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Drought stress can be described as multidimensional stress factors affecting plants’ growth, development, and productivity. In order to reduce the adverse impact of drought stress, a plethora of attempts have been employed. Among those attempts, nano-engineered particles have gained a remarkable attention. Of the relevant particles, calcium oxide (CaO) and graphene oxide (GO) have been well-documented to positively regulate and mediate the plant growth system through shifting physiological biochemical and molecular aspects of the plant. The solo impacts of the nanoparticles are well-known but their interactions were not assayed for Medicago sativa L. cultivars. For that reason, the present study investigates the impact of CaO NPs and GO on the response and regulation of the defensive mechanism in alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) callus in drought stress-suffered cultivars. The activation of CaO-GO can be induced with mannitol in the callus of alfalfa cultivars. Dry and fresh weight values were determined in callus samples. There were significant differences between cultivars and concentration. In terms of MDA, H2O2, proline content, it was observed that the Ca2+ NPs application was important, and it showed a strong link with the resistance degree of cultivars. Erzurum cultivar was observed for better proline content with 1.5 ppm GO. MDA activities demonstrated an increasing trend concerning concentrations of mannitol and nanoparticles. The MDA highest activity was observed with 1/2 ppm CaO+0.5/1.5 ppm GO (0.1849 mg/g FW) in the Erzurum. However, the Erzurum cultivar responded with better H2O2 content with 100 mM mannitol +0.5 ppm (0.1017 mg/g FW). This result has presented, under in vitro conditions, that the supplementation of CaO and GO can importantly reduce the negative impacts of drought stress on alfalfa callus; additionally, it has been seen that the dosages of nanoparticle and mannitol are also important.

Purpose. To investigate the efficacy and safety of switching to 0.0015% tafluprost ophthalmic solution with reduced benzalkonium chloride (BAK) on primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) patients with corneal disorders under 0.005% latanoprost treatment. Material and Methods. This was a single-arm, open-label, switching study on adult POAG patients treated with latanoprost 0.005% for more than 3 months, with corneal disorders but no dry eye therapy. All patients were switched to tafluprost 0.0015% and followed up for 3 months. The primary outcome was the change in fluorescein staining score (National Eye Institute/Industry [NEI] score) at the end of the study. Secondary outcomes included changes in intraocular pressure (IOP), tear break-up time (TBUT), hyperemia score, and other ocular and nonocular adverse events. Results. Of the 20 patients initially enrolled, 17 patients, all with POAG, completed the study. At the end of the study, the mean NEI score significantly decreased by 1.8 ± 2.2 ( p < 0.01 ). No significant changes in IOP were observed (12.8 ± 4.6 mmHg at baseline vs. 12.3 ± 4.0 mmHg on visit 2; p = 0.470 ). TBUT increased by 1.2 ± 1.7 seconds ( p < 0.05 ). The proportions of patients with no sign of hyperemia on the bulbar and palpebral conjunctiva increased from 58.5% to 64.7% at baseline (before switching to tafluprost treatment) to 94.1% and 94.1%, respectively, after switching to tafluprost treatment. Dry eye sensation scores were significantly reduced ( p < 0.05 ), while other ocular symptom scores did not change significantly. Conclusion. Switching to tafluprost 0.0015% significantly improved fluorescein staining score, TBUT, and conjunctival hyperemia while maintaining IOP control among POAG patients with corneal disorders.

Improving the governance effectiveness of river basin units (RBUs) is often the focus of academic studies. However, the literature on measuring the influencing factors of the river basin governance effectiveness in urban areas is relatively scarce. Therefore, this study employed the theory of governance across boundaries and adopted an exploratory research approach to discover influencing factors, namely Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and SPSS questionnaire survey. Resulting from the analysis of in-depth interviews, the top three attention-getting influencing factors in descending order are organizational structure, overall plan, and landscape recreation. In comparison, resulting from the quantitative analysis of the AHP questionnaire, the top three attention-getting influencing factors in descending order are flood protection, overall plan, and ecological conservation. These two findings are significantly different. This study's findings also indicate that the public's satisfaction with the individual governance effectiveness reaches a score of 80.06. The analysis results provide a feedback to RBUs, which can be a policy for revising the plan–do–check–act (PDCA) cycle in order to improve the governance effectiveness.

