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Zhen-Hua Li,1,&ast; Jie Wang,1,&ast; Xin Cheng,1,&ast; Yi-Cheng Mao,1 Kang-Di Zhang,1 Wen-Jie Yu,1 Ying-Qing Li,1 Kai Huang,1,2 Kun Ding,1 Xiao-Jing Yang,1 Cheng-Yang Hu,3 Xiu-Jun Zhang1,4 1Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Hospital Infection Prevention and Control, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Humanistic Medicine, School of Humanistic Medicine, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui, People’s Republic of China; 4Center for Evidence-Based Practice, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui, People’s Republic of China&ast;These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Cheng-Yang Hu; Xiu-Jun Zhang, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui, People’s Republic of China, Tel/Fax +86 551 65167031 ; +86 551 65169635, Email cy.hu@ahmu.edu.cn; zhangxiujun@ahmu.edu.cnBackground: There is growing evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on public mental health. However, less attention has been paid to left-behind experience college students (LBEs). This online study aimed to investigate the relationship between psychological capital (PsyCap) and anxiety among LBEs during COVID-19 pandemic, and further analyze the mediation role of self-esteem between them.Methods: A total of 9990 students were chosen using the stratified cluster sampling method. Three self-reported questionnaires were used to assess the PsyCap, self-esteem, and anxiety, respectively. All the statistical analyses were conducted using SPSS 23.0 and R, and to further investigate the mediation effect of self-esteem in the association of PsyCap with anxiety, AMOS 23.0 was used to build a structural equation model.Results: PsyCap, self-esteem, and anxiety were significantly correlated among LBEs during the COVID-19 pandemic. PsyCap affects anxiety directly (β = – 0.22, SE = 0.051, 95% CI: – 0.27, – 0.17, P < 0.05). In addition, self-esteem partially mediated the relationship between PsyCap and anxiety (mediating effect value = – 0.16, 95% CI: – 0.20, – 0.13, P < 0.05).Conclusion: During the pandemic of COVID-19, left-behind experience had a negative influence on the PsyCap and self-esteem of college students. In addition, for LBEs, self-esteem plays an important mediating role between PsyCap and anxiety. Therefore, from the perspective of PsyCap and self-esteem, schools should translate them into practical educational strategies to enhance the mental health and mitigate the anxiety levels of LBEs.Keywords: left-behind experience, COVID-19, psychology, mental health

Serological assays are indispensable tools in public health. Presently deployed serological assays, however, largely overlook research progress made in the last two decades that jeopardizes the conceptual foundation of these assays, i.e., antibody (Ab) specificity. Challenges to traditional understanding of Ab specificity include Ab polyspecificity and most recently nonreproducible Ab-probe interactions (NRIs). Here, using SARS-CoV-2 and four common livestock viruses as a test bed, we developed a new serological platform that integrates recent understanding about Ab specificity. We first demonstrate that the response rate (RR) from a large-sized serum pool (∼100) is not affected by NRIs or by nonspecific Ab-probe interactions (NSIs), so RR can be incorporated into the diagnostic probe selection process. We subsequently used multiple probes (configured as a "protein peptide hybrid microarray", PPHM) to generate a digital microarray index (DMI) and finally demonstrated that DMI-based analysis yields an extremely robust probabilistic trend that enables accurate diagnosis of viral infection that overcomes multiple negative impacts exerted by NSI/NRI. Thus, our study with SARS-CoV-2 confirms that the PPHM-RR-DMI platform enables very rapid development of serological assays that outperform traditional assays (for both sensitivity and specificity) and supports that the platform is extendable to other viruses.

Abstract. The purpose of this study was to better understand effects of video game rewards on information processing using neuroimaging techniques. Excitation transfer theory, with the limited capacity model of motivated mediated messages, was used to predict that game rewards (administered through goal-directed spatial decision-making demands) will increase hippocampal activity. Activity will remain heightened in a subsequent declarative memory task. It was also predicted that heightened hippocampal activity during encoding will result in better recall after a 25-min delay. Both hypotheses were supported. Participants who played the goal-directed spatial decision-making game experienced greater hippocampal activation during the encoding phase of the memory task. And they demonstrated better recall for the encoded information after the delay. There was also a negative correlation between hippocampal activation and a primary inhibitory neurotransmitter, gamma-aminobutyric acid. These results suggest that goal-directed spatial decision-making mechanics can be important for facilitating hippocampal activation and declarative memory. They stress the need for future research to consider how these mechanics could be implemented in games for learning or as a potential intervention technique for those with memory impairments.

