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A new Chinese truffle species, Tuber sinomacrosporum belongs to the Macrosporum group was illustrated and described, it is characterized by brownish-red ascoma, prosenchymatous peridium, dark brown gleba, 1(2) spored asci and large ellipsoid ascospores with 2–6 μm high reticulate-alveolate. Molecular analysis of the internal transcribed spacers (ITS) of the nuclear ribosomal DNA supports this species is distinct from the known species within the Macrosporum group. Phylogenetic relationships and morphological differences between this new species and its related species are discussed.

Background: Previous cross-sectional studies have identified a possible link between Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection and dementia. However, the association of H. pylori infection with longitudinal cognitive decline has rarely been investigated. Objective: This cohort study aims to demonstrate the effects of H. pylori infection on longitudinal cognitive decline. Methods: This cohort study recruited 268 subjects with memory complaints. Among these subjects, 72 had a history of H. pylori infection, and the rest 196 subjects had no H. pylori infection. These subjects were followed up for 24 months and received cognitive assessment in fixed intervals of 12 months. Results: At baseline, H. pylori infected, and uninfected participants had no difference in MMSE scores. At 2 years of follow-up, H. pylori infected participants had lower MMSE scores than uninfected participants. H. pylori infection was associated with an increased risk of longitudinal cognitive decline, as defined by a decrease of MMSE of 3 points or more during follow-up, adjusting for age, sex, education, APOE ɛ4 genotype, hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and smoking history (HR: 2.701; 95% CI: 1.392 to 5.242). H. pylori infection was associated with larger cognitive decline during follow-up, adjusting for the above covariates (standardized coefficient: 0.282, p

The regulation of amines can convert ligand-free T3-InS clusters into a variety of products. These results indicate that the coordination ability N atoms of amines has an important influence on the formation and assembly mode of clusters.

It has been assumed that patients with strict immunosuppressive treatment after solid organ transplantation have only marginal risk in developing autoimmune encephalitis. We reported a woman in her late 40 s who presented with generalized convulsions and loss of consciousness. After detailed history review, neuropsychological tests, metagenomic next-generation sequencing of serum and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain, and electroencephalogram, she was diagnosed as anti-CASPR2 encephalitis based on the positive anti-CASPR2 auto-antibody in serum and CSF. The patient underwent liver transplantation and has taken lenvatinib for 2 months, in addition to tacrolimus, mycophenotale mofetil, and entecavir administered for half a year. This case was the first report of anti-CASPR2 encephalitis in post-organ transplantation patients. Together with the reports of other encephalitis cases in organ transplantation, it warns the possibility of developing immune-oriented encephalitis in patients undergoing immunosuppression, especially in combination with other treatments of immunomodulatory activity.

Since China is facing a complicated international situation and sustainable development requirement at the same time, this paper examines the effects of external uncertainty, international sanctions, on green innovations by adopting the system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation for 30 provinces (autonomous region and municipalities) from 1997 to 2019. We employ green inventions as the dependent variable and 5 indicators of sanctions (including unilateral, plurilateral, multilateral, economic, and intensity) as the main explanatory variables alternately. For further robustness tests, we use substitution variable green utility models, adopt sub-samples in different regions, change the empirical methodology, and add omitted variables. We also examine the mechanism effects of three possible channels. The conclusion is that plurilateral and economic sanctions both present significant negative impacts on green innovations, whereas China was not affected by unilateral or multilateral sanctions during the sample period. GDP, interpersonal globalization, and environment are proved to be the possible channels through which sanctions affect green innovations. Our research findings should assist Chinese-listed companies suffering from sanctions to make better responses on their way to green innovations. First published online 24 November 2022

We achieved a concise total synthesis of salimabromide by using a novel intramolecular radical cyclization to simultaneously construct the unique benzo-fused [4.3.1] carbon skeleton and the vicinal quaternary stereocenters. Other notable transformations include a tandem Michael/Mukaiyama aldol reaction to introduce most of the molecule's structural elements, along with hidden information for late-stage transformations, an intriguing tandem oxidative cyclization of a diene to form the bridged butyrolactone and enone moieties spontaneously, and a highly enantioselective hydrogenation of a cycloheptenone derivative (97% ee) that paved the way for the asymmetric synthesis of salimabromide.

