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BackgroundInternet gaming disorder (IGD) has become a social problem in children. Evidence from previous studies has proven that anxiety is associated with IGD. However, IGD was always assessed as a whole based on total scores, and the fine-grained relationship between anxiety and IGD was hidden.ObjectiveThe present study aims to investigate the fine-grained relationship between anxiety and IGD in elementary school students during the COVID-19 lockdown, and to identify potential targets for psychological interventions.MethodsDuring the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, 667 children from a primary school in China were investigated by the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale-Short Version and Internet Gaming Disorder Scale. R4.1.1 software was used to construct a network model, assess bridge centrality, and test the robustness of the network and conduct a network.ResultsThere were 23 cross-community edges (weight ranged from −0.03 to 0.12), and each node of anxiety was connected to different nodes of IGD. The nodes with the top 80th percentile bridge expected influence were A2 “social phobia” (0.20), A3 “panic disorder” (0.21) and IGD5 “escape” (0.22). The robustness of the network was acceptable.ConclusionFrom the perspective of network analysis, the present study explored the correlation pathways between anxiety and IGD in children and identified social phobia and panic disorder as the best targets for intervention to reduce IGD.

The ketogenic diet (KD) is well known for its neuroprotective effect, but little is known about its prophylactic efficacy against chronic sleep deprivation (SD) induced cognitive deficiency. An emerging study indicated that ferroptosis plays an important role in neurologic diseases but has been rarely reported in chronic SD. Here, we investigated the prophylactic effects of a medium-chain triglyceride-enriched KD (MKD) and a long-chain triglyceride-enriched KD (LKD) on cognitive deficiency and revealed the underlying mechanism focused on ferroptosis in chronic SD model mice. The results showed that the MKD exhibited stronger effects than the LKD on improving cognitive deficiency

Enveloped virus entry requires fusion of the viral envelope with a host cell membrane. Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) entry is mediated by a set of glycoproteins that interact to trigger the viral fusion protein glycoprotein B (gB). In the current model, receptor-binding by gD signals a gH/gL heterodimer to trigger a refolding event in gB that fuses the membranes. To explore functional interactions between gB and gH/gL, we used a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) to generate two HSV-1 mutants that show a small plaque phenotype due to changes in gB. We passaged the viruses to select for restoration of plaque size and analyzed second-site mutations that arose in gH. HSV-1 gB was replaced either by gB from saimiriine herpesvirus type 1 (SaHV-1) or by a mutant form of HSV-1 gB with three alanine substitutions in domain V (gB3A). To shift the selective pressure away from gB, the gB3A virus was passaged in cells expressing gB3A. Sequencing of passaged viruses identified two interesting mutations in gH, including gH-H789 in domain IV and gH-S830N in the cytoplasmic tail (CT). Characterization of these gH mutations indicated they are responsible for the enhanced plaque size. Rather than being globally hyperfusogenic, both gH mutations partially rescued function of the specific gB version present during their selection. These sites may represent functional interaction sites on gH/gL for gB. gH-H789 may alter the positioning of a membrane-proximal flap in the gH ectodomain, whereas gH-S830 may contribute to an interaction between the gB and gH CTs.IMPORTANCEEnveloped viruses enter cells by fusing their envelope with the host cell membrane. Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) entry requires the coordinated interaction of several viral glycoproteins, including gH/gL and gB. gH/gL and gB are essential for virus replication and both proteins are targets of neutralizing antibodies. gB fuses the membranes after being activated by gH/gL, but the details of how gH/gL activates gB are not known. This study examined the gH/gL-gB interaction using HSV-1 mutants that displayed reduced virus entry due to changes in gB. The mutant viruses were grown over time to select for additional mutations that could partially restore entry. Two mutations in gH (H789Y and S830N) were identified. The positions of the mutations in gH/gL may represent sites that contribute to gB activation during virus entry.

Implementing underwater target tracking remains difficult for a free-swimming robotic fish owing to the intrinsically reciprocating motion in fishlike propulsion. In this article, we present a novel robotic fish platform with a camera stabilizing system and achieve real-time two-dimensional target tracking assisted by reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous environments. More specifically, we first develop an active visual tracking system based on cascade control structure to obtain the relative orientation between the robotic fish and the underwater target. Then, we propose a target tracking controller dealing with continuous state and action spaces based on deep RL (DRL). The controller takes the position of the target object as input and yields the motion parameters of the bioinspired central pattern generator governed robotic fish. The robustness and adaptability of the proposed controller as well as the influence of time-delays on the control system are explored via simulated experiments under different scenarios. Finally, both static and dynamic tracking experiments on the actual robotic fish demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechatronic design and control methods, providing insights to executing aquatic vision-based tracking tasks.

