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BackgroundThe psychobiological state known as mental fatigue (MF) is by engaging in mentally taxing activities for an extended period, which is typically found in team sports, of the high cognitive demand and unpredictable environment. It increases the perception of effort and influences executive functions, impairing sport-specific performance in athletes. However, the consequences of MF on sport-specific motor performance (SSMP) among athletes in team sports remain unclear.ObjectiveThis scoping review seeks to find and map research publications that investigate the effect of MF on SSMP in team sports.MethodsWeb of Science, Scopus, and PubMed were searched as the main databases, and CENTRAL, Psychology, and Behavioral Sciences Collection, SPORTDicus obtained from EBSCOhost, as well as gray literature was searched for relevant literature and Google Scholar. Cognitive tasks before the SSMP exam are the focus of the selected literature on mental exhaustion. Only experiments testing mental and non-mental exhaustion were chosen.ResultsTwelve studies fulfill the requirement of selection criteria. SSMP in team sports, including soccer, basketball, cricket, and Australian football mainly is examined as physical and technical performance. More specifically, MF significantly influenced physical performance measured as intermittent endurance and total distance (P < 0.05), while data was inclusive when assess in an ecological setting (e.g., small-sided game) (P > 0.05). Technical performance was mainly measured as ball loss, errors in passing and shooting, interception, and successful tackle and showed a dramatic impairment (P < 0.05). The decline of physical activity is relevant with higher level PRE, while decreased technical performance is related to impaired attention resources shown as visual perceptual.ConclusionMF adversely influences SSMP in team sports. The most relevant theory for future study to examine the impacts of MF on team-sport athletes could be the psychological model of exercise and its potential extension on attention resources, rather than the traditional “catastrophe” theory.

Large mural thrombi in the relatively normal ascending aorta are extremely uncommon conditions that may lead to major adverse cardiovascular events due to new embolism. Because of their changeable variations, the management of these unstable thrombi is challenging and controversial. The size, morphology, location, embolic involvement, and patients’ conditions are all crucial for therapeutic decision-making. Treatment options include anticoagulation, thrombolysis, surgical thrombectomy, and endovascular stenting. Therefore, surgical strategies should be highly individualized. Herein, we present a rare case of a huge thrombus from the ascending aorta to the arch in a 43-year-old man. Considering the high risks of catastrophic embolic events, surgical removal of the aortic mass, thromboendarterectomy, and reconstruction of the arterial wall were performed with a satisfactory outcome. This report illustrates our experience of surgical strategies and perioperative treatments for this challenging case, and contemporary surgical management for mural thrombi in the ascending aorta was also thoroughly discussed.

Cinnamomum camphora (C. camphora) is a broad-leaved evergreen tree cultivated in subtropical China. Currently, the use of C. camphora clonal cuttings for coppice management has become popular. However, the effects of C. camphora coppice planting on soil abiotic and biotic variances remained unclear. In this study, we collected soil from three points in the seven-year C. camphora coppice planting land: under the tree canopy (P15), between trees (P50), and abandoned land (Control) to investigate the effects of C. camphora coppice planting on soil fertility, microbial community structure and enzyme activity. The results revealed that C. camphora coppice planting significantly increased soil fertility in the point under the tree canopy (P15) and point between trees (P50), and P15 had more significant effects than P50. Meanwhile, in P15 and P50, soil bacterial, fungal alpha-diversity were improved and microbial community structures were also changed. And the changes of soil organic carbon and total nitrogen promote the transformation of soil bacterial, fungal community structures, respectively. In addition, C. camphora coppice planting significantly (p C. camphora coppice planting could improve soil fertility in subtropical China, which promoted the transformation of soil microbial community from oligotrophs (K-strategist) to copiotrophs (r-strategist). Thus, this work can provide a theoretical basis for soil nutrient variation and productive management of C. camphora coppice plantation in subtropical China.

Background Allergic diseases are highly prevalent in the women of childbearing age. As we know, the immune system could change when pregnancy, which may affect the course of allergic diseases. Meanwhile, they also can affect the course and outcome of pregnancy. The data on incidence of allergies during pregnancy is lacking and conducting clinical trials in pregnant women was limited, therefore, we observed a prebirth cohort to supplement the relevant data and strengthen concerned research conductions. Objective We aim to obtain the incidence of allergies in urban pregnancy and explore the relevant factors of allergic diseases in urban pregnancy. Methods We design a multicenter and prospective cohort in 20 institutions above municipal level which were eligible according to the study design from 14 provinces covering all-side of China. This cohort was conducted from 13+6 weeks of gestation to 12 months postpartum and in our study, we chose the prenatal part to analyze. The outcome was developing allergies during pregnancy, which were diagnosed by clinicians according to the uniform criterion from National Health Commission. All the data was collected by electronic questionnaires through tablet computers. Results The incidence of allergic diseases in urban pregnant women was 21.0% (95%CI 20.0% ~ 22.0%). From social demography data, the history of allergies of pregnant women and their parents had statistical significance(p p p = 0.026;p = 0.006). Conclusion The incidence of allergic diseases in urban pregnant women was similar to the former study and kept a medium–high level. The history of allergies of pregnant women and their parents, house decoration time, exposure to plush toys, disinfectants, insecticides, antihistamines, glucocorticoids, antipyretic analgesics, tocolytic agents, probiotics, self-rated depression, and anxiety were relevant factors of allergic diseases during pregnancy.

Pregnant women infected with HCV should be given attention due to their special physiological stage and the effect on offspring health. To examine the prevalence of HCV infection among pregnant women in part of China and explore relevant factors during pregnancy, a cross-sectional study was conducted in four maternal and children health care institutions (MCHC) in Guangdong, Hunan and Chongqing. Pregnant women who were delivered, induced or spontaneous abortion were included and relevant information was collected through the Hospital Information System. Results showed that the prevalence of HCV among pregnant women in four MCHCs was 0.11% (95% CI 0.09–0.13%). Age, occupations, regions, syphilis-infection, intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy (ICP), and placenta previa were significant factors (all P Z = 3.41, P = 0.0006; OR = 18.16, 95% CI 9.34–35.29). HCV and HBV infection were risk factors of ICP (OR = 4.18, 95% CI 2.18–8.04; OR = 2.59, 95% CI 2.31–2.89). Our study indicates that the prevalence of HCV among pregnant women in the three provinces(city) was low compared with the general population in China. Older age and syphilis-infection increased the risk of HCV infection during pregnancy. HCV infection was a risk factor of ICP. Generally, we need keep a watchful eye on HCV infection and relevant factors mentioned above during pregnancy in clinic, especially those also infected with syphilis. HCV testing based on risk factors is recommended in antenatal care and obstetrics.

