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For certified public accountant (CPA) firms to maintain high levels of competent assistance, achievement evaluations are essential. However, because aspects like customer fulfilment, productivity, economic success, and legality include personal and interconnected assessments, standard approaches to assessment frequently fall short of addressing the inherent complexity and uncertainty in decision-making. To overcome these issues, this paper suggests a unique multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model based on complex T-Spherical fuzzy Frank (CTSFF) operations. The approach uses complex T-spherical fuzzy Frank Weighted Averaging (CTSFFWA) and complex T-spherical fuzzy Frank Weighted Geometric (CTSFFWG) operators to manage multi-attribute assessment under unclear and uncertain circumstances. The ability to handle subjective and unclear data while integrating interconnections between several assessment requirements is lacking in the practical assessment methods currently used by CPA companies. This restriction makes obtaining trustworthy and useful information for enhancing company operations more difficult. The intricacy of contemporary CPA operations, such as the increasing requirement to consider qualitative assessments and a range of client viewpoints, calls for creating a strong and flexible structure to support decision-making. The inability of conventional fuzzy frameworks to accurately represent these subtleties necessitates using sophisticated techniques. To retain mathematical accuracy while accounting for ambiguity via membership, non-membership, and abstention degrees, the suggested model uses CTSFF logic. A thorough assessment of CPA company achievement through various factors is made possible by the improved aggregation possibilities introduced using CTSFFWA and CTSFFWG operators. Flexibility evaluation is additionally built into the framework to guarantee the findings’ reliability and pinpoint ideal factor setups. This research gives decision-makers a versatile instrument to modify the framework for various expert business sectors. It offers a methodical and comprehensive way to assess the efficiency of CPA firms. This investigation makes an essential contribution to the discipline of decision-making under uncertainty by filling in the deficiencies in the assessment methods that are currently in use.

Abstract Plant viral diseases cause great losses in agricultural production. Virus cross-protection is a strategy in which a mild virus is employed to shield plants against subsequent infections by severe viral strains. However, this approach is restricted to protection against the same viruses. In this study, we observed that pre-inoculation with apple geminivirus (AGV) reduced the accumulation of secondarily infected heterologous viruses, such as cucumber mosaic virus, potato virus X, and tobacco mosaic virus in Nicotiana benthamiana, tomato, and pepper plants. Transcriptional expression analysis showed that autophagy-related genes were transcriptionally up-regulated upon AGV inoculation at an early stage of infection. Accordingly, autophagic activity was observed to be elevated following AGV infection. Interestingly, AGV accumulation was reduced in autophagy-deficient plants, suggesting that autophagy activation promotes AGV infection in the plant. Moreover, pre-inoculation with AGV provided cross-protection against infection with a phytopathogenic bacterium (Pseudomonas syringae) and fungus (Botrytis cinerea) in Nicotiana species. In summary, our study showed that AGV, an asymptomatic virus, could protect plants against severe viral, fungal, and bacterial diseases to some extent through the activation of autophagy pathways, highlighting its potential as a biocontrol agent for managing a wide range of plant crop diseases in the field.

IntroductionAnaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) plays a vital role in the global nitrogen cycle by oxidizing ammonium to nitrogen under anaerobic environments. However, the existence, abundance, and diversity of anammox bacteria between different temperatures are less studied, particularly in purple paddy soils.Methods13C-DNA stable-isotope probe combined with Illumina MiSeq high-throughput sequencing was employed to explore soil abundance and diversity of anammox bacteria. In doing so, 40–60 cm depth soils from typical purple paddy soils in Chongqing, southwest China, were cultured under 12CO2-labeled and 13CO2-labeled at 35°C, 25°C, 15°C, and 5°C for 56 days.Results and DiscussionAnammox bacteria were not labeled at all by 13CO2 at 5°C. The highest abundance of anammox bacteria was found at 25°C (3.52 × 106~3.66 × 106 copies·g−1 dry soil), followed by 35°C and 15°C (2.01 × 106~2.37 × 106 copies·g−1 dry soil) and almost no increase at 5°C. The relative abundance of Candidatus Jettenia sp. was higher at 25°C and 15°C, while Candidatus Brocadia sp. was higher at 35°C and 5°C. Our results revealed differences in anammox bacteria at different temperatures in purple paddy soils, which could provide a better understanding of soil N cycling regulated by anammox bacteria.