Sleep deprivation (SD) is one of the main risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but the underlying mechanism is still unclear. Ketogenic diet (KD) has been shown widely neuroprotective effects but less known about its effect on SD-induced AD. In the present study, a continuous 21 days SD mouse model with or without KD was established. The changes of cognitive function, pathological hallmarks of AD, ferroptosis, and intracellular signal pathways in mice were detected by Morris water maze, ThS staining, diaminobenzidine (DAB)-enhanced Perls’ stain, antioxidant assay, immuno-histochemistry, and western blot. The results showed that KD can prevent the cognitive deficiency, amyloid deposition and hyperphosphorylated tau induced by chronic SD. Analysis of ferroptosis revealed that KD can inhibit iron dyshomeostasis by down-regulating the expression of TfR1 and DMT1 and up-regulating the expression of FTH1, FPN1. Meanwhile, KD alleviated oxidative stress with elevated xCT/GPX4 axis, FSP1 and reduced MDA. In addition, KD could promote neuronal repair by enhancing BDNF and DCX. Further studies demonstrated that KD activated Sirt1/Nrf2 signaling pathway in the hippocampus in SD-exposed mice. Our finding firstly suggested that KD could prevent chronic SD-induced AD by inhibiting ferroptosis and improving the neuronal repair ability via Sirt1/Nrf2 signaling pathway.

Sleep deprivation (SD) is one of the main risk factors for Alzheimer's disease (AD), but the underlying mechanism is still unclear. Ketogenic diet (KD) has been shown widely neuroprotective effects but less known about its effect on SD-induced AD. In the present study, a continuous 21 days SD mouse model with or without KD was established. The changes of cognitive function, pathological hallmarks of AD, ferroptosis, and intracellular signal pathways in mice were detected by Morris water maze, ThS staining, diaminobenzidine (DAB)-enhanced Perls' stain, antioxidant assay, immuno-histochemistry, and western blot. The results showed that KD can prevent the cognitive deficiency, amyloid deposition and hyperphosphorylated tau induced by chronic SD. Analysis of ferroptosis revealed that KD can inhibit iron dyshomeostasis by down-regulating the expression of TfR1 and DMT1 and up-regulating the expression of FTH1, FPN1. Meanwhile, KD alleviated oxidative stress with elevated xCT/GPX4 axis, FSP1 and reduced MDA. In addition, KD could promote neuronal repair by enhancing BDNF and DCX. Further studies demonstrated that KD activated Sirt1/Nrf2 signaling pathway in the hippocampus in SD-exposed mice. Our finding firstly suggested that KD could prevent chronic SD-induced AD by inhibiting ferroptosis and improving the neuronal repair ability

It has been reported that eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) have anticonvulsant effects, yet the respective mechanism of EPA and DHA on epilepsy is still unclarified. This study aims to investigate the effect of EPA and DHA on pentylenetetrazol (PTZ) induced seizures and depression.The administration of EPA and DHA at a dose of 1% w/w significantly inhibits PTZ-induced seizures and depressive-like behavior, whereas EPA outcompetes DHA. Further mechanistic studies reveal that the higher effect of EPA can be partly attributed to the promotion of M2 polarization, inhibition of M1 polarization of microglia, and lower iron content in the brain, resulting from the stronger activation of nuclear factor E2-related factor 2 (Nrf2). This study finds that DHA and EPA comparably inhibit NLRP3 inflammasome activation but with different mode-of-actions: EPA prefers to inhibit the binding of NLRP3 and ASC, while DHA decreases the protein levels of ASC and Caspase-1.These results indicate that DHA and EPA can efficaciously alleviate PTZ-induced seizure and depressive-like behavior but with different efficiency and molecular mechanisms.

To explore the change of brain connectivity in schizophrenics (SCZ), the resting-state EEG source functional connections of SCZ and healthy control (HC) were investigated in this paper. Different band single-layer networks, multilayer networks, and improved multilayer networks were constructed and their topological attributes were extracted. The topological attributes of SCZ and HC were automatically distinguished using ensemble learning methods called Ensemble Learning based on Trees and Soft voting method, and the effectiveness of different network construction methods was compared based on the classification accuracy. The results showed that the classification accuracy was 89.38% for α band network, 82.5% for multilayer network, and 86.88% for improved multilayer network. Comparing patients with SCZ to those with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the classification accuracy of improved multilayer network was the highest, which was 88.12%. The power spectrum in the α band of SCZ was significantly lower than HC, whereas there was no significant difference between SCZ and AD. This indicated that the improved multilayer network can effectively distinguish SCZ and other groups not only when their power spectrum was significantly different. The results also suggested that the improved multilayer topological attributes were regarded as biological markers in the clinical diagnosis of patients with schizophrenia and even other mental disorders.