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers published in the journal Sustainability between 2009 and 2023. The aim is to identify influential countries, authors, and papers, as well as patterns in authorship and citation trends. The analysis focuses on frequently cited sources, the most cited research papers and references within the journal, and trends in author keywords. The analysis shows that Sustainability is a leading publication in sustainability research, with an annual growth rate of 53.57%. The selected papers, published between 2013 and 2022, have an average age of 2.11 years and an average of 88.12 citations each. The study highlights the most influential countries in sustainability research published in Sustainability, with China leading, followed by the United States and Germany. The most prolific authors are from China, Spain, and Italy. Interdisciplinary collaboration is essential to address complex sustainability challenges, as shown in the papers published in Sustainability. The study emphasizes the importance of staying informed about emerging trends and research directions in the field of sustainability published in this journal Sustainability. It underscores the significance of fostering international collaborations and partnerships to address complex sustainability challenges facing our world today, as evidenced by the papers published in Sustainability. Overall, this bibliometric analysis provides valuable insights into the current state of sustainability research published in Sustainability and its implications for policy and practice. It highlights key areas for future research and underscores the need for interdisciplinary collaboration to address complex sustainability challenges, as demonstrated by the papers published in Sustainability. These findings have important implications for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners interested in promoting sustainable development in the field of sustainability., as published in Sustainability.

IntroductionGeriatric syndrome (GS) increases risk of disability and mortality in older adults. Sarcopenia is a predominant illness of GS and accelerate its progression. This study aimed to investigate associations between mortality, emergency department (ED) re-visits and GS-related illnesses among older adults who visited the ED.MethodThis retrospective observational study enrolled elderly patients who visited the ED in our hospital between January 2018 and October 2020. Patients were evaluated for potential sarcopenia, which was defined by both low handgrip strength and calf circumference. Follow-up was at least 6 months. Data of age, gender, mortality, ED re-visits, and GS-related illnesses were collected and analyzed for associations.ResultsA total of 273 older adults aged 74 years or older were included, of whom 194 were diagnosed with possible sarcopenia. Older adults with possible sarcopenia also had significantly lower body mass index (BMI); a higher proportion needed assistance with daily activities; more had malnutrition, frailty, and history of falls (all p < 0.001) and acute decline in activities of daily living (p = 0.027). Multivariate analysis showed that possible sarcopenia [adjusted hazard ratio, aHR): 9.89, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.17–83.81, p = 0.036], living in residential institutions (aHR: 2.85, 95% CI: 1.08–7.50, p = 0.034), and frailty (aHR: 7.30, 95% CI: 1.20–44.62, p = 0.031) were associated with mortality. Aged over 85 years (adjusted odds ratio: 2.44, 95% CI: 1.25–4.80, p = 0.02) was associated with ED re-visits.ConclusionSarcopenia is associated with mortality among older adults who visit ED. Initial screening for sarcopenia and relevant risk factors among older adults in the ED may help with early intervention for those at high-risk and may improve their prognosis.

Photorealistic object appearance modeling from 2D images is a constant topic in vision and graphics. While neural implicit methods (such as Neural Radiance Fields) have shown high-fidelity view synthesis results, they cannot relight the captured objects. More recent neural inverse rendering approaches have enabled object relighting, but they represent surface properties as simple BRDFs, and therefore cannot handle translucent objects. We propose Object-Centric Neural Scattering Functions (OSFs) for learning to reconstruct object appearance from only images. OSFs not only support free-viewpoint object relighting, but also can model both opaque and translucent objects. While accurately modeling subsurface light transport for translucent objects can be highly complex and even intractable for neural methods, OSFs learn to approximate the radiance transfer from a distant light to an outgoing direction at any spatial location. This approximation avoids explicitly modeling complex subsurface scattering, making learning a neural implicit model tractable. Experiments on real and synthetic data show that OSFs accurately reconstruct appearances for both opaque and translucent objects, allowing faithful free-viewpoint relighting as well as scene composition., Comment: Journal extension of arXiv:2012.08503 (TMLR 2023). The first two authors contributed equally to this work. Project page: https://kovenyu.com/osf/

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We present a new test-time optimization method for estimating dense and long-range motion from a video sequence. Prior optical flow or particle video tracking algorithms typically operate within limited temporal windows, struggling to track through occlusions and maintain global consistency of estimated motion trajectories. We propose a complete and globally consistent motion representation, dubbed OmniMotion, that allows for accurate, full-length motion estimation of every pixel in a video. OmniMotion represents a video using a quasi-3D canonical volume and performs pixel-wise tracking via bijections between local and canonical space. This representation allows us to ensure global consistency, track through occlusions, and model any combination of camera and object motion. Extensive evaluations on the TAP-Vid benchmark and real-world footage show that our approach outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods by a large margin both quantitatively and qualitatively. See our project page for more results: http://omnimotion.github.io/

