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A simple prediction of the well-known unification model of active galactic nuclei is that a sample of sources should exhibit an anti-correlation between the solid angle of the dusty torus and of the ionization cone (as the sum of them shall equal 4$\pi$), which however has never been detected. In this work, we analyze the correlation between [OIII] 5007 narrow emission line equivalent width and $L_{\rm IR}(\lambda)/L_{\rm bol}$ for a large sample of luminous quasars. For the first time, we detect a clear intrinsic anti-correlation between them, which immediately verifies the torus/ionization-cone geometry in luminous quasars. More interestingly, the anti-correlation significantly weakens with increasing wavelength from $\sim$ 2 to 12 $\mu$m, and disappears at $\sim$ 12 $\mu$m. Simulations show a cool dust component (in addition to equatorial torus) with its strength positively correlating with the solid angle of the ionization cone is required to explain the observations. This shows that the polar dust seen in nearby active galaxies also exists in luminous quasars, with its contribution to total dust emission increasing with $\lambda$ (from $\sim$ 2 to 12 $\mu$m) and reaching between 39%-62% (model dependent) at rest frame 12 $\mu$m. Our findings provide a unique approach to map the otherwise spatially unresolvable inner structure of quasars., Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

Evidence suggests that exposure to coal dust increases immunoglobulin concentration. However, there is a paucity of data reporting immunoglobulin G (IgG) subclass in coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (CWP). Therefore, this study intended to evaluate potential diagnostic biomarkers for the disease. CWP patients, dust-exposed workers without pneumoconiosis (DEW), and matched healthy controls (HCs) presented to the General Hospital of Datong Coal Mining Group and Occupational Disease Prevention and Treatment Hospital of Datong Coal Mining Group between May 2019 and September 2019 were recruited. The serum immunoglobulin concentration was determined by the multiplex immunoassay technique. Totally, 104 CWP patients, 109 DEWs, and 74 HCs were enrolled. Serum levels of IgG1, IgG2, IgM, and IgA were elevated in CWPs compared with those in DEWs and HCs ( P < 0.05 ). The order of diagnostic accuracy between CWPs and DEWs depicted by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was IgG2, IgM, IgG1, IgG3, and IgA. Significantly higher IgG1/IgG3 and IgG2/IgG3 ratios were observed in the CWP group than in DEW and HC groups. Based on the IgG2/IgG3 ratio, the area under the ROC curve between CWP and DEW was 0.785 (95% CI 0.723-0.838), with a sensitivity of 73.1% and a specificity of 73.4%. Our findings suggest that IgG1, IgG2, IgM, and IgA are higher in the CWPs than DEWs and HCs. The IgG2/IgG3 ratio provides a viable alternative for the diagnosis of CWP.

Mechanisms underlying pain after axonal injury remain elusive. A small subgroup of patients experience pain after corneal refractive surgery, providing a human pain model after well-defined injury to axons. Here we analyze a mutation (P610T) in Nav1.7, a threshold sodium channel expressed in nociceptors, found in two siblings with persistent ocular pain after refractive surgery. We show that it impairs channel slow inactivation, thereby triggering inappropriate repetitive activity in trigeminal ganglion axons that signal eye pain.

In this paper, we propose an efficient point cloud classification method via manifold learning based feature representation. Different from conventional methods, we use manifold learning algorithms to embed point cloud features for better considering the geometric continuity on the surface. Then, the nature of point cloud can be acquired in low dimensional space, and after being concatenated with features in the original three-dimensional (3D) space, both the capability of feature representation and the classification network performance can be improved. We explore three traditional manifold algorithms (i.e., Isomap, Locally-Linear Embedding, and Laplacian eigenmaps) in detail, and finally, we select the Locally-Linear Embedding (LLE) algorithm due to its low complexity and locality consistency preservation. Furthermore, we propose a neural network based manifold learning (NNML) method to implement manifold learning based non-linear projection. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed two manifold learning methods can obtain better performances than the state-of-the-art methods, and the obtained mean class accuracy (mA) and overall accuracy (oA) can reach 91.4% and 94.4%, respectively. Moreover, because of the improved feature learning capability, the proposed NNML method can also have better classification accuracy on models with prominent geometric shapes. To further demonstrate the advantages of PointManifold, we extend it as a plug and play method for point cloud classification task, which can be directly used with existing methods and gain a significant improvement.

Ascribed to the presence of sulphur atoms, l-Met is a biomaterial based wide bandgap (2.88 eV) p-type semiconductor. The piezoelectric voltage constant of l-Leu is more than one order of magnitude higher than that of lead zirconate titanate (PZT).

