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PURPOSE: The OlympiA randomized phase III trial compared 1 year of olaparib (OL) or placebo (PL) as adjuvant therapy in patients with germline BRCA1/2, high-risk human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-negative early breast cancer after completing (neo)adjuvant chemotherapy ([N]ACT), surgery, and radiotherapy. The patient-reported outcome primary hypothesis was that OL-treated patients may experience greater fatigue during treatment. METHODS: Data were collected before random assignment, and at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months. The primary end point was fatigue, measured with the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy-Fatigue scale. Secondary end points, assessed with the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer Quality of Life Questionnaire, Core 30 item, included nausea and vomiting (NV), diarrhea, and multiple functional domains. Scores were compared between treatment groups using mixed model for repeated measures. Two-sided P values <.05 were statistically significant for the primary end point. All secondary end points were descriptive. RESULTS: One thousand five hundred and thirty-eight patients (NACT: 746, ACT: 792) contributed to the analysis. Fatigue severity was statistically significantly greater for OL versus PL, but not clinically meaningfully different by prespecified criteria (≥3 points) at 6 months (diff OL v PL: NACT: -1.3 [95% CI, -2.4 to -0.2]; P = .022; ACT: -1.3 [95% CI, -2.3 to -0.2]; P = .017) and 12 months (NACT: -1.6 [95% CI, -2.8 to -0.3]; P = .017; ACT: -1.3 [95% CI, -2.4 to -0.2]; P = .025). There were no significant differences in fatigue severity between treatment groups at 18 and 24 months. NV severity was worse in patients treated with OL compared with PL at 6 months (NACT: 6.0 [95% CI, 4.1 to 8.0]; ACT: 5.3 [95% CI, 3.4 to 7.2]) and 12 months (NACT: 6.4 [95% CI, 4.4 to 8.3]; ACT: 4.5 [95% CI, 2.8 to 6.1]). During treatment, there were some clinically meaningful differences between groups for other symptoms but

Nan Jiang,1,&ast; Wei Jin,2,&ast; Zhenghui Fu,3,&ast; He Cao,1 Hong Zheng,3 Quqing Wang,1 Qiongting Zhang,3 Kang Ju,3 Jiwei Wang1 1Key Laboratory of Health Technology Assessment of Ministry of Health, School of Public Health, Fudan University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Patriotic Public Health and Health Promotion instruction, Shanghai Municipal Center for Health Promotion, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; 3Shanghai Changning Mental Health Center (Affiliated to East China Normal University), Shanghai, People’s Republic of China&ast;These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Jiwei Wang, Key Laboratory of Health Technology Assessment of Ministry of Health, School of Public Health, Fudan University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China, Email jiweiwang@fudan.edu.cn Kang Ju, Shanghai Changning Mental Health Center (Affiliated to East China Normal University), Shanghai, People’s Republic of China, Email jukang2009@163.comPurpose: This study aims to explore the serial mediating effect of stigma and depression on the association between social support and medication adherence.Patients and Methods: A cross-sectional survey was undertaken in the Changning District of Shanghai using a five-part questionnaire from August to December 2023. A convenient sampling method was employed, and 35 patients with schizophrenia were invited from each of the 9 streets in Changning District to participate in the survey, resulting in a total of 305 valid questionnaires collected. The questionnaire measured social support, stigma, depression, medication adherence, and demographic characteristics. Data analysis involved descriptive statistics, independent samples t-tests, ANOVA, Pearson correlation analysis, and the bootstrap method.Results: There was a direct and significantly positive association between social support and medication adherence (β = 0.69, p < 0.001). Moreover, increased levels of stigma (β = - 0.4

An increasing number of studies have shown how feedback interactions between plants and soil can influence primary and secondary succession. However, very little is known about the patterns and mechanisms of such plant–soil feedbacks on stressed mine tailings ecosystem, which can be severely contaminated by a range of toxic elements. In a two-phase plant–soil feedback experiment based on the rare earth element (REE) mine tailing soil, we investigated biotic (changes in bacterial and fungal communities) and abiotic (changes in chemical properties) legacies of three pioneer grass species, and examined feedback effects of three grasses, two legumes and two woody plants with different root traits. Positive plant–soil feedbacks were found in Miscanthus sinensis, Paspalum thunbergii and Tephrosia candida, and neutral feedbacks were observed in the other four plants. These effects corresponded with an increase in nutrients and total organic carbon, as well as a decrease in acidity and extractable aluminium and REEs. There were less signs of biotic changes in the conditioned tailings. The correlation analysis suggested a relationship between plants' responses to soil legacies and root traits, as well as root economics spectrum. On the mine tailings, acquisitive species with higher specific root length appeared to have greater potential for positive feedback. Synthesis and application. Our study shows that early succession on contaminated rare earth element mine tailings may lead to more positive plant–soil feedback than predicted based on results of non-contaminated soils, mainly due to the alleviation of abiotic stress in tailings. Therefore, the improvement of specific abiotic soil stress and the trait-based selection of acquisitive plants should be preferentially considered to promote the primary restoration of degraded land.

Infection, autoimmunity, and cancer are principal human health challenges of the 21st century. Often regarded as distinct ends of the immunological spectrum, recent studies hint at potential overlap between these diseases. For example, inflammation can be pathogenic in infection and autoimmunity. T resident memory (TRM) cells can be beneficial in infection and cancer. However, these findings are limited by size and scope; exact immunological factors shared across diseases remain elusive. Here, we integrate large-scale deeply clinically and biologically phenotyped human cohorts of 526 patients with infection, 162 with lupus, and 11,180 with cancer. We identify an NKG2A+ immune bias as associative with protection against disease severity, mortality, and autoimmune/post-acute chronic disease. We reveal that NKG2A+ CD8+ T cells correlate with reduced inflammation and increased humoral immunity and that they resemble TRM cells. Our results suggest NKG2A+ biases as a cross-disease factor of protection, supporting suggestions of immunological overlap between infection, autoimmunity, and cancer.

From the mid-19th century to the end of the 20th century, photographic plates served as the primary detectors for astronomical observations. Astronomical photographic observations in China began in 1901, and over a century, a total of approximately 30,000 astronomical photographic plates have been captured. These historical plates play an irreplaceable role in conducting long-term, time-domain astronomical research. To preserve and explore these valuable original astronomical observational data, Shanghai Astronomical Observatory has organized the transportation of plates taken at night from various stations across the country to the Sheshan Plate Archive for centralized preservation. For the first time, plate information statistics was performed. On this basis, the plates were cleaned and digitally scanned, and finally digitized images were acquired for 29,314 plates. In this study, using Gaia DR2 as the reference star catalog, astrometric processing has been carried out successfully on 15,696 single-exposure plates, including object extraction, stellar identification, and plate model computation. As a result, for long focal length telescopes, such as the 40cm double-tube refractor telescope and the 1.56m reflector telescope at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and the 1m reflector telescope at the Yunnan Astronomical Observatory, the astrometric accuracy obtained for their plates is approximately 0.1" to 0.3". The distribution of astrometric accuracy for medium and short focal length telescopes ranges from 0.3" to 1.0". The relevant data of this batch of plates, including digitized images and stellar catalog of the plates are archived and released by the National Astronomical Data Center. Users can access and download plate data based on keywords such as station, telescope, observation year, and observed celestial coordinates., Comment: Accepted for Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 17 pages, 14 figures, 6 tables. Database, https://nadc.china-vo.org/res/r100742

