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Mycoplasma pneumoniae is a major cause of respiratory tract infections, particularly in children and young adults. M. pneumoniae accounts for 10%-30%) of community-acquired pneumonia (1). Macrolides are the primary treatment, [...]

In Chinese language and culture, there are many metaphorical habits that use upright or skew shapes to express morality. Three experiments were conducted to determine whether there is a psychological metaphor in the cognition of Chinese people. To explore the psychological metaphorical associations between moral concepts and upright/skew shapes, the Stroop-like paradigm was used in Experiment 1, which showed that participants responded faster to positive moral words. There are some disputes regarding whether the metaphorical association is unidirectional or bidirectional in mapping. In Experiment 2, the priming paradigm was adopted, and the results showed that the priming of upright/skew shapes affected the judgment of moral words, and the priming of moral words also affected the judgment of upright/skew shapes, indicating bidirectional mapping between moral concepts and upright/skew shapes. We also wanted to determine whether this metaphorical association had any effect on face recognition. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to judge neutral faces presented with quadrilateral or oblique quadrilateral faces. We found that participants tended to think that upright faces were more moral, while skew faces were more immoral. Our study found a psychological metaphorical association between moral concepts and upright/skew shapes, bidirectional mapping, and its effect on face cognition., Author(s): Cong-xing Wang [sup.1] , Yu-qin Yang [sup.1] [sup.2] , Zi-qing Ye [sup.3] , Jin-yun Wu [sup.1] , Ge Xu [sup.4] , Yi-duo Ye [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) https://ror.org/020azk594, grid.411503.2, [...]

The combined effect of stress and seepage is an important reason of engineering geological problems such as landslides, dam failures, and tunnel collapse. However, due to the limitations of the test apparatus, the existing studies rarely consider the stress effect in the seepage process. In this study, a soil column apparatus based on the wetting front advancing method was developed to explore the permeability properties of intensely weathered sandstone in a wide range of suction (10~106 kPa). The results suggest that the wetting front advancing velocity decreased as the vertical stress increased during infiltration, which indicates that the stress changes the infiltration channel and affects the infiltration rate. On the other hand, due to the water sensitivity of intensely weathered sandstone, the soil column deformation before and after wetting is significantly different, indicating that water infiltration further exacerbates the deformation. When vertical stress is applied to the soil column, the permeability coefficient-suction curves at different sections are paralleled in general, which is affected by the variation in dry density and the non-uniform distribution of stresses inside the soil column. Moreover, as the initial dry density increases, the influence of the vertical stress on the permeability coefficient gradually decreases. Key words: unsaturated soils, stress, permeability, hydro-mechanical coupling, wetting front, Introduction In mountainous areas with complex geological conditions, tunnel construction inevitably passes through extremely soft rocks, which are composed of soil formed by the weathering and decomposition of clastic rocks, [...]

The PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway is commonly dysregulated in cancer. Rapalogs exhibit modest clinical benefit, likely owing to their lack of effects on 4EBP1. We hypothesized that bi-steric mTORC1-selective inhibitors would have greater potential for clinical benefit than rapalogs in tumors with mTORC1 dysfunction. We assessed this hypothesis in tumor models with high mTORC1 activity both in vitro and in vivo. Bi-steric inhibitors had strong growth inhibition, eliminated phosphorylated 4EBP1, and induced more apoptosis than rapamycin or MLN0128. Multiomics analysis showed extensive effects of the bi-steric inhibitors in comparison with rapamycin. De novo purine synthesis was selectively inhibited by bi-sterics through reduction in JUN and its downstream target PRPS1 and appeared to be the cause of apoptosis. Hence, bi-steric mTORC1-selective inhibitors are a therapeutic strategy to treat tumors driven by mTORC1 hyperactivation., Introduction The PI3K/AKT/mTOR network is a critical intracellular signaling pathway directing cell growth and metabolism in physiological and pathological conditions (1). The evolutionarily conserved mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) is [...]

Firms that extend their e-commerce platforms into customer decision-making to build relationships need to understand the customer journey or build e-relationships through a lens that the customer uses to assess the value created and fulfilled. By contrasting the value cycles that customers and firms use, four different activities are identified for firms with shorter and longer value cycles. By enabling customers to support value creation, fulfilling the value created by enlisting partners and expanding services, and engaging the customers during value-in-use, three organizations discussed in the published literature appear to have developed e-relationship strategies to create and sustain value both before and during COVID-19. This analysis led us to develop three different insights: customer empowerment, collaborative competency, and intelligent digital platform for organizational capability. These insights were used to analyze two different organizations interviewed during the 2020period, as they faced many COVID-19 challenges, and assess the generalizability of these capabilities. We provide three recommendations for IS leaders for building e-relationships through a customer lens, by drawing on five case studies of companies to remain agile. Keywords: Value creation, value fulfillment, e-relationship, intelligent digital platform, organizational capability, sustain value, INTRODUCTION Businesses have used the primary and support activities of their business value chain to transform inputs into outputs and fulfill value propositions made to their customers, with the expectation [...]

