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Light, one of the key environmental components for both life and work, played significant role in subjective feelings (e.g. affect and comfort), but the exact effects and mechanisms were still to be determined. The present study screened thirty healthy adults (13 females, 22.45 ± 3.26 years) and examined subjective affect and comfort under short-term white lights with different combination of correlated color temperature (CCT) and illuminance at different times of day (e.g. morning, afternoon, and evening). Our results showed a significant interaction between illuminance level and time-of-day on subjective comfort. Participants felt more comfortable under 50 lx and 100 lx instead of 500 lx in the evening, and more comfortable under 500 lx in the morning and afternoon. In addition, a positive correlation between illuminance and comfort in the morning and a negative correlation between them in the evening were found. No significant effect of CCT on any subjective feeling was revealed. Our results necessitate the consideration of time-of-day in understanding lighting effects and application of healthy lighting in daily life.

Visual functions decline with age, but how aging degrades visual functions remains controversial. In the current study, the mechanisms underlying age-related visual declines were examined psychophysically. We developed an efficient method to quickly explore contrast sensitivity as a function of nine spatial frequencies at three levels of external noise in both young and old subjects. Fifty-two young and twenty-six old subjects have been screened for ophthalmological and mental diseases and participated in the experiment. Contrast sensitivity varied significantly with spatial frequency, age, and level of external noise. By adopting a nonlinear observer model, we decomposed contrast sensitivity into inefficiencies in internal additive noise, internal multiplicative noise, perceptual template gain, and/or system non-linearity. Model analysis revealed that aging impacts both internal additive noise and perceptual template gain, and such age-related degradation is tuned to spatial frequency, which is also a good predictor to discriminate old from young. The quick characterization of contrast sensitivity functions at different noise levels and the accompanying analysis developed in the current study may have profound application in other clinical populations.

Plant–microbe interactions can modulate the plant metabolome, but there is no information about how different soil microbiomes could affect the sugarcane metabolome and its quality. Here, we collected soil and stalk samples from bitter sugarcane (BS) and sweet sugarcane (SS) to conduct chemical analysis, microbiome and metabolome analysis. Our data revealed lower species diversity in the BS group than in the SS group, and 18 discriminatory OTUs (relative abundance ≥ 0.01%) were identified. Sugarcane metabolomic analysis indicated the different abundances of 247 metabolites between the two groups in which 22 distinct metabolites involved in two flavonoid biosynthesis pathways were revealed. Integrated analysis between soil microbial taxa, stalk chemical components, and soil properties showed that the flavonoid content in stalks and the nitrogen concentration in soil were highly correlated with the soil microbiome composition. Bacteria at the genus level exhibited greater associations with distinct metabolites, and six genera were independently associated with 90.9% of the sugarcane metabolites that play a major metabolic role in sugarcane. In conclusion, this study provided evidences that the interaction between plant–microbiome can change the plant metabolome.