Character education has become one of the fastest growing reform movements in K-12 education today, partially in response to unacceptable levels of student misbehavior and inadequate endorsement of good character values (Williams 2000). Between 1993 and 2009, 36 states passed laws mandating or recommending some aspect of character education in schools. Character education programs also have strong support from parents, teachers, and school administrators (Character Education Partnership 2010; Glanzer and Milzen 2006). But despite the widespread popularity of such programs, relatively few randomized controlled trials have examined the impact of these programs on the character traits, behavior, and academic outcomes of students (What Works Clearinghouse 2007). This study examines the impact of the Lessons in Character (LIC) program--an English language arts-based character education program--on student academic achievement, social competence, and problem behaviors and, secondarily, on the school environment. The program consists of literature-based supplementary material aligned with California English language arts standards and designed to integrate easily into the current English language arts curricula. The LIC curriculum is designed to be easy to implement in the classroom and to involve minimal teacher training, which distinguishes the program from other character education programs. The following confirmatory research questions guide this study: (1) Do students in grades 4 and 5 who attend schools in the LIC intervention group exhibit higher scores on measures of academic achievement after two academic years of potential LIC exposure than their counterparts who attend schools in the control group?; (2) Do students in grades 4 and 5 who attend schools in the LIC intervention group exhibit higher scores on measures of social competence after two academic years of potential LIC exposure than their counterparts who attend schools in the control group?; and (3) Do students in grades 4 and 5 who attend schools in the LIC intervention group exhibit fewer problem behaviors after two academic years of potential LIC exposure than their counterparts who attend schools in the control group? The impact analyses did not find that LIC improved student academic achievement, social competence, or problem behaviors on any of the analyzed measures. Nor were statistically significant impacts on the school environment measures of expectations and student belonging detected. Moreover, analyses of teacher reports of program implementation indicated that 30 percent of teachers reported that, in year 1, they implemented the number of core lessons recommended by the developer and that, in year 2, 23 percent reported having done so. The failure to detect program impacts on student and school environment outcomes could be due to the weak implementation of the program, an intervention design that simply does not work in bringing about changes in student and school environmental outcomes, or methodology limitations of the study. An important limitation of the study was that retention rates differed between teachers in intervention and control schools. Although participation rates in intervention and control schools did not differ and there were no statistically significant differences in the baseline characteristics of teachers or students in the intervention and control schools, it is possible that there were important unobserved differences between intervention and control samples that could have resulted in biases in estimated program impacts. Appended are: (1) Statistical power estimates; (2) Teacher and student recruitment and retention by grade level and data source; (3) Survey items used to measure confirmatory and intermediate outcomes; (4) Internal consistency reliability and intraclass correlations of confirmatory and intermediate outcomes measures; (5) School-level and teacher-level baseline characteristics for retained sample; (6) Covariates included in impact analysis models; (7) Sensitivity analyses--primary impacts on student-level outcomes; (8) Sensitivity analyses--primary impacts on teacher-level outcomes; (9) Sensitivity Analyses--exploratory impacts on student-level outcomes; (10) Sensitivity analyses--exploratory impacts on teacher-level outcomes; (11) Teacher survey; (12) Student survey; and (13) Teacher implementation log. (Contains 65 tables, 6 figures, 2 boxes and 27 footnotes.)

Lung adenocarcinoma is the most common type of lung cancer. Known risk variants explain only a small fraction of lung adenocarcinoma heritability. Here, we conducted a two-stage genome-wide association study of lung adenocarcinoma of East Asian ancestry (21,658 cases and 150,676 controls; 54.5% never-smokers) and identified 12 novel susceptibility variants, bringing the total number to 28 at 25 independent loci. Transcriptome-wide association analyses together with colocalization studies using a Taiwanese lung expression quantitative trait loci dataset (n = 115) identified novel candidate genes, including FADS1 at 11q12 and ELF5 at 11p13. In a multi-ancestry meta-analysis of East Asian and European studies, four loci were identified at 2p11, 4q32, 16q23, and 18q12. At the same time, most of our findings in East Asian populations showed no evidence of association in European populations. In our studies drawn from East Asian populations, a polygenic risk score based on the 25 loci had a stronger association in never-smokers vs. individuals with a history of smoking (P interaction = 0.0058). These findings provide new insights into the etiology of lung adenocarcinoma in individuals from East Asian populations, which could be important in developing translational applications.

Infection, autoimmunity, and cancer are the principal human health challenges of the 21st century and major contributors to human death and disease. Often regarded as distinct ends of the immunological spectrum, recent studies have hinted there may be more overlap between these diseases than appears. For example, pathogenic inflammation has been demonstrated as conserved between infection and autoimmune settings. T resident memory (TRM) cells have been highlighted as beneficial for infection and cancer. However, these findings are limited by patient number and disease scope; exact immunological factors shared across disease remain elusive. Here, we integrate large-scale deeply clinically and biologically phenotyped human cohorts of 526 patients with infection, 162 with lupus, and 11,180 with cancer. We identify an NKG2A+ immune bias as associative with protection against disease severity, mortality, and autoimmune and post-acute chronic disease. We reveal that NKG2A+ CD8+ T cells correlate with reduced inflammation, increased humoral immunity, and resemble TRM cells. Our results suggest that an NKG2A+ bias is a pan-disease immunological factor of protection and thus supports recent suggestions that there is immunological overlap between infection, autoimmunity, and cancer. Our findings underscore the promotion of an NKG2A+ biased response as a putative therapeutic strategy.

Artificial Intelligence has become a dominant part of our lives, however, complex artificial intelligence models tend to use a lot of energy, computationally complex operations, and a lot of memory resources. Therefore, it excluded a whole class of hardware in its applicability. Namely, relatively resource-constrained low-cost hardware. This paper investigates learning methods that are potentially better suited for these types of devices: the forward-forward algorithm and Hebbian learning rules. The results are compared to backpropagation with equivalent network configurations, training hyperparameters and internal data types on different types of low-cost hardware. Backpropagation has consistently outperformed other algorithms in various tests. It exhibits higher accuracy, faster training, and faster inference compared to forward-forward models. However, forward-forward models can come close to matching backpropagation's performance, but they suffer from longer training times and decreased performance with multi-layer networks. Additionally, a poorly trained forward-forward model is sensitive to quantization, resulting in a significant drop in accuracy. On the other hand, forward-forward models offer the benefit of independently training each layer, allowing for more flexibility in optimizing the training process. Hebbian models were not found to be competitive, displaying performance below the required threshold. Smaller models for MCU and FPGA would likely perform even worse., Electrical Engineering

