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Psoriasis is a chronic recurrent inflammatory skin disease that is characterized by abnormal proliferation and differentiation of keratinocytes (KCs), angiogenesis and skin inflammation. Transfer RNA fragments (tRFs) are tRNA-derived small RNAs (tsRNAs), which possess regulatory functions in many diseases. Their potential roles in the pathological development of psoriasis have not been established. We first identified differentially expressed (DE) tRFs from psoriatic skin lesions using small RNA sequencing, and collected additional clinical samples for validation. Then, we investigated the function and mechanism of target tRFs in vitro. As a result of our investigation: we identified 234 DE transcripts in psoriatic skin lesions compared with normal controls. Further functional analysis showed the downregulation of tRF-Ile-AAT-019 in psoriatic lesions plays a critical role in pathogenesis since it could target 3'UTR of the serine protease serpin protein E1 (SERPINE1) gene. We next demonstrated that tRF-Ile-AAT-019 could suppress SERPINE1, thus leading to decreased expressions of vascular endothelial growth factor but increased expressions of keratinocytes (KCs) differentiation markers including Keratin1 and Involucrin. In conclusion, tRF-Ile-AAT-019 plays a protective role in the pathological progression of psoriasis via targeting SERPINE1, resulting in regulation of KCs differentiation and vascular proliferation biomarkers and providing a potential novel targeting pathway for the disease treatment.

Background: Developmental hypothyroidism impairs learning and memory in offspring, which depend on extensive neuronal circuits in the entorhinal cortex, together with the hippocampus and neocortex. The entorhinal-dentate gyrus pathway is the main entrance of memory circuits. We investigated whether developmental hypothyroidism impaired the morphological development of the entorhinal-dentate gyrus pathway.Methods: We examined the structure and function of the entorhinal-dentate gyrus pathway in response to developmental hypothyroidism induced using 2-mercapto-1-methylimidazole.Results: 1,1´-Dioctadecyl-3,3,3´,3´-tetramethylindocarbocyanine perchlorate tract tracing indicated that entorhinal axons showed delayed growth in reaching the outer molecular layer of the dentate gyrus at postnatal days 2 and 4 in hypothyroid conditions. The proportion of fibers in the outer molecular layer was significantly smaller in the hypothyroid group than in the euthyroid group at postnatal day 4. At postnatal day 10, the pathway showed a layer-specific distribution in the outer molecular layer, similar to the euthyroid group. However, the projected area of entorhinal axons was smaller in the hypothyroid group than in the euthyroid group. An electrophysiological examination showed that hypothyroidism impaired the long-term potentiation of the perforant and the cornu ammonis 3–cornu ammonis 1 pathways. Many repulsive axon guidance molecules were involved in the formation of the entorhinaldentate gyrus pathway. The hypothyroid group had higher levels of erythropoietin-producing hepatocyte ligand A3 and semaphorin 3A than the euthyroid group.Conclusion: We demonstrated that developmental hypothyroidism might influence the development of the entorhinal-dentate gyrus pathway, contributing to impaired long-term potentiation. These findings improve our understanding of neural mechanisms for memory function.