A leader-follower system is developed for cooperative transportation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that inter-UAV communication is not required and the reference trajectory of the payload can be modified in real time, so that it can be applied to a dynamically changing environment. To track the modified reference trajectory in real time under the communication-free condition, the leader-follower system is considered as a nonholonomic system in which a controller is developed for the leader to achieve asymptotic tracking of the payload. To eliminate the need to install force sensors, UKFs (unscented Kalman filters) are developed to estimate the forces applied by the leader and follower. Stability analysis is conducted to prove the tracking error of the closed-loop system. Simulation results demonstrate the good performance of the tracking controller. The experiments show the controllers of the leader and the follower can work in the real world, but the tracking errors were affected by the disturbance of airflow in a restricted space.

An AND-gate bioluminescent probe FK-Luc-BH was constructed by integrating excitation-free BLI modality with a dual-locked strategy to monitor the co-localization of cathepsin L and hypochlorite in tumor sites for precise tumor imaging.

To improve the defense capability of military equipment under extreme conditions, impact-resistant and high-energy-consuming materials have to be developed. The damping characteristic of entangled porous metallic wire materials (EPMWM) for vibration isolation was previously investigated. In this paper, a study focusing on the impact-resistance of EPMWM with the consideration of ambient temperature is presented. The quasi-static and low-velocity impact mechanical behavior of EPMWM under different temperatures (25 °C–300 °C) are systematically studied. The results of the static compression test show that the damping energy dissipation of EPMWM increases with temperature while the nonlinear damping characteristics are gradually enhanced. During the impact experiments, the impact energy loss rate of EPMWM was between 65% and 85%, while the temperatures increased from 25 °C to 300 °C. Moreover, under the same drop impact conditions, the overall deformation of EPMWM decreases in the temperature range of 100 °C–200 °C. On the other hand, the impact stiffness, energy dissipation, and impact loss factor of EPMWM significantly increase with temperature. This can be attributed to an increase in temperature, which changes the thermal expansion coefficient and contact state of the internal wire helixes. Consequently, the energy dissipation mode (dry friction, air damping, and plastic deformation) of EPMWM is also altered. Therefore, the EPMWM may act as a potential candidate material for superior energy absorption applications.

Aims The aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of plasma-mediated oxidative stress on the post-treatment viability of Listeria monocytogenes at the physiological and molecular levels. Methods and Results 107 CFU/ml L. monocytogenes in 10 ml phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) was treated with atmospheric non-thermal plasma for 0, 30, 60, 90 and 120 s respectively. Optical diagnostics using optical emission spectroscopy (OES) confirmed that dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma was a significant source of ample exogenous reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (RONS). The development of extracellular main long-lived species was associated with plasma exposure time, accompanied by a massive accumulation of intracellular ROS in L. monocytogenes (p < 0.01). With the exception of virulence genes (hly), most oxidation resistance genes (e.g. sigB, perR, lmo2344, lmo2770 and trxA) and DNA repair gene (recA) were upregulated significantly (p < 0.05). A visible fragmentation in genomic DNA and a decline in the secretion of extracellular proteins and haemolytic activity (p < 0.01) were noticed. The quantitate oxygen consumption rates (OCRs) and extracellular acidification rates (ECARs) confirmed the viability attenuation from the aspect of energy metabolism. Survival assay in a real food system (raw milk) further suggested not only the viability attenuation, but also the resuscitation potential and safety risk of mild plasma-treated cells during post-treatment storage. Conclusion DBD plasma had the potential to inactivate and attenuate the virulence of L. monocytogenes, and it was recommended that plasma exposure time longer than 120 s was more suitable for attenuating viability and avoiding the recovery possibility of L. monocytogenes in raw milk within 7 days. Significance and Impact of the Study The current results presented a strategy to inactivate and attenuate the viability of L. monocytogenes, which could serve as a theoretical basis for better application of non-thermal plasma in food in an effort to effectively combat foodborne pathogens.

