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Active tracking of underwater small targets is a great challenge with kinematic information alone. This is because the active sonar often encounters multipath propagation and the induced clutter can even mask target echoes. Recently, high-order time lacunarity (HOT-Lac) has shown its ability in effectively highlighting “blob” targets from high clutter harbor environments. Hence, this paper proposes a HOT-Lac aided track scoring mechanism to solve the ambiguity of data association within the framework of Multiple Hypotheses Tracking (MHT). Specifically, the trajectory consistency of potential targets is captured by a momentum accumulation of the HOT Lac feature, which can inherit the historical information for the whole track. Meanwhile, due to the separability of the distribution of target and clutter in the HOT-Lac feature space, the probabilities of the target hypothesis and null hypothesis are modeled by the online computation of the HOT-Lac feature. Finally, the cumulative likelihood ratio based on HOT-Lac is integrated into MHT to score the potential tracks. Experiments in several real-world harbor scenarios demonstrate that the proposed HOT-Lac feature-aided tracker can suppress false tracks accurately and quickly.

Spatial-temporal variations of active sonar echo intensity can provide effective motion information for characterizing intruding small targets and play a key role in follow-up tracking, behavioral analysis, and recognition, etc. Inspired by the idea of optical flow, which can be used to calculate subtle spatial-temporal variations of each pixel in image sequences, a different motion acoustic flow field (MAFF) is proposed for estimating the motion of underwater small targets in successive active sonar echographs from harbor environments. This is because directly applying current calculation framework for optical flow presents two challenges in this case. The first challenge is that the echo intensity fluctuation breaks its potential assumption of brightness consistency in the pre-processing stage. The second challenge is that the small size of the blob targets could be smoothed out as outliers by its median filter-based post-processing. Hence starting from the classical optical flow equation, MAFF introduces a novel spatial-temporal connected component pre-processing and a novel blob shape segmentation refinement post-processing. Experiments on a set of real-world harbor datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our MAFF calculation framework.

Background: Vincristine (VCR) is a chemotherapeutic drug commonly used in the treatment of Colorectal Cancer (CRC). However, VCR drug resistance may result in reduced efficacy and even failure of chemotherapy in CRC treatment. MiRNA has been demonstrated to be associated with the sensitivity of tumor cells to chemotherapy. Objective: This study aimed to identify a novel miRNA-14669 that can reverse vincristine resistance and sensitize drug-resistant colorectal cancer cells. Methods: High-throughput sequencing was performed to screen miRNAs that are associated with VCR drug resistance, and qRT-PCR was used for further validation. The miRNA mimic and inhibitor were designed and transfected into HCT-8,HCT-116 and HCT-8/VCR cells. Wound healing test examined the effect of the miRNA on the migration of colorectal cancer cells. Flow cytometry was used to evaluate cell apoptosis of HCT-8 cells. Survivin, Bcl-2, GST3, MDR1 and MRP1 expressions were detected by Western blot. Results: The expression of miRNA-14669 in HCT-8/VCR cells was 1.925 times higher than that of the HCT-8 cells. After transfecting with mimic miRNA, HCT-8 and HCT-116 cells showed an increased survival rate. The survival rate of HCT-8/VCR cells decreased by transfection of inhibitor. The inhibitor also sensitized HCT-8 and HCT-116 cells to VCR or 5-Fluorouracil (5-FU). The migratory ability of HCT-8 and HCT-116 cells increased by miRNA mimic while reduced by miRNA inhibitor. Overexpression of miRNA-14669 reduced apoptosis, while downregulation of miRNA- 14669 increased cell apoptosis in HCT-8 cells. The mechanism of the miRNA involved in drug resistance may be attributed to apoptosis of tumor cells, detoxification of GST3 and drug efflux induced by MDR1 and MRP1. PI3K / AKT is the signaling pathway related to drug resistance. Conclusion: We identified a novel miRNA-14669 that may be associated with the chemotherapeutic resistance in CRC cells.