Quantum computing holds great potential for advancing the limitations of machine learning algorithms to handle higher data dimensions and reduce overall training parameters in deep neural network (DNN) models. This study uses a parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) on a gate-based quantum computer to investigate the potential for quantum advantage in a model-free reinforcement learning problem. Through a comprehensive investigation and evaluation of the current model and capabilities of quantum computers, we designed and trained a novel hybrid Quantum neural network based on the latest Qiskit and PyTorch framework. We compared its performance with a full-classical DNN with and without an integrated PQC. Our research provides insights into the potential of deep quantum learning to solve a maze problem and, potentially, other reinforcement learning problems. We conclude that various reinforcement learning problems can be effective with reasonable training epochs. Moreover, a comparative discussion of the various quantum reinforcement learning model on maze problems is discussed to evaluate our research's overall potential and advantages.

In recent years, there has been an emerging trend of combining two innovations in computer science and physics to achieve better computation capability. Exploring the potential of quantum computation to achieve highly efficient performance in various tasks is a vital development in engineering and a valuable question in sciences, as it has a significant potential to provide exponential speedups for technologically complex problems that are specifically advantageous to quantum computers. However, one key issue in unleashing this potential is constructing an efficient approach to load classical data into quantum states that can be executed by quantum computers or quantum simulators on classical hardware. Therefore, the split-step quantum walks (SSQW) algorithm was proposed to address this limitation. We facilitate SSQW to design parameterized quantum circuits (PQC) that can generate probability distributions and optimize the parameters to achieve the desired distribution using a variational solver. A practical example of implementing SSQW using Qiskit has been released as open-source software. Showing its potential as a promising method for generating desired probability amplitude distributions highlights the potential application of SSQW in option pricing through quantum simulation., Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures

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This work reports an acoustic filter at 23.5 GHz with a low insertion loss (IL) of 2.38 dB and a 3-dB fractional bandwidth (FBW) of 18.2%, significantly surpassing the state-of-the-art. The device leverages electrically coupled acoustic resonators in 100 nm 128{\deg} Y-cut lithium niobate (LiNbO3) piezoelectric thin film, operating in the first-order antisymmetric (A1) mode. A new film stack, namely transferred thin-film LiNbO3 on silicon (Si) substrate with an intermediate amorphous silicon (a-Si) layer, facilitates the record-breaking performance at millimeter-wave (mmWave). The filter features a compact footprint of 0.56 mm2. In this letter, acoustic and EM consideration, along with material characterization with X-ray diffraction and verified with cross-sectional electron microscopy are reported. Upon further development, the reported filter platform can enable various front-end signal-processing functions at mmWave., Comment: 4 pages, 8 figures, submitted to IEEE JMEMS

The continuing circulation and reassortment with low-pathogenicity avian influenza Gs/Gd (goose/Guangdong/1996)-like avian influenza viruses (AIVs) has caused huge economic losses and raised public health concerns over the zoonotic potential. Virologic surveillance of wild birds has been suggested as part of a global AIV surveillance system. However, underreporting and biased selection of sampling sites has rendered gaining information about the transmission and evolution of highly pathogenic AIV problematic. We explored the use of the Citizen Scientist eBird database to elucidate the dynamic distribution of wild birds in Taiwan and their potential for AIV exchange with domestic poultry. Through the 2-stage analytical framework, we associated nonignorable risk with 10 species of wild birds with100 significant positive results. We generated a risk map, which served as the guide for highly pathogenic AIV surveillance. Our methodologic blueprint has the potential to be incorporated into the global AIV surveillance system of wild birds.

Mass spectrometry (MS) is the primary analytical tool used to characterize proteins within the biopharmaceutical industry. Electrospray ionization (ESI) coupled to liquid chromatography (LC) is the current gold standard for intact protein analysis. However, inherent speed limitations of LC/MS prevent analysis of large sample numbers (1000) in a day. Infrared matrix-assisted laser desorption electrospray ionization (IR-MALDESI-MS), an ambient ionization MS technology, has recently been established as a platform for high-throughput small molecule analysis. Here, we report the applications of such a system for the analysis of intact proteins commonly performed within the drug discovery process. A wide molecular weight range of proteins 10-150 kDa was detected on the system with improved tolerance to salts and buffers compared to ESI. With high concentrations and model proteins, a sample rate of up to 22 Hz was obtained. For proteins at low concentrations and in buffers used in commonly employed assays, robust data at a sample rate of 1.5 Hz were achieved, which is ∼22× faster than current technologies used for high-throughput ESI-MS-based protein assays. In addition, two multiplexed plate-based high-throughput sample cleanup methods were coupled to IR-MALDESI-MS to enable analysis of samples containing excessive amounts of salts and buffers without fully compromising productivity. Example experiments, which leverage the speed of the IR-MALDESI-MS system to monitor NISTmAb reduction, protein autophosphorylation, and compound binding kinetics in near real time, are demonstrated.

