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Emission characteristics of quantum-dot micropillar lasers (QDMLs) are located at the intersection of nanophotonics and nonlinear dynamics, which provides an ideal platform for studying the optical interface between classical and quantum systems. In this work, a noise-induced bimodal QDML with orthogonal dual-mode outputs is modeled, and nonlinear dynamics, stochastic mode jumping and quantum statistics with the variation of stochastic noise intensity are investigated. Noise-induced effects lead to the emergence of two intensity bifurcation points for the strong and the weak mode, and the maximum output power of the strong mode becomes larger as the noise intensity increases. The anti-correlation of the two modes reaches the maximum at the second intensity bifurcation point. The dual-mode stochastic jumping frequency and effective bandwidth can exceed 100 GHz and 30 GHz under the noise-induced effect. Moreover, the noise-induced photon correlations of both modes simultaneously exhibit super-thermal bunching effects ($g^{(2)}(0)>2$) in the low injection current region. The $g^{(2)}(0)$-value of the strong mode can reach over 6 in the high injection current region. Photon bunching ($g^{(2)}(0)>1$) of both modes is observed over a wide range of noise intensities and injection currents. In the presence of the noise-induced effect, the photon number distribution of the strong or the weak mode is a mixture of Bose-Einstein and Poisson distributions. As the noise intensity increases, the photon number distribution of the strong mode is dominated by the Bose-Einstein distribution, and the proportion of the Poisson distribution is increased in the high injection current region, while that of the weak mode is reduced. Our results contribute to the development preparation of super-bunching quantum integrated light sources for improving the spatiotemporal resolution of quantum sensing measurements., 17 pages, 9 figures

Additional file 1: Table S1. Ingredients and composition of wheat-based diet

Insulin glargine is a long-acting insulin analog, which plays an important role in the treatment of diabetes mellitus. Biosimilar products of insulin glargine can provide patients with additional safe, high-quality, and potentially cost-effective options for treating diabetes. This article presents a randomized, double-blind, single-dose, two-treatment, four-period, replicate crossover, euglycemic clamp study which was designed to evaluate the PK and PD similarity between the recombinant insulin glargine developed by Wanbang (test) and Lantus® (reference) in healthy volunteers. Subjects received subcutaneous administration of the insulin glargine formulation (0.4 U/kg) on two occasions for the test and reference drug, respectively, and a 20% dextrose solution was infused at variable rate to clamp the blood glucose concentrations at 0.3 mmol/L below the subjects’ fasting glucose for 24 h. Taking advantage of the improved sensitivity of the bioanalytical method applied and the solution of the matrix stability problem, the parent insulin glargine was determined in the vast majority of plasma samples using a fully validated UHPLC-MS/MS method. The PK characteristics of the parent insulin glargine were revealed for the first time: after subcutaneous injection, concentrations of the parent insulin glargine increased to a relative high level within 3 h, and then, a relatively flat concentration–time profile lasting for at least 12 h post-dose was observed. For the first time, the pharmacokinetic parameters of the parent insulin glargine were used as endpoints for similarity evaluation, which complied with the regulatory guidance better and made the similarity conclusion more powerful. The ratios of geometric means of all PK and PD endpoints were close to 100.00%. For the PK endpoints (AUC0–24h, Cmax, AUC0–12h, and AUC12–24h of the parent insulin glargine and its metabolite M1), the 90% confidence intervals of geometric mean ratios of test to reference were entirely contained within 80.00%–125.00%. For the PD endpoints [AUCGIR(0–24h), GIRmax, AUCGIR(0–12h), and AUCGIR(12–24h)], the 95% confidence intervals of geometric mean ratios of test to reference were entirely contained within 80.00%–125.00%. Based on the above mentioned results, it can be concluded that the PK and PD characteristics of the biosimilar drug developed by Wanbang are similar to those of Lantus.