Alzheimers disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease characterized by cognitive decline and atrophy in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and subsequent brain regions. Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) has been widely used in research and clinical care for diagnosis and monitoring AD progression. However, atrophy patterns are complex and vary by patient. To address this issue, researchers have made efforts to develop more concise metrics that can summarize AD-specific atrophy. Many of these methods can be difficult to interpret clinically, hampering adoption. In this study, we introduce a novel index which we call an AD-NeuroScore, that uses a modified Euclidean-inspired distance function to calculate differences between regional brain volumes associated with cognitive decline. The index is adjusted for intracranial volume (ICV), age, sex, and scanner model. We validated AD-NeuroScore using 929 older adults from the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) study, with a mean age of 72.7 years (SD = 6.3; 55.1-91.5) and cognitively normal (CN), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), or AD diagnoses. Our validation results showed that AD-NeuroScore was significantly associated with diagnosis and disease severity scores (measured by MMSE, CDR-SB, and ADAS-11) at baseline. Furthermore, baseline AD-NeuroScore was associated with both changes in diagnosis and disease severity scores at all time points with available data. The performance of AD-NeuroScore was equivalent or superior to adjusted hippocampal volume (AHV), a widely used metric in AD research. Further, AD-NeuroScore typically performed as well as or sometimes better when compared to other existing sMRI-based metrics. In conclusion, we have introduced a new metric, AD-NeuroScore, which shows promising results in detecting AD, benchmarking disease severity, and predicting disease progression. AD-NeuroScore differentiates itself from other metrics by being clinically practical

BackgroundThis study aims to construct and verify a nomogram model for microvascular invasion (MVI) based on hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tumor characteristics and differential protein expressions, and explore the clinical application value of the prediction model.MethodsThe clinicopathological data of 200 HCC patients were collected and randomly divided into training set and validation set according to the ratio of 7:3. The correlation between MVI occurrence and primary disease, age, gender, tumor size, tumor stage, and immunohistochemical characteristics of 13 proteins, including GPC3, CK19 and vimentin, were statistically analyzed. Univariate and multivariate analyzes identified risk factors and independent risk factors, respectively. A nomogram model that can be used to predict the presence of MVI was subsequently constructed. Then, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, calibration curve, and decision curve analysis (DCA) were conducted to assess the performance of the model.ResultsMultivariate logistic regression analysis indicated that tumor size, GPC3, P53, RRM1, BRCA1, and ARG were independent risk factors for MVI. A nomogram was constructed based on the above six predictors. ROC curve, calibration, and DCA analysis demonstrated the good performance and the clinical application potential of the nomogram model.ConclusionsThe predictive model constructed based on the clinical characteristics of HCC tumors and differential protein expression patterns could be helpful to improve the accuracy of MVI diagnosis in HCC patients.

Some people remain healthier throughout life than others but the underlying reasons are poorly understood. Here we hypothesize this advantage is attributable in part to optimal immune resilience (IR), defined as the capacity to preserve and/or rapidly restore immune functions that promote disease resistance (immunocompetence) and control inflammation in infectious diseases as well as other causes of inflammatory stress. We gauge IR levels with two distinct peripheral blood metrics that quantify the balance between (i) CD8+ and CD4+ T-cell levels and (ii) gene expression signatures tracking longevity-associated immunocompetence and mortality-associated inflammation. Profiles of IR metrics in ~48,500 individuals collectively indicate that some persons resist degradation of IR both during aging and when challenged with varied inflammatory stressors. With this resistance, preservation of optimal IR tracked (i) a lower risk of HIV acquisition, AIDS development, symptomatic influenza infection, and recurrent skin cancer; (ii) survival during COVID-19 and sepsis; and (iii) longevity. IR degradation is potentially reversible by decreasing inflammatory stress. Overall, we show that optimal IR is a trait observed across the age spectrum, more common in females, and aligned with a specific immunocompetence-inflammation balance linked to favorable immunity-dependent health outcomes. IR metrics and mechanisms have utility both as biomarkers for measuring immune health and for improving health outcomes.

Coastal upwelling regions are among the most productive marine ecosystems but may be threatened by amplified ocean acidification. Increased acidification is hypothesized to reduce iron bioavailability for phytoplankton thereby expanding iron limitation and impacting primary production. Here we show from community to molecular levels that phytoplankton in an upwelling region respond to short-term acidification exposure with iron uptake pathways and strategies that reduce cellular iron demand. A combined physiological and multi-omics approach was applied to trace metal clean incubations that introduced 1200 ppm CO2 for up to four days. Although variable, molecular-level responses indicate a prioritization of iron uptake pathways that are less hindered by acidification and reductions in iron utilization. Growth, nutrient uptake, and community compositions remained largely unaffected suggesting that these mechanisms may confer short-term resistance to acidification; however, we speculate that cellular iron demand is only temporarily satisfied, and longer-term acidification exposure without increased iron inputs may result in increased iron stress.

Dicranopteris linearis is the best-known hyperaccumulator species of rare earth elements (REEs) and silicon (Si), capable of dealing with toxic level of REEs. Hence, this study aimed to clarify how D. linearis leaves cope with excessive REE stress, and whether Si plays a role in REE detoxification. The results show that lanthanum (La – as a representative of the REEs) stress led to decreased biomass and an increase of metabolism related to leaf cell wall synthesis and modification. However, the La stress-induced responses, especially the increase of pectin-related gene expression level, pectin polysaccharides concentration, and methylesterase activity, could be mitigated by Si supply. Approximately 70% of the Si in D. linearis leaves interacted with the cell walls to form organosilicon Si-O-C linkages. The Si-modified cell walls contained more hydroxyl groups, leading to a more efficient REE retention compared to the Si-free ones. Moreover, this [Si-cell wall] matrix increased the pectin-La accumulation capacity by 64%, with no effect on hemicellulose-La and cellulose-La accumulation capacity. These results suggest that [Si-pectin] matrix fixation is key in REE detoxification in D. linearis, laying the foundation for the development of phytotechnological applications (e.g., REE phytomining) using this species in REE-contaminated sites.

Synchrotron-based micro-X-ray fluorescence analysis (µXRF) is a nondestructive and highly sensitive technique. However, element mapping of rare earth elements (REEs) under standard conditions requires care, since energy-dispersive detectors are not able to differentiate accurately between REEs L-shell X-ray emission lines overlapping with K-shell X-ray emission lines of common transition elements of high concentrations. We aim to test REE element mapping with high-energy interference-free excitation of the REE K-lines on hyperaccumulator plant tissues and compare with measurements with REE L-shell excitation at the microprobe experiment of beamline P06 (PETRA III, DESY). A combination of compound refractive lens optics (CRLs) was used to obtain a micrometer-sized focused incident beam with an energy of 44 keV and an extra-thick silicon drift detector optimized for high-energy X-ray detection to detect the K-lines of yttrium (Y), lanthanum (La), cerium (Ce), praseodymium (Pr), and neodymium (Nd) without any interferences due to line overlaps. High-energy excitation from La to Nd in the hyperaccumulator organs was successful but compared to L-line excitation less efficient and therefore slow (∼10-fold slower than similar maps at lower incident energy) due to lower flux and detection efficiency. However, REE K-lines do not suffer significantly from self-absorption, which makes XRF tomography of millimeter-sized frozen-hydrated plant samples possible. The K-line excitation of REEs at the P06 CRL setup has scope for application in samples that are particularly prone to REE interfering elements, such as soil samples with high concomitant Ti, Cr, Fe, Mn, and Ni concentrations.