Fault tolerance is essential for the maneuverability of self-propelled biomimetic robotic fish in real-world aquatic applications. This paper explores the fault-tolerance control problem of a free-swimming robotic fish with multiple moving joints and a stuck tail joint. The created control system is composed of two main components: a feedback controller and a feedforward compensator. Specifically, the bio-inspired central pattern generator-based feedback controller is designed to make the robotic fish robust to external disturbances, while the feedforward compensator speeds up the convergence of the overall control system. Simulations are performed for control system analysis and performance validation of the faulty robotic fish. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed fault-tolerant control method is able to effectively regulate the faulty robotic fish, allowing it to complete the desired motion in the presence of damage and thereby improving both the stability and the lifetime of the real robotic system. Keywords: Fault-tolerant control, Robotic fish, Motion control, Feedback controller, Feedforward compensator

Biofilms are among the most important causes of nosocomial and recurrent infections as biofilms confer antibiotic resistance to pathogenic bacteria and protect them from the host’s immune system. Thus, it is imperative to investigate effective therapeutic agents to counteract biofilms. As an important signaling molecule, Nitric Oxide (NO) plays a crucial role in various biological and pathological processes. NO could disperse biofilm and restore the drug sensitivity by reducing intracellular cyclic-diguanosine monophosphate (c-di-GMP) levels. This review highlights recent advances on antibacterial and antibiofilm effects of NO when NO was co-administered with other antimicrobial agents. A significant improvement in drug permeability and biofilm cell targeting and reduced cytotoxicity could be attained with this strategy. In this review, we briefly lay out challenges and propose future directions in this appealing avenue of research on NO-based therapy for biofilm eradication.

Nitric oxide (NO), as an endogenous diatomic molecule, plays a key regulatory role in many physiological and pathological processes. This diatomic free radical has been shown to affect different physiological and cellular functions and participates in many regulatory functions ranging from changing the cardiovascular system to regulating neuronal functions. Thus, NO gas therapy as an emerging and promising treatment method has attracted increasing attention in the treatment of various pathological diseases. As is known, the physiological and pathological regulation of NO depends mainly on its location, exposure time and released dosage. However, NO gas lacks effective accumulation and controlled long-term gas releasing capacity at specific sites, resulting in limited therapeutic efficacy and potential side effects. Thus, researchers have developed various NO donors, but eventually found that it is still difficult to control the long-term release of NO. Inspired by the self-assembly properties of nanomaterials, researchers have realized that nanomaterials can be used to support NO donors to form nanomedicine to achieve spatial and temporal controlled release of NO. In this review, according to the history of the medicinal development of NO, we first summarize the chemical design of NO donors, NO prodrugs, and NO-conjugated drugs. Then, NO nanomedicines formed by various nanomaterials and NO donors depending on nanotechnology are highlighted. Finally, the biomedical applications of NO nanomedicine with optimized properties are summarized.

An association between type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) and cognitive impairment was recently reported. However, the mechanisms by which T1DM induces cognitive impairment are still unknown. Here, we confirmed that T1DM mice induced by streptozotocin (STZ) injection had impaired working memory and spatial memory. We observed long-term potentiation (LTP) induction defects and synaptic loss in mice 20 weeks after STZ injection. We also found decreased levels of synaptic proteins, including the N-methyl-D-aspartic acid receptor (NMDAR) subunit NR2A, synaptophysin (SYP), and postsynaptic density 95 (PSD95), in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, revealing similarities in the alteration patterns of these synaptic proteins in aged Alzheimer's disease (AD) APP/PS1 mice and T1DM mice. Taken together, these findings expand our understanding of the mechanisms underlying T1DM-induced cognitive impairment.

With the boost demand of localization-based service, indoor positioning has been drawn on highly awareness. However, although there are already many solutions to deal with this problem, comparisons of them are still of great significance. This paper compares the precision and the robustness of traditional indoor localization methods in wireless sensor network (WSN). Exponential model is applied to analogy a 2.4GHz indoor channel. Based on different types of sensors, several specific algorithms, such as TOA, TDOA, Least Square Method, Triangular Localization, Centroid Localization and AOA are illustrated in a two-dimensional indoor model. In addition, these methods are compared under the same condition to get their respective results and errors. From the comparison of them, different methods are decided to use based on different kind of sensors. AOA and TDOA are chosen when sensors only can measure the angle and the time respectively. When the sensor can merely receive the signal strength, triangular localization method is the best way.

