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Arising from the urachal epithelial lining, the urachal carcinoma is a rare tumor, which accounts for 0.35%–0.7% of all bladder cancers. Urachal carcinoma has a higher predilection in men with median age around 50–60 years old. The most common clinical symptom is intermittent painless gross hematuria, and less‐reported presentations include suprapubic mass, dysuria, lower abdominal pain, and frequent urination. The pathological study reveals that most cases (90%) are categorized as an intestinal adenocarcinoma subtype, while other morphological variants, including mucinous, enteric, signet ring cell subtype, not otherwise specified (NOS), squamous cell carcinoma, urothelial carcinoma, sarcoma, small cell carcinoma, and undifferentiated carcinoma, totally account for about 10%. The urachal carcinoma occurs mostly in the lower segment of urachal tube and bladder dome or anterior wall. However, due to the classically silent nature of the early lesions and high malignancy, urachal carcinoma patients are commonly diagnosed in advanced stage. Treatment modalities for local recurrence or metastatic urachal cancer include surgery and chemotherapy (cisplatin and 5‐FU based‐chemotherapy). Meanwhile, the EGFR‐, PD‐L1‐, and MEK‐targeted therapies in the metastatic urachal carcinoma cases showed satisfactory response. We presented a rare case of Sheldon stage IVB urachal adenocarcinoma with pulmonary metastasis, and the patient had no progression of disease 6 months following surgical treament without chemoradiotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) typically present with a complex anatomical distribution, often accompanied by insidious symptoms. This combination contributes to its high incidence and poor prognosis. It is now understood that the immune features of cellular components within the tumor ecosystem and their complex interactions are critical factors influencing both tumor progression and the effective immune response. Methods: We obtained single-cell RNA sequencing data of 26,496 cells from three tumor tissues and five normal tissues and performed subsequent analyses. Immunohistochemical staining on tumor sections was used to validate the presence of malignant cells. Additionally, we included bulk RNA sequencing data from 502 HNSCC patients. Kaplan–Meier analysis and the log-rank test were employed to assess predictors of patient outcomes. Results: We identified three epithelial subclusters exhibiting immune-related features. These subclusters promoted the infiltration of T cells, dendritic cells, and monocytes into the tumor microenvironment. Additionally, cancer-associated fibroblasts displayed tumor-promoting and angiogenesis characteristics, contrasting with the predominant antigen-presenting and inflammatory roles observed in fibroblasts from normal tissues. Furthermore, tumor endothelial subsets exhibited a double-sided effect, promoting tumor progression and enhancing the effectiveness of immune response. Finally, follicular helper T cells and T helper 17 cells were found to be significantly correlated with improved outcomes in HNSCC patients. These CD4+ T cell subpopulations could promote the anti-tumor immune response by recruiting and activating B and T cells. Conclusion: Our findings provide deeper insights into the immune features of the tumor ecosystem and reveal the prognostic significance of follicular helper T cells and T helper 17 cells. These findings may pave the way for the development of therapeutic approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the relationship between media use and breast cancer screening intentions by integrating the celebrity identification model and the theory of reasoned action. It tests an integrative model with survey data from 315 U.S. adult women. The study found that media use for breast cancer information was positively associated with parasocial interaction (PSI) and identification with celebrities who have or have had breast cancer; PSI was positively associated with attitudes, descriptive and injunctive norms in breast cancer screening, while identification with celebrities was positively associated with descriptive norms; attitudes, injunctive norms and descriptive norms were positively associated with breast cancer screening intentions. The study supports the mediating effect of PSI, identification, attitudes, and descriptive and injunctive norms on the association between media use and breast cancer prevention intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The Chinese visceral adiposity index (CVAI) is a new index to evaluate visceral adipose tissue in the Chinese population. Arterial stiffness (AS) is a kind of degeneration of the large arteries, and obesity is an essential contributing factor to AS. Our study aimed to explore the longitudinal association between CVAI and the risk of AS and to compare the predictive power of CVAI, body mass index (BMI), and waist circumference (WC) for AS. Methods: Between 2010 and 2020, a total of 14,877 participants participating in at least two brachial-ankle pulse wave velocity (baPWV) measurements from the Kailuan study were included. The Cox proportional hazard regression models were performed to evaluate the longitudinal association between CVAI and the risk of AS. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was calculated to compare the predictive power of CVAI, BMI, and WC for AS. Results: After adjusting for potential confounding factors, CVAI was significantly associated with the risk of AS. Compared with the first CVAI quartile, the hazard ratios (HR) and 95% CI of the second, third, and fourth quartiles were 1.30 (1.09–1.56), 1.37 (1.15–1.63), and 1.49 (1.24–1.78), respectively. The area under ROC curve of CVAI was 0.661, significantly higher than BMI (AUC: 0.582) and WC (AUC: 0.606). Conclusion: CVAI may be a reliable indicator to identify high-risk groups of AS in the Chinese general population, and the predictive power of CVAI for AS was better than BMI and WC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] Anti-tumor therapies reliant on reactive oxygen species (ROS) as primary therapeutic agents face challenges due to a limited oxygen substrate. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is particularly hindered by inherent hypoxia, while chemodynamic therapy (CDT) encounters obstacles from insufficient endogenous hydrogen peroxide (H 2 O 2) levels. In this study, we engineered biodegradable tumor microenvironment (TME)-activated hollow mesoporous MnO 2 -based nanotheranostic agents, designated as HAMnO 2 A. This construct entails loading artemisinin (ART) into the cavity and surface modification with a mussel-inspired polymer ligand, namely hyaluronic acid-linked poly(ethylene glycol)-diethylenetriamine-conjugated (3,4-dihydroxyphenyl) acetic acid, and the photosensitizer Chlorin e6 (mPEG-HA-Dien-(Dhpa/Ce6)), facilitating dual-modal imaging-guided PDT/CDT synergistic therapy. In vitro experimentation revealed that HAMnO 2 A exhibited ideal physiological stability and enhanced cellular uptake capability via CD44-mediated endocytosis. Additionally, it was demonstrated that accelerated endo -lysosomal escape through the pH-dependent protonation of Dien. Within the acidic and highly glutathione (GSH)-rich TME, the active component of HAMnO 2 A, MnO 2 , underwent decomposition, liberating oxygen and releasing both Mn2+ and ART. This process alleviates hypoxia within the tumor region and initiates a Fenton-like reaction through the combination of ART and Mn2+, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of PDT and CDT by generating increased singlet oxygen (1O 2) and hydroxyl radicals (•OH). Moreover, the presence of Mn2+ ions enabled the activation of T 1 -weighted magnetic resonance imaging. In vivo findings further validated that HAMnO 2 A displayed meaningful tumor-targeting capabilities, prolonged circulation time in the bloodstream, and outstanding efficacy in restraining tumor growth while inducing minimal damage to normal tissues. Hence, this nanoplatform serves as an efficient all-in-one solution by facilitating the integration of multiple functions, ultimately enhancing the effectiveness of tumor theranostics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dysomma anguillare is a demersal eel widespread distributing in tropical waters of the Indo-West Pacific and Atlantic. As an important component of the coastal fishery and marine ecosystem, the lack of genomic information for this species severely restricts the progress of relevant researches. In this study, the abecedarian genome-wide characteristics and phylogenetic relationships analyses were carried out based on next-generation sequencing (NGS) platform. The revised genome size was approximately 1 310 Mb, with the largest scaffold length reaching 23 878 bp through K-mer (K = 17) method. The heterozygosity, repetitive rate and average GC content were about 0.94%, 51.93% and 42.23%, respectively. A total of 1 160 104 microsatellite motifs were identified from the de novo assembled genome of D. anguillare, in which dinucleotide repeats accounted for the largest proportion (592 234, 51.05%), the highest occurrence frequency (14.58%) as well as the largest relative abundance (379.27/Mb). The high-polymorphic and moderate-polymorphic loci composed around 73% of the total single sequence repeats (SSRs), showing a latent capacity for