Background Promoting self-directed learning (SDL) among nursing undergraduates is crucial to meet the new requirements of the healthcare system and to adapt to online learning contexts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, identifying the classification features of SDL ability and developing targeted interventions are both critical. Professional identity (PI) may contribute to the cultivation of SDL ability, but their relationship remains relatively unknown. This study aimed to explore the subgroups of SDL ability and their differences in PI among nursing undergraduates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods A total of 2438 nursing undergraduates at four universities in China were enrolled in this cross-sectional study from November 2021 to February 2022. The Self-Directed Learning Scale of Nursing Undergraduates (SLSNU) and the Professional Identity Scale for Nursing Students (PISNS) were administered. A latent profile analysis was performed to explore SDL ability latent profiles. Multinomial logistic regression analysis was conducted to examine the predictors of profile membership, and a one-way analysis of variance was applied to compare the PI scores in each latent profile. Results Three latent profiles were identified and labeled ‘low SDL ability’ (n = 749, 30.7%), ‘low initiative of help-seeking’ (n = 1325, 54.4%) and ‘high SDL ability’ (n = 364, 14.9%). Multinomial logistic regression analysis suggested that nursing undergraduates who voluntarily chose a nursing major, had served as a student cadre, and had participated in clinical practicum were less likely to be included in the “low SDL ability” group. The average PI score was statistically different across the three profiles (F = 884.40, p Conclusion The SDL ability among nursing undergraduates was divided into three profiles, and results show that promoting PI may effectively foster SDL ability. This study highlights the importance of targeted interventions by considering their distinct SDL ability patterns, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trigger-action programming (TAP) is an intelligent tool, which makes it easy for users to make intelligent rules for IoT devices and applications. Unfortunately, with the popularization of TAP and more and more rules, the rule chain from multiple rules appears gradually and brings more and more threats. Previous work pays more attention to the construction of the security model, but few people focus on how to accurately identify the rule chain from multiple rules. Inaccurate identification of rule chains will lead to the omission of rule chains with threats. This paper proposes a rule chain recognition model based on multiple features, TapChain, which can more accurately identify the rule chain without source code. We design a correction algorithm for TapChain to help us get the correct NLP analysis results. We extract 12 features from 5 aspects of the rules to make the recognition of the rule chain more accurate. According to the evaluation, compared with the previous work, the accuracy rate of TapChain is increased by 3.1%, the recall rate is increased by 1.4%, and the precision rate can reach 88.2%. More accurate identification of the rule chain can help to better implement the security policies and better balance security and availability. What’s more, according to the rule chain that TapChain can recognize, there is a new kind of rule chain with threats. We give the relevant case studies in the evaluation.

Aortic dissection (AD) is one of the most dangerous diseases of the cardiovascular system, which is characterized by acute onset and poor prognosis, while the pathogenesis of AD is still unclear and may affect or even delay the diagnosis of AD. Anchorage-dependent cell death (Anoikis) is a special mode of cell death, which is programmed cell death caused by normal cells after detachment from extracellular matrix (ECM)and has been widely studied in the field of oncology in recent years. In this study, we applied bioinformatics analysis, according to the results of research analysis and Gene Ontology (GO), as well as Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), finally found 3 anoikis-related genes (ARGs) based on machine learning. Then we further verified by receiver operating characteristic (ROC), gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA), gene set enrichment analysis (GSVA)and other methods. We hypothesize ARGs may be involved in the pathogenesis of AD through pathways such as oxidative stress, inflammatory response, and ECM. Therefore, we conclude that the ARGs can be an important factor in determining the diagnosis of AD.

Background: Traditional detection of fungal infections of the skin relies on microscopy techniques or fungal culture. Currently, reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) has been widely applied to assist the diagnosis of commondermatomycosis with advantages of non-invasiveness, celerity, real time, and repeatability. Materials and Methods: A total of 478 clinically suspected dermatomycosis patients were enrolled in this study including 148 cases of tinea manus and pedis, 188 cases of tinea corporis and cruris and 142 cases of pityriasis versicolor. RCM examination was performed to image the lesions. Aim: This study aimed to summarize the image characteristics of in vivo RCM examination on common dermatomycosis and retrospectively evaluate its accuracy as compared with microscopy results. Furthermore, we attempted to tackle the challenges of RCM diagnosis on common dermatomycosis. Results: Based on RCM images, 231 of 478 (48.3%) patients were detected with hyphae. Among all RCM confirmed cases, 58 out of 148 (39.2%) were tinea manus and pedis, 145 out of 188 (77.1%) were tinea corporis and cruris, and 28 out of 142 (19.7%) were pityriasis versicolor. The remaining patients (51.7%) could not be diagnosed by the dermatologist according to RCM. Hyphae structures were primarily identified during diagnoses of dermatomycosis by RCM. Conclusions: RCM is a novel optical imaging technique that confers high-resolution images of fungi. RCM has certain advantages in the diagnosis of tinea manus and pedis. RCM is not suitable for the diagnosis of pityriasis versicolor.

This scoping review aims to unequivocally identify and evaluate AI technologies that have been developed, tested or implemented in oncology nursing through a comprehensive synthesis of knowledge.

