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Adenomyosis (AM) is a common gynecological disorder characterized by the presence of endometrial glands and stroma within the uterinemyometrium. It is associated with abnormal uterine bleeding (AUB), dysmenorrhea, and infertility. Although several mechanisms have been proposed to elucidate AM, the exact cause and development of the condition remain unclear. Recent studies have highlighted the significance of macrophage polarization in the microenvironment,which plays a crucial role in AMinitiation and progression. However, a comprehensive review regarding the role and regulatory mechanism of macrophage polarization in AM is currently lacking. Therefore, this review aims to summarize the phenotype and function of macrophage polarization and the phenomenon of the polarization of adenomyosis-associated macrophages (AAMs). It also elaborates on the role and regulatory mechanism ofAAMpolarization in invasion/migration, fibrosis, angiogenesis, dysmenorrhea, and infertility. Furthermore, this review explores the underlying molecular mechanisms of AAM polarization and suggests future research directions. In conclusion, this review provides a new perspective on understanding the pathogenesis of AM and provides a theoretical foundation for developing targeted drugs through the regulation of AAM polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heart failure is a clinical syndrome caused by ventricular insufficiency, which results in decreased activity tolerance and repeated hospitalization, seriously affecting quality of life, and it is the main cause of death in elderly people. In recent years, great progress has been made in the treatment of heart failure, but the prevalence, mortality, and readmission rate among elderly patients with heart failure remain high. Because elderly patients have multiple cardiovascular disease risk factors, coexistence of multiple diseases accompanied by multiple syndromes, multiple medications, and natural decline of body functions, the clinical diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation, and long‐term management of these patients differ from those in other populations. To facilitate clinical practice and application of clinical geriatric medicine, especially among community physicians, experts from the Cardiovascular Group, Geriatrics Branch of the Chinese Medical Association have drafted this consensus to summarize the diagnosis and treatment regimens for elderly patients with chronic heart failure and provide guidance for its clinical diagnosis and treatment in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Molecular testing of indeterminate thyroid nodules informs about the presence of point mutations, insertions/deletions, copy number variants, RNA fusions, transcript alterations and miRNA expression. American Thyroid Association (ATA) guidelines suggest molecular testing of indeterminate thyroid nodules may be considered to supplement risk of malignancy ROM). Although these recommendations have been incorporated in clinical practices in the United States, molecular testing of indeterminate thyroid nodules is not common practice in Asia. Here, we performed molecular testing of 140 indeterminate nodules from Chinese patients using a novel molecular platform composed of RNA and DNA-RNA classifiers, which is similar to Afirma GEC and ThyroSeq v3. Compared with reports from North America, the new RNA and DNA-RNA classifiers had a higher positive predictive value (p1 = 0.000 and p2 = 0.020) but a lower negative predictive value (p1 = 0.004 and p2 = 0.098), with no significant differences in sensitivity (p1 = 0.625 and p2 = 0.179) or specificity p1 = 0.391 and p2 = 0.264). Out of 58 resected nodules, 10 were borderline and 33 malignant, indicating a 74.1% ROM, which was higher than reports in North America (10-40% ROM). Our findings emphasize molecular testing with the newly reported RNA and DNA-RNA classifiers can be used as a 'rule-in' test when ROM is high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aging is associated with dramatic changes to DNA methylation (DNAm), although the causes and consequences of such alterations are unknown. Our ability to experimentally uncover mechanisms of epigenetic aging will be greatly enhanced by our ability to study and manipulate these changes using in vitro models. However, it remains unclear whether the changes elicited by cells in culture can serve as a model of what is observed in aging tissues in vivo. To test this, we serially passaged mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) and assessed changes in DNAm at each time point via reduced representation bisulfite sequencing. By developing a measure that tracked cellular aging in vitro, we tested whether it tracked physiological aging in various mouse tissues and whether anti-aging interventions modulate this measure. Our measure, termed CultureAGE, was shown to strongly increase with age when examined in multiple tissues (liver, lung, kidney, blood, and adipose). As a control, we confirmed that the measure was not a marker of cellular senescence, suggesting that it reflects a distinct yet progressive cellular aging phenomena that can be induced in vitro. Furthermore, we demonstrated slower epigenetic aging in animals undergoing caloric restriction and a resetting of our measure in lung and kidney fibroblasts when re-programmed to iPSCs. Enrichment and clustering analysis implicated EED and Polycomb group (PcG) factors as potentially important chromatin regulators in translational culture aging phenotypes. Overall, this study supports the concept that physiologically relevant aging changes can be induced in vitro and used to uncover mechanistic insights into epigenetic aging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Al2O3 ceramics have a wide range of applications because of the superior mechanical properties and chemical stability of the material. In this study, Al2O3 was successfully brazed using an Ag-SiO2 filler in air. The microstructure of Al2O3 joints was characterized using scanning electron microscopy, electron probe microanalysis, and transmission electron microscopy. The composition of the joint was determined to be Al2O3/SiO2/Ag/SiO2/Al2O3. Mechanical properties and fracture characteristics of joints were investigated. The achieved shear strength was highest at 32 MPa when joints were obtained at 1050°C for 30 min using Ag-1SiO2 braze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impending climate warming is expected to influence plant growth and distribution, and the distribution range limit of tree species is extremely sensitive to climate change. However, synchronous comparisons of responses of different tree species with overlapping ecological niches to climate at their distribution range limit in the same region have received little attention. In the present study, we assessed the discrepancy in radial growth responses of two dominant oak species to climate at their distribution range limit (southern range limit for Quercus mongolica, northern range limit for Quercus variabilis) in Beijing, China. Furthermore, growth-climate relationships were examined using linear mixed-effects models, and growth trends up to the year 2100 were forecast based on future climate