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Good business environment is a necessary condition to stimulate market vitality and promote high-quality economic development, but also a significant symbol of the modernization of national governance. In recent years, the research on business environment has attracted the wide attention of scholars all over the world. Considering the important role of China in world economic development, this paper adopts text analysis and visualization graph analysis method, and takes the journal literatures published in Web of Science (WOS) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) from 2012 to 2022 as samples. The research progress of the business environment is visually analyzed from the aspects of the number of publications, authors and cooperative relations, publishing institutions and the evolution of research topics. The results show that the number of articles published in both Chinese and English literature presents an increasing trend. Chinese literature focuses on national policy support and government governance, while English literature focuses on the correlation analysis between business environment and enterprises. From the perspective of the evolution path of relevant research, the research on business environment in China is not long. At present, except for a few quantitative performance evaluation analysis, most qualitative research on development countermeasures is conducted. Foreign research on business environment appeared earlier, with a wide range of research topics, and has achieved more mature results.

In recent years, with the rapid development of the lithium-ion battery industry, the massive upstream consumption of mineral raw materials has led to great crises and challenges in balancing global supply and demand. A diversity of trading partners can effectively alleviate the pressure of supply and demand for raw materials; so, it is particularly important for trading countries to find suitable trading partners. This study takes nine important minerals contained in the main element raw materials of lithium-ion batteries as the research object, and the international trade data range from 2011 to 2020. The study combines complex networks and motifs and links prediction methods to predict the potential international trade relations of the nine minerals based on the actual network topology. We summarize three trade link rules as follows. (1) The predicted links have a timeliness requirement, and they generally turn into actual trade links within 3 years. (2) When looking for trading partners, trading countries tend to establish long-term and stable trade relations. (3) The existing trade relations will promote the establishment of predicted trade relations. In addition, we find that successfully predicted links will promote the formation of important motifs in the network. This study can provide a theoretical basis for trading countries to find suitable trading partners and can strengthen the safety of trading countries in the trade of the main element minerals for lithium-ion batteries.

Objective. To investigate patients’ preference and the attitude towards physician attire in an internal medicine clinic in China. Methods. This study was conducted from 1 January 2021 to 30 June 2021 in a tertiary care hospital in China. We surveyed 126 patients in the hospital with 6 sets of pictures of commonly worn physician attires in the hospital setting with a two-part questionnaire. The first part listed respondent demographics to collect basic information. The second part of the questionnaire was administered to adult patients who received care in the internal medicine clinics (outpatients). Survey forms collected demographic data (age, gender, patient age, education, marital status, and employment status), asked questions regarding 6 specific attires (scrubs, scrubs and white coat, casual, casual and white coat, business suit, and formal and white coat), and behavioral items (professional, responsible, reliable, knowledgeable, succession rate, and medical safety), finally, to assess the preference of attire on overall perception. Results. Scrubs and white coat scored the highest through 6 domains about physicians’ attire (professional, reliable, responsible, knowledgeable, medical safety, and succession rate, p < 0.05 for all comparisons). A casual suit without a white coat was the least preferred across the surveyed attributes. There was a significant preference gap between wearing a white coat and not wearing a white coat ( p < 0.001 ). Physician attire to white coat was considered as more professional, reliable, responsible, knowledgeable, having greater medical safety, and a higher success rate than attires without white coat. Conclusion. Patients felt that the physician wearing a white coat was better than other attires. Scrubs and white coat was the most popular attire. Hospital or related authorities may promote the standardized wearing of white coats, leading in a greater patient-physician relationship.

The synergistic design of 1D core–shell V3S4@C hosts and homogeneous catalyst Co(C5H5)2 is proposed to promote the chemisorption and conversion kinetics of polysulfides towards advanced Li–S batteries with high areal S loading and low E/S ratio.

The tail of imidazole regulated the assembly of fascinating 2D sql topology and 3D 2-fold interpenetrated lvt structure polyoxotungstate-based open frameworks with efficient visible-white-light-driven aerobic catalytic oxidation of sulfides.

