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Embitterment and post-traumatic embitterment disorder (PTED) is critical, merging through different cultures. We explored the prevalence and related clinical characteristics of PTED of inpatients in a general hospital in China.Two hundred inpatients (aged 18-65 years) from different departments were recruited by convenient sampling and standardized diagnostic interviews of PTED. Demographic data, Post-traumatic Embitterment Disorder Self-Rating Scale (PTED-21), the Patient Health Questionnaire depression scale (PHQ-9), Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) and the Patient Health Questionnaire depression scale (PHQ-15) were collected on all participants.The prevalence of PTED was 21% (42/200) in inpatients in China; besides, the rate of increased syndromal embitterment is 28% (56/200), including 42 patients diagnosed with PTED. PTED was mainly associated with stressful events, such as illness, work and complicated interpersonal relationships. Rheumatology department and respiratory department have the highest and second highest prevalence of PTED among all departments. PTED-21 scores were significantly correlated with PHQ-9, GAD-7 and PHQ-15 (all P 0.01).The present study shows that embitterment is a critical negative emotion in inpatients with somatic illnesses with comorbid depression, anxiety and somatic symptoms. PTED and feelings of embitterment should be given proper attention in diagnosing somatic patients, and it is crucial to enhance PTED screening and intervention in the future. Future intervention studies on post-traumatic embitterment disorder could be done in general and especially in psychosomatic and somatic medicine.

Accumulating evidence suggests that the pathogenesis of alcoholic liver disease (ALD) is strongly correlated with abnormalities of the gut-liver axis. Echinacea purpurea polysaccharide (EPP) is a homogeneous polysaccharide, which has been shown to mitigate ALD. However, the effects of EPP on gut microbiome and consequently on hepatic metabolism have yet to be explored. In this study, the microbiome and metabolomics were combined to explore the effects of EPP on gut microbiota and hepatic metabolism, and the relationship between both was further revealed by Spearman correlation analysis. Results exhibited EPP reversed alcohol-induced disturbances in gut microbiota, evidenced by increased abundance of Muribaculaceae, Lactobacillus, and Bacteroides and decreased abundance of Escherichia_Shigella and Enterococcus. Besides, EPP promoted the production of n-butyric acid, a short-chain fatty acid that maintains the integrity of the intestinal barrier. Moreover, EPP improved alterations in hepatic metabolites, and characteristic metabolites such as Berberine and Ponasterone as well as key metabolic pathways, particularly Nitrogen metabolism, were identified. Furthermore, correlation analysis suggested significant associations between gut microbes and hepatic metabolites, which in turn confirmed EPP alleviated ALD via the gut-liver axis. Therefore, these findings elucidated in-depth mechanisms of EPP against ALD and provided a new target for intervention in alcohol-related diseases.

Oncogenic KRAS is a major driver in lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) that has yet to be therapeutically conquered. Here we report that the SLC7A11/glutathione axis displays metabolic synthetic lethality with oncogenic KRAS. Through metabolomics approaches, we found that mutationally activated KRAS strikingly increased intracellular cystine levels and glutathione biosynthesis. SLC7A11, a cystine/glutamate antiporter conferring specificity for cystine uptake, was overexpressed in patients with KRAS-mutant LUAD and showed positive association with tumor progression. Furthermore, SLC7A11 inhibition by either genetic depletion or pharmacological inhibition with sulfasalazine resulted in selective killing across a panel of KRAS-mutant cancer cells in vitro and tumor growth inhibition in vivo, suggesting the functionality and specificity of SLC7A11 as a therapeutic target. Importantly, we further identified a potent SLC7A11 inhibitor, HG106, that markedly decreased cystine uptake and intracellular glutathione biosynthesis. Furthermore, HG106 exhibited selective cytotoxicity toward KRAS-mutant cells by increasing oxidative stress– and ER stress–mediated cell apoptosis. Of note, treatment of KRAS-mutant LUAD with HG106 in several preclinical lung cancer mouse models led to marked tumor suppression and prolonged survival. Overall, our findings reveal that KRAS-mutant LUAD cells are vulnerable to SLC7A11 inhibition, offering potential therapeutic approaches for this currently incurable disease.