This study examines the impact of societal events on the change of perceived relevance of different foundations used in making moral judgments.

ObjectiveHealth literacy plays a crucial role in managing chronic health conditions. Previous studies have revealed the positive relationship between health literacy and diabetes knowledge but few studies have focused on peripheral vascular disease (PVD) in diabetes in relation to health literacy in diabetes management. This study investigated the relationship between the risk for PVD and health literacy level with other determining factors among patients with type 2 diabetes.MethodWe conducted a survey on health literacy using the Mandarin Multidimensional Health Literacy Questionnaire in the department of metabolism and endocrine systems at a regional hospital in northern Taiwan from December 2021 to May 2022 and obtained data from the hospital's health information system (HIS) from 2013 to 2020 to identify occurrences of PVD (n = 429). We performed logistic regression analysis to identify the relationship between PVD events and health literacy levels (overall and in five separate subdimensions) adjusted with other variables.ResultsA longer duration of diabetes increased the risk for PVD events (P = 0.044 and 0.028). In terms of health literacy, the overall level was not significant; however, the dimension of higher levels of health literacy in acquiring health information increased the risk for PVD events (P = 0.034). Other variables were not significantly associated with the risk for PVD events.ConclusionThis study examined the risk for PVD events in terms of the duration of diabetes and provided evidence across the range of dimensions of health literacy concerning the ability to control diabetes. Those with a higher level of health literacy may be more aware of their disease situation, seek and cooperate with their healthcare providers earlier, and have more opportunities to be made aware of their health status from regular checkups than those with inadequate health literacy. These results may help providers make available more self-management tools that are adequate and sustainable for diabetes patients with poor health literacy.

Bi-doped yttrium iron garnet nanopowders were successfully synthesized by a combustion method at different synthesis conditions, and the evolution of their structural, magnetic, and magneto-optical properties has been studied by various methods. X-ray diffraction analysis revealed that crystallite size increases with increase as in annealing time (tA) well as in annealing temperature (TA) and varied from 15.2 nm (TA = 650 °C, tA = 0.5 h) to 44.5 nm (TA = 800 °C, tA = 12 h). The magnetic hysteresis loops exhibit behavior characteristic of soft magnetic materials; herewith, the saturation magnetization demonstrates a growing trend with increasing crystallite size (D). The behavior of the coercivity indicates that, at room temperature, the transition between single-domain and multidomain states occurs at D = 35.3 nm. It was found that the size effect in the MCD spectra is clearly observed for the samples with crystallite sizes less than 42.2 nm for an intersublattice charge-transfer transition and a crystal-field tetrahedral transition. The influence of cation redistribution on the observed changes has been discussed.

The performance of superconducting qubits is degraded by a poorly characterized set of energy sources breaking the Cooper pairs responsible for superconductivity, creating a condition often called "quasiparticle poisoning." Recently, a superconductor with one of the lowest average quasiparticle densities ever measured exhibited quasiparticles primarily produced in bursts which decreased in rate with time after cooldown. Similarly, several cryogenic calorimeters used to search for dark matter have also observed an unknown source of low-energy phonon bursts that decrease in rate with time after cooldown. Here, we show that a silicon crystal glued to its holder exhibits a rate of low-energy phonon events that is more than two orders of magnitude larger than in a functionally identical crystal suspended from its holder in a low-stress state. The excess phonon event rate in the glued crystal decreases with time since cooldown, consistent with a source of phonon bursts which contributes to quasiparticle poisoning in quantum circuits and the low-energy events observed in cryogenic calorimeters. We argue that relaxation of thermally induced stress between the glue and crystal is the source of these events, and conclude that stress relaxation contributes to quasiparticle poisoning in superconducting qubits and the athermal phonon background in a broad class of rare-event searches., Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures. W. A. Page and R. K. Romani contributed equally to this work. Correspondence should be addressed to R. K. Romani

In this study, an unreliable machine repair system with warm standby switching failure and retrial behavior is examined. An application of the Ceph storage cluster system is described to illustrate the applicability of the proposed model and establish its results. To analyze the reliability of the application system, two-state-transition rate diagrams and their associated differential-difference equations are provided. Laplace transforms and the matrix-analytical method are employed to obtain the steady-state probabilities. Explicit expressions for the reliability function, mean time to failure, and steady-state availability of the examined system are then derived. With these system performance measures, we perform a sensitivity analysis of the system parameters to identify critical variables. Furthermore, the numerical results for various parameter settings are tabulated and presented graphically. Finally, managerial insights and constructive results are provided as a guide for managers in determining an effective strategy for performance enhancement.