Student Engagement in the Language Classroom Edited by Phil Hiver, Ali H. Al-Hoorie, and Sarah Mercer. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2021. 320 pp. Paper, $59.95. As positive psychology has shed new [...]

Acute respiratory diseases (ARD) are caused by numerous viral pathogens, including several human adenovirus (HAdV) types. Respiratory HAdV infections range from mild to severe and are fatal in some cases. [...]

This study aims to investigate workability and microstructural characteristics of sodium hexametaphosphate (SHMP)treated calcium bentonite (Ca-bentonite) as a potential material for soil-bentonite slurry trench cutoff walls. First, a series of Marsh viscosity, filtrate loss, density, and pH experiments are performed on bentonite--tap water slurries containing Cabentonite amended with 0%-8% SHMP dosages. Subsequently, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and zeta potential tests are conducted to explore microstructural characteristics that control the mechanisms of SHMP treatment. The results indicate that the workability of the slurry is significantly improved with SHMP addition. The SEM, XRD, and zeta potential analyses show that SHMP-amended Ca-bentonite possesses a more dispersed structure and higher negative zeta potential relative to the unamended Ca- bentonite. The mechanisms of SHMP amendment are identified to be exchange of bivalent calcium cations in Ca-bentonite by monovalent sodium cations in the SHMP, sorption of the SHMP anions that give the clay system a steric stabilization and increased negative surface charge density, and sequestration of the bivalent calcium cations on the Ca-bentonite. Overall, the SHMP treatment is effective in making the Ca-bentonite slurry amenable for use in the soil-bentonite slurry trench wall construction. Key words: calcium bentonite, microstructure, slurry trench cutoff wall, sodium hexametaphosphate, workability. Cette etude vise a enqueter sur la maniabilite et les caracteristiques microstructurelles de la bentonite calcique (Ca-bentonite) traitees a l'hexametaphosphate de sodium (SHMP) comme materiau potentiel pour la paroi de la limite tranchee de boue de bentonite de sol. Tout d'abord, une serie d'experiences de viscosite Marsh, de densite, de perte de filtrat et de pH sont effectuees sur des boues d'eau du robinet et de bentonite contenant du Ca- bentonite modifiee avec des dosages SHMP de 0 a 8 %. Par la suite, des essais de microscopie electronique a balayage (MEB), de diffraction de rayons X (XRD), de spectroscopie infrarouge a transformee de Fourier et de potentiel zeta sont menes pour explorer les caracteristiques microstructurelles qui controlent les mecanismes de traitement SHMP. Les resultats indiquent que la maniabilite de la boue est significativement amelioree avec l'ajout de SHMP. L'analyse MEB, XRD, et le potentiel zeta montrent que le Ca-bentonite modifie en SHMP possede une structure plus dispersee et du potentiel zeta negatif superieur par rapport au Ca-bentonite non modifie. Les mecanismes de SHMP modifies sont identifies a etre l'echange de cations en calcium bivalent en Ca-bentonite par les cations de sodium monovalents dans le SHMP, la sorption de l'anion de SHMP qui donne au systeme d'argile la stabilisation sterique et une augmentation de la densite de charge de surface negative, et la sequestration des cations de calcium bivalents sur le Cabentonite. Dans l'ensemble, le traitement SHMP est efficace pour faire de la boue de Ca- bentonite facile a utiliser dans la construction de la paroi de la tranchee de boue de sol-bentonite. [Traduit par la Redaction] Mots-cles : bentonite calcique, microstructure, paroi de la tranchee de boue de sol-bentonite, hexametaphosphate de sodium, maniabilite., Introduction Soil-bentonite (SB) slurry trench cutoff walls have been employed extensively in the USA and Canada as in situ barriers to control transport of the contaminants in groundwater due to [...]