Biological experiments performed in space crafts like space stations, space shuttles, and recoverable satellites has enabled extensive spaceflight life investigations (SLIs). In particular, SLIs have revealed distinguished space effects on microbial growth, survival, metabolite production, biofilm formation, virulence development and drug resistant mutations. These provide unique perspectives to ground-based microbiology and new opportunities for industrial pharmaceutical and metabolite productions. SLIs are with specialized experimental setups, analysis methods and research outcomes, which can be accessed by established databases National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Life Science Data Archive, Erasmus Experiment Archive, and NASA GeneLab. The increasing research across diverse fields may be better facilitated by databases of convenient search facilities and categorized presentation of comprehensive contents. We therefore developed the Space Life Investigation Database (SpaceLID) http://bidd.group/spacelid/, which collected SLIs from published academic papers. Currently, this database provides detailed menu search facilities and categorized contents about the studied phenomena, materials, experimental procedures, analysis methods, and research outcomes of 448 SLIs of 90 species (microbial, plant, animal, human), 81 foods and 106 pharmaceuticals, including 232 SLIs not covered by the established databases. The potential applications of SpaceLID are illustrated by the examples of published experimental design and bioinformatic analysis of spaceflight microbial phenomena.

With the upgrade of the transportation capacity of some existing freight tracks to heavy-haul railways in China, there is increased use of heavy-haul trains with larger axle loads and traction masses than in the past. The existing railway bridges not only bear the increased loads of heavy-haul trains but also experience much more loading times. This situation greatly affects the normal use and even the bearing capacity of reinforced concrete bridges and leads to concrete cracks and decreased flexural rigidity of the girders. As a result, the ultimate bearing capacity and operational safety of girders must be reasonably strengthened. Two reinforced concrete T-girders with a span of 12 m were demolished after 20 years of service. One of the T-girders, without any treatment, was selected for the destructive bending test, and the failure process and actual ultimate bearing capacity were obtained. The other girder was strengthened by the tensioning of prestressed carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) plates which showed the advantages of high tensile stress more than 2600 MPa, light mass, anti-corrosion and good resistance to durability. Then a destructive comparative bending test was performed to verify the strengthening effect. The research results showed that the actual ultimate flexural load capacity of the unstrengthened T-girder was 1.58 times the original design load capacity. After the T-girder was strengthened by prestressed CFRP plates, the cracking moment and actual ultimate flexural load capacity were 30.5% and 16.4% higher, respectively, which could decrease the cracking degree and deflection-span ratio of the T-girder under the operating conditions of heavy-haul trains. The strengthened T-girder showed a desirable serviceable limit state and ultimate flexural bearing capacity for KM98 trains with 300 kN axles.

Introduction: Anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) plays a vital role in the global nitrogen cycle by oxidizing ammonium to nitrogen under anaerobic environments. However, the existence, abundance, and diversity of anammox bacteria between different temperatures are less studied, particularly in purple paddy soils. Methods: 13C-DNA stable-isotope probe combined with Illumina MiSeq high-throughput sequencing was employed to explore soil abundance and diversity of anammox bacteria. In doing so, 40-60 cm depth soils from typical purple paddy soils in Chongqing, southwest China, were cultured under 12CO2-labeled and 13CO2-labeled at 35°C, 25°C, 15°C, and 5°C for 56 days. Results and Discussion: Anammox bacteria were not labeled at all by 13CO2 at 5°C. The highest abundance of anammox bacteria was found at 25°C (3.52 x 106 -3.66 x 106 copies·g-1 dry soil), followed by 35°C and 15°C (2.01 x 106 -2.37 x 106 copies·g-1 dry soil) and almost no increase at 5°C. The relative abundance of Candidatus Jettenia sp. was higher at 25°C and 15°C, while Candidatus Brocadia sp. was higher at 35°C and 5°C. Our results revealed differences in anammox bacteria at different temperatures in purple paddy soils, which could provide a better understanding of soil N cycling regulated by anammox bacteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Space-time video super-resolution (STVSR) serves the purpose to reconstruct high-resolution high-frame-rate videos from their low-resolution low-frame-rate counterparts. Recent approaches utilize end-to-end deep learning models to achieve STVSR. They first interpolate intermediate frame features between given frames, then perform local and global refinement among the feature sequence, and finally increase the spatial resolutions of these features. However, in the most important feature interpolation phase, they only capture spatial-temporal information from the most adjacent frame features, ignoring modelling long-term spatial-temporal correlations between multiple neighbouring frames to restore variable-speed object movements and maintain long-term motion continuity. In this paper, we propose a novel long-term temporal feature aggregation network (LTFA-Net) for STVSR. Specifically, we design a long-term mixture of experts (LTMoE) module for feature interpolation. LTMoE contains multiple experts to extract mutual and complementary spatial-temporal information from multiple consecutive adjacent frame features, which are then combined with different weights to obtain interpolation results using several gating nets. Next, we perform local and global feature refinement using the Locally-temporal Feature Comparison (LFC) module and bidirectional deformable ConvLSTM layer, respectively. Experimental results on two standard benchmarks, Adobe240 and GoPro, indicate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach over state of the art.