Since the Brexit happened in January 2020, it is likely to impact the United Kingdom (UK) and the whole of Europe in different ways. The UK and other European countries will revise their preferences concerning fisheries, ports access and governance, and bilateral diplomatic relationships with the countries alongside the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR). However, this is not an end to uncertainties, but the beginning to show the double-edged effects of Brexit. This paper focuses on the opportunities and challenges for Sino-UK as well as European Union (EU) relations arising from Brexit. The present study considers Brexit’s impact on the MSR countries, especially China, Pakistan, and India. It examines what Brexit means for the Sino-UK/EU relationship, politically, economically, and culturally. It concludes with the potential impacts of Brexit on Sino-UK/EU trade relations, maritime security, marine resources usage, the safety of navigation, port governance and cooperation, and suggests the appropriate strategies that can be put in place to capitalise on opportunities to reap benefits while mitigating the challenges.

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) has been extensively used for the fabrication of various packaging materials, creating million tons of waste per year. Degrading and recycling PET waste has been id...

Mass spectrometry (MS) can provide high sensitivity and specificity for biochemical assays without the requirement of labels, eliminating the risk of assay interference. However, its use had been limited to lower-throughput assays due to the need for chromatography to overcome ion suppression from the sample matrix. Direct analysis without chromatography has the potential for high throughput if sensitivity is sufficient despite the presence of a matrix. Here, we report and demonstrate a novel direct analysis high-throughput MS system based on infrared matrix-assisted desorption electrospray ionization (IR-MALDESI) that has a potential acquisition rate of 33 spectra/s. We show the development of biochemical assays in standard buffers for wild-type isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 (IDH1), diacylglycerol kinase zeta (DGKζ), and p300 histone acetyltransferase (P300) to demonstrate the suitability of this system for a broad range of high-throughput lead discovery assays. A proof-of-concept pilot screen of ∼3k compounds is also shown for IDH1 and compared to a previously reported fluorescence-based assay. We were able to obtain reliable data at a speed amenable for high-throughput screening of large-scale compound libraries.

We propose Point2Cyl, a supervised network transforming a raw 3D point cloud to a set of extrusion cylinders. Reverse engineering from a raw geometry to a CAD model is an essential task to enable manipulation of the 3D data in shape editing software and thus expand their usages in many downstream applications. Particularly, the form of CAD models having a sequence of extrusion cylinders -- a 2D sketch plus an extrusion axis and range -- and their boolean combinations is not only widely used in the CAD community/software but also has great expressivity of shapes, compared to having limited types of primitives (e.g., planes, spheres, and cylinders). In this work, we introduce a neural network that solves the extrusion cylinder decomposition problem in a geometry-grounded way by first learning underlying geometric proxies. Precisely, our approach first predicts per-point segmentation, base/barrel labels and normals, then estimates for the underlying extrusion parameters in differentiable and closed-form formulations. Our experiments show that our approach demonstrates the best performance on two recent CAD datasets, Fusion Gallery and DeepCAD, and we further showcase our approach on reverse engineering and editing., Comment: CVPR 2022