With the acceleration of the pace of urban life and the development of information technology, the takeout industry has emerged as the times require, which obtains intermediate costs by distributing goods to consumers. People pay more and more attention to public health, which requires takeout workers to drive as fast as possible to ensure the quality and safety of goods, but it also makes takeout workers suffer from various occupational injuries, such as car accidents, stomach diseases caused by eating disorders and long-term psychological pressure. This paper optimized the employment protection of takeout workers in combination with their professional characteristics. This paper used the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to analyze the indicators that can evaluate the optimization effect of employment protection for takeout workers, and compared the occupation of takeout workers before and after employment protection. The experimental results showed that in Meituan takeout, the rationality of the average delivery management system before and after the optimization of employment protection was 47.2 and 64.4%, respectively; in ELEME takeout, the rationality of the average takeout distribution management system before and after the optimization of employment protection was 55.0% and 69.8%, respectively. Therefore, in the context of public health, the implementation of social security, employment relationship and optimization of service evaluation mechanism for outbound sales personnel can effectively improve the rationality of the delivery management system.

Ferroptosis is an iron-dependent cell death induced by the oxidation of polyunsaturated fatty acids. In recent years, ferroptosis has garnered tremendous potential in cancer therapy. However, the significance pathways of ferroptosis in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) therapy are still poorly understood. Here, we investigated the role of a critical antioxidant protein, thioredoxin 1 (Trx1), in regulating ferroptosis in CML cells. First, we showed that Trx1 expression was higher in patients with CML than in healthy controls. Specifically, Trx1 knockdown suppressed cell growth and slowed tumor progression in xenograft models. Pharmacological inhibitors of Trx1 also attenuated cell growth, reduced colony formation, and caused CML cell death. Second, we showed that decreased Trx1 expression enhanced the cytotoxicity of the glutathione (GSH) biosynthesis inhibitor buthionine sulfoximine. Mechanistically, the combined inhibition of Trx1 and GSH synthesis disrupted the homeostasis of cellular reactive oxygen species as evidenced by increased ROS and malondialdehyde; and decreased GSH. Importantly, inhibition of Trx1 significantly resentisized GSH-depletion induced ferroptosis in CML cells. Finally, targeting Trx1 and GSH synthesis with small-molecule inhibitors caused a synergic effect on CML cells both in vitro and in vivo.Together, these results highlight an critical role of Trx1 in GSH-depletion induced ferroptosis and provide clues for dual inhibition of the Trx1 and GSH system as a combinatorial strategy for CML therapy.

The extent of pancreatoduodenectomy for pancreatic head cancer remains controversial, and more high-level clinical evidence is needed. This study aimed to evaluate the outcome of extended pancreatoduodenectomy (EPD) with retroperitoneal nerve resection in pancreatic head cancer.This multicenter randomized trial was performed at 6 Chinese high-volume hospitals that enrolled patients between October 3, 2012, and September 21, 2017. Four hundred patients with stage I or II pancreatic head cancer and without specific pancreatic cancer treatments (preoperative chemotherapy or chemoradiation) within three months were randomly assigned to undergo standard pancreatoduodenectomy (SPD) or EPD, with the latter followed by dissection of additional lymph nodes (LNs), nerves and soft tissues 270° on the right side surrounding the superior mesenteric artery and celiac axis. The primary endpoint was overall survival (OS) by intention-to-treat (ITT). The secondary endpoints were disease-free survival (DFS), mortality, morbidity, and postoperative pain intensity.The R1 rate was slightly lower with EPD (8.46%) than with SPD (12.56%). The morbidity and mortality rates were similar between the two groups. The median OS was similar in the EPD and SPD groups by ITT in the whole study cohort (23.0 vs. 20.2 months, P = 0.100), while the median DFS was superior in the EPD group (16.1 vs. 13.2 months, P = 0.031). Patients with preoperative CA19-9200.0 U/mL had significantly improved OS and DFS with EPD (EPD vs. SPD, 30.8 vs. 20.9 months, P = 0.009; 23.4 vs. 13.5 months, P0.001). The EPD group exhibited significantly lower locoregional (16.48% vs. 35.20%, P0.001) and mesenteric LN recurrence rates (3.98% vs. 10.06%, P = 0.022). The EPD group exhibited less back pain 6 months postoperation than the SPD group.EPD for pancreatic head cancer did not significantly improve OS, but patients with EPD treatment had significantly improved DFS. In the subgroup analysis, improvements in both OS and DFS in the EPD arm were observed in patients with preoperative CA19-9200.0 U/mL. EPD could be used as an effective surgical procedure for patients with pancreatic head cancer, especially those with preoperative CA19-9200.0 U/mL.

