent a new method of intercellular communication. To explore how TCDD could influence palatal cell behaviors and communication, we treated mesenchymal cells with TCDD, collected the exosomes secreted by the cells, assessed the 2 types of palatal cells, and then observed the effects of TCDD-induced exosomes. We found that the effects of TCDD-induced exosomes were equal to those of TCDD. Thus, TCDD might change the genetic materials of palatal cells and exosomes to cause dysregulated gene expression from parental cells, affect cellular information communicators, and induce abnormal cellular behaviors that could lead to CP.

Background Self-efficacy for appropriate medication use is an important construct when evaluating the optimal use of medications. However, no instrument that assesses this construct in elderly Chinese patients has been shown to have valid psychometric properties. Objective To investigate the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the self-efficacy for Appropriate Medication Use Scale in elderly patients with type 2 diabetes. Setting Geriatric patients were recruited from the endocrinology department of a tertiary hospital in Shanghai, China. Method Self-efficacy was assessed by the Chinese version of the Self-Efficacy for Appropriate Medication Use Scale in subjects who were at least 65 years old. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to develop a psychometrically sound model of the scale. Main outcome measures Internal and test-retest reliability; convergent and discriminant validity of the scale; model fit indices of the factor model. Results The two-factor model of the self-efficacy for Appropriate Medication Use Scale was not suitable for elderly patients with respect to both item factor loadings and model fit indices. Conceptually overlapping scale items emerged when the scale was used in these patients. The final model developed appeared to achieve an ideal model fit and presented acceptable convergent and discriminant validity. Conclusions This study presented a Chinese version of the self-efficacy for Appropriate Medication Use Scale with psychometrically sound properties that will enable pharmacists, nurses and physicians to prospectively evaluate the impact of medication self-efficacy on a variety of health outcomes in elderly patients with type 2 diabetes.

To mitigate the climate change-induced water shortage and realize the sustainable development of agriculture, drip irrigation, a more efficient water-saving irrigation method, has been intensively implemented in most arid agricultural regions in the world. However, compared to traditional border irrigation, how drip irrigation affects the biophysical conditions in the cropland and how crops physiologically respond to changes in biophysical conditions in terms of water, heat and carbon exchange remain largely unknown. In view of the above situation, to reveal the mechanism of drip irrigation in improving spring wheat water productivity, paired field experiments based on drip irrigation and border irrigation were conducted to extensively monitor water and heat fluxes at a typical spring wheat field (Triticum aestivum L.) in Northwest China during 2017–2020. The results showed that drip irrigation improved yield by 10.3 % and crop water productivity (i.e., yield-to-evapotranspiration-ratio) by 15.6 %, but reduced LAI by 16.9 % in contrast with border irrigation. Under drip irrigation, the lateral development of spring wheat roots was promoted by higher soil temperature combined with frequent dry-wet alternation in the shallow soil layer (0–20 cm), which was the basis for efficient absorption of water and fertilizer, as well as efficient formation of photosynthate. Meanwhile, drip irrigation increased net radiation and decreased latent heat flux by inhibiting leaf growth, thereby increased sensible heat, causing a higher soil temperature (+1.10 ℃) and canopy temperature (+1.11 ℃). Further analysis proved that soil temperature was the key factor affecting yield formation. Based on the above conditions, the decrease in leaf distribution coefficient (−0.030) led to the decrease in evapotranspiration (−5.7 %) and the increase in ear distribution coefficient (+0.029). Therefore, drip irrigation emphasized the role of soil moisture in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum, enhanced crop activity by increasing field temperature, especially soil temperature, and finally improved yield and water productivity via carbon reallocation. The study revealed the mechanism of drip irrigation for improving spring wheat yield, and would contribute to improving Earth system models in representing agricultural cropland ecosystems with drip irrigation and predicting the subsequent biophysical and biogeochemical feedbacks to climate change.