Joseph Anthony Tumbocon,1,2 Tina T Wong,3– 5 Thanendthire Sangapillai,6 Yung-Chang Yen,7 Sang-Woo Park,8 Hsien Han Lim,9 Ngamkae Ruangvaravate10 1Eye Institute, St. Luke’s Medical Center, Quezon City, Philippines; 2Department of Ophthalmology, St. Luke’s Medical Center College of Medicine, Quezon City, Philippines; 3Glaucoma Department, Singapore National Eye Centre, Singapore, Singapore; 4Cataract & Comprehensive Ophthalmology Department, Singapore Eye Research Institute, Singapore, Singapore; 5Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Singapore, Singapore; 6Tun Hussein Onn National Eye Hospital, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia; 7Department of Ophthalmology, Chi Mei Medical Center, Tainan City, Taiwan; 8Department of Ophthalmology, Chonnam National University Medical School and Hospital, Gwangju, South Korea; 9Eye Centre, Sunway Medical Centre, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia; 10Department of Ophthalmology, Faculty of Medicine Siriraj Hospital, Mahidol University, Bangkok, ThailandCorrespondence: Joseph Anthony Tumbocon, Eye Institute, St. Luke’s Medical Center, 279 E Rodriguez Sr. Ave, Quezon City, Metro Manila, 1112, Philippines, Email jatumbocon@gmail.comBackground: Preserved prostaglandin analogs (PGAs) have been linked to ocular surface disease (OSD). While the benefits of preservative-low (PL) or -free (PF) Tafluprost (Santen Inc., Japan) were reported in real-world studies in Western countries, this is the first study in Asia to assess the effectiveness and safety of switching from preserved PGA to PL or PF-Tafluprost.Methods: We conducted a meta-analysis on studies that included adults (> 18 years of age) with a Corneal Fluorescein Staining Score (CFS) > 1. These individuals had switched to PL or PF-tafluprost after using a preserved PGA therapy for at least 3 months for glaucoma and were identified from Santen’s tafluprost study database. A total of six studies from South Korea, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan were pooled for analysis.Results: An intraocular pressure (IOP) reduction of 5.9% (0.91 mmHg) was seen in 265 patients. However, this result was not statistically significant (95% CI: − 3.64, 1.81; Figure 1). Among 132 patients, a 47.9% reduction in the CFS (95% CI: − 3.65, − 1.91) was seen. Tear film break-up (n=183) significantly increased by 1.06 seconds (95% CI: 0.65, 1.47). In 88 patients, the bulbar conjunctiva score decreased by − 0.46 (95% CI: − 0.81, − 0.10) and palpebral conjunctiva score decreased by − 0.42 (95% CI: − 0.67– 0.17). One or more new adverse reactions were reported in 3% of the individuals after switching.Conclusion: Tafluprost IOP reduction is comparable to other PGAs, with significant improvements in the ocular surface and minimal adverse reactions which were already previously reported.Keywords: ocular surface disease, glaucoma, preserved prostaglandins, tafluprost, PGA, preservative-free, preservative-low, Asian population, meta analysis

Centralized high-throughput purification laboratories routinely produce large numbers of test tubes with fractions containing the purified compounds of interest interspersed with test tubes containing fractions collected from undesired peaks. Because the next step after purification entails the removal of the solvent in a centrifugal evaporator with multiple sample positions per rotor, select test tubes must be labeled prior to dry-down to track the identity of each compound. The diversity of test tube sizes and tray configurations from different chromatography system vendors complicates this labeling task. Therefore, the development of an automated tube labeler that can accommodate a multitude of test tube and tray sizes can reduce the chances of error as well as reduce the hands-on labor required to complete this tedious but essential task. Custom hardware and software have been implemented to inform and to enable the Pick-n-Place arm of a commercially available Tecan EVO robotic system to pick up and present select tubes, filled with purified chromatography fractions from a multitude of vendor trays, to a custom label application station integrated with a commercially available Zebra label printer. Particular challenges existed with accurately positioning tubes in Agilent G1364-84544 trays onto the deck of the instrument. The resulting instrument reduces hands-on time for labeling fractions by approximately 60%.

BackgroundWhile large genome-wide association studies have identified nearly one thousand loci associated with variation in blood pressure, rare variant identification is still a challenge. In family-based cohorts, genome-wide linkage scans have been successful in identifying rare genetic variants for blood pressure. This study aims to identify low frequency and rare genetic variants within previously reported linkage regions on chromosomes 1 and 19 in African American families from the Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) program. Genetic association analyses weighted by linkage evidence were completed with whole genome sequencing data within and across TOPMed ancestral groups consisting of 60,388 individuals of European, African, East Asian, Hispanic, and Samoan ancestries.ResultsAssociations of low frequency and rare variants in RCN3 and multiple other genes were observed for blood pressure traits in TOPMed samples. The association of low frequency and rare coding variants in RCN3 was further replicated in UK Biobank samples (N = 403,522), and reached genome-wide significance for diastolic blood pressure (p = 2.01 × 10- 7).ConclusionsLow frequency and rare variants in RCN3 contributes blood pressure variation. This study demonstrates that focusing association analyses in linkage regions greatly reduces multiple-testing burden and improves power to identify novel rare variants associated with blood pressure traits.

Additional file 3: Fig. S1. TOPMed Freeze 8 phenotype distributions in African Americans.