Interpretation of resolved polarized images of black holes by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) requires predictions of the polarized emission observable by an Earth-based instrument for a particular model of the black hole accretion system. Such predictions are generated by general relativistic radiative transfer (GRRT) codes, which integrate the equations of polarized radiative transfer in curved spacetime. A selection of ray-tracing GRRT codes used within the EHT collaboration is evaluated for accuracy and consistency in producing a selection of test images, demonstrating that the various methods and implementations of radiative transfer calculations are highly consistent. When imaging an analytic accretion model, we find that all codes produce images similar within a pixel-wise normalized mean squared error (NMSE) of 0.012 in the worst case. When imaging a snapshot from a cell-based magnetohydrodynamic simulation, we find all test images to be similar within NMSEs of 0.02, 0.04, 0.04, and 0.12 in Stokes I, Q, U , and V respectively. We additionally find the values of several image metrics relevant to published EHT results to be in agreement to much better precision than measurement uncertainties., Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to offer useful information for improving women’s beauty self-images by analyzing personal color choices in women’s fashions and determining the correlation between color matching and personal fashion color choices in manicures and pedicures.Methods: The research subjects included 32 women aged 20–50 years who lived in capital area and whose personal color fashion choices were determined. The data were analyzed with frequency analysis, a χ2-test, and a one-way ANOVA using SPSS WIN 25.0.Results: Considering the personal color choices, they were high in “summer types” for L* values of skin, high in “winter types” for L* values of hands and feet, and high in “fall types” for values a* and b* of skin, hands, and feet. Also, with regard to matching tones for hands and feet, the personal color choices were mostly “spring types” with warm spring-type tones, summer types with cool summer-type tones, “fall types” with warm fall-type tones, and “winter types” with cool winter-type tones.Conclusion: The results of this study suggested the matched tones for hands and feet are similar to the personal color fashion choices. These findings support a theoretical basis for harmonious color matching when choosing colors in manicure and pedicure nail art. The findings of this study may assist with beauty styling and self-images of women in this fashion era.

Background: Pulverized coal detection is an indispensable detection measure in the coal industry. The current detection devices can be divided into two types: invasive and non-invasive. The coal dust detection methods and devices based on acoustics, optics, and electricity have been extensively studied. In order to achieve a high-efficiency online detection scheme, improving the accuracy and stability of the detection means is the primary goal of the research. Objective: The general problems and characteristics of coal dust detection device design are summarized, as well as recent technological developments and the need for online testing to predict future research trends. Methods: The current typical detection devices are classified according to the detection principle and whether they invade the target, analyzing its advantages and disadvantages according to the device performance and application scenarios. Results: It has a beneficial effect on the design of the pulverized coal concentration detection device. Conclusion: The paper summarizes and analyzes several representative coal concentration detection device patents in recent years. Then it points out advantages and main problems. On this basis, the main development direction of the coal dust concentration detection device in the future is discussed.

Background: Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a common disorder of the central nervous system with considerable socio-economic burden. Andrographolide (Andro), the main active component of Andrographis paniculata, has exhibited neuroprotective effects in different models of neurological diseases. The aim of this study was to evaluate the neuroprotective effects of Andro against SCI and explore the related mechanisms.Methods: SCI was induced in rats by the Allen method, and the modeled animals were randomly divided into sham-operated, SCI, SCI + normal saline (NS) and SCI + Andro groups. The rats were injected intraperitoneally with Andro (1 mg/kg) or the same volume of NS starting day one after the establishment of the SCI model for 28 consecutive days. Post-SCI tissue repair and functional recovery were evaluated by measuring the spinal cord water content, footprint tests, Basso-Beattie-Bresnahan (BBB) scores, hematoxylin-eosin (HE) staining and Nissl staining. Apoptosis, oxidative stress and inflammation, as well as axonal regeneration and remyelination were analyzed using suitable markers. The in vitro model of SCI was established by treating cortical neurons with H2O2. The effects of Andro on apoptosis, oxidative stress and inflammation were evaluated as indicated.Results: Andro treatment significantly improved tissue repair and functional recovery after SCI by reducing apoptosis, oxidative stress and inflammation through the nuclear factor E2-related factor 2/heme oxygenase-1 (Nrf-2/HO-1) and nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-κB) signaling pathways. Furthermore, Andro treatment promoted M2 polarization of the microglial cells and contributed to axonal regeneration and remyelination to improve functional recovery after SCI. In addition, Andro also attenuated apoptosis, oxidative stress and inflammation in H2O2-stimulated cortical neurons in vitro.Conclusion: Andro treatment alleviated SCI by reducing apoptosis, oxidative stress and inflammation in the injured tissues and cortical neurons, and promoted axonal regeneration and remyelination for functional recovery.

It is clinical reported that YangXue QingNao Wan (YXQNW) combined with donepezil can significantly improve the cognitive function of AD patients. However, the mechanism is not clear. A network pharmacology approach was employed to predict the protein targets and affected pathways of YXQNW in the treatment of AD. Based on random walk evaluation, the correlation between YXQNW and AD was calculated; while a variety of AD clinical approved Western drugs were compared. The targets of YXQNW were enriched and analyzed by using the TSEA platform and MetaCore. We proved that the overall correlation between YXQNW and AD is equivalent to clinical Western drugs, but the mechanism of action is very different. Firstly, YXQNW may promote cerebral blood flow velocity by regulating platelet aggregation and the vasoconstriction/relaxation signal pathway, which has been verified by clinical meta-analysis. Secondly, YXQNW may promote Aβ degradation in the liver by modulating the abnormal glucose and lipid metabolisms via the adiponectin-dependent pathway, RXR/PPAR-dependent lipid metabolism signal pathway, and fatty acid synthase activity signal pathway. We also verified whether YXQNW indeed promoted Aβ degradation in hepatic stellate cells. This work provides a novel scientific basis for the mechanism of YXQNW in the treatment of AD.