In the field of computer vision research, the research on human action recognition of depth video sequence is an important research direction. Herein, considering the characteristics of temporal and spatial depth video sequence, the authors propose a framework of the consultation model of several action sequence features to solve the classification problem in-depth video sequence. According to the characteristics of the 3D human action space, a variety of action sequence feature data is obtained, and then these data is projected to three coordinate planes, the acquired fusion features are used to train the consultation model, and finally the model is validated through the data. The authors have achieved good results by comparing the two publicly available datasets with the other methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the model performs well in existing identification methods.

Opening Book is a kind of assistive technologies to enhance the performance of computer games. The opening stages of the game method generally used to query the database generated. This method improving search efficiency and avoids the missing strategic of traditional evaluation systems. This paper studies the technical problems of using the Opening Book of draughts, and introduces the generation and usage of the Opening Book. The authors also discussed the detail of statistics in Opening Book. Besides, this paper presents a new idea of introducing the information of the Opening Book into the traditional Alpha-Beta valuation system. The experiment proved that the method proposed in this paper can effectively solve the issues of the start of the draughts and improve the game level of the draughts.

Computer game is one of the important research directions in the field of artificial intelligence. The opening book is an important way to improve the level of computer game program. This paper first discusses the understanding of computer game and gives a brief introduction to the rules of draughts. The moves in the opening are of great significance to the development of the whole game. This paper takes the draughts with 10*10 board computer game program as the research object and introduces the method of applying the opening book. The application of opening book avoids the time-consuming search of the program in the opening and the strategic mistakes that affect the overall development. This paper also studies the generation method and structural design of the opening book. It demonstrates the necessity and superiority of the application of the opening book in the draughts computer game program.

Fault tolerance is critical to the real applications of underwater robots in complex underwater environments. In this paper, the fault-tolerant speed control is proposed to control the robotic fish with a stuck tail joint to reach the specified speed. Specifically, based on the yaw fault-tolerant control, we firstly analyze the coupling problem between the control parameters and design the feedback controller. In order to solve the problem that the feedback controller converges slowly, a multi-layer perceptron-based feedforward controller is proposed. Simulation experiments are designed to test the performance and effectiveness of the control system. Simulation results reveal the effectiveness of the control method.

This paper proposes a complete three-dimensional (3-D) dynamic model of a gliding robotic dolphin with full consideration of both 3-D gliding motion and flapping motion. The gliding robotic dolphin can not only implement an efficient dolphin-like swimming, but also has long endurance due to the buoyancy-driven system. Firstly, the mechanical structure including dolphin-like swimming part and gliding part of the robot is offered. More importantly, derivation processes of the kinematic analysis, net buoyancy analysis, hydrodynamic analysis, and multi-link dynamic modeling are discussed in detail to provide theoretical support. Furthermore, this paper presents some comparison of the spiraling movements based on these two different swimming motions, and gives the corresponding analyses according to the simulation results. Finally, through comparing results of the aquatic experiments and the simulation, we verify the complete dynamic model, and analyze the yaw angle and diving depth.

Noninvasive near-infrared (NIR) light responsive therapy is a promising cancer treatment modality; however, some inherent drawbacks of conventional phototherapy heavily restrict its application in clinic. Rather than producing heat or reactive oxygen species in conventional NIR treatment, here a multifunctional yolk-shell nanoplatform is proposed that is able to generate microbubbles to destruct cancer cells upon NIR laser irradiation. Besides, the therapeutic effect is highly improved through the coalition of small interfering RNA (siRNA), which is codelivered by the nanoplatform. In vitro experiments demonstrate that siRNA significantly inhibits expression of protective proteins and reduces the tolerance of cancer cells to bubble-induced environmental damage. In this way, higher cytotoxicity is achieved by utilizing the yolk-shell nanoparticles than treated with the same nanoparticles missing siRNA under NIR laser irradiation. After surface modification with polyethylene glycol and transferrin, the yolk-shell nanoparticles can target tumors selectively, as demonstrated from the photoacoustic and ultrasonic imaging in vivo. The yolk-shell nanoplatform shows outstanding tumor regression with minimal side effects under NIR laser irradiation. Therefore, the multifunctional nanoparticles that combining bubble-induced mechanical effect with RNA interference are expected to be an effective NIR light responsive oncotherapy.

A special drug carrying hydrogel base wound dressing by radiation preparation is developed for hospital uses. The dressing possesses high water absorption property. Radiation preparation is carried out using a Van de Graaff Accelerator as an electron radiation source. The effect of absorbed dose and cmount of crosslinking agent on the gel fraction and swelling ratio of the hydrogel were determined respectively. As a bio-medical material, standard tests were made. Results showed properties conforming with requirements for clinical applications. Results obtained from clinical tests were good.