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The Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP) is the largest loess deposit on Earth with expansive surface-exposed source rocks of varying origins, ages, and history. Here, we present abundances of elements on representative loess and palaeosol samples from seven classic sections of the CLP. Most elements, including soluble elements (e.g. Rb and Cs), show significant correlations with La or Al2O3. These correlations indicate that these elements are hosted or absorbed in particle minerals during weathering, transport, and deposition (e.g. mica, K-feldspar, and clay minerals). These new observations allow the use of La/X (‘X’ being the element of interest) and the estimated La abundance of 31 ppm in the model upper continental crust (UCC) to estimate the abundances of other elements. The results show higher Cs (Cs = 6.7 ± 1.2 ppm), lower transition metals, Ba, and Ga. Given the high CaO and presence of carbonate in UCC rocks of both vast western China (the primary source for the CLP) and eastern China, we propose that these updates on the element abundances represent a refined model for the carbonate-bearing UCC.

Has China’s vigorous economic growth raised its citizens’ happiness? Existing studies have portrayed, if not a pessimistic picture, a complicated one. We conducted two studies to clarify this issue. In Study 1, we used data from available national surveys between 1990 and 2018 (64 samples) and demonstrated a significant quadratic U-shaped trend and a rising tendency. In Study 2, we conducted a cross-temporal meta-analysis from 2001 to 2019 (689 samples) and found that Chinese happiness manifested a linear rising trend, although this trend was more salient in the community sample than in the student one. In both studies, Granger causal analysis suggested that economic growth was the Granger cause of the increase in Chinese happiness. These findings indicate that economic growth has raised happiness in China since 1990, particularly since 2001, and highlight the importance of moving beyond the Easterlin Paradox.

Many effective techniques have recently been proposed to estimate the parameters of specific tampering operations. Most of them consider the situation in which an image is tampered with by only a single operation. However, in reality, multiple operations are used to falsify an image. Because the tampering traces of previous operations may be weakened or eliminated by later operations, it is difficult for the prior algorithms, each of which was developed for a single operation, to detect all tampering operations. In this paper, we propose a new method for estimating the parameters of operations in different manipulation chains. A framework is presented to investigate the correlation between multiple operations, which divides the degree of correlation into uncoupled and coupled operations. Then, two cases of certain operator chains with different degrees of correlation are adopted to reveal the assessment framework. Under this framework, we design well-directed features to estimate the parameters for each operator chain. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

By examining the changes in the conceptual associations between individualism-collectivism and 10 other concepts based on the Google Ngram Chinese Corpus from the 1950s to the 1990s, Hamamura et al. (2021) inferred (a) no rise in individualism; (b) continuing collectivism; and (c) no effect of modernization on individualism in contemporary China. We question the validity of these conclusions given the following issues in their research: (a) misinterpretation of statistical results; (b) improper calculation of cultural associations; and (c) inappropriate generalization of specific findings. Contrary to their original findings, our reanalysis of their data suggests that individualism has been increasingly accepted and associated with some positive (vs. negative) aspects of life (e.g., income vs. loss, richness vs. poverty) over recent decades in China. Future research should use more rigorous methods and diverse corpora to clarify and explain changes in individualism and collectivism in China. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth most lethal malignancy and is characterized by poor immunogenicity. Pancreatic cancer cells have various strategies to suppress host immune response, evade immune defenses, and facilitate tumor growth and development. As a mode of long-range intercellular communication, cancer-derived exosomes contribute to impairment of the immune system. However, the mechanisms that induce changes in the activities of signal transduction pathways in immune cells, which are influenced by tumor-derived exosomes, are poorly understood. We (1) treated peripheral T lymphocytes with pancreatic cancer-derived exosomes, tagged CD63 with tdTomato, to trace exosome transfer from pancreatic cancer cells to T lymphocytes; (2) carried out a cytotoxicity assay of exosome-treated T lymphocytes using the Real Time Cellular Analysis system; (3) performed RNA sequencing and gene set enrichment analysis to explore the pivotal signaling pathway that mediates apoptosis in exosome-treated T lymphocytes; and (4) demonstrated the role of p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress in exosome-induced T-lymphocyte apoptosis. In conclusion, these results indicate that pancreatic cancer cells secrete exosomes, which are taken up by T lymphocytes to activate p38 MAPK, and then induce ER stress-mediated apoptosis, ultimately causing immunosuppression.

