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Imidacloprid (IMI), a typic neonicotinoid insecticide, is widely used and persist in soils with long half-time causing serious threat to ecosystem and human health. It is urgent to develop suitable and effective methods to accelerate it degradation and alleviate its negative impacts in soil. In this study, the introduction of functional microbe white-rot fungus Phanerochaete chrysosporium to remediate IMI contaminated wetland soil was carried out. The remediation performance and the response of the soil microbial community were examined. The results showed that P. chrysosporium could improve the degradation of IMI in soil no matter the soil was sterilized or not. The bioaugmentation was especially observed in non-sterilized soil under the inoculation patterns of FE and SP with the maximum IMI degradation rate of 91% and 93% in 7 days, respectively. The invertase activity in soil was also enhanced with P. chrysosporium inoculation. Microbial community analysis revealed that P. chrysosporium inoculation could increase the diversity and richness of bacterial community, and stimulate some IMI degraders genera including Ochrobactrum, Leifsonia, Achromobacter, and Bacillus. Moreover, the xenobiotic degradation and metabolism pathway was generally enhanced with P. chrysosporium inoculation based on PICRUSt analysis. These obtained results demonstrated that the introduction of white-rot fungus is of great potentially enabling the remediation of neonicotinoids contaminated soil.

Nanoscale zero-valent iron particles (NZVI) are widely used in a variety of industries owing to their advantageous mechanical, physical, and chemical properties. These particles can be released into environmental media, including water, soil, and air, through several pathways. NZVI in the ecosystem can be taken up, excreted and distributed within organisms, which is harmful to plants, animals and humans. Plants play a significant role as producers in the ecological circle and can both positively and negatively affect the ecological behavior of NZVI. Therefore, understanding the relationship between plants and NZVI is likely to be of great value for the assessment of NZVI-associated risks and future research directions. In this review, we summarize the current knowledge on the uptake, distribution, and accumulation of NZVI in plants; the phytotoxicity triggered by NZVI exposure at the physiological, biochemical, and molecular levels; and the defense mechanism used by plants to defend against NZVI-induced insults. We further discuss the toxic effects of NZVI on soil animals and microorganisms as well as the risk posed by the presence of NZVI in the food chain.

The automatic English scoring (AES) systems are coming to the forefront of English learners’ minds with their speed, accuracy and personalized feedback. However, fewer researchers have studied the validity of AES systems in assessing narrative texts such as continuation writing tasks. Therefore, this paper empirically investigates the scoring between two AES systems, Juku and iWrite, and the difference in scoring validity between these two systems and the teacher. This study mainly uses a quantitative method. The subjects of the study were the continuation writing tasks scores of 30 senior high school students in a Chinese middle school. Each task was scored by a professional teacher, Juku and iWrite, all with a perfect score of 25. Then the scores were statistically analyzed using SPSS 26.0. The results of the analysis showed that (1) iWrite was more consistent and correlated with manual scoring than Juku. (2) In terms of mean scores, the manual scores were significantly higher than the Juku and iWrite scores. (3) In terms of discrimination, the system scores were not as good as the manual scores, but the latter were more subjective. (4) In terms of accuracy and stability, the AES systems were higher than manual scoring. Therefore, learners can use the AES scoring system as a reference and practice narrative writing based on the system’s feedback on grammar and the teacher’s feedback on plot and content.

Recently, deep learning-based methods are proposed for hyperspectral images (HSIs) denoising. Among them, unsupervised methods such as deep image prior (DIP)-based methods have received much attention because these methods do not require any training data. However, DIP-based methods suffer from the semiconvergence behavior, i.e., the iteration of DIP-based methods needs to terminate by referring to the ground-truth image at the optimal iteration point. In this article, we propose the spatial-spectral constrained deep image prior (S2DIP) for the HSI mixed noise removal. Specifically, we integrate the DIP, the spatial-spectral total variation regularization term, and the $\ell _1$-norm sparse term to respectively capture the deep prior of the clean HSI, the spatial-spectral local smooth prior of the clean HSI, and the sparse prior of noise. The proposed S2DIP jointly leverages the expressive power brought from the deep convolutional neural network without any training data and exploits the HSI and noise structures via hand-crafted priors. Thus, our method avoids the semiconvergence behavior of DIP-based methods. Meanwhile, our method largely enhances the HSI denoising ability of DIP-based methods. To tackle the corresponding model, we utilize the alternating direction multiplier method algorithm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms model-based and deep learning-based state-of-the-art HSI denoising methods.