Rare earth elements (REEs) are critical for numerous modern technologies, and demand is increasing globally; however,production steps are resource-intensive and environmentally damaging.Some plant species are able to hyper accumulate REEs, and understanding the biology behind this phenomenon could play a pivotal role in developing more environmentally friendly REE recovery technologies. Here, we identified a REE transporter NRAMP REE Transporter 1 (NREET1)from the REE hyper accumulator fern Dicranopteris linearis. AlthoughNREET1 belongs to the natural resistance-associated macrophage protein(NRAMP) family, it shares a low similarity with other NRAMP members.When expressed in yeast, NREET1 exhibited REE transport capacity, but itcould not transport divalent metals, such as zinc, nickel, manganese, or iron.NREET1 is mainly expressed in D. linearis roots and predominantly localized in the plasma membrane. Expression studies in Arabidopsis thaliana revealed that NREET1 functions as a transporter mediating REE uptake and transfer from root cell walls into the cytoplasm. Moreover, NREET1 has a higher affinity for transporting light REEs compared to heavy REEs, which is consistent to the preferential enrichment of light REEs in field-grown D. linearis. We therefore conclude that NREET1 may play an important role in the uptake and consequently hyper accumulation of REEs in D.linearis. These findings lay the foundation for the use of synthetic biology techniques to design and produce sustainable, plant-based REE recovery systems.

BACKGROUND: There is limited knowledge regarding the perceived participation of children with long-term health conditions in everyday activities. Children may have perceptions that differ from those of their primary caregivers. It is unclear whether children and caregivers rate their participation in everyday situations in the same way. OBJECTIVES: We aimed to explore the level of agreement pertaining to perceived participation (attendance and involvement) and examine whether differences exist in the rank order of activities selected as the three most important between reports from children with long-term health conditions and their primary caregivers. METHODS: The simplified Chinese version of the Picture My Participation (PMP-C; Simplified) was used in an interview with children with long-term health conditions; meanwhile, their primary caregivers finished the questionnaire independently. Data were analyzed using Wilcoxon tests, weighted kappa values, and Spearman's rank order correlation. RESULTS: Children with long-term health conditions reported significantly lower attendance scores for six activity items (p < 0.05) and higher involvement scores for two activity items (p < 0.05) than their primary caregivers did. An overall slight to fair agreement in perceived participation was found at the child-caregiver dyad level, though differences in dyads were observed. A strong correlation was identified between the rank order of the most important activities for both groups (r = 0.81). CONCLUSIONS: Differences may exist between the perceived participation of children with long-term health conditions, as reported by primary caregivers and the children themselves. The findings highlight that children with long-term health conditions exhibit unique views with respect to their perceived participation and have to be asked regarding their perceptions themselves.

The discovery of superconductivity in planar nickelates raises the question of how the electronic structure and correlations of Ni1+ compounds compare to those of the Cu2+ cuprate superconductors. Here, we present an angle- resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) study of the trilayer nickelate Pr4Ni3O8, revealing a Fermi surface resembling that of the hole-doped cuprates but with critical differences. Specifically, the main portions of the Fermi surface are extremely similar to that of the bilayer cuprates, with an additional piece that can accommodate additional hole doping. We find that the electronic correlations are about twice as strong in the nickelates and are almost k-independent, indicating that they originate from a local effect, likely the Mott interaction, whereas cuprate interactions are somewhat less local. Nevertheless, the nickelates still demonstrate the strange-metal behavior in the electron scattering rates. Understanding the similarities and differences between these two families of strongly correlated superconductors is an important challenge.

BACKGROUND: Knowledge is limited on attendance and involvement of perceived participation of children with long-term health conditions. AIMS: To evaluate the perceived participation of children with long-term health conditions and to compare their participation with that of healthy peers. MATERIAL AND METHODS: A cross-sectional comparative study was designed using self-reported data from 65 children with long-term health conditions and from 65 healthy peers, utilising the simplified Chinese version of Picture My Participation (PMP-C; Simplified). RESULTS: The frequency scores of children with long-term health conditions were significantly lower than those of healthy peers in terms of attendance for the total domain and for 13 activity items. The involvement scores of children with long-term health conditions were significantly lower than those of healthy children in 3 items. There was a strong correlation between rank orders of the most important activities for the two groups (r = 0.83). CONCLUSIONS: Children with long-term health conditions participated less in activities compared to healthy children. Further studies are required to investigate factors of the participation of children. SIGNIFICANCE: The PMP-C (Simplified) offered an opportunity for children to express their own perspectives of participation based on their individual experience of the activity.

An increasing number of studies have shown how feedback interactions between plants and soil can influence primary and secondary succession. However, very little is known about the patterns and mechanisms of such plant-soil feedbacks on stressed mine tailings ecosystem, which can be severely contaminated by a range of toxic elements. In a two-phase plant-soil feedback experiment based on the rare earth element (REE) mine tailing soil, we investigated biotic (changes in bacterial and fungal community) and abiotic legacies (changes in chemical properties) of three pioneer grass species, and examined feedback effects of three grasses, two legumes and two woody plants with different root traits. Positive plant-soil feedback was found in Miscanthus sinensis, Paspalum thunbergii and Tephrosia candida, and neutral feedback was observed in other four plants. These effects corresponded with an increase of nutrients and total organic carbon, as well as a decrease of acidity and extractable aluminum and REEs. There were less signs of biotic changes in the conditioned tailings. The correlation analysis suggested a relationship between responses to soil legacies and root traits, as well as root economics spectrum. On the mine tailings, acquisitive species with higher specific root length appeared to have greater potential for positive feedback. Synthesis and application: Our study shows that early succession on contaminated REE mine tailings may lead to more positive plant-soil feedback than predicted based on results of non-contaminated soils, mainly due to the alleviation of abiotic stress in tailings. Therefore, the improvement of specific abiotic soil stress and the trait-based selection of acquisitive plants should be preferentially considered to promote the primary restoration of degraded land., An increasing number of studies have shown how feedback interactions between plants and soil can influence primary and secondary succession. However, very little is known about the patterns and mechanisms of such plant-soil feedbacks on stressed mine tailings ecosystem, which can be severely contaminated by a range of toxic elements. In a two-phase plant-soil feedback experiment based on the rare earth element (REE) mine tailing soil, we investigated biotic (changes in bacterial and fungal community) and abiotic legacies (changes in chemical properties) of three pioneer grass species, and examined feedback effects of three grasses, two legumes and two woody plants with different root traits. Positive plant-soil feedback was found in Miscanthus sinensis, Paspalum thunbergii and Tephrosia candida, and neutral feedback was observed in other four plants. These effects corresponded with an increase of nutrients and total organic carbon, as well as a decrease of acidity and extractable aluminum and REEs. There were less signs of biotic changes in the conditioned tailings. The correlation analysis suggested a relationship between responses to soil legacies and root traits, as well as root economics spectrum. On the mine tailings, acquisitive species with higher specific root length appeared to have greater potential for positive feedback. Synthesis and application: Our study shows that early succession on contaminated REE mine tailings may lead to more positive plant-soil feedback than predicted based on results of non-contaminated soils, mainly due to the alleviation of abiotic stress in tailings. Therefore, the improvement of specific abiotic soil stress and the trait-based selection of acquisitive plants should be preferentially considered to promote the primary restoration of degraded land.

