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Abstract Condensed matter physics has often provided a platform for investigating the interplay between particles and fields in cases that have not been observed in high-energy physics. Here, using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we provide an example of this by visualizing the electronic structure of a noncentrosymmetric magnetic Weyl semimetal candidate NdAlSi in both the paramagnetic and ferrimagnetic states. We observe surface Fermi arcs and bulk Weyl fermion dispersion as well as the emergence of new Weyl fermions in the ferrimagnetic state. Our results establish NdAlSi as a magnetic Weyl semimetal and provide an experimental observation of ferrimagnetic regulation of Weyl fermions in condensed matter.

Flexible sensors are prone to the problems of slow recovery rate and large residual strain in practical use. In this paper, a polyurethane functional composite with a gradient change in elastic modulus is proposed as a flexible sensor to meet the recovery rate and residual strain without affecting the motion. Different hard and soft segment ratios are used to synthesize a gradient polyurethane structure. The conductive percolation threshold was obtained between 45 wt% and 50 wt% of flake silver powder. Both gradient polyurethane and gradient polyurethane composites demonstrated that gradient materials can increase the recovery rate and reduce residual strain. The gradient polyurethane composites had a tensile strength of 3.26 MPa, an elastic modulus of 2.58 MPa, an elongation at break of 245%, a sensitivity coefficient of 1.20 at 0–25% deformation, a sensitivity coefficient of 11.38 at 25–75% deformation, a rate of recovery of 1.95 s at a time, and a resistance to fatigue (over 1000 cycles at a fixed strain of 20% showed a stable electrical response). The sensing performance under different cyclic strain frequencies was also investigated. The process has practical applications in the field of wearable skin motion and health monitoring.

Zinc-ion batteries are promising candidates for large-scale energy storage. The side reactions of the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and zinc dendrite growth are major challenges for developing high-performance zinc-ion batteries. In this paper, a supramolecular gel electrolyte (BLO-ILZE) was self-assembled in an ionic liquid (EMIMBF4) with zinc tetrafluoroborate (Zn(BF4)2) on the separator in situ to obtain a gel electrolyte used in zinc-ion batteries. BLO-ILZE is demonstrated to significantly enhance conductivity over a broad temperature range between −70 and 100 °C. Interestingly, through testing and fitting, it is found that the supramolecular gel electrolyte satisfies the liquid state law over a wide temperature range, and even achieves high conductivity (2.12 mS cm−1) at −40 °C. It is equivalent to the conductivity of aqueous zinc-ion batteries (ZnSO4/H2O) at −10 °C, which is 2.33 mS cm−1. Moreover, the supramolecular gel electrolyte can effectively inhibit the HER, thus exhibiting a longer lifetime in Zn/Zn cells for 3470 h at 1 mA cm−2 compared to the aqueous zinc-ion batteries with the Zn(BF4)2 aqueous electrolyte (400 h at 1 mA cm−2). The assembled V2O5/BLO-ILZE/Zn full cells also showed cycling performance, with 5000 cycles at 0.5 mA g−1 at room temperature, a capacity of 98%, and a coulombic efficiency of about 100%.

Background: Similar to the high-fat diet (HFD), the high-glycemic diet (HGD) contributes to the development and progression of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). However, the effect of HGD on gastrointestinal motility in T2DM and its u nderlying mechanisms remain unclear. Methods: Thirty C57BL/6J mice were randomly designated into the normal-feeding diet (NFD) group, HFD group, and HGD group. The plasma glucose, plasma insulin, and gastrointestinal motility were examined. Meanwhile, the tension of isolated colonic smooth muscle rings was calculated, and the gut microbiota was analyzed by 16s rDNA high-throughput sequencing. Result: After 16 weeks of HGD feeding, obesity, hyperglycemia, insulin resistance, and constipation were observed in HGD mice. Autonomic contraction frequency of the colonic neuromuscular system and electrical field stimulation-induced contractions were reduced in HGD mice. On the contrary, neuronal nitric oxide synthase activity and neuromuscular relaxation were found to be enhanced. Finally, gut microbiota analysis revealed that Rhodospirillaceae abundance significantly increased at the family level in HGD mice. At the genus level, the abundance of Insolitispirillum increased remarkably, whereas Turicibacter abundance decreased significantly in HGD mice. Conclusion: HGD induced constipation in obese diabetic mice, which we speculated that it may be related to neuromuscular dysmotility and intestinal microbiota dysbiosis.

Abstract Extracellular vesicles (EVs) and their clinical applications have been recognized as one of the most fast‐growing and promising fields. Numerous groups including us have expressed their concerns on the idea of isolating “pure” EVs for different purposes, as there are no specific markers to date that can examine the exact EV purity. Typically, major instrument need and EV yielding loss are primary compensations of getting EVs with higher purity. As such, especially in biomarker‐based clinical tests, ceaseless efforts for obtaining more pure EV are worth of discussion. We here propose alternative philosophy to tone down the importance of purity, but to emphasize the significance in clinical laboratory medicine to measure EVs obtained by well‐controlled isolation methods. As a result, EVs are enriched to the adequate degree to meet certain clinical applications such as disease diagnosis and/or prognosis. In this review, we will justify the adequate enrichment rationale with advances of EV definitions, markers and contaminants, EV isolation methods, as well as the conclusions acquired from clinical research using less pure but ease‐to‐operate EV isolation methods.