Proliferative vitreoretinopathy (PVR) is an intractable condition after rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (RD), which is the primary cause of failure in retinal reattachment surgery. This study aimed to investigate the effects of chicken ovalbumin upstream promoter transcriptional factor 1 (COUP-TF1) in the development of proliferative vitreoretinopathy (PVR) both in vitro and in vivo. Adult retinal pigment epithelium cell line was used for in-vitro experiments. Immunocytochemistry assay, real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction, and Western blot were used to measure the expression of COUP-TF1, alpha-smooth muscle actin (α-SMA), and E-cadherin. Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) was observed through cell counting kit-8 assay, wound healing tests, and the expression changes of related proteins. PVR rabbit models were established and evaluated by the images of fundus and vitreous cavity, pathological sections, and COUP-TF1 expression. As shown by our results, the proliferation and migration of the COUP-TF1 knockdown cells were reduced compared with the control cells with or without transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1) treatment. After TGF-β1 treatment, α-SMA expression was upregulated in ARPE-19 cells but kept the same in COUP-TF1 knockdown cells. E-cadherin expression was down-regulated in all the groups but the extent of the decrease in COUP-TF1 knockdown cells was smaller. EMT was attenuated in ARPE-19 cells after COUP-TF1 was knocked down. In the in-vivo experiment, PVR severity was attenuated and the retinal detachment rate decreased on the 14th and 28th day in COUP-TF1 knockdown group. In conclusion, COUP-TF1 is related to the development of PVR, and COUP-TF1 knockdown attenuates the progression of PVR. This suggests that COUP-TF1 can be a promising candidate for the treatment of PVR.

Purpose Cortical visual impairment (CVI) is the common cause of pediatric visual impairment in cerebral palsy (CP) while exotropia is the most common strabismus associated with CP. We aim to observe the strabismic surgery outcomes in pediatric patients with CP and CVI. Method Our medical records were collected from pediatric patients treated in our hospital from May 1, 2017 to Jan 1, 2022. With normal intelligence assessment and diagnosis of exotropia in children with CP and CVI, microsurgeries were performed under intravenous combined inhalation anesthesia. The strabismus was examined by the prism test under best vision correction and the contrast sensitivity testing (CST) was measured at five levels of spatial frequencies. Result A total of 38 exotropia patients with CP and CVI were identified and included for analysis during the study period with age ranged from 5 to 12 years (mean 8.45 years) and mean follow up duration was 8.7 months (6–42 months). After bilateral lateral rectus recession (with/without medial rectus resection or inferior oblique transposition), the exotropia amount of participants were obviously revealed from − 30 ~ − 140 (median, IQR: − 50, 40) prism diopters (PD) preoperatively to 0 ~ − 15 (0, 5) PD postoperatively. Statistically significantly improvements were observed at all levels of spatial frequency on CST postoperatively, especially at high spatial frequency areas (p Conclusion Our results demonstrated that the effect of strabismus surgery on exotropia in children with CP and CVI were stable and monocular contrast sensitivity post- operation increased significantly at all spatial frequencies levels.

The aim of this study was to use dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) and diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI) to measure changes in blood–brain barrier (BBB) permeability and cerebral edema over time in a rat model of asphyxial cardiac arrest (ACA). ACA was established by endotracheal tube clamping. Male rats were randomized into a sham group (n = 5) and three ACA groups (n = 18). After return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC), the rats were randomized to perform DWI and DCE-MRI exam in the 6 h, 24 h and 72 h timepoint (ROSC + 6 h, ROSC + 24 h, and ROSC + 72 h). Results shows that fifteen of 18 animals achieved successful resuscitation in the ACA groups. The average apparent diffusion coefficient(ADC) value of the whole brain in ROSC + 6 h was markedly lower than those of the sham, ROSC + 24 h, and ROSC + 72 h. The aquaporin-4(AQP4) score in ROSC + 6 h was significantly higher than those in the other groups, which were negatively correlated with the ADC values. The ratio of whole brain to masseter muscle of volume transfer constant (rKtrans), tissue interstitium-to-plasma rate constant(rKep), and fractional extra-cellular space volume(rVe) in ROSC + 6 h were all significantly higher than those in the sham, ROSC + 24 h, and ROSC + 72 h. The transforming growth factor β1(TGF-β1) and vascular endothelial growth factor A(VEGF-a) scores in ROSC + 6 h were significantly higher than those in the other groups, which were all positively correlated with rKtrans and rKep. In conclusions, brain injury is a frequent complication after CA and resuscitation. DWI and DCE-MRI can quantitatively evaluate brain injury in term of cerebral edema and BBB permeability after successful CPR.

