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Since the COVID-19 outbreak at the end of December 2019, a variety of novel Coronavirus nucleic acid detection methods have been proposed at home and abroad. Because of the disadvantages of most existing PCR instruments on the market such as long reaction time and high cost, this study developed a more timesaving and cheaper two-channel real-time quantitative PCR instrument. In this instrument, a PCR system combining a thermal cycle system and real-time fluorescence quantitative technology was designed. The software system and data processing, optical system, thermal cycle module, and hardware module of the PCR instrument were studied. The low-cost, portable real-time quantitative PCR system has been validated with consistent results compared to Bio-rad CFX Connect. At the same time, the same samples were used for the contract experiment with the hospital instrument, and the amplification result was better than the existing instrument in the hospital.

Background To analyze the level changes of 28 cytokines in aqueous humor of patients with proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) coexisting neovascular glaucoma (NVG) after intravitreal injection of conbercept (IVC), and to investigate whether these cytokines are associated with intraoperative bleeding (IOB). Methods Totally 34 eyes with NVG secondary to PDR were enrolled. Patients were randomized into two groups, and all of them underwent 25-gauge pars plana vitrectomy (PPV) combined with trabeculectomy. Group I, 18 eyes received IVC 3 days before PPV, and 100 µL aqueous humor was collected at the time of IVC pretreatment and 3 days later at the beginning of PPV respectively. Group II, 16 eyes received IVC after PPV, and 100 µL aqueous humor was collected only at the beginning of PPV. Aqueous humor from 19 eyes with age-matched cataract patients served as controls. Luminex bead-based multiplex array was used to measure the levels of 28 cytokines in aqueous humor. The baseline cytokine levels were compared among the three groups. All NVG patients were divided into IOB and non-bleeding (INB) groups. The cytokine levels of aqueous humor at the beginning of PPV were compared between group I and II, also between IOB and INB groups. IOB in NVG patients was graded according to vitreous bleeding amount. The correlation between cytokine levels and the grades of IOB were analyzed. Results Compared with controls, the baseline levels of 18 cytokines associated with inflammation and angiogenesis showed significantly increased in group I and group II (all, P P P rs > 0.4, P Conclusions IVC 3 days before PPV combined with trabeculectomy reduces IOB in NVG patients, in which the downregulation of IL-4, Ang-2, PLGF and VEGF-A after IVC may be an underlying mechanism. Trial registration ChiCTR2100048118, retrospectively registered on 2 July 2021.

In recent ten years, the serious problem of Chinese college students’ physical health shows a downward trend, which has aroused great concern from all walks of life. Aiming at this problem, this paper studies the physical test scores and health status of students from Grade 15 to Grade 18 at Guangxi University of Chinese Medicine. Firstly, the data are cleaned and sorted, and the indicators of Guangxi University of Chinese Medicine college students’ physical test are analyzed descriptively by using matplotlib package in python software. Then, correlation analysis and cluster analysis are carried out on each index of the physical test, which can be divided into two clusters. Then using Apriori algorithm for comprehensive comparative analysis, taking each index of physical fitness test as the antecedent and "total score = pass" as the consequent, the first six strong association rules are found out, and it is concluded that there are differences in several conditions of male and female students’ test indicators under the condition of "total score = pass". The indexes of speed, endurance and flexibility have great influence on college students’ physical fitness, while the BMI and vital capacity are not important factors affecting their physical fitness. By analyzing the results, we can strengthen the weak links in school education and promote the adjustment and reform of physical education in Guangxi University of Chinese Medicine (GXTCMU).

The COVID-19 outbreak has affected the lives of people across the globe. To investigate the mental impact of COVID-19 and to respond to the call of researchers for the use of unobtrusive and intensive measurement in capturing time-sensitive psychological concepts (e.g., affect), we used big data methods to investigate the impact of COVID-19 by analyzing 348,933 tweets that people posted from April 1, 2020 to April 24, 2020. The dataset covers 2,231 working adults, who are from 454 counties across 48 states in the United States. In this study, we theorize the similarity and dissimilarity between COVID-19 and other common stressors. Similar to other stressors, pandemic severity negatively influenced the well-being of people by increasing negative affect. However, we did not find an influence of pandemic severity on the positive affect of the people. Dissimilar to other stressors, the protective factors for people during COVID-19 are not common factors that make people resilient to stress and they echo the unique experience during COVID-19. Moreover, we analyzed the text content of 348,933 tweets through Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) and word cloud analysis to further reveal the psychological impact of COVID-19 and why the protective factors make people resilient to the mental impact of COVID-19. These exploratory analyses revealed the specific emotions that people experienced and the topics that people are concerned about during the pandemic. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Influence maximization has been studied extensively from the perspective of the influencer. However, the influencer typically purchases influence from a provider, for example in the form of purchased advertising. In this paper, we study the problem from the perspective of the influence provider. Specifically, we focus on influence providers who sell Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising on billboards. Given a set of requests from influencers, how should an influence provider allocate resources to minimize regret, whether due to forgone revenue from influencers whose needs were not met or due to over-provisioning of resources to meet the needs of influencers? We formalize this as the \underlineM inimizing \underlineR egret for the \underlineO OH \underlineA dvertising \underlineM arket problem (\problem). We show that \problem is both NP-hard and NP-hard to approximate within any constant factor. The regret function is neither monotone nor submodular, which renders any straightforward greedy approach ineffective. Therefore, we propose a randomized local search framework with two neighborhood search strategies, and prove that one of them ensures an approximation factor to a dual problem of \problem. Experiments on real-world user movement and billboard datasets in New York City and Singapore show that on average our methods outperform the baselines in effectiveness by five times.