BackgroundPositive symptoms are a useful predictor of aggression in schizophrenia. Although a similar pattern of abnormal brain structures related to both positive symptoms and aggression has been reported, this observation has not yet been confirmed in a single sample.MethodTo study the association between positive symptoms and aggression in schizophrenia on a neurobiological level, a prospective meta-analytic approach was employed to analyze harmonized structural neuroimaging data from 10 research centers worldwide. We analyzed brain MRI scans from 902 individuals with a primary diagnosis of schizophrenia and 952 healthy controls.ResultsThe result identified a widespread cortical thickness reduction in schizophrenia compared to their controls. Two separate meta-regression analyses revealed that a common pattern of reduced cortical gray matter thickness within the left lateral temporal lobe and right midcingulate cortex was significantly associated with both positive symptoms and aggression.ConclusionThese findings suggested that positive symptoms such as formal thought disorder and auditory misperception, combined with cognitive impairments reflecting difficulties in deploying an adaptive control toward perceived threats, could escalate the likelihood of aggression in schizophrenia.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder and is associated with structural grey matter differences in the brain. We investigated the genetic background of some of these brain differences in a sample of 899 adults and adolescents consisting of individuals with ADHD and healthy controls. Previous work in an overlapping sample identified three ADHD-related grey matter brain networks located in areas of the superior, middle, and inferior frontal gyrus as well as the cerebellar tonsil and culmen. We associated these brain networks with protein coding genes using a statistical stability selection approach. We identified ten genes, the most promising of which were NR3C2, TRHDE, SCFD1, GNAO1, and UNC5D. These genes are expressed in brain and linked to neuropsychiatric disorders including ADHD. With our results we aid in the growing understanding of the aetiology of ADHD from genes to brain to behaviour.

Smartwatches are increasingly popular in our daily lives. Motion gestures are a common way of interacting with smartwatches, e.g., users can make a movement in the air with their arm wearing the watch to trigger a specific command of the smartwatch. Motion gesture interaction can compensate for the small screen size of the smartwatch to some extent and enrich smartwatch-based interactions. An important aspect of motion gesture interaction lies in how to determine the start and end of a motion gesture. This paper is aimed at selecting gestures as suitable delimiters for motion gesture interaction with the smartwatch. We designed six gestures (“shaking wrist left and right,” “shaking wrist up and down,” “holding fist and opening,” “turning wrist clockwise,” “turning wrist anticlockwise,” and “shaking wrist up”) and conducted two experiments to compare the performance of these six gestures. Firstly, we used dynamic time warping (DTW) and feature extraction with KNN ( K -nearest neighbors) to recognize these six gestures. The average recognition rate of the latter algorithm for the six gestures was higher than that of the former. And with the latter algorithm, the recognition rate for the first three of the six gestures was greater than 98%. According to experiment one, gesture 1 (shaking wrist left and right), gesture 2 (shaking wrist up and down), and gesture 3 (holding fist and opening) were selected as the candidate delimiters. In addition, we conducted a questionnaire data analysis and obtained the same conclusion. Then, we conducted the second experiment to investigate the performance of these three candidate gestures in daily scenes to obtain their misoperation rates. The misoperation rates of two candidate gestures (“shaking wrist left and right” and “shaking wrist up and down”) were approximately 0, which were significantly lower than that of the third candidate gesture. Based on the above experimental results, gestures “shaking wrist left and right” and “shaking wrist up and down” are suitable as motion gesture delimiters for smartwatch interaction.

Moiré superlattices have recently been extensively studied in both electronic and photonic systems, e.g., magic-angle bilayer graphene showing superconductivity and twisted bilayer photonic crystals leading to magic-angle lasers. However, the moiré physics is barely studied in the field of magnonics, i.e., in using spin waves for information processing. In this work, we report magnon flat-band formation in twisted bilayer magnonic crystals at the optimal "magic angle" and interlayer exchange coupling combination using micro magnetic simulations. At the flat-band frequency, magnons undergo a strong two-dimensional confinement with a lateral scale of about 185 nm. The magic-angle magnonic nanocavity occurs at the AB stacking region of a moiré unit cell, unlike its photonic counterpart which is at the AA region, due to the exchange-induced magnon spin torque. The magnon flat band originates from band structure reformation induced by interlayer magnon-magnon coupling. Our results enable efficient accumulation of magnon intensity in a confined region that is key for potential applications such as magnon Bose-Einstein condensation and even magnon lasing.