This article studies the localization and circumnavigation problem concerned with a cluster of nonholonomic vehicles independently of a uniform global coordinate. Particularly, the clustered vehicles collaboratively locate an unknown target and then circumnavigate it isometrically with desired distance and velocity. However, the vehicles have no access to any position information, including their own absolute positions and others’ relative positions. Instead, they are capable of measuring relative bearings only with respect to their neighbors within their local coordinates. Different local coordinates are not necessarily aligned. Moreover, only some of the vehicles can measure relative bearings with respect to the target. For the solution to the concerned localization and circumnavigation problem, a coordinate-free distributed algorithm composed by two parts is proposed. To be specific, the first distributed localization part guarantees that the vehicles accurately estimate the relative positions with respect to the target and neighbors given a persistently exciting condition. And the second distributed circumnavigation part further guarantees that the vehicles move around the target estimation isometrically with the desired distance and velocity. Also, the necessary persistently exciting condition is shown to be met. Finally, simulation and experiment are both given to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed distributed algorithm.

Most existing 3D instance segmentation methods are derived from 3D semantic segmentation models. However, these indirect approaches suffer from certain limitations. They fail to fully leverage global and local semantic information for accurate prediction, which hampers the overall performance of the 3D instance segmentation framework. To address these issues, this paper presents PSGformer, a novel 3D instance segmentation network. PSGformer incorporates two key advancements to enhance the performance of 3D instance segmentation. Firstly, we propose a Multi-Level Semantic Aggregation Module, which effectively captures scene features by employing foreground point filtering and multi-radius aggregation. This module enables the acquisition of more detailed semantic information from global and local perspectives. Secondly, PSGformer introduces a Parallel Feature Fusion Transformer Module that independently processes super-point features and aggregated features using transformers. The model achieves a more comprehensive feature representation by the features which connect global and local features. We conducted extensive experiments on the ScanNetv2 dataset. Notably, PSGformer exceeds compared state-of-the-art methods by 2.2% on ScanNetv2 hidden test set in terms of mAP. Our code and models will be publicly released.

Protein folding is a process in which a polypeptide must undergo folding process to obtain its three-dimensional structure. Thermodynamically, it is a process of enthalpy to overcome the loss of conformational entropy in folding. Folding is primarily related to hydrophobic interactions and intramolecular hydrogen bondings. During folding, hydrophobic interactions are regarded to be the driving forces, especially in the initial structural collapse of a protein. Additionally, folding is guided by the strong interactions within proteins, such as intramolecular hydrogen bondings related to the α-helices and β-sheets of proteins. Therefore, a protein is divided into the folding key (FK) regions related to intramolecular hydrogen bondings and the non-folding key (non-FK) regions. Various conformations are expected for FK and non-FK regions. Different from non-FK regions, it is necessary for FK regions to form the specific conformations in folding, which are regarded as the necessary folding pathways (or “beacons”). Additionally, sequential folding is expected for the FK regions, and the intermediate state is found during folding. They are reflected on the local basins in the free energy landscape (FEL) of folding. To demonstrate the structural model, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are conducted on the folding pathway of the TRP-cage in water.

