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The global COVID pandemic of 2020, affected travel patterns across the world. The level of impact was influenced not only by the virus itself, but also by the nature, extent, and duration of governmental restriction on commerce and personal activity to limit its spread. This paper focuses on the interaction between COVID-19 transmission and traffic volume and further explores the impact of traffic control policies on the interaction. Roadway traffic volume was used to quantify and assess the Chinese response to the pandemic; specifically, the relationship between government restrictions, travel activity, and COVID-19 progression across 29 provinces. Space and time distributions of traffic volume across China during the first half of 2020, were used to quantity the response and recovery of travel during the critical initial onset period of the virus. Most revealing of these trends were the impact of the Chinese restriction policies on both travel and the virus as well as the relationship of traffic trends during the closure period with the speed and extent of the recovery "bounce" across individual provinces based on location, economic activity, and restriction policy. These suggest that the most significant and rapid declines in traffic volume during the restriction period resulted in the most pronounced returns to normal (or more) demand levels. Based on these trends a Susceptible Infection Recovery model was created to simulate a range of outbreak and restriction policies to examine the relationship between COVID-19 spread and traffic volume in China.

Human body fluids have become an indispensable resource for clinical research, diagnosis and prognosis. Urine is widely used to discover disease-specific glycoprotein biomarkers because of its recurrently non-invasive collection and disease-indicating properties. While urine is an unstable fluid in that its composition changes with ingested nutrients and further as it is excreted through micturition, urinary proteins are more stable and their abnormal glycosylation is associated with diseases. It is known that aberrant glycosylation can define tumor malignancy and indicate disease initiation and progression. However, a thorough and translational survey of urinary glycosylation in diseases has not been performed. In this article, we evaluate the clinical applications of urine, introduce methods for urine glycosylation analysis, and discuss urine glycoprotein biomarkers. We emphasize the importance of mining urinary glycoproteins and searching for disease-specific glycosylation in various diseases (including cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, and viral infections). With advances in mass spectrometry-based glycomics/glycoproteomics/glycopeptidomics, characterization of disease-specific glycosylation will optimistically lead to the discovery of disease-related urinary biomarkers with better sensitivity and specificity in the near future.

Nano zero-valent iron biochar (nZVI–BC), an environmentally-friendly functional material prepared from waste biomass, has attracted extensive attention. This material has potential to solve the problem of biomass conversion. However, the lack of a method of converting biomass to the nZVI–BC involved in biomass modification and pyrolysis hinders its further production and application. In this study, we introduced the green solvent polyethylene glycol 400 (PEG400) to a biomass (rice straw, RS) modification system with FeCl3·6H2O, and activated RS was prepared to nZVI–BC by one-step pyrolysis. The addition of PEG400 promoted the hydrolysis of iron ion and improved the RS surface structure, promoting the attachment of Fe2O3 to the RS surface. The mild activation conditions with temperatures of 60, 80, 100 °C and a time of 0.5 h prevented the excessive loss of the lignin component and were conducive to the formation of carbon skeletons. Amorphous carbon and Fe2O3 were subjected to redox reactions to form nZVI–BC with the assistance of reducing gas produced from pyrolysis. In addition, the prepared nZVI–BC was tested for dye (Congo red) removal, showing rapid absorption (70.6% at 5 min) and high catalysis in advanced oxidation (75.67% at 5 min, 90% at 60 min). This work proposed a novel mechanistic strategy for preparing nZVI–BC and set a foundation for its scaled production and application.

In ultra-high-field (UHF) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) applications, the design and analysis of high-frequency radio frequency (RF) coils requires full-wave electromagnetic (EM) methods that can handle complex field-tissue interactions. Using a Huygens' equivalent surface, the Method of Moments (MoM) and the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) algorithm can be combined to accurately model the high-frequency RF coils. In previous research, a uniform FDTD mesh structure was considered, providing a compromised solution for coil-tissue interactions. This paper proposes a hybrid FDTD/MoM algorithm with non-uniform meshes. The fine mesh domain is set at the Huygens' surface, and the other domain uses coarse meshes. The proposed algorithms are strictly validated, and their computational performance is compared against conventional methods. Results show that the new algorithm can improve the calculation efficiency without losing accuracy. Specifically, compared with the uniform FDTD method, the numerical difference between both hybrid methods remains at 3.2%. Still, the calculation time of the non-uniform grid algorithm is reduced by 64.2%, demonstrating the effectiveness of the new algorithm for modeling RF coils for UHF-MRI applications.