Few-shot prompting elicits the remarkable abilities of large language models by equipping them with a few demonstration examples in the input. However, the traditional method of providing large language models with all demonstration input-output pairs at once may not effectively guide large language models to learn the specific input-output mapping relationship. In this paper, inspired by the regulatory and supportive role of metacognition in students' learning, we propose a novel metacognition-enhanced few-shot prompting, which guides large language models to reflect on their thought processes to comprehensively learn the given demonstration examples. Furthermore, considering that positive reinforcement can improve students' learning motivation, we introduce positive reinforcement into our metacognition-enhanced few-shot prompting to promote the few-shot learning of large language models by providing response-based positive feedback. The experimental results on two real-world datasets show that our metacognition-enhanced few-shot prompting with positive reinforcement surpasses traditional few-shot prompting in classification accuracy and macro F1., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables

In recent years, personality has been regarded as a valuable personal factor being incorporated into numerous tasks such as sentiment analysis and product recommendation. This has led to widespread attention to text-based personality recognition task, which aims to identify an individual's personality based on given text. Considering that ChatGPT has recently exhibited remarkable abilities on various natural language processing tasks, we provide a preliminary evaluation of ChatGPT on text-based personality recognition task for generating effective personality data. Concretely, we employ a variety of prompting strategies to explore ChatGPT's ability in recognizing personality from given text, especially the level-oriented prompting strategy we designed for guiding ChatGPT in analyzing given text at a specified level. The experimental results on two representative real-world datasets reveal that ChatGPT with zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting exhibits impressive personality recognition ability and is capable to provide natural language explanations through text-based logical reasoning. Furthermore, by employing the level-oriented prompting strategy to optimize zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting, the performance gap between ChatGPT and corresponding state-of-the-art model has been narrowed even more. However, we observe that ChatGPT shows unfairness towards certain sensitive demographic attributes such as gender and age. Additionally, we discover that eliciting the personality recognition ability of ChatGPT helps improve its performance on personality-related downstream tasks such as sentiment classification and stress prediction., Comment: 15 pages, 13 figures, 5 tables

The ecological and oceanographic processes that drive the response of pelagic ocean microbiomes to environmental changes remain poorly understood, particularly in coastal upwelling ecosystems. Here we show that seasonal and interannual variability in coastal upwelling predicts pelagic ocean microbiome diversity and community structure in the Southern California Current region. Ribosomal RNA gene sequencing, targeting prokaryotic and eukaryotic microbes, from samples collected seasonally during 2014-2020 indicate that nitracline depth is the most robust predictor of spatial microbial community structure and biodiversity in this region. Striking ecological changes occurred due to the transition from a warm anomaly during 2014-2016, characterized by intense stratification, to cooler conditions in 2017-2018, representative of more typical upwelling conditions, with photosynthetic eukaryotes, especially diatoms, changing most strongly. The regional slope of nitracline depth exerts strong control on the relative proportion of highly diverse offshore communities and low biodiversity, but highly productive nearshore communities.

BACKGROUND: Experimental studies indicate that neuroendocrine pathways might play a role in progression of breast cancer. We aim to test the hypothesis that somatic mutations in the genes of neuroendocrine pathways influence breast cancer prognosis, through dysregulated gene expression in tumor tissue. METHODS: We conducted an extreme case-control study including 208 breast cancer patients with poor invasive disease-free survival (iDFS) and 208 patients with favorable iDFS who were individually matched on molecular subtype from the Breast Cancer Cohort at West China Hospital (WCH; N = 192) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA; N = 224). Whole exome sequencing and RNA sequencing of tumor and paired normal breast tissues were performed. Adrenergic, glucocorticoid, dopaminergic, serotonergic, and cholinergic pathways were assessed for differences in mutation burden and gene expression in relation to breast cancer iDFS using the logistic regression and global test, respectively. RESULTS: In the pooled analysis, presence of any somatic mutation (odds ratio = 1.66, 95% CI: 1.07-2.58) of the glucocorticoid pathway was associated with poor iDFS and a two-fold increase of tumor mutation burden was associated with 17% elevated odds (95% CI: 2-35%), after adjustment for cohort membership, age, menopausal status, molecular subtype, and tumor stage. Differential expression of genes in the glucocorticoid pathway in tumor tissue (P = 0.028), but not normal tissue (P = 0.701), was associated with poor iDFS. Somatic mutation of the adrenergic and cholinergic pathways was significantly associated with iDFS in WCH, but not in TCGA. CONCLUSION: Glucocorticoid pathway may play a role in breast cancer prognosis through differential mutations and expression. Further characterization of its functional role may open new avenues for the development of novel therapeutic targets for breast cancer., Funding agencies:China Scholarship Council 201806240005 National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) 8187111500

Anti-counterfeiting QR codes are widely used in people's work and life, especially in product packaging. However, the anti-counterfeiting QR code has the risk of being copied and forged in the circulation process. In reality, copying is usually based on genuine anti-counterfeiting QR codes, but the brands and models of copiers are diverse, and it is extremely difficult to determine which individual copier the forged anti-counterfeiting code come from. In response to the above problems, this paper proposes a method for copy forgery identification of anti-counterfeiting QR code based on deep learning. We first analyze the production principle of anti-counterfeiting QR code, and convert the identification of copy forgery to device category forensics, and then a Dual-Branch Multi-Scale Feature Fusion network is proposed. During the design of the network, we conducted a detailed analysis of the data preprocessing layer, single-branch design, etc., combined with experiments, the specific structure of the dual-branch multi-scale feature fusion network is determined. The experimental results show that the proposed method has achieved a high accuracy of copy forgery identification, which exceeds the current series of methods in the field of image forensics., Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures

Moisture has a great effect on the microstructure of mudstone and the stability of muddy strata. Due to many clay minerals in mudstone, swelling deformation and even disintegration occur during moisture diffusion, accompanied by energy storage and release. To reveal the deterioration mechanism and energy characteristics of mudstone induced by moisture diffusion, firstly, the Weibull distribution function is introduced into the FDEM-based moisture diffusion-fracture coupling model to consider the heterogeneity of swelling deformation and stress of mudstone minerals. Then, the microfracture behavior and energy evolution of heterogeneous mudstone during moisture diffusion are studied using the coupling model. Results indicate that the nonuniform swelling deformation between particles is the main reason for the microfracture, both tensile and shear failures occur in mudstone. The evolution of kinetic energy can be divided into three stages, while that of strain energy depends on the storage rate by swelling deformation and the release rate by microfracture in mudstone during moisture diffusion. When the storage rate is greater than the release rate, the evolution of strain energy is divided into two stages. Otherwise, it is divided into three stages. Besides, the effects of homogeneity index, swelling coefficient, and moisture content on the microcrack morphology and energy evolution are also discussed. Finally, the microcrack morphology and energy evolution of mudstone under different moisture loading conditions are investigated, where the microcrack morphology under the surrounding moisture condition agrees well with the experimental results. The results in this paper provide theoretical value for studying the swelling and microfracture mechanism of mudstone during moisture diffusion. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Yuan Li,1– 3,&ast; Yaxin Zhou,4,5,&ast; Miao Chen,6 Mei R Fu,7 Biru Luo,1– 3 Pengming Yu,4,5,8 Hong Zheng,1,9 Fangfei Liu1,9 1Nursing Department, West China Second University Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China; 2Key Laboratory of Birth Defects and Related Diseases of Women and Children (Sichuan University), Ministry of Education, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China; 3West China School of Nursing, Sichuan University, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China; 4Rehabilitation Medicine Center, Sichuan University, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China; 5West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China; 6Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China; 7Rutgers University, School of Nursing, Camden, NJ, USA; 8Key Laboratory of Rehabilitation Medicine in Sichuan Province, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China; 9Department of Pediatric Cardiology, West China Second University Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China&ast;These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Biru Luo, Nursing Department, West China Second University Hospital, Sichuan University, No. 20, Section 3, South Renmin Road, Chengdu, Sichuan, 610041, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86-1 818 060 9180, Email luomr@scu.edu.cn Miao Chen, Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, No. 37, Guoxue Alley, Wuhou District, Chengdu, Sichuan, 610041, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86-1 898 060 6107, Email 540129343@qq.comAbstract: Progress in medical and surgical care has tremendously improved the survival rates of children with congenital heart disease (CHD). However, reduced aerobic capacity and health-related issues remain a threaten to quality survival and prevention of related complications among children and adolescents with CHD. This research program aims to develop and evaluate a WeCh