Policy-Space Response Oracles (PSRO) is an influential algorithm framework for approximating a Nash Equilibrium (NE) in multi-agent non-transitive games. Many previous studies have been trying to promote policy diversity in PSRO. A major weakness in existing diversity metrics is that a more diverse (according to their diversity metrics) population does not necessarily mean (as we proved in the paper) a better approximation to a NE. To alleviate this problem, we propose a new diversity metric, the improvement of which guarantees a better approximation to a NE. Meanwhile, we develop a practical and well-justified method to optimize our diversity metric using only state-action samples. By incorporating our diversity regularization into the best response solving in PSRO, we obtain a new PSRO variant, Policy Space Diversity PSRO (PSD-PSRO). We present the convergence property of PSD-PSRO. Empirically, extensive experiments on various games demonstrate that PSD-PSRO is more effective in producing significantly less exploitable policies than state-of-the-art PSRO variants.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been shown effective for cooperative games in recent years. However, existing state-of-the-art methods face challenges related to sample inefficiency, brittleness regarding hyperparameters, and the risk of converging to a suboptimal Nash Equilibrium. To resolve these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel theoretical framework, named Maximum Entropy Heterogeneous-Agent Mirror Learning (MEHAML), that leverages the maximum entropy principle to design maximum entropy MARL actor-critic algorithms. We prove that algorithms derived from the MEHAML framework enjoy the desired properties of the monotonic improvement of the joint maximum entropy objective and the convergence to quantal response equilibrium (QRE). The practicality of MEHAML is demonstrated by developing a MEHAML extension of the widely used RL algorithm, HASAC (for soft actor-critic), which shows significant improvements in exploration and robustness on three challenging benchmarks: Multi-Agent MuJoCo, StarCraftII, and Google Research Football. Our results show that HASAC outperforms strong baseline methods such as HATD3, HAPPO, QMIX, and MAPPO, thereby establishing the new state of the art. See our project page at https://sites.google.com/view/mehaml.

Collaborative filtering (CF) is an important research direction in recommender systems that aims to make recommendations given the information on user-item interactions. Graph CF has attracted more and more attention in recent years due to its effectiveness in leveraging high-order information in the user-item bipartite graph for better recommendations. Specifically, recent studies show the success of graph neural networks (GNN) for CF is attributed to its low-pass filtering effects. However, current researches lack a study of how different signal components contributes to recommendations, and how to design strategies to properly use them well. To this end, from the view of spectral transformation, we analyze the important factors that a graph filter should consider to achieve better performance. Based on the discoveries, we design JGCF, an efficient and effective method for CF based on Jacobi polynomial bases and frequency decomposition strategies. Extensive experiments on four widely used public datasets show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods, which brings at most 27.06% performance gain on Alibaba-iFashion. Besides, the experimental results also show that JGCF is better at handling sparse datasets, which shows potential in making recommendations for cold-start users.

The current study aimed to investigate the role and underlying mechanism of Resolvin D1 (RvD1) alleviating spinal nerve ligation (SNL)-induced neuropathic pain (NP) and its interplay with regulatory cascades of Nod-like Receptor Protein 3 (NLRP3) inflammasome. Sprague-Dawley male rat models of SNL-stimulated NP were established, which were pre-treated with different doses of RvD1, WRW4 (ALX/FPR2 inhibitor) or U0126 (ERK inhibitor) for three successive days following the operation. Pain behavior was assessed by measuring changes in the mechanical sensitivity of the hind paws during an observation period of seven consecutive days. The spinal cord (SC) and dorsal root ganglions (DRGs) tissues were collected on postoperative day 7. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) and Western blot were performed to determine the expression levels of NLRP3 inflammasome complex, ALX/FPR2 receptor and extracellular signal-related kinase (ERK). The pro-inflammatory mediators (IL-1β and IL-18) were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The results showed that RvD1 could alleviate mechanical allodynia significantly in the SNL-induced NP rat models. Also, RvD1 inhibited the expression of p-ERK, the NLRP3 inflammasomes complex and its corresponding downstream pro-inflammatory mediators which were significantly enhanced in the SC and DRGs of the rat SNL models. While these changes were partially reversed by pre-administration of WRW4 and further strengthened by co-treated with U0126. Our results suggest that RvD1 dependent on ALX/FPR2 may have an analgesic and anti-inflammatory influence on SNL-induced NP driven by inhibiting NLRP3 inflammasome via ERK signaling pathway. These data also provide strong support for the recent modulation of neuro-inflammatory priming and highlight the potential for specialized pro-resolving mediators (SPMs) as novel therapeutic avenues for NP.