Magnetism in two-dimensional (2D) materials has attracted considerable attention recently for both fundamental understanding of magnetism and their tunability towards device applications. The isostructural Fe$_3$GeTe$_2$ and Fe$_3$GaTe$_2$ are two members of the Fe-based van der Waals (vdW) ferromagnet family, but exhibit very different Curie temperatures (T$_C$) of 210 K and 360 K, respectively. Here, by using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and density functional theory, we systematically compare the electronic structures of the two compounds. Qualitative similarities in the Fermi surface can be found between the two compounds, with expanded hole pockets in Fe$_3$GaTe$_2$ suggesting additional hole carriers compared to Fe$_3$GeTe$_2$. Interestingly, we observe no band shift in Fe$_3$GaTe$_2$ across its T$_C$ of 360 K, compared to a small shift in Fe$_3$GeTe$_2$ across its T$_C$ of 210 K. The weak temperature-dependent evolution strongly deviates from the expectations of an itinerant Stoner mechanism. Our results suggest that itinerant electrons have minimal contributions to the enhancement of T$_C$ in Fe$_3$GaTe$_2$ compared to Fe$_3$GeTe$_2$, and that the nature of ferromagnetism in these Fe-based vdW ferromagnets must be understood with considerations of the electron correlations.

Previous studies have shown the great potential of using plasma-activated water (PAW) on improving agriculture seed germination, however, information on the influence of PAW on crop plantlet juice remains scanty. In this research, the effect of PAW generated by atmosphere pressure Ar–O2 plasma jet for 1–5 min on wheat seed germination, seedling growth and nutritional properties of wheat plantlet juice was investigated. Results revealed that all PAWs could enhance wheat seed germination and seedling growth in 7 days by improving the germination rate, germination index, fresh weight, dry weight and vigour index, and especially that PAW activated for 3 min (PAW-3) showed the best overall performance. In addition, the application of PAWs enhanced the nutritional properties of wheat plantlet juice from those grown for 14 days by improving total soluble solids, protein content, photosynthetic pigments, total phenolic content, antioxidant activity, enzyme activity, free amino acids and minerals content, and the best enhancement was also observed in PAW-3. It was concluded that PAWs would be an effective technique to enhance the growth and nutritional properties of crop sprouts, which could be served as functional foods in many forms.

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are ubiquitous soil contaminants, and their bioaccessibility determines their environmental risks in contaminated land. In the present study, the residual concentrations of PAHs in the soils of two industrial sites were determined, and their bioaccessibility was estimated by the hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin extraction (HPCD) extraction method. The results showed heavy PAH contamination at both site S1 (0.38-3342.5 mg kg

BACKGROUND: Abnormal regulation of the NOTCH signaling pathway in prostate cancer (PCa) can promote tumorigenesis, progression, and T cell exhaustion. However, there has not been a comprehensive analysis of NOTCH family genes (NOTCHs) as potential therapeutic targets and prognostic biomarkers for PCa patients. METHODS: NOTCHs expressions in various types of cancer tissues and normal adjacent tissues in the TIMER and UALCAN database were screened. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) and real-time quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) were applied to validate the expression pattern of NOTCHs in clinical samples. The relationships of NOTCHs expression and clinicopathologic parameters or disease-free survival (DFS) were evaluated via GEPIA2 and UALCAN. A proteins network was built using STRING and GeneMANIA. Additionally, NOTCHs mutation status was analyzed by cBioportal. Finally, we used GDSC and TIMER to investigate NOTCH signaling-related drugs and immune cell infiltration. RESULTS: The transcriptional levels of NOTCH1 and NOTCH4 in PCa tissues were significantly lower than in normal tissues, which was further validated in clinical patients’ tissue samples. Furthermore, NOTCH1, NOTCH3, and NOTCH4 expressions in PCa were associated with worse DFS. Interestingly, there was a significant positive correlation between NOTCHs and androgen receptor (AR), but not with AR-related genes (KLK3 and TMPRSS2). Finally, we found that NOTCHs expressions were remarkably associated with infiltration of B cells, CD8(+)/CD4(+) T cells, macrophages, neutrophils, and dendritic cells, which indicated that NOTCHs mutation status might be a potential therapeutic target for -tinib antineoplastic drugs. CONCLUSIONS: The expression and mutation of NOTCH1–4 in PCa were associated with disease progression, prognosis, immune cell infiltration, and drug sensitivity.