Background: This study aims to present a critical review of the existing literature on the effect of core training on athletes’ skill performance, and to provide recommendations and suggest future research directions for both coaches and researchers.Methods: The data in this study were reported using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guideline. We collected studies in the literature using prominent academic and scientific databases such as Ebscohost, Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Only 16 of the 119 studies met all of the inclusion criteria, and were thus included in the systematic review. Each study’s quality was determined using the PEDro scale. The scoring of 16 studies ranges from 2 to 5.Results: Core training could potentially improve skill performance among football, handball, basketball, swimming, dancing, Karate, Muay Thai, gymnasts, volleyball, badminton, and golf players.Conclusion: Compared with the traditional training methods, core training is a new strength training method. Strong core muscles function as hubs in the biological motor chain, which create a fulcrum for the four limbs’ strength and establish a channel for the cohesion, transmission, and integration of the upper and lower limbs. In other words, core training optimizes the transfer and overall control of motion and force to the terminal segment within athletic actions. Meanwhile, core training could increase stability and stiffness in the spine to reduce unrequired “energy leaks” and torso movement during the exertion of external loads. This mechanism could help athletes achieve better skill performance. Therefore, this review suggests that core training should be considered integrated into athletes’ daily training routines.Systematic Review Registration: [https://inplasy.com/], identifier [INPLASY2021100013].

BackgroundBrucella spp. is an important zoonotic pathogen responsible for brucellosis in humans and animals.Brucella abortusA19 strain is a widespread vaccine in China. However, it has a drawback of residual virulence in animals and humans.MethodsIn this study, the BALB/c mice were inoculated with either 100 μL PBS(control group, C group), 109 CFU/mL inactivatedB. abortusA19 strain (I group), 105 CFU/mL (low-dose group, L group) 106 CFU/mL liveB. abortusA19 strain (high-dose group, H group), or 105 CFU/mL liveB. abortusA19 strain combined with 109 CFU/mL inactivatedB. abortusA19 strain (LI group). Mice were challenged withB. abortusstrain 2308 at 7 week post vaccination. Subsequently, the immune and protective efficacy of the vaccines were evaluated by measuring splenic bacterial burden, spleen weight, serum IgG, interferon-gamma (IFN-γ), interleukin-4 (IL-4) percentage of CD4 + and CD8 + T cells of mice via bacterial isolation, weighing, ELISA and flow cytometry, respectively.ResultsThe splenic bacterial burden and spleen weight of the mice in group LI were mostly equivalent to the mice of group H. Moreover,Brucella-specific serum IgG, IFN-γ, IL-4, and the percentage of CD4+and CD8+T cells of the LI group mice were similar to those of the H group. In the subsequent challenge test, both vaccines conferred protective immunity to wild-type (WT) 2308 strain. In addition, the levels of IL-4 and IFN-γ, CD4+and CD8+T cells in these mice were similar to those of the mice in the H group.ConclusionsCombined immunization with low dose live vaccine and inactivated vaccine allowed to reduce the liveB. abortusA19 vaccine, dose with an equivalent protection of the high-dose live vaccine.

BackgroundIt has been well investigated that nature exposure intervention can restore directed attention and improve subsequent cognitive performance. The impairment of decision-making skills in mentally fatigued soccer players was attributed to the inability of attention allocation. However, nature exposure as the potential intervention to counter mental fatigue and improve the subsequent decision-making skill in soccer players has never been investigated.ObjectsThis study aimed to evaluate the effects of nature exposure intervention on decision-making skills among mentally fatigued university soccer players. Moreover, different durations of nature exposure were also evaluated.MethodsA random control between-subject design was adopted. Players were randomly assigned into six groups with three different durations of the experimental group compared with the corresponding control group (4.17 min: Exp 1 vs. Con 1; 8.33 min: Exp 2 vs. Con 2; and 12.50 min: Exp 3 vs. Con 3). All players were first mentally fatigued by performing a 45-min Stroop task; then, they viewed virtual photos of natural or urban scenes; and finally, they performed a soccer decision-making task.ResultsThe subjective ratings of mental fatigue were significantly higher following the Stroop task. Only Exp 3 (12.50 min viewing natural scenes) significantly improved decision-making reaction time compared with Con 3 (p = 0.09). Moreover, the accuracy slightly increased in Exp 3 after the intervention.ConclusionIn line with attention restoration theory, nature exposure significantly improved decision-making skills in mentally fatigue university players. However, the duration must be 12.50 min for each stimulus to stay longer to attract involuntary attention.

Brucellosis is an important zoonotic disease that causes great economic losses. Vaccine immunisation is the main strategy for the prevention and control of brucellosis. Although live attenuated vaccines play important roles in the prevention of this disease, they also have several limitations, such as residual virulence and difficulty in the differentiation of immunisation and infection. We developed and evaluated a new bacterial ghost vaccine of

Hypergraphs are important objects to model ternary or higher-order relations of objects, and have a number of applications in analysing many complex datasets occurring in practice. In this work we study a new heat diffusion process in hypergraphs, and employ this process to design a polynomial-time algorithm that approximately finds bipartite components in a hypergraph. We theoretically prove the performance of our proposed algorithm, and compare it against the previous state-of-the-art through extensive experimental analysis on both synthetic and real-world datasets. We find that our new algorithm consistently and significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art across a wide range of hypergraphs.

Subduction of oceanic lithosphere is widely considered as the primary cause of mantle heterogeneity as reflected by the chemical variation of ocean island basalts. However, the fate of deeply subducted oceanic lithosphere (i.e., remaining intact, getting segmented or completely destroyed and intermixed with ambient mantle) is still largely unknown. Based on trace element and radiogenic isotope systematics, it has been suggested that the geochemical difference of shield and post-erosional stage lavas of the volcanic Madeira archipelago reflects recycling of different portions of subducted lithosphere (e.g., Geldmacher and Hoernle, 2000, EPSL 183; Gurenko et al. 2013, Lithos 170-171). Accordingly, the geochemical composition of the shield stage magmas reflects altered upper oceanic crust, while the isotopically less enriched post-erosional magmas preferentially stem from less-modified, lower crustal/lithospheric mantle portions of the recycled slab. New, high precision potassium (δ41K of -0.75‰ to -0.50‰) and oxygen (δ18O of 4.90‰ to 5.21‰ in olivine phenocrysts) isotope data from Madeira lavas support this model. Subduction dehydration can cause large K isotope fractionation in the upper, seawater-altered parts of oceanic crust resulting in lighter K isotopes (lower δ41K) in ocean island basalts containing such material. The measured δ41K represents the lowest range among oceanic basalts published so far and overlaps with obducted eclogite, indicating the involvement of dehydrated oceanic crust. The correlation of light K with light O and enriched radiogenic isotope ratios supports the model that Madeira’s magma source contains different portions of subducted oceanic crust, which were preserved over millions of years without significant intermixing.