This thesis presents research on the paleogeographic data of Early Cretaceous granites and Mid-Late Jurassic limestones in the Zaduo area, Eastern Qiangtang Terrane, Tibetan Plateau, China. The granite study provides further insight into the Lhasa-Qiangtang collision, while the limestones have been remagnetized due to the India-Eurasia collision. The magnetic fabric of the remagnetized limestones documented the NNE-SSW oriented compression during the remagnetization. A comparative study of the remagnetized and unremagnetized rocks, which mainly concentrates on their rock magnetic properties, was also carried out. The combination of gravity and paleomagnetic data reveals a coupled lithosphere-scale oroclinal deformation of the eastern ending of the Qiangtang Terrane. The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 investigates an Early Cretaceous granite in the Zaduo area and presents a new paleomagnetic investigation on the granite. Chapter 2 discusses the remagnetization of the Jurassic limestones in the Zaduo area and its implications for the India-Eurasia collision. Chapter 3 is about the lithosphere-scale oroclinal deformation of the eastern ending of the Qiangtang Terrane. Chapter 4 focuses on the remagnetization of the limestones and the NNE-SSW oriented compression during the India-Eurasia collision, and Chapter 5 is about the comparative study of the remagnetized and unremagnetized rocks.

Recent research in offline reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated that return-conditioned supervised learning is a powerful paradigm for decision-making problems. While promising, return conditioning is limited to training data labeled with rewards and therefore faces challenges in learning from unsupervised data. In this work, we aim to utilize generalized future conditioning to enable efficient unsupervised pretraining from reward-free and sub-optimal offline data. We propose Pretrained Decision Transformer (PDT), a conceptually simple approach for unsupervised RL pretraining. PDT leverages future trajectory information as a privileged context to predict actions during training. The ability to make decisions based on both present and future factors enhances PDT's capability for generalization. Besides, this feature can be easily incorporated into a return-conditioned framework for online finetuning, by assigning return values to possible futures and sampling future embeddings based on their respective values. Empirically, PDT outperforms or performs on par with its supervised pretraining counterpart, especially when dealing with sub-optimal data. Further analysis reveals that PDT can extract diverse behaviors from offline data and controllably sample high-return behaviors by online finetuning. Code is available at here., 17 pages, 9 figures, ICML 2023

Recent years have witnessed the great potential of attention mechanism in graph representation learning. However, while variants of attention-based GNNs are setting new benchmarks for numerous real-world datasets, recent works have pointed out that their induced attentions are less robust and generalizable against noisy graphs due to lack of direct supervision. In this paper, we present a new framework which utilizes the tool of causality to provide a powerful supervision signal for the learning process of attention functions. Specifically, we estimate the direct causal effect of attention to the final prediction, and then maximize such effect to guide attention attending to more meaningful neighbors. Our method can serve as a plug-and-play module for any canonical attention-based GNNs in an end-to-end fashion. Extensive experiments on a wide range of benchmark datasets illustrated that, by directly supervising attention functions, the model is able to converge faster with a clearer decision boundary, and thus yields better performances.

MOBA games, e.g., Dota2 and Honor of Kings, have been actively used as the testbed for the recent AI research on games, and various AI systems have been developed at the human level so far. However, these AI systems mainly focus on how to compete with humans, less on exploring how to collaborate with humans. To this end, this paper makes the first attempt to investigate human-agent collaboration in MOBA games. In this paper, we propose to enable humans and agents to collaborate through explicit communication by designing an efficient and interpretable Meta-Command Communication-based framework, dubbed MCC, for accomplishing effective human-agent collaboration in MOBA games. The MCC framework consists of two pivotal modules: 1) an interpretable communication protocol, i.e., the Meta-Command, to bridge the communication gap between humans and agents; 2) a meta-command value estimator, i.e., the Meta-Command Selector, to select a valuable meta-command for each agent to achieve effective human-agent collaboration. Experimental results in Honor of Kings demonstrate that MCC agents can collaborate reasonably well with human teammates and even generalize to collaborate with different levels and numbers of human teammates. Videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/mcc-demo., Accepted at ICLR 2023

