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Objective We aimed to describe the rationalisation beliefs endorsed by Chinese male smokers and to examine the association between rationalisation and the intention to quit. Setting Questionnaires were conducted among male smokers in three cities (Shanghai, Nanning and Mudanjiang) which represent different geographical locations, economic development levels and legislative status of tobacco control in China. Design and participants It was a multicentre crosssectional survey involved a total of 3710 male smokers over 18 years. Outcome measures Primary outcomes were intention to quit, smoking rationalisation scores and sub scores in six dimensions. Smoking rationalisation was assessed using a newly developed Chinese rationalisation scale. Multivariable logistic regression was performed to examine the relationship between rationalisation and intention to quit. Results On average, smokers scored 3.3 out of 5 on the smoking rationalisation scale. With a one point increase in total rationalisation scale, the odds for intention to quit in the next 6 months decreased by 48% (OR=0.52, 95% CI: 0.44 to 0.61; p<0.001). Separate logistic regressions for six subscales of rationalisation shown consistent inverse associations with intention to quit (all p values <0.001). Believing that smoking was socially acceptable was the strongest predictor (OR=0.62, 95% CI: 0.55 to 0.71; p<0.001). Conclusions Rationalisation beliefs could be important barriers to smoking cessation. Some beliefs have stronger association with quit intention than others. Eroding rationalisation beliefs endorsed by smokers is a potential strategy for smoking cessation intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A coaxial line with periodically tapered inner rode corrugated ripples is introduced to act as a distributed Bragg reflector to increase output microwave power of relativistic diffraction generator (RDG). The RDG device consists of an overmoded cross-section, two-sectional disk-loaded cylindrical slow-wave structure (SWS), and coaxial reflector is placed upstream at the first SWS section. The RDG device with tapered Bragg reflector is investigated by full three-dimensional Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations and experiments in this paper. The structural parameters of the reflector are optimized for favorable characteristic of mode selection and frequency response. It is found that oscillation modes varied at different magnetic field magnitude. The measured radiation power at 29~31 GHz is over 300 MW for TM01 mode and over 700 MW for TM11 mode. Results show that the reflector has a great impact on performance of the device. Operating at proper conditions, the radiation power is remarkably enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SPARC-like protein 1 (SPARCL1), a member of the family of secreted proteins which is acidic and rich in cysteine, is a potential tumor suppressor gene in most types of tumor. A systemic review and bioinformatics analysis was carried out to determine the associations between SPARCL1 and tumor progression and clinical factors. Downregulation of SPARCL1, thought to be regulated by epigenetic modifications including DNA methylation, serves important functions in tumor progression and development, with its regulatory functions on cell viability, migration, invasion, cell adhesion and drug resistance. Downregulation of SPARCL1 was markedly associated with a poor overall survival rate of patients with one of =7 solid tumors and predicted increased mortality in patients with one of ≥4 distinct tumor types. The present review indicated that SPARCL1 may be a therapeutic target for cancer treatment and a biomarker to determine prognosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The harmonic confocal gyrotron with nonuniform electron beam is proposed in this paper in order to develop compact and high power terahertz radiation source. A 0.56 THz third harmonic confocal gyrotron with a dual arc section nonuniform electron beam has been designed and investigated. The studies show that confocal cavity has extremely low mode density, and has great advantage to operate at high harmonic. Nonuniform electron beam is an approach to improve output power and interaction efficiency of confocal gyrotron. A dual arc beam magnetron injection gun for designed confocal gyrotron has been developed and presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. Approximately 63.7% of nonsmokers in China are exposed to secondhand smoke (SHS) in their homes. The current study documents the prevalence and correlates of smoke-free home policies in Shanghai, as well as reasons for implementing such a policy and places where smoking is most commonly allowed. Methods. We conducted in-person surveys of 500 participants using a multistage proportional random sampling design in an urban and suburban district. Results. Overall, 35.3% had a smokefree home policy. In the logistic regression, having higher income, not having smokers in the home, having children in the home, having fewer friends/relatives who permit smoking at home, and not being a current smoker were correlates of having a smokefree home policy (P < 0.05). Concern about the health impact of SHS was reportedly the most important reason for establishing a smoke-free home. Among participants with no or partial bans, the most common places where smoking was allowed included the living room (64.2%), kitchen (46.1%), and bathroom (33.8%). Conclusions. Smoke-free home policies were in place for a minority of households surveyed. Establishing such a policy was influenced by personal smoking behavior and social factors. These findings suggest an urgent need to promote smoke-free home policies through tobacco control programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The complex characteristics and unclear biological fate of biomacromolecules (BMM), including colloidal and soluble microbial products (SMP), extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) and membrane surface foulants (MSF), are crucial factors that limit our understanding of membrane fouling in membrane bioreactors (MBRs). Findings: In this study, the microbial transformation of BMM was investigated in a lab-scale MBR by well-controlled bioassay tests. The results of experimental measurements and mathematical modeling show that SMP, EPS, and MSF had different biodegradation behaviors and kinetic models. Based on the multi-exponential G models, SMP were mainly composed of slowly biodegradable polysaccharides (PS), proteins (PN), and non- biodegradable humic substances (HS). In contrast, EPS contained a large number of readily biodegradable PN, slowly biodegradable PS and HS. MSF were dominated by slowly biodegradable PS, which had a degradation rate constant similar to that of SMP-PS, while degradation behaviors of MSF-PN and MSF-HS were much more similar to those of EPS-PN and EPS-HS, respectively. In addition, the large- molecular weight (MW) compounds (>100 kDa) in BMM were found to have a faster microbial transformation rate compared to the small-MW compounds (<5 kDa). The parallel factor (PARAFAC) modeling of three-dimensional fluorescence excitation- emission matrix (EEM) spectra showed that the tryptophan-like PN were one of the major fractions in the BMM and they were more readily biodegradable than the HS. Besides microbial mineralization, humification and hydrolysis could be viewed as two important biotransformation mechanisms of large-MW compounds during the biodegradation process. Significance: The results of this work can aid in tracking the origin of membrane foulants from the perspective of the biotransformation behaviors of SMP, EPS, and MSF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

220 GHz gyrotron with an 8 T pulse magnet has been designed, constructed and operated in Terahertz Research Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. TE mode is selected as the operation mode, which is less susceptible to the mode competition. Experimental results show the output power is achieved 11.5 kW with efficiencies of 12.8%, and the frequency is between 219.6 GHz and 234.2 GHz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To verify the concept of a coaxial gyrotron with two electron beams (CGTB), an electron gun with two beams is needed. In this paper, two types of two-beam magnetron injection guns are proposed: a normal two-beam magnetron injection gun and a coaxial two-beam magnetron injection gun. The design models and space charge limiting current are given. The simulation results show that both types of guns could fulfill the requirement for a CGTB. Comparisons between the two types of injection guns are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  The harmonic generation of high power microwave in plasma filled waveguide is studied and the analytical theory is presented, and the numerical calculation and analysis of second harmonic are done in this paper. The theoretical and numerical analysis show that high power microwave can generate harmonic in the plasma filled waveguide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Analytical theory of high-power microwave propagation in waveguide filled with plasma is presented in this paper. The ponderomotive force effect of high power microwave is taken into consideration and preliminary numerical calculations are carried out, the propagation characteristics of the high-power microwave and the influence of microwave power on the distribution of plasma density are calculated and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design, performance, and characteristics of a plasma cathode electron gun are presented. The plasma cathode is based on a hollow cathode direct current discharge, and the electron beam is accelerated by pulse voltage. By discharging at high gas pressure and operating at low gas pressure, both the maximum accelerating voltage and maximum emitting current could be increased. Utilizing argon, with the accelerating voltage up to 9 kV and gas pressure down to 52 mPa, the gun is able to generate an electron beam of about 4.7 A, and the corresponding emitting current density is about 600 A/cm2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation: Identifying transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) encoding complex regulatory signals in metazoan genomes remains a challenging problem in computational genomics. Due to degeneracy of nucleotide content among binding site instances or motifs, and intricate ‘grammatical organization’ of motifs within cis-regulatory modules (CRMs), extant pattern matching-based in silico motif search methods often suffer from impractically high false positive rates, especially in the context of analyzing large genomic datasets, and noisy position weight matrices which characterize binding sites. Here, we try to address this problem by using a framework to maximally utilize the information content of the genomic DNA in the region of query, taking cues from values of various biologically meaningful genetic and epigenetic factors in the query region such as clade-specific evolutionary parameters, presence/absence of nearby coding regions, etc. We present a new method for TFBS prediction in metazoan genomes that utilizes both the CRM architecture of sequences and a variety of features of individual motifs. Our proposed approach is based on a discriminative probabilistic model known as conditional random fields that explicitly optimizes the predictive probability of motif presence in large sequences, based on the joint effect of all such features. Results: This model overcomes weaknesses in earlier methods based on less effective statistical formalisms that are sensitive to spurious signals in the data. We evaluate our method on both simulated CRMs and real Drosophila sequences in comparison with a wide spectrum of existing models, and outperform the state of the art by 22% in F1 score. Availability and Implementation: The code is publicly available at http://www.sailing.cs.cmu.edu/discover.html. Contact: epxing@cs.cmu.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]