Additional file 5: Fig. S3. TOPMed Freeze 8 phenotype distributions in East Asian/Asian Americans.

Additional file 1. Supplemental Materials & Methods.

Additional file 7: Fig. S5. TOPMed Freeze 8 phenotype distributions in Samoans.

Additional file 8. Members of the Samoan Obesity, Lifestyle and Genetic Adaptations Study (OLaGA) Group.

Additional file 1.

Additional file 9. Members of the NHLBI Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) Consortium.

Additional file 2: Table S1. Characteristics of UK Biobank European samples.

Supplemental material, sj-doc-1-taj-10.1177_20406223221080646 for Effectiveness of using calligraphic activity to treat people with schizophrenia: a randomized controlled trial in Southern Taiwan by Wen-Yi Huang, Hector W.H. Tsang, Shu-Mei Wang, Yu-Chen Huang, Yi-Chun Chen, Chih-Heng Cheng, Chih-Yin Chen, Jung-Sheng Chen, Yen-Ling Chang, Ru-Yi Huang, Chung-Ying Lin, Marc N. Potenza and Amir H. Pakpour in Therapeutic Advances in Chronic Disease

Additional file 2.

We describe the selective hydrogenation of furfural (FAL) into tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol (THFA) under mild conditions (30 °C) in aqueous media using an Rh-loaded carbon (Rh/C) catalyst in a one-pot fashion. In FAL hydrogenation, the Rh/C catalyst showed a high THFA yield (92%) with 93% selectivity in aqueous media within 12 h, whereas the use of a dimethylacetamide (DMA) solvent system resulted in a 95% THFA yield within 32 h at 30 °C. The study of the effect of the solvent on FAL hydrogenation reveals that polar solvents showed higher THFA yields than a toluene solvent. The Rh/C catalyst used in this study exhibited higher activity compared to Ru/C, Pd/C, Ni/C derived from Ni-based metal–organic framework (Ni-MOF), and Ni-loaded carbon black (Ni/CB) catalysts in FAL-to-THFA hydrogenation. The Rh/C catalyst is characterized in detail using various characterization techniques such as TEM, XRD, N2-adsorption–desorption, XPS, and ICP-OES to understand its physicochemical properties. The Rh/C catalyst shows similar high THFA yields in the recycling experiment of FAL hydrogenation under ambient conditions.

In this review, we introduce advanced synthetic methods for functional nanostructured materials (in powder form) bridging to the development in emerging energy and environmental applications. Three types of synthetic methods (aerosol-based, aerogel-based, and de novo methods) are introduced, all of which have shown to be extensively investigated as novel routes to create nanostructured materials with designed material properties (i.e., controlled size, shape, porosity, and chemical composition are to be achievable). The typical experimental setup and the general experimental procedure for material preparation via the above three synthesis routes are discussed. Complementary characterization approaches are employed to study material properties of the synthesized nanostructured materials via the three synthesis routes. Here we investigate: (1) CuxO-CeO2, Ni-CeO2, and CuxO nanoparticle-encapsulating metal–organic framework (MOF) hybrid nanoparticles synthesized via the aerosol-based method; (2) Cr-encapsulating MOF (Cr-MOF-199), Au-encapsulating MOF (Au@ZIF-8), and MOF-derived nanocomposites (CuO/CuCr2O4) produced via the de novo route; (3) a variety of aerogels (carbon, metal oxide, polymer) with high porosity created by the aerogel-based approach. Finally, several examples of emerging energy and environmental applications are introduced using these functional nanostructured materials, including (1) catalytic transformation to chemicals by using precious metal nanoparticles-embedded MOFs and the MOF-derived nanocomposites as the catalysts; (2) methane combustion using CuxO-CeO2 hybrid nanoparticles as catalyst, (3) methane dry reforming with CO2 using Ni-CeO2 hybrid nanoparticles as catalyst; (4) CO2 capture by fluoroalkyl silane-modified mesoporous silica and polymethylsilsesquioxane (PMSQ) aerogel membranes; (5) adsorption of organic solvent, dye, and oil by cetyltrimethylammonium bromide-modified PMSQ aerogel.