Objective To investigate the relationship between oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) findings and short-term adverse pregnancy outcomes among women with gestational diabetes mellitus. Methods We retrospectively collected 387 cases of pregnant womenwith gestational diabetes mellitus from 2020 to 2021 at the Maternity & Child Care Center of Dezhou and analyzed laboratory results. According to OGTT values, patients were divided into three groups, and pregnancy outcomes were analyzed; these included gestational weight gain, gestational hypertension, cesarean section, preterm birth, dead fetus, fetal distress, fetal growth restriction, congenital disabilities, macrosomia, and low birth weight. In group 1, 277 patients had abnormal OGTT values, and short-term adverse outcomes were studied. Results Three abnormal OGTT points were accompanied by significant gestational weight gain, gestational hypertension incidence, and low birth weight incidence; the risks of cesarean section and preterm birth increased. Abnormal fasting plasma glucose was associated with gestational hypertension. Conclusion OGTT findings can be used to alert clinicians to short-term adverse outcomes in mothers and infants. Clinicians should be aware of abnormal OGTT findings.

Tuber sinomacrosporum S. P. Wan, & F. Q. Yu, sp. nov. (FIGURE 2) MycoBank: 846502 Typification: CHINA. Yunnan Province, Dali City (25° 38′ N , 100° 68′ E), in humic soil under a pure Pinus forest, at about 2090 m, 26 December 2020, wsp1043-8, YNAU016 (GenBank ITS number = OK625303). Diagnosis: Tuber sinomacrosporum is characterized by the brownish-red ascoma, mostly 1(2)-spored asci, large and ellipsoid ascospores. Etymology: referring to a Chinese species have large spores. Description: Ascoma 2.2 × 1.35 cm in diam, oval-shaped or irregular, light brown, partial brown to brownishred when fresh, becoming brownish-red when dried, surface partially covered with yellow tomentose. Odor pleasant. Peridium 108.0–148.0 μm thick, one layer, prosenchymatous, composed of yellowish to transparent cells and interwoven hyphae, cells (1.0–)2.2–5.7(–7.8) × (1.0–)1.7–4.5(–5.4) μm, hyphae 1.3–2.8 μm in diam. Gleba solid, blackish at maturity, marbled with different whitish to greyish veins continuous with the peridium; composed of hyaline, interwoven, thin-walled hyphae, 0.7–2.4 μm broad at the septa, the cells subglobose to globose, 1.1–7.3(– 10.5) × 0.9–5.7(–8.6) μm. Asci 114.0–143.0(–158.0) × 86.0–117.0(–124.0) μm, ellipsoid, rarely pyriform or irregular, hyaline, sessile or with a short or tall stalk 7.5–49.0 μm, 1-spored, rarely 2-spored. Ascospores ellipsoid, sometimes oblong elliptical and broadly ellipsoid, hyaline when young, becoming brownish-red to brown at maturity; excluding alveolar ornamentation, in 1-spored asci (80.0–)89.0–105.0(–109.0) × (55.0–)61.0–76.0(–78.0) μm (Q = 1.32–1.53, Q m = 1.43 ± 0.08) (n = 120), in 2-spored (51.0–)55.0–78.0(–84.0) × (32.0–)37.0–55.0(–57.0) μm (Q = 1.25–1.65, Q m = 1.4 ± 0.16) (n = 30). Ornamented with alveolate reticulum, 2–6 μm deep, constituted of irregularly polygonal meshes, reticulum with 3–7 meshes along the spore length and 3–7 across. Distribution and habitat: Hypogeous, in soil under pure stand of Pinus forest in Yunnan Province, China. Known only from China., Published as part of Wan, Shan-Ping, Liu, Wei, Cui, Meng-Jin, Wang, Rui, Wang, Yu-Yun, Liu, Mei-Ju, Wang, Rui- Xue, Yu, Cheng-Jin & Yu, Fu-Qiang, 2023, Morphological and molecular evidence support a new truffle, Tuber sinomacrosporum, in Macrosporum group, pp. 283-291 in Phytotaxa 591 (4) on pages 286-288, DOI: 10.11646/phytotaxa.591.4.5, http://zenodo.org/record/7835575