The epidemic of multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria is an ever-growing global concern. Polymyxin B (PMB), a kind of "old fashioned" antibiotic, has been revived in clinical practice and mainly used as last-line antibiotics for otherwise untreatable serious infections because the incidence of the resistance to PMB is currently relatively low in comparison with other antibiotics

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic inflammatory skin disease involving skin barrier dysfunction and immune imbalance. However, the mechanism of AD is not clear completely and may be related to heredity and environment. Neuropeptides are a class of peptides secreted by nerve endings, they may play roles in promoting vasodilation, plasma extravasation, chemotaxis of inflammatory cells and mediating pruritus. Since itching and immune cell infiltration are the main manifestations of atopic dermatitis, to further investigate the impact of neuropeptides on AD, our review summarized the mechanisms of several common neuropeptides in AD and hypothesized that neuropeptides may be the novel potential targets in AD treatment.

U-Shaped Steel Sheet Piles (USSSP) have buckling and bending problems during construction. In this research, the structural measure of stiffened plates applied along the longitudinal direction of USSSP is analyzed and proposed. A theoretical calculation method of stiffening effect is proposed based on the dynamic correlation coefficient method and the formula for the critical buckling load of locally stiffened USSSP is derived. A parametric analysis of the number, width, and arrangement scheme of the stiffened plates on the USSSP with different lengths is examined. The empirical formula derived for the total stiffening area and the critical load of the axial compression members of the USSSP is compared with practical results from an engineering case study. The results show a quadratic function under the condition of arranging the different number of stiffened plates at equal intervals, which is accurate in deriving the critical load values USSSP after local stiffening, and provide a theoretical basis for the optimization design of local reinforcement of USSSP axial compression members in engineering projects.

Glioma is the most common tumour of the central nervous system, with a poor prognosis and an increasing trend of incidence in recent years; it is also beginning to affect younger age groups more. Added to this, cuproptosis is a new form of cell death. Indeed, when a certain amount of copper accumulates in a cell, it affects specific mitochondrial metabolic enzymes in that cell and leads to cell death–a phenomenon known as cuproptosis. In this study, we applied bioinformatics analysis, and, according to the results of the study analysis and Gene Ontology (GO), as well as the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes KyotoEncyclopediaofGenesandGenomes, the glutaminase (GLS) genes affect the prognosis and tumour mutation of glioma patients through cuproptosis. Interestingly, however, GLS is not involved in the immune escape of glioma. Glutaminase genes are a class of glucose metabolism-related genes that are involved in the tricarboxylic acid cycle of cells. At the same time, the expression of the glutaminase gene was positively correlated with the degree of immune cell infiltration and the expression of various immune cell markers, and thus affected the prognosis of glioma patients. Therefore, we believe that the cuproptosis-related glutaminase gene can be an important factor in determining the prognosis of glioma patients.

ObjectiveThis study aimed to investigate the relationship between prognostic and tumor parameters of cervical cancer patients, such as tumor size (TS), tumor volume (TV), and tumor volume reduction rate (TVRR) after external beam radiotherapy.MethodsA total of 217 patients with advanced cervical cancer, classified as Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) IIa–IVa, were enrolled in the study. Pre- and mid-RT pelvic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were performed twice, during RT and just before brachytherapy.ResultsThe median follow-up time was 51 months (range, 7–111 months). The 5-year overall survival (OS), progression-free survival (PFS), and local failure-free survival (LFFS) rates were 81.3, 85.1, and 92.9%, respectively. Multivariate analysis revealed that tumor parameters including FIGO stage >II (Hazard Ratio, 2.377 and 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.091–5.182; P = 0.029), pre-RT TV >61.6 cm3 (HR, 0.417 and 95% CI, 0.188–0.926; P = 0.032), and mid-RT TV >11.38 cm3 (HR, 3.192 and 95% CI, 1.094–9.316; P = 0.034) were observably associated with OS. Univariate analysis showed that the tumor volume reduction rate (TVRR) was dramatically associated with overall survival (HR, 0.204 and 95% CI 0.033–1.282; P <0.001) and local failure-free survival (P = 0.050).ConclusionsIn this retrospective study, TVRR and mid-radiotherapy tumor volume are independent and strong prognostic parameters for patients with local advanced cervical cancer receiving CCRT.