The center coordinate and radius of the spherical hedges are the basic phenotypic features for automatic pruning. A binocular vision-based shape reconstruction and measurement system for front-end vision information gaining are built in this paper. Parallel binocular cameras are used as the detectors. The 2D coordinate sequence of target spherical hedges is obtained by region segmentation and object extraction process. Then, a stereo correcting algorithm is conducted to keep two cameras to be parallel. Also, an improved semi-global block matching (SGBM) algorithm is studied to get a disparity map. According to the disparity map and parallel structure of the binocular vision system, the 3D point cloud of the target is obtained. Based on this, the center coordinate and radius of the spherical hedges can be measured. Laboratory and outdoor tests on shape reconstruction and measurement are conducted. In the detection range of 2,000–2,600 mm, laboratory test shows that the average error and average relative error of standard spherical hedges radius are 1.58 mm and 0.53%, respectively; the average location deviation of the center coordinate of spherical hedges is 15.92 mm. The outdoor test shows that the average error and average relative error of spherical hedges radius by the proposed system are 4.02 mm and 0.44%, respectively; the average location deviation of the center coordinate of spherical hedges is 18.29 mm. This study provides important technical support for phenotypic feature detection in the study of automatic trimming.

Transgenic expression of Cre recombinase driven by a specific promoter is normally used to conditionally knockout a gene in a tissue- or cell-type-specific manner. In αMHC-Cre transgenic mouse model, expression of Cre recombinase is controlled by the myocardial-specific α-myosin heavy chain (αMHC) promoter, which is commonly used to edit myocardial-specific genes. Toxic effects of Cre expression have been reported, including intro-chromosome rearrangements, micronuclei formation and other forms of DNA damage, and cardiomyopathy was observed in cardiac-specific Cre transgenic mice. However, mechanisms associated with Cardiotoxicity of Cre remain poorly understood. In our study, our data unveiled that αMHC-Cre mice developed arrhythmias and died after six months progressively, and none of them survived more than one year. Histopathological examination showed that αMHC-Cre mice had aberrant proliferation of tumor-like tissue in the atrial chamber extended from and vacuolation of ventricular myocytes. Furthermore, the αMHC-Cre mice developed severe cardiac interstitial and perivascular fibrosis, accompanied by significant increase of expression levels of MMP-2 and MMP-9 in the cardiac atrium and ventricular. Moreover, cardiac-specific expression of Cre led to disintegration of the intercalated disc, along with altered proteins expression of the disc and calcium-handling abnormality. Comprehensively, we identified that the ferroptosis signaling pathway is involved in heart failure caused by cardiac-specific expression of Cre, on which oxidative stress results in cytoplasmic vacuole accumulation of lipid peroxidation on the myocardial cell membrane. Taken together, these results revealed that cardiac-specific expression of Cre recombinase can lead to atrial mesenchymal tumor-like growth in the mice, which causes cardiac dysfunction, including cardiac fibrosis, reduction of the intercalated disc and cardiomyocytes ferroptosis at the age older than six months in mice. Our study suggests that αMHC-Cre mouse models are effective in young mice, but not in old mice. Researchers need to be particularly careful when using αMHC-Cre mouse model to interpret those phenotypic impacts of gene responses. As the Cre-associated cardiac pathology matched mostly to that of the patients, the model could also be employed for investigating age-related cardiac dysfunction.

Given the promising results on joint modeling of SPX/VIX smiles of the recently introduced quadratic rough Heston model, we consider a multi-asset market making problem on SPX and its derivatives, e.g. VIX futures, SPX and VIX options. The market maker tries to maximize its profit from spread capturing while controlling the portfolio's inventory risk, which can be fully explained by the value change of SPX under the particular setting of the quadratic rough Heston model. The high dimensionality of the resulting optimization problem is relaxed by several approximations. An asymptotic closed-form solution can be obtained. The accuracy and relevance of the approximations are illustrated through numerical experiments.