COVID-19 and the pandemic-induced lockdowns juxtaposed against the surge in the number of college graduates have made the dilemma of “fierce competition and difficult employment” more real. The employment of college students has become a topic of serious concern in society. This study aimed to develop a Future Employability Scale for Chinese college students and evaluate its reliability and validity. Based on the analysis of the literature, the study developed the initial measurement scale of the college students’ future employability and calibrated the initial measurement and question volume based on experts’ feedback. First, the students’ group was measured, and data from 389 university students were collected and analyzed. Second, the data collection and verification factor analysis of 387 university students were collected and verified, and the internal consistency reliability, split-half reliability, and validity of the scale were evaluated. Further, 68 college students were selected to evaluate their test-retest reliability after an interval of one month. The Future Employability Scale of college students had 28 items covering four dimensions: knowledge skill, personality quality, interpersonal network, and career development. The reliability test found that the total scale of the Future Employability Scale and the internal consistency reliability, split-half reliability, and retest reliability of each dimension were good, and the validity test suggested that the scale had good content validity, structural validity, and calibration correlation validity. With a clear structure, good reliability, and validity, the Future Employability Scale is a good tool to measure the future employability of college students.

Background and Purpose: Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is usually associated with chronic gastrointestinal disorders. Its most common subtype is accompanied with diarrhea (IBS-D). The enteric nervous system (ENS) modulates major gastrointestinal motility and functions whose aberration may induce IBS-D. The enteric neurons are susceptible to long-term neurotransmitter level alterations. The patchouli alcohol (PA), extracted from Pogostemonis Herba, has been reported to regulate neurotransmitter release in the ENS, while its effectiveness against IBS-D and the underlying mechanism remain unknown.Experimental Approach: In this study, we established an IBS-D model in rats through chronic restraint stress. We administered the rats with 5, 10, and 20 mg/kg of PA for intestinal and visceral examinations. The longitudinal muscle myenteric plexus (LMMP) neurons were further immunohistochemically stained for quantitative, morphological, and neurotransmitters analyses.Key Results: We found that PA decreased visceral sensitivity, diarrhea symptoms and intestinal transit in the IBS-D rats. Meanwhile, 10 and 20 mg/kg of PA significantly reduced the proportion of excitatory LMMP neurons in the distal colon, decreased the number of acetylcholine (Ach)- and substance P (SP)-positive neurons in the distal colon and restored the levels of Ach and SP in the IBS-D rats.Conclusion and Implications: These findings indicated that PA modulated LMMP excitatory neuron activities, improved intestinal motility and alleviated IBS-induced diarrheal symptoms, suggesting the potential therapeutic efficacy of PA against IBS-D.

With the growing demands of human beings, sanitary landfill, along with the increase in landfill depth and leachate water pressure, has put forward new and higher requirements for the impermeable layer. In particular, it is required to have a certain adsorption capacity of harmful substances from the perspective of environmental protection. Hence, the impermeability of polymer bentonite–sand mixtures (PBTS) at different water pressure and the adsorption properties of polymer bentonite (PBT) on contaminants were investigated through the modification of PBT using betaine compounded with sodium polyacrylate (SPA). It was found that the composite modification of betaine and SPA could reduce the average particle size of PBT dispersed in water (reduced to 106 nm from 201 nm) and enhance the swelling properties. As the content of SPA increased, the hydraulic conductivity of PBTS system decreases and the permeability resistance improves, while the resistance to external water pressure increases. It is proposed a concept of the potential of osmotic pressure in a constrained space to explain the impermeability mechanism of PBTS. The potential of osmotic pressure obtained by linear extrapolation of the trendline of colloidal osmotic pressure versus mass content of PBT could represent the external water pressure that the PBT resist. Additionally, the PBT also has a high adsorption capacity for both organic pollutants and heavy metal ions. The adsorption rate of PBT was up to 99.36% for phenol; up to 99.9% for methylene blue; and 99.89%, 99.9%, and 95.7% for low concentrations of Pb2+, Cd2+, and Hg+, respectively. This work is expected to provide strong technical support for the future development in the field of impermeability and removal of hazardous substances (organic and heavy metals).

Here, we present a high repetition rate, narrow bandwidth, extreme ultraviolet photon source for time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. The narrow bandwidth pulses Δ E = 9 , 14 , and 18 meV for photon energies h ν = 10.8 , 18.1 , and 25.3 eV are generated through high harmonic generation using ultra-violet drive pulses with relatively long pulse lengths (461 fs). The high harmonic generation setup employs an annular drive beam in tight focusing geometry at a repetition rate of 250 kHz. Photon energy selection is provided by a series of selectable multilayer bandpass mirrors and thin film filters, thus avoiding any time broadening introduced by single grating monochromators. A two stage optical-parametric amplifier provides