Urticaria is a type of skin disease characterized by rapid onset of hives (superficial dermis edema, erythema, pruritus, or burning sensation). According to whether the natural course exceeds 6 weeks, urticaria can be divided into acute and chronic urticaria (CU). At present, the evaluation of CU activity mainly depends on the Urticaria Activity Score (UAS), but the evaluation indicators are relatively single, and we need more reliable experimental data for evaluation. We typically summarize advanced biomarkers and several related pathogenic pathways discovered in recent years on urticaria, including the cell adhesion/chemotaxis pathway, interleukin (IL)-6/Janus tyrosine kinase/STAT pathway, IL-17/IL-23 pathway, basophil- and mast cell-related pathway, coagulation/fibrinolysis-related pathways, single-nucleotide polymorphism, and some other pathways. This review aims to find appropriate biomarkers so that we can evaluate disease activity, discover novel therapeutic targets, and predict the patients’ response more accurately to therapeutic agents.

With the high popularity of IoT devices, industrial IoT platforms, such as smart factories and oilfield industrial control systems, have become a new trend in the development of smart city. Although various manufacturers pay wide attention to the different functional requirements of IoT platforms, they seldom consider security issues, especially in terms of data security, which has led to a large number of cases of privacy leakage. Some works have been made to provide secure and reliable communication solutions for industrial IoT platforms, unfortunately, as different communication protocols and interaction models are adopted in different scenarios, these solutions are mainly isolated and fragmented. Therefore, it is an urgent challenge to construct a universal cross-platform secure communication scheme for industrial IoT platforms. In this article, we analyze the logic and requirements of different industrial IoT scenarios to abstracts them into a universal model. We summarize the possible attacks on different industrial IoT platforms and design a security scheme to capture these attacks based on the conditional proxy re-encryption primitive. The proposed scheme ensures that data cannot be accessed by an unauthorized user. We also evaluate the security and performance of our scheme, and the experimental results show that our scheme can achieve the functionality and security requirements with low overhead.

Multidrug resistance (MDR) of tumors is one of the clinical direct reasons for chemotherapy failure. MDR directly leads to tumor recurrence and metastasis, with extremely grievous mortality. Engineering a novel nano-delivery system for the treatment of MDR tumors has become an important part of nanotechnology. Herein, this review will take those different mechanisms of MDR as the classification standards and systematically summarize the advances in nanotechnology targeting different mechanisms of MDR in recent years. However, it still needs to be seriously considered that there are still some thorny problems in the application of the nano-delivery system against MDR tumors, including the excessive utilization of carrier materials, low drug-loading capacity, relatively narrow targeting mechanism, and so on. It is hoped that through the continuous development of nanotechnology, nano-delivery systems with more universal uses and a simpler preparation process can be obtained, for achieving the goal of defeating cancer MDR and accelerating clinical transformation.

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) with higher specific energy as well as longer cycling performance have been rapidly evolving in recent years. Silicon as a kind of anode material in LIBs is arousing more and more attention owned to its ultrahigh specific energy and abundant supply. However, the pulverization during lithiation and de-lithiation of silicon always causes a considerable reduction in capacity. Several investigations have been carried out to tackle this problem by using silicon composites with nanostructural design. This study focuses on the most recent research on Si-metal alloy and Si-metal oxide composites, which show significant promise for improving the cycle life of LIBs. Their nanostructures will also be examined to propose new research avenues for silicon-based anodes.

In order to clarify the role of oxygen vacancy (OV), five α-MnO

Using a simple three-dimensional printed element, i.e., ridge prism, we generate a new diffraction-free structured terahertz (THz) beam: THz sheet in free space. Numerical and experimental results show that the output beam from such an element has an one-dimensional invariant transverse profile. Note that the THz sheet generated by a ridge prism is always close to the element, which limits its application. Thus, we design a lens group system to deliver the THz sheet to a distance, as well as increase the diffraction-free length of the THz sheet six times. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate that this structured beam can be used to extend the depth of fields of a THz transmission imaging system.