Dual-Encoders is a promising mechanism for answer retrieval in question answering (QA) systems. Currently most conventional Dual-Encoders learn the semantic representations of questions and answers merely through matching score. Researchers proposed to introduce the QA interaction features in scoring function but at the cost of low efficiency in inference stage. To keep independent encoding of questions and answers during inference stage, variational auto-encoder is further introduced to reconstruct answers (questions) from question (answer) embeddings as an auxiliary task to enhance QA interaction in representation learning in training stage. However, the needs of text generation and answer retrieval are different, which leads to hardness in training. In this work, we propose a framework to enhance the Dual-Encoders model with question answer cross-embeddings and a novel Geometry Alignment Mechanism (GAM) to align the geometry of embeddings from Dual-Encoders with that from Cross-Encoders. Extensive experimental results show that our framework significantly improves Dual-Encoders model and outperforms the state-of-the-art method on multiple answer retrieval datasets., Comment: Findings of EMNLP 2021(10 pages)

Additional file 1: Table S1. Samples from 43 intensive chicken farms across six distinct geographical regions (Qingyuan, Maoming, Huizhou, Meizhou, Yangjiang and Shanwei) in Guangdong Province.

Ultrastrong, biomorphic cellular silicon carbide (bio-SiC) ceramics were generated by the carbothermal reduction of gaseous SiO with a pyrolytic carbon template. The anisotropic wood tissue microst...

Background Cryptosporidium is one of the most prevalent parasites infecting both birds and mammals. To examine the prevalence of Cryptosporidium species and evaluate the public health significance of domestic chickens in Guangdong Province, Southern China, we analyzed 1001 fecal samples collected from 43 intensive broiler chicken farms from six distinct geographical regions between June 2020 and March 2021. Methods Individual DNAs were subjected to nested PCR-based amplification and sequencing of the small subunit of the nuclear ribosomal RNA gene (SSU rRNA). The 60 kDa glycoprotein gene (pgp60) was performed from all positive SSU rRNA samples to characterise subtypes of C. meleagridis. Results Cryptosporidium infection rates was found to be 13.2%, comprising with infections with C. meleagridis (78/1001, 7.8%), C. baileyi (48/1001, 4.8%) and mixed infections (6/1001, 0.6%). Three subtype families were identified, IIIb, IIIe and IIIg. Six subtypes were identified in broiler chickens, including one novel (IIIgA25G3R1a) and five previously reported (IIIbA23G1R1c, IIIbA24G1R1, IIIbA21G1R1a, IIIeA17G2R1 and IIIeA26G2R1). Within these subtypes, five known subtypes were genetically identical to those identified in humans. Conclusions This is the first report of C. meleagridis in chickens from Guangdong. The frequent occurrence of C. meleagridis in domestic chickens and the common C. meleagridis subtypes identified both in humans and chickens is of public health significance. Our study indicates that broiler chickens represent a potential zoonotic risk for the transmission of Cryptosporidium in this region.

Background: with the development of medical science, lncRNA, originally considered as a noise gene, has been found to participate in a variety of biological activities. Nowadays, more and more studies show that lncRNA is involved in various human diseases, such as gastric cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer, etc. However, obtaining lncRNA-disease association only through biological experiments not only costs manpower and material resources, but also gains little. Therefore, it is very important to develop effective computational models for predicting lncRNA-disease association. Results: In this paper, a new lncRNA-disease association prediction model LDAP-WMPS based on weight distribution and projection score is proposed. Based on the existing research results of disease semantic similarity, the integrated lncRNA similarity matrix and the integrated disease similarity matrix are calculated according to the disease semantic similarity and the association information between data. On this basis, the weight algorithm is combined with the improved projection algorithm to predict the lncRNA-disease association through the known lncRNA-miRNA association and miRNA-disease association. The simulation results show that under the loocv framework, the AUC of LDAP-WMPS can reach 0.8822. Better than the latest results. Through the case study of adenocarcinoma and colorectal cancer, it is proved that LDAP-WMPS can effectively infer lncRNA-disease association. Conclusions: The simulation results show that LDAP-WMPS has good prediction performance, which is an important supplement to the research of lncRNA-disease association prediction without lncRNA-disease association data. Keywords: lncRNA-miRNA association, miRNA-disease association, disease semantic similarity, Integrated lncRNA similarity, integrated disease similarity, Weight allocation algorithm, Projection score.