Basket-Sensitive Item Recommendation (BSIR) is a challenging task that aims to recommend an item to add to the current basket given a user’s historical behaviors. The recommended item is supposed to be relevant to the items in current basket. Previous works mainly produce a recommendation based on user’s current basket, ignoring the inherent preference released by user’s long-term behaviors and failing to accurately distinguish the item importance in the basket for detecting user intent. To tackle the above issues, we propose a hybrid model, i.e., Hybrid-Preference Neural Model (HPNM), where a user’s inherent preference is recognized by modeling the historical sequential baskets and the recent preference is identified by focusing on the current basket. In detail, we apply an attention mechanism for distinguishing the importance of items in a basket to generate an accurate basket representation. GRU is utilized for modeling the basket-level sequential information to obtain user’s long-term preference and the representation of the current session is regarded as user’s short-term preference. We evaluate the performance of our proposals against the state-of-the-art baselines in the field of BSIR on two public datasets, i.e., TaFeng and Foursquare. The experimental results show that HPNM can achieve obvious improvements against the baselines in terms of HLU and Recall. In addition, we find HPNM with an attention mechanism can lead to a larger improvement against the baseline for item recommendation in terms of HLU and Recall on testing baskets with relatively fewer items.

The existence of antibiotics in the environment can trigger a number of issues by fostering the widespread development of antimicrobial resistance. Currently, the most popular techniques for removing antibiotic pollutants from water include physical adsorption, flocculation, and chemical oxidation, however, these processes usually leave a significant quantity of chemical reagents and polymer electrolytes in the water, which can lead to difficulty post-treating unmanageable deposits. Furthermore, though cost-effectiveness, efficiency, reaction conditions, and nontoxicity during the degradation of antibiotics are hurdles to overcome, a variety of photocatalysts can be used to degrade pollutant residuals, allowing for a number of potential solutions to these issues. Thus, the urgent need for effective and rapid processes for photocatalytic degradation leads to an increased interest in finding more sustainable catalysts for antibiotic degradation. In this review, we provide an overview of the removal of pharmaceutical antibiotics through photocatalysis, and detail recent progress using different nanostructure-based photocatalysts. We also review the possible sources of antibiotic pollutants released through the ecological chain and the consequences and damages caused by antibiotics in wastewater on the environment and human health. The fundamental dynamic processes of nanomaterials and the degradation mechanisms of antibiotics are then discussed, and recent studies regarding different photocatalytic materials for the degradation of some typical and commonly used antibiotics are comprehensively summarized. Finally, major challenges and future opportunities for the photocatalytic degradation of commonly used antibiotics are highlighted.

Chloride ions in the seaside environment can corrode the steel reinforcement in concrete, which greatly endangers the safety of seaside structures. As an excellent adsorption material, hydrogel is widely used in the field of water treatment but is rarely used in cementitious materials. In this study, a polyacrylamide–chitosan hydrogel (PAMC) was prepared with N,N-methylenebisacrylamide as the cross-linking agent and acrylamide as the monomer. The prepared PAMC gel could effectively adsorb chloride ions in simulated seawater and simulated sea sand environments, and the maximum adsorption capacity of chloride ions by PAMC-1 (prepared from 2.5 g acrylamide and 1% content of N,N-methylenebisacrylamide relative to acrylamide) gels in simulated seawater was 55.53 mg/g. The adsorption behavior of the PAMC gels in solution fit the Langmuir isotherm model. The composition and morphology of the PAMC gel were characterized, and the responsiveness of the PAMC gel to the environment was studied. The results showed that the PAMC gels adsorbed better in alkaline environments and thus could be used in alkaline cement-based environments. The mortar sample containing the PAMC-1 gel had higher resistance to chloride ion penetration, and the chloride ion content at 7.5–10mm from the surface of the sample cured for 28 days was reduced by 41.4% compared to the samples without the gel.

Most ECDs are coated with an electrochromic material on the transparent conductive oxide (TCO) substrate. A novel electrochromic device (ECD), having a variable optical performance, was prepared by using tungsten foil as a substrate in this study. It was found that the WO3 discoloration layer, having a monoclinic phase crystalline structure made of 600 °C calcined, had optimum charge transmission performance with PADA gel polymer electrolyte. Ionic conductivity of PADA gel polymer electrolyte was 2.3 × 10−3 S cm−1 at −20 °C, and it was possible to help Li+ to implement embedding and extraction from WO3 even in low-temperature conditions. The colored time (tc) and the bleached time (tb) of the electrochromic device were 15 s and 26 s, and it showed yellowish-brown in the colored state and navy blue in the bleached state. The ECD (WO3-600) exhibited good cycle stability reach at least 150 times.