It has been reported that MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play pivotal roles in the occurrence and progression of a variety of cancers. As reported, miR-4295 promotes cell growth and metastasis in a lot of cancers. Nonetheless, the role and molecular mechanism of miR-4295 in HNSCC still remain unknown. In this study, we discovered miR-4295 expression was significantly upregulated in HNSCC tissues and cell lines, which is also associated with the overall survival of patients. Additionally, suppression of miR-4295 significantly inhibited cell proliferation, migration and EMT process in HNSCC. Through Targetscan website, it was predicted that NPTX1 might be a direct target gene of miR-4295. Then, we verified that NPTX1 could directly interact with miR-4295 via luciferase reporter and RNA assays. What's more, we discovered that there was a significantly negative correlation between NPTX1 and miR-4295 expression. It was indicated by further investigation that the effect of miR-4295 suppression on cell proliferation, migration and EMT process in HNSCC can be restored by knockdown of NPTX1 at the same time. Our results suggested that miR-4295 promoted the progression of HNSCC via regulating NPTX1 expression and miR-4295/NPTX1 axis, which may be a new therapeutic strategy for HNSCC.

Automatic speaker verification (ASV) has been successfully deployed for identity recognition. With increasing use of ASV technology in real-world applications, channel mismatch caused by the recording devices and environments severely degrade its performance, especially in the case of unseen channels. To this end, we propose a meta speaker embedding network (MSEN) via meta-learning to generate channel-invariant utterance embeddings. Specifically, we optimize the differences between the embeddings of a support set and a query set in order to learn a channel-invariant embedding space for utterances. Furthermore, we incorporate distribution optimization (DO) to stabilize the performance of MSEN. To quantitatively measure the effect of MSEN on unseen channels, we specially design the generalized cross-channel (GCC) evaluation. The experimental results on the HI-MIA corpus demonstrate that the proposed MSEN reduce considerably the impact of channel mismatch, while significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

Chalcogenide phase-change materials (PCMs) are promising candidates for nonvolatile memory and neuromorphic computing devices. The recently developed Ge2Sb2Se4Te1 alloy shows superior properties in terms of low optical loss and higher thermal stability with respect to the flagship Ge2Sb2Te5 alloy, making this new quaternary alloy a suitable candidate for high-performance optical switches and modulators. In this work, we carry out ab initio calculations to understand how selenium substitution modifies the local structure and the optical response of the amorphous quaternary alloys. We consider four amorphous Ge2Sb2Se x Te5-x (GSST) alloys with x = 1 to 4 and show that the substitution of selenium content induces a gradual reduction in the calculated refractive indices, which is in agreement with experimental observation. This improvement on optical loss stems from the increased band gap size, which is attributed to the larger Peierls-like distortion and the stronger charge transfer in the Se-richer amorphous GSST alloys.

Neural selectivity of orientation is a fundamental property of visual system. We aim to investigate whether and how the orientation selectivity changes in amblyopia.Seventeen patients with amblyopia (27.1 ± 7.1 years) and 18 healthy participants (25.1 ± 2.7 years) took part in this study. They were asked to continuously detect vertical gratings embedded in a stream of randomly oriented gratings. Using a technique of subspace reverse correlation, the orientation-time perceptive field (PF) for the atypical grating detection task was derived for each participant. Detailed comparisons were made between the PFs measured with the amblyopic and healthy eyes.The PF of the amblyopic eyes showed significant differences in orientation and time domain compared with that of the normal eyes (cluster-based permutation test, ps0.05), with broader bandwidth of orientation tuning (31.41 ± 10.59 degrees [mean ± SD] vs. 24.76 ± 6.85 degrees, P = 0.039) and delayed temporal dynamics (483 ± 68 ms vs. 425 ± 58 ms, P = 0.015). None of the altered PF properties correlated with the contrast sensitivity at 1 cycle per degree (c/deg) in amblyopia. No difference in PFs between the dominant and non-dominant eyes in the healthy group was found.The altered orientation-time PF to the low spatial frequency and high contrast stimuli suggests amblyopes had coarser orientation selectivity and prolonged reaction time. The broader orientation tuning probably reflects the abnormal lateral interaction in the primary visual cortex, whereas the temporal delay might indicate a high level deficit.