Fast pyrolysis of the mixed plastics (PE: PP: PS: PVC = 0.5: 0.3: 0.15: 0.05) with and without hydrothermal dechlorination pretreatment were investigated in a fixed bed reactor to determine the effects of pyrolysis parameters (temperature, carrier gas flow rate and particle size) on the distribution and the quality of the products. The results showed that high pyrolysis temperature, high carrier gas flow rate and small particle size promoted the migration of organic chlorine in condensable products to inorganic chlorine in gas products. And the optimal conditions for fast pyrolysis of mixed plastics to produce oil were the pyrolysis temperature of 500 °C, carrier gas flow rate of 40 ml/min and particle size of 0.1–0.15 mm with the maximum oil yield of 67.88 wt%. Hydrothermal pretreatment of mixed plastics has shown an excellent dechlorination efficiency of 99.9 %. Furthermore, the total yield of oil and wax was increased by 7.06 wt%, meanwhile the content of C5-C9 components in the pyrolysis oil showed an upward trend when compared with fast pyrolysis without pretreatment. Besides, the concentration of methane achieved 50.68 % due to the possible weakening effect of hydrothermal pretreatment on C C bond energy of β-position.

The purpose of this study was to compare the differences of V-pattern exotropia in craniosynostosis and normal children. 39 children were included in this study, 19 craniosynostosis and 20 children in control group. They underwent comprehensive ocular examinations and received strabismus surgery. The extraocular muscle samples were analysed. Compared with the control group, craniosynostosis group had larger deviation in primary and up gaze, larger V pattern, and more severe inferior oblique overaction. For 20–40, and 50–60 prism diopter exotropia, the lateral recession in the craniosynostosis group was larger than that in the control group, 7.13 ± 0.44 mm vs 6.71 ± 0.47 mm, 8.90 ± 0.21 mm vs 7.75 ± 0.46 mm (p = 0.025, 0.000). The anterior transposition of craniosynostosis group was more anterior than that of control group, posterior 1.03 ± 1.24 vs 2.68 ± 0.94 mm (p = 0.000). Compared with the control group, the extraocular muscle abnormality in craniosynostosis was significant, 32% vs 5% (p = 0.031). There were 40 proteins in craniosynostosis group, which were different from those in control group. A larger V pattern and larger deviation is common in craniosynostosis children. For the same PD of deviation, it usually needs more recession in craniosynostosis because of the thinner and weaker extraocular muscles. Collagen related proteins were increased in craniosynostosis, and decreased contraction related protein tropomodulin might play key role for the weakness of EOMs.

In order to avoid forming an information cocoon, the information propagation of COVID-19 is usually created through the action of "proactive search", an important behavior other than "reactive follow". This behavior has been largely ignored in modeling information dynamics. Here, we propose to fill in this gap by proposing a proactive-reactive susceptible-discussing-immune (PR-SFI) model to describe the patterns of co-propagation on social networks. This model is based on the forwarding quantity and takes into account both proactive search and reactive follow behaviors. The PR-SFI model is parameterized by data fitting using real data of COVID-19 related topics in the Chinese Sina-Microblog, and the model is calibrated and validated using the prediction accuracy of the accumulated forwarding users. Our sensitivity analysis and numerical experiments provide insights about optimal strategies for public health emergency information dissemination.