Session-based recommendation aims to model a user’s intent and predict an item that the user may interact with in the next step based on an ongoing session. Existing session-based recommender systems mainly aim to model the sequential signals based on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) structures or the item transition relations between items with Graph Neural Network (GNN) based frameworks to identify a user’s intent for recommendation. However, in real scenarios, there may be strong sequential signals existing in users’ adjacent behaviors or multi-step transition relations among different items. Thus, either RNN- or GNN-based methods can only capture limited information for modeling complex user behavior patterns. RNNs pay attention to the sequential relations among consecutive items, while GNNs focus on structural information, i.e., how to enrich the item embedding with its adjacent items. In this paper, we propose a Collaborative Co-attention Network for Session-based Recommendation (CCN-SR) to incorporate both sequential and structural information, as well as capture the co-relations between them for obtaining an accurate session representation. To be specific, we first model the ongoing session with an RNN structure to capture the sequential information among items. Meanwhile, we also construct a session graph to learn the item representations with a GNN structure. Then, we design a co-attention network upon these two structures to capture the mutual information between them. The designed co-attention network can enrich the representation of each node in the session with both sequential and structural information, and thus generate a more comprehensive representation for each session. Extensive experiments are conducted on two public e-commerce datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baseline model for session based recommendation in terms of both Recall and MRR. We also investigate different combination strategies and the experimental results verify the effectiveness of our proposed co-attention mechanism. Besides, our CCN-SR model achieves better performance than baseline models with different session lengths.

Session-based recommendation (SBRS) aims to make recommendations for users merely based on the ongoing session. Existing GNN-based methods achieve satisfactory performance by exploiting the pair-wise item transition pattern; however, they ignore the temporal evolution of the session graphs over different time-steps. Moreover, the widely applied cross-entropy loss with softmax in SBRS faces the serious overfitting problem. To deal with the above issues, we propose dynamic graph learning for session-based recommendation (DGL-SR). Specifically, we design a dynamic graph neural network (DGNN) to simultaneously take the graph structural information and the temporal dynamics into consideration for learning the dynamic item representations. Moreover, we propose a corrective margin softmax (CMS) to prevent overfitting in the model optimization by correcting the gradient of the negative samples. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets, that is, Diginetica and Gowalla, and the experimental results show the superiority of DGL-SR over the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of Recall@20 and MRR@20, especially on hitting the target item in the recommendation list.

An ionic liquid-based ionically cross-linked gel polymer electrolyte (GPE-ILs) was successfully synthesized using acrylic acid, 2-diethylaminoethyl methacrylate, methyl methacrylate, and ionic liquids. Electrochromic devices (ECDs) with an architecture of glass/FTO/WO3/GPE-ILs/FTO/glass were fabricated by a laminating technology. The devices showed performances of large optical modulation of 49.9% at 650 nm, short switching times with the coloration time (tc) of 7 s and the bleaching time (tb) of 4 s, high coloration efficiency of 96.2 cm2 C−1, and cycling stability of 200 cycles. The GPE-ILs exhibits high ionic conductivity, superior thermal stability and good self-healing ability. GPE-ILs demonstrates an ionic conductivity of 3.19 × 10−3 S cm−1 at 25 °C and the same ions migration behaviors with most widely used liquid electrolyte between −10 and 80 °C maintains more than 80% of its tensile strength after self-healing and received only 5% weight loss at 300 °C.

At present, living cells are widely used in cell transplantation and tissue engineering. Many efforts have been made aiming towards the use of a large number of living cells with high activity and integrated functionality. Currently, cryopreservation has become well-established and is effective for the long-term storage of cells. However, it is still a major challenge to inhibit cell damage, such as from solution injury, ice injury, recrystallization and osmotic injury during the thawing process, and the cytotoxicity of cryoprotectants. Hence, this review focused on different novel gel cryopreservation systems. Natural polymer hydrogel cryopreservation, the synthetic polymer hydrogel cryopreservation system and the supramolecular hydrogel cryopreservation system were presented, respectively. Due to the unique three-dimensional network structure of the hydrogel, these hydrogel cryopreservation systems have the advantages of excellent biocompatibility for natural polymer hydrogel cryopreservation systems, designability for synthetic polymer hydrogel cryopreservation systems, and versatility for supramolecular hydrogel cryopreservation systems. To some extent, the different hydrogel cryopreservation methods can confine ice crystal growth and decrease the change rates of osmotic shock in cell encapsulation systems. It is notable that the cryopreservation of complex cells and tissues is demanded in future clinical research and therapy, and depends on the linkage of different methods.

BACKGROUND:Oxygen consumption reflects multiple processes in pancreatic islets including mechanisms contributing to insulin secretion, oxidative stress and viability, providing an important readout in studies of islet function, islet viability and drug testing. Due to the scarcity, heterogeneity, and intrinsic kinetic properties of individual islets, it would be of great benefit to detect oxygen consumption by single islets. We present a novel method we have developed to image oxygen in single islets. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:Using a microfluidics system, individual islets and a fluorescent oxygen-sensitive dye were encased within a thin alginate polymer layer. Insulin secretion by the encapsulated islets was normal. Fluorescent signal from the encased dye, detected using a standard inverted fluorescence microscope and digital camera, was stable and proportional to the amount of oxygen in the media. When integrated into a perifusion system, the sensing system detected changes in response to metabolic substrates, mitochondrial poisons, and induced-oscillations. Glucose responses averaged 30.1±7.1% of the response to a metabolic inhibitor (cyanide), increases were observed in all cases (n = 6), and the system was able to resolve changes in oxygen consumption that had a period greater than 0.5 minutes. The sensing system operated similarly from 2-48 hours following encapsulation, and viability and function of the islets were not significantly affected by the encapsulation process. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE:An oxygen-dependent dye situated around and within a pancreatic islet encapsulated by a thin layer of alginate was sensitive to changes in oxygen consumption, and was not harmful to the function or viability of islets over the course of two days. The microcapsule-based sensing method is particularly suited to assessing the effects of compounds (dose responses and time courses) and chronic changes occurring over the course of days. The approach should be applicable to other cell types and dyes sensitive to other biologically important molecules.