A near-complete diploid nuclear genome and accompanying circular mitochondrial and chloroplast genomes have been assembled from the elite commercial diatom species Nitzschia inconspicua. The 50 Mbp haploid size of the nuclear genome is nearly double that of model diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum, but 30% smaller than closer relative Fragilariopsis cylindrus. Diploid assembly, which was facilitated by low levels of allelic heterozygosity (2.7%), included 14 candidate chromosome pairs composed of long, syntenic contigs, covering 93% of the total assembly. Telomeric ends were capped with an unusual 12-mer, G-rich, degenerate repeat sequence. Predicted proteins were highly enriched in strain-specific marker domains associated with cell-surface adhesion, biofilm formation, and raphe system gliding motility. Expanded species-specific families of carbonic anhydrases suggest potential enhancement of carbon concentration efficiency, and duplicated glycolysis and fatty acid synthesis pathways across cytosolic and organellar compartments may enhance peak metabolic output, contributing to competitive success over other organisms in mixed cultures. The N. inconspicua genome delivers a robust new reference for future functional and transcriptomic studies to illuminate the physiology of benthic pennate diatoms and harness their unique adaptations to support commercial algae biomass and bioproduct production.

Heterogeneous noble-metal-based catalysis plays an essential role in the production of fine chemicals. Rh-based catalysts are one of the most active candidates for indole synthesis. However, it is still highly desired to develop heterogeneous Rh-based catalysts with high activity and selectivity. In this work, a general, facile wet-chemical method is reported to synthesize ultrathin amorphous/crystalline heterophase Rh and Rh-based bimetallic alloy nanosheets (NSs), including RhCu, RhZn, and RhRu. Impressively, the amorphous/crystalline heterophase Rh NSs exhibit enhanced catalytic activity toward the direct synthesis of indole compared to the crystalline counterpart. Importantly, the obtained amorphous/crystalline heterophase RhCu alloy NSs can further enhance the selectivity to indole of >99.9% and the conversion is 100%. This work demonstrates the importance of phase engineering and metal alloying in the rational design and synthesis of tandem heterogeneous catalysts toward fine chemical synthesis. © 2021 Wiley-VCH GmbH

Irregular polygon shapes (eg, with small edges or small angles) are usually encountered in the contact simulation of discrete block systems. Treatment of irregular polygons in contact detection process has critical effects on the robustness and efficiency of the discontinuous computation approach. The present work proposes a cover-based strategy to detect and solve contacts of irregular convex polygons in a robust and efficient way. Contact constraints of two polygons are represented by vertex-edge and edge-vertex contact covers in 2D. Two loops, namely vertex-edge loop and edge-vertex loop, and two filter criteria, namely the entrance filter criterion and the distance filter criterion, are used to establish the potential contact cover list of two neighbor polygons. The initial active and closed contact covers are chosen based on block configuration at the beginning of the step and they are then updated in the open-close iteration process using proposed criteria. This strategy is implemented in discontinuous deformation analysis. The robustness of the proposed cover-based approach and the conventional type-based approach in handling contact of irregular blocks is verified first. Then, the contact analysis efficiency of the cover-based approach with different contact tolerances is evaluated. This cover-based method can be extended to 3D case for efficient and robust contact analysis of irregular polyhedral blocks. © 2020 The Authors. International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Yan Sun,1,2 Lixin Yu,1,2 Wei Gao,1,2 Jinzhen Cai,1,2 Wentao Jiang,1,2 Wei Lu,3 Yihe Liu,1,2 Hong Zheng1,2 1Organ Transplantation Center, Tianjin First Central Hospital, Tianjin, 300192, People’s Republic of China; 2Tianjin Key Laboratory for Organ Transplantation, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China; 3Liver Cancer Treatment Centre, Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital, Tianjin, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Yihe Liu; Hong ZhengOrgan Transplantation Center, Tianjin First Central Hospital, No. 24 of Fukang Street, Nankai District, Tianjin, 300192, People’s Republic of ChinaTel/Fax +8602223627027Email limyihe@163.com; zhemghomgi@21cn.comObjective: This study aimed to investigate the colonization and prevalence of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) in pediatric liver transplant recipients and analyze the high-risk factors and prognosis of CRE infection.Methods: A prospective study involving 152 pediatric patients undergoing liver transplantation was carried out. Anal swab bacteria cultures were collected when the patients entered the intensive care unit (ICU) and when they left in order to screen for intestinal CRE colonization. The results were grouped according to the occurrence of CRE infection following surgery, and the patients were divided into two groups: a CRE infection group and a non-CRE infection group. Univariate analysis and multiple logistic regression analysis were conducted to determine the independent risk factors of CRE infection and analyze the survival rate.Results: Of the 152 pediatric liver transplant recipients enrolled in the study, there were 13 cases of postoperative CRE infection and 139 cases of non-CRE infection. The incidence of preoperative CRE infection, preoperative cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection, and preoperative sepsis in the CRE infection group was significantly higher than in the non-CRE infection group (P < 0.005). Intraoperative bleeding volu

Traffic forecasting is an integral part of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Achieving a high prediction accuracy is a challenging task due to a high level of dynamics and complex spatial-temporal dependency of road networks. For this task, we propose Graph Attention-Convolution-Attention Networks (GACAN). The model uses a novel Att-Conv-Att (ACA) block which contains two graph attention layers and one spectral-based GCN layer sandwiched in between. The graph attention layers are meant to capture temporal features while the spectral-based GCN layer is meant to capture spatial features. The main novelty of the model is the integration of time series of four different time granularities: the original time series, together with hourly, daily, and weekly time series. Unlike previous work that used multi-granularity time series by handling every time series separately, GACAN combines the outcome of processing all time series after each graph attention layer. Thus, the effects of different time granularities are integrated throughout the model. We perform a series of experiments on three real-world datasets. The experimental results verify the advantage of using multi-granularity time series and that the proposed GACAN model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines., Comment: This paper has been published in the IJCNN 2021 (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9534064/)