subsequent population genetic structure and genetic diversity appraisal researches. Another byproduct of whole-genome sequencing, the double-stranded and circular mitogenome (16 690 bp) was assembled to investigate the evolutionary relationships of D. anguillare. The phylogenic tree constructed with maximum likelihood (ML) method showed that D. anguillare was closely related to Synaphobranchidae species, and the molecular systematic results further supported classical taxonomy status of D. anguillare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital orthodontic treatment monitoring has been gaining increasing attention in the past decade. However, current methods based on deep learning still face difficult challenges. Transformer, due to its excellent ability to model long-term dependencies, can be applied to the task of tooth point cloud registration. Nonetheless, most transformer-based point cloud registration networks suffer from two problems. First, they lack the embedding of credible geometric information, resulting in learned features that are not geometrically discriminative and blur the boundary between inliers and outliers. Second, the attention mechanism lacks continuous downsampling during geometric transformation invariant feature extraction at the superpixel level, thereby limiting the field of view and potentially limiting the model’s perception of local and global information. In this paper, we propose GeoSwin, which uses a novel geometric window transformer to achieve accurate registration of tooth point clouds in different stages of orthodontic treatment. This method uses the point distance, normal vector angle, and bidirectional spatial angular distances as the input geometric embedding of transformer, and then uses a proposed variable multiscale attention mechanism to achieve geometric information perception from local to global perspectives. Experiments on the Shing3D Dental Dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and that it outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches across multiple metrics. Our code and models are available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As escalating environmental pollution results from economic development, the green supply chain is vital in enhancing ecological quality. In light of the rapid growth of online shopping, the dual-channel supply chain has gained significant popularity. Governments have implemented policies to achieve carbon peaks and neutrality worldwide. Considering green quality and channel preferences, this study constructs a Stackelberg model led by the manufacturer within a dual-channel supply chain to compare the effects under two government subsidy strategies. A Stackelberg game-theoretic approach is applied to analyze the model. The findings indicate the following: (1) Increases in the subsidy coefficient can increase product greenness and the overall profit in both subsidy strategies, which makes sense; (2) When direct sales channels become dominant, subsidizing the manufacturer proves superior to subsidizing the retailer in terms of promoting green quality and overall profit, which extends existing studies of government subsidy decisions. Furthermore, subsidizing the retailer may negatively affect the total supply chain profit; (3) Consistent with previous literature, intense competition between manufacturers and retailers is expected to enhance the overall profit of the supply chain; (4) Interestingly, customer preference for online channels does not influence product green quality under manufacturer subsidization strategies but exhibits a negative impact under retailer subsidization strategies. Finally, this research provides managerial implications for decision-makers and potential issues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To explore the role of interleukin (IL)‐17 in connective tissue disease‐associated pulmonary arterial hypertension (CTD‐PAH) and to investigate its possible mechanism on pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells (PASMCs). Methods: Enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) were used to compare levels of serum IL‐17 in patients with CTD‐PAH and healthy controls (HCs). After treatment for 3 months, the serum IL‐17 levels were tested in CTD‐PAH. ELISA and immunohistochemistry were used to compare levels of serum IL‐17 and numbers of pulmonary artery IL‐17+ cells, respectively, in a rat model of monocrotaline‐induced PAH and untreated rats. Proliferation, migration, and inflammatory factors expression of PASMCs were assessed after stimulation with different concentrations of IL‐17 for various time periods. Proteins in the mitogen‐activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway were examined by western blot. Results: Levels of IL‐17 were upregulated in patients with CTD‐PAH compared to HCs. After 3 months of treatment, serum IL‐17 levels were downregulated with pulmonary artery pressure amelioration. Moreover, serum IL‐17 levels and numbers of IL‐17+ cells infiltrating lung arterioles were increased in PAH model rats. IL‐17 could dose‐ and time‐dependently promote proliferation and migration of PASMCs as well as time‐dependently induce IL‐6 and intercellular cell adhesion molecule‐1 (ICAM‐1) expression. The levels of MKK6 increased after IL‐17 treatment. Inhibition of MAPK decreased proliferation of PASMCs. Conclusion: Levels of IL‐17 may increase in CTD‐PAH, and IL‐17 promotes proliferation, migration, and secretion of IL‐6 and ICAM in PASMCs, respectively, which likely involves the p‐38 MAPK pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores efficient methods for computing eigenvalues and function values associated with Chebyshev-type prolate spheroidal wave functions (CPSWFs). Applying the expansion of the factor e i c x y and the inherent properties of Chebyshev polynomials, we present an exact and stable numerical approximation for the exact eigenvalues of the integral operator to CPSWFs. Additionally, we illustrate the efficiency of employing fast Fourier transform and barycentric interpolation techniques for computing CPSWF values and related quantities, which are essential for various numerical applications based on these functions. The analysis is supported by numerical examples, providing validation for the accuracy and reliability of our proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important equipment for the separation, store, and transport of the oil and natural gas in energy industry, the pressure vessels are subjected to harsh service environments of sulfide stress cracking (SSC). In this work, the effect of the cooling rate on the SSC susceptibility of a Q345 pressure vessel steel is studied. A pronounced distinction in microstructure is presented as the cooling rate is increased from ≈1 to ≈15 °C s−1. At ≈1 °C s−1, the microstructure is consisted of polygonal‐like ferrite and distinct banded pearlite. At ≈5 °C s−1, the microstructure is consisted of polygonal‐like ferrite and faintly banded pseudo‐pearlite. At ≈15 °C s−1, the microstructure is acicular ferrite with a complete elimination of banded structure. The cooling rate decides the level of the banded structure. As the cooling rate increases, the banded structure becomes relatively slight and even disappears. Strength in sort ascending is ≈1, ≈ 5, and ≈15 °C s−1. The SSC failure happens at ≈1 and ≈5 °C s−1, while does not happen at ≈15 °C s−1. The strength is not the only dominant factor responsible for the SSC failure. The SSC is preferentially generated at the banded structure. The elimination of the banded structure is necessary to improve the SSC resistance of the Q345 pressure vessel steel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leaf mustard is rich in bioactive components such as polyphenols and glucosinolates, which reportedly have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities. Here, in this study, we investigated the potential antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects of fresh leaf mustard extract (FrLME) and fermented leaf mustard extract (FeLME) using a lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced in vitro antioxidant model and LPS-induced RAW264.7 inflammation model. The results showed that both FrLME and FeLME exhibit antioxidant activity in ABTS, DPPH, and FRAP assays in linear. In the LPS-induced inflammatory cells, analyses of SOD and GSH-PX activities indicated that the FrLME group exhibited significantly higher activity compared to the FeLME group (p < 0.05). A comparative assessment of the extracts indicated that the levels of nitrites (NO) and inflammatory cytokines (TNF-α, IL-1β, and IL-6) were considerably lower in cells treated with FrLME than in those treated with FeLME (p < 0.05). Moreover, treatment with FrLME and FeLME effectively mitigated cellular inflammation, as evidenced by the significantly reduced mRNA and protein expression of the TLR4-NF-κB p65-COX-2/iNOS pathway markers during LPS-induced inflammation. Notably, extracts from fresh leaves demonstrated more pronounced inhibitory effects compared to those from fermented leaf mustard. The outcomes of this study establish a foundation for exploring the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory mechanisms of leaf mustard in more intricate models of inflammatory diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Stress hyperglycemia ratio (SHR) reflects a true acute