Background and Purpose: Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is usually associated with chronic gastrointestinal disorders. Its most common subtype is accompanied with diarrhea (IBS-D). The enteric nervous system (ENS) modulates major gastrointestinal motility and functions whose aberration may induce IBS-D. The enteric neurons are susceptible to long-term neurotransmitter level alterations. The patchouli alcohol (PA), extracted from Pogostemonis Herba, has been reported to regulate neurotransmitter release in the ENS, while its effectiveness against IBS-D and the underlying mechanism remain unknown. Experimental Approach: In this study, we established an IBS-D model in rats through chronic restraint stress. We administered the rats with 5, 10, and 20 mg/kg of PA for intestinal and visceral examinations. The longitudinal muscle myenteric plexus (LMMP) neurons were further immunohistochemically stained for quantitative, morphological, and neurotransmitters analyses. Key Results: We found that PA decreased visceral sensitivity, diarrhea symptoms and intestinal transit in the IBS-D rats. Meanwhile, 10 and 20 mg/kg of PA significantly reduced the proportion of excitatory LMMP neurons in the distal colon, decreased the number of acetylcholine (Ach)- and substance P (SP)-positive neurons in the distal colon and restored the levels of Ach and SP in the IBS-D rats. Conclusion and Implications: These findings indicated that PA modulated LMMP excitatory neuron activities, improved intestinal motility and alleviated IBS-induced diarrheal symptoms, suggesting the potential therapeutic efficacy of PA against IBS-D. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between data analytics techniques and financial statement audits. We analyze how specific data analytics techniques can be applied to financial statement audits and integrate related studies on data analytics in auditing. We provide a comprehensive analysis of how specific data analytics is associated with audit quality and/or auditor’s judgment performance. Research implications and new insights into future research opportunities are accordingly derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Session-based recommendation (SBR), which mainly relies on a user’s limited interactions with items to generate recommendations, is a widely investigated task. Existing methods often apply RNNs or GNNs to model user’s sequential behavior or transition relationship between items to capture her current preference. For training such models, the supervision signals are merely generated from the sequential interactions inside a session, neglecting the correlations of different sessions, which we argue can provide additional supervisions for learning the item representations. Moreover, previous methods mainly adopt the cross-entropy loss for training, where the user’s ground truth preference distribution towards items is regarded as a one-hot vector of the target item, easily making the network over-confident and leading to a serious overfitting problem. Thus, in this article, we propose a Collaborative Graph Learning (CGL) approach for session-based recommendation. CGL first applies the Gated Graph Neural Networks (GGNNs) to learn item embeddings and then is trained by considering both the main supervision as well as the self-supervision signals simultaneously. The main supervisions are produced by the sequential order while the self-supervisions are derived from the global graph constructed by all sessions. In addition, to prevent overfitting, we propose a Target-aware Label Confusion (TLC) learning method in the main supervised component. Extensive experiments are conducted on three publicly available datasets, i.e., Retailrocket, Diginetica, and Gowalla. The experimental results show that CGL can outperform the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of Recall and MRR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Session-based recommendation aims to generate recommendations merely based on the ongoing session, which is a challenging task. Previous methods mainly focus on modeling the sequential signals or the transition relations between items in the current session using RNNs or GNNs to identify user’s intent for recommendation. Such models generally ignore the dynamic connections between the local and global item transition patterns, although the global information is taken into consideration by exploiting the global-level pair-wise item transitions. Moreover, existing methods that mainly adopt the crossentropy loss with softmax generally face a serious over-fitting problem, harming the recommendation accuracy. Thus, in this article, we propose a Graph Co-Attentive Recommendation Machine (GCARM) for session-based recommendation. In detail, we first design a Graph Co-Attention Network (GCAT) to consider the dynamic correlations between the local and global neighbors of each node during the information propagation. Then, the item-level dynamic connections between the output of the local and global graphs are modeled to generate the final item representations. After that, we produce the prediction scores and design a Max Cross-Entropy (MCE) loss to prevent over-fitting. Extensive experiments are conducted on three benchmark datasets, i.e., Diginetica, Gowalla, and Yoochoose. The experimental results show that GCARM can achieve the state-of-the-art performance in terms of Recall and MRR, especially on boosting the ranking of the target item. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Purpose To report novel pathogenic variants of X-linked genes in five Chinese families with early-onset high myopia (eoHM) by using whole-exome sequencing and analyzing the phenotypic features. Methods 5 probands with X-linked recessive related eoHM were collected in Ningxia Eye Hospital from January 2021 to June 2022. The probands and their family members received comprehensive ophthalmic examinations,and DNA was abstracted from patients and family members. Whole-exome sequencing was performed on probands to screen the causative variants, and all suspected pathogenic variants were determined by Sanger sequencing and co-segregation analysis was performed on available family members. The pathogenicity of novel variants was predicted using silico analysis and evaluated according to ACMG guidelines. RT-qPCR was used to detect differences in the relative mRNAs expression of candidate gene in mRNAs available with the proband and family members in the pedigree 2. The relationship between genetic variants and clinical features was analyzed. Results All probands were male, and all pedigrees conformed to an X-linked recessive inheritance pattern. They were diagnosed with high myopia at their first visits between 4 and 7 years old. Spherical equivalent ranged between − 6.00D and − 11.00D.The five novel hemizygous variants were found in the probands, containing frameshift deletion variant c.797_801del (p.Val266Alafs*75) of OPN1LW gene in the pedigree 1, nonsense variant c.513G > A (p.Trp171Ter)of RP2 gene in the pedigree 2, missense variant c.98G > T (p.Cys33Phe) of GPR143 gene in the pedigree 3, frameshift deletion variant c.1876_1877del (p.Met626Valfs*22) of FRMD7 gene in the pedigree 4 and inframe deletion variant c.670_ 675del (p.Glu192_ Glu193del) of HMGB3 gene in the pedigree 5. All variants were classified as pathogenic or likely pathogenic by the interpretation principles of HGMD sequence variants and ACMG guidelines. In family 2, RT-qPCR showed that the mRNA expression of RP2 gene was lower in the proband than in other normal family members, indicating that such variant caused an effect on gene function at the mRNA expression level. Further clinical examination showed that pedigrees 1, 2, 3, and 4 were diagnosed as X-linked recessive hereditary eye disease with early-onset high myopia, including quiescent cone dysfunction, retinitis pigmentosa, ocular albinism, and idiopathic congenital nystagmus respectively. The pedigree 5 had eoHM in the right eye and ptosis in both eyes. Conclusion In this paper,we are the first to report five novel hemizygous variants in OPN1LW, RP2, GPR143, FRMD7, HMGB3 genes are associated with eoHM. Our study extends the genotypic spectrums for eoHM and better assists ophthalmologists in assessing, diagnosing, and conducting genetic screening for eoHM.