Revealing the atomistic mechanisms for the high-temperature mechanical behavior of materials is important for optimizing their properties for service at high-temperatures and their thermomechanical processing. However, due to materials microstructure’s dynamic recovery and the absence of available in situ techniques, the high-temperature deformation behavior and atomistic mechanisms of materials are difficult to evaluate. Here, we report the development of a microelectromechanical systems-based thermomechanical testing apparatus that enables mechanical testing at temperatures reaching 1556 K inside a transmission electron microscope for in situ investigation with atomic-resolution. With this unique technique, we first uncovered that tungsten fractures at 973 K in a ductile manner via a strain-induced multi-step body-centered cubic (BCC)-to-face-centered cubic (FCC) transformation and dislocation activities within the strain-induced FCC phase. Both events reduce the stress concentration at the crack tip and retard crack propagation. Our research provides an approach for timely and atomic-resolved high-temperature mechanical investigation of materials at high-temperatures., High-temperature deformation of materials is challenging to evaluate. Here the authors develop a novel device that allows atomic resolved in situ high temperature mechanical tests inside a transmission electron microscope and reveal ductile fracture of a single crystal tungsten deformed at 973 K.

To characterize ticks in cattle from Guangdong Province and Guangxi Zhuang Nationality Autonomous Region, Southern China, 783 cattle in four localities were examined. Among them, 232 (29.63%) cattle were positive for tick infection. A total of 503 ticks collected in these cattle were further investigated. Two Rhipicephalus species, namely R. microplus and R. sanguineus, were firstly identified by morphological features. Thereinto, R. microplus is the prevalent species in cattle in southern China, with high prevalent in summer and autumn annually. Mixed infection of R. microplus and R. sanguineus was just found in yellow cattle. To further confirm the morphological identification of these cattle-origin ticks, a phylogeographic analysis inferred from the sequences of the ribosomal internal transcribed spacer-2 (ITS-2) was performed, and R. microplus and R. sanguineus were identified. However, the morphological taxonomy of R. microplus has been challenged in recent years. The mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (cox1) marker was then used to provide higher resolution of R. mircoplus complex. The re-constructed cox1 phylogenetic tree further identified these R. mircoplus tick samples as R. microplus Clade A. These findings illustrated the prevalence and characterization of cattle-origin ticks in Southern China for the first time, and provided base-line information for further control of tick and tick-borne disease in these areas.

Previous molecular simulations and experiments suggest that grain boundaries (GBs) serve as dislocation sources in nanocrystalline metals. Although a large number of studies have been carried out, direct experimental evidence of dislocation nucleation from GBs has rarely been achieved. In this work, we performed in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) observations for a Pt nanocrystalline film with an average grain size of ~10 nm during tensile deformation. This study revealed direct evidence of dislocation nucleation at the GBs at the atomic scale. This is different from the common hypothesis predicted by molecular dynamic simulations that only partial dislocations are emitted from GBs in small-grained structures.

Routing mechanism is a key issue in Wireless Sensor Networks, and rumor routing protocol can reduce energy consumption and extend the lifecycle of network with unicast mechanism. However, in Rumor Routing protocol, the transmission path of event message is not optimal and random forwarding mechanism will lead to routing loop. In this paper, we investigate Rumor Routing protocol, and propose an improved rumor routing protocol based on optimized intersection angle theory. Localization technology and vector intersection angle mechanism are brought into the new protocol as two metrics of route selection. The new mechanism can reduce the energy consumption of data transmission. We compare Rumor Routing protocol, GPSR protocol, a Rumor Routing-based protocol, and the improved protocol. Results of simulation experiments indicate that the improved routing protocol can reduce the energy consumption of routing path and extend the lifecycle of network.

Asphalt mixture uniformity has an important impact on the long-term performance of pavement. This paper introduces the asphalt mixture uniformity evaluation method based on digital image processing technology, lists a variety of evaluation indicators based on different evaluation ideas, and finally points out the advantages of this method compared with the traditional method and new detection technology, as well as the shortcomings of the current method.