Removing rain streaks in videos has recently received much attention. Existing hand-crafted priors-based methods suffer from limited representation abilities, and supervised deep learning methods need high-quality training data. This paper proposes a novel video rain streaks removal method by reconciling hand-crafted and self-supervised deep priors. The hand-crafted priors include the learned gradient prior, the sparse prior, and the temporal local smooth prior. Meanwhile, a deep convolutional neural network is employed to self-supervisedly capture the deep prior of the clean video without any training data. Our method organically integrates hand-crated priors and self-supervised deep priors to achieve both high generalization abilities and representation abilities. Thus, our method can faithfully remove directional rain streaks in real world videos. To address the resulting model, we introduce an alternating direction multiplier method algorithm. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods.

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is one of the most common malignancies in children. Our aim was to identify a novel miRNA that can predict prognosis of childhood ALL patients and explore its potential mechanism.The miRNA expression profiles of childhood ALL were analyzed using GEO database and HiSeq instruments. The expression of miR-155 was examined by RT-PCR in 42 ALL patients. To investigate the role of miR-155 in ALL, four ALL cell lines (CEM-C1, Jurkat, MOLT-3 and MOLT-4) were transfected with miR-155 mimics, miR-155 inhibitors or corresponding controls. Dual-luciferase reporter system was applied to confirm the miR-155 target ZNF238. Moreover, proliferation and apoptosis were evaluated by MTT and flow cytometry.Dataset GSE56489 and GSE23024 demonstrated that miR-155 was up-regulated and ZNF238 was down-regulated at diagnosis status of ALL. High miR-155 expression was associated with poor outcome. Overexpressed miR-155 promoted ALL cell proliferation and inhibited apoptosis. Dual-luciferase reporter result showed that miR-155 directly regulated ZNF238. Silencing ZNF238 promoted cell proliferation in ALL cells.Our research indicating that miR-155 might possess potential value as a biomarker for predicting the prognosis of individuals. However, the role of ZNF238 in childhood ALL remain unknown. In the present study, we found the possible role of ZNF238 as a new tumor suppressor in ALL, which might be necessary for the antiproliferative functions of normal cells to counteract ALL formation.Our results propose that miR-155 is in association with poor prognosis of childhood ALL. Furthermore, miR-155 could promote cell proliferation targeting ZNF238.

Background: The poor prognosis of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is partly due to the immunosuppressive leukemia environment. A therapeutic approach to induce pyroptosis is promising to work on this issue. Pyroptosis, a form of inflammatory cell death, is capable to release pro-immune factors and enhance the infiltration and cytotoxicity of natural killer (NK) cells. Chemical drugs have been verified to enhance anti-tumor immunity by inducing pyroptosis. Arsenic trioxide (ATO), a clinical drug in leukemia, is reported to be effective to kill AML cells, but it’s still unclear about its mechanism in AML. Our research is aimed at exploring the ATO effect on pyroptosis induction and the anti-tumor immunity of NK cells in AML.Methods: Pyroptotic phenomenon was detected by confocal microscopy, Annexin-V / propidium iodide staining, LDH release assay, and western blotting; The release of cytokines was detected by SDS-PAGE, proteomic analysis, ELISA, etc.; AML xenograft models were established to explore the ATO effect in vivo and the anti-tumor effect of ATO treatment was identified by tumor-volume measurement, HE staining and KI67 staining; The activity of NK cells was evaluated by immunofluorescence, flow cytometric analysis, etc.; The differential expressed proteins were identified by quantitative proteomic analysis and western blotting.Results: We first discovered that ATO induced pyroptosis in AML cells and activated caspase-3/gasdermin E (GSDME) pathway to induce pyroptosis, and enhances the release of LDH, HMGB1, and IL-1β. Moreover, we revealed that ATO treatment promoted the proliferation, tumor-infiltration, and degranulation of NK cells in AML and its leukemia microenvironment. The further proteomic clues indicate the potential mechanisms of the ATO anti-leukemia effect in vivo.Conclusions: These findings indicate that ATO treatment induces pyroptosis via caspase-3/GSDME pathway, enhances the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines, and activates NK cells in AML. Our data identify what is to our knowledge the first clinical drug that induces pyroptosis in AML, revealing the potential anti-leukemic and pro-immune properties of ATO treatment in the leukemia microenvironment of AML, which may be beneficial in reducing the recurrence problems associated with the leukemia microenvironment.