A preliminary version of this article appeared in the proceedings of CIKM 2020 [10]. In this extension, we (1) propose another interest extractor, i.e., dynamic routing, in the implicit interest mining module, and another type of disagreement regularization, i.e., output disagreement regularization, in our interest-aware, diversity promoting loss; (2) investigate the performance of our multi-interest, diversified, sequential recommendation model with different interest extractors in implicit interest mining, i.e., multi-head attention vs. dynamic routing; (3) investigate the performance of multi-interest, diversified, sequential recommendation with various latent interests numbers; (4) explore the influence of the parameter λ on the performance of multi-interest, diversified, sequential recommendation; (5) investigate the performance of multiinterest, diversified, sequential recommendation with different types of disagreement regularization; (6) investigate the impact of maximum entropy regularization on the performance of multi-interest, diversified, sequential recommendation; (7) provide a case study to show the recommendations generated by multi-interest, diversified, sequential recommendation; (8) analyze the computational complexity of the baseline model as well as our proposal; and (9) survey more related work and conduct a more detailed analysis of the approach and experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To investigate pathogenic variants in six families with cone–rod dystrophy (CORD) presenting various inheritance patterns by using whole-exome sequencing (WES) and analyzing phenotypic features.Methods: A total of six families with CORD were enrolled in Ningxia Eye Hospital for this study. The probands and their family members received comprehensive ophthalmic examinations, and DNA was abstracted from patients and family members. Whole-exome sequencing was performed on probands to screen the causative variants, and all suspected pathogenic variants were determined via Sanger sequencing. Furthermore, co-segregation analysis was performed on available family members. The pathogenicity of novel variants was predicted using in silico analysis and evaluated according to the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) guidelines.Results: Of the six families, two families were assigned as X-linked recessive (XL), two families were assigned as autosomal recessive (AR), and two families were assigned as autosomal dominant (AD). Pathogenic variants were detected in CACNA1F in two X-linked recessive probands, among which family 1 had a hemizygous frameshift variant c.2201del (p.Val734Glyfs*17) and family 2 had a hemizygous missense variant c.245G>A (p.Arg82Gln). Both probands had high myopia, with fundus tessellation accompanied by abnormalities in the outer structure of the macular area. The homozygous splice variant c.2373 + 5G>T in PROM1 and the homozygous nonsense variant c.604C>T (p.Arg202Ter) in ADAM9 were detected in two autosomal recessive families of the probands. Both probands showed different degrees of atrophy in the macular area, and the lesions showed hypofluorescence changes in autofluorescence. The heterozygous variation in CRX c.682C>T (p.Gln228Ter) was detected in two autosomal dominant families. The onset age of the two probands was late, with better vision and severe macular atrophy. According to ACMG guidelines and the analysis of online in silico tools, all variations were labeled as potentially harmful or pathogenic.Conclusion: Pathogenic variants in CACNA1F, PROM1, ADAM9, and CRX genes were identified in six families affected by the diverse inheritance patterns of CORD. Furthermore, the potential impact of the nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) mechanism on the manifestation of CORD phenotypes was examined and addressed. Simultaneously, the spectrum of pathogenic variants and clinical phenotypes associated with the CORD gene was extended.