BACKGROUND. Cytotoxic T lymphocyte-mediated (CTL-mediated) severe cutaneous adverse reactions (SCARs), including Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS) and toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN), are rare but life-threatening adverse reactions commonly induced by drugs. Although high levels of CTL-associated cytokines, chemokines, or cytotoxic proteins, including TNF-[alpha] and granulysin, were observed in SJS-TEN patients in recent studies, the optimal treatment for these diseases remains controversial. We aimed to evaluate the efficacy, safety, and therapeutic mechanism of a TNF-[alpha] antagonist in CTL-mediated SCARs. METHODS. We enrolled 96 patients with SJS-TEN in a randomized trial to compare the effects of the TNF-[alpha] antagonist etanercept versus traditional corticosteroids. RESULTS. Etanercept improved clinical outcomes in patients with SJS-TEN. Etanercept decreased the SCORTEN-based predicted mortality rate (predicted and observed rates, 17.7% and 8.3%, respectively). Compared with corticosteroids, etanercept further reduced the skin-healing time in moderate-to-severe SJS-TEN patients (median time for skin healing was 14 and 19 days for etanercept and corticosteroids, respectively; P = 0.010), with a lower incidence of gastrointestinal hemorrhage in all SJS-TEN patients (2.6% for etanercept and 18.2% for corticosteroids; P = 0.03). In the therapeutic mechanism study, etanercept decreased the TNF-[alpha] and granulysin secretions in blister fluids and plasma (45.7%-62.5% decrease after treatment; all P < 0.05) and increased the Treg population (2-fold percentage increase after treatment; P = 0.002), which was related to mortality in severe SJS-TEN. CONCLUSIONS. The anti-TNF-[alpha] biologic agent etanercept serves as an effective alternative for the treatment of CTL-mediated SCARs. TRIAL REGISTRATION. ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01276314. FUNDING. Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan., Introduction Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS) and its related disease, toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN), are severe cutaneous adverse reactions (SCARs) involving keratinocyte apoptosis and detachment of the epidermis. Allopurinol and carbamazepine are [...]

The ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) comprises a network of enzymes that is responsible for maintaining cellular protein homeostasis. The therapeutic potential of this pathway has been validated by the clinical successes of a number of UPS modulators, including proteasome inhibitors and immunomodulatory imide drugs (IMiDs). Here we identified TAK-243 (formerly known as MLN7243) as a potent, mechanism-based small-molecule inhibitor of the ubiquitin activating enzyme (UAE), the primary mammalian E1 enzyme that regulates the ubiquitin conjugation cascade. TAK-243 treatment caused depletion of cellular ubiquitin conjugates, resulting in disruption of signaling events, induction of proteotoxic stress, and impairment of cell cycle progression and DNA damage repair pathways. TAK-243 treatment caused death of cancer cells and, in primary human xenograft studies, demonstrated antitumor activity at tolerated doses. Due to its specificity and potency, TAK-243 allows for interrogation of ubiquitin biology and for assessment of UAE inhibition as a new approach for cancer treatment., Author(s): Marc L Hyer [1]; Michael A Milhollen (corresponding author) [1]; Jeff Ciavarri [1]; Paul Fleming [1]; Tary Traore [1]; Darshan Sappal [1]; Jessica Huck [1]; Judy Shi [1]; James [...]

In this paper, we present an alternative scheme to generate W state of three superconducting qubits in three spatially separated coplanar waveguide resonators with the quantum Zeno dynamics and the dressed states. When a set of dressed states is suitably chosen, a scheme can be designed for accelerating the adiabatic passage without additional couplings. What is more, the populations of the intermediate states of the system can be restricted by choosing suitable control parameters. We discuss the influence of dissipation and operational imperfection by numerical analysis and the results show that the scheme is robust against various decoherence processes. In addition, we hope the scheme can provide a theoretical basis for the manipulation of the multi-qubit quantum state. Key words: W state, circuit quantum electrodynamics, dressed state, quantum Zeno dynamics, accelerating adiabatic passage. Nous presentons ici un schema alternatif pour generer l'etat intrique W de trois qubits supraconducteurs dans trois resonateurs a guide d'onde coplanaires separes spatialement, avec dynamique quantique de Zenon et etats habilles. Lorsqu'un ensemble d'etats habilles est choisi de facon appropriee, on peut construire un schema qui accelere le passage adiabatique sans couplages additionnels. De plus, les populations des etats intermediaires peuvent etre restreintes en choisissant les parametres de controle idoines. Nous discutons par analyse numerique l'influence de la dissipation et de l'imperfection operationnelle; les resultats montrent que le schema est robuste contre differents processus de decoherence. En conclusion, nous esperons que ce schema peut fournir une base theorique pour la manipulation de l'etat quantique multi-qubits. [Traduit par la Redaction] Mots-cles: etat W, electrodynamique du circuit quantique, etat habille, dynamique quantique de Zenon, accelerant le passage adiabatique., 1. Introduction In recent years, much attention has been focused on production and manipulation of entangled states, which promoted the development of experimental technique and led to the realization of [...]