Yan-ju Xiao,1,&ast; Yan-hong Chen,1,&ast; Hong-yu Zheng,1 Chun-mei Xu,1 Xiao Liu,2 Si-ping Yan2 1Department of Ultrasonography, People’s Hospital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Nanning, 530021, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Obstetrical, People’s Hospital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Nanning, 530021, People’s Republic of China&ast;These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Yan-hong ChenDepartment of Ultrasonography, People’s Hospital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, No. 6 of Taoyuan Street, Qingxiu District, Nanning, 530021, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86 771 2186593Fax +86 771 2802018Email yanhongchen@21cn.comObjective: This study aims to investigate the formation factors that affect the angle of nuchal cord and explore the types of nuchal cord that exist and the process of standardized ultrasound diagnosis of nuchal cord.Methods: Ultrasonography was performed on 707 fetuses with nuchal cord, to observe the direction of the coil, determine the type of coil, and analyze the correlation between the fetal position, placental location, and the direction of the coil with the angle of the umbilical cord.Results: Among the 707 fetuses, those with 1 loop accounted for 89.67%, fetuses with 2 loops accounted for 6.08%, fetuses with 3 loops accounted for 0.28%, and fetuses with partial draping of the umbilical cord accounted for 3.96%. Nuchal cord mostly occurred in fetuses where the placenta was attached to the anterior wall of the uterus, and the α-shaped and C-shaped types were in the majority. The C-shaped type accounted for 43.14%, the α-shaped type for 40.88%, the O-shaped type for 12.02%, and the L-shaped type for 3.96%.Conclusion: The direction of the coil of the umbilical cord can be determined by blood flow vector observation. The fetal position, placental location, and the direction of the coil are the three factors affecting the coiling angle of the umbilical cord. Ultrasonic classificat

Little is known about how health insurance policies, particularly in developing countries, influence breast cancer prognosis. Here, we examined the association between individual health insurance and breast cancer-specific mortality in China. We included 7436 women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer between 2009 and 2016, at West China Hospital, Sichuan University. The health insurance plan of patient was classified as either urban or rural schemes and was also categorized as reimbursement rate (ie, the covered/total charge) below or above the median. Breast cancer-specific mortality was the primary outcome. Using Cox proportional hazards models, we calculated hazard ratios (HRs) for cancer-specific mortality, contrasting rates among patients with a rural insurance scheme or low reimbursement rate to that of those with an urban insurance scheme or high reimbursement rate, respectively. During a median follow-up of 3.1 years, we identified 326 deaths due to breast cancer. Compared to patients covered by urban insurance schemes, patients covered by rural insurance schemes had a 29% increased cancer-specific mortality (95% CI 0%-65%) after adjusting for demographics, tumor characteristics and treatment modes. Reimbursement rate below the median was associated with a 42% increased rate of cancer-specific mortality (95% CI 11%-82%). Every 10% increase in the reimbursement rate is associated with a 7% (95% CI 2%-12%) reduction in cancer-specific mortality risk, particularly in patients covered by rural insurance schemes (26%, 95% CI 9%-39%). Our findings suggest that underinsured patients face a higher risk of breast cancer-specific mortality in developing countries., Funding Agencies:Key Research and Development Project of Sichuan Province of China 2017SZ00005

Yu Liu,1 Le-Feng Wang,1 Li-Hong Liu,1 Xin-Chun Yang,1 Zheng-Hong Ren,2 Kui-Bao Li,1 Mu-Lei Chen,1 Hong-Shi Wang,1 Jiu-Chang Zhong,1 Li Xu,1 Zhu-Hua Ni,1 Wei-Ming Li,1 Kun Xia,1 Da-Peng Zhang,1 Hao Sun,1 Zong-Sheng Guo,1 Yong-Hui Chi,1 Ji-Fang He,1 Zhi-Yong Zhang,1 Feng Jiang1 1Heart Center & Beijing Key Laboratory of Hypertension, Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 2School of Public Health, Peking University Health Science Center, Beijing, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Le-Feng WangHeart Center & Beijing Key Laboratory of Hypertension, Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, Capital Medical University, No. 8 of Gongtinan Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, People’s Republic of ChinaTel/Fax +86 10 85231173Email wanglefeng_dr66@163.comObjective: Patients presenting with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) with prior digestive system disease are more likely to suffer from gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding than those without these diseases. However, few articles reported how the different conditions of the digestive tract produced different risks of GI bleeding.Methods: A single-center study on 7464 patients admitted for AMI from December 2010 to June 2019 in the Beijing Chaoyang Heart Center was retrospectively examined. Patients with major GI bleeding (n = 165) were compared with patients without (n = 7299). Univariate and multivariate logistic regression models were constructed to test the association between GI bleeding and prior diseases of the digestive tract, including gastroesophageal reflux disease, chronic gastritis, peptic ulcer, hepatic function damage, diseases of the colon and rectum, and gastroenterological tract tumors.Results: Of the 7464 patients (mean age, 63.4; women, 25.6%; STEMI, 58.6%), 165 (2.2%) experienced major GI bleeding, and 1816 (24.3%) had a history of digestive system disease. The risk of GI bleeding was significantly associated with peptic ulc

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (ERC grant agreement n° 338133), Golgins are an abundant class of peripheral membrane proteins of the Golgi. These very long (50–400 nm) rod-like proteins initially capture cognate transport vesicles, thus enabling subsequent SNARE-mediated membrane fusion. Here, we explore the hypothesis that in addition to serving as vesicle tethers, Golgins may also possess the capacity to phase separate and, thereby, contribute to the internal organization of the Golgi. GM130 is the most abundant Golgin at the cis Golgi. Remarkably, overexpressed GM130 forms liquid droplets in cells analogous to those described for numerous intrinsically disordered proteins with low complexity sequences, even though GM130 is neither low in complexity nor intrinsically disordered. Virtually pure recombinant GM130 also phase-separates into dynamic, liquid-like droplets in close to physiological buffers and at concentrations similar to its estimated local concentration at the cis Golgi., Unión Europea. FP7, National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NHI), Depto. de Química Física, Fac. de Ciencias Químicas, TRUE, pub

The goaf may face a series of deformation and settlement problems when the room-pillar mining method is used to excavate ore and pillars in the deep strata. To this end, a deep room-pillar model with two levels was made, and the pillar recovery was carried out. The instantaneous deformation responses during the pillars recovery and the long-term settlements after the pillar recovery were analysed. During the pillar recovery, different regions of surrounding rocks suffer from different dynamic disturbances which can be divided into three types: the combined action of blasting disturbance and unloading disturbance; the sequential action of blasting disturbance and unloading disturbance; and the action of unloading disturbance. After the pillar recovery, the settlement above the first recovering pillar is the largest, which has a traction effect on the settlement in other areas. The settlement process can be divided into two stages, stable displacement stage and unstable displacement stage. When the pillar-room system undergoes the unstable displacement stage, rock spalling and further cascading collapse will occur., The goaf may face a series of deformation and settlement problems when the room-pillar mining method is used to excavate ore and pillars in the deep strata. To this end, a deep room-pillar model with two levels was made, and the pillar recovery was carried out. The instantaneous deformation responses during the pillars recovery and the long-term settlements after the pillar recovery were analysed. During the pillar recovery, different regions of surrounding rocks suffer from different dynamic disturbances which can be divided into three types: the combined action of blasting disturbance and unloading disturbance; the sequential action of blasting disturbance and unloading disturbance; and the action of unloading disturbance. After the pillar recovery, the settlement above the first recovering pillar is the largest, which has a traction effect on the settlement in other areas. The settlement process can be divided into two stages, stable displacement stage and unstable displacement stage. When the pillar-room system undergoes the unstable displacement stage, rock spalling and further cascading collapse will occur.