hyperglycemic state during acute basilar artery occlusion (ABAO). We aimed to investigate the association between SHR and short-term and long-term outcomes in patients with ABAO receiving endovascular treatment (EVT). Methods: We selected patients treated with EVT from the BASILAR study, a nationwide prospective registry. A total 250 patients with documented glucose and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1C) values at admission were included. SHR was calculated as the ratio of glucose/HbA1C. All 250 patients completed 90 days of follow-up and 234 patients (93.6%) completed 1 year of follow-up. The primary outcome was the favorable outcome defined as modified Rankin Scale (mRS) score ≤ 3 at 90 days. Safety outcomes included mortality at 90 days and 1 year, and intracranial hemorrhage. Results: Among the 250 patients included, patients with higher tertiles of SHR were associated with decreased odds of a favorable functional outcome at 90 days (adjusted OR, 0.26; 95% CI, 0.12–0.56; P = 0.001 and adjusted OR, 0.37; 95% CI, 0.18–0.80; P = 0.01; respectively) and 1 year (adjusted OR, 0.34; 95% CI, 0.16–0.73; P = 0.006 and adjusted OR, 0.38; 95% CI, 0.18–0.82; P = 0.01; respectively) after adjusting for confounding covariates. The mortality was comparable across tertiles of SHR groups at 90 days and 1 year. Conclusions: Our study showed that SHR was associated with a decreased probability of favorable functional outcome both at 90 days and 1 year after EVT in patients with ABAO. The relationship was more pronounced in non-diabetes patients. Trial registration: Clinical Trial Registry Identifier: ChiCTR1800014759 (November 12, 2013). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eukaryotic translation initiation factor 4E (eIF4E), which plays a pivotal role in initiating translation in eukaryotic organisms, is often hijacked by the viral genome‐linked protein to facilitate the infection of potyviruses. In this study, we found that the naturally occurring amino acid substitution D71G in eIF4E is widely present in potyvirus‐resistant watermelon accessions and disrupts the interaction between watermelon eIF4E and viral genome‐linked protein of papaya ringspot virus‐watermelon strain, zucchini yellow mosaic virus or watermelon mosaic virus. Multiple sequence alignment and protein modelling showed that the amino acid residue D71 located in the cap‐binding pocket of eIF4E is strictly conserved in many plant species. The mutation D71G in watermelon eIF4E conferred resistance against papaya ringspot virus‐watermelon strain and zucchini yellow mosaic virus, and the equivalent mutation D55G in tobacco eIF4E conferred resistance to potato virus Y. Therefore, our finding provides a potential precise target for breeding plants resistant to multiple potyviruses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

X-ray baggage inspection automatically determines whether there are prohibited items in passenger luggage and has recently achieved good progress due to the development of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). However, the performance of X-ray baggage inspection degrades with heavily occluded and cluttered baggage owing to the interaction of the imaged objects. Inspired by the idea that discriminant cues may still exist in multiscale perceptions, discrepancies among different classes, and associations among different tasks, we propose a novel approach that exploits pseudo semantic masks to enhance the discriminant ability of feature representations. Moreover, the features at neighboring scales interact to further explore context information. We verify our method on the publicly available SIXray, OPIXray, and HIXray datasets. The results show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art X-ray baggage inspection methods by 1.02% and 0.85% in terms of mean average precision (mAP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection of small infrared targets with dense distributions and large-scale variations is an extremely challenging problem. This paper proposes a multi-stage, multi-scale local feature fusion method for infrared small target detection to address this problem. The method is based on multi-stage and multi-scale local feature fusion. Firstly, considering the significant variation in target sizes, ResNet-18 is utilized to extract image features at different stages. Then, for each stage, multi-scale feature pyramids are employed to obtain corresponding multi-scale local features. Secondly, to enhance the detection rate of densely distributed targets, the multi-stage and multi-scale features are progressively fused and concatenated to form the final fusion results. Finally, the fusion results are fed into the target detector for detection. The experimental results for the SIRST and MDFA demonstrate that the proposed method effectively improves the performance of infrared small target detection. The proposed method achieved mIoU values of 63.43% and 46.29% on two datasets, along with F-measure values of 77.62% and 63.28%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: A20 may be a neuroprotective factor. Herein, we aimed to investigate whether serum A20 levels were associated with disease severity, delayed cerebral ischemia (DCI), and outcome after aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH). METHODS: In this prospective cohort study containing 112 aSAH patients and 112 controls, serum A20 levels were quantified. At 90 d poststroke, Modified Rankin Scale (MRS) scores =3 were defined as a poor outcome. All correlations and associations were assessed using multivariate analysis. RESULTS: Compared with controls, there was a significant elevation of serum A20 levels in patients (median 123.7 pg/mL vs. 25.8 pg/mL; P<0.001). Serum A20 levels were independently correlated with Hunt-Hess scores (ß 9.854; 95% confidence interval [95% CI] 2.481-17.227, P=0.009) and modified Fisher scores (ß 10.349, 95% CI 1.273-19.424, P=0.026). Independent associations were found between serum A20 levels and poor outcome (odds ratio [OR] 1.015, 95% CI 1.000-1.031, P=0.047) and DCI (OR 1.018, 95% CI 1.001-1.035, P=0.042). Areas under the curve for predicting poor outcome and DCI were 0.771 (95% CI 0.682-0.845) and 0.777 (95% CI 0.688-0.850), respectively. Serum A20 levels =128.15 pg/mL predicted poor outcome, with a sensitivity of 73.9% and specificity of 74.2%, and A20 levels =160.55 pg/mL distinguished the risk of DCI with 65.5% sensitivity and 89.2% specificity. Its ability to predict poor outcome and DCI was similar to those of Hunt-Hess scores and modified Fisher scores (both P>0.05). CONCLUSION: Enhanced serum A20 levels are significantly associated with stroke severity and poor clinical outcome after aSAH, implying that serum A20 may be a potential prognostic biomarker for aSAH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, virgin coconut oil (VCO) nanoemulsions were prepared by ultrasonication using a sodium caseinate (SC) and xanthan gum (XG) complex as an emulsifier. The stability and digestion characteristics of SC/XG–VCO emulsions formed by co-adsorption and SC–VCO–XG emulsions formed by layer adsorption were compared. The stability of the two emulsions was studied under different pH, ionic strength, heat treatment, freeze–thaw cycles, and storage conditions, and the droplet size and zeta potential were used as indicators to assess the stability. In addition, the stability of oxidation and the digestive properties of both emulsions were studied. It was found that the SC–VCO–XG emulsions had better environmental stability, oxidative stability, storage stability, and digestibility compared to SC/XG–VCO emulsions. This study has shown that the formation method of protein–polysaccharide stabilized emulsions has an impact on the stability and digestibility properties of the emulsions, and that the emulsion carriers constructed by layer adsorption are more suitable for subsequent industrial production and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are very few labeled datasets in speech emotion recognition. The reason is that emotion is subjective and requires much time for labeling experts to identify emotion categories, while the wav2vec2.0 model is a general model for obtaining speech representations through self-supervised training. Therefore, we try to apply it to speech-emotion recognition tasks. We propose a multimodal dual-branch transformer network. For the speech processing branch, first, we use wav2vec2.0 to extract speech features. Then, a fine-tuning strategy and a self-attention-based interlayer feature fusion strategy are used. Second, a fully convolutional classification network is used for emotion classification. Then, we use RoBERTa for text emotion recognition and bimodal fusion by an improved weighted Dempster–Shafer (DS) strategy. In addition, we propose an accuracy-weighted label smoothing method, which can improve recognition accuracy. We perform comprehensive experiments on two benchmarks: IEMOCAP and CASIA, covering both Chinese and English datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method has higher accuracy than state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peniophora is an old corticioid genus, from which two small satellite genera, Dendrophora and Duportella, were derived based on morphological differences. Molecular systematic studies showed that they belong to Peniophoraceae, Russulales, but the