In this work, a series of metal ion doped Cs2TeCl6 microcrystals were prepared and obtained a highest PLQY of 81.5% in the optimum Cs2TeCl6:Cr3+ microcrystals. In addition, WLEDs based on the mixture of Cs2TeCl6:Cr3+ and BaMgAl10O17:Eu2+ phosphors exhibit high performance.

Solar still is a simple equipment for the fresh water production in the regions where water is scarce and is rich in solar energy sources. In this paper, a solar still unit was built and tested in the south of China to investigate its water production. The test results show that the fresh water production is affected by average solar irradiation intensity, the production of the unit averaged at 6.27 kg/day, the water production decreased to 1.9 kg/day when the daily average solar radiation decreased to 236 W/m2. At the same time, the test result show that because of the difference between the ambient and seawater temperatures, the solar still could produce water at night, and the daily production could increase to 7.55 kg/day when the daily average solar radiation is 533 W/m2.

Background In the past decade, the Chinese drug regulatory system has undergone many changes. A major reform starting in 2015 has significantly reshaped the regulatory processes. It was important to assess the impact of the reform on new drug approvals in China. Method We analyzed the temporal trends of regulatory characteristics of the new drugs approved by the Chinese regulatory agency from 2011 to 2021, using data collected in the Pharmcube database. Results A total of 353 new drugs were approved, including 220 small molecule drugs, 86 biological products and 47 vaccines. The annual number of new drug approvals increased dramatically since 2017, reaching a record high of 70 in 2021. The median NDA approval time was 15.4 months in 2017-2021, the shortest in the decade, and was significantly shorter than that in the pre-reform period. The newly instituted expedited pathways such as priority review (PR) and accelerated approval for urgently needed overseas drugs (UNOD) significantly reduced new drug application (NDA) approval times compared with standard review. For imported drugs, in 2017-2021, the median time difference between the first approval in the world and the approval in China was 5 years, representing significant “drug lag”. However, the proportion of the imported drugs approved in China within 3 years of its first foreign approval has increased to 24.4% in 2017-2021. Conclusion The regulatory reform has produced significant, positive immediate outcomes in several metrics of drug regulatory approval. China’s regulatory system will continue to evolve as there still are many areas requiring further reform and improvement.

The basic Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) has some shortcomings, for example, the convergence speed is slow, it is easy to fall into local extremum, and high-dimensional optimization ability is poor and so on. In response to these shortcomings, an improved grey wolf algorithm which combines flower pollination mechanism, teaching mechanism and polynomial variation is proposed in this study. The flower pollination mechanism is integrated with GWO algorithm, Levy distribution is introduced into the global search of grey wolf population. And the double random mechanism is added in the local search, for these improvements, this algorithm’s overall optimization performance is improved. The teaching mechanism is added to wolf to improve the algorithm’s convergence speed. Polynomial mutation is applied to the individuals with poor optimization effect to improve the algorithm’s accuracy and its ability to jump out of local extremum. Theoretical analysis shows that the time complexity of the improved algorithm is the same as that of the basic algorithm. The test results of five representative comparison algorithms on multiple different characteristics and different dimensions of CEC2017 benchmark functions and two classical engineering problems show that FMGWO algorithm has high optimization accuracy, convergence speed and solution stability. Therefore, it has obvious advantages in global optimization. &nbsp

The video streaming system employs adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms to optimize a user’s quality of experience. However, it is hard for ABR algorithms to choose the right bitrate consistently under highly dynamic bandwidth fluctuations in wild Internet. In this article, we propose a building block on the client side named Opportunistic Chunk Replacement Mechanism (OCRM) to help existing ABR algorithms make full use of the available bandwidth to improve the network utilization and viewing experience of users. Specifically, the servers take advantages of the spare bandwidth to opportunistically transmit high-quality chunks (called opportunistic chunks ) with low priority to the client, without incurring any extra delay. Then, the client player replaces the low-quality chunks with the opportunistic ones that have high quality. We compare OCRM with state-of-the-art ABR algorithms by using trace-driven experiments spanning a wide variety of quality of experience metrics and network conditions. The test results show that OCRM effectively achieves high network utilization and improves the user’s viewing experience by up to 35%.