We investigated whether genetic susceptibility to tuberculosis (TB) influences lung adenocarcinoma development among never-smokers using TB genome-wide association study (GWAS) results within the Female Lung Cancer Consortium in Asia. Pathway analysis with the adaptive rank truncated product method was used to assess the association between a TB-related gene-set and lung adenocarcinoma using GWAS data from 5512 lung adenocarcinoma cases and 6277 controls. The gene-set consisted of 31 genes containing known/suggestive associations with genetic variants from previous TB-GWAS. Subsequently, we followed-up with Mendelian Randomization to evaluate the association between TB and lung adenocarcinoma using three genome-wide significant variants from previous TB-GWAS in East Asians. The TB-related gene-set was associated with lung adenocarcinoma (p = 0.016). Additionally, the Mendelian Randomization showed an association between TB and lung adenocarcinoma (OR = 1.31, 95% CI: 1.03, 1.66, p = 0.027). Our findings support TB as a causal risk factor for lung cancer development among never-smoking Asian women.

Contact interaction of two bodies can be modeled using the penalty function approach while its accuracy and robustness are directly associated with the geometry of contact bodies. Particularly, in the research fields of rock mechanics, we need to treat polygonal shapes such as mineral grains/particles at a mesoscale and rock blocks at a macroscale. The irregular shapes (e.g., polygons with small angles or small edges) pose challenges to traditional contact solution approach in terms of algorithmic robustness and complexity. This paper proposed a robust potential-based penalty function approach to solve contact of polygonal particles/block. An improved potential function is proposed considering irregular polygonal shapes. A contact detection procedure based on the entrance block concept is presented, followed by a numerical integral algorithm to compute the contact force. The proposed contact detection approach is implemented into discontinuous deformation analysis with an explicit formulation. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed contact detection approach are verified by benchmarking examples. The potential of the proposed approach in analysis of kinetic behavior of complex polygonal block systems is shown by two application examples. It can be applied in any discontinuous computation models using stepwise contact force-based solution procedures. © 2020, The Author(s).

Clinical Named Entity Recognition (CNER) aims to automatically identity clinical terminologies in Electronic Health Records (EHRs), which is a fundamental and crucial step for clinical research. To train a high-performance model for CNER, it usually requires a large number of EHRs with high-quality labels. However, labeling EHRs, especially Chinese EHRs, is time-consuming and expensive. One effective solution to this is active learning, where a model asks labelers to annotate data which the model is uncertain of. Conventional active learning assumes a single labeler that always replies noiseless answers to queried labels. However, in real settings, multiple labelers provide diverse quality of annotation with varied costs and labelers with low overall annotation quality can still assign correct labels for some specific instances. In this paper, we propose a Cost-Quality Adaptive Active Learning (CQAAL) approach for CNER in Chinese EHRs, which maintains a balance between the annotation quality, labeling costs, and the informativeness of selected instances. Specifically, CQAAL selects cost-effective instance-labeler pairs to achieve better annotation quality with lower costs in an adaptive manner. Computational results on the CCKS-2017 Task 2 benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed CQAAL., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures

Keratinases are unique among proteolytic enzymes for their ability to degrade recalcitrant insoluble proteins, and they are of critical importance in keratin waste management. Over the past few decades, researchers have focused on discovering keratinase producers, as well as producing and characterizing keratinases. The application potential of keratinases has been investigated in the feed, fertilizer, leathering, detergent, cosmetic, and medical industries. However, the commercial availability of keratinases is still limited due to poor productivity and properties, such as thermostability, storage stability and resistance to organic reagents. Advances in molecular biotechnology have provided powerful tools for enhancing the production and functional properties of keratinase. This critical review systematically summarizes the application potential of keratinase, and in particular certain newly discovered catalytic capabilities. Furthermore, we provide comprehensive insight into mechanistic and molecular aspects of keratinases including analysis of gene sequences and protein structures. In addition, development and current advances in protein engineering of keratinases are summarized and discussed, revealing that the engineering of protein domains such as signal peptides and pro-peptides has become an important strategy to increase production of keratinases. Finally, prospects for further development are also proposed, indicating that advanced protein engineering technologies will lead to improved and additional commercial keratinases for various industrial applications.

Inverted perovskite solar cells have attracted increasing attention because they have achieved long operating lifetimes. However, they have exhibited significantly inferior power conversion efficiencies compared to regular perovskite solar cells. Here we reduce this efficiency gap using a trace amount of surface-anchoring alkylamine ligands (AALs) with different chain lengths as grain and interface modifiers. We show that long-chain AALs added to the precursor solution suppress nonradiative carrier recombination and improve the optoelectronic properties of mixed-cation mixed-halide perovskite films. The resulting AAL surface-modified films exhibit a prominent (100) orientation and lower trap-state density as well as enhanced carrier mobilities and diffusion lengths. These translate into a certified stabilized power conversion efficiency of 22.3% (23.0% power conversion efficiency for lab-measured champion devices). The devices operate for over 1,000 h at the maximum power point under simulated AM1.5 illumination, without loss of efficiency. While perovskite solar cells with an inverted architecture hold great promise for operation stability, their power conversion efficiency lags behind that of conventional cells. Here, Zheng et al. achieve a certified 22.34% efficiency, exploiting alkylamine ligands as grain and interface modifiers., Funding Agencies|KAUSTKing Abdullah University of Science & Technology; Office of Sponsored Research (OSR) [OSR-2017-CRG-3380]

Jingjing Wei,1– 3,* Xianglan Jin,2,* Baoxin Chen,2 Xuemei Liu,4 Hong Zheng,4 Rongjuan Guo,2 Xiao Liang,3 Chen Fu,2,4 Yunling Zhang2,3 1Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Neurology, Dongfang Hospital, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Neurology, Xiyuan Hospital, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 4Central Laboratory, Dongfang Hospital, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Yunling ZhangDepartment of Neurology, Xiyuan Hospital, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, 1 Xiyuan Playground, Haidian District, Beijing 100091, People’s Republic of ChinaTel/Fax +86-10-6283-5960Email yunlingzhang2004@126.comChen FuCentral Laboratory, Dongfang Hospital, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, 6 First Block, Fangxingyuan, Fengtai District, Beijing 100078, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86-10-6768-9634Fax +86-10-67691949Email fuchen2003@163.comPurpose: Cognitive impairment (CI) is one of the most significant post-stroke complications. The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is widely applied to the early screening of post-stroke CI (PSCI), and has good sensitivity and specificity, but needs a long time to administer. Clinicians and researchers need shorter, more effective cognitive testing tools. The purpose of this study was to detect the sensitivity and specificity of two different short-form versions of the MoCA (SF-MoCA) for screening of PSCI in a Chinese population.Methods: A total of 2,989 stroke participants were included from 14 hospitals in northern and southern China between June 2011 and September 2013. The sensitivity and specificity of the two SF-MoCA versions were compared.Results: Using an MoCA score < 26 as the critical value, t

A key challenge in ecology is to understand the relationships between organismal traits and ecosystem processes. Here, with a novel dataset of leaf length and width for 10 480 woody dicots in China and 2374 in North America, we show that the variation in community mean leaf size is highly correlated with the variation in climate and ecosystem primary productivity, independent of plant life form. These relationships likely reflect how natural selection modifies leaf size across varying climates in conjunction with how climate influences canopy total leaf area. We find that the leaf size‒primary productivity functions based on the Chinese dataset can predict productivity in North America and vice‐versa. In addition to advancing understanding of the relationship between a climate‐driven trait and ecosystem functioning, our findings suggest that leaf size can also be a promising tool in palaeoecology for scaling from fossil leaves to palaeo‐primary productivity of woody ecosystems.