Measuring the purity in the metal powder is critical for preserving the quality of additive manufacturing products. Contamination is one of the most headache problems which can be caused by multiple reasons and lead to the as-built components cracking and malfunctions. Existing methods for metallurgical condition assessment are mostly time-consuming and mainly focus on the physical integrity of structure rather than material composition. Through capturing spectral data from a wide frequency range along with the spatial information, hyperspectral imaging (HSI) can detect minor differences in terms of temperature, moisture and chemical composition. Therefore, HSI can provide a unique way to tackle this challenge. In this paper, with the use of a near-infrared HSI camera, applications of HSI for the non-destructive inspection of metal powders are introduced. Technical assumptions and solutions on three step-by-step case studies are presented in detail, including powder characterization, contamination detection, and band selection analysis. Experimental results have fully demonstrated the great potential of HSI and related AI techniques for NDT of powder metallurgy, especially the potential to satisfy the industrial manufacturing environment., Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables

AI methods are used in societally important settings, ranging from credit to employment to housing, and it is crucial to provide fairness in regard to algorithmic decision making. Moreover, many settings are dynamic, with populations responding to sequential decision policies. We introduce the study of reinforcement learning (RL) with stepwise fairness constraints, requiring group fairness at each time step. Our focus is on tabular episodic RL, and we provide learning algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees in regard to policy optimality and fairness violation. Our framework provides useful tools to study the impact of fairness constraints in sequential settings and brings up new challenges in RL., Comment: Fairness, Reinforcement Learning