Lewy pathologies, which mainly consist of insoluble α-synuclein (α-syn) aggregates, are the hallmarks of Parkinson's disease and many other neurodegenerative diseases termed "synucleinopathies". Detection of Lewy pathologies with optical methods is of interest for preclinical studies, while the α-syn fluorescent probe is still in great demand. By rational design, we obtained a series of D-π-A-based trisubstituted alkenes with acceptable optical properties and high binding affinities to α-syn fibrils. Among these probes, FPQXN and TQXN-2 exhibited high binding affinities (6 and 8 nM, respectively), significant fluorescence enhancements (17.2- and 26.6-fold, respectively), and satisfying quantum yields (36.5% and 10.4%, respectively), which met the need for the in vitro neuropathological staining of Lewy pathologies in the PD brain sections. In addition, TQXN-2 showed great potential in fluorescent discrimination of Lewy pathologies and Aβ plaques. Our research provides flexible tools for in vitro detection of α-syn aggregates and offers new structural frameworks for the further development of α-syn fluorescent probes.

Unicompartmental knee arthroplasty (UKA) has been proven as an ideal alternative surgical procedure to treat symptomatic isolated knee osteoarthritis, and recently this technique has gained its popularity. However, postoperative complications would inevitably compromise the effectiveness and patients' satisfaction. The objective of this study is to demonstrate the incidence and risk factors of delayed wound healing (DWH) after UKA. This retrospective cohort study was conducted from February 2021 to May 2022 and a total of 211 patients were enrolled. Demographic characteristics, operation-related variables, and laboratory indexes were extracted. Receiver operating characteristic analysis was performed to detect the optimum cut-off value for continuous variables. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis was performed to demonstrate the risk factors of DWH. There were 155 female and 56 male patients with an average age of 64. 6 ± 6.9 years included in this study. After 6.6 ± 4.9 months' follow-up, 12 cases of DWH were observed which indicated an incidence of DWH of 5.7%, mean wound healing duration for 12 patients was 43.1 ± 19.3 days. In the univariate analysis, age 62.5 years, postoperative hospital stay 5.5 days, surgical incision 10.5 cm, barbed suture, body mass index (BMI) 32.0 kg/m

IntroductionTea is one of the most widely consumed beverages around the world. Larvae of the moth, Ectropis obliqua Prout (Geometridae, Lepidoptera), are one of the most destructive insect pests of tea in China. E. obliqua is a polyphagus insect that is of increasing concern due to the development of populations resistant to certain chemical insecticides. Microbial biological control agents offer an environmentally friendly and effective means for insect control that can be compatible with “green” and organic farming practices.MethodsTo identify novel E. obliqua biological control agents, soil and inset cadaver samples were collected from tea growing regions in the Fujian province, China. Isolates were analyzed morphologically and via molecular characterization to identity them at the species level. Laboratory and greenhouse insect bioassays were used to determine the effectiveness of the isolates for E. obliqua control.ResultsEleven isolates corresponding to ten different species of Metarhizium were identified according to morphological and molecular analyses from soil and/or insect cadavers found on tea plants and/or in the surrounding soil sampled from eight different regions within the Fujian province, China. Four species of Metarhizium including M. clavatum, M. indigoticum, M. pemphigi, and M. phasmatodeae were documented for the first time in China, and the other species were identified as M. anisopliae, M. brunneum, M. lepidiotae, M. majus, M. pinghaense, and M. robertsii. Insect bioassays of the eleven isolates of Metarhizium revealed significant variation in the efficacy of each isolate to infect and kill E. obliqua. Metarhizium pingshaense (MaFZ-13) showed the highest virulence reaching a host target mortality rate of 93% in laboratory bioassays. The median lethal concentration (LC50) and median lethal time (LT50) values of M. pingshaense MaFZ-13 were 9.6 × 104 conidia/mL and 4.8 days, respectively. Greenhouse experiments and a time-dose-mortality (TDM) models were used to further evaluate and confirm the fungal pathogenic potential of M. pingshaense MaFZ-13 against E. obliqua larvae.DiscussionIsolation of indigenous microbial biological control agents targeting specific pests is an effective approach for collecting resources that can be exploited for pest control with lowered obstacles to approval and commercialization. Our data show the presence of four different previously unreported Metarhizium species in China. Bioassays of the eleven different Metarhizium strains isolated revealed that each could infect and kill E. obliqua to different degrees with the newly isolated M. pingshaense MaFZ-13 strain representing a particularly highly virulent isolate potentially applicable for the control of E. obliqua larvae.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 had reported over 676 million cases by March 2023. The main aim of this study is to investigate whether the levels of anti-S and anti-N antibodies could precisely indicate the degree of protection against SARS-CoV-2 and affect the probability or time of contracting COVID-19. In this study, a serosurveillance study was conducted in healthcare workers (HCWs) at a regional hospital in Taiwan to evaluate their antibody levels based on infection and vaccination status. Of 245 HCWs enrolled, all have been vaccinated prior to infection. Of these, 85 participants were infected by SARS-CoV-2, while 160 participants were not infected at the time of blood sample collection. The level of anti-SARS-CoV-2 S antibody was significantly higher in the infected HCWs than in the non-infected participants (p < 0.001). It is worth noting that the mean duration between the administration of the last dose of the vaccine and the occurrence of SARS-CoV-2 infection was 5.61 ± 2.95 months. Our follow-up survey revealed that the non-infected group had significantly higher levels of antibodies compared to the infected group (all p < 0.001). In conclusion, this study suggests that the level of antibodies could serve as a reflection of the protective efficacy against SARS-CoV-2 infection. It has the implication for vaccine decision-making policies in the future.

