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Agro-pastoral ecotone of northern China is the prominent area for agricultural production, but it is also the most typical ecological fragile area with frequent drought disasters. Taking Yulin City at Shaanxi Province in China as the case area, the paper aims to investigate the spatio-temporal changes of agricultural vulnerability to drought in China's agro-pastoral ecotone in the period 2000 to 2020. The results show that: 1) the agricultural vulnerability to drought in Yulin City has shifted from high vulnerability in the period 2000–2010 to low vulnerability in the period 2011–2020. 2) There exist obvious spatio-temporal differences of the agricultural vulnerability to drought in Yulin City during the research period. 3) Four sensitive events and 14 resilient events were identified in the research and the crops of Yulin had become more resilient to drought. Finally, the paper put forward with policy implications to make adaptive strategies of agriculture to climate change in China's agro-pastoral ecotone in the future, e.g., carrying out agricultural zoning based on agricultural production conditions, intensifying the construction of disaster prevention and relief system, and integrating with modern agricultural technology to develop new type agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mechanical force loading is essential for maintaining bone homeostasis, and unloading exposure can lead to bone loss. Osteoclasts are the only bone resorbing cells and play a crucial role in bone remodeling. The molecular mechanisms underlying mechanical stimulation-induced changes in osteoclast function remain to be fully elucidated. Our previous research found Ca2+-activated Cl− channel Anoctamin 1 (Ano1) was an essential regulator for osteoclast function. Here, we report that Ano1 mediates osteoclast responses to mechanical stimulation. In vitro, osteoclast activities are obviously affected by mechanical stress, which is accompanied by the changes of Ano1 levels, intracellular Cl− concentration and Ca2+ downstream signaling. Ano1 knockout or calcium binding mutants blunts the response of osteoclast to mechanical stimulation. In vivo, Ano1 knockout in osteoclast blunts loading induced osteoclast inhibition and unloading induced bone loss and. These results demonstrate that Ano1 plays an important role in mechanical stimulation induced osteoclast activity changes. An essential role of the Ca2+-activated Cl− channel, Anoctamin 1, is identified in mediating the response of osteoclasts to mechanical stimulation. Ano1 knockout in osteoclasts inhibits unloading- induced osteoclast activation and unloading-induced bone loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Chinese government's emergency emissions reduction strategy which aims to reduce air pollution and mentions topics including a decline in the concentration of particulate matter and a study about the environmental effects of urban and rural development.

A letter to the editor is presented related to a study on geological implications of China's land creation projects, led by researcher Peiyue Li and others.

Aliasing refers to the phenomenon that high frequency signals degenerate into completely different ones after sampling. It arises as a problem in the context of deep learning as downsampling layers are widely adopted in deep architectures to reduce parameters and computation. The standard solution is to apply a low-pass filter (e.g., Gaussian blur) before downsampling (Zhang in: ICML, 2020). However, it can be suboptimal to apply the same filter across the entire content, as the frequency of feature maps can vary across both spatial locations and feature channels. To tackle this, we propose an adaptive content-aware low-pass filtering layer, which predicts separate filter weights for each spatial location and channel group of the input feature maps. We investigate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method across multiple tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, video instance segmentation, and image-to-image translation. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our approach effectively adapts to the different feature frequencies to avoid aliasing while preserving useful information for recognition. Code is available at https://maureenzou.github.io/ddac/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has abundant shale gas resource, but its geological conditions are complicated. This work sought to find the shale breaking mechanism with the polycrystalline diamond compact (PDC) bit when drilling the shale that is rich in stratification. Therefore, a laboratory-scale drilling device based on a drilling machine is developed. The influences of Longmaxi shale stratification on drilling parameters in the drilling process with