We consider the scenario where a long-haul heavy-duty truck drives across a national highway system to fulfill multiple geographically-dispersed tasks in a specific order. The objective is to minimize the total fuel consumption subject to the pickup and delivery time window constraints of individual tasks, by jointly optimizing task execution times, path planning, and speed planning. The need to coordinate execution times for multiple tasks differentiates our study from existing single-task ones. In this paper, we first prove that the problem is NP-hard, and argue that optimizing task execution times by itself is a non-convex puzzle. We then exploit the problem structure to develop (i) a Fully-Polynomial-Time Approximation Scheme (FPTAS) for solving small-/medium- scale problem instances, and (ii) a fast and efficient heuristic, called SPEED (Sub-gradient-based Price-driven Energy-Efficient Delivery), for solving large-scale problem instances. We provide performance guarantees of both algorithms. We further characterize a sufficient condition under which SPEED generates an optimal solution. We evaluate the performance of our solutions using real-world traces over the US national highway system. We observe that our solutions can save up to 22% fuel as compared to fastest-/shortest- path baselines, and up to 10% fuel than a conceivable alternative that directly generalizes the state-of-the-art single-task algorithm to the multi-task settings studied in this paper. The fuel saving is robust to the number of tasks to be fulfilled. A set of simulations also show that our algorithms always obtain close-to-optimal solutions and meet all time window constraints for all the theoretically feasible instances, while the conceivable alternative fails to meet one or more time window constraints for 47% of the instances.

Hydroxyapatite (HAP), which is the main inorganic component of human bones and teeth, has received much attention for its use as an implant material. Doping foreign ions into the HAP lattice struct...

Background To investigate whether asymptomatic close-contact family members of patients diagnosed with coronavirus disease (COVID-19) should immediately undergo CT screening in addition to the viral nucleic acid test. Methods We retrospectively analyzed the data of a family cluster of 8 individuals, of whom 1 family member (Patient 3) had an epidemiologic history of having visited Guangzhou from Hubei Province on January 20, 2020. Her father (Patient 1) developed a fever and respiratory system symptoms and was confirmed COVID-19-positive on February 4-5, 2020 at Zengcheng People's Hospital, Guangzhou, China. Seven close-contact family members of the patients were then screened for COVID-19 on February 5-6 at the hospital. The CT imaging manifestation and laboratory tests of this family cluster were investigated and reported. Results Five (62.5%) of the 8 family members were confirmed COVID-19-positive. Except for Patient 1, who had fever, cough, fatigue, and dizziness, the remaining four (4/5, 80%) COVID-19-positive family members (Patients 2-5) had no clinical symptoms. Among the 5 patients, 2 had leukopenia (2/5, 40%), 1 had low absolute neutrophil counts (1/5, 20%), and 2 had increased high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (2/5, 40%). Ground-glass opacity (GGO) was found on chest CT imaging in all 5 patients (5/5, 100%), with interlobular septal thickening. Thickened blood vessel shadows were seen in 3 patients (3/5, 60%). The 3 COVID-19-negative family members (Family Members 1-3) did not have CT abnormalities, and they showed negative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) results twice. Conclusions CT screening is necessary in close-contact family members of a confirmed COVID-19 pneumonia case, regardless of the presence of clinical symptoms.

Controller area network (CAN) is a widely used protocol that allows communication among electronic control units (ECUs) in automotive electronics. It was extended to CAN with flexible data-rate (CAN-FD) to meet the increasing demand for bandwidth generated by the growing number of features in modern automobiles. The signal-to-frame packing problem has been studied in the literature for both CAN and CAN-FD. In this paper, we propose and formulate the signal offset assignment problem (SOAP) in CAN-FD to improve the bus utilization during frame packing. We propose two algorithmic themes to solve SOAP and establish their worst case performance guarantees. The first is a general approximation framework (GAF) which can use any approximation algorithm for the makespan minimization problem (MMP) in multiprocessor systems. Its performance guarantee is the product of the performance guarantee of the MMP algorithm and the number of distinct periods in the frame. The second is a 2-D strip packing-based framework (2DSPF) which uses the bottom left fill algorithm for 2-D strip packing. The performance guarantee is $2{G}$ , where ${G}$ is the minimum number of groups into which the set of signals can be partitioned so that the periods of the signals in the same group form a geometric series. The experimental results for GAF and 2DSPF indicate that by carefully assigning offsets for signals in frame packing schemes, one can achieve about 10.83% improvement in bus utilization in CAN-FD systems.