Multimedia event detection aims to precisely retrieve videos that contain complex semantic events from a large pool. This work addresses this task under a zero-shot setting, where only brief event-specific textural information (such as event names, a few descriptive sentences etc.) is known yet none positive video example is provided. Mainstream approaches to tackling this task are middle-level semantic concept based, where meticulously-crafted concept banks (\emph{e.g.}, LSCOM) are adopted. We argue that these concept banks are still inadequate facing video semantic complexity. Existing semantic concepts are essentially first-order, mainly designed for atomic objects, scenes or human actions etc. This work advocates the utilization of high-order concepts (such as subject-predicate-object triplets or adjective-object). The main contributions are two-fold. First, we harvest a comprehensive albeit compact high-order concept library through distilling information from three large public datasets (MS-COCO, Visual Genome and Kinetics-600), mainly related to visual relations and human-object interactions. Secondly, zero-shot events are often only briefly and partially described via textual input. The resultant semantic ambiguity makes the pursuit of most indicative high-order concepts challenging. We thus design a novel query-expanding scheme that enriches ambiguous event-specific keywords by searching over either large common knowledge bases (\emph{e.g.}, WikiHow) or top-ranked webpages retrieved from modern search engines. This way sets up a more faithful connection between zero-shot events and high-order concepts. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that strives for concept-based video search beyond first-order concepts. Extensive experiments have been conducted on several large video benchmarks (TRECVID 2013, TRECVID 2014 and ActivityNet-1.3). The evaluations clearly demonstrate the superiority of our constructed high-order concept library and its complementariness to existing concepts.

The conventional Pb-Ag alloy possesses a high oxygen evolution reaction overpotential, poor stability, and short service life in acidic solutions, making it an unsuitable sort of anode material for the zinc electrowinning process. Therefore, a layered carbon-covered cobalt tetroxide (Co

Chronic and excessive alcohol consumption can lead to the development of alcoholic liver disease (ALD), which is characterized by oxidative damage, inflammation, and impaired intestinal barrier function. To evaluate the effect of exopolysaccharides (EPS) from Sporidiobolus pararoseus on ALD, alcohol was used in this study to cause liver damage in mice. Then, the antioxidant and anti-inflammation activities and protective effect of EPS on the intestinal barrier function were further explored in an ALD model. The results show that the histopathological change and liver injury were significantly improved in the EPS group. EPS treatment significantly increased the levels of superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione (GSH), and glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) (P

The oxygen evolution reaction kinetics in industrial zinc electrowinning is sluggish, resulting in low electrocatalytic activity and substantial energy expenditure (about one-third of energy was wasted due to the strong polarization effect). Herein, the paper described a core-shell structured MnCo

Suzhen Chen,1,2 Zhi Xu,1,2 Yinghui Li,1,2 Tianyu Wang,1,2 Yingying Yue,1,2 Zhenghua Hou,1,2 Linlin You,1,2 Na Lu,1,2 Yingying Yin,1,2 Xiaoyun Liu,1,2 Liangliang Tan,1,2 Houcheng Ji,3 Yaoran Shi,1,2 Xiaoyun Xin,1,2 Wenhao Jiang,1,2 Yonggui Yuan1,2 1Department of Psychosomatics and Psychiatry, ZhongDa Hospital, School of Medicine, Southeast University, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China; 2Institute of Psychosomatics, School of Medicine, Southeast University, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Psychiatry, The Second People’s Hospital of Jiangning District, Nanjing, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Yonggui Yuan, Department of Psychosomatics and Psychiatry, ZhongDa Hospital, School of Medicine, Southeast University, No. 87 Dingjiaqiao, Gulou District, Nanjing, 210009, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86-25-83285124, Email yygylh2000@sina.comPurpose: Shumian capsule (SMC) is a patent Chinese herbal medicine that can soothe the liver and relieves depression, quiet the spirit. Here, we aimed to investigate the efficacy of SMC for treating insomnia using both scales and polysomnography (PSG).Patients and Methods: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial was performed. Twenty-six insomnia patients randomly received SMC (n = 11) or placebo (n = 15) for four weeks. Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Inventory (PSQI), Insomnia Severity Index (ISI), 9-items Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), 7-items Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7), 17-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD-17), and Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HAMA) were applied at the baseline and the 2nd, 4th week after treatment. Treatment Emergent Symptom Scale was used to assess adverse reactions. We used PSG to record and analyze sleep features at baseline and after four weeks.Results: PSQI, ISI, PHQ-9, HAMD-17, and HAMA scores decreased significantly after SMC treatment. Also, the total sleep time, rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep latency, stage 2 sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep, and sleep efficiency improved significantly after SMC treatment. In the placebo group, the only significant change was the decrease of PHQ-9 at week-2. Furthermore, both SMC and placebo reported no adverse events.Conclusion: SMC could safely improve sleep quality with depression and anxiety remission in insomnia patients.Keywords: Chinese herbal medicine, shumian capsule, insomnia, polysomnography, clinical trial, randomized and double-blind method

