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Context Sulfate (SO42−) concentrations in eutrophic lakes are continuously increasing. Aims This study aimed to explore the effects on nitrogen and their limiting factors in eutrophic lakes. Methods We constructed a series of microcosms with different initial SO42− concentrations (0–180 mg L−1) to simulate the SO42− concentration in eutrophic lakes. Key results The NO3−-N concentration rapidly decreased in all treatments. The respective 2.21 and 2.77 mg L−1 concentrations of NO3−-N recorded on Day 5 in the initial 150 and 180 mg L−1 SO42− concentration treatments were higher than in other treatments. The highest N2O concentrations in all treatments showed insignificant differences. The existence of free Fe2+ that was released from iron reduction resulted in an insignificant effect of increased SO42− concentration on nitrogen dynamics. With a decrease in Fe2+, the acid volatile sulfate (AVS) increased, and the highest AVS concentrations were positively correlated with the initial SO42− concentration (7.20–12.88 mg kg−1). Conclusion This effect could be ascribed to the fact that the rapid combination of sulfide (∑S2−) and Fe2+ prevents ∑S2− from producing a toxic effect on the denitrification. Implications Our study highlighted the role of iron in eutrophic lakes, especially in the coupling of sulfate reduction and nitrogen dynamics.

A well preserved immune system is a powerful tool to prevent foreign invasion or to suppress internal mutation, which must be tightly controlled by co-stimulatory molecules in different pathophysiological conditions. One such critical molecule is OX40L expressed on activated antigen-presenting cells (APCs). Consistently, its abnormality is associated with various immunological disorders such as autoinflammatory diseases and allergy. However, a comprehensive analysis of the immune-moderating role of OX40L in dendritic cells (DCs), the most powerful APCs to initiate immune responses in vivo, and investigation of its anti-tumor efficacy in the disease setting have not been performed properly. In this study, genetic approaches for both gain-of-function and reduction-of-function were employed to reveal that OX40L was required for the efficient presentation, but not uptake, of antigens by DCs to stimulate CD4

Grazing and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) influence soil nitrogen (N) cycling in grassland ecosystems. However, it remains unclear whether AMF mediate grazing effects on soil N cycling. We investigated the influence of benomyl (a broad-range fungicide) application to suppress AMF on soil N fluxes under different levels of grazing intensity in a steppe ecosystem on the Mongolia plateau. In situ soil core incubation method was used during both growing and non-growing seasons. Benomyl application to suppress AMF remarkably stimulated the net nitrification rate across all grazing intensities during the growing season. Benomyl application exerted a negative effect on soil N fluxes and/or N pools under no to moderate levels of grazing and a positive effect under heavy grazing during the growing season. The responses of amino acid and inorganic N stocks to grazing differed substantially between growing and non-growing seasons. The accumulation of amino acid in grazed plots (especially heavily grazed plots) during the non-growing season enhances the substrate availability for microbes in the early growing season of the following year. Our study provides field evidence that N losses are controlled to some extent by AMF and suggests a mechanism that grazing may affect soil N cycling through changing the AMF-plant symbiosis and therefore the interactions between AMF and other microbes. The findings improve our understanding of the effects of grazing and AMF on seasonal dynamics of different N forms and N pools in semiarid grassland.

The study analyzed the drivers’ take-over behaviors in intelligent cars when driving on urban roads and tried to find reasonable dimensions of the human-machine interface. Firstly, the main driving assistance functions in the process of take-over were analyzed based on the entropy theory, and the weight values of each function for the consumer’s purchase intention were calculated. Secondly, we explored the perceived comfortable dimensions of the interactive components under typical interaction modes. By means of experiments using a within-subjects design, the initial population of the evolutionary computation was obtained. The evolutionary mechanism of dimensions driven by users’ perception was constructed with a genetic algorithm. After debugging the parameters of the model, we verified the rationality of the model and evolved appropriate dimensions. Finally, the validity of the evolved dimensions was proved by a controlled experiment and paired-sample t-test. The results indicated that the completion time of most take-over tasks under the HMI with the evolved dimensions was significantly shorter, which ensured the HMI could be more conducive to the take-over quality and traffic efficiency.

