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Soil salinization seriously restricts the development of agricultural production, the sustainable use of land resources, and the stability of the ecological environment. In order to objectively reveal the research status of soil salinization, CiteSpace software was used to conduct data mining and quantitative analysis on research papers on soil salinization from 2008 to 2023 in China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Web of science databases. The data sources were transformed into visual graphs by reproducing clustering statistics from aspects such as publication volume, authors, keywords, and publishing institutions. In addition, this paper also combined the actual needs and cutting-edge hotspots in relevant research in China, and proposed and analyzed the limitations and future development trends of soil salinity monitoring research in China. This has important practical significance for comprehensively grasping the current research status of salinization, further clarifying and sorting out the research ideas of salinization monitoring, enriching the remote sensing monitoring methods of saline soil, and solving the actual problems of soil salinization in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Drug repurposing, the application of existing therapeutics to new indications, holds promise in achieving rapid clinical effects at a much lower cost than that of de novo drug development. The aim of our study was to perform a more comprehensive drug repurposing prediction of diseases, particularly cancers. Methods: Here, by targeting 4,096 human diseases, including 384 cancers, we propose a greedy computational model based on a heterogeneous multilayer network for the repurposing of 1,419 existing drugs in DrugBank. We performed additional experimental validation for the dominant repurposed drugs in cancer. Results: The overall performance of the model was well supported by cross-validation and literature mining. Focusing on the top-ranked repurposed drugs in cancers, we verified the anticancer effects of 5 repurposed drugs widely used clinically in drug sensitivity experiments. Because of the distinctive antitumor effects of nifedipine (an antihypertensive agent) and nortriptyline (an antidepressant drug) in prostate cancer, we further explored their underlying mechanisms by using quantitative proteomics. Our analysis revealed that both nifedipine and nortriptyline affected the cancer-related pathways of DNA replication, the cell cycle, and RNA transport. Moreover, in vivo experiments demonstrated that nifedipine and nortriptyline significantly inhibited the growth of prostate tumors in a xenograft model. Conclusions: Our predicted results, which have been released in a public database named The Predictive Database for Drug Repurposing (PAD), provide an informative resource for discovering and ranking drugs that may potentially be repurposed for cancer treatment and determining new therapeutic effects of existing drugs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land use change has become a new field in global change research, and it is closely related to land resource security and sustainable development. The environmental simulation model was mostly used to study the land-use change before. In this paper, we use the Economic Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient of economic model to study the land use structure changes in the western plain of Jilin Province, China. The results showed that the Lorenz curve has the phenomenon of “two near and two far” and Gini coefficient “two increased and two decreased”. That is to say, during the 15 years from 1989 to 2004, the areas of cultivated land and unused land had increased, Lorenz curves were near to the perfect equality line, and the distribution tended to be uniform; the areas of grassland and water body were reduced, the Lorenz curves were away from the perfect equality line, and the distribution tended to be increasingly uneven, which reflects the main process of the land use structure changes. Studying on the land use changes based on Economic model is simpler and more intuitionistic, and had the generalization values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seismic computed tomography (CT) method is derived from the basic principles of X-ray section scanning first applied in medical science. The method records P-wave arrivals between shots and receivers in separate boreholes. Using the velocity information from 2D seismic P-wave arrival inversion, we can determine the distribution of velocity in rock and soil bodies. This paper introduces a practical case of using the seismic CT method for detecting the structure of the rocks for tunnel engineering and to utilize SIRT algorithms for doing first arrival time iterative inversion. Compared with other exploration methods, it is more efficient and accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]