Therapeutic hypothermia (TH) is potentially an important therapy for central nervous system (CNS) trauma. However, its clinical application remains controversial, hampered by two major factors: 1) Many of the CNS injury sites, such as the optic nerve (ON), are deeply buried, preventing access for local TH. The alternative is to apply TH systemically, which significantly limits the applicable temperature range. 2) Even with possible access for “local refrigeration”, cold-induced cellular damage offsets the benefit of TH. Here we present a clinically translatable model of traumatic optic neuropathy (TON) by applying clinical trans-nasal endoscopic surgery to goats and non-human primates. This model faithfully recapitulates clinical features of TON such as the injury site (pre-chiasmatic ON), the spatiotemporal pattern of neural degeneration, and the accessibility of local treatments with large operating space. We also developed a computer program to simplify the endoscopic procedure and expand this model to other large animal species. Moreover, applying a cold-protective treatment, inspired by our previous hibernation research, enables us to deliver deep hypothermia (4°C) locally to mitigate inflammation and metabolic stress (indicated by the transcriptomic changes after injury) without cold-induced cellular damage, and confers prominent neuroprotection both structurally and functionally. Intriguingly, neither treatment alone was effective, demonstrating that in situ deep hypothermia combined with hibernation-mimicking cold protection constitutes a breakthrough for TH as a therapy for TON and other CNS traumas.

NPHS2 is the causative gene of nephrotic syndrome type 2 (MIM 600995) which often clinically manifests as steroid-resistant nephrotic syndrome (SRNS). The NPHS2 gene encodes a slit diaphragm (SD) associated protein podocin.This study reported a novel disease-causing mutation of NPHS2 in a Chinese family with SRNS. We also investigated the pathogenic mechanism of the variants in this family.A Chinese family with SRNS was recruited. Whole exome sequencing was performed to screen for disease-causing mutation. Sanger sequencing was used to confirm the results. In vitro functional experiments including immunoblotting, co-immunoprecipitation and double immunofluorescence staining were performed to explore the pathogenic mechanisms of mutations.In this family, compound heterozygous mutations of NPHS2 (c.467dupT and c.865A G) were identified and segregated with the disease. The maternal c.865A G was a novel variant, leading to amino acid substitution (p.K289E). In vitro functional assays indicated that c.467dupT (p.L156FfsX11) mutant lost interaction with nephrin. Both K289E and L156FfsX11 mutants showed sharply diminished plasma membrane localization. Furthermore, abnormal distribution of podocin mutants also altered the cell membrane localization of nephrin.We reported a family with SRNS caused by compound heterozygous mutations of NPHS2 (c.467dupT and c.865A G). c.865A G (p.K289E) in NPHS2 was a novel causative variant associated with SRNS. Both variants in this family not only affected the normal cell membrane localization of podocin, but also altered the cell membrane localization of nephrin which is the major architectural protein of SD.

This study aimed to use a machine-learning method to identify HTR1A/1B methylation and resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) related to the diagnosis of MDD, then try to build classification models for MDD diagnosis based on the identified features.Peripheral blood samples were collected from all recruited participants, and part of the participants underwent the resting-state fMRI scan. Features including HTR1A/1B methylation and rsFC were calculated. Then, the initial feature sets of epigenetics and neuroimaging were separately input into an all-relevant feature selection to generate significant discriminative power for MDD diagnosis. Random forest classifiers were constructed and evaluated based on identified features. In addition, the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) method was adapted to interpret the diagnostic model.A combination of selected HTR1A/1B methylation and rsFC feature sets achieved better performance than using either one alone - a distinction between MDD and healthy control groups was achieved at 81.78% classification accuracy and 0.8948 AUC.A high classification accuracy can be achieved by combining multidimensional information from epigenetics and cerebral radiomic features in MDD. Our approach can be helpful for accurate clinical diagnosis of MDD and further exploring the pathogenesis of MDD.