Full list of authors: Farah, Joseph; Galison, Peter; Akiyama, Kazunori; Bouman, Katherine L.; Bower, Geoffrey C.; Chael, Andrew; Fuentes, Antonio; Gómez, José L.; Honma, Mareki; Johnson, Michael D.; Kofuji, Yutaro; Marrone, Daniel P.; Moriyama, Kotaro; Narayan, Ramesh; Pesce, Dominic W.; Tiede, Paul; Wielgus, Maciek; Zhao, Guang-Yao; Alberdi, Antxon; Alef, Walter; Algaba, Juan Carlos; Anantua, Richard; Asada, Keiichi; Azulay, Rebecca; Baczko, Anne-Kathrin; Ball, David; Baloković, Mislav; Barrett, John; Benson, Bradford A.; Bintley, Dan; Blackburn, Lindy; Blundell, Raymond; Boland, Wilfred; Boyce, Hope; Bremer, Michael; Brinkerink, Christiaan D.; Brissenden, Roger; Britzen, Silke; Broderick, Avery E.; Broguiere, Dominique; Bronzwaer, Thomas; Bustamente, Sandra; Byun, Do-Young; Carlstrom, John E.; Chan, Chi-kwan; Chatterjee, Koushik; Chatterjee, Shami; Chen, Ming-Tang; Chen, Yongjun; Cho, Ilje; Christian, Pierre; Conway, John E.; Cordes, James M.; Crawford, Thomas M.; Crew, Geoffrey B.; Cruz-Osorio, Alejandro; Cui, Yuzhu; Davelaar, Jordy; De Laurentis, Mariafelicia; Deane, Roger; Dempsey, Jessica; Desvignes, Gregory; Doeleman, Sheperd S.; Eatough, Ralph P.; Falcke, Heino; Fish, Vincent L.; Fomalont, Ed; Ford, H. Alyson; Fraga-Encinas, Raquel; Friberg, Per; Fromm, Christian M.; Gammie, Charles F.; Garc'a, Roberto; Gentaz, Olivier; Goddi, Ciriaco; Gold, Roman; Gómez-Ruiz, Arturo I.; Gu, Minfeng; Gurwell, Mark; Hada, Kazuhiro; Haggard, Daryl; Hecht, Michael H.; Hesper, Ronald; Ho, Luis C.; Ho, Paul; Huang, Chih-Wei L.; Huang, Lei; Hughes, David H.; Ikeda, Shiro; Inoue, Makoto; Issaoun, Sara; James, David J.; Jannuzi, Buell T.; Janssen, Michael; Jeter, Britton; Jiang, Wu; Jimenez-Rosales, Alejandra; Jorstad, Svetlana; Jung, Taehyun; Karami, Mansour; Karuppusamy, Ramesh; Kawashima, Tomohisa; Keating, Garrett K.; Kettenis, Mark; Kim, Dong-Jin; Kim, Jae-Young; Kim, Jongsoo; Kim, Junhan; Kino, Motoki; Koay, Jun Yi; Koch, Patrick M.; Koyama, Shoko; Kramer, Carsten; Kramer, Michael; Krichbaum, Thomas P.; Kuo, Cheng-Yu; Lauer, Tod R.; Lee, Sang-Sung; Levis, Aviad; Li, Yan-Rong; Li, Zhiyuan; Lico, Rocco; Lindahl, Greg; Lindqvist, Michael; Liu, Jun; Liu, Kuo; Liuzzo, Elisabetta; Lo, Wen-Ping; Lobanov, Andrei P.; Loinard, Laurent; Lonsdale, Colin; Lu, Ru-Sen; MacDonald, Nicholas R.; Mao, Jirong; Marchili, Nicola; Markoff, Sera; Marscher, Alan P.; Martí-Vidal, Iván; Matsushita, Satoki; Matthews, Lynn D.; Medeiros, Lia; Menten, Karl M.; Mizuno, Izumi; Mizuno, Yosuke; Moran, James M.; Moscibrodzka, Monika; Müller, Cornelia; Mejas, Alejandro Mus; Musoke, Gibwa; Nagai, Hiroshi; Nagar, Neil M.; Nakamura, Masanori; Narayanan, Gopal; Natarajan, Iniyan; Nathanail, Antonios; Neilsen, Joey; Neri, Roberto; Ni, Chunchong; Noutsos, Aristeidis; Nowak, Michael A.; Okino, Hiroki; Olivares, Héctor; Ortiz-León, Gisela N.; Oyama, Tomoaki; zel, Feryal; Palumbo, Daniel C. M.; Park, Jongho; Patel, Nimesh; Pen, Ue-Li; Piétu, Vincent; Plambeck, Richard; PopStefanija, Aleksandar; Porth, Oliver; Pötzl, Felix M.; Prather, Ben; Preciado-López, Jorge A.; Psaltis, Dimitrios; Pu, Hung-Yi; Ramakrishnan, Venkatessh; Rao, Ramprasad; Rawlings, Mark G.; Raymond, Alexander W.; Rezzolla, Luciano; Ripperda, Bart; Roelofs, Freek; Rogers, Alan; Ros, Eduardo; Rose, Mel; Roshanineshat, Arash; Rottmann, Helge; Roy, Alan L.; Ruszczyk, Chet; Rygl, Kazi L. J.; Sánchez, Salvador; Sánchez-Arguelles, David; Sasada, Mahito; Savolainen, Tuomas; Schloerb, F. Peter; Schuster, Karl-Friedrich; Shao, Lijing; Shen, Zhiqiang; Small, Des; Sohn, Bong Won; SooHoo, Jason; Sun, He; Tazaki, Fumie; Tetarenko, Alexandra J.; Tilanus, Remo P. J.; Titus, Michael; Toma, Kenji; Torne, Pablo; Traianou, Efthalia; Trent, Tyler; Trippe, Sascha; van Bemmel, Ilse; van Langevelde, Huib Jan; van Rossum, Daniel R.; Wagner, Jan; Ward-Thompson, Derek; Wardle, John; Weintroub, Jonathan; Wex, Norbert; Wharton, Robert; Wiik, Kaj; Wong, George N.; Wu, Qingwen; Yoon, Doosoo; Young, André; Young, Ken; Younsi, Ziri; Yuan, Feng; Yuan, Ye-Fei; Zensus, J. Anton; Zhao, Shan-Shan; Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.--This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited., Recent developments in very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) have made it possible for the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to resolve the innermost accretion flows of the largest supermassive black holes on the sky. The sparse nature of the EHT's (u, v)-coverage presents a challenge when attempting to resolve highly time-variable sources. We demonstrate that the changing (u, v)-coverage of the EHT can contain regions of time over the course of a single observation that facilitate dynamical imaging. These optimal time regions typically have projected baseline distributions that are approximately angularly isotropic and radially homogeneous. We derive a metric of coverage quality based on baseline isotropy and density that is capable of ranking array configurations by their ability to produce accurate dynamical reconstructions. We compare this metric to existing metrics in the literature and investigate their utility by performing dynamical reconstructions on synthetic data from simulated EHT observations of sources with simple orbital variability. We then use these results to make recommendations for imaging the 2017 EHT Sgr A* data set. © 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society., We thank the National Science Foundation (awards OISE-1743747, AST-1816420, AST-1716536, AST-1440254, AST-1935980) and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF-5278) for financial support of this work. This work was supported in part by the Black Hole Initiative, which is funded by grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to Harvard University. Support for this work was also provided by the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51431.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration thanks the following organizations and programs: the Academy of Finland (projects 274477, 284495, 312496, 315721); the Agencia Nacional de Investigacin y Desarrollo (ANID), Chile via NCN19058 (TITANs) and Fondecyt 3190878, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung; an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship; Allegro, the European ALMA Regional Centre node in the Netherlands, the NL astronomy research network NOVA and the astronomy institutes of the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, and Radboud University; the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, through a grant (60477) from the John Templeton Foundation; the China Scholarship Council; Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT, Mexico, projects U0004-246083, U0004-259839, F0003-272050, M0037-279006, F0003-281692, 104497, 275201, 263356); the Delaney Family via the Delaney Family John A. Wheeler Chair at Perimeter Institute; Direccin General de Asuntos del Personal Acadmico-Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico (DGAPA-UNAM, projects IN112417 and IN112820); the European Research Council Synergy Grant "BlackHoleCam: Imaging the Event Horizon of Black Holes" (grant 610058); the Generalitat Valenciana postdoctoral grant APOSTD/2018/177 and GenT Program (project CIDEGENT/2018/021); MICINN Research Project PID2019-108995GB-C22; the European Research Council for advanced grant "JETSET: Launching, propagation and emission of relativistic jets from binary mergers and across mass scales" (grant No. 884631); the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (grant GBMF-3561); the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) sezione di Napoli, iniziative specifiche TEONGRAV; the two Dutch National Supercomputers, Cartesius and Snellius (NWO grant 2021.013); the International Max Planck Research School for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne; Joint Princeton/Flatiron and Joint Columbia/Flatiron Postdoctoral Fellowships, with research at the Flatiron Institute being supported by the Simons Foundation; the Japanese Government (Monbukagakusho: MEXT) Scholarship; the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Research Fellowship (JP17J08829); the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS, grants QYZDJ-SSW-SLH057, QYZDJ-SSW-SYS008, ZDBS-LY-SLH011); the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellowship; the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG); the Max Planck Partner Group of the MPG and the CAS; the MEXT/JSPS KAKENHI (grants 18KK0090, JP21H01137, JP18H03721, 18K03709, 18H01245, 25120007); the Malaysian Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS) FRGS/1/2019/STG02/UM/02/6; the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) Funds; the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan (103-2119-M-001-010-MY2, 105-2112-M-001-025-MY3, 105-2119-M-001-042, 106-2112-M-001-011, 106-2119-M-001-013, 106-2119-M-001-027, 106-2923-M-001-005, 107-2119-M-001-017, 107-2119-M-001-020, 107-2119-M-001-041, 107-2119-M-110-005, 107-2923-M-001-009, 108-2112-M-001-048, 108-2112-M-001-051, 108-2923-M-001-002, 109-2112-M-001-025, 109-2124-M-001-005, 109-2923-M-001-001, 110-2112-M-003-007-MY2, 110-2112-M-001-033, 110-2124-M-001-007, and 110-2923-M-001-001); the Ministry of Education (MoE) of Taiwan Yushan Young Scholar Program; the Physics Division, National Center for Theoretical Sciences of Taiwan; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, Fermi Guest Investigator grant 80NSSC20K1567, NASA Astrophysics Theory Program grant 80NSSC20K0527, NASA NuSTAR award 80NSSC20K0645); the National Institute of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan; the National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant 2016YFA0400704, 2016YFA0400702); the National Science Foundation (NSF, grants AST-0096454, AST-0352953, AST-0521233, AST-0705062, AST-0905844, AST-0922984, AST-1126433, AST-1140030, DGE-1144085, AST-1207704, AST-1207730, AST-1207752, MRI-1228509, OPP-1248097, AST-1310896, AST-1555365, AST-1615796, AST-1715061, AST-1716327, AST-1903847, AST-2034306); the Natural Science Foundation of China (grants 11650110427, 10625314, 11721303, 11725312, 11933007, 11991052, 11991053); NWO grant No. OCENW.KLEIN.113; a fellowship of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2020M671266); the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC, including a Discovery Grant and the NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarships-Doctoral Program); the National Youth Thousand Talents Program of China; the National Research Foundation of Korea (the Global PhD Fellowship Grant: grants NRF-2015H1A2A1033752, 2015-R1D1A1A01056807; the Korea Research Fellowship Program: NRF-2015H1D3A1066561, Basic Research Support Grant 2019R1F1A1059721); the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) VICI award (grant 639.043.513) and Spinoza Prize SPI 78-409; the New Scientific Frontiers with Precision Radio Interferometry Fellowship awarded by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), which is a facility of the National Research Foundation (NRF), an agency of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) of South Africa; the Onsala Space Observatory (OSO) national infrastructure, for the provisioning of its facilities/observational support (OSO receives funding through the Swedish Research Council under grant 2017-00648); the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (research at the Perimeter Institute is supported by the Government of Canada through the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science); the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacin (grants PGC2018-098915-B-C21, AYA2016-80889-P, PID2019-108995GB-C21, PID2020-117404GB-C21); the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the "Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa" award for the Instituto de Astrofsica de Andaluca (SEV-2017-0709); the Toray Science Foundation; the Consejera de Economa, Conocimiento, Empresas y Universidad of the Junta de Andaluca (grant P18-FR-1769), the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas (grant 2019AEP112); the M2FINDERS project, which has received funding by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement No. 101018682); the US Department of Energy (USDOE) through the Los Alamos National Laboratory (operated by Triad National Security, LLC, for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the USDOE (contract 89233218CNA000001); the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 730562 RadioNet; Shanghai Pilot Program for Basic Research, Chinese Academy of Science, Shanghai Branch (JCYJ-SHFY-2021-013); ALMA North America Development Fund; the Academia Sinica; Chandra DD7-18089X and TM6-17006X; and the GenT Program (Generalitat Valenciana) Project CIDEGENT/2018/021. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), supported by NSF grant ACI-1548562, and CyVerse, supported by NSF grants DBI-0735191, DBI-1265383, and DBI-1743442. The XSEDE Stampede2 resource at TACC was allocated through TG-AST170024 and TG-AST080026N. The XSEDE JetStream resource at PTI and TACC was allocated through AST170028. The simulations were performed in part on the SuperMUC cluster at the LRZ in Garching, on the LOEWE cluster in CSC in Frankfurt, and on the HazelHen cluster at the HLRS in Stuttgart. This research was enabled in part by support provided by Compute Ontario (http://computeontario.ca), Calcul Quebec (http://www.calculquebec.ca), and Compute Canada (http://www.computecanada.ca). C.C. acknowledges support from the Swedish Research Council (VR). We thank the staff at the participating observatories, correlation centers, and institutions for their enthusiastic support. This paper makes use of the following ALMA data: ADS/JAO.ALMA#2016.1.01154.V. ALMA is a partnership of the European Southern Observatory (ESO; Europe, representing its member states), NSF, and National Institutes of Natural Sciences of Japan, together with National Research Council (Canada), Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST; Taiwan), Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA; Taiwan), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI; Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI)/NRAO, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The NRAO is a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement by AUI. Hector Olivares and Gibwa Musoke were supported by Virtual Institute of Accretion (VIA) postdoctoral fellowships from the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA). APEX is a collaboration between the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie (Germany), ESO, and the Onsala Space Observatory (Sweden). The SMA is a joint project between the SAO and ASIAA and is funded by the Smithsonian Institution and the Academia Sinica. The JCMT is operated by the East Asian Observatory on behalf of the NAOJ, ASIAA, and KASI, as well as the Ministry of Finance of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the National Key R&D Program (No. 2017YFA0402700) of China. Additional funding support for the JCMT is provided by the Science and Technologies Facility Council (UK) and participating universities in the UK and Canada. Simulations were performed in part on the SuperMUC cluster at the LRZ in Garching, on the LOEWE cluster in CSC in Frankfurt, on the HazelHen cluster at the HLRS in Stuttgart, and on the Pi2.0 and Siyuan Mark-I at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The computer resources of the Finnish IT Center for Science (CSC) and the Finnish Computing Competence Infrastructure (FCCI) project are acknowledged. Junghwan Oh was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2021R1A6A3A01086420). We thank Martin Shepherd for the addition of extra features in the Difmap software that were used for the CLEAN imaging results presented in this paper. The computing cluster of Shanghai VLBI correlator supported by the Special Fund for Astronomy from the Ministry of Finance in China is acknowledged. The LMT is a project operated by the Instituto Nacional de Astrofisica, Optica, y Electronica (Mexico) and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (USA). The IRAM 30 m telescope on Pico Veleta, Spain, is operated by IRAM and supported by CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France), MPG (Max-Planck- Gesellschaft, Germany), and IGN (Instituto Geogrfico Nacional, Spain). The SMT is operated by the Arizona Radio Observatory, a part of the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona, with financial support of operations from the State of Arizona and financial support for instrumentation development from the NSF. Support for SPT participation in the EHT is provided by the National Science Foundation through award OPP-1852617 to the University of Chicago. Partial support is also provided by the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. The SPT hydrogen maser was provided on loan from the GLT, courtesy of ASIAA. Support for this work was provided by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant No. HST-HF2-51494.001 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5–26555. The EHTC has received generous donations of FPGA chips from Xilinx Inc., under the Xilinx University Program. The EHTC has benefited from technology shared under open-source license by the Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER). The EHT project is grateful to T4Science and Microsemi for their assistance with Hydrogen Masers. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System. We gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the extended staff of the ALMA, both from the inception of the ALMA Phasing Project through the observational campaigns of 2017 and 2018. We would like to thank A. Deller and W. Brisken for EHT-specific support with the use of DiFX. We thank J. Delgado for helpful discussions and feedback.