We attempted to explore the common and distinct long- and short-range functional connectivity (FC) patterns of melancholic and non-melancholic major depressive disorder (MDD) and their associations with clinical characteristics.Fifty-nine patients with first-episode drug-naïve MDD, including 31 patients with melancholic features and 28 patients with non-melancholic features, underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning to examine long- and short-range FC. Thirty-two healthy volunteers were recruited as controls. The support vector machines (SVM) was applied to distinguish the melancholic patients from the non-melancholic patients by using the FC of abnormal brain regions.Compared to healthy volunteers, patients with MDD showed increased long-range positive FC (lpFC) in the right insula/inferior frontal gyrus and left insula. Relative to non-melancholic patients, melancholic patients displayed decreased lpFC in the right lingual gyrus, decreased short-range positive FC (spFC) in the right middle temporal gyrus and right superior parietal lobule, increased lpFC in the left inferior parietal lobule, and increased spFC in the left middle occipital gyrus/inferior occipital gyrus, left cerebellum VII/IX, and bilateral cerebellum CrusII. Increased lpFC in the left inferior parietal lobule in melancholic patients was correlated with the TEPS abstract anticipatory scores. SVM results showed that FCs of five combinations within different brain regions could distinguish melancholic patients from non-melancholic patients.FC abnormalities in the default mode network and parietal-occipital brain regions may underlie the neurobiology of melancholic MDD. An increased lpFC in the left inferior parietal lobule correlated with anhedonia may be a distinctive neurobiological feature of melancholic MDD.

Oxidative stress contributes significantly to the development of neurodegenerative diseases, thus developing nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2)-dependent neuroprotectors is highly required for either prevention or treatment of these diseases. This work highlights an electrophilicity-based strategy that allows finding more active Nrf2-dependent neuroprotectors than natural piperlongumine (PL). Electrophilic modification was applied on both the exocylic and endocyclic Michael acceptors of PL, which includes placement of an electron-withdrawing trifluoromethyl group on its aromatic ring in the ortho, meta, or para position to the exocyclic olefin, and further introduction of an electron-withdrawing α-chlorine on its lactam ring. From a panel of PL analogs, we identified PLCl-4CF

What are the molecular mechanisms leading to human sperm DNA damage?Semen samples were collected and the sperm DNA fragmentation index (DFI) was assessed. Differentially expressed RNA in spermatozoa with a high (DFI ≥30%, experimental group) or normal (DFI30%, control group) DFI were identified by RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) technology, and Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) analysis was performed. Three differentially expressed RNA related to sperm DNA damage and repair, namely PMS1, TP53BP1 and TLK2, were validated using real-time quantitative (RT-qPCR).A total of 19,970 expressed RNA were detected in the two groups. Compared with the control group, the expression levels of 189 RNA in the experimental group were significantly increased and those of 163 genes decreased. Gene Ontology enrichment analysis showed that these RNA were mainly concentrated in the ATPase-dependent transmembrane transport complex, extracellular exosome, somatic cell DNA recombination, protein binding, cytoplasm and regulation of localization. KEGG pathway analysis showed that these RNA were mainly related to the PI3K-Akt signalling pathway, endocytosis, p53 signalling pathway and cGMP-PKG signalling pathway. The RT-qPCR results showed that the expression levels of PMS1, TP53BP1 and TLK2 in the experimental group were significantly lower than in the control group (P = 0.01, 0.015 and 0.004, respectively), which was identical to the results of RNA sequencing.Differentially expressed RNA related to sperm DNA damage and repair may be identified by RNA-seq technology, which provides new insights into the understanding of sperm DNA damage and repair, and will help to discover new biomarkers related to sperm DNA damage.

Obesity impairs cognition. Bariatric surgery can result in substantial weight loss in patients with severe obesity; however, the impact of bariatric surgery on cognitive function remains controversial. To quantify the effect of bariatric surgery on cognition in patients with severe obesity, we performed a meta-analysis of 20 studies retrieved from PubMed, Cochrane, and Embase. Of these, 6 cohort studies found that Roux-en-Y gastric bypass leads to better performance for immediate verbal memory function (standardized mean difference [SMD] = .56; 95% confidence interval [CI]: .30-.82, P.0001; I2 = 0%) and delayed memory function (SMD = .64; 95% CI: .38-.90, P.00001; I