The extent to which core-periphery hierarchical trade patterns have significantly changed with the emergence of Asia remains debated. This paper addresses the debate by examining the spatial patterns and mobility of Asian countries in global solar energy trade. Based on network analysis from 1990 to 2013, it shows that Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia emerged as core countries as early as 1990. The Asian core expanded to six countries by 2013, including Japan, South Korea, China, and Singapore. China in particular moved steeply upward in the spatial hierarchy. The United States also experienced considerable vertical mobility, but Germany is the most stable core. The rise of East and Southeast Asia, however, did not decrease economic inequality internationally. Rather, new patterns of network inequality may be observed both within Asia and globally. Less developed Southeast and South Asia--Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Pakistan--experienced no or marginal mobility. Keywords: Solar energy trade, core-periphery, Asia, spatial mobility, network analysis., Relational economic geography has focused geographers' attention beyond material production and distribution of commodities to the formation of their structural networks (Martinus and others 2015). Within the context of East [...]

Bartonelloses are major emerging infectious bacterial diseases because of the high prevalence of chronic Bartonella infections in mammals and humans and their increasing risk for infection of immunocompromised populations (1-4). [...]

A population of partially exhausted CXCR5.sup.+ CD8.sup.+ T cells, induced by chronic virus infection and residing in B-cell follicles, is shown to control viral replication. During chronic viral infection, virus-specific CD8.sup.+ T cells become exhausted, exhibit poor effector function and lose memory potential.sup.1,2,3,4. However, exhausted CD8.sup.+ T cells can still contain viral replication in chronic infections.sup.5,6,7,8,9, although the mechanism of this containment is largely unknown. Here we show that a subset of exhausted CD8.sup.+ T cells expressing the chemokine receptor CXCR5 has a critical role in the control of viral replication in mice that were chronically infected with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV). These CXCR5.sup.+ CD8.sup.+ T cells were able to migrate into B-cell follicles, expressed lower levels of inhibitory receptors and exhibited more potent cytotoxicity than the CXCR5.sup.- subset. Furthermore, we identified the Id2-E2A signalling axis as an important regulator of the generation of this subset. In patients with HIV, we also identified a virus-specific CXCR5.sup.+ CD8.sup.+ T-cell subset, and its number was inversely correlated with viral load. The CXCR5.sup.+ subset showed greater therapeutic potential than the CXCR5.sup.- subset when adoptively transferred to chronically infected mice, and exhibited synergistic reduction of viral load when combined with anti-PD-L1 treatment. This study defines a unique subset of exhausted CD8.sup.+ T cells that has a pivotal role in the control of viral replication during chronic viral infection., Author(s): Ran He [sup.1] [sup.9] , Shiyue Hou [sup.2] , Cheng Liu [sup.1] [sup.9] , Anli Zhang [sup.3] , Qiang Bai [sup.1] [sup.9] , Miao Han [sup.4] , Yu Yang [...]

Author(s): Ran He [1]; Shiyue Hou [2]; Cheng Liu [1]; Anli Zhang [3]; Qiang Bai [1]; Miao Han [4]; Yu Yang [3]; Gang Wei [4]; Ting Shen [4]; Xinxin Yang [...]

Human-associated microbial communities have a crucial role in determining our health and well-being (1,2), and this has led to the continuing development of microbiome-based therapies (3) such as faecal microbiota transplantation (4,5). These microbial communities are very complex, dynamic6 and highly personalized ecosystems (3,7), exhibiting a high degree of inter-individual variability in both species assemblages (8) and abundance profiles (9). It is not known whether the underlying ecological dynamics of these communities, which can be parameterized by growth rates, and intra-and inter-species interactions in population dynamics models (10), are largely host-independent (that is, universal) or host-specific. If the inter-individual variability reflects host-specific dynamics due to differences in host lifestyle (11), physiology (12) or genetics (13), then generic microbiome manipulations may have unintended consequences, rendering them ineffective or even detrimental. Alternatively, microbial ecosystems of different subjects may exhibit universal dynamics, with the inter-individual variability mainly originating from differences in the sets of colonizing species (7,14). Here we develop a new computational method to characterize human microbial dynamics. By applying this method to cross-sectional data from two large-scale metagenomic studies-the Human Microbiome Project (9,15) and the Student Microbiome Project (16)--we show that gut and mouth microbiomes display pronounced universal dynamics, whereas communities associated with certain skin sites are probably shaped by differences in the host environment. Notably, the universality of gut microbial dynamics is not observed in subjects with recurrent Clostridium difficile infection (17) but is observed in the same set of subjects after faecal microbiota transplantation. These results fundamentally improve our understanding of the processes that shape human microbial ecosystems, and pave the way to designing general microbiome-based therapies (18)., The underlying dynamics of a microbial ecosystem, that is, the ecological interactions that govern its change, equilibrium and stability, can be represented by a population dynamic model [[??].sup.(v)] = f [...]