We propose a Joint Neural Collaborative Filtering (J-NCF) method for recommender systems. The J-NCF model applies a joint neural network that couples deep feature learning and deep interaction modeling with a rating matrix. Deep feature learning extracts feature representations of users and items with a deep learning architecture based on a user-item rating matrix. Deep interaction modeling captures non-linear user-item interactions with a deep neural network using the feature representations generated by the deep feature learning process as input. J-NCF enables the deep feature learning and deep interaction modeling processes to optimize each other through joint training, which leads to improved recommendation performance. In addition, we design a new loss function for optimization that takes both implicit and explicit feedback, pointwise and pair-wise loss into account. Experiments on several real-world datasets show significant improvements of J-NCF over state-of-the-art methods, with improvements of up to 8.24% on the MovieLens 100K dataset, 10.81% on the MovieLens 1M dataset, and 10.21% on the Amazon Movies dataset in terms of HR@10. NDCG@10 improvements are 12.42%, 14.24%, and 15.06%, respectively. We also conduct experiments to evaluate the scalability and sensitivity of J-NCF. Our experiments show that the J-NCF model has a competitive recommendation performance with inactive users and different degrees of data sparsity when compared to state-of-the-art baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the content of rockery protection was discussed through the analysis of a series of documents such as the convention, declaration, and regulations concerning heritage protection in accordance with the principles of authenticity and integrity. Through the analysis of the influence factors of the rockery and its environment, it is proposed that the rockery protection should strengthen environmental protection on the basis of the protection of the body of a rockery. From the perspectives of structure, skill, materials and function, the contents of the rockery protection and the human settlement environment where the rockery is located, the external environment and internal environment of the rockery space were analyzed, and the contents of the rockery protection were preliminarily proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Purpose To report novel BEST1 variants in six Chinese families with bestrophinopathies of two different inheritance modes and analyze the intrafamilial phenotypic diversity. Method A total of 25 participants including 13 patients and 12 healthy family members from 6 Chinese families with bestrophinopathies were available for genetic and clinical analysis. All of the patients were subjected to comprehensive ophthalmic evaluations and exome sequencing was performed on the probands to detect the causative variants. The pathogenicity of gene variants was predicted using silico analysis and evaluated according to ACMG guidelines. All (likely) pathogenic variants were determined by Sanger sequencing and co‐segregation analyses were performed on available family members. The relevant original literature previously reported was retrieved to explore the relationship between BEST1‐related gene variants and clinical features. Results In the 6 families, 3 families (10 patients) were assigned as autosomal dominant bestrophinopathies (VMD) and 3 families (3 patients) were assigned as Autosomal recessive Bestrophinopathies (ARB). A total of 9 variants on the BEST1 gene were identified, containing 7 missense variants, 1 nonsense variant, and 1 frameshift variant, respectively, of which 3 variants c.88A > G (p.Lys30Glu), c.764G > A (p.Arg255Gln) and c.233dupT (p.Ser79Phefs*153) were novel variants. Three families with ARB were detected with heterozygous variants on the BEST1 gene.2 families (8 patients) with BVMD showed markedly irregular dominant inheritance, and the severity of macular lesions varies greatly among individuals of the same family. Among them, the probands showed typical vitelliform lesions in the macula, while the other six patients had no visible signs of the disease by fundus photography (ophthalmoscopy) and minor lesions could be detected on OCT in two patients, the continuity of the ellipsoidal band was interrupted with the chimeric band. The phenotypes of the patients in the three ARB families ranged from typical/atypical vitelliform lesions to extensive extramacular deposits (peripheral spots). Conclusion This study provided evidence that the phenotype of BVMD manifested irregular dominant inheritance, with patients carrying a pathogenic heterozygous variant of BEST1 to develop obvious intrafamilial phenotypic diversity, and the patients who harbor two pathogenic alleles showed recessive inheritance bestrophinopathies with distinct phenotypic diversity. Our study also emphasized the importance of comprehensive genetic analysis in patients with bestrophinopathies, and in such challenging families with distinct intrafamilial phenotypic diversity, it shall provide novel insights into phenotypic assessments of bestrophinopathies, and contribute to better diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment for these patients.