inter- and intra-generic phylogenetic relationships are still unclear. Moreover, the species diversity of this group in subtropical and tropical Asia has not been sufficiently investigated and studied. In this study, we carried out an intensive taxonomic and phylogenetic study on Peniophora sensu lato based on analyses of concatenated ITS1-5.8S-ITS2 (ITS, Internal Transcribed Spacer) and 28S (D1–D2 domains of nuc 28S rDNA) sequence data of all available species worldwide. In the phylogenetic trees, species of Peniophora s. l. (sensu lato) including types of Peniophora s.s. (sensu stricto), Dendrophora and Duportella were interspersed within a strongly supported clade. It means that the morphological delimitations of the three genera are not reliable, and they should be regarded as a large genus. As a result, eight species of Duportella were transferred to Peniophora, although five of them have not been sequenced. Four new distinct lineages, corresponding to Peniophora cremicolor, P. major, P. shenghuae and P. vietnamensis spp. nov., were recovered in the trees. Peniophora taiwanensis is treated as a later synonym of P. malaiensis based on morphological and molecular evidence. Duportella renispora is excluded from Peniophoraceae, because BLAST results of the ITS and 28S sequences of the holotype showed that it is closely related to Amylostereum. Descriptions and illustrations are provided for the four new species, and an identification key is given for all 25 species of Peniophora in China. Our results indicated that the species diversity of the corticioid fungi in Asia is rich and deserves further study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two over 80 wasp stings male victims appeared severe abnormal coagulation were consecutively examined by thromboelastography (TEG) guided with heparinase during hospitalization. However, the cause of coagulopathy remains unsolved. Rats were applied to establish a wasp-stung animal model highly resembled the manifestations of wasp-stung patients. According body surface area conversion, Sprague-Dawley rats were stung based on wasp sting numbers (0, 4, 8, 12 stings; n = 6 each) with various exposure times (0, 1, 3, 6 h) to determine the simulation of coagulopathy. The blood R, K values, and angle degree of wasp-stung rats were measured by TEG. The TEG profiles of stung rats were found to be concomitant with that of wasp-stung patients. Data showed that the endogenous heparinization of rats was time-dependent. Compared to the TEG profile of eight stings given rat, the coagulation time of 2 mm clot formation at 3 h (R value) was longer than that at 0 h. The coagulation time was prolonged with increasing sting numbers when compared to the various stings at 1, 3, and 6 h exposed. Interestingly, there was observed the peak coagulation at 3 h of eight stings. The Ck-standard and Ck-heparinase at 3 h after 8 stings given were R: 9.6–4.4 min; K: 3.8–1.8 min; angle degree: 49.8–68.0, respectively. The original data of R, K values and angle degree in two wasp-stung victims were 11.7–13.6 min, 4.3–5.5 min, and 41.2-32.8° in CK-standard, respectively; whereas those of the CK-heparinase groups were 5.6–6.7 min, 2.4–2.5 min, and 59.5–58.8°, correspondingly. Conclusively, this massive wasp-stung animal model can be applied to the investigations of pathogenesis and provides a clinical strategy or guideline for clinical intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on tooth surface design based on deep neural networks has recently achieved progress in terms of both accuracy and execution efficiency. However, unrealistic outputs are still a challenging issue, partially because of (1) the lack of semantic guidance, (2) the inability to discover and rectify false results, and (3) the lack of exploration of structural coherence in intermediate layers. In this paper, we present an approach to predict depth images for designed teeth based on a conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) by incorporating semantic guidance. Moreover, the uncertainty of semantic inference is employed to improve the model outputs, and a structural coherence loss is proposed for adversarial learning to enhance the discrimination capability of the network in intermediate layers. We evaluate the performance of our approach with the Shining3D tooth dataset. The experimental results show that our method produces better results than the other available approaches in terms of accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The eighth version of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (8th AJCC) system for anaplastic thyroid carcinoma (ATC) added lymph node (LN) metastasis as the staging element. This study aimed to explore the association between LN status and ATC's prognosis, identify the optimal LN index and establish a novel prognostic model. Design and Patients: Data of 199 ATC patients after surgery were collected from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database, then randomly divided into training and validation cohorts. Measurements: We compared the prognostic value of AJCC N status, number of positive LN (PLNN), ratio of LN (LNR) and log odds of positive LN (LODDS). We conducted univariate and multivariate Cox analyses to determine the independent prognostic factors for ATC, and constructed a novel prognostic model. The concordance index (C‐index), area under the receiver‐operating characteristic curve (AUC), calibration curves and decision curve analysis (DCA) were used to assess the nomogram's predictive performance. Results: LODDS showed the highest accuracy among four LN systems to predict overall survival (OS) for ATC. In the training cohort, the C‐index of the LODDS‐based nomogram was 0.738. The AUCs were 0.813, 0.850 and 0.869 for predicting 1‐, 2‐ and 3‐year OS, respectively. The calibration plots and DCA indicated the great clinical applicability of the model. The above results were verified in the validation cohort. Conclusions: LODDS showed better predictive performance than other LN schemes in ATC. The LODDS‐incorporated nomogram has the potential to more precisely predict the prognosis for ATC patients than the AJCC system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feiyun River (Rui’an section) is a tidal reach, and the design water levels within different return periods are difficult to determine. The POT analysis methods were used to study the water level maximums of the river section. The study results indicate that skew surges has a measurable impact on extreme water levels and are characterized by a sharp increase in wind speeds at the estuary, followed by a sudden decrease, leading to a significant storm surge event. When the return periods are 50 years, 100 years and 200 years, the corresponding water levels of Feiyun River (Rui’an section) are 5.59 m, 6.04 m and 6.49 m, respectively. The proportion of skew surges in extreme water levels increases with the return period length, and it exceeds 50% when the return period is 200 years. The calculation results based on skew surges are often more reasonable in long return periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant reduction in plasma concentration of cholesterol during early lactation is a common occurrence in high-yielding dairy cows. An insufficient synthesis of cholesterol in the liver has been linked to lipid accumulation caused by high concentrations of fatty acids during negative energy balance (NEB). As ruminant diets do not provide quantitative amounts of cholesterol for absorption, phytosterols such as β-sitosterol may serve to mitigate the shortfall in cholesterol within the liver during NEB. To gain mechanistic insights, primary hepatocytes were isolated from healthy female 1-day old calves for in vitro studies with or without 1.2 mM fatty acids (FA) to induce metabolic stress. Furthermore, hepatocytes were treated with 50 μM β-sitosterol with or without FA. Data were analyzed by one-way ANOVA with subsequent Bonferroni correction. Results revealed that calf hepatocytes treated with FA had greater content of non-esterified fatty acids (NEFA) and triacylglycerol (TAG), and greater mRNA and protein abundance of the lipid synthesis-related SREBF1 and FASN. In contrast, mRNA and protein of CPT1A (fatty acid oxidation) and the cholesterol metabolism-related targets SREBF2, HMGCR, ACAT2, APOA1, ABCA1 and ABCG5 was lower. Content of the antioxidant-related glutathione (GSH) and activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD) also was lower. Compared with FA challenge alone, 50 μM β-sitosterol led to greater mRNA and protein abundance of SREBF2, HMGCR, ACAT2 and ABCG5, and greater content of GSH and activity of SOD. In contrast, compared with the FA group, the mRNA and protein abundance of SREBF1 and ACC1 and the content of TAG and NEFA in the β-sitosterol + FA group were lower. Overall, β-sitosterol can promote cholesterol metabolism and reduce oxidative stress while reducing lipid accumulation in hepatocytes challenged with high concentrations of fatty acids. • High fatty acid load induces severe lipid accumulation and oxidative stress in hepatocytes and reduces cholesterol synthesis. • β-sitosterol promotes high fatty acid-induced cholesterol metabolism in hepatocytes. • β-sitosterol alleviates high fatty acid-induced lipid accumulation and oxidative stress in hepatocytes. • β-sitosterol triggers a potential new regulatory mechanism of cholesterol