The fabrication of functional wound dressing for effective hemostasis, anti-inflammation as well as angiogenesis is of vital importance. In this paper, a three-dimensional (3D) nanofiber sponge with dimethyloxaloglycine (DMOG) loaded mesoporous spheres of derivatives of Prussian blue analogues (PBAs) was prepared (3D-PBAFeCo-DMOG). The nanostructure, composition, and mechanical properties of 3D-PBAFeCo-DMOG were characterized, showing regular nanostructure and good mechanical property. The behavior of in vitro drug release showed the DMOG could achieve long-term and stable release by encapsulating in PBAFeCo microspheres and nanofibers. In vitro coagulation experiments showed that 3D-PBAFeCo-DMOG had effective hemostasis and clotting capacities. In addition, the antioxidant capacity and cell compatibility of 3D-PBAFeCo-DMOG were confirmed. These results indicate that 3D-PBAFeCo-DMOG nanofiber sponge, as a controlled drug release system, may provide a new strategy for promoting angiogenesis and wound healing for clinical applications.

Histone epigenetic modifications are chemical modification changes to histone amino acid residues that modulate gene expression without altering the DNA sequence. As both the phenotypic and causal factors, cardiac metabolism disorder exacerbates mitochondrial ATP generation deficiency, thus promoting pathological cardiac hypertrophy. Moreover, several concomitant metabolic substrates also promote the expression of hypertrophy-responsive genes via regulating histone modifications as substrates or enzyme-modifiers, indicating their dual roles as metabolic and epigenetic regulators. This review focuses on the cardiac acetyl-CoA-dependent histone acetylation, NAD

Effective hemostasis, antibacterial, and anti-inflammation are essential for wound healing, which, however, are hampered by the structural deficiencies of traditional wound dressings. Herein, we prepared a three-dimensional (3D) layered nanofiber sponge (3D-AgMOF-CUR), where silver-metal organic framework (Ag-MOF) was grown in situ and curcumin (CUR) was loaded, to promote the wound healing by timely absorbing exudate at the wound site, accelerating hemostasis, as well as resisting bacteria growth and inflammation. Nanostructure, water absorption capacity, porosity, elasticity and tensile properties, and drug release in vitro of the 3D-AgMOF-CUR were systemically characterized. Its outstanding hemostasis and coagulation effect were demonstrated by in vitro coagulation and blood suction tests. Experimental results from CCK-8 assay, disk diffusion and bacterial co-culture methods further evidenced the fantastic antibacterial effect and good cytocompatibility of the 3D-AgMOF-CUR. In addition, its high wound healing efficiency was confirmed in vivo, as revealed by improved wound healing efficiency and significantly decreased scar area during the healing process of a wound infection model. This study demonstrated that the layered 3D nanofiber sponge could shed light on the clinical wound healing in the future.

Rechargeable aqueous Zn-MnO

The rapid development of the Internet, especially the application of search engines and machine translation, makes it easier to copy texts. Most existing text plagiarism detection methods are not capable of dealing with the increasing number of plagiarism sources and the increasingly ambiguous plagiarized texts. In this paper, we pay attention to the task of large-scale text deduplication, and propose a multi-level distributed text computing model, which improves the checking speed through multi-level latent semantic analysis, and combines BERT to judge plagiarized text more accurately. In order to further verify the model, we also combined the latest fuzzy plagiarism technology to construct a three-level data set. The experimental results show that our model performs well when plagiarism data increases and plagiarism ambiguity increases.

Over recent decades, massive socioeconomic development and accelerated globalization have led to substantial changes in human culture and psychology. In this chapter, the authors identify a general trend of human cultural change around the globe: individualism has been increasing whereas collectivism has been decreasing. This trend is manifested in diverse social indicators, cultural products, daily practices, and various domains of psychology including cognition, personality, attitudes and values, and human development. Cultural change, however, is not linear. Economic depression as well as other external forces such as disaster and pandemic may interfere with it; some aspects of cultural heritage may also endure over the course of modernization, and multicultural societies are burgeoning around the world. Our review highlights that culture is not a static construct but a dynamic process. Future studies may extend the content and scope of our current research, explore processes and mechanisms underlying cultural change, and examine how individuals, organizations, and governments cope with this change.