Levoglucosan is served as a significant versatile product to generate high value-added chemicals and pharmaceutical additives. Levoglucosan was predominately produced from pyrolysate of cellulose. However, the direct fast pyrolysis of waste biomass produces a small quantity of levoglucosan in comparison with the theoretical value of cellulose. This study explored Fenton pretreatment as a possible route to enhance levoglucosan yield during the fast pyrolysis of the waste corncob. The experimental results showed that different Fenton pretreated conditions and pyrolytic temperatures played vital roles in the formation of levoglucosan. The levoglucosan yield from fast pyrolysis at 500 °C of corncob pretreated by Fenton reaction of 14 mL/g H2O2 and 16 mM FeSO4 was about 95% higher than that of the untreated corncob. Additionally, Fenton pretreated corncob was capable of obtaining the levoglucosan at a low pyrolytic temperature (300 °C). It was mainly attributed to the effective disrupting of biomass structures and the selective degradation of lignin and hemicellulose during pretreatment. Furthermore, the powerful removal of alkali and alkaline earth metals during Fenton pretreatment was beneficial to increasing the levoglucosan yield. These findings demonstrate that Fenton pretreatment can provide a novel effective method to enhance levoglucosan yield during biomass fast pyrolysis.

In this study, the effects of different pretreatment methods including phosphoric acid (PA), freeze drying (FD) and phosphoric acid-freeze drying combined (PA-FD) pretreatment on corn stover characteristics and pyrolysis of corn stover samples was investigated. The results demonstrated that the physiochemical properties of biochars varied significantly. In comparison, PA pretreatment could effectively remove a large portion of inorganics and improve the fuel characteristics. PA-CSB-600 had a greater HHV, lower O/C and H/C ratios, and a lower biochar energy yield (Y

An important goal of an active sonar system is to detect and track underwater intruders such as frogmen, unmanned underwater vehicles, etc. Unfortunately, the intruders appear visually as a small fluctuating “blob” against the high-level fluctuating background caused by multipath propagation and reverberation in the harbor environment, making it difficult to be distinguished. Classical motion features well developed in computer vision cannot cope with an underwater environment. Thus, this paper presents a robust high-order flux tensor (RHO-FT) to characterize the small underwater moving targets against high-level fluctuating background. According to the dynamic behavior of active clutter from real-world harbor environment, we first classify it into two main types: (1) dynamic clutter but with relatively consistent spatial-temporal variation in a certain neighborhood; (2) sparkle clutter presenting completely random flashing. Then starting from the classical flux tensor, we develop a statistical high-order computation to handle the former followed by a spatial-temporal connected component to suppress the latter to achieve higher robustness. Experiments on a set of real-world harbor datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our RHO-FT.

In the application of synthetic aperture radar differential interferometry in urban environments, it is easy to regard the phase change in the deformation band of buildings under construction as noise that requires filtering. This introduces an error into the surrounding area while over-filtering, resulting in an error in the magnitude of the deformation measurement results for the entire region and the loss of deformation details in the surrounding area. Based on the traditional DInSAR workflow, this study added a deformation magnitude identification step, determined the deformation magnitude by using enhanced offset tracking technology, supplemented the filtering quality map and removed the construction areas that affect the interferometry in the filtering stage. The enhanced offset tracking technique adjusted the ratio of contrast saliency and coherence via the contrast consistency peak in the radar intensity image, which was used as the basis for adjusting the adaptive window size. The method proposed in this paper was evaluated in an experiment on a stable region using simulated data and in an experiment on a large deformation region using Sentinel-1 data. The experimental results show that the enhanced method has a better anti-noise ability than the traditional method, and the accuracy rate is improved by about 12%. The supplemented quality map can effectively remove the large deformation area to prevent over-filtering while ensuring the filtering quality, and it can achieve better filtering results.

Piper nigrum is an important aromatic plant, and its fruits (black and white pepper) are commonly used as food additives and spices. However, its stems were disposed as wastes. This research comprehensively investigated bioactive alkaloids of the stems, eight new dimeric amide alkaloids and eight known compounds were obtained. All obtained compounds showed excellent anti-inflammatory activity. Additionally, the dimeric amide alkaloids enhanced the anticancer effect of paclitaxel against cervical cancer cells. These results demonstrate that the stems of P. nigrum could be the sustainable source of bioactive alkaloids for development and utilization in the food and health fields.

