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Purpose: Additional effective therapeutic strategies for Type 2 diabetes (T2D) patients are urgently needed. Gut microbiota plays an important role in T2D development and is a promising treatment strategy for T2D patients. Faecalibacterium prausnitzii (F. prausnitzii) is regarded as one of the most important bacterial indicators for a healthy gut, but the mechanisms of its anti-diabetic properties are still unclear.Methods and Results: The abundance of F. prausnitzii in feces of patients with T2D was detected by using qPCR. The effects of F. prausnitzii on glucose homeostasis, insulin resistance (IR), dyslipidemia, hepatic steatosis and inflammation were investigated in type 2 diabetic (T2D) db/db mice. We also investigated F. prausnitzii in people. Our results showed that the abundance of F. prausnitzii was significantly lower in T2D patients compared to healthy subjects. In T2D mice, we found that F. prausnitzii treatment significantly decreased fasting blood glucose and IR index, indicating improved glucose intolerance as well as IR. Furthermore, based on evaluation of lipid-regulating enzyme activities and proinflammatory cytokine levels, F. prausnitzii was not only able to improve inflammation in both adipose tissue and liver, but also ameliorate hepatic steatosis through inhibiting the activity of hepatic lipogenic enzymes.Conclusion: These results suggested that F. prausnitzii might serve as a therapeutic option for T2D by improved IR, lipid metabolism and inflammation.

Supplementary Material 2

Supplementary Material 1

In the multipass bundle-drawing process of multifilament composite wire of NbTi alloy, the cored wire is prone to damage and even fracture due to severe plastic deformation. Therefore, it is necessary to study the fracture mechanism of NbTi alloy in plastic deformation and conduct a model of the fracture process. A quasi-static uniaxial tensile test was conducted at room temperature, taking the Nb-47 wt.% Ti alloy as the experimental material. The fracture morphology and damage evolution were observed using scanning electron microscopy. The fracture morphology of the NbTi alloy presents a ‘cup-cone’ shape. The damage evolution shows the characteristics of microvoid nucleation and growth to microcrack formation, indicating that the fracture mechanism of the alloy is a typical microvoid coalescing ductile fracture. The Gurson–Tvergaard–Needleman (GTN) damage model is used in the finite element simulation for the uniaxial tensile process of NbTi alloy, and the microvoid volume fraction-related damage parameters in the model are determined by the reverse calibration method. The damage behavior in the multipass bundle-drawing process of the NbTi/Cu multifilament composite wire is predicted by the GTN damage model with calibrated damage parameters.

The aim of the study was to evaluate the possible role of endophytic fungi (EF) on Rosa powdery mildew (PM) resistance. The endophytic fungal communities of two wild Rosa varieties with different PM susceptibilities were investigated through both culture-dependent and independent methods, and the antagonistic activities of endophytes against the PM pathogen were evaluated by pot experiments. There were more OTUs recovered from the PM resistant variety than from the PM susceptible variety. Similarly, the culturable EF from the PM resistant variety (1333 isolates) was more than that from the PM susceptible variety (670 isolates). Consistent with this, the colonization rate of culturable EF of the PM resistant variety was significantly higher than that of the PM susceptible variety at each PM stage (p

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-slr-10.1177_02676583211023729 for Examining transfer in the acquisition of the count/mass distinction in L2 English by Wenting Tang, Robert Fiorentino and Alison Gabriele in Second Language Research

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-slr-10.1177_02676583211023729 for Examining transfer in the acquisition of the count/mass distinction in L2 English by Wenting Tang, Robert Fiorentino and Alison Gabriele in Second Language Research

In this paper, according to the geometric characteristics of TiB2 particle acquired from the scanning electron microscopes (SEM), computational structural modeling of TiB2/Cu composites is performed, in which the size, shape, position, volume fraction and proportion of TiB2 particles are numerically reproduced to be similar to those of the actual micro-structures of TiB2/Cu composites. The ductile damage and failure behaviors for matrix, the elastic brittle failure for the particle reinforcement, and the traction-separation for interface, were independently simulated in this model. Four evaluation indexes such as elastic modulus, yield strength, tensile strength and elongation are used to assess the comprehensive mechanical properties of composites. Load-bearing capability of the TiB2/Cu composites is investigated by analyzing the stress and strain distribution of particles, interface and matrix. The validity of the simulation results is verified by the agreement of the experimental stress-strain curve and the morphology of fracture section. The effects of particle size, shape, volume fraction and proportion of TiB2 particles on the mechanical behavior are presented. The present work may provide useful guidelines for optimum composite structures design and industrial applications.