We investigate the reason why β-methylthio and β-methylselenyl substitution alter the molecular stacking in organic semiconductor crystals, in terms of the intermolecular interaction energy.

Evidence has indicated that lysine methyltransferase 2B (KMT2B), a major H3K4 tri-methyltransferase (H3K4me3), contributes to the development of various cancers; however, its role in cervical cancer (CC) is unclear. In this study, increased KMT2B expression was observed in human CC specimens and significantly associated with poor prognosis. The condition medium of KMT2B-overexpressing cells facilitated angiogenesis

Structural water molecules adsorbed on Au nanoparticles in the form of {OH−·H2O@Au NPs} were identified as catalytical-active sites of 4-nitrophenol reduction, which is extremely sensitive to the subtle changes in the surrounding microenvironment.

Membrane protein engineering exhibits great potential for cell functionalization. Although genetic strategies are sophisticated for membrane protein engineering, there still exist some issues, including transgene insertional mutagenesis, laborious, complicated procedures, and low tunability. Herein, we report a DNA-templated anchoring of exogenous proteins on living cell membranes to realize programmable functionalization of living cells. Using DNA as a scaffold, the model cell membranes are readily modified with proteins, on which the density and ratio of proteins as well as their interactions can be precisely controlled through predictable DNA hybridization. Then, the natural killer (NK) cells were engineered to gain the ability to eliminate the immune checkpoint signaling at the NK-tumor synapse, which remarkably promoted NK cell activation in immunotherapy. Given the versatile functions of exogenous proteins and flexible designs of programmable DNA, this method has the potential to facilitate membrane-protein-based cell engineering and therapy.

Interactions between the Sumatran tiger Panthera tigris sumatrae and people (e.g. injury or loss of lives of people and tigers, evacuation of injured tigers, loss of livestock and sightings of tigers) can negatively affect the conservation of the subspecies. Land-use change in Sumatra has reduced habitat for tigers, forcing them into human-dominated landscapes and increasing the probability of interactions with people. Although the number of such interactions is high in South-east Asia, few studies have been published since 2000 and for Sumatra there is a lack of information regarding where these events occur. We collated data on human–tiger interactions in the province of Riau using web scraping of news sources published during 2010–2020, and mapped these data to village boundaries. We recorded 101 interaction events, with a total of 107 interactions, which we categorized into seven types (people injured or killed, livestock killed, sightings of tigers, tigers killed, injured or evacuated), in 78 villages. Most interactions with reported locations occurred close to settlements (35%), followed by in plantations (26%) and smallholdings (25%), with forests and forest edges comprising 14% of such events. Interactions were dominated by sightings of tigers, but severe interaction types (human death or injury and attacks on livestock) were also reported. The mean annual number of human–tiger interactions was 4.6 during 2011–2017 and 21.3 during 2017–2020. We highlight the need for mitigation and prevention, such as establishing conflict mitigation teams, improving animal husbandry practices, and providing training and education on human–tiger interactions focused in plantations and settlements. Ministry of Education (MOE) National Research Foundation (NRF) Published version This research was supported by the Earth Observatory of Singapore via its funding from the National Research Foundation Singapore and the Singapore Ministry of Education under the Research Centres of Excellence initiative. This work comprises Earth Observatory of Singapore contribution number 454.

To investigate the stability and cost-effectiveness of the three-dimensional-printed (3DP) off-the-shelf (OTS) prosthesis in the reconstruction of the anterior column of the thoracic/lumbar spine after tumor resection.Thirty-five patients (26 with primary malignant tumors and nine with metastatic malignant tumors) who underwent tumor resection and anterior column reconstruction between January 2014 and January 2019 were included in a single institute. Patients were divided into the 3DP OTS prosthesis (3DP) group (n = 14) and the titanium mesh cage (TMC) group (n = 21) by the type of implant. The operation time, intraoperative blood loss, hospital stay, history of radiotherapy, surgical level and total cost were collected and compared between the two groups. Mechanical complications and radiological parameters including mean vertebral height, subsidence, fixation failure(nonunion, migration, screw loosening, rod breakage) rate were recorded at preoperation, 1 week, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months after surgery then at 1 year interval or stop until the end of survival. The follow-up patients were also sent with short form-36 to assess their health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and questions about the current condition of their disease.The mean overall follow-up was 24.6 months. Of the 35 patients involved, six patients died and six were lost to follow-up. The differences between the two groups in operative time, intraoperative blood loss, and hospital stay were not statistically significant (p 0.05). The differences in fixation failure and the subsidence rate between the two groups were not statistical significant (p 0.05). The difference of subsidence rate between the cases with and without osteoporosis, cases with and without radiotherapy was statistically significant within each group (p 0.05). However, the difference of subsidence rate between the surgical level above or below T10 was not statistically significant (p 0.05). The response rate of the questionnaire among the survived patients was 100% (23/23 patients). The results of the Short Form- (SF-)36 between the two groups were similar (p 0.05). The total cost was higher in the 3DP group (p 0.05) with its higher graft cost (p 0.05), but the differences in internal fixation cost and other cost were not statistically significant between groups (p 0.05).Compared to TMC, the 3DP OTS prosthesis achieved similar clinical and radiological results in spinal anterior spinal column reconstruction of thoracic/lumbar spinal tumor resection. However, the 3DP OTS prosthesis was more expansive than TMC.