In this article, the Ni-46.1Al-7.8Mo (at.%) alloy was directionally solidified at different growth rates ranging from 15 μm/s to 1000 μm/s under a constant temperature gradient (334 K/cm). The dependence of microstructural length scales on the growth rate was investigated. The results show that, with the growth rate increasing, the primary dendritic arm spacings (PDAS) and secondary dendritic arm spacings (SDAS) decreased. There exists a large distribution range in PDAS under directional solidification conditions at a constant temperature gradient. The average PDAS and SDAS as a function of growth rate can be given as λ1 = 848.8967 V−0.4509 and λ2 = 64.2196 V−0.4140, respectively. In addition, a comparison of our results with the current theoretical models and previous experimental results has also been made.

Based on the gas-liquid phase equilibrium and multi-component diffusion theory, an analytical model for predicting acid dew point temperature and vapour condensation characteristics of flue gas was developed. The effects of components content, ash particle radius, wall temperature, coal-burned type and excess air ratio have been investigated. The results indicated that the acid dew point temperature and vapour condensation rate will increase with both water and sulfuric acid vapour contents increase. Vapours are not prone to condense on the ash particles when the particle radius is less than the corresponding critical condensing radius. The vapour condensation characteristics can be divided into two different stages with the wall temperature varies. The particle radius has a significant influence on the vapour condensation characteristics in the higher temperature stage. The acid dew point temperatures present significant differences for different coal-burned types, and the water vapour condensation rate is more sensitive to excess air ratio compared with the acid condensation rate.

Survival classification on time-to-event clinical data is useful in clinical research. Survival analysis techniques are widely used to predict the survival probability over time that a particular event occurs. It is crucial to identify the risk of experiencing the event for patients, which can be achieved by classifying risk groups of patients. However, the existing classification methods, such as logistic regression, support vector machines and artificial neural network, cannot be applied to clinical data directly, due to the context of censoring. To address this problem, we propose a new two-tied labeling approach for reformulating the clinical data and make classifiers available to process such data. We perform such labeling on real-life clinical data and the good performances achieved by the classification methods reveal the great promise of our approach for risk group classification.

A series of stoichiometric NiAl alloys contain four different concentrations of Mo (7.8, 9, 13, 16 at.%) were directionally solidified in the Bridgman-type directional solidification furnace for four different growth rates (V = 1.5–6 μm/s) in a constant temperature gradient (G = 334 K/cm). the microstructures of the alloys produced with the different growth rates at a constant temperature gradient tended to form fully fibrous structures. The fiber spacings λ were measured from transverse section of the specimen. The variation of λ with respect to growth rate (V) and composition (C 0) were determined by linear regression analysis. It has been found that λ decreases with the increasing values of V and C 0. The results are compared with theoretical models and previous experimental published data.

In this work, we designed a MEMS device which allows simultaneous direct measurement of mechanical properties during deformation under external stress and characterization of the evolution of microstructure of nanomaterials within a transmission electron microscope. This MEMS device makes it easy to establish the correlation between microstructure and mechanical properties of nanomaterials. The device uses piezoresistive sensors to qualitatively measure the force and displacement of nanomaterials, e.g., in wire and thin plate forms. The device has a theoretical displacement resolution of 0.19 nm and a force resolution of 2.1 μN. The device has a theoretical displacement range limit of 2.74 μm and a load range limit of 27.75 mN.

This article proposes a type of proportional navigation law design of plane-symmetrical vehicle with terminal attack angle constraint for over target flight. Firstly, the line of sight rotating rate and the velocity rotating rate model of the vehicle are expressed. Then, the attitude of the vehicle is constructed by the acceleration vector requirement of proportional navigation law. Accordingly, the guidance command uncertain issue can be avoided for plane-symmetrical vehicle over target flight. It guarantees high precision to hit the target. The effect and efficiency of the guidance law are shown by simulations of characteristic trajectories.

