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Here, we report our recent progress in the design, fluid thermodynamics simulation, and high-power test of the2nd harmonic cavity for the China Spallation Neutron Source Phase II. A high-performance and large-size magnetic alloy (MA) core was developed as the load material for the radiofrequency cavity to achieve a high gradient of 40 kV/m. The water-cooling structure and cooling efficiency were studied and improved through numerical analysis and thermal experiments. The long-term stability of the cavity, especially the waterproofness of the MA cores with high heat load, was verified by high power tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While reservoir dams have created significant social and economic benefits, dam failure caused by various reasons bring about great threats to the downstream areas. Many countries determine management investment according to the risk level of reservoir dams and the "as low as reasonably practicable" (ALARP) principle. However, life cannot be directly quantified in currency, and the traditional "cost-benefit" method cannot be effectively applied to reservoir dam management decisions. Hence, the life quality index (LQI) was introduced and improved to solve this problem based on the targeted analysis of the parameters of the life quality index, considering the fact that the per capita GDP changes over time. Without monetary quantification of life, an annual economic investment was determined to effectively control the risk level of the reservoir dam in a certain period of time in the future to ensure people's life safety and quality of life. The improved LQI method was applied to a small-scale reservoir in China. The results showed that (a) the annual investment in dam risk management calculated by the improved LQI method was 20.07% higher than that of the traditional LQI method; (b) the annual investment in dam management changed 24 times due to changes in warning time and public risk awareness; and (c) dam management investment should be used not only to ensure the safety of the structure but also to improve early warning capacity and public risk awareness. This study focuses on how to reasonably determine the management investment of reservoir dams when the dam risk is in the ALARP region, which can effectively promote the application of dam risk standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuous decline in the birth rate can lead to a series of social and economic problems. Accurately predicting the birth rate of a region will help national and local governments to formulate more scientifically sound development policies. This paper proposes a discrete-aware model BRP-Net based on attention mechanism and LSTM, for effectively predicting the birth rate of prefecture-level cities. BRP-Net is trained using multiple variables related to comprehensive development of prefecture-level cities, covering factors such as economy, education and population structure that can influence the birth rate. Additionally, the comprehensive data of China's prefecture-level cities exhibits strong spatiotemporal specificity. Our model leverages the advantages of attention mechanism to identify the feature correlation and temporal relationships of these multi-variable time series input data. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed BRP-Net has higher accuracy and better generalization performance compared to other mainstream methods, while being able to adapt to the spatiotemporal specificity of variables between prefecture-level cities. Using BRP-Net to achieve precise and robust prediction estimates of the birth rate in prefecture-level cities can provide more effective decision-making references for local governments to formulate more accurate and reasonable fertility encouragement policies., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Xue et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

BACKGROUND Sepsis has emerged as a leading cause of death in the intensive care unit. A growing number of studies have shown that genetic variants, especially single nucleotide polymorphisms, are key determinants of inter-individual variation in sepsis response. Therefore, early prediction of the onset and progression of sepsis, along with early intervention in high-risk patients, should be performed to effectively reduce the morbidity and mortality of the disease. MATERIAL AND METHODS A total of 581 Chinese patients were enrolled in this study, including 271 patients with sepsis and 310 patients without. We measured gene polymorphisms of MBL2 and serum levels of MBL2, tumor necrosis factor (TNF-alpha), interleukin (IL)-6, IL-4, and IL-10 in all patients. The effects of site mutations on the binding of MBL2 to mannose-associated serine protease 1 (MASP1) and MASP2 were also analyzed. RESULTS Of 3 site mutations in the MBL2 gene (rs5030737, rs1800450, and rs1800451), only rs1800450 had a mutant (G/A) genotype. The frequency of the GA genotype and A allele in the sepsis group was higher than that in the non-sepsis group. Furthermore, rs1800450G/A was associated with decreased serum MBL2 and IL-10 levels and decreased MBL2-MASP1 and MBL2-MASP2 interactions. Bioinformatics analysis showed that rs1800450G/A reduced the structural stability of the MBL2 protein and affected its function. CONCLUSIONS MBL2 rs1800450G/A was associated with a higher risk of sepsis, which possibly involved a decreased level of serum MBL2 that broke the balance of inflammation and weakened the binding of MBL2 to MASP1 and MASP2.