Raman scattering provides a convenient mechanism to generate or amplify light at wavelengths where gain is not otherwise available. When combined with recent advancements in high power fiber lasers that operate at wavelengths ~2 μm, great opportunities exist for Raman systems that extend operation further into the mid-infrared (IR) regime for applications such as gas sensing, spectroscopy, and biomedical analyses. Here, a thulium-doped fiber laser is used to demonstrate Raman emission and amplification from a highly nonlinear silicon core fiber (SCF) platform at wavelengths beyond 2 μm . The SCF has been tapered to obtain a micrometer sized core diameter (~1.6 μm) over a length of 6 cm, with losses as low as 0.2 dB/cm. A maximum on-off peak gain of 30.4 dB was obtained with a modest average pump power of 12.4 mW, with simulations indicating that the gain could be increased to up to ~50 dB by extending the SCF length. Simulations also show that by exploiting the large Raman gain and extended mid-infrared transparency of the SCF, cascaded Raman processes could yield tunable systems with practical output powers across the 2-5 μm range.

Background: To investigate the clinical efficacy of the axillary approach in the surgical treatment of Ideberg type I and II scapular glenoid fractures. Methods: Retrospective analysis of 13 cases of scapular glenoid fracture treated in the affiliated Hospital of Jining Medical College, Jiaxiang County People hospital, Zoucheng City people Hospital, Yanzhou District People Hospital, and Juancheng County people Hospital from December 2020 to January 2022. Eight males (including one bilateral) and five females, with an average age of 57.5 years (range from 33 to 75 years). According to Ideberg classification, there were 10 cases of type Ⅰ a, 1 case of type Ⅰ a combined with type Ⅰ b, and 2 cases of type Ⅱ. All patients were treated with axillary approach surgery and seven patients with combined anterior shoulder dislocation were treated by first-stage manipulation and second-stage reoperation. Seven patients were fixed with a wire anchor, three patients with type Ⅰ a were fixed with a "T" plate, and five patients were complicated with rotator cuff tear and were repaired with a wire anchor. At the last follow-up, the Constant-Murley shoulder function score, visual analog score (VAS), DASH score, and Hawkins grade were used to evaluate shoulder function, pain, and stability after treatment. Results: All 13 patients in this group were followed up thoroughly, and the follow-up time was 12-25 months, with an average of 18.6 months. The operation time was 65-135min, with an average of 85.6 min. Intraoperative blood loss ranged from 20 to 120mL, averaging 55.6ml. The duration of hospitalization ranged from 7 to 22 days, with an average of 9.6 days. The surgical incisions of all patients were grade-A healing. Bone healing of glenoid fractures was observed three months after the operation. At the last follow-up, the shoulder range of motion was forward flexion 160.5°±9.3°, abduction 155.6°±12.5°, external rotation (neutral position) 40.7°±5.8°, internal rotation (neutral position) 65.4°±12.1°. The Constant-Murley score for the shoulder joint was (92.3±6.5) points (range 85-95), and the DASH score was (12.16±6.86) points (range 3.26 to 26.75). Conclusions: The axillary approach for Ideberg type I and II scapular glenoid fractures is a feasible surgical approach with complete access through the muscle gap, minimal surgical trauma, mild postoperative pain, and satisfactory clinical results.