We proposed that self-affirmation can endow people with more cognitive resource to cope with uncertainty. We tested this possibility with an event-related potential (ERP) study by examining how self-affirmation influences ambiguous feedback processing in a simple gambling task, which was used to investigate risk decision-making. We assigned 48 participants randomly to the affirmation and non-affirmation (i.e., control) groups. All participants accepted the manipulation first and then completed the gambling task with an electroencephalogram (EEG) recording, in which participants might receive a positive (winning), negative (losing), or ambiguous (unknown valence) outcome after they made a choice. We considered both the feedback-related negativity (FRN) and P3 components elicited by the outcome feedback, which reflected the amount of cognitive resources being invested in the early and late stages of the outcome feedback processing, respectively. ERP results showed that ambiguous feedback elicited a larger FRN among affirmed participants than unaffirmed participants but exerted no influence on the P3. This finding suggests that self-affirmation may help coping with uncertainty by enhancing the early processing of uncertainty.

Current assistive technologies need complicated, cumbersome, and expensive equipment, which are not user-friendly, not portable, and often require extensive fine motor control. Our approach aims at solving these problems by developing, a compact, non-obtrusive and ergonomic wearable device, to measure signals associated with human physiological gestures, and thereafter generate useful commands to interact with the environment. Our innovation uses machine learning and non- invasive biosensors on top of the ears to identify eye movements and facial expressions with over 95% accuracy. Users can control different applications, such as a robot, powered wheelchair, cell phone, smart home, or other Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Combined with VR headset and hand gesture recognition devices, user can use our technology to control a camera-mounted robot (e.g., telepresence robot, drones, or any robotic manipulator) to navigate around the environment in first-person's view simply by eye movements and facial expressions. It enables a human- intuitive way of interaction totally 'touch-free'. The experimental results show satisfactory performance in different applications, which can be a powerful tool to help disabled people interact with the environment and measure other physiological signals as a universal controller and health monitoring device.

This paper proposed a method using eye saccade and facial expression physiological signals to interpret human intentions as a mean to operate wearable robots. Our approach used only two electrodes placed on top of the left and right ears to identify high fidelity physiological signals. With the developed machine learning algorithms, we can achieve over 97% accuracy of the classified various human eye-facial gestures, which allows us to build up intuitive Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) strategies to let disable people operate exoskeletons or wheelchairs easily and naturally. This method also enables the design of earbud-like wearable device, which can be worn comfortably for long hours to provide ubiquitous controllability to operate external smart devices. The ultimate goal of this research is to seamlessly merge human and machine all together by just using a simple wearable device.

The decomposition kinetics of the pure polyaniline (PANI), PANI/CeO2 composites, and PANI/Dy2O3 composites were investigated using thermogravimetry (TG) technique under air atmosphere. Two isoconversional methods and multiple linear regression method were used for the evaluation of kinetic parameters from the TG data of different heating rates. The estimation of activation energy values shows that the addition of CeO2 significantly enhances the thermal stability of PANI matrix, while the presence of Dy2O3 slightly reduces the thermal stability of the final composites. The kinetic analysis results show that the kinetic model for the decomposition process for PANI is D3 and for the two kinds of composites is F1–D1.

A simple route of in situ polymerization by the chemical oxidation method was successfully employed to synthesize polyaniline/dysprosium oxide (PANI/Dy2O3) composites. The synthesized materials were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectra and X-ray diffraction. The thermal stability of the composite was studied by thermogravimetry (TG). The electrochemical performance of the composites was investigated by cyclic voltammetry and alternating current impedance spectroscopy with a three-electrode system. TG results suggested that the thermal stability of PANI/Dy2O3 composites showed a tendency to first increase and then decrease with increasing Dy2O3 amount. Electrochemical experiments indicated that the composite electrodes showed a lower capacitance than that of pure PANI, which may be attributed to the interaction between PANI and Dy2O3 in the composites.