Reconstruction of facial soft-tissue defects may pose a dilemma for plastic surgeons, as the flaps must be reliable to obtain a natural appearance while minimizing donor site morbidities. This clinical study describes a reconstructive method for infraorbital and zygomatic defects using a pre-expanded rotation flap based on the orbicularis oculi muscle (OOM).The surgeries were subdivided into 2 stages. In the first stage of the operation, a 100 to 200 mL expander was placed underneath the temporal area through a hairline incision. In the second stage, after adequate inflation of the expander, the pre-expanded rotation flap based on the OOM of the lower eyelid was raised from lateral to medial to cover the facial defects.In this single-center study from February 2010 to February 2017, 16 patients underwent facial defect reconstruction using the pre-expanded flap based on the OOM. All of the defects were located at the infraorbital and zygomatic regions, and their sizes ranged from 3.0 4.0 to 7.0 14.0 cm. The causes of these defects included postburn scars (37.5%), melanocytic nevus (50%), and hemangiomas (12.5%). In all cases, good coverage was provided for the defects that were in the medial cheek or lower eyelids. There were no flap losses of any kind. There were no major complications, and all minor incidences were treated by minimal procedures. The patients were followed up after surgery, with the follow up ranging from 6 months to 108 months. The follow-up data included postoperative consultations, the defect size, the need for further procedures and the degree of satisfaction.The pre-expanded rotation flaps in the lateral facial area based on the OOM can ideally and safely be applied for facial defect reconstruction owing to their reliable blood supply and excellent texture match.

Cadmium (Cd) is one of the most harmful and widespread pollutants in agricultural soil, where it is readily taken up by plants and threatens human health through the food chain. Nitrification inhibitors (NIs) are usually used to reduce nitrogen (N) loss in soil and increase the nitrogen use efficiency of crops. However, information regarding the Cd transfer in soil and crops system with the application of urea combined with NIs is limited. Especially, the influences of NIs on Cd availability in the rice-rape rotation are unclear. Here, we studied the pH, N speciation, and Cd activity in soils, as well as Cd accumulation in rice and rapeseed tissues that resulted after the application of dicyandiamide (DCD) and 3,4-dimethylpyrazole phosphate (DMPP) under alternating redox conditions. Rice and rape experiments appeared to represent an opposite phenomenon in the treatments of urea + NIs. Addition of NIs increased the pH of paddy soil, but decreased the pH of rapeseed soil. The treatments of urea + DCD and urea + DMPP0.5% produced a significantly lower concentration of extractable Cd in the paddy soil, and reduced the accumulation of Cd in brown rice. For rapeseed, the urea + NI treatments enhanced the Cd activity and increased the accumulation of Cd in rapeseed. It is proposed that NIs could be used to regulate N transformation in agricultural soils and inhibited Cd uptake by rice in urea fertilization. Moreover, the application of NIs combined with urea would potentially favor phytoextraction of Cd by rape, which is a ideal candidate for phytoremediation in Cd-contaminated soil.

The fate and toxicity of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) and ions in water bodies is largely determined by the natural organic matter (NOM)-mediated redox cycling. However, the process of NOM-mediated redox cycling in the day/night cycles remains elusive. In this study, the inter-transformation between AgNPs and Ag+ ion caused by humic acid (HA) was investigated under controlled light and dark conditions. It was shown that HA induced the reduction of Ag+ into AgNPs in simulated sunlight, and also oxidize AgNPs to release Ag+ in darkness. Kinetics data demonstrated that the rates of AgNPs formation and dissolution increased along with the increment of HA concentrations. Along with the pH increase, the reduction of Ag+ accelerated, but the oxidative dissolution of AgNPs was inhibited. In day-night cycles, the AgNPs and Ag+ concentrations exhibited similar wave-shaped change curves. The peaks of AgNPs and Ag+ ion appeared at 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., respectively. The toxicity of AgNPs/Ag+ to Escherichia coli was determined primarily by the concentration of dissolved Ag+, but also affected by the particle-specific toxicity. The dual role of HA implied that previous reports about the photo-reduction of Ag+ to AgNPs by NOM should be reconsidered, and the oxidizability of HA in darkness strongly affect the transformation and toxicity of AgNPs in water.