Truffle cultivation has drawn more and more attention for its high economic and ecological values in the world. To select symbionts suitable for cultivation purposes, we conducted greenhouse-based mycorrhization trials of two Tuber species (T. formosanum and T. pseudohimalayense) with five broad-leaved tree species (Corylus yunnanensis, Quercus aliena var. acutiserrata, Q. acutissima, Q. robur, Q. variabilis) and one conifer species (Pinus armandii). Axenically germinated seedlings of all tree species were either inoculated, or not, with spore suspensions of these two truffles in the greenhouse. Eight months after inoculation, T. formosanum or T. pseudohimalayense ectomycorrhizae were successfully formed on these six tree species, as evidenced by both morphological and molecular analyses. All selected trees showed good receptivity to mycorrhization by both fungi, with average colonization rates visually estimated at 40-50%. Plant growth, photosynthesis, and nutrient uptake were assessed 2 years after inoculation and were mainly affected by host species. Mycorrhization by both fungi significantly improved P uptake of the hosts, and the interaction between truffle species and host plant species had significant effects on leaf water and leaf K concentrations. In addition, a significantly negative correlation between leaf Ca and leaf C concentration was found across all the seedlings. In addition, mycorrhization had slightly increased plant stem and canopy, but had no significant effects on plant photosynthesis. Overall, these results suggest that the effects of these two Tuber ECMF on plant growth and nutrient acquisition depend on the identity of the host species. Moreover, all selected plant species could be symbiotic partners with either T. pseudohimalayense or T. formosanum for field cultivation purposes.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the interobserver reliability and intraobserver repeatability of the China-Japan Friendship Hospital (CJFH) typing classification system for nontraumatic osteonecrosis of the femoral head (ONFH).Image data of 50 hips were randomly selected in 289 patients (433 hips) with ONFH who underwent treatment in the China-Japan Friendship Hospital from 2012 to 2016. Bilateral hip plain radiography, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), or computerized tomography (CT) were performed in all hips. The assessments were performed by 8 new residents independently, and the repeatability was assessed at 4-week intervals. Evaluation indicators included the size, location, and extent of necrotic lesions. Kappa values were used to determine the reliability and repeatability.According to the CJFH classification system, 2,800 evaluations were performed with an average interobserver Kappa value of 0.711, and 400 assessments were performed with an average intraobserver Kappa value of 0.748. Reliability analysis indicated a higher reliability and repeatability of this classification system. Critical factors affecting the consistency included the accurate selection of the median coronal plane and definitive tri-pillar division of the femoral head.The CJFH classification system is a simple and direct evaluation model for ONFH with substantial inter- and intraobserver reliability.

With the purpose of investigating the effects of confining pressure and aging on the mechanical properties of Hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) based composite solid propellant, tensile tests of thermal accelerated aged propellant samples under room temperature and different confining pressure conditions were performed through the use of a self-made confining pressure device and conventional testing machine. Afterwards, the maximum tensile stress σ m and the corresponding strain e m for the propellant under different test conditions were obtained and analyzed. The results indicate that confining pressure and aging can significantly affect the mechanical properties of HTPB propellant, and the coupled effects are very complex. On the one hand, the stress σ m increases as a whole when confining pressure becomes higher or thermal aging time rises. Besides, this stress is more sensitive to aging with increasing confining pressure. There are almost three regions in the stress increments σ mP − σ m 0 / σ m 0 and thermal aging time curves for HTPB propellant. The maximum value of the stress increment σ mP − σ m 0 / σ m 0 for the propellant is about 98% at 7.0 MPa and 170 d. On the other hand, the strain e m decreases with increasing thermal aging time under the whole confining pressure conditions. However, the variation of this strain with confining pressure is more complex at various thermal aging time, which is different from that of unaged solid propellant in previous researches. In addition, this strain is slightly less sensitive to aging as the confining pressure increases. Furthermore, there is also a critical confining pressure in this investigation, whose value is between 0.15 MPa and 4.0 MPa. Beyond this critical pressure, the trends of the stress σ m and the corresponding strain e m all change. Moreover, there are some critical thermal aging time for the stress increment ( σ mP − σ m 0 ) / σ m 0 and strain increment ( e mP − e m 0 ) / e m 0 of HTPB propellant in this investigation, which are about at 35, 50 and 170 d. Finally, based on the twin-shear strength theory, a new modified nonlinear strength criterion of thermal aged HTPB propellant under confining pressure was proposed. And the whole errors of fitted results are lower than 6%. Therefore, the proposed strength criterion can be selected as a failure criterion for the analysis the failure properties of aged HTPB propellant under different confining pressures, the structural integrity of solid propellant grain and the safety of solid rocket motor during ignition operation after long periods of storage.