metabolism during negative energy balance in cows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Trust is positively associated with whether people are hesitant towards getting COVID-19 vaccine. • Trust in doctors and institutions were both important for White and Black Americans. • Trust in non-discrimination by medical providers was important for Black Americans. • Trust in social media was important for White Americans. Mass vaccination has been identified as the easiest way to combat the deadly spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease, yet many Americans are still hesitant to be vaccinated. To understand motivations behind why someone is vaccine hesitant, we conceptualized a theoretical model in which demographic variables are positively associated with four types of trust (i.e., trust in institutions, physicians, non-discrimination, and social media). These trust variables, in turn, are positively associated with the outcome variable of vaccine acceptance. A multi-group structural equation modeling analysis of survey data from 1008 U.S. adults suggested that trust in institutions and physicians were important for both White and Black Americans in whether they were vaccine accepting or hesitant, while trust in non-discrimination was important for Black Americans and trust in social media was important for White Americans. Implications of the findings and how they can inform future vaccine campaigns are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring the influence range of early cities is significant for understanding the mechanisms behind ancient settlement systems and human-environment interactions. Due to a lack of effective research methods, the evolution processes and impact mechanisms of the influence ranges of prehistoric cities are still ambiguous. In this study, we chose the Songshan Mountain region for research, which witnessed the origin and development of Chinese civilization. Using GIS spatial analyses such as the 'average nearest neighbor' and 'Thiessen polygon', we explored the spatial-temporal distributions and influence ranges of Neolithic-Bronze Age cities in the region. The roles of human culture and the natural environment in the process were also investigated. The results indicated that the spatial distributions of early cities were random during the Yangshao (7000–5000 BP) and Longshan (5000–4000 BP) cultures. During the Erlitou culture (3800–3500 BP) and Shang Dynasty (3600–3046 BP), the spatial distributions changed into dispersed models. During the Zhou Dynasty (3046–2256 BP), the spatial distribution model was random again. Correspondingly, the influence range of early cities during the Erlitou culture is the largest, followed by those of the Longshan culture, Yangshao culture, Shang Dynasty, and Zhou Dynasty. This is different from the conventional view that the ancient city's influence range continuously expands as time advances. Both the natural environment and human culture are believed to impact this evolutional process. Specifically, the Holocene climate variation and the consequent cyclic river downcutting and silting affect the city site selection and thus the spatial-temporal distribution and influence range of early cities. The enfeoffment system occurring during the Erlitou culture should also have played a vital role in this evolution. In general, the natural environment is more important for the spatial distribution and influence range of early cities during Yangshao, Longshan, and Erlitou cultures, while human culture represented by the enfeoffment system plays a dominant role during Shang and Zhou Dynasties when the natural environment is relatively stable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prohibited item detection from X-ray images determines whether any prohibited items are present in baggage, and great progress has recently been made in this field with the development of deep learning. Nevertheless, the appearance of an occluded item interacts with the cover, which is different from occlusions encountered in conventional object detection. We design three mechanisms to handle this challenge on the assumption that the occluded part is still partially observed. First, we propose a scale interaction module in which the features in neighboring scales interact one or more times to enhance the model's perception ability. Then, we design a cross-image weakly supervised semantic analysis model utilizing the coattention mechanism to perceive similar and different targets, breaking through the information bottleneck of the isolated detection of a single image. Finally, we introduce a multitask learning module to simultaneously optimize the model at the global level and pixel level. We evaluate our approach on the publicly available security inspection X-ray (SIXray) dataset, the occluded prohibited items X-ray (OPIXray) dataset, and the HIXray dataset, and the results show that our approach is competitive with other X-ray baggage inspection approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tooth point cloud segmentation plays an important role in the digital dentistry, and has received much attention in the past decade. Recently, methods based on the graph neural network have made significant progress. However, the development has been hindered by two challenges: (1) the heterogeneous geometry data are analyzed separately or combined linearly which leads to a semantic gap in different streams; (2) there is mis-alignment between the loss function and evaluation metrics in the segmentation task. In this paper, a novel interacted graph network is presented that combines cues from heterogeneous geometry data by extending the graph attention architecture to propagate information among the different graphs. Moreover, in this paper, an approach is designed to search the segmentation loss function based on the computation graphs according to the evaluation metrics, and the evolution algorithm is revised to avoid potential loss and equivalent loss functions. Our method and other methods use the Shining3D Tooth Segmentation dataset, with experimental results compared in terms of accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Pediatric COVID-19 only accounted for a minority of household transmission. • Lower household COVID-19 transmissibility was shown in children than adults. • Younger children were as susceptible to COVID-19 as the older children in the households. • Increased household transmissibility was observed in children with new variants. • Children seemed as susceptible as adults in households with new variants. To explore household transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in children in new-variants dominating periods. Through retrieval in PubMed and Embase, studies were included in two parts: meta-analysis of the household secondary attack rate (SAR) and case analysis of household pediatric infections. A total of 95 articles were included: 48 for meta-analysis and 47 for case analysis. Pediatric COVID-19 only comprised a minority of the household transmission. The total pooled household SAR of child index cases and contacts were 0.20 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.15–0.26) and 0.24 (95% CI: 0.18–0.30). Lower household transmissibility was reported in both child index cases and contacts than in adults (relative risk [RR] = 0.64, 95% CI: 0.50–0.81; RR = 0.74, 95% CI: 0.64–0.85). Younger children were as susceptible as the older children (RR = 0.89, 95% CI: 0.72–1.10). Through subgroup analyses of different variants and periods, increased household SAR was observed in children (Wild: 0.20; Alpha: 0.42; Delta: 0.35; Omicron: 0.56), and no significant difference was found in household SAR between children and adults when new variants dominated. Although children were found not to be dominant in the household transmission, their transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be on the rise as new variants emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acute-exacerbation chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (AECOPD) is mainly associated with acute respiratory tract infection. In recent years, a growing number of studies have found that Tanreqing capsule (TRQ) has a favorable anti-inflammatory effect. In this study, we used network pharmacology and pharmacodynamics to explore the molecular mechanism and effects of TRQ in AECOPD treatment. To further understand the molecular mechanism of TRQ in AECOPD treatment, we used the network pharmacology to predict components of TRQ, TRQ-related targets, AECOPD-related targets, and pathways. In addition, we used the cigarette-smoke/lipopolysaccharide -induced AECOPD experimental model in Sprague–Dawley rats (72 rats randomly divided into six groups [n = 12 each]: control, model, high-TRQ [TRQ-H], medium-TRQ [TRQ-M], low-TRQ, and dexamethasone [Dex]) to evaluate the therapeutic effects of TRQ and to verify the network pharmacology. We found that 59 overlapping targets based on component-and AECOPD-related targets were frequently involved in the advanced glycation end product–receptor for advanced glycation end product signaling pathway in diabetic complications, the phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase–protein kinase B signaling pathway, and the hypoxia-inducible factor 1 signaling pathway, which might play important roles in the anti-inflammatory mechanism of TRQ in AECOPD