Emerging evidence indicates that circRNA can regulate various diseases. However, the mechanisms of circRNA in these diseases have not been fully understood. Therefore, detecting potential circRNA–disease associations has far-reaching significance for pathological development and treatment of these diseases. In recent years, deep learning models are used in association analysis of circRNA–disease, but a lack of circRNA–disease association data limits further improvement. Therefore, there is an urgent need to mine more semantic information from data. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Semantic Association Analysis by Embedding and Deep learning (SAAED), which consists of two parts, a neural network embedding model called Entity Relation Network (ERN) and a Pseudo-Siamese network (PSN) for analysis. ERN can fuse multiple sources of data and express the information with low-dimensional embedding vectors. PSN can extract the feature between circRNA and disease for the association analysis. CircRNA–disease, circRNA–miRNA, disease–gene, disease–miRNA, disease–lncRNA, and disease–drug association information are used in this paper. More association data can be introduced for analysis without restriction. Based on the CircR2Disease benchmark dataset for evaluation, a fivefold cross-validation experiment showed an AUC of 98.92%, an accuracy of 95.39%, and a sensitivity of 93.06%. Compared with other state-of-the-art models, SAAED achieves the best overall performance. SAAED can expand the expression of the biological related information and is an efficient method for predicting potential circRNA–disease association.

Low-temperature solid oxide fuel cells (LT-SOFCs) are a promising next-generation fuel cell due to their low cost and rapid start-up, posing a significant challenge to electrode materials with high electrocatalytic activity. Herein, we reported the bimetallic nanoparticles encapsulated in carbon nanotubes (NiFe@CNTs) prepared by carefully controlling catalytic pyrolysis of waste plastics. Results showed that plenty of multi-walled CNTs with outer diameters (14.38 ± 3.84 nm) were observed due to the smallest crystalline size of Ni-Fe alloy nanoparticles. SOFCs with such NiFe@CNTs blended in anode exhibited remarkable performances, reaching a maximum power density of 885 mW cm

The aim of this research was to test the hypothesis that changes in the intestinal microbiota lead to the alternation of histidine metabolism and Th17/Treg cell imbalance in obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) patients. In total, 46 subjects were enrolled in the study, with 32 subjects in the OSA group and 14 in the healthy group, according to polysomnography examinations. Basic clinical characteristics were collected for this analysis. Feces were collected from OSA patients to detect the gut microbiota using 16S rRNA sequencing. Peripheral blood was obtained to detect the Th17/Treg cell ratio by flow cytometry. The present research demonstrated that at the phylum level, OSA patients have a disproportionate Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratio with increased Firmicutes and decreased Bacteroidetes in the gut microbiota compared to the healthy population. A Metastats analysis also indicated that the family Rikenellaceae was prevalent in the control group but not the OSA group. In addition, the abundance of Clostridium_XlVa was reduced and the abundance of Alistipes was elevated in healthy subjects at the genus level. Furthermore, a Phylogenetic Investigation of Communities by Reconstruction of Unobserved States analysis identified the alternation of metabolic pathways in OSA patients. The current study also identified an imbalance of Th17/Treg cells in OSA patients, with OSA patients having an elevated number of Treg cells compared to the control group. We determined that the abundance of Rikenellaceae and Alistipes increased and Clostridium_XlVa decreased in patients with OSA, which may have caused an imbalance in the proportion of Th17/Treg cells.