The photosynthetic mechanism of crop yields in fluctuating light environments in the field remains controversial. To further elucidate this mechanism, we conducted field and simulation experiments using maize (Zea mays) plants. Increased planting density enhanced the light fluctuation frequency and reduced the duration of daily high light, as well as the light-saturated photosynthetic rate, biomass, and yield per plant. Further analysis confirmed a highly significant positive correlation between biomass and yield per plant and the duration of photosynthesis related to daily high light. The simulation experiment indicated that leaf area and photosynthetic rate of maize leaves decreased gradually and considerably when shortening the daily duration of high light, while the quantum yield of regulatory energy dissipation decreased slightly. Under an identical duration of high light exposure, increasing the fluctuation frequency decreased leaf area and the light-saturated photosynthetic rate slightly and increased the quantum yield of regulatory energy dissipation distinctly. Proteomic data also demonstrated that photosynthesis was mainly affected by the duration of high light, not the light fluctuation frequency. Consequently, the current study proposes that an appropriate duration of daily high light under fluctuating light environments is the key factor for greatly improving photosynthesis while the regulatory energy dissipation changes slightly in maize plans. This is a promising mechanism through which to enhance the photosynthetic productivity and yield of maize under complex light environments in the field.

It is a typical problem in the field of object detection to simultaneously detect objects with large scale variation in one image. Recently proposed state-of-the-art object detectors generally learn pyramidal feature representation to deal with the scale variation, which has been proved effective via various feature pyramid networks. However, the majority of the feature pyramid networks based on heuristic feature fusion strategies may be suboptimal, as excess human guidance will restrict the self-learning of deep neural networks. An adaptive feature pyramid is bound to provide a significant performance boost. In this paper, we propose a novel feature pyramid network named CATFPN that consists of Scale-Wise Feature Concatenation (SWFC) module and Global Context (GC) block. The SWFC module evenly distributes semantic features for each feature layer and the GC block introduces a self-attention mechanism. As a feature pyramid network, the CATFPN can be applied to any detector based on multi-scale features. We adopt the CATFPN in typical RetinaNet and Faster R-CNN detector models, without bells and whistles, achieving 1.1% AP and 0.7% AP improvements over FPN on the MS COCO benchmark, respectively. Our competitive performance reported on the test-dev subset of COCO achieves 42.3% AP.

Foam diversion acidizing can effectively solve the problem of acid distribution with severe heterogeneity between and within layers. Based on the foam diversion principle, the gas trap theory, and volume conservation principle, the foam slug diversion acidizing model was established and solved considering the change of bottomhole temperature and deviation factor of foam. The simulation results show that the change of temperature has a great influence on the diversion effect at the initial stage of injection, but a small influence at the middle and late stage. The effect of temperature on the highly permeable layer is greater than that of temperature on the low permeability layer. The deviation factor of foam is mainly controlled by temperature at the initial stage, and by pressure at the middle and late stage, and the whole process shows a downward trend, which has little influence on the diversion effect. The quasi-skin factor of gas trap is the most important parameter that influences the effect of foam diversion. The water saturation of the low permeability layer rises faster than that of the high permeability layer, and the effect of diversion is obvious. The research results have a strong guiding significance for foam diversion acidizing.

The selection criteria for Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) intermediate-stage hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients who would truly benefit from liver resection (LR) remain undefined.To identify BCLC-B HCC patients more suitable for LR.We included patients undergoing curative LR for BCLC stage A or B multi-nodular HCC (MNHCC) and stratified BCLC-B patients by the sum of tumor size and number (N + S). Overall survival (OS), recurrence-free survival (RFS), recur-rence-to-death survival (RTDS), recurrence patterns, and treatments after recurrence in BCLC-B patients in each subgroup were compared with those in BCLC-A patients.In total, 143 patients who underwent curative LR for MNHCC with BCLC-A (BCLC-B HCC patients undergoing hepatectomy with N + S ≤ 10 had mild recurrence patterns and excellent OS similar to those in BCLC-A MNHCC patients, and LR should be considered in these patients.