Novel g-C3N4/CuS hybrid photocatalysts were synthesized successfully via a facile hydrothermal method. Characterization results of the photocatalysts showed that especial heterostructure had formed between g-C3N4 and CuS, and possess suitable matched band potential. The composite photocatalysts displayed strong UV-visible light absorption ability in the range from 200 to 800 nm. Photocatalytic performance of the photocatalysts were evaluated via photooxidation of methyl orange (MO) under visible-light irradiation. Hybrid photocatalysts showed better photocatalytic properties than that of pure g-C3N4 or CuS. The 60% g-C3N4/CuS sample proved the supreme photocatalytic property. The integrated g-C3N4 and CuS heterojunction elevated the separation efficiency of photogenerated electron–hole pairs, and increased the photo-decoloration efficiency of MO under visible-light irradiation. A four-cycle repeatability experiment was carried out to investigate the stability of hybrid photocatalysts in the photocatalyst reaction. Radical capture experiments proved that photogenerated e−, h+ and .OH were responsible for MO photo-decoloration. In addition, the potential mechanism of the photocatalytic system g-C3N4/CuS+H2O2+vis are presented.

Allometry, a growth pattern in which different parts of an organism grow at defined rates, is a common feature of fish and can be influenced by environmental factors. The rare minnow Gobiocypris rarus Ye et Fu, 1983 undergoes allometric growth, and this study investigated its allometry patterns and assessed whether the culture environment affects them by comparing growth patterns in conventional (CV) and specific pathogen-free (SPF) stocks using 14 morphological characters. A U-shaped pattern of allometric growth was found in both groups, characterized by higher growth rates of the head and caudal regions than the trunk region. Although the overall allometric growth pattern was similar between these two inbred groups of rare minnows, allometric coefficients for morphometric characters before inflection were higher for SPF fish than CV fish. Growth rates of total length and body mass were also higher for SPF than CV individuals. These results indicate that the environment does play a vital role in rare minnow growth and development, and that a clean culture environment and a U-shaped pattern of allometric growth are highly beneficial for its early growth.

The prognosis of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with FMS-like tyrosine kinase 3 internal tandem duplication (FLT3-ITD) mutations is poor. Some studies, including our previous study, have indicated that arsenic trioxide (ATO) exhibited significant anti-carcinogenic activity in FLT3-ITD AML cells and explored the possibility of targeting the FLT3-ITD protein for degradation as a therapy. Autophagy is a critical mechanism of the anti-leukemic effects of ATO. In this study, we explored the therapeutic efficacy of ATO treatment in a mouse model bearing FLT3-ITD AML and found that ATO significantly reduced the leukemic burden in bone marrow and spleen. We also found that autophagy was responsible for, at least in part, the degradation of the FLT3-ITD protein by ATO. After ATO treatment, MV4-11 cells showed complete autophagic flux. The autophagy inhibitor bafilomycin A or down-regulation of the key autophagy genes Atg5 and Atg7 reversed the FLT3 degradation induced by ATO. We also found that p62/SQSTM1 delivered FLT3-ITD proteins to the lysosome, where they were subsequently degraded. These results indicate that ATO can induce autophagic degradation of the FLT3-ITD mutated protein in FLT3-ITD AML.

We consider an ensemble of atoms with $\Lambda$-type level structure trapped in a single-mode cavity, and propose a geometric scheme of coherent manipulation of quantum states on the subspace of zero-energy states within the quantum Zeno subspace of the system. We find that the particular subspace inherits the decoherence-free nature of the quantum Zeno subspace and features a symmetry-protected degeneracy, fulfilling all the conditions for a universal scheme of arbitrary unitary operations on it., Comment: 5 pages with 3 figures. Supplemental Material is available upon request