treatment. Moreover, TRQ groups exerted protective effects against AECOPD by reducing the infiltration of inflammatory cells. Meanwhile, TRQ-M and TRQ-H groups significantly downregulated or upregulated the expression of tumor necrosis factor, interleukin (IL) 6, C-reactive protein, IL10, and serum amyloid A, as key targets in network pharmacology, in the serum and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid to achieve anti-inflammatory efficacy. Our study showed that TRQ had better anti-inflammatory efficacy against AECOPD, and initially elucidated its molecular mechanism. Moreover, our study also provides a new strategy to explore effective mechanism of TRQ against AECOPD; and further studies are needed to validate the biological processes and pathways of TRQ against AECOPD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aerobics sports injury diagnosis is a rapid diagnosis of sports injuries caused by athletes in the process of aerobics training or competition. The purpose of this paper is to use image processing technology to study and analyze the diagnosis of aerobics sports injury, so that the diagnosis results can be obtained more quickly and effectively. This paper first introduces the image processing technology and then analyzes the sports injury in colleges and universities. Firstly, the algorithm formula of image processing technology is given, and then the algorithm is introduced into the dynamic analysis of aerobics injury diagnosis. The two are compared through example analysis. The experimental results show that joint strain, sprains, and muscle strain are the main types of sports injury of College Aerobics students, reaching 59, 50, and 31 times, respectively. When using image processing technology in the diagnosis of sports injury, the diagnosis results can be obtained quickly and effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a hallmark of authentic science practices, students need to enact epistemic agency to shape/reshape the key aspects of their inquiry work as a collaborative community. This study elaborates an emergent temporal mechanism for engaging students' epistemic agency: "reflective structuration" by which members of a classroom community coconstruct ever‐evolving inquiry directions and group structures as their collective inquiry work proceeds. Using an interactional ethnography method, we examined how students (n = 22) in a Grade 5 classroom coconstructed shared inquiry directions and flexible group structures to guide their sustained inquiry about human body systems over 7 months supported by a collaborative online environment. Rich data were collected to trace the work of the eye inquiry group as a telling case. With their teacher's support, students took agentic moves to construct an evolving set of wondering areas as a way to frame what their whole class needed to investigate. Flexible groups, such as the eye inquiry group, emerged and evolved in the various areas, leading to progressively deepening inquiry and extensive idea exchanges among students. Implications for research and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cisplatin induces the disruptions in gut microbiota and gut microbiota related LPS leakage, LPS leaking from the gut reaches the heart through absorption into the venous bloodstream and then through the arteries to the kidney tissue, causing activation of TLR4/NF-κB/TNF-α pathway and acute kidney injury in mice. Toralactone can protected against cisplatin-induced renal damage by repairing gut microbiota disruption and inhibiting LPS/TLR4/NF-κB/TNF-α pathway (by FigDraw). [Display omitted] • Toralactone alleviates cisplatin-induced acute kidney injury in mice. • Toralactone regulating the gut microbiota. • Toralactone inhibiting the gut related LPS/TLR4/NF-κB/TNF-α signaling pathway in kidney. Gut microbiota has been reported to be perturbed by cisplatin and to modulate the nephrotoxicity of chemotherapeutic agents. However, the critical role of toralactone, a bioactive components of Cassia obtusifolia L. seeds, in modulating the gut microbiota in the pathogenesis of cisplatin-induced nephrotoxicity remains to be elucidated. Methods: In this study, we verified the reno-protective effects of toralactone and compared the composition and function of the gut microbiota in the normal, cisplatin-treated and low or high dose of toralactone-treated mice using 16S rDNA gene sequencing. We also investigated the gut microbiota related LPS/TLR4/NF-κB/TNF-α pathway in renal tissue. To elucidate the causal relationship between gut dysbiosis and cisplatin nephrotoxicity, an antibiotic cocktail was administered to deplete the gut microbiota and fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) was performed prior to cisplatin treatment. Results: The renal histopathology showed that toralactone significantly alleviated cisplatin-induced renal injury. 16S rDNA gene sequencing analysis demonstrated that toralactone treatment effectively reversed cisplatin-induced gut microbiota dysbiosis in mice. FMT from toralactone-treated mice to cisplatin-induced kidney injury mice was observed to have the reno-protective effects, and deletion of gut microbiota by antibiotics was found to negate the reno-protective effect of toralactone. Interestingly, the renal tissue of cisplatin-associated kidney injury mice showed activation of the LPS/TLR4/NF-κB pathway and increase in TNF-α within the renal tissue, whereas toralactone treatment was observed to inhibit the LPS/TLR4/NF-κB/TNF-α pathway. Conclusion: This study elucidated the reno-protective effects for the first time, demonstrating that it exerts its beneficial effects through the gut microbiota, which mediate the LPS/TLR4/NF-κB/TNF-α inflammatory pathway. It may help to develop therapeutic approaches using toralactone and targeted restoration of the gut microbiota. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Structural characteristics of coconut oil body (COB) were investigated. • COB was stable at alkaline pH rather than high ionic strengths and heating treatment. • Freshly prepared COB showed a small droplet size with a monomodal size distribution. • β-carotene was successfully loaded into COB. • Bioaccessibility of β-carotene was improved after gastrointestinal digestion. In this work, we investigated structural characteristics and stability analysis of the coconut oil body (COB) and its application for loading β-carotene (β-CA). The COB contained neutral lipids (81.1 ± 2.1 %), membrane proteins (0.6 ± 0.0 %), and moistures (18.3 ± 3.2 %), in which the molecular weights of membrane proteins ranged from 12 kDa to 40 kDa, as analyzed by the SDS-PAGE. The COB exhibited a small droplet diameter (5.1 ± 0.3 µm) with a monomodal diameter distribution, as reflected by the dynamic light scattering. The COB showed stable states at alkaline pH values (pH 8–10) and instability against ionic strengths (50–200 mmol/L) and thermal treatment (30-90℃) after analyzing the instability indexes. COB-based emulsions were favorable for the loading and retention of β-CA, as reflected by free fatty acids release rates and bioaccessibility in the simulated gastrointestinal digestion. This study will contribute to using the coconut oil bodies for loading bioactive nutraceuticals to enhance their bioaccessibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protein lysine modifications (PLMs) are hotspots of post-translational modifications and are involved in many diseases; however, their role in human sperm remains obscure. This study examined the presence and functional roles of a classical PLM (lysine acetylation, Kac) and three novel PLMs (lysine malonylation, Kmal; lysine succinylation, Ksucc; lysine crotonylation, Kcr) in human sperm. Immunoblotting and immunofluorescence assays revealed modified proteins (15–150 kDa) in the tails of human sperm. An immunoaffinity approach coupled with liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry revealed 1423 Kac sites in 680 proteins, 196 Kmal sites in 118 proteins, 788 Ksucc sites in 251 proteins, and 1836 Kcr sites in 645 proteins. These modified proteins participate in a variety of biological processes and metabolic pathways. Crosstalk analysis demonstrated that proteins involved in the sperm energy pathways of glycolysis, oxidative phosphorylation, the citrate cycle, fatty acid oxidation, and ketone body metabolism were modified by at least one of these modifications. In addition, these modifications were found in 62 male fertility-related proteins that weave a protein-protein interaction network associated with asthenoteratozoospermia, asthenozoospermia, globozoospermia, spermatogenic failure, hypogonadotropic hypogonadism, and polycystic kidney disease. Our findings shed light on the functional role of PLMs in male reproduction. Protein lysine modifications (PLMs) are hotspots of posttranslational modifications and are involved in many diseases. This study revealed the presence of a classical PLM (lysine acetylation) and three novel PLMs (lysine malonylation, lysine succinylation, and lysine crotonylation) in human sperm tails. The modified proteins participate in a variety of biological processes and metabolic pathways. In addition, these modifications were found in 62 male infertility-associated proteins and could serve as potential diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets for male infertility. [Display omitted] • Lysine