Large animal model of optic nerve (ON) injury is an essential tool for translational medicine. Perfusion fixation with paraformaldehyde is mainly used for preparing the semi-thin (1-2 μm thick) and ultra-thin (0.5 μm thick) sections of the ON tissues. However, this conventional fixation technique in large animals needs a large volume of fixatives, which increases the risk of toxic exposure and is environmentally unfriendly. Additionally, fixed residual ON cannot be used for other tests that require fresh tissue samples. Although conventional immersion fixation is feasible for preparing a semi-thin section of the ON in small animals (0.2-0.6 mm in diameter), it faces technical challenges when fixing the ON of large animals (3 mm in diameters), as increased diameter limits the permeability of the fixatives into deeper tissue. Therefore, we optimized the immersion-fixation method to obtain high-quality, large-scale, semi-thin, and ultra-thin sections for the ON of goat and rhesus macaques. Using this optimized technique, the ON microstructure was well preserved throughout the entire area of 1.5*1.5 square millimeters, allowing confident quantification of axon density/diameter on semi-thin section and identification of specific organelles and glial cells on ultra-thin sections. Furthermore, the optimized technique is a quick, simple, and environmentally friendly fixation method. Notably, the ON regions of large animals with or without an intact neurovascular system can be prepared for light and electron microscopy. In contrast, the residual unfixed ON from the same animal can be further utilized for experiments such as tissue culture and biomolecular tests.

Background Cone dystrophy with supernormal rod response (CDSRR) is an autosomal recessive retinal disorder characterized by myopia, dyschromatopsia, nyctalopia, photophobia, and nystagmus. CDSRR is caused by mutations in KCNV2, the gene encoding for an electrically silent Kv subunit (Kvs) named Kv8.2. Methods A Chinese CDSRR family was recruited. Complete ophthalmology clinical examinations were performed to clarify the phenotype. Genetic examination was underwent using whole exome sequencing (WES). In addition, a candidate gene was validated by Sanger sequencing. Expression analysis in vitro including immunoblotting, quantitative real‐time PCR (qRT‐PCR), and co‐immunoprecipitation experiments was performed to investigate the pathogenic mechanism of the identified gene variants. Results WES identified two KCNV2 heterozygous mutations from the proband. Sanger sequencing validated that the patient's parents had, respectively, carried those two mutations. Further in vitro functional experiments indicated that the mutated alleles had led the Kv8.2 proteins to fail in expressing and interacting with the Kv2.1 protein, respectively. Conclusions This study expanded the KCNV2 mutation spectrum. It can also be deduced that CDSRR has a broad heterogeneity. It is further confirmed that the inability expression of Kv8.2 proteins and the failure of Kv8.2 proteins to interact with Kv2.1 may have accounted for the etiology of CDSRR based on previous studies and this study., Compound heterozygous variations (c.731G>C and c.280dup) were revealed in the KCNV2 gene of a male with CDSRR. Functional analysis had confirmed that c.280dup may led to non‐sensed mRNA decay (NMD), which in turn makes the protein unable to express. In addition, it is also approved that the c.731G>C mutation, in which the Kv2.1 protein failed to interact with Kv8.2 proteins. For the etiology of CDSRR, our study suggested that the inability expression of Kv8.2 proteins along with the failure of interactions between the Kv2.1 protein and the Kv8.2 proteins may account for the occurrence of the CDSRR.

This work presents a miniaturised liquid crystal (LC) phase shifter operating at 6GHz, with a glass-liquid crystal-glass structure for the phase shifter part and slot-coupled structures for the input and output ports. By varying the bias voltage loaded on both sides of the LC material, a phase shift range of 220°can be achieved with a maximum FoM 78.8°/dB.

Weakly-supervised temporal action localization aims to locate intervals of action instances with only video-level action labels for training. However, the localization results generated from video classification networks are often not accurate due to the lack of temporal boundary annotation of actions. Our motivating insight is that the temporal boundary of action should be stably predicted under various temporal transforms. This inspires a self-supervised equivariant transform consistency constraint. We design a set of temporal transform operations, including naive temporal down-sampling to learnable attention-piloted time warping. In our model, a localization network aims to perform well under all transforms, and another policy network is designed to choose a temporal transform at each iteration that adversarially brings localization result inconsistent with the localization network's. Additionally, we devise a self-refine module to enhance the completeness of action intervals harnessing temporal and semantic contexts. Experimental results on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art weakly-supervised temporal action localization methods.