Liaoyu white cattle (LYWC) is a local breed in Liaoning Province, China. It has the advantages of grow quickly, high slaughter ratew, high meat quality and strong anti-stress ability. N6 methyladenosine (m6A) is a methylation modification of N6 position of RNA adenine, which is an important modification mechanism affecting physiological phenomena. In this study, we used the longissimus dorsi muscle of LYWC and SIMC for m6A-seq and RNA-seq high-throughput sequencing, and identified the key genes involved in muscle growth and m6A modification development by bioinformatics analysis. There were 31532 m6A peaks in the whole genome of LYWC and 47217 m6A peaks in the whole genome of SIMC. Compared with Simmental cattle group, LYWC group had 17,351 differentially expressed genes: 10,697 genes were up-regulated, 6,654 genes were down regulated, 620 differentially expressed genes were significant, while 16,731 differentially expressed genes were not significant. Among the 620 significantly differentially expressed genes, 295 genes were up-regulated and 325 genes were down regulated. In order to explore the relationship between m6A and mRNA expression in the muscles of LYWC and SIMC, the combined analysis of MeRIP-seq and RNA-seq revealed that 316 genes were m6A modified with mRNA expression. To identify differentially methylated genes related to muscle growth, four related genes were selected for quantitative verification in LYWC and SIMC. GO enrichment and KEGG analysis showed that the differentially expressed genes modified by m6A are mainly involved in skeletal muscle contraction, steroid biosynthesis process, redox process, PPAR pathway and fatty acid metabolism, and galactose metabolism. These results provide a theoretical basis for further research on the role of m6A in muscle growth and development.

Chinese cabbage is a key vegetable crop in northwest China. It is of great significance to study the evapotranspiration (ET) and crop coefficient (Kc) for agricultural water-saving management in this area. Eddy covariance (EC) was used to measure the ET and Kc of Chinese cabbage in northwest China from 1 May to 16 October 2020, in order to analyze the characteristics of these variables under plastic mulch. The results showed that the average Kc of the first crop of cabbage was higher in the middle and late stages, with values of 1.08 and 1.09 during the heading and maturity stages, respectively. The average Kc of the second crop of cabbage was higher in the middle stage, with values of 1.10 and 1.13 during the rosette and heading stages, respectively. The average annual Kc of Chinese cabbage was 0.81. Although Kc was higher in the middle and late periods, the water use efficiency was still 28.96 kg·ha−1·mm−1. The annual ET of Chinese cabbage was 505.3 mm. The study revealed the variation pattern of ET and Kc of Chinese cabbage, which provides an important scientific basis for the irrigation management of Chinese cabbage and is of great significance to guide the practice of water-saving vegetable planting.

The existing translation models have the problem that the task of translation thread is not clearly divided, which leads to the time-consuming of model translation. This paper designs a long character English aided translation model of foreign related contract text based on feature extraction algorithm. The feature vector of the characters to be recognized is extracted to recognize the long character structure of the foreign related contract text. Based on the feature extraction algorithm, the translation thread task is divided, the context of execution module and translation module is switched, the ambiguity of word segmentation is judged according to the syntactic and semantic information, the auxiliary word segmentation mode is set by gradient descent method, and the automatic alignment function of English auxiliary translation module is designed, to realize the construction of long character English auxiliary translation model of foreign related contract text. Experimental results: the average translation time of the designed model is 3.555s, which is 1.640s and 1.707s shorter than the two existing translation models, which proves that the performance of the model is better.

Soybean is one of the major crops that is widely cultivated in Northwest China due to its high nutritional and economic value. However, drought has recently become an important factor restricting the growth of soybeans in the arid region of Northwest China and the selection of drought-resistant soybean is of importance for cooperating with drought and improving yield. In this study, three-year soybean field experiments were conducted to test the effects of different water treatments on the soil moisture status and the yield of two varieties of soybeans (Longhuang1 (LH1), Longahuang3 (LH3)). Based on the field data, the soil water content, biomass, LAI, and yield were calibrated and evaluated using the soil-crop system model WHCNS (soil Water Heat Carbon Nitrogen Simulator). The results showed that the nRMSE, NSE, IA, and R2 of the soil water content from two types of soybean, i.e., LH1 (LH3) were 10.98% (9.79%), 0.86 (0.90), 0.96 (0.97), 0.87 (0.90), respectively. The nRMSE, NSE, IA and R2 of the yield of LH1 (LH3) were 19.12% (4.41%), 0.87 (0.99), 0.97 (1.00), 0.98 (0.99), respectively. Scenario simulations of yield and other indicators in two soybean varieties under different irrigation schedules in different hydrological years showed that the maximum yield and II of LH3 are lower than those of LH1, but the higher yield and II of LH1 comes from a larger irrigation amount. Appropriately reducing the number of irrigations in the branching period will not reduce crop yield and may oppositely lead to a small increase in yield and income, reducing the number of irrigations at the end of grouting has no significant impact on yield and income.