Query completion approaches assist searchers in formulating queries with few keystrokes when using an information retrieval system to address their information needs, which help users benefit from avoiding spelling mistakes and from producing clear query formulations, etc. Previous work on query completion algorithms returns a ranked list of queries to the users mostly based on the overall observed search popularity of query candidates in the whole query logs. However, the query search popularity could be changed over time, i.e., it's time-aware. Thus, these ranking approaches based on the overall search popularity could not work very well and users may fail to find an acceptable query in the returned list, resulting in a limited search satisfaction. Hence, this paper proposes a Learning-based Personalized Query Ranking approach, i.e., LQR, where the features on the observed and predicted search popularity both in the whole logs and the recent period are exploited. Taking a pair-wise learning scenario, this paper presents a method for generating a ranked list of query candidates, and then reranks the candidates by the similarity to current search context. The experimental results show the proposed approach outperforms the baseline in terms of Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), reporting an average MRR improvement of 7% against the baseline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Angle-of-arrival(AOA) based passive localization is an important enabling technology in tracking systems. Previous work mainly focus on locating the target by making a coordinates estimation, while only a few provide ambiguous area estimation. The latter ones, however, are more applicable in military scenarios, e.g. warship tracking, since ambiguous area contains much more information than coordinates. This paper proposes a novel approach for ambiguous area estimation in AOA based localization. Comparing to existing work, confidence ellipse is used for area estimation instead of rectangle and circle. Theoretic model and parameter setting in practical uses are discussed. We conduct extensive simulations in different settings. Simulation results show that our approach provides a good tradeoff between the accuracy and the confidence for localization. It performs better than the previous work under the same localization condition based on a good performance of the tradeoff between the confidence and accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supramolecular hydrogel microspheres are hydrogel particles formed by the self-assembly of hydrogelators in water, through non-covalent interactions. In this paper, we provide a novel strategy to prepare supramolecular hydrogel microspheres with diameters ranging from 15 to 105 microns by using microfluidics. Since the gelation temperature is ca.64 °C, the aqueous solution containing the hydrogelator was initially set at 70 °C so the liquid mixture can be pumped into the microfluidic device. The hydrogelator solution then pinches off into uniform micron size droplets at the narrow orifice of the microfluidic device. While traveling downstream in the microchannel, the self-assembly process occurs inside the droplets and the droplets solidify into microsphere gels when the temperature drops to ca.64 °C and below. Optical and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) demonstrate that compact, entangled, round, cage-like aggregates of hydrogelator were formed within the supramolecular hydrogel microsphere, in contrast to loose and less compact aggregates within bulk hydrogel. Thermal analysis (DSC) indicates that supramolecular hydrogel microspheres are more thermally stable and can immobilize more water molecules, owing to the compact entangled three-dimensional network structures. This observation is of particular importance for potential drug delivery and biomaterials applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1,3:2,4-di- p-methylbenzylidene sorbitol (MDBS) is a small organic molecule that is capable of inducing self-assembly in a wide variety of organic solvents and of forming organogels. In this paper, we present a novel approach to tune the network architectures of organogels by utilizing geometric confinement while varying the gelator concentration. Self-assembly of MDBS in propylene carbonate (PC) is investigated in a series of microchannels with widths varying from 20 to 80 μm and the gelator concentration varying from 2 to 7 wt %. We demonstrate by optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) that a transition from fibrillar structure to sheaflike spherulite structure occurs when (a) the channel width is increased for fixed gelator concentrations and (b) gelator concentration is increased for fixed channel widths. A phase diagram is built based on these observations. Polarized microscopy and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images are also obtained for organogel under unconfined condition to display the spherulite structures viewed under different length scales. The thermal properties of the organogel are measured by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) to verify the structural difference obtained under confined and unconfined conditions and the structure stability. Our results provide a novel strategy to control the topological structure of self-assembled systems and to modify their thermal properties via geometric confinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  Ionically cross-linked polyampholytic hydrogels were synthesized by redox copolymerization of acrylamide and an ionic complex of (N,N-diethylamino)ethyl methacrylate and acrylic acid (designated as PADA hydrogel). The swelling behavior of the hydrogels in water indicated that a minimal equilibrium swelling ratio is found when the molar ratio of anionic/cationic monomers was 1.55. In NaCl solution, the hydrogels exhibited the typical swelling behavior of conventional polyampholytic gels. Their equilibrium swelling ratios increased with an increase in the NaCl concentration. In solutions of multivalent ions (CaCl2 and trisodium citrate solutions), the equilibrium swelling ratios of the hydrogels increased first and were then followed by a decrease with an increase in salt concentration. Interestingly, an unexpected abrupt swelling phenomenon was observed when the fully swollen hydrogels in salt solution were transmitted to pure water. The unique swelling behavior of PADA hydrogels depends not only on the molar ratio of the anionic/cationic monomers but also on the valency of the ions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A four-point error separation technique integrating three-point roundness and two-point straightness error separations is proposed to measure and reconstruct a cylindrical profile for the accurate evaluation of cylindricity. Four probes mounted onto two sections in the probe carriage target the surface of the cylinder to detect the differential vector of the least-squares centers in two adjacent cross-sectional profiles of the cylinder. The vector of the least-squares center in each cross-sectional profile is extracted by accumulation. The spatial curved median line of the cylinder is determined by fitting the extracted least-squares centers. Theoretical analysis and numerical validation prove that radial error motions of the spindle and straightness error motions of the slider are eliminated during reconstruction of the cylindrical profile. The influence of tilt error motions of the spindle on the accuracy of error separation can be weakened by reducing the distance between the two sections in which the four probes are located. The spatial median line profile of the cylinder is accurately determined even if the error motions of the spindle are not repeatable in each revolution. An experimental system was constructed to perform comparison experiments. The results validate the fact that the technique has higher precision in reconstructing cylindrical profiles owing to its robust anti-interference ability. The technique is suitable for in situ measurement of cylindricity under unrepeatable radial error motions of the spindle and indeterminate straightness error motions of the slider. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]