In order to describe the influence of pr6o11 on thermal and electrochemical performance of polyaniline (pani), pani/pr6o11 composites were synthesized by in situ polymerization in the presence of sulfosalicylic acid (as dopant). the composites obtained was characterized by scanning electron microscope, fourier transform infrared spectra, and x-ray diffraction. the thermal stability of the composites was investigated by thermogravimetry and derivative thermogravimetry. finally, the comparative analysis on the electrochemical properties of pani/pr6o11 composites electrodes, such as cyclic voltammetry, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, and constant current charge-discharge test, was conducted under similar conditions. scanning electron microscope, infrared, and x-ray diffraction results show that interaction exists between pani and pr6o11, and the composites are more crystalline than pure pani. thermogravimetry and derivative thermogravimetry analyses indicate that pani/pr6o11 composites and pure pani have similar thermal stability. moreover, the studies regarded to capacitive properties show that the electrochemical performance of the composites is improved greatly when pr6o11 is added in small amount. however, with increasing the amount of pr6o11, the electrochemical performance of the composites become worse, which indicates a large amount of pr6o11 has a negative effect on the capacitance. these results suggest that pani is still in the conductive form after inserting the pr6o11, and the capacitance performance of pani can be improved only by a low percentage of pr6o11. copyright (c) 2013 john wiley & sons, ltd.

Polyaniline/rare earth oxide composites (PANI/La2O3 and PANI/Sm2O3) were synthesized by in situ polymerization at the presence of sulfosalicylic acid (as dopant). The composites obtained were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectra (FTIR), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The thermal stability of the composites was investigated by thermogravimetry (TG) and derivative thermogravimetry (DTG). The electrochemical performance of the composites was investigated by cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The results of FTIR, XRD, SEM, CV, and EIS show that the structure of composite has changed greatly when rare earth oxide content is >0.7 g (PANI/La2O3[w/w(92.7/7.3)] and PANI/Sm2O3[w/w(96.2/3.8)]) and the PANI in the composite has transformed into pernigraniline base (non-conducting state) from emeraldine base (conducting state). TG-DTG analysis indicates that the thermal stability of composite was higher than pure PANI, which is attributed to the interaction between PANI and rare earth oxide.

Polyaniline (PANI)/CeO2 composites were prepared by adding CeO2 powder into the polymerization reaction mixture of aniline. Fourier transform infrared spectra (FTIR) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) were used to characterize the composites. Thermogravimetry (TG) and derivative thermogravimetry (DTG) were used to study the thermal stability of the composites. IR and XRD results show that interaction exists between PANI and CeO2. This interaction maybe is hydrogen bonding action between the hydroxyl groups on the surface of the CeO2 and the imine groups in the PANI molecular chains. TG–DTG analysis indicates that the thermal stability of the composites is higher than that of the pure PANI. The improvement in the thermal stability of the composites is attributed to the interaction between PANI and CeO2, which restricts the thermal motion of PANI chains and shields the degradation of PANI in the composites.

System identification is the basis for control system design. For linear time-invariant systems have a variety of identification methods, identification methods for nonlinear dynamic system is still in the exploratory stage. Nonlinear identification method based on neural network is a simple and effective general method that does not require too much priori experience about the system to be identified. Through training and learning, the network weights are corrected to achieve the purpose of system identification. The paper is about the identification of multivariable nonlinear dynamic system based on PID neural network. The structure and algorithm of PID neural network are introduced and the properties and characteristics are analyzed. The system identification is completed and the results are fast convergence.

A simple route of in situ polymerization by the chemical oxidation method was successfully employed to synthesize polyaniline/dysprosium oxide (PANI/Dy2O3) composites. The synthesized materials were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectra and X-ray diffraction. The thermal stability of the composite was studied by thermogravimetry (TG). The electrochemical performance of the composites was investigated by cyclic voltammetry and alternating current impedance spectroscopy with a three-electrode system. TG results suggested that the thermal stability of PANI/Dy2O3 composites showed a tendency to first increase and then decrease with increasing Dy2O3 amount. Electrochemical experiments indicated that the composite electrodes showed a lower capacitance than that of pure PANI, which may be attributed to the interaction between PANI and Dy2O3 in the composites.

Currently, many effective techniques have been proposed to estimate the parameters of tampering operations. Most of them consider the situation that an image is tampered by only one operation. However, multiple manipulation operations are always used to tamper an image in our daily life. Moreover, since the tampering traces of previous operations may be weakened or eliminated by later ones, the detecting accuracy of methods used for detecting single operations would be reduced. In this paper, we propose a new method to estimate the parameters of operations in different manipulation chains. Especially, we first investigate the correlation of operations and divide the degree of interactions between them into uncoupled and coupled. Furthermore, resizing and median filtering are adopted to reveal the assessment framework. Meanwhile, we propose well-directed features including energy density of difference-image to estimate operation parameters. The experiment proves the effectiveness of our method.