scenarios (RCP2.6 and RCP8.5). Our results indicated that there were no significant differences in the growth response to climate between Q. variabilis at its northern limit and Q. mongolica at its southern limit, and the growth of the two tree species was positively correlated with the minimum temperature and negatively correlated with the climatic moisture deficit of autumn. However, the growth response to climate variables varied at different sites. Additionally, the model forecast showed an increase in radial growth of Q. variabilis at its northern limit and Q. mongolica at its southern limit up to the end of the present century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fractal image compression coding algorithm is a novel image compression technology; however, the long encoding time and unacceptable image reconstruction quality remain the primary obstacles in practical application. The purpose of this study is to improve the coding quality from the perspective of grey level transform and feature extraction. In this study, a novel orthogonal sparse fractal coding algorithm based on image texture feature is proposed. The authors define a normalised version as the new grey description feature of the image block so that two improved methods are scientifically combined in theory and algorithm. First, orthogonal sparse grey level transform based on sparse decomposition improves image reconstruction quality and decoding speed. Then, the similarity measure matrix, which stores the variance feature between range blocks and domain blocks, is used to reduce redundancies and encoding time. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm in this study can obtain better image reconstruction quality and speed up encoding time significantly as compared to the conventional fractal coding schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The behavior of excitons in van der Waals (vdWs) heterostructures depends on electron-electron interactions and charge transfer at the hetero-interface. However, what still remains to be unraveled is to which extent the carrier densities of both counterparts and the band alignment in the vdWs heterostructures determine the photoluminescence properties. Here, we systematically study the photoluminescence properties of monolayer MoS2/graphene heterostructures by modulating the carrier densities and contact barrier at the interface via electrochemical gating. It is shown that the PL intensities of excitons can be tuned by more than two orders of magnitude, and a blue-shift of the exciton peak of up to 40 meV is observed. By extracting the carrier density of MoS2 using an electric potential distribution model, and the Schottky barrier using fi rst-principle calculations, we fi nd that the controllable carrier density in MoS2 plays a dominant role in the PL tuning at negative gate bias, whereas the interlayer relaxation of excitons induced by the Schottky barrier has a major contribution at positive gate bias. This is further verified by controlling the tunneling barrier and screening fi eld across MoS2 by inserting selfassembled monolayers (SAMs) at the interface. These fi ndings will benefit to better understand the effect of many-body interactions and hetero-interfaces on the optical and optoelectronic properties in vdWs heterostructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-granularity of time and time zone difference are two aspects of a time management model (TMM) for distributed workflow management system (DWfS). There are some recent literatures concerning each of them. However, current researches on DWfS have not put them together but have built up an integrated model. As business and scientific collaboration processes across continents become more and more frequent, it is increasingly important to build an integrated model to take them as a whole to make the time transformation and temporal verification in collaboration processes easy and efficient. Aiming at solving this problem, an integrated TMM, DWfS-TMM, is proposed in this paper. The DWfS-TMM model consists of a set of general time ontology and a set of general rules for unified transformation between different time zones and different time granularity units. The representation of build-time and run-time temporal constraints in workflow processes and the temporal consistency checking method in this model is investigated. Finally, a real case study is investigated and it is shown from this case study that the presented model is useful and practicable. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of the ShanghaiGrid is to provide information services to the people. It aims to construct a metropolitan-area information service infrastructure and establish an open standard for widespread upper-layer applications from both communities and the government. The Information Service Grid Toolkit and a typical application called the Traffic Information Grid are discussed in detail. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents findings of a study which determined the role of the mechanical strain of human airway smooth muscle (HASM) cells in inducing their proliferation and migration. Contribution of matrix metalloproteinases (MMP) to strain-induced HASM proliferation and migration; Integration of extracellular matrix metalloproteinase inducer within HASM cells; Role of MMP in HASM cell migration and invasion; Effect of cyclic strain of HSM on Tenascin-C release.

A simple wideband tubular suspended stripline (SSL) bandpass filter using novel miniaturisation technology is presented. In this design, the equivalent circuit of the proposed filter is considered as the conventional tubular bandpass filter circuit. A new miniaturisation technology called 'different height of cavity' is applied to the filter design. A SSL filter is designed and fabricated with the passband from 0.6 to 1 GHz. The insertion loss is better than 0.6 dB in the passband while the return loss is mostly higher than 20 dB. The group delay variation is <0.2 ns. Good agreement between the simulated and measured result is observed, which proves the validity of the technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dissimilar steels welded joints, between ferritic steel and austenitic stainless steel, are always encountered in high-temperature components in power plants. As two new grade ferritic steel and austenitic stainless steel, T92 (9Cr0.5Mo2WVNb) and HR3C (TP310HCbN), exhibit superior heat strength at elevated temperatures and are increasingly applied in ultra-supercritical (USC) plants around the world, a complete assessment of the properties for T92/HR3C dissimilar steels welded joints is urgently required. In this paper, metallographic microstructures across the joint were inspected by optical microscope. Particularly, the creep rupture test was conducted on joints under different load stresses at 625 °C to analyse creep strength and predict their service lives, while their fractograph were observed under scanning electron microscope. Additionally, finite element method was employed to investigate residual stress distribution of joints. Results showed that the joints were qualified under USC conditions, and T92 base material was commonly the weakest part of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]