Lacustrine eutrophication is generally considered as an important contributor of carbon emissions to the atmosphere; however, there is still a huge challenge in accuracy estimating carbon emissions from lakes. To test the effect of widely used space-for-time substitution on lake carbon emissions, this study monitored different processes of carbon emissions, including the carbon production potential, dissolved carbon concentrations, and carbon release fluxes in eight lakes along the trophic gradients on a spatial scale and the typical eutrophic Lake Taihu for one year on a temporal scale. Eutrophication promoted carbon production potential, dissolved carbon concentrations, and carbon release fluxes, especially for CH

Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) is present in nearly half of patients with heart failure. The prevalence of heart failure with normal or near-normal ejection fractions increases more rapidly than in patients with reduced ejection fractions. Angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor (ACEI), angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB), aldosterone antagonist, β-blocker, and calcium channel blocker have not shown significant efficacy in HFpEF clinical trials. Sacubitril/Valsartan, combined angiotensin receptor blocker (Valsartan) with neprilysin inhibitor (Sacubitril), was the first-of-its-kind angiotensin receptor-neprilysin inhibitor (ARNI) to be developed. It has shown significant efficacy on HFpEF in recent studies. It is considered that most of the current Sacubitril/Valsartan studies are still concentrated in the field of heart failure, especially heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF). This review discusses the latest advances in cardiovascular, renal, and metabolic aspects of Sacubitril/Valsartan, mainly in HFpEF, providing more evidence for further future research on Sacubitril/Valsartan and raising issues that should be paid attention. At the same time, this review will introduce the academic consensus on Sacubitril/Valsartan in treating HFpEF in China.

Soil nitrogen (N) availability and pH are two determinants affecting plant growth, both of which are influenced by long‐term N deposition. However, the physiological mechanism of plants response to the changes in soil N availability and pH are not fully understood. To investigate the response of Picea asperata to both factors, seedlings of P. asperata were exposed to 50 or 1000 µM NH₄NO₃ with pH 5 or pH 7. In the current study, P. asperata, regardless of N availability and pH in growth medium, exhibited invariably a NH4+ preference. Lower root biomass, root : shoot mass ratio, total root length and area, and root vitality were detected in high N condition compared to those in low N supply, corresponding well to lower net influxes of NH4+ and NO3- at the root surface in both pH treatments. These results indicate that P. asperata may employ an active‐forge strategy to exploit nutrient resources for growth under low N availability, probably by increased below‐ground carbon allocation and net influxes of NH4+ and NO3-. Although low pH, to some extent may generate more malondialdehyde, P. asperata would enhance pH tolerance by increased detoxification, i.e., antioxidant enzymes (peroxidase), free proline and soluble protein as well as improved carbohydrate status (i.e., soluble sugar and starch).

Patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) are often complicated with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). However, several drugs, including angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor (ACEI) and angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB), have not shown apparent benefits in terms of morbidity and mortality of HFpEF. PARAMOUNT and other studies have shown the potential benefits of Sacubitril/Valsartan on patients with HFpEF, but its effects on renal function and the effect of low-dose Sacubitril/Valsartan in actual clinical conditions have not been thoroughly evaluated. In our longitudinal and observational research, 353 patients were followed up for 12 weeks. We evaluated renal function [urinary protein, serum creatinine and estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR)] and cardiac function [NT-proBNP (brain natriuretic peptide), New York Heart Association (NYHA) classification, left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), left atrial width and left ventricular end-diastolic width] at baseline and during follow-up. Worsening renal function (WRF) was defined as an increased serum creatinine≥26.5umol/L or decreased eGFR≥20%. The decline of eGFR in the Sacubitril/Valsartan group was slower than that in the control group (p = 0.021). The outcome of proteinuria in the ACEI/ARB group was significantly better than that in the Sacubitril/Valsartan group (p = 0.001). In terms of echocardiogram, the average left atrial width in Sacubitril/Valsartan group decreased by 1.38 ± 3.02 mm, which was significantly lower than that in the ACEI/ARB group (p = 0.02). The increase of urine protein class in the ACEI/ARB group increased the risk of WRF with statistical significance (OR = 2.36, 95%CI 1.01-5.49, p = 0.047), but no statistical significance was found in all the patients or Sacubitril/Valsartan group. In conclusion, Sacubitril/Valsartan could more effectively slow down renal function decline and reverse myocardial remodeling in patients with CKD and HFpEF than ACEI/ARB, even at low doses, though its protective effect on urinary protein is not as good as that of ACEI/ARB.