acetylation, malonylation, succinylation, and crotonylation were detected in human sperm tails. • The modified proteins participate in a variety of biological processes and metabolic pathways. • Crosstalk analysis showed the enrichment of modified proteins in sperm energy pathways. • The 62 modified male fertility-related proteins constitute a PPI network of male infertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To describe the clinical manifestations, immunological features, and risk factors in patients with sarcoidosis complicated with autoimmune diseases (ADs) as well as determine the frequency of autoantibodies and possible correlation between autoantibodies and laboratory data. Patients with pathologically confirmed sarcoidosis at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital (China) between January 2017 and October 2020 were included. Age- and sex-matched patients who visited the rheumatology outpatient clinic without systemic or ADs were included as controls. Demographic, clinical, serological, and radiological data of sarcoidosis patients were recorded and analyzed. To exclude ADs, autoantibodies, such as antinuclear antibody, extractable nuclear antigen antibodies, and anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibody were assessed in controls. A total of 154 sarcoidosis patients (111 females; 72.1%) with a mean ± standard deviation age of 50.7 ± 10.3 years were included. Nineteen patients (12.3%) had ADs; Hashimoto's thyroiditis (n = 6) and Sjogren's syndrome (n = 4) were common. Age, globulin, immunoglobulin G, erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), and C-reactive protein were significantly different between sarcoidosis patients with and without ADs. The ESR level might be a risk factor for sarcoidosis complicated with ADs (RR = 1.053; P = 0.018). Autoantibodies were detected in 29 patients (18.8%), and the frequency was significantly higher than that in controls (18.8% vs. 3%; P = 0.001). Sarcoidosis patients were more likely to have autoantibodies despite the absence of ADs (10.4% vs. 3%; P = 0.031). Age may be a risk factor for sarcoidosis patients presenting with autoantibodies (RR = 1.077; P = 0.042). An association was identified between ADs and sarcoidosis. The inflammatory indexes, such as ESR, IgG, and CRP, were significantly different between sarcoidosis patients with and without ADs. ESR might be a risk factor for the coexistence of ADs and sarcoidosis. Sarcoidosis patients were prone to being autoantibody-positive despite the absence of ADs, and age might be a risk factor for sarcoidosis presenting with autoantibodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soluble solid content (SSC) is the most important attribute related to the quality and price of apples. The objective of this study was to detect the SSC of "Fuji" apple using hyperspectral imaging (HSI) combined with a deep learning algorithm. A novel, output‐related deep learning algorithm, stacked weighted auto‐encoders (SWAE) was proposed to extract output‐related features based on pixel‐level spectra of each sample. Relevant variables were identified and assigned to different weights by correlation analysis with the output variable. To quantitatively predict the SSC under the constraint of preferential reconstruction for quality‐related variables, the deep features containing information about the SSC quality prediction were extracted, and then these features were input into gray wolf optimization‐support vector regression (GWO‐SVR) to quantitatively predict SSC. Furthermore, successive projection algorithm (SPA) and competitive adaptive reweighed sampling (CARS) were adopted as traditional feature selection algorithms to build GWO‐SVR models for predicting the SSC in apples and comparing them with the deep learning models. The results showed that the proposed SWAE‐GWO‐SVR model yielded satisfactory performance with Rp2 of 0.9436, and RMSEP of 0.1328 °Brix, which demonstrate that deep learning combined with HSI can facilitate the nondestructive assessment of the internal quality attributes of fruits. Practical applications: Traditional methods for detecting the soluble solid content (SSC) in apples are destructive and laborious. Therefore, the hyperspectral imaging (HSI) technique combined with deep learning was used to determine the SSC in apples in a rapid and nondestructive manner. The results indicated that combined method is feasible for SSC prediction. Thus, HSI combined with deep learning is considered as a promising method for detecting the SSC in apples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • A composite pier protective technique with low-transition temperature PCM was proposed. • The thickness, phase change range, latent heat, and thermal conductivity of the composite pier determined its thermal control performance. • The composite pier could reduce the freeze-thaw cycles suffered by the concrete structures and extend their service life. Concrete structures in cold regions are often damaged by freeze-thaw action, which can seriously reduce their service life. How to actively reduce the freeze-thaw cycles suffered by the structures is key to enhance their freeze-thaw durability. In this paper, a composite pier protective technique with microencapsulated phase change material concrete (MPCMC) was proposed, including the MPCMC layer, the pure microencapsulated phase change material (MPCM) layer, the insulation layer, and the structure concrete (SC). To analyze the thermal control performance of the composite MPCMC pier, a 3-D heat transfer model with phase change were established. Combing the laboratory and field tests, a series of numerical simulations were conducted. The results indicated that the key parameters, including the thickness, phase change range, and thermal conductivity of the MPCMC layer and MPCM layer, and the thickness and thermal conductivity of the insulation layer, can determine the thermal control performance of the composite pier. An optimal composite structure was obtained considering the engineering cost. The optimal structure can effectively reduce the freeze-thaw cycles and extend its service life. Compared to the ordinary concrete pier, the maximum degree of reduction for freeze-thaw cycles can reach 94% and the maximum extension for service life can be 1470% at the freezing point of 0 °C. The study can provide some theoretical basis for the design of the freeze-thaw resistance of the concrete structure in cold regions and related researches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: As an essential macronutrient, phosphorus (P) is often a limiting nutrient because of its low availability and mobility in soils. Drought is a major environmental stress that reduces crop yield. How plants balance and combine P‐starvation responses (PSRs) and drought resistance is unclear. In this study, we identified the transcription factor ZmPHR1 as a major regulator of PSRs that modulates phosphate (Pi) signaling and homeostasis. We found that maize zmphr1 mutants had reduced P concentration and were sensitive to Pi starvation, whereas ZmPHR1‐OE lines displayed elevated Pi concentration and yields. In addition, 57% of PSR genes and nearly 70% of ZmPHR1‐regulated PSR genes in leaves were transcriptionally responsive to drought. Under moderate and early drought conditions, the Pi concentration of maize decreased, and PSR genes were up‐regulated before drought‐responsive genes. The ZmPHR1‐OE lines exhibited drought‐resistant phenotypes and reduced stomatal apertures, whereas the opposite was true of the zmphr1 mutants. ZmPT7‐OE lines and zmspx3 mutants, which had elevated Pi concentration, also exhibited drought resistance, but zmpt7 mutants were sensitive to drought. Our results suggest that ZmPHR1 plays a central role in integrating Pi and drought signals and that Pi homeostasis improves the ability of maize to combat drought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing diffusion models (DMs) have shown impressive performance in face super-resolution tasks under normal illumination conditions. However, when applied to low-resolution (LR) facial images captured under non-uniform illumination (NI) conditions, the performance of DMs significantly deteriorates due to the lack of sufficient illumination information constraints. To address this challenge, we present ILSR-Diff, a novel illumination-constrained DM, designed to restore authentic high-resolution (HR) facial images while compensating for NI conditions. ILSR-Diff comprises three key components: (1) The illumination conditional constraint module extracts global and spatial illumination constraints from conditional facial images and seamlessly embeds them into the denoising network, which effectively addresses facial distortion caused by complex facial illumination variations in LR faces. (2) The noise guider harnesses facial priors by blending them with Gaussian noise to guide the initial noise sampling, which provides superior sampling initialization and prior knowledge for the denoising process to enhance the efficiency and precision of reconstruction. (3) The contrastive diffusion loss function utilizes high-level semantic features of high-quality faces to supervise the training of the denoising network, thereby enhancing the recovery details of facial features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ILSR-Diff achieves authentic HR facial images under NI conditions