Single-component and competitive adsorption of tetracycline (TC) and Zn(II) on an NH4Cl-induced magnetic ultra-fine buckwheat peel powder biochar (NH4Cl-BHP-char/Fe3O4) was investigated in batch experiments. NH4Cl-BHP-char/Fe3O4 exhibited a large surface area of 1119.097 m2 g−1 and a total pore volume of 0.139 cm3 g−1 and was easily separated from aqueous solution using a magnet. Also, adsorption was endothermic, spontaneous, and highly pH-dependent. The optimum pH of the single-component adsorption of TC and Zn(II) was 4.0 and 6.5, respectively, and the optimum pH of co-adsorption was 6.0. The kinetics studies showed the prepared biochar could be rapidly adsorbed within 60 min, and chemical adsorption was dominant. For single-component adsorption, the maximum adsorption capacities of TC and Zn(II) were 106.38 and 151.52 mg g−1, respectively, and they underwent monolayer adsorption on the biochar surface. Moreover, for competitive adsorption, maximum TC and Zn(II) adsorption capacities of 126.58 and 357.14 mg g−1 were achieved. Both film diffusion and intra-particle diffusion were found to be significant processes to facilitate adsorption. TC and Zn(II) promoted the adsorption of each other. The proposed biochar could be used repeatedly for at least four cycles. All these results demonstrated that developed NH4Cl-BHP-char/Fe3O4 was regarded as a low-cost alternative adsorbent to remove the heavy metal ions and antibiotic pollutants from water or wastewater.

The electrocatalytic activity of hematite with different exposed facets toward the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) was investigated. Hematite nanoparticles with pseudo cubic, hexagonal bipyramid and plate morphologies were prepared, which predominantly have exposed (012), (113) and (001) facets, respectively. The OER activity of hematite measured under alkaline conditions was significantly dependent on the surface orientation, and the onset potential of the (001) facet was more than 130 mV more negative than those of the (012) and (113) facets. On the basis of the results of spectroelectrochemical measurements and theoretical calculations, this higher activity of the (001) facet was attributed to the lower energy required for the formation of oxo intermediate species. When pH conditions changed from alkaline to neutral, the facet dependence was less pronounced and the OER initiated from almost the same potential on all of the three facets. These findings indicate that the factor determining the OER activity of hematite differs depending on pH, and the surface structure strongly affects the OER activity under conditions where the concerted transfer of protons and electrons proceeds.

For locating a target moving in a more general track relative to the single receiver and at an ultra-low frequency (

A vector sensor can provide measurements of ocean acoustic fields in terms of the acoustic pressure and three-dimensional particle velocity, providing potentially highly-informative data for applications such as geoacoustic inversion. This paper applies nonlinear Bayesian inversion to vector sensor data to estimate seabed geoacoustic properties and uncertainties in South China Sea. Linear-frequency-modulated source transmissions, recorded as acoustic pressure and vertical particle velocity, are processed to estimate the vertical phase gradient of acoustic pressure at multiple frequencies as the inversion data. An advantage of this type of data is that it can be modeled without knowledge of the source spectrum, allowing inversion with an unknown source and a single sensor. Geoacoustic inversion of phase-gradient data is carried out and compared to inversion of the vertical acoustic impedance, another type of vector-sensor data, independent of the source spectrum, which has been considered previously. Model selection for the optimal number of seabed sediment layers is carried out using Bayesian information criterion, and parameter estimates, uncertainties, and correlations are calculated using delayed-rejection adaptive Metropolis-Hastings sampling. Results indicate a three-layer seabed model (including the semi-infinite basement), with properties in agreement with independent measurements including a high-resolution seismic profile and surficial sediment type from a core.

We study the strategic investment for green product development (GPD) in a supply chain. We develop a stylized two-period model in which either the retailer or the manufacturer could decide to invest in GPD in the second period. We find that the manufacturer investing in GPD is dominating because both supply chain members could earn more and the manufacturer could save more on the environmental tax. Under certain conditions, the prices are lower in the second period. However, the corresponding demand in the second period is always lower than the first period when the products become green.

A data-based discriminant based on fusing the scintillation of normal mode amplitudes is proposed for depth classification of surface/submerged moving source passively in a shallow water waveguide. The approach is based on a modified Hankel transform to estimate the modal wavenumber spectrum using the synthetic aperture created by the moving source. The modal wavenumber peaks are corresponding to the terms of modal excitation time series associated with the temporal modulation of an acoustic source's depth, which is used to build the fused modal scintillation index (FMSI). FMSI's robustness is presented through analysing its dependence on the SSP, sediment properties, frequency, the receiver depth, and the source depth fluctuation. Real data for a ship of opportunity and a controlled towed source collected in South China Sea preliminarily illustrates FMSI's potential for depth classification. The fused modal scintillation approach may provide a robust method for qualitative binary source depth classification.