Visual backdoor attack is a recently-emerging task which aims to implant trojans in a deep neural model. A trojaned model responds to a trojan-invoking trigger in a fully predictable manner while functioning normally otherwise. As a key motivating fact to this work, most triggers adopted in existing methods, such as a learned patterned block that overlays a benigh image, can be easily noticed by human. In this work, we take image recognition and detection as the demonstration tasks, building trojaned networks that are significantly less human-perceptible and can simultaneously attack multiple targets in an image. The main technical contributions are two-folds: first, under a relaxed attack mode, we formulate trigger embedding as an image steganography-and-steganalysis problem that conceals a secret image in another image in a decipherable and almost invisible way. In specific, a variable number of different triggers can be encoded into a same secret image and fed to an encoder module that does steganography. Secondly, we propose a generic split-and-merge scheme for training a trojaned model. Neurons are split into two sets, trained either for normal image recognition / detection or trojaning the model. To merge them, we novelly propose to hide trojan neurons within the nullspace of the normal ones, such that the two sets do not interfere with each other and the resultant model exhibits similar parameter statistics to a clean model. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on the datasets PASCAL VOC and Microsoft COCO (for detection) and a subset of ImageNet (for recognition). All results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed visual trojan method.

MgO activated slag and bentonite (MASB) slurry is a new and promising vertical barrier material along with excellent performances. Some solid wastes, such as phosphogypsum (PG), red mud (RM), fly ash and so on, show a positive effect on the performances of alkali activated slag. However, few studies focus on the recycling of these solid wastes in the system of MgO activated slag. The purpose of this paper is to study the incorporation of phosphogypsum and red mud on the mechanical property, permeability and hydration process of MASB slurry. The results showed that the addition of PG could significantly improve the mechanical strength and anti-permeability of the MASB slurry at early age (7 days), where the unconfined compressive strength (UCS) increased from 793.1 kPa to 1395.7 kPa and the permeability coefficient declined from 16.1 × 10

Chlorogenic acid (CGA) is a functional phenolic acid widely used in food and medicine-related fields. It has been proved to be effective in the treatment of alcoholic liver disease (ALD). However, the exact mechanism by which CGA prevents ALD, especially from the crosstalk between gut and liver, has not been previously reported. This work was aimed to explore the protective effects of CGA against ALD and its relationships to gut-liver axis abnormalities. Experimental results showed the increased (p 0.05) serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), low density lipoprotein (LDL), total cholesterol (TC) and triglyceride (TG) levels of mice fed with ethanol were ameliorated by supplementing with CGA. Moreover, CGA promoted the production of n-butyric acid by nearly 3 times (1.78 vs 0.62 nM, p 0.01), a short-chain fatty acid that helps maintain the integrity of the intestinal barrier. Furthermore, CGA alleviated microbial dysbiosis, evidenced by the increased relative abundances of beneficial bacteria Muribaculaceae, Bacteroides, Alloprevotella, and Parabacteroides, and decreased that of opportunistic pathogens Eubacterium_nodatum, Eubacterium_ruminantium, and Anaerotruncus. Correlation analysis further elucidated the microbiota altered after CGA intervention was positively correlated with short-chain fatty acids and antioxidant indexes, while negatively correlated with inflammatory cytokines. In summary, these findings suggested the hepatoprotective effect of CGA was ascribed to the modulation of gut-liver axis homeostasis.

An optical see-through two-dimensional (2D)/three-dimensional (3D) compatible display using variable-focus lens and multiplexed holographic optical elements (MHOE) is presented. It mainly consists of a MHOE, a variable-focus lens and a projection display device. The customized MHOE, by using the angular multiplexing technology of volumetric holographic grating, records the scattering wavefront and spherical wavefront array required for 2D/3D compatible display. In particular, we proposed a feasible method to switch the 2D and 3D display modes by using a variable-focus lens in the reconstruction process. The proposed system solves the problem of bulky volume, and makes the MHOE more efficient to use. Based on the requirements of 2D and 3D displays, we calculated the liquid pumping volume of the variable-focus lens under two kinds of diopters.

The direct effect of genetic variations on clinical phenotypes within schizophrenia (SZ) remains elusive. We examined the previously identified association of reduced gray matter concentration in the insula - medial prefrontal cortex and a quantitative trait locus located in 12q24 in a SZ dataset. The main analysis was performed on 1461 SNPs and 830 participants. The highest contributing SNPs were localized in five genes including TMEM119, which encodes a microglial marker, that is associated with neuroinflammation and Alzheimer's disease. The gene set in 12q4 may partially explain brain alterations in SZ, but they may also relate to other psychiatric and developmental disorders.