Target detection is the basis for automatic target recognition system of infrared imaging guidance to complete subsequent tasks such as recognition and tracking. Existing systems have not the autonomous learning ability of target feature, and it will be powerless once the task environment exceeds the pre-planned condition. The single-stage target detection based on deep learning has the ability of autonomous learning and high computational efficiency, which is an effective way to solve the problem of infrared imaging guidance target detection in complex environment. SSD (Single Shot MultiBox Detector) is a classical single-stage detection model, however, the convolution layer with strong semantic information in SSD has low resolution, which is not conducive to small target detection. In addition, the location loss of SSD does not consider the impact of target scale change. Therefore, this paper puts forward two improvement ideas in view of SSD: (1) Starting from FPN (Feature Pyramid Network), feature channel’s importance is distinguished through efficient channel attention mechanism, the contribution of each feature layer to the fusion output is described based on the learnable weight, and the feature weighted fusion of bidirectional multi-scale is realized between the feature layer which has low resolution and strong semantics and the feature layer which has high resolution and weak semantics. (2) Starting from IoU (Intersection over Union) and considering non overlapping parts and geometric relationship between the predicted box and the ground-truth box, the location loss of SSD that remains invariable to the target scale change is constructed to improve the sensitivity of the detection model to the locating error of small target. The experimental results show that, for 300 × 300 input, the presented method achieves 84.7% mAP (mean Average Precision) on VOC2007 test and for 512 × 512 input, it reaches 86.6%. On the self-built infrared aircraft data set, the proposed method achieves 81.1% mAP and can detect more small targets. Without affecting detection speed, the presented method on experimental results outperforms some comparable state-of-the-art models such as YOLOv3 (You Only Look Once), DSSD (Deconvolutional Single Shot Multibox Detector), RSSD (Rainbow Single Shot Multibox Detector) and FSSD (Fusion Single Shot Multibox Detector).