Some athletes consume supplements to improve the effect of training and achieve optimal performance during competition. Among the different supplements, beetroot juice has been indicative of improved nitric oxide (NO) concentration in blood, which can promote vasodilation, blood flow, gene expression, mitochondrial efficiency and gas exchange. Different methods have been proposed to classify beetroot juice as an egorgenic aid that can improve the performance of athletes. The objective of this paper is to review methods chosen to gain greater and detailed understanding regarding current issues about the effect of beetroot juice as an ergogenic aid during exercise efforts. Based on Pubmed database, conceptual keywords were input (beet or beetroot, nitrate or nitrite, supplement or supplementation, and exercise, efforts, and physical exercise), and covered literature from 2010 to 2019. Animal researches, review and meta-analyses articles, and inaccessible full-text, and studies that did not use beetroot juice supplementation were excluded, leaving 170 researches available. CiteSpace (version V) showed that the United States and several European countries occupied a dominant position in the carriers of beetroot juice research network. Current prominent research areas were effects of dietary NO3- supplementation, including blood pressure, O2 cost of submaximal exercise, and exercise performance. The optimal strategy for dietary NO3- supplementation and potential effects of dietary NO3- supplementation on intermittent exercise performance involve muscle fiber type recruited and the Yo-Yo intermittent recovery test..