This paper presents a wide-beam 3D-fractal Hilbert GNSS antenna in the RDSS-S band. The proposed antenna consists of a novel radiator with four two-order 3D-fractal Hilbert curve radiating arms, and the corresponding feeding circuit. The beamwidth, with the gain greater than 0dB of the antenna, is 148° (Phi=0°) and 138° (Phi=90°). The size of the antenna is 30mm×30mm×12mm. In addition, the model of the 3D-fractal Hilbert curve and a prototype of the two-order RDSS-S antenna were manufactured by 3D printing. Simulated and measured results show that the proposed wide-beam 3D-Fractal Hilbert antenna is very suitable for GNSS.

In this paper, we propose a novel model with a hierarchical photo-scene encoder and a reconstructor for the task of album storytelling. The photo-scene encoder contains two sub-encoders, namely the photo and scene encoders, which are stacked together and behave hierarchically to fully exploit the structure information of the photos within an album. Specifically, the photo encoder generates semantic representation for each photo while exploiting temporal relationships among them. The scene encoder, relying on the obtained photo representations, is responsible for detecting the scene changes and generating scene representations. Subsequently, the decoder dynamically and attentively summarizes the encoded photo and scene representations to generate a sequence of album representations, based on which a story consisting of multiple coherent sentences is generated. In order to fully extract the useful semantic information from an album, a reconstructor is employed to reproduce the summarized album representations based on the hidden states of the decoder. The proposed model can be trained in an end-to-end manner, which results in an improved performance over the state-of-the-arts on the public visual storytelling (VIST) dataset. Ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical photo-scene encoder and reconstructor., 8 pages, 4 figures

Spinel-type oxides have attracted a broad interest in sensing materials research owing to their high catalytic activity and flexibly tunable chemical properties. Here, we report the synthesis of superfine porous NiFe2O4 microspheres by one-step solvothermal approach, in order to fabricate ultra-sensitive acetone sensors for real-time monitoring, relying on the high catalytic activity of NiFe2O4 and effective mass transfer property of porous microspheres structure. The porous NiFe2O4 sensors displayed high selectivity to acetone against other interfering gases, giving a high sensitivity (27.4), fast response time (2 s) towards 100 ppm acetone and low detection limit (200 ppb) at 250 °C. This paper proposed a general approach for fabricating highly sensitive gas sensor based on spinel-type oxides in monitoring volatile organic pollutants.

This study was aimed to evaluate the effects of dietary supplementation of Bacillus cereus as probiotics on growth, fillet quality, serum biochemical parameters and intestinal histology of Pengze crucian carp (Carassius auratus var. Pengze). Fish were fed basic diet (Control group) and three diets such as CD7, CD9 and CD11 supplemented with B. cereus at dose of 10⁷, 10⁹ and 10¹¹ CFU/kg for 70 days. The results showed that supplementation of 10⁹ CFU/kg B. cereus significantly improved the growth performance compared to that in the Control group. The textures of muscle were improved by dietary supplementation of probiotics, and the hardness, gumminess, chewiness and the resilience of fish fillet increased with increasing dose of B. cereus. Total cholesterol including high‐density lipoprotein and low‐density lipoprotein level in serum decreased correspondingly with increasing level of probiotics whereas, acid phosphatase and catalase activities increased in serum. B. cereus supplementation enhanced the immunity and antioxidant capacity via an increase in acid phosphatase, alkaline phosphatase, glutathione peroxidase, reduce glutathione, and catalase, accompanied by a significant reduction in malondialdehyde. Higher intestinal fold height was observed in CD9 group than other groups. The lowest enterocyte height was exhibited in the Control group, HE values increased with increasing dose of probiotics. Moreover, dietary inclusion of B. cereus significantly affected the digestive enzymes activities in terms of higher lipase and trypase activities. In conclusion, dietary supplementation of B. cereus could promote the growth, elevate the immunity and antioxidant status of carp, and importantly improve the texture of fish fillet.