Background Surgical stainless wire has been widely used to stabilize pectus bar and ribs in Nuss procedure for pectus excavatum correction. However, wire fracture and its secondary complications are problems easily to be ignored but very important. The purpose of this article was to describe a series of cases with wire breakage, hoping to arouse the attention of worldwide thoracic surgeons to this potential threat, and to share our modifications on the fixation patterns and materials in Nuss procedure. Methods From September 2011 to January 2020, 44 patients underwent Nuss procedure at Chongqing University Three Gorges Hospital. In the initial 25 patients (Group A), each bar was secured by stainless wires, and the latter 19 patients (Group B) received stainless wires and polyblend polyethylene sutures (PDS) in the bar fixation. Patient demographics, Haller index (HI), wire fracture rate, characteristics of the broken wires, and operation time were recorded. Results The mean operation age was 8.1±4.3 years in group A and 10.4±2.9 years in group B. There was no statistical difference in HIs between the two groups (P>0.05). The wire fracture occurred in 88.0% of the patients in Group A, while the wires in Group B were all intact. There was no bar displacement or other serious complication requiring surgical intervention in the two groups. The mean operation time of bar removal when encountering wire fracture was 104.6±42.8 minutes, which was significantly higher than that in Group B (P≤0.001). Conclusions The wire fracture in the bar fixation could pose potential hazards to patients deserving special attention from thoracic surgeons. Cancel the wire fixation in the non-stabilizer side while simultaneously using wires and PDS in the pectus bar fixation may achieve the pectus bar stability while overcoming the problem of wire fracture.

Solar steam generation is regarded as a perspective technology, due to its potentials in solar light absorption and photothermal conversion for seawater desalination and water purification. Although lots of steam generation systems have been reported to possess high conversion efficiencies recently, researches of simple, cost-effective, and sustainable materials still need to be done. Here, inspired by natural young sunflower heads' property increasing the temperature of dish-shaped flowers by tracking the sun, we used 3D-structured carbonized sunflower heads as an effective solar steam generator. The evaporation rate and efficiency of these materials under 1 sun (1 kW m-2) are 1.51 kg m-2 h-1 and 100.4%, respectively, beyond the theoretical limit of 2D materials. This high solar efficiency surpasses all other biomass-based materials ever reported. It is demonstrated that such a high capability is mainly attributed to the 3D-structured top surface, which could reabsorb the lost energy of diffuse reflection and thermal radiation, as well as provide enlarged water/air interface for steam escape. 3D-structured carbonized sunflower heads provide a new method for the future design and fabrication of high-performance photothermal devices.

In this paper, an extreme learning machine (ELM) network based on an improved shuffled frog leaping algorithm (CCSFLA) is applied in early bearing fault diagnosis. ELM is a new type of single layer forward network. Although the generalization is stronger compared with traditional neural networks, a random setup of initial parameters increases instability of the network. An improved SFLA based on sinusoidal chaotic mapping with infinite collapses and constriction factors (CCSFLA) is proposed in this paper to optimize the ELM and obtain a CCSFLA–ELM model. Results show that the CCSFLA–ELM model can be used for optimization and that it improved the recognition of early bearing fault diagnosis.

In order to study the adjustment of national policies on medium, small and micro enterprises, and to determine the credit risk and credit strategy of banks to medium, small and micro enterprises. Firstly, the enterprise strength and comprehensive reputation of small and micro enterprises are analyzed, and their weight is determined by the subjective and objective comprehensive evaluation method, and the credit risk factors of each enterprise are calculated. A dual objective optimization model was established and solved by simulated annealing algorithm. The optimal profit amount and annual average interest rate of banks for different industries and different categories of credit strategy are obtained. Analytic Hierarchy process and Fuzzy Bayesian network are used to explore the influence of multiple emergent factors on banks adjustment credit strategy.