Background Osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) is a heterogeneous connective tissue disorder characterized by increased bone fragility and a series of extraskeletal manifestations. Approximately 90 % of OI cases are caused by type I collagen variants encoded by the collagen type I alpha 1 (COL1A1) or type I alpha 2 (COL1A2) gene. Lumbar Scheuermann’s disease is an atypical type of Scheuermann’s disease accompanied by Schmorl’s nodes and irregular endplates but without pronounced kyphosis. Although the etiology of Scheuermann’s disease is unclear, genetic and environmental factors are likely. Case presentation Here, we report a 32-year-old male patient who experienced multiple brittle fractures. Gene sequencing revealed a heterozygous mutation, c.4048G > A (p.G1350S), in the COL1A2 gene, and the patient was diagnosed with OI. Magnetic resonance imaging of his thoracolumbar spine revealed multiple Schmorl’s nodes. Conclusions This is the first reported case of OI coexisting with the spinal presentation of Scheuermann’s disease. It is speculated that the COL1A2 gene mutation might be an underlying novel genetic cause of Scheuermann’s disease. In conclusion, this case demonstrates the relationship between Scheuermann’s disease and OI for the first time and enriches the genotype-phenotype spectrum of OI.

Apache Kafka, which is a high-throughput distributed message processing system, has been leveraged by the majority of enterprise for its outstanding performance. Unlike common cloud-based access control architectures, Kafka service providers often need to build their systems on other enterprises' high-performance cloud platforms. However, since the cloud platform belongs to a third party, it is not necessarily reliable. Paradoxically, it has been demonstrated that Kafka's data is stored in the cloud in the plaintext form, and thus poses a serious risk of user privacy leakage. In this paper, we propose a secure fine-grained data transmission scheme called Secure Door on Cloud (SDoC) to protect the data from being leaked in Kafka. SDoC is not only more secure than Kafka's built-in security mechanism, but also can effectively prevent third-party cloud from stealing plaintext data. To evaluate the performance of the SDoC, we simulate normal inter-entity communication and show that Kafka with SDoC integration has a lower data transfer time overhead than that of Kafka with built-in security mechanism opened.

Sudden unexpected death (SUD) refers to the sudden (usually occurs within 24 h from the onset of the initial symptoms) and unexpected (not caused by obvious reasons like trauma, poisoning, violent asphyxia, etc.) death of a person. It may be the result of one or several serious underlying diseases, while the initial symptoms may be totally different from the common manifestations of those diseases. Disorders of many endocrine organs can cause SUD, and some of these conditions are reviewed in this article.

Today's smart devices like fitness tracker, smartwatch, etc., often employ Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for data transmission. Such devices thus become our information portal, e.g., SMS message and notifications are delivered to those devices through BLE. In this study, we present BlueDoor, which can obtain unauthorized information from smart devices via BLE vulnerability. We thoroughly examine the BLE protocol, and leverage its intrinsic properties designed for low-cost embedded and wearable devices to bypass the encryption and authentication in BLE. By mimicking a low capacity device to downgrade the process of encryption key negotiation and authentication, BlueDoor can enforce a new key with the peripheral BLE device and pass the authentication without user participation. As a result, BlueDoor can extract BLE packets as well as read/write stored data on BLE devices. We show that BlueDoor works well on the fundamental design tradeoff of using BLE on diverse embedded and wearable devices, and thus can be generalized to various BLE devices. We implement the BlueDoor design and examine its performance on 15 COTS BLE enabled smart devices, including fitness trackers, smartwatch, smart bulb, etc. The results show that BlueDoor can break the information flow and obtain different types of information (e.g., SMS message, notifications) delivered to BLE devices. In addition to privacy threats, this further means traditional operations such as using SMS for verification in widely adopted authentication, are insecure.