Recently, unsupervised image-to-image translation methods based on contrastive learning have achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks. However, in the previous works, the negatives are sampled from the input image itself, which inspires us to design a data augmentation method to improve the quality of the selected negatives. Moreover, the previous methods only preserve the content consistency via patch-wise contrastive learning in the embedding space, which ignores the domain consistency between the generated images and the real images of the target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised image-to-image translation framework based on multi-cropping contrastive learning and domain consistency, called MCDUT. Specifically, we obtain the multi-cropping views via the center-cropping and the random-cropping with the aim of further generating the high-quality negative examples. To constrain the embeddings in the deep feature space, we formulate a new domain consistency loss, which encourages the generated images to be close to the real images in the embedding space of the same domain. Furthermore, we present a dual coordinate attention network by embedding positional information into the channel, which called DCA. We employ the DCA network in the design of generator, which makes the generator capture the horizontal and vertical global information of dependency. In many image-to-image translation tasks, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, and the advantages of our method have been proven through extensive comparison experiments and ablation research.

In this study, the effects of plasma-activated water (PAW), generated by dielectric barrier discharge cold plasma at the gas–liquid interface, on the quality of fresh strawberries during storage were investigated. The results showed that, with the prolongation of plasma treatment time, the pH of PAW declined dramatically and the electrical conductivity increased significantly. The active components, including NO2−, NO3−, H2O2, and O2−, accumulated gradually in PAW, whereas the concentration of O2− decreased gradually with the treatment time after 2 min. No significant changes were found in pH, firmness, color, total soluble solids, malondialdehyde, vitamin C, or antioxidant activity in the PAW-treated strawberries (p > 0.05). Furthermore, the PAW treatment delayed the quality deterioration of strawberries and extended their shelf life. Principal component analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis showed that the PAW 2 treatment group demonstrated the best prolonged freshness effect, with the highest firmness, total soluble solids, vitamin C, and DPPH radical scavenging activity, and the lowest malondialdehyde and ∆E* values, after 4 days of storage. It was concluded that PAW showed great potential for maintaining the quality of fresh fruits and extending their shelf life.

With compression, both Bi2Te2Se and Bi2Se2Te followed the transformation path R3̄m → C2/m → C2/c → Im3̄m. With decreasing pressure from the site-disordered state, partial amorphization were observed in these compounds.

In order to fabricate a heat transfer ceramic-based pipeline for concentrated solar power, rare earth Y2O3 was utilized as a modifying agent to improve the physico-chemistry properties of the cordierite-based composite ceramics. The influences of the sintering temperature and Y2O3 additive on the densification, flexural strength, and thermostability were investigated. The research results indicate that the densification degree of the composite ceramics gradually increases with elevated temperature, and the initial sintering temperature decreases with the addition of Y2O3. In addition, the flexural strength and heat shock resistance of the ceramic materials were improved with the addition of Y2O3. In particular, a sample containing 7 wt% Y2O3 (sample E4) sintered at 1360 °C showed the best properties with a relative density of 92.49%, a flexural strength of 126.81 MPa, and strength loss rate of -7.74% after 30 heat shock cycles. X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy analysis showed that parts of Y3+ ions dissolving into high-temperature liquid phases could reduce liquid viscosity to accelerate grain crystallization and pore elimination. The second phase of yttrium silicate properly impeded the generation of β-spodumene with lower strength during the heat shock process. Overall, a cordierite-based composite ceramic with low porosity was obtained with high mechanical strength and heat shock resistance and can be regarded as a highly potential material for solar heat transfer pipelines.