The study conducted a research on L1 Chinese and L2 English speakers��� acquisition of Chinese topic-comment constructions. Several results were found. First, the type of the topic, the position of the topic, and the English proficiency did exert influence on Chinese native speakers��� perception of Chinese topic-comment constructions. To analyze Chinese native speakers��� perception of Chinese topic-comment constructions, three aspects need to be considered. Second, backward transfer from English to Chinese seemed to occur in high English proficiency group when they comprehended the Chinese topic-comment constructions. For the high English proficiency group, because of the backward transfer from English to Chinese, they seemed to have got used to subject-prominence feature of English and unlearnt the topic-prominence feature of Chinese. Therefore, when they encountered sentence that topic was placed in complement clause, they still felt acceptable. Another explanation is that they appeared to transfer the strategy used in processing English garden path sentences into Chinese, which facilitated their understanding of Chinese garden path sentences (in this study, it is the construction whose topic is in complement clause). Third, when participants, dealt with the constructions that moved-topics are in complement clause (Chinese garden path sentences), they tended to adopt the late closure strategy and minimal attachment strategy, which undermined their acceptability of this kind of sentences.

In the traditional deep compression framework, iteratively performing network pruning and quantization can reduce the model size and computation cost to meet the deployment requirements. However, such a step-wise application of pruning and quantization may lead to suboptimal solutions and unnecessary time consumption. In this paper, we tackle this issue by integrating network pruning and quantization as a unified joint compression problem and then use AutoML to automatically solve it. We find the pruning process can be regarded as the channel-wise quantization with 0 bit. Thus, the separate two-step pruning and quantization can be simplified as the one-step quantization with mixed precision. This unification not only simplifies the compression pipeline but also avoids the compression divergence. To implement this idea, we propose the automated model compression by jointly applied pruning and quantization (AJPQ). AJPQ is designed with a hierarchical architecture: the layer controller controls the layer sparsity, and the channel controller decides the bit-width for each kernel. Following the same importance criterion, the layer controller and the channel controller collaboratively decide the compression strategy. With the help of reinforcement learning, our one-step compression is automatically achieved. Compared with the state-of-the-art automated compression methods, our method obtains a better accuracy while reducing the storage considerably. For fixed precision quantization, AJPQ can reduce more than five times model size and two times computation with a slight performance increase for Skynet in remote sensing object detection. When mixed-precision is allowed, AJPQ can reduce five times model size with only 1.06% top-5 accuracy decline for MobileNet in the classification task.

Typical LED light sources have lower light utilization efficiency (LUE) in reflective directional illumination applications due to light pattern mismatch. Light patterns are generally controlled by secondary optical systems, which are heavy and large. Compared with the secondary optical system, the primary lens is smaller in size, lighter in weight, and more efficient in light extraction. This work is a preliminary study on the primary lens of LED in order to improve the LUE of LED in reflective directional illumination fields. Experimental result shows that the light extraction efficiency (LEE) of LED light source packaged by a primary optical lens is improved by a maximum proportion of 16.3%. The LUE of the LED packaged with the primary lens is up to 40.1% at 60°. After encapsulating the primary lens, the weighted mean angle of light intensity in the full space is at 57° which is bigger than that of LED without primary lens (46°).

To study the effect of TiB whisker on the mechanical properties of copper matrix composites (CMCs), a 3D microscopic TiB/Cu finite element model was established. By using the geometric features of TiB whisker obtained from the scanning electron microscopes (SEM), random dispersions of the length, the diameter, the positions and the volume fractions of TiB whiskers were numerically reconstructed in line with their actual microscopic structures. Brittle fractures of whisker, ductile damage and failure behaviors of matrix, and whisker–matrix interfacial behaviors are introduced in the model to simulate the mechanical behavior of TiB/Cu. The results show that when the length of TiB whisker exceeds 6d, the tensile strength of TiB/Cu tend to be stable at 320 MPa and the elongation tend to be stable at 0.086, where d is the diameter of TiB whisker. The effective length of whisker in TiB/Cu is 6d. Damage mechanisms in TiB/Cu were revealed by analyzing the average stress in the end and the middle of TiB whisker, and the simulation results were consistent with the experimental observations. This work provides a theoretical basis for the selection and optimization of parameters of reinforcement phase in preparation of TiB/Cu.

Thermal exposure experiments of Ni-based cast superalloy K403 at 950 °C for 5, 50 and 100 h were conducted. The effect of thermal exposure on the microstructures and room-temperature mechanical properties of the superalloys K403 was studied. The results show that M6C carbides segregate from intra-grains and grain boundaries, and γ′ phases aggregate and grow up with blunted corners. With increasing of thermal exposure time, on the one hand, γ′ phases of spherical or nearly spherical shapes are formed from blunted corners and parts of the γ′ phase tend to coarsen due to the connection-oriented effect. On the other hand, the offset yielding stress and the tensile strength decrease, while the plasticity improves obviously, resulting from the aggregation and coarsening of the γ′ strengthening phase. The room-temperature tensile fracture surface is characterized by the dendritic structure fracture for K403 alloys before and after the thermal exposure. Whereas the intercrystalline fracture feature, and the shallow and small dimples appear on the tensile section of the thermal-exposed alloys. And the amount of dimples increases as the exposure time increases.