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Background: The village doctors have served rural residents for many decades in China, and their role in rural health system has been highly praised in the world; unfortunately, less attention has been paid to the health workforce during the ambitious healthcare reform in recent years. Therefore, we conducted a longitudinal study to explore the current situation and track the future evolution of the rural healthcare workforce., Methods: The self-administered structured Village Clinic Questionnaire and Village Doctor Questionnaire, which were modified from the official questionnaires of the Ministry of Health, were constructed after three focus groups, in-depth interviews in Hebei Province, and a pilot survey in Sichuan Province. Using a stratified multistage cluster sampling process, we gathered baseline data for a longitudinal survey of village doctors, village clinics from Changshu County, Liyang County, Yongchuan District, Mianzhu County, and Jingning County in China in 2011. Well-trained interviewers and strict procedures were employed to ensure the quality of this survey. Descriptive and correlation analyses were performed with Stata 12.0., Results: After four months of surveying, 1,982 Village Doctor Questionnaires were collected, and the response rate was 88.1%. There were 1,507 (76.0%) male and 475 (24.0%) female doctors, with an average age of 51.3 years. The majority of village doctors (58.5%) practiced both western medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine, and 91.2% of the doctors received their education below college level. Their practice methods were not correlated with education level (P = 0.43), but closely related to the way they obtained their highest degree (that is, prior to starting work or as on-the-job training) (P < 0.01). The mean income of the village doctors was 1,817 (95% CI 1,733 to 1,900) RMB per month in 2011; only 757 (41.3%) doctors had pensions, and the self-reported expected pension was 1,965 RMB per month., Conclusions: Village doctors in rural China are facing critical challenges, including aging, gender imbalance, low education, and a lack of social protection. This study may be beneficial for making better policies for the development of the health workforce and China's healthcare reform.

We demonstrate single and multi-shot Fourier transform holography with the use of a tabletop extreme ultraviolet laser. The reference wave was produced by a Fresnel zone plate with a central opening that allowed the incident beam to illuminate the sample directly. The high reference wave intensity allows for larger objects to be imaged compared to mask-based lensless Fourier transform holography techniques. We obtain a spatial resolution of 169 nm from a single laser pulse and a resolution of 128 nm from an accumulation of 20 laser pulses for an object ~11x11μm(2) in size. This experiment utilized a tabletop extreme ultraviolet laser that produces a highly coherent ~1.2 ns laser pulse at 46.9 nm wavelength.

Simulated microgravity (SM) has been implicated in affecting diverse cellular pathways. Although there is emerging evidence that SM can alter cellular functions, its effect in cancer metastasis has not been addressed. Here, we demonstrate that SM inhibits migration, gelatinolytic activity, and cell proliferation of an A549 human lung adenocarcinoma cell line in vitro. Expression of antigen MKI67 and matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP2) was reduced in A549 cells stimulated by clinorotation when compared with the 1×g control condition, while overexpression of each gene improves ability of proliferation and migration, respectively, under SM conditions. These findings suggest that SM reduced the metastatic potential of human lung adenocarcinoma cells by altering the expression of MKI67 and MMP2, thereby inhibiting cell proliferation, migration, and invasion, which may provide some clues to study cancer metastasis in the future.

We propose and demonstrate by numerical simulation a new phase modulation format, the staggered differential phase-shift keying (SDPSK), for 100 Gbit/s applications. Non-return-to-zero (NRZ) SDPSK signals was generated by using two phase modulators, and return-to-zero (RZ) SDPSK signals with 50% duty cycle was generated by cascading a dual-arm Mach-Zehnder modulator. The demodulation of 2 bit/symbol can be simply achieved on 1 bit rate through only one Mach-Zehnder delay interferometer and a balanced receiver. By comparing the transmission characteristics of the two staggered phase modulation formats with those of NRZ-DPSK, RZ-DPSK, NRZ-DQPSK, and RZ-DQPSK, respectively, we show that, the SDPSK signal has similar chromatic dispersion and polarization-mode-dispersion tolerance to the DPSK signal with same NRZ or RZ shape, while the SDPSK signal has stronger nonlinear tolerance than the DPSK or DQPSK signal. In addition, the SDPSK signal has the best transmission performance when each signal was transmitted over 106km optical SMF+DCF, and then launched into a third-order Gaussian optical bandpass filter placed with beyond 125GHz bandwidth.

We report on the observation of central wavelength dynamics in an erbium-doped fiber ring laser by using the nonlinear polarization rotating technique. The evolution of central wavelength with the laser operation state was observed experimentally. Numerical simulations confirmed the experimental observation and further demonstrated that the dynamics of wavelength evolution is due to the combined effects of fiber birefringence, fiber nonlinearity, and cavity filter.

Complete asymmetric amplification of ethylenediammonium sulfate was achieved under continuous dissolution/crystallization conditions using an abrasion/grinding method.