and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Compared with SR3, our method achieves improvements of 2.2 dB and 2.8 dB in PSNR on the Multi-PIE and Extended-YaleB datasets, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we provide further illustrations of prolate interpolation and pseudospectral differentiation based on the barycentric perspectives. The convergence rates of the barycentric prolate interpolation and pseudospectral differentiation are derived. Furthermore, we propose the new preconditioner, which leads to the well-conditioned prolate collocation scheme. Numerical examples are included to show the high accuracy of the new method. We apply this approach to solve the second-order boundary value problem and Helmholtz problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the high-dimensional setting, this article considers a canonical testing problem in multivariate analysis, namely testing coefficients in linear regression models. Several tests for high-dimensional regression coefficients have been proposed in the recent literature. However, these tests are based on the sum of squares type statistics, that perform well under the dense alternatives and suffer from low power under the sparse alternatives. In order to attack this issue, we introduce a new test statistic which is based on the maximum type statistic and magnifies the sparse signals. The limiting null distribution of the test statistic is shown to be the extreme value distribution of type I and the power of the test is analysed. In particular, it is shown theoretically and numerically that the test is powerful against sparse alternatives. Numerical studies are carried out to examine the numerical performance of the test and to compare it with other tests available in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Several studies showed that life course adiposity was associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, the underlying causality remains unclear.Objective: We aimed to examine the causal relationship between life course adiposity and AD using Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis.Methods: Instrumental variants were obtained from large genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for life course adiposity, including birth weight (BW), childhood body mass index (BMI), adult BMI, waist circumference (WC), waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), and body fat percentage (BFP). A meta-analysis of GWAS for AD including 71,880 cases and 383,378 controls was used in this study. MR analyses were performed using inverse variance weighted (IVW), weighted median, and MR-Egger regression methods. We calculated odds ratios (ORs) per genetically predicted standard deviation (1-SD) unit increase in each trait for AD.Results: Genetically predicted 1-SD increase in adult BMI was significantly associated with higher risk of AD (IVW: OR = 1.03, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.01-1.05, p = 2.7×10-3) after Bonferroni correction. The weighted median method indicated a significant association between BW and AD (OR = 0.94, 95% CI = 0.90-0.98, p = 1.8×10-3). We also found suggestive associations of AD with WC (IVW: OR = 1.03, 95% CI = 1.00-1.07, p = 0.048) and WHR (weighted median: OR = 1.04, 95% CI = 1.00-1.07, p = 0.029). No association was detected of AD with childhood BMI and BFP.Conclusion: Our study demonstrated that lower BW and higher adult BMI had causal effects on increased AD risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The pathophysiological process of amyloid-β, tau deposition, and neurodegeneration of Alzheimer's disease (AD) begin in a preclinical phase, while anxiety is associated with an increased risk of AD in preclinical phase.Objective: To examine the relationships between anxiety and amyloid-β, tau deposition, and neurodegeneration. To test the hypothesis that anxiety could predict clinical progression in the elderly without dementia.Methods: 1,400 participants from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database were included in the study and were studied over a median period of 3 years. In multivariable models, the cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between anxiety and amyloid-β PET, tau PET, and FDG PET SUVRs in participants without dementia were explored using Spearman rank correlation, logistic regression model, multiple linear regression model, Kaplan-Meier survival curves, and Cox proportional hazards model. The association between baseline anxiety and clinical progression was also explored.Results: There was a positive correlation between anxiety and amyloid-β deposition (r = 0.11, p = 0.0017) and a negative correlation between anxiety and neurodegeneration (r = -0.13, p = 0.00022). MCI participants with anxiety showed a faster clinical progression of dementia (HR = 1.56, p = 0.04). Non-anxious participants with more amyloid-β deposition or more severe neurodegeneration displayed accelerated development into anxiety (HR = 2.352, p < 0.0001; HR = 2.254, p < 0.0001).Conclusion: Anxiety was associated with amyloid-β deposition and neurodegeneration in non-dementia elderly. Anxiety in MCI predicted conversion to dementia. Anxiety may play a selective role and prediction of disease progression in the early phase of AD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeking for a safe, efficient, inexpensive, and eco-friendly oxidizer is always a big challenge for in-situ chemical oxidation (ISCO) technology. This study adopted the potassium peroxoborate (PPB), a novel peroxide, for soil remediation for the first time. PPB based chemical oxidation system (PPB-CO) could efficiently degrade polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) without other reagents added, reaching 72.1 %, 64.2 %, and 50.0 % removal rates for naphthalene, phenanthrene, and pyrene after 24 h reaction, respectively. The superior total PAHs removal efficiency (60.6 %) was 3.6–4.7 times higher than that of other commercial peroxides (2Na 2 CO 3 •3H 2 O, CaO 2 , and H 2 O 2). Mechanism analysis revealed that varieties of reactive oxygen species (ROS) can be generated by PPB through Fenton-like or non-Fenton routines, including H 2 O 2 , perborates species, O 2 •−, •OH, and 1O 2. The sustainable generation of H 2 O 2 reduced the disproportionation effect of H 2 O 2 by 86 %, significantly improving the utilization rate. Moreover, sandbox experiments and actual contaminated soil remediation experiments verified the feasibility of PPB-CO in a real polluted site. This work provides a novel strategy for effectively soil remediation, highlighting the selection and application of new oxidants. [Display omitted] • A novel oxidant potassium peroxoborate was initially adopted in soil remediation. • The degradation rate of PPB is 3.6–4.7 times higher than commercial peroxides. • Multiple reactive oxygen species generated during PPB hydrolysis. • The sustainable generation of ROS improving the utilization rate of oxidant. • PPB-CO system presents outstanding performance in the actual soil remediation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lysine succinylation (Ksucc) is a recently identified posttranslational modification that is involved in many diseases. This study examined the role of Ksucc in the pathogenesis of hypertrophic scar (HS). The presence of Ksucc in human skin was measured by immunoblotting. Ksucc occurs in many skin proteins ranging from 25 to 250 kDa, and higher levels of Ksucc are found in HS skin than in normal skin. An immunoaffinity approach coupled with LC–MS/MS was used to characterize the first succinylome of human skin, and 159 Ksucc sites in 79 proteins were identified. Among these, there were 38 increased succinylated sites in 29 proteins but no decreased succinylated sites in HS compared with normal skin. A parallel reaction monitoring assay was performed to validate the results of the succinylome and showed that the levels of Ksucc in decorin and collagens, which are involved in the pathogenesis of HS, were increased in HS than in normal skin. In addition, increasing the level of Ksucc enhanced cell proliferation and upregulated the expression of fibrosis markers (α-SMA, COL1, and COL3) in human skin fibroblasts. Our results provide global insights into the functional role of Ksucc in hypertrophic scarring. [Display omitted] • Lysine succinylation (Ksucc) occurred in skin proteins ranged from 25 to 250 kDa. • Higher levels of Ksucc were found in the hypertrophic scar (HS) than in the normal skin. • The succinylome identified 38 upregulated Ksucc sites in 29 proteins in HS compared with normal skin. • Elevating Ksucc upregulated the cell proliferation and the expression of fibrosis markers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ovarian granulosa cell tumor (GCT) is extremely rare in children and adolescents, especially along with Meigs syndrome (MS). We describe the case of a 12-year-old girl who was referred to our center for massive peritoneal effusions with evidence of a pelvic mass on ultrasonography and computed tomography. The patient was treated with laparoscopic surgery (fertility-sparing surgery) and postoperative chemotherapy. Our case highlights the clinical importance of assessing MS in the diagnosis of pediatric female patients with peritoneal effusion and ovarian mass and the importance of fertility-sparing surgery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]