High-performance size-exclusion chromatography (HPSEC) has been developed for the rapid and quantitative analysis of inactivated foot and mouth disease virus (FMDV) and adopted by regulatory agencies and vaccine manufacturers. However, strong non-specific adsorption of type A/AKT III FMDV was found on some batches of TSK G4000 SW

Aiming at the problems of high equipment composition complexity, long idle time of idle machines, and difficulty in online optimization of energy consumption in the production system that adopts the “immediate rework” mechanism, an online energy consumption optimization method for rework production systems is proposed. A digital model of production system energy consumption for the “immediate rework” mechanism is established, and real-time data is integrated to realize online energy consumption optimization based on the optimal buffer threshold. Taking the module production line of a battery workshop of a new energy vehicle factory as the application object, the online energy consumption optimization system of the rework production line of the workshop is designed and developed, and the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method are verified.

Background: Influenza virus matrix protein M1 is encoded by viral RNA fragment 7 and is the most abundant protein in virus particles. M1 is expressed in the late stages of viral replication and exerts functionality by inhibiting viral transcription. The M1 protein sequence is an attractive target for antibody drugs.Methods: The M1 protein sequence was amplified by RT-PCR using cDNA from the H5N1 virus as a template; the M1 protein was then expressed and purified. A human strain, high affinity, and single chain antibody (HuScFv) against M1 protein was obtained by phage antibody library screening using M1 as an antigen. A recombinant TAT-HuScFv protein was expressed by fusion with the TAT protein transduction domain (PTD) gene of HIV to prepare a human intracellular antibody against avian influenza virus. The differences between HuScFv and TAT-HUScFv were verified by various experiments and the amino acid binding site of the M1 protein was determined.Results: The M1 protein of H5N1, HuScFv, and TAT-HuScFv, were successfully purified and expressed by and in E. coli. Further analysis demonstrated that TAT-HuScFv inhibited the hemagglutination activity of the 300TCID50 H1N1 virus, thus providing preliminary validation of the universality of the antibody. After two rounds of M1 protein decomposition, the TAT-HuScFv antigen binding site was identified as Alanine (A) at position 239. Collectively, our data describe a recombinant antibody with high binding activity against the conserved sequences of avian influenza viruses. This intracellular recombinant antibody blocked the M1 protein that infected intracellular viruses, thus inhibiting the replication and reproduction of H5N1 viruses.Conclusion: Recombinant HuScFv was successfully identified using the Tomlinson (I+J) phage antibody library and successfully linked to the TAT protein transductive domain of the HIV virus. Compared with the HuScFv, the addition of the TAT peptide improved its ability to penetrate the cell membrane. A definite amino acid binding site was identified after the decomposition of M1 protein, thus providing a target and reference for the development of antibody drugs and the study of new drugs.

Vaccination can prevent and control animal brucellosis. Currently, live attenuated vaccines are extensively used to prevent Brucella infection. However, traditional vaccines such as live attenuated vaccines are associated with biological safety risks for both humans and animals. The bacterial ghost (BG) is a new form of vaccine with great prospects. However, bacterial cells cannot be completely inactivated by biological lysis, conferring a safety risk associated with the vaccine. In this study, we developed a Brucella abortus A19 bacterial ghost (A19BG) through a double inactivation strategy with sequential biological lysis and hydrogen peroxide treatment. This strategy resulted in 100% inactivation of Brucella, such that viable bacterial cells were not detected even at an ultrahigh concentration of 10

Abstract: The alterations in vascular homeostasis are deeply involved in the development of numerous diseases, such as coronary heart disease, stroke, and diabetic complications. Changes in blood flow and endothelial permeability caused by vascular dysfunction are the common mechanisms for these three types of diseases. The disorders of glucose and lipid metabolism can bring changes in the energy production patterns in endothelium and surrounding cells which may consequently cause energy metabolic disorders, oxidative stress, and inflammatory responses. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) follows the principle of the “treatment by the syndrome differentiation.” TCM considers coronary heart disease, stroke, and diabetes complications all as the type of Qi-deficiency and blood stasis syndrome, which mainly occurs in the vascular system. Therefore, the common pathogenesis of these three types of diseases suggests that the treatment strategy by TCM should be in a close manner and referred to as “treating different diseases by the same treatment.” Qishen Yiqi dripping pill is a modern Chinese herbal medicine that has been widely used for the treatment of patients with coronary heart disease characterized as Qi-deficiency and blood stasis in China. Recently, many clinical reports have demonstrated the potential therapeutic effects of Qishen Yiqi dripping pills on ischemic stroke and diabetic nephropathy. Based on these reports, we will summarize the clinical applications of Qishen Yiqi dripping pills on coronary heart disease, ischemic stroke, and diabetic nephropathy, including the involved mechanisms discussed in various research works.

Hierarchical clustering studies a recursive partition of a data set into clusters of successively smaller size, and is a fundamental problem in data analysis. In this work we study the cost function for hierarchical clustering introduced by Dasgupta, and present two polynomial-time approximation algorithms: Our first result is an $O(1)$-approximation algorithm for graphs of high conductance. Our simple construction bypasses complicated recursive routines of finding sparse cuts known in the literature. Our second and main result is an $O(1)$-approximation algorithm for a wide family of graphs that exhibit a well-defined structure of clusters. This result generalises the previous state-of-the-art, which holds only for graphs generated from stochastic models. The significance of our work is demonstrated by the empirical analysis on both synthetic and real-world data sets, on which our presented algorithm outperforms the previously proposed algorithm for graphs with a well-defined cluster structure., Comment: This work appeared at the 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS'21)

This paper explores the comparative role of governments in fostering the advancement of technology through business incubation in Australia and China. It suggests an enabling-oriented approach to government policy and service delivery may stimulate and sustain incubatees’ growth via the development of social capital. Government may also play a critical role in policy programs that foster learning, research and innovation.