In order to clarify the role of oxygen vacancy (OV), five α-MnO2 catalysts with abundant OVs are fabricated via a novel and facile redox-precipitation approach and employed to the toluene oxidation in air. The concentration of OVs in α-MnO2 catalysts is regulated via the alkyl chain length of alcohols, and its correlation with catalytic performances is scientifically investigated based on various characterization technologies and density functional theory (DFT) calculation. The α-MnO2-C2 catalyst exhibits excellent catalytic activity (T90 = 217 °C), stability, and water resistance for toluene oxidation in air. The OVs can induce the new bandgap states (BGS), which upshift the antibonding orbitals relative to the Fermi level (Ef), eventually favoring the formation of adsorbed active oxygen species. Furthermore, the OVs cause an increase in the amount of Mn3+, resulting in the elongated Mn–O bonds due to the strong Jahn-Teller effect of Mn3+. Therefore, the synergistic effects of OVs benefit toluene oxidation through L-H and MvK mechanisms over the prepared α-MnO2-Cx catalysts. This work reveals the important role of OVs in the promotion of toluene catalytic oxidation activity and also may provide new insights for the design of high-performance VOCs oxidation elimination catalyst.

A scheme to perform high-quality (high-Q) W-band (75-110 GHz) microwave photonic filters (MPFs) with tunability and reconfigurability is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The analysis reveals an inverse proportional relationship between the operating frequency of the MPF and the compensatory ability of the optical spectrum processor (OSP) when mitigating the third-order dispersion (TOD). To extend the operating frequency of the MPF to W-band, we present a TOD precompensation technology implemented by a quadratic phase provider (QPP) device. Providing the OSP with an additional quadratic phase shift, the QPP can shift and extend the systematic TOD compensation range, thus resolving the operating frequency limit imposed by the conventional OSP-based technique. Combined with an automatic in-line TOD compensation procedure, the systematic TOD can be precisely compensated. With an almost complete cancelation of TOD in the filter, a tunable and reconfigurable single-passband W-band filter with a 3-dB bandwidth of around 15.5 MHz and a record-setting Q-factor of 6459 is obtained.

A novel gain medium structure is designed providing Q-switched pulses with high efficiency. The use of an improved corner-side hybrid pump structure achieves a high absorption efficiency of pump light by crossing through the active media 13 times Nd:YAG. A layer of Sm:YAG is bonded around the active media, which suppresses parasitic oscillation and amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) effectively. A high-efficient actively Q-switched laser is successfully realized with a pulse energy of 104 mJ. The corresponding optical-optical conversion efficiency is 30.5%. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the highest optical to optical efficiency for an actively Q-switched Nd:YAG laser at the hundred milli-joules level.

Third-order dispersion (TOD) is a fundamental parameter to characterize optical fiber. In this paper, we propose a method to precisely measure TOD of an optical fiber by using the amplitude and phase transfer function of a microwave photonic filter (MPF). The fiber under test (FUT) plays an important role in the MPF, of which the transfer function has a quadratic phase distortion due to the TOD of the FUT. Through iteratively modifying the quadratic phase spectral coefficient of the optical signal in the MPF to counteract the TOD effect, the transfer function distortion can be almost compensated. According to the definite relationship between the TOD and the compensation coefficient, we can determine the TOD precisely. In the experiment, the measurement uncertainty of 0.2% is obtained of a dispersion compensating fiber, designed for the compensation of 80 km standard fiber.

High mobility group box-1 (HMGB1), a non-histone protein, plays an important role in autoimmune diseases. However, the significance of HMGB1 in the pathogenesis of autoimmune thyroiditis has not been reported. The purpose of this study was to explore whether HMGB1 participates in the pathogenesis of autoimmune thyroiditis, and whether glycyrrhizin (GL), a direct inhibitor of HMGB1, attenuates the severity of thyroid inflammatory infiltration in a murine model of autoimmune thyroiditis.A total of 80 male NOD.H-2The mRNA expression of HMGB1 was significantly higher at 8 and 16 weeks in the NaI group than it was in the control group. Serum levels of thyroglobulin antibodies, HMGB1, tumor necrosis factor alpha, IL-6, and IL-1β were significantly increased in the NaI group, but they were dramatically attenuated with GL injection. The prevalence of thyroiditis and the infiltration of lymphocytes were significantly decreased in the NaI + GL group. GL administration also significantly reduced the protein expression of TLR2, MyD88, HMGB1 and nuclear transcription factor κB in the thyroid gland and attenuated the severity of thyroiditis.HMGB1 may play a crucial role in autoimmune thyroiditis by causing inflammatory infiltration, thus increasing the severity of autoimmune thyroiditis. GL effectively attenuated thyroiditis in the iodine-induced NOD.H-2