In-vehicle human–machine interface (HMI) mainly refers to the T-shaped panel system with instruments, centre console, gear lever and other components installed. For intelligent vehicles, the high level of intelligent interconnection may to some extent make drivers lack situational safety awareness and reduce the usability of the system. Thus, this study attempted to establish a relationship between design features and system usability of the in-vehicle panels. From the perspective of visual ergonomics, the panels were deconstructed into design features to determine 36 samples to be studied. After dividing each sample into four areas of interest (AOI), eye movement and subjective preference data were collected to quantify the user experience. Artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machine (SVM) were used in the study. Nevertheless, conventional learning algorithms often underwent deficiencies in accuracy and robustness in the detection of multifarious kinds of panels. Therefore, the parameters of the two models were tuned to deal with the noise common in user experience data. The determinant coefficients, mean-square errors and mean relative errors of the two models showed that the SVM model had a higher accuracy, smaller error and was more stable in the learning of user experience of HMI design features, which could provide a method for the layout design and evaluation of T-shaped instrument panel.

This paper presents a new sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) pre-training method PoDA (Pre-training of Denoising Autoencoders), which learns representations suitable for text generation tasks. Unlike encoder-only (e.g., BERT) or decoder-only (e.g., OpenAI GPT) pre-training approaches, PoDA jointly pre-trains both the encoder and decoder by denoising the noise-corrupted text, and it also has the advantage of keeping the network architecture unchanged in the subsequent fine-tuning stage. Meanwhile, we design a hybrid model of Transformer and pointer-generator networks as the backbone architecture for PoDA. We conduct experiments on two text generation tasks: abstractive summarization, and grammatical error correction. Results on four datasets show that PoDA can improve model performance over strong baselines without using any task-specific techniques and significantly speed up convergence., Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2019

Due to the shielding effect of the outermost electronic layer 5s and 5p of rare earth, the near-infrared photoluminescence (PL) of Er3+ can not be easily affected by the external environment. However, we have regulated the near-infrared PL of Er3+ by changing temperature, which is ascribed to the phase transition of BaTiO3 from tetragonal to cubic phase and the presence of impurity. It also found that the redshift of wavelength in samples containing tetragonal phase BaTiO3 can reach 13 nm, which is never observed in other materials. The center wavelength shifts from 1530 nm to 1543 nm as the temperature rises from 20 to 200 °C. Moreover, the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of samples containing cubic phase has a growth of 6 nm (up to 85 nm) with increasing temperature. It indicated that temperature-induced phase transition can be an important method to modulate the PL of Er3+ in BaTiO3 with impurity.

Along with China’s national strategy “One Belt, One Road,” an increasing number of Chinese construction companies has ventured or will venture into the global market. The choice of entry mo...

This paper focuses on the problems concerning soft information management in construction projects. Firstly, it is stated in the paper that soft information managements pertains to uncertain language multi-attribute group decision- making problem of incomplete information. Further, a decision model regarding soft information management in construction projects is built on the foundation of 1) the process of linguistic variables and 2) the uncertain language multi-attribute group decision-making model based on Dempster-Shafer theory. Soft information is difficult to quantify and can easily get lost when spreading among different units and the previous mentioned method can be better applied to solve these problems. In the end of this paper, empirical study is taken to confirm the efficiency and scientificalness of this method.

It is a transition period for UMNSs in China, as operation mode is changed from single line operation to network operation. With the booming construction of UMNS in many big cities, interdependence and cascading relationship is more and more clear. Impropriate handled of failures in one line would induce malfunction in related lines or even cascade the whole operation network. This research takes UMNS as object and focuses on vulnerability analysis of it. The objectives of this research contain: exploring the connotation and formation mechanism of vulnerability; identifying the relationship between characters of the network and vulnerability of UMNS; assessing physical, structural, and social functional vulnerability of UMNS; establishing visualized dynamic monitoring system and case study.