Accelerated MRI shortens acquisition time by subsampling in the measurement $\kappa$-space. Recovering a high-fidelity anatomical image from subsampled measurements requires close cooperation between two components: (1) a sampler that chooses the subsampling pattern and (2) a reconstructor that recovers images from incomplete measurements. In this paper, we leverage the sequential nature of MRI measurements, and propose a fully differentiable framework that jointly learns a sequential sampling policy simultaneously with a reconstruction strategy. This co-designed framework is able to adapt during acquisition in order to capture the most informative measurements for a particular target. Experimental results on the fastMRI knee dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach successfully utilizes intermediate information during the sampling process to boost reconstruction performance. In particular, our proposed method can outperform the current state-of-the-art learned $\kappa$-space sampling baseline on over 96% of test samples. We also investigate the individual and collective benefits of the sequential sampling and co-design strategies., Comment: Code and supplementary materials are available at http://imaging.cms.caltech.edu/seq-mri

In this paper, we present a sufficient condition for finite Morse index of complete properly self-shrinkers. We prove that a complete properly embedded self-shrinker in $\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ with finite asymptotically conical ends or asymptotically cylindrical ends must have finite Morse index. Moreover, as an application of this result, we show that a complete properly embedded self-shrinker in $\mathbb{R}^3$ with finite genus has finite Morse index., Comment: 13 pages

The polarization-adjusted convolutional (PAC) codes concatenate the polar transform and the convolutional transform to improve the decoding performance of the finite-length polar codes, where the rate-profile is used to construct the PAC codes by setting the positions of frozen bits. However, the optimal rateprofile method of PAC codes is still unknown. In this paper, an optimized rate-profile algorithm of PAC codes is proposed. First, we propose the normalized compression factor (NCF) to quantify the transmission efficiency of useful information, showing that the distribution of useful information that needs to be transmitted after the convolutional transform should be adaptive to the capacity profile after finite-length polar transform. This phenomenon indicates that the PAC code improves the transmission efficiency of useful information, which leads to a better decoding performance than the polar codes with the same length. Then, we propose a novel rate-profile method of PAC codes, where a quadratic optimization model is established and the Euclidean norm of the NCF spectrum is adopted to construct the objective function. Finally, a heuristic bit-swapping strategy is designed to search for the frozen set with high objective function values, where the search space is limited by considering the only bits with medium Hamming weight of the row index. Simulation results show that the PAC codes with the proposed optimized rate-profile construction have better decoding performance than the PAC codes with the originally proposed Reed-Muller design construction.

We report the

Transdermal delivery systems have been intensively studied over the past 2 decades, with the focus on overcoming the skin barrier for more effective application of pharmaceutical and cosmetic products. Although the cosmeceutical industry has made a substantial progress in the development and incorporation of new and effective actives in their products, the barrier function of the skin remains a limiting factor in the penetration and absorption of these actives. Enhancement via modification of the stratum corneum by hydration, acting of chemical enhancers on the structure of stratum corneum lipids, and partitioning and solubility effects are described. This review summarizes the advances in the development and mechanisms of action of chemical components that act as permeation enhancers, as well as the advances in appropriate vehicles, such as gels, emulsions, and vesicular delivery systems, that can be used for effective transdermal delivery.

In order to survey the infectious situation of canine coronavirus (CCV) in giant panda population, a virus neutralization test detecting specific antibodies against CCV in giant panda’s sera was established by using two-fold dilutions of serum and 100 TCID50 of the virus. The 62 sera samples of giant pandas, which were gathered from zoos and reserve region of Sichuan Province, China were detected. The neutralization antibody titer of 1:4 was recognized as the positive criterion, 8 sera samples were detected to be positive, and the positive rate was 12.9%. The titers of neutralizing antibody ranged from 1:8 to 1:32. It was the first comprehensive investigation on neutralization antibodies against CCV in giant panda population in China. The results of study showed that the infection of CCV in giant panda population was universal, which has posed a threat to the health of giant panda. Therefore, it is incumbent on us to study safe and effective vaccines to protect giant panda against CCV infection.

For any undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ and a set $E_W$ of candidate edges with $E\cap E_W=\emptyset$, the $(k,\gamma)$-spectral augmentability problem is to find a set $F$ of $k$ edges from $E_W$ with appropriate weighting, such that the algebraic connectivity of the resulting graph $H=(V,E\cup F)$ is least $\gamma$. Because of a tight connection between the algebraic connectivity and many other graph parameters, including the graph's conductance and the mixing time of random walks in a graph, maximising the resulting graph's algebraic connectivity by adding a small number of edges has been studied over the past 15 years. In this work we present an approximate and efficient algorithm for the $(k,\gamma)$-spectral augmentability problem, and our algorithm runs in almost-linear time under a wide regime of parameters. Our main algorithm is based on the following two novel techniques developed in the paper, which might have applications beyond the $(k,\gamma)$-spectral augmentability problem. (1) We present a fast algorithm for solving a feasibility version of an SDP for the algebraic connectivity maximisation problem from [GB06]. Our algorithm is based on the classic primal-dual framework for solving SDP, which in turn uses the multiplicative weight update algorithm. We present a novel approach of unifying SDP constraints of different matrix and vector variables and give a good separation oracle accordingly. (2) We present an efficient algorithm for the subgraph sparsification problem, and for a wide range of parameters our algorithm runs in almost-linear time, in contrast to the previously best known algorithm running in at least $\Omega(n^2mk)$ time [KMST10]. Our analysis shows how the randomised BSS framework can be generalised in the setting of subgraph sparsification, and how the potential functions can be applied to approximately keep track of different subspaces., Comment: 57 pages, 1 figure, a preliminary version appeared in ESA 2020

Clustering is an important topic in algorithms, and has a number of applications in machine learning, computer vision, statistics, and several other research disciplines. Traditional objectives of graph clustering are to find clusters with low conductance. Not only are these objectives just applicable for undirected graphs, they are also incapable to take the relationships between clusters into account, which could be crucial for many applications. To overcome these downsides, we study directed graphs (digraphs) whose clusters exhibit further "structural" information amongst each other. Based on the Hermitian matrix representation of digraphs, we present a nearly-linear time algorithm for digraph clustering, and further show that our proposed algorithm can be implemented in sublinear time under reasonable assumptions. The significance of our theoretical work is demonstrated by extensive experimental results on the UN Comtrade Dataset: the output clustering of our algorithm exhibits not only how the clusters (sets of countries) relate to each other with respect to their import and export records, but also how these clusters evolve over time, in accordance with known facts in international trade., Comment: 24 pages. To appear at NeurIPS 2020

A spatial and temporal attention strategy based on Non-local Networks is proposed for video-based person re-identification. The most existing methods design attention mechanisms on high-level features, which ignore the low-level features with more details. The proposed method adopts non-local networks which can aggregate features according to feature correlation at any level. There are two contributions of this work can be summarized as follows: (i) The spatial and temporal redundancy in video-based person Re-ID is analyzed in this work; (ii) An Efficient Non-local Attention Network is designed to reduce the computation complexity by exploring spatial and temporal redundancy for video-based person Re-ID. We conduct extensive experiments on two large-scale benchmarks, i.e. MARS and DukeMTMC-VideoReID. The experiments show that our model achieve 85.2% mAP, 88.3% rank-1 accuracy on MARS dataset and 95.4% mAP, 95.6% rank-1 on DukeMTMC-VideoReID without re-ranking, which significantly outperforms the state-of-arts.