Domain adaptation is the situation for supervised learning in which the training data are sampled from the source domain while the test data are sampled from the target domain that follows a different distribution. The key to solving such a problem is to reduce effects of the discrepancy between the training data and test data. Recently, deep learning methods that employ stacked denoising auto-encoders (SDAs) to learn new representations for both domains have been successfully applied in domain adaptation. And, remarkable performance on multi-domain sentiment analysis datasets has been reported, making deep learning a promising approach to domain adaptation problems. In this paper, a deep learning method called Stacked Robust Adaptively Regularized Auto-regressions (SRARAs) is proposed to learn useful representations for domain adaptation problems. Each layer of SRARAs contains two steps: a linear transformation step, which is based on robust adaptively regularized auto-regression, and a non-linear squashing transformation step. The first step aims at reducing the discrepancy between the training data and test data, and the second step is to introduce non-linearity and control the range of the elements in the outputs. The experimental results on text and image datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is very effective.

Urchin-like hierarchical Zn doped CdS powders were successfully synthesized via simple one-pot hydrothermal process. Their SEM and TEM images indicated that the hierarchical structure were assembled by single crystal nanorods with the hexagonal wurtzite phase. EDS element mapping verified that Zn ions were homogeneously distributed among the hierarchical microstructure. The performances of gas sensors based on pure and Zn doped CdS were measured and compared. The results indicated that Zn doping could enhance their responses to some volatile organic compounds and improve its selectivity to ethanol and toluene as well. The possible reasons for this enhancement were investigated. In addition, the sensor based on Zn doped CdS exhibited the ultrafast response and recovery to ethanol ( τ response 1 , τ recovery = 8 s ), indicating that the Zn doped CdS could be a promising gas sensing candidate for online monitoring of ethanol.

With the availability of abundant online multi-relational video information, recommender systems that can effectively exploit these sorts of data and suggest creatively interesting items will become increasingly important. Recent research illustrates that tensor models offer effective approaches for complex multi-relational data learning and missing element completion. So far, most tensor-based user clustering models have focused on the accuracy of recommendation. Given the dynamic nature of online media, recommendation in this setting is more challenging as it is difficult to capture the users’ dynamic topic distributions in sparse data settings as well as to identify unseen items as candidates of recommendation. Targeting at constructing a recommender system that can encourage more creativity, a deep Bayesian probabilistic tensor framework for tag and item recommendation is proposed. During the score ranking processes, a metric called Bayesian surprise is incorporated to increase the creativity of the recommended candidates. The new algorithm, called Deep Canonical PARAFAC Factorization (DCPF), is evaluated on both synthetic and large-scale real-world problems. An empirical study for video recommendation demonstrates the superiority of the proposed model and indicates that it can better capture the latent patterns of interactions and generates interesting recommendations based on creative tag combinations.

The undoped and 1.0–5.0 mol% La–doped In2O3 hollow microspheres have been successfully synthesized via a simple hydrothermal method without template and gas sensor have been fabricated basing on them. The nanostructures and morphologies of the maintained hollow spheres were characterized by various experimental techniques. The gas sensing properties of these hollow microspheres were investigated systematically. The results indicated that among all the samples (pure, 1.0, 3.0 and 5.0 mol% La–doped In2O3), 3.0 mol% La–doped In2O3 exhibited the highest response toward 10 ppm hydrogen sulfide (H2S) at 200 °C, having a response value of 17.8, approximately 4.8 times higher than pure In2O3. Furthermore, excellent selectivity, good repeatability and outstanding long-term stability were also achieved. The significantly enhanced sensing properties to H2S could be attributed to the changes in distribution of different oxygen components, crystallite size and specific surface area caused by La doping.

Maca (Lepidium meyenii Walp.) has emerged as a popular functional plant food due to its various pharmacological properties, including anti-oxidation, anti-inflammation and anti-fatigue activity. In this study, we investigated the role of Maca aqueous extract (ME) on muscle during exercise-induced fatigue both in vivo and in vitro. As a result, ME significantly enhanced mouse leg grip-strength and increased exercise endurance in the rota-rod test. ME could clear the accumulation of metabolites - blood lactic acid (BLA), blood urea nitrogen (BUN) and reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels after weight-loaded forced swimming. Focusing on muscle, we found that the administration of ME strengthened mouse muscle structures so that exercise-induced metabolic stress was alleviated by upregulating NAD+/NADH. Furthermore, ME inhibited the reduction of the viability and accumulation of ROS by treatment with H2O2 in C2C12 skeletal muscle cells. ME-induced activation of energy metabolism in skeletal muscle might up-regulate mitochondrial biogenesis and function, thereby protecting against oxidative stress-induced damage. We concluded that the effects of Maca played a crucial role in the regulation of exercise-induced fatigue in mouse muscle, which could be expected to serve as a functional food supplement for improving exercise performance and alleviating physical fatigue.