Aphallia is an extremely rare congenital malformation of unknown cause, with few reports in the literature. It is usually associated with other urogenital and gastrointestinal anomalies and is believed to be a result of either the absence of a genital tubercle or chromosome polymorphism. Herein, we describe an extremely rare case of congenital aphallia with congenital urethrorectal fistula and describe our treatment for this patient.An 8-year-old boy was brought to our hospital by his parents because of congenital absence of the penis. The child was male per karyotype and had excess heterochromatin on chromosome 9 (46 XY with 9 qh+). No urethral orifice was identified, and urine passed rectally since birth; thus, urinary tract outlet obstruction led to urine reflux from the anus to the epididymis for a long time. The boy had to be placed on prophylactic antibiotics because he developed urinary tract infection and epididymitis almost every day.Congenital aphallia (46 XY normal male karyotype) associated with congenital urethroretal fistula.We performed urethral exteriorization via perineal urethroplasty and urethrorectal fistula repair. The parents approved for phallic reconstruction when the boy reached puberty.A new external urethral orifice was created on the lower scrotum. The urinary reflux was corrected, and the epididymitis symptoms disappeared. The urethral fistula was then closed. At 8 months follow up, the patient was no longer on antibiotics and had no symptoms of urinary tract infection or epididymitis.Compatible treatment should be adopted to address urinary tract drainage and infection. Management requires a stepwise approach to address needs as they arise. Neophalloplasty should be performed by an experienced team in early adolescence.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), along with the recent progress in biomedical language understanding, is gradually changing medical practice. With the development of biomedical language understanding benchmarks, AI applications are widely used in the medical field. However, most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it challenging to replicate many of the successes in English for other languages. To facilitate research in this direction, we collect real-world biomedical data and present the first Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation (CBLUE) benchmark: a collection of natural language understanding tasks including named entity recognition, information extraction, clinical diagnosis normalization, single-sentence/sentence-pair classification, and an associated online platform for model evaluation, comparison, and analysis. To establish evaluation on these tasks, we report empirical results with the current 11 pre-trained Chinese models, and experimental results show that state-of-the-art neural models perform by far worse than the human ceiling. Our benchmark is released at \url{https://tianchi.aliyun.com/dataset/dataDetail?dataId=95414&lang=en-us}., Accepted by ACL 2022

Much recent progress in task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems has been driven by available annotation data across multiple domains for training. Over the last few years, there has been a move towards data curation for multilingual ToD systems that are applicable to serve people speaking different languages. However, existing multilingual ToD datasets either have a limited coverage of languages due to the high cost of data curation, or ignore the fact that dialogue entities barely exist in countries speaking these languages. To tackle these limitations, we introduce a novel data curation method that generates GlobalWoZ -- a large-scale multilingual ToD dataset globalized from an English ToD dataset for three unexplored use cases. Our method is based on translating dialogue templates and filling them with local entities in the target-language countries. We release our dataset as well as a set of strong baselines to encourage research on learning multilingual ToD systems for real use cases.

X-ray analyzer-based imaging (ABI) is a powerful phase-sensitive technique that can provide a wide dynamic range of density and extract useful physical properties of the sample. It derives contrast from x-ray absorption, refraction, and scattering properties of the investigated sample. However, x-ray ABI setups can be susceptible to external vibrations, and mechanical imprecisions of system components, e.g., the precision of motor, which are unavoidable in practical experiments. Those factors will provoke deviations of analyzer angular positions and hence errors in the acquired image data. Consequently, those errors will introduce artefacts in the retrieved refraction and scattering images. These artefacts are disadvantageous for further image interpretation and tomographic reconstruction. For this purpose, this work aims to analyze image artefacts resulting from deviations of analyzer angular positions. Analytical expressions of the refraction and scattering image artefacts are derived theoretically and validated by synchrotron radiation experiments. The results show that for the refraction image, the artefact is independent of the sample’s absorption and scattering signals. By contrast, artefact of the scattering image is dependent on both the sample’s refraction and scattering signals, but not on absorption signal. Furthermore, the effect of deviations of analyzer angular positions on the accuracy of the retrieved images is investigated, which can be of use for optimization of data acquisition. This work offers the possibility to develop advanced multi-contrast image retrieval algorithms that suppress artefacts in the retrieved refraction and scattering images in x-ray analyzer-based imaging.

Thrombocytopenia, a most common complication of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, is an important cause of morbidity and mortality in cancer patients. However, there are still no approved agents for the treatment of radiation- and chemotherapy-induced thrombocytopenia (RIT and CIT, respectively). In this study, a drug screening model for predicting compounds with activity in promoting megakaryocyte (MK) differentiation and platelet production was established based on machine learning (ML), and a natural product ingenol was predicted as a potential active compound. Then, in vitro experiments showed that ingenol significantly promoted MK differentiation in K562 and HEL cells. Furthermore, a RIT mice model and c-MPL knock-out (c-MPL

A 2.3 W wavelength-switchable blue external cavity diode laser (ECDL) was studied. The laser was built on Littrow configuration and a piezoelectric ceramic transducer (PZT) driver was employed to change the Littrow angle for wavelength tuning. Its emitting wavelength can be switched between 447.46 nm and 448.10 nm which are the required wavelengths for NO2 differential absorption lidar application. The measured spectral linewidth of the proposed ECDL was 0.08 nm. The main peak was at least 35 dB stronger than its adjacent freely running emission peak and background amplified spontaneous emission (ASE). The wavelength switching dynamics were inspected and shows good repeatability at frequencies of 16.7 Hz and 50 Hz.