micro-PDC bit are investigated. Six groups of drilling experiments with six inclination angles ( β = 0°, 15°, 30°, 45°, 60° and 90°), total thirty-six groups, are carried out. The weight on bit reaches the maximum value at β = 30° and reaches the minimum value at β = 0°. The biggest torque value is at β = 30°, and the smaller torque values are at β = 15°, β = 45° and β = 60°. When the inclination angle is between 30° and 60°, the shale fragmentation volume is larger. The inclination angle β = 0° is beneficial, and β = 15° and β = 60° are detrimental to controlling the drilling direction in the Longmaxi shale gas formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Loess Plateau is one typical area of serious soil erosion in the world. China has implemented 'Grain for Green' (GFG) project to restore the eco-environment of the Loess Plateau since 1999. With the GFG project subsidy approaching the end, it is concerned that farmers of fewer subsidies may reclaim land again. Thus, 'Gully Land Consolidation Project' (GLCP) was initiated in 2010. The core of the GLCP was to create more land suitable for farming in gullies so as to reduce land reclamation on the slopes which are ecological vulnerable areas. This paper aims to assess the effect of the GLCP on soil erosion problems by studying Wangjiagou project region located in the central part of Anzi valley in the middle of the Loess Plateau, mainly using the revised universal soil loss equation (RUSLE) based on GIS. The findings show that the GLCP can help to reduce soil shipment by 9.87% and it creates more terraces and river-nearby land suitable for farming which account for 27.41% of the whole study area. Thus, it is feasible to implement the GLCP in places below gradient 15°, though the GLCP also intensifies soil erosion in certain places such as field ridge, village land, floodplain, natural grassland, and shrub land. In short, the GLCP develops new generation dam land and balances the short-term and long-term interests to ease the conflicts between economic development and environmental protection. Furthermore, the GLCP and the GFG could also be combined preferably. On the one hand, the GFG improves the ecological environment, which could offer certain safety to the GLCP, on the other hand, the GLCP creates more farmland favorable for farming in gullies instead of land reclamation on the slopes, which could indirectly protect the GFG project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging evidence indicates that microRNAs (miRNAs) have important roles in regulating osteogenic differentiation and bone formation. Thus far, no study has established the pathophysiological role for miRNAs identified in human osteoporotic bone specimens. Here we found that elevated miR-214 levels correlated with a lower degree of bone formation in bone specimens from aged patients with fractures. We also found that osteoblast-specific manipulation of miR-214 levels by miR-214 antagomir treatment in miR-214 transgenic, ovariectomized, or hindlimb-unloaded mice revealed an inhibitory role of miR-214 in regulating bone formation. Further, in vitro osteoblast activity and matrix mineralization were promoted by antagomir-214 and decreased by agomir-214, and miR-214 directly targeted ATF4 to inhibit osteoblast activity. These data suggest that miR-214 has a crucial role in suppressing bone formation and that miR-214 inhibition in osteoblasts may be a potential anabolic strategy for ameliorating osteoporosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to find the circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) co-related with the severity of coronary artery calcification (CAC), and testify whether the selected miRNAs could reflect the obstructive coronary artery disease in symptomatic patients. Patients with chest pain and moderated risk for coronary artery disease (CAD) were characterized with coronary artery calcium score (CACS) from cardiac computed tomography (CT). We analyzed plasma miRNA levels of clinical matched 11 CAC (CACS > 100) and 6 non-CAC (CACS = 0) subjects by microarray profile. Microarray analysis identified 34 differentially expressed miRNAs between CAC and non CAC groups. Eight miRNAs (miR-223, miR-3135b, miR-133a-3p, miR-2861, miR-134, miR-191-3p, miR-3679-5p, miR-1229 in CAC patients) were significantly increased in CAC plasma in an independent clinical matched cohort. Four miRNAs (miR-2861, 134, 1229 and 3135b) were correlated with the degree of CAC. Validation test in angiographic cohort showed that miR-134, miR-3135b and miR-2861 were significantly changed in patients with obstructive CAD . We identified three significantly upregulated circulating miRNAs (miR-134, miR-3135b and 2861) correlated with CAC while detected obstructive coronary disease in symptomatic patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]