Background Chemotherapy is a first-line treatment for advanced and metastatic bladder cancer, but the unsatisfactory objective response rate to this treatment yields poor 5-year patient survival. Only PD-1/PD-L1-based immune checkpoint inhibitors, FGFR3 inhibitors and antibody-drug conjugates are approved by the FDA to be used in bladder cancer, mainly for platinum-refractory or platinum-ineligible locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma. Emerging studies indicate that the combination of targeted therapy and chemotherapy shows better efficacy than targeted therapy or chemotherapy alone. Newly identified targets in cancer cells and various functions of the tumour microenvironment have spawned novel agents and regimens, which give impetus to sensitizing chemotherapy in the bladder cancer setting. Aim of Review: This review aims to present the current evidence for potentiating the efficacy of chemotherapy in bladder cancer. We focus on combining chemotherapy with other treatments as follows: targeted therapy, including immunotherapy and antibody-drug conjugates in clinic; novel targeted drugs and nanoparticles in preclinical models and potential targets that may contribute to chemosensitivity in future clinical practice. The prospect of precision therapy is also discussed in bladder cancer. Key Scientific Concepts of Review: Combining chemotherapy drugs with immune checkpoint inhibitors, antibody-drug conjugates and VEGF inhibitors potentially elevates the response rate and survival. Novel targets, including cancer stem cells, DNA damage repair, antiapoptosis, drug metabolism and the tumour microenvironment, contribute to chemosensitization. Gene alteration-based drug selection and patient-derived xenograft- and organoid-based drug validation are the future for precision therapy.

The gravity displacement gas kick often occurs due to the fractures developed in fractured carbonate formation. The improper control of the gravity displacement gas kick is prone to blowout accidents. In this study, the gravity displacement gas–liquid two-phase flow law was simulated by CFD software, and the variation of fracture gravity displacement rate under two boundary conditions was obtained. Besides, the simplified gravity displacement models were established for fractures with two boundaries based on the gas–liquid two-phase flow theory. The analysis results of the influence factors related to the gravity displacement gas kick revealed that the gravity replacement rate of a fracture with an inclination angle of 90° was almost three times that with an inclination angle of 30°. When the wellhead backpressure was not applied, the gravity replacement rate was 0.35 m3/h; while, after the wellhead backpressure of 12 MPa was applied, the gravity replacement rate decreased to 0.22 m3/h. When the consistency coefficient was larger than 1.0 Pa sn, the fluidity index was larger than 0.6. In conclusion, the gravity displacement gas kick will inevitably occur under large inclination closure fractures. The larger the inclination and opening of the fracture, the smaller the wellhead backpressure, and the more serious the gravity displacement gas kick. During field operations, the gravity displacement overflow can be alleviated under low density and high viscosity drilling fluid by applying wellhead backpressure.

Analysis of electroencephalogram (EEG) is a crucial diagnostic criterion for many sleep disorders, of which sleep staging is an important component. Manual stage classification is a labor-intensive process and usually suffered from many subjective factors. Recently, more and more computer-aided techniques have been applied to this task, among which deep convolutional neural network has been performing well as an effective automatic classification model. Despite some comprehensive models have been developed to improve classification results, the accuracy for clinical applications has not been reached due to the lack of sufficient labeled data and the limitation of extracting latent discriminative EEG features. Therefore, we propose a novel hybrid manifold-deep convolutional neural network with hyperbolic attention. To overcome the shortage of labeled data, we update the semi-supervised training scheme as an optimal solution. In order to extract the latent feature representation, we introduce the manifold learning module and the hyperbolic module to extract more discriminative information. Eight subjects from the public dataset are utilized to evaluate our pipeline, and the model achieved 89% accuracy, 70% precision, 80% sensitivity, 72% f1-score and kappa coefficient of 78%, respectively. The proposed model demonstrates powerful ability in extracting feature representation and achieves promising results by using semi-supervised training scheme. Therefore, our approach shows strong potential for future clinical development.

The control standard of pavement settlement caused by urban tunnel excavation is the focus of academic research at present. The establishment of settlement control standard gradually develops from safety control standard to comfort control standard. Based on the acceleration interference model, this paper presents a method to determine the pavement settlement control datum caused by the new tunnel penetrating the existing highway. Firstly, the vibration acceleration along the vertical direction of the road was selected as the comfort index, and the ideal sine function and Peck formula were used to describe the longitudinal curve of the road surface and the characteristics of the road surface settlement groove caused by tunnel construction. Secondly, considering the acceleration interference model, based on theoretical derivation, the calculation formula of vertical acceleration under the influence of road surface smoothness is obtained. According to superposition principle, the calculation formula of vertical acceleration under the influence of road surface smoothness and tunnel excavation is obtained. Thirdly, based on the relationship between acceleration value and subjective feeling of human body, the determination formula of pavement settlement control benchmark is proposed. The results show that the control datum formula is consistent with the engineering practice. Reducing the speed and the width coefficient of pavement settlement groove are effective methods to improve the comfort.