Previous studies have shown that the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which can be affected by emotions, is important in the occurrence or progression of glaucoma. The autonomic innervation distributed in the anterior chamber (AC) structures might play an efferent role in the neural regulation of intraocular pressure (IOP). This study aimed to investigate the anatomic neural connection from the emotional brain to autonomic innervation in the AC.A retrograde trans-multisynaptic pseudorabies virus encoded with an enhanced green fluorescent protein (PRV531) and non-trans-synaptic tracer FAST Dil were injected into the right eye of mice, respectively. Fluorescent localization in the emotional brain and preganglionic nuclei was studied. Five and a half days after PRV531 injection into the right AC, fluorescent signals were observed in several emotional brain regions, including the amygdala, agranular insular cortex, lateral septal nuclei, periaqueductal gray, and hypothalamus. Autonomic preganglionic nuclei, including Edinger-Westphal nucleus, superior salivatory nucleus, and intermediolateral nucleus, were labeled using PRV531.The sensory trigeminal nuclei were not labeled using PRV531. The fluorescence signals in the nuclei mentioned above showed bilateral distribution, primarily on the ipsilateral side. Seven days after injecting FAST Dil into the AC, we observed no FAST Dil-labeled neurons in the central nervous system.Our results indicate a neural connection from the emotional brain to autonomic innervation in the AC, which provides anatomical support for the emotional influence of IOP via the ANS.

Serine/threonine phosphatase calcineurin (CN) is a unique but confounding calcium/calmodulin- mediated enzyme, which is composed of a catalytic subunit A (CNA) and a regulatory subunit B (CNB). We cloned six transcripts for CNA named from NlCNA-X1 to NlCNA-X6, one CNB named NlCNB1 and one CNB homologous gene NlCNBH1 from Nilaparvata lugens. All of them are constitutively transcripted in various tissues and developmental stages. The primary structure of the six isoforms showed obvious differences in the length and composition of the amino acid sequence between the two binding domains of Ca2+/calmodulin (CaM) and CNB. Ca2+-binding EF-hand motifs were found in NlCNB1 and NlCNBH1. The specific gene silencing of NlCNA, NlCNB1 and NlCNBH1 respectively by RNAi resulted in drastical reduction in survival rate, female weight, eclosion rate and fecundity of N. lugens. These results showed that NlCNA, NlCNB1 and NlCNBH1 were required for N. lugens growth and reproduction. The negative effects of NlCNB1 silence on nymph mortality (97%), molting malformation (90%) and female sterile (50%) were more serious than those of NlCNA or NlCNBH1. qRT-PCR and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) analyses indicated that the nymphs with silenced NlCNA, NlCNB1 or NlCNBH1 showed impaired hormone and energy metabolism. In nymphs, the contents of 20-hydroxyecdysone (20E) after NlCNB1 RNAi and phenoloxidase after NlCNA RNAi were particularly decreased. These results suggested that NlCNA is involved in immunity of N. lugens by regulation of phenoloxidase, while NlCNB1 may control the growth and development of N. lugens by 20E signaling pathway in addition to interact with CNA. Injection of 70 ng/μL dsNlCNB1 resulted in 77.0% down regulation of NlCNB1, and the nymph mortality was up to 57.9% at 10 d after injection. Therefore, NlCNB1 could be a potential candidate target used for strategy design in control of N. lugens. Our results revealed the importance of CN in the regulation of the growth and development of N. lugens, which provided a basis for further study of the molecular mechanism of CN.

The production of a distinct profile of volatile organic compounds plays a crucial role in the ecology of hypogeous Ascomycetes, and is also key to their gastronomic relevance. In this study, we explored the aroma components of two rarely investigated Chinese desert truffles, namely

β-Hydroxybutyl acid (βOHB), the most prevalent type of ketone in the human body, is involved in the pathogenesis of cognitive disorders, especially Alzheimer's dementia (AD), through a variety of mechanisms, such as enhancing mitochondrial metabolism, regulating signaling molecule, increasing histone acetylation, affecting the metabolism of Aβ and Tau proteins, inhibiting inflammation and lipid metabolism, and regulating intestinal microbes. Based on the above findings, clinical drug development in AD has begun to focus on βOHB.