Hexokinase (HK) is one of the key enzymes in the glycolytic pathway that catalyzes the phosphorylation of glucose. In the present study, we cloned the HK gene from the coccidian Eimeria tenella (EtHK), expressed EtHK as a His-tagged fusion protein, and characterized its primary biochemical features. Mutagenesis confirmed that residues S159, N216, and D217 are essential or important to the EtHK catalytic activity. EtHK exhibited high affinity for D-glucose (Km = 0.67 to 0.79 mM), but was also able to utilize 2-deoxy-D-glucose (Km = 5.66 mM), D-fructose (Km = 13.76 mM), and D-mannose (Km = 25.41 mM). We also observed that quercetin and mangiferin could inhibit the EtHK enzyme activity (IC50 values = 6.52 and 85.82 μM, respectively). Among the two inhibitors, mangiferin also inhibited the growth of E. tenella in vitro (MIC50 = 0.12 μM). These observations suggest that EtHK may be explored as potential drug target, and mangiferin and its analogs may be explored for developing anti-coccidial therapeutics.

In this work, we designed a micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) device that allows simultaneous direct measurement of mechanical properties during deformation under external stress and characterization of the evolution of nanomaterial microstructure within a transmission electron microscope. This MEMS device makes it easy to establish the correlation between microstructure and mechanical properties of nanomaterials. The device uses piezoresistive sensors to measure the force and displacement of nanomaterials qualitatively, e.g., in wire and thin plate forms. The device has a theoretical displacement resolution of 0.19 nm and a force resolution of 2.1 μN. The device has a theoretical displacement range limit of 5.47 μm and a load range limit of 55.0 mN.

A pulsed method for impedance spectroscopy measurement, different from the traditional swept frequency methods, is presented. A string of square-wave pulses is digitally generated as the excitation signal to the sensing electrodes. A pulsed measurement system is described. A sample-collecting method for sampling the instantaneous response signals is implemented based on a field programmable gate arrays chip. The sampled data is further processed to obtain the impedance spectrum. Experiments are carried out for the measurement of electrical impedance spectroscopy of the demo electric circuits in order to inspect the feasibility of the pulsed measurement system. The preliminary experimental results indicate that the pulsed measurement system can effectively extract the electrical impedance spectroscopy information of the object detected. The proposed approach is feasible for evaluating the electrical impedance spectroscopy of the object detected.

The edge detection for images based on traditional wavelet analysis has the disadvantage of not being sensitive to direction properties, so aimed at the problem the article makes some improvement and puts forward a new kind of wavelet transform used for image edge detection. Compared with the detection based on Canny operator, it can be concluded that the new kind of edge detection based on wavelet transform can obtain complete image edge as well as accurate positioning and can reserve better detail information.

Anterior maxillary segmental distraction (AMSD) is an effective surgical procedure in the treatment of maxillary hypoplasia secondary to cleft lip and palate. Its unique advantage of preserving velopharyngeal function makes this procedure widely applied. In this study, the application of AMSD was described and its long-term stability was explored. Eight patients with severe maxillary hypoplasia secondary to CLP were included in this study. They were treated with AMSD using rigid external distraction (RED) device. Cephalometric analysis was performed twice at three time points for evaluation: before surgery (T1), after distraction (T2), and 2 years after treatment (T3). One-way analysis of variance was used to assess the differences statistically. All the distractions completed smoothly, and maxilla was distracted efficiently. The value of SNA, NA-FH, Ptm-A, U1-PP, overjet and PP (ANS-PNS) increased significantly after the AMSD procedure (P < 0.05), with the mean overjet increased by 14.28 mm. However, comparison of cephalometric analysis between T2 and T3 showed no significant difference (P > 0.05). Changes of palatopharyngeal depth and soft palatal length were insignificant. AMSD with RED device provided an effective way to correct maxillary hypoplasia secondary to CLP, extended the palatal and arch length, avoided damage on velopharyngeal closure function and reduced the relapse rate. It is a promising and valuable technique in this potentially complicated procedure.