Aims Prediabetes is a highly heterogenous metabolic state with increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Current guidelines raised the necessity of CVD risk scoring for prediabetes without clear recommendations. Thus, this study aimed to systematically assess the performance of 11 models, including five general population-based and six diabetes-specific CVD risk scores, in prediabetes. Methods and results A cohort of individuals aged 40–69 years with prediabetes (HbA1c ≥ 5.7 and Overall, 56 831 prediabetic individuals were included, of which 4303 incident CVD events occurred within a median follow-up of 8.9 years. All the 11 risk scores assessed had modest C-statistics for discrimination ranging from 0.647 to 0.680 in prediabetes. Scores developed in the general population did not outperform those diabetes-specific models (C-statistics, 0.647–0.675 vs. 0.647–0.680), while the PREDICT-1° Diabetes equation developed for Type 2 diabetes performed best [0.680 (95% confidence interval, 0.672–0.689)]. The calibration plots suggested overall poor calibration except that the PREDICT-1° Diabetes equation calibrated well after recalibration. The decision curves generally indicated moderate clinical usefulness of each model, especially worse within high threshold probabilities. Conclusion Neither risk stratification schemes for the general population nor those specific for Type 2 diabetes performed well in the prediabetic population. The PREDICT-1° Diabetes equation could be a substitute in the absence of better alternatives, rather than the general population-based scores. More precise and targeted risk assessment tools for this population remain to be established.

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNA) are dysregulated in various human cancers and control tumor development and progression. However, the upstream mechanisms underlying their dysregulation remain unclear. Here, we demonstrate that the expression of hepatocyte nuclear factor 1 homeobox A antisense RNA 1 (HNF1A-AS1) is significantly upregulated in gastric cancer tissues. Overexpression of HNF1A-AS1 enhanced cell proliferation and promoted cell-cycle progression, whereas knockdown of HNF1A-AS1 elicited the opposite effects. Early growth response protein 1 (EGR1) directly bound the HNF1A-AS1 promoter region and activated its transcription. Overexpression of EGR1 enhanced cell proliferation and promoted cell-cycle promotion, similar to the function of HNF1A-AS1. HNF1A-AS1 functioned as competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) by binding to miR-661, upregulating the expression of cell division cycle 34 (CDC34), which is a direct target of miR-661. EGR1 and HNF1A-AS1 enhanced the expression of cyclin-dependent kinase 2 (CDK2), CDK4, and cyclin E1 but inhibited the expression of p21 by promoting CDC34-mediated ubiquitination and degradation of p21. Taken together, these findings suggest that EGR1-activated HNF1A-AS1 regulates various pro- and antigrowth factors to promote the development of gastric cancer, implicating it as a possible target for therapeutic intervention in this disease.Significance: This study provides novel insights into mechanisms by which the noncoding RNA HNF1A-AS1 contributes to gastric cancer progression through modulation of the cell cycle. Cancer Res; 78(20); 5877–90. ©2018 AACR.

Figure S1 showed that the overexpression and knockdown efficiency of HNF1A-AS1 in both GC cells and the proliferation of GC cells transfected with SI-HNF1A-AS1-2 were inhibited. Figure S2 indicated that the migration, invasion and cell cycle progression of GC cells transfected with SI-HNF1A-AS1-2 were inhibited. Table S1 showed sequences of primers.

PDF file - 63K, PCR Primer Sequences

PDF file - 7.6MB, A. Thickness of stroma surrounding each gland in different mouse postatic lobes. B. MMP7 staining in the dorsal prostatic lobes.