Infrared Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption Electrospray Ionization (IR-MALDESI) mass spectrometry is an ambient-direct sampling method being developed for high-throughput, label-free, biochemical screening of large-scale compound libraries. Here, we report the development of an ultrahigh-throughput continuous motion IR-MALDESI sampling approach capable of acquiring data at rates up to 22.7 samples per second in a 384-well microtiter plate. At top speed, less than 1% analyte carryover is observed from well-to-well and signal intensity relative standard deviations (RSD) of 11.5% and 20.9% for 3 μM 1-hydroxymidazolam and 12 μM dextrorphan, respectively, are achieved. The ability to perform parallel kinetics studies on 384 samples with ~30s time resolution using an isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 (IDH1) enzyme assay is shown. Finally, we demonstrate the repeatability and throughput of our approach by measuring 115,200 samples from 300 microtiter plate reads consecutively over 5.54 hours with RSDs under 8.14% for each freshly introduced plate. Taken together, these results demonstrate the use of IR-MALDESI at sample acquisition rates that surpass other currently reported direct sampling mass spectrometry approaches used for high throughput compound screening.For Table of Contents Only

ImportanceAlthough influenza vaccination has been associated with Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), the findings among studies of older adult populations are inconsistent.ObjectiveTo determine the risk of GBS after influenza vaccination among older adults.Design, Setting, and ParticipantsThis cross-sectional study incorporated a self-controlled case series design. Days 1 to 7, days 1 to 14, and days 1 to 42 after influenza vaccination were identified as risk intervals; days 8 to 180, days 15 to 180, and days 43 to 180 comprised the corresponding control interval. Population-based data were obtained from Taiwan’s National Health Insurance research database between January 1, 2003, and December 31, 2017. Data were analyzed from November 1, 2021, through February 28, 2022. Adults 65 years or older who developed GBS within 180 days after influenza vaccination were enrolled.ExposureGovernment-funded seasonal influenza vaccination.Main Outcomes and MeasuresOnset of GBS during risk intervals after influenza vaccination compared with control intervals using Poisson regression to calculate incidence rate ratio (IRR).ResultsOf 13 482 122 adults aged 65 years or older who received an influenza vaccination, 374 were hospitalized for GBS. The mean (SD) age of the study population was 75.0 (6.1) years; 215 (57.5%) were men and 159 (42.5%) were women. In terms of comorbidities, 33 adults (8.8%) had cancer and 4 (1.1%) had autoimmune diseases. The IRRs for GBS during days 1 to 7, days 1 to 14, and days 1 to 42 were 0.95 (95% CI, 0.55-1.61; P = .84), 0.87 (95% CI, 0.58-1.29; P = .48), and 0.92 (95% CI, 0.72-1.17; P = .49), respectively. No results showed statistical significance. Similarly, no significant differences in IRRs were noted for the overall risk interval (ie, days 1-42) in subgroup analyses pertaining to different age groups (65-74 years [0.93 (95% CI, 0.66-1.31)], 75-84 years [0.85 (95% CI, 0.58-1.26)], and ≥85 years [1.10 (95% CI, 0.57-2.11)]), sex (men, 0.97 [95% CI, 0.71-1.33; P = .87]; women, 0.85 [95% CI, 0.58-1.23; P = .39]), Charlson Comorbidity Index (1.03 [95% CI, 0.77-1.38; P = .84]), or comorbidities (cancer, 0.68 [95% CI, 0.28-1.64; P = .39]; autoimmune disease, 1.10 [95% CI, 0.11-10.53; P = .94]).Conclusions and RelevanceThese findings suggest that influenza vaccination did not increase the risk of GBS among adults aged 65 years or older in Taiwan regardless of postvaccination period or underlying characteristics.

C-type shocks are believed to be ubiquitous in turbulent molecular clouds thanks to ambipolar diffusion. We investigate whether the drag instability in 1D isothermal C-shocks, inferred from the local linear theory of Gu & Chen, can appear in nonideal magnetohydrodynamic simulations. Two C-shock models (with narrow and broad steady-state shock widths) are considered to represent the typical environment of star-forming clouds. The ionization-recombination equilibrium is adopted for the one-fluid approach. In the 1D simulation, the inflow gas is continuously perturbed by a sinusoidal density fluctuation with a constant frequency. The perturbations clearly grow after entering the C-shock region until they start being damped at the transition to the post-shock region. We show that the profiles of a predominant Fourier mode extracted locally from the simulated growing perturbation match those of the growing mode derived from the linear analysis. Moreover, the local growth rate and wave frequency derived from the predominant mode generally agree with those from the linear theory. Therefore, we confirm the presence of the drag instability in simulated 1D isothermal C-shocks. We also explore the nonlinear behavior of the instability by imposing larger-amplitude perturbations to the simulation. We find that the drag instability is subject to wave steepening, leading to saturated perturbation growth. Issues concerning local analysis, nonlinear effects, one-fluid approach, and astrophysical applications are discussed.