Byline: Di. Li, Ru-Zhi. Zhang, Hai-Xia. Shi, Yu-Hua. Yang, Ting. Tian, Li. Wang Background: Autologous melanocyte transplantation plays an important role in the treatment of vitiligo. Objective: Previous studies have [...]

The traffic flow prediction is becoming increasingly crucial in Intelligent Transportation Systems. Accurate prediction result is the precondition of traffic guidance, management, and control. To improve the prediction accuracy, a spatiotemporal traffic flow prediction method is proposed combined with k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and long short-term memory network (LSTM), which is called KNN-LSTM model in this paper. KNN is used to select mostly related neighboring stations with the test station and capture spatial features of traffic flow. LSTM is utilized to mine temporal variability of traffic flow, and a two-layer LSTM network is applied to predict traffic flow respectively in selected stations. The final prediction results are obtained by result-level fusion with rank-exponent weighting method. The prediction performance is evaluated with real-time traffic flow data provided by the Transportation Research Data Lab (TDRL) at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) Data Center. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model can achieve a better performance compared with well-known prediction models including autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), support vector regression (SVR), wavelet neural network (WNN), deep belief networks combined with support vector regression (DBN-SVR), and LSTM models, and the proposed model can achieve on average 12.59% accuracy improvement., 1. Introduction The accurate prediction of future traffic conditions (e.g., traffic flow, travel speed and travel time) is crucial requirement for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), which can help administrators take [...]

ABSTRACT Herbal medicine is a popular complementary or alternative treatment for prostate cancer. Wedelia chinensis has at least three active compounds, wedelolactone, luteolin, and apigenin synergistically inhibiting prostate cancer cell [...]

Resistance spot welding (RSW) remains the most common joining method in the automobile industry, where it is used to weld sheet metal to form vehicle bodies and other parts. The [...]

Hormone therapies for advanced prostate cancer target the androgen receptor (AR) ligand-binding domain (LBD), but these ultimately fail and the disease progresses to lethal castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). The mechanisms [...]

Composite structures are used extensively in aircraft, space vehicles, marine, and automotive structures due to their light weight, high stiffness, and high ultimate strength. These structures often are joined to [...]

The ultimate proof of our understanding of natural or technological systems is reflected in our ability to control them. Although control theory offers mathematical tools for steering engineered and natural systems towards a desired state, a framework to control complex self-organized systems is lacking. Here we develop analytical tools to study the controllability of an arbitrary complex directed network, identifying the set of driver nodes with time-dependent control that can guide the system's entire dynamics. We apply these tools to several real networks, finding that the number of driver nodes is determined mainly by the network's degree distribution. We show that sparse inhomogeneous networks, which emerge in many real complex systems, are the most difficult to control, but that dense and homogeneous networks can be controlled using a few driver nodes. Counterintuitively, we find that in both model and real systems the driver nodes tend to avoid the high-degree nodes., According to control theory, a dynamical system is controllable if, with a suitable choice of inputs, it can be driven from any initial state to any desired final state within [...]

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has recently gained attention both within industry and academia; however, its characteristics cannot be easily solved using existing distributed computing technologies. Composition and interaction issues have been the central concerns, because SOC applications are composed of heterogeneous and distributed processes. To tackle the complexity of inter-organizational service integration, the authors propose a methodology to decompose complex process requirements into different types of flows, such as control, data, exception, and security. The subset of each type of flow necessary for the interactions with each partner can be determined in each service. These subsets collectively constitute a process view, based on which interactions can be systematically designed and managed for system integration through service composition. The authors illustrate how the proposed SOC middleware, named FlowEngine, implements and manages these flows with contemporary Web services technologies. An experimental case study in an e-governmental environment further demonstrates how the methodology can facilitate the design of complex inter-organizational processes. Keywords: Cross-Organizational Process View, Decomposition Methodology, E-Government, Exceptions, Flows, Web Services, INTRODUCTION Recently, Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) (Papazoglou & Georgakopoulos, 2003) has gained a lot of attention within both the industry and academy. SOC is a computing paradigm that utilizes services as [...]