Black photothermal materials with broadband solar absorption have attracted great interest for efficient steam generation. However, the solar steam device composed of thermal insulators and water supply paths makes the device more intricate and problematic to operate. Herein, inspired by random close packing structure of beetle, black TiO2 (BTiO2) film with random size distribution is fabricated for simplifying the vapor generation device. The BTiO2 with random size distribution realized a broadband absorption in the full spectrum of solar light (250−2500 nm) due to the plenty of oxygen vacancies/surface disorders/surface defects after the reduction process. When BTiO2 film irradiated under 1 sun illumination, the temperature is quickly changed from 25.4 °C to 90 °C within 120 s which leads to a superior photothermal effect. This high solar thermal energy conversion surpasses other photothermal materials (PMs) reported before. At the same time, when used for steam generation, the solar steam efficiency of 77.14% is achieved under 1 sun solar light irradiation without any thermal insulating management and water supply path. Furthermore, the BTiO2 films presented remarkable flexibility and strong mechanical robustness, which provide a promising approach to design new black materials of different size structures with high mechanical stability/flexibility for developing solar energy-related applications.

We present a novel learning-based framework for face reenactment. The proposed method, known as ReenactGAN, is capable of transferring facial movements and expressions from an arbitrary person’s monocular video input to a target person’s video. Instead of performing a direct transfer in the pixel space, which could result in structural artifacts, we first map the source face onto a boundary latent space. A transformer is subsequently used to adapt the source face’s boundary to the target’s boundary. Finally, a target-specific decoder is used to generate the reenacted target face. Thanks to the effective and reliable boundary-based transfer, our method can perform photo-realistic face reenactment. In addition, ReenactGAN is appealing in that the whole reenactment process is purely feed-forward, and thus the reenactment process can run in real-time (30 FPS on one GTX 1080 GPU). Dataset and model are publicly available on our project page (Project Page: https://wywu.github.io/projects/ReenactGAN/ReenactGAN.html).

We introduce a novel approach for annotating large quantity of in-the-wild facial images with high-quality posterior age distribution as labels. Each posterior provides a probability distribution of estimated ages for a face. Our approach is motivated by observations that it is easier to distinguish who is the older of two people than to determine the person's actual age. Given a reference database with samples of known ages and a dataset to label, we can transfer reliable annotations from the former to the latter via human-in-the-loop comparisons. We show an effective way to transform such comparisons to posterior via fully-connected and SoftMax layers, so as to permit end-to-end training in a deep network. Thanks to the efficient and effective annotation approach, we collect a new large-scale facial age dataset, dubbed `MegaAge', which consists of 41,941 images. Data can be downloaded from our project page mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/projects/MegaAge and github.com/zyx2012/Age_estimation_BMVC2017. With the dataset, we train a network that jointly performs ordinal hyperplane classification and posterior distribution learning. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on popular benchmarks such as MORPH2, Adience, and the newly proposed MegaAge., To appear on BMVC 2017 (oral) revised version

Electronic medical records (EMRs) have high value for research, as they contain the patient's personal information, medical history, clinical examination, treatment process, and other information. Analysis based on EMRs can effectively assist doctors in clinical decision-making, provide data support for clinical research as well as personalized healthcare service for patients. We introduce a novel approach for EMR similarity computation by re-structuring and filtering some parts of physical examination result. Our approach is motivated by observations that it is easier to distinguish disease bias special part than bias the whole EMR which maybe contain some ineffective information. Assuming the check parts are independent, we split them and select effective parts. Then, we apply Deep NLP, converting the word to vectors which can be used to measure syntactic and semantic word similarities better. In addition, We replace traditional Euclidean distance with Word Mover's Distance(WMD), a novel distance function between text documents. Finally, KNN cluster is been used to evaluate the similarity between EMRs. Compared with traditional method such as LDA and LSI, our proposed method achieved higher recall value of disease classification problem.

In this paper, an extreme learning machine (ELM) network based on an improved shuffled frog leaping algorithm (CCSFLA) is applied in early bearing fault diagnosis. ELM is a new type of single layer...