Speech evaluation is an essential process of language learning. Traditionally, speech evaluation is done by experts evaluate voice and pronunciation from testers, which lack of efficiency and standards. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, based on deep learning and audio caption, to evaluate speeches instead of linguistic experts. First, the proposed approach extracts audio features from the speech. Then, the relationships between audio features expert evaluations are learned by deep learning. At last, an LSTM model is applied to predict expert evaluations. The experiment is done in a real-world dataset collected by our collaborative company. The result shows the proposed approach achieves excellent performance and has high potentials in the application.

Genes involved in latent membrane protein 1 (LMP1) signaling pathways have been suggested to play an important role in nasopharyngeal carcinogenesis. We investigated potentially functional genetic variants associated with the risk of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) in genes involved in the LMP1 signaling pathway. Altogether, 73 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with MAF ≥ 10% were located within the regions of interest of the four genes TRAF3, NFKBIA, CHUK and MAP2K4. From these, 10 SNPs were selected for genotyping based on LD (r2 ≥ 0.80) in a hospital-based case-control study of 332 NPC cases and 585 healthy controls from the Chinese Han population. Minor allele carriers of the promoter SNP rs2233409 in NFKBIA, had an increased risk of NPC (AA vs GG: OR 7.14, 95%CI, 1.08–34.18, P = 0.04, dominant model). Based on the results, we concluded that rs2233409 polymorphism in NFKBIA may be moderately associated with the risk of NPC. Further studies with larger independent samples and functional analysis are needed to verify our results.

A highly linear W-band receiver front-end based on higher-order optical sideband (OSB) processing is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Two-tone analysis shows that by manipulating higher-order OSBs, the third-order intermodulation distortion (IMD3) introduced by optoelectronic components (mainly modulators) in the receiver front-end can be further suppressed, and a 9 dB improvement of the ratio of the fundamental and IMD3 can be attained. In the experiment, the spurious-free dynamic range of the W-band receiver front-end is up to 122.1 dB·Hz2/3, with improvement by 9 dB compared with that of only processing the five OSBs.

We present the investigation on deformation of orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes in bending ring-core fibers (RCFs) with different structure sizes through numerical and experimental studies. The effective refractive index differences of even and odd fiber eigenmodes, which constitute OAM±1,1 modes, induced by RCF bending and their impacts on the OAM±1,1 mode intensity distributions are analyzed. Bending experiments are also carried out on three different RCFs, and the results match well with simulation values. It is found that RCFs with smaller inner and outer radii show preferable tolerance to the fiber bending.

Recommender system (RS) has become an active research area driven by the enormous industrial demands. Meanwhile, with the rapid development of microblogging system, various kinds of social data are available, which provide opportunities as well as challenges for traditional RSs. In this paper, we introduce the social recommendation (SR) problem utilizing microblogging data. We study this problem via multi-view user preference learning. Specifically, we first model user preference by learning a low-dimensional common representation of multi-view information including rating information, social relations, item side information, tagging information, and then recommend items based on the learnt user preference. We also develop an efficient alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) scheme to solve the proposed model. We empirically evaluate our approach using two real world datasets to demonstrate the significant improvement of our proposed approach against the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin disease featured by excessive proliferation of keratinocytes, clearly defined round erythema and dry, scaly plaques, long-term inflammatory cells infiltration in skin lesions. However, the physiopathological mechanism of psoriasis is still not clearly understood. Neuropeptides, a class of peptides secreted by the nervous system, may play important roles in promoting excessive proliferation of keratinocyte, enhancing angiogenesis, vasodilation, plasma extravasation and chemotaxis of inflammatory cells during the development of psoriasis. To understand the pathogenesis of neuropeptides in psoriasis, we summarized the function of several common neuropeptides in psoriasis and hypothesize neuropeptides may serve as therapeutic potential novel targets in psoriasis.