In this paper, we demonstrate an Intelligent Trajectory-driven outdoor Advertising deployment Assistant (ITAA), which assists users to find an optimal strategy for outdoor advertising (ad) deployment. The challenge is how to measure the influence to the moving trajectories of ads, and how to optimize the placement of ads among billboards that maximize the influence has been proven NP-hard. Therefore, we develop a framework based on two trajectory-driven influence models. ITAA is built upon this framework with a user-friendly UI. It serves both ad companies and their customers. We enhance the interpretability to improve the user's understanding of the influence of ads. The interactive function of ITAA is made interpretable and easy to engage.

Exploiting the energy transfer (ET) direction is important in nanoscale fluorescent detection systems. In a typical detection system based on ET, the quenching efficiency was evaluated by decrease of donor's emission intensity, but there exists reabsorption process apart from nonradiative ET process. Here, we propose a method to analyze the individual contribution of nonradiative ET and reabsorption to quenching efficiency. These two processes influence in a different way on the nanoplatform consisting of NaYF4:20%Yb,2%Er UCNPs and a sulfonyl modified cyanine dye. We find that nonradiative ET process contributes more than reabsorption and possesses a better detection sensitivity (2.27 folds). Our work presents a thorough understanding of detection process, which will be conducive in evaluating the sensitivity of similar detection systems.

With the wide application of laser technology in various fields, how to quickly and quantitatively evaluate the characteristic parameters of laser spot becomes a hot issue in laser technology research. In this paper, based on the virtual instrument LabVIEW platform, the image is captured by USB camera, the NI-IMAQdx module is used for programming.Through image acquisition, gradation transformation, filtering processing, threshold segmentation and edge detection, the pseudo-color transformation display, centroid, long and short axis values and ellipticity of laser spot intensity are obtained, the corresponding display level is 0–256, and the working wavelength range is 400 nm–1100 nm, which satisfies the testing and analysis requirements in most current environments.

Nanosecond and sub-nanosecond ultrashort pulse have good applications in medical cosmetology, microstructure machining, scientific research, etc. Using stimulated Brillouin scattering(SBS) to compress the pulse width of ten nanoseconds to one nanosecond or even picosecond which is a technical way that is economical and easy to implement. This article uses a compact single-cell structure device to pass a Nd:YAG laser-pulse with 8.05ns and 145mJ through FC-40. An ultrashort pulse with 1.35ns and 94.5mJ was obtained. The pulse width after compression was measured within 4 h, and the pulse width stability was better than 5%.

The laser source with 3 μm/2 μm output wavelength has many application prospects in clinical medicine, photoelectric countermeasure, and scientific research measurement. An Er3+ doped ZBLAN fiber laser with output wavelength of 2 .8 μm and 1 .6 μm is experimentally studied. By setting the pump power to 5 W, a continuous dual-wavelength output with a central wavelength of 2.803 μm and 1.61 μm is obtained and the corresponding maximum output power is 362.4 mW and 108.6 mW. The slope efficiency is 12.1% and 4.94% respectively. What’s more, the slope efficiency is 12.1% and 4.94% respectively, and the fluctuation rates of peak power of the two wavelengths are 9.7% and 2.1% within 4 h which indicate that the laser has relatively good stability.

This study aims to investigate the effects of dietary Porphyra yezoensis polysaccharides (PPs) on growth performance and nonspecific immunity of juvenile grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella). Four hundreds of juvenile grass carps were randomly divided into four groups, i.e. one control group received basal diet and three treatment groups received diets supplemented with three different levels of PPs (1, 3, and 5 g kg−1) and tested for growth performance, survival percent, intestine digestive-enzyme activities, superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity, catalase (CAT) activity, glutathione peroxidase (GPx) activity, serum total protein, lysozyme, alkaline phosphatase, complement C3 and complement C4 and resistance to Aeromonas hydrophila of juvenile grass carp. After 60 days of feeding, the diet supplemented with an appropriate dose of PPs significantly increased growth performance, survival percent, intestine digestive-enzyme activities, SOD activity, CAT activity, GPx activity, serum lysozyme, alkaline phosphatase, complement C3, and complement C4 and resistance to Aeromonas hydrophila of juvenile grass carp compared with the control group and the optimum dose of PPs was found to be 3 g kg−1. Results showed that dietary PPs can improve growth performance and nonspecific immunity of juvenile grass carps and can thus be used as a diet supplement for them.

In the present work, dicyclohexano-18-crown-6 impregnated titanate nanotubes composite (TNTs@DCH18C6) was prepared as an adsorbent for the selective separation of Sr2+ from acidic medium solution. Samples were specified with TEM, FTIR, and TGA. Effects of nitric acid concentration, adsorbent dosage, ionic strength, initial Sr2+ concentration and contact time were investigated with batch experiments. The results indicated that the adsorption was faster in the first 5 min and equilibrium was achieved after 180 min in the media of 6 mol L−1 HNO3. The adsorption data at equilibrium state were successfully described by the Freundlich isotherm. The kinetics adsorption was well described by the pseudo-second-order model. Results demonstrated that the as-synthesized hybrid composite is highly stable in harsh acidic medium, indicating its promise as an effective adsorbent for the removal of Sr2+ from acidic solution.

The late Pleistocene deformation pattern in the eastern Qilian Shan remains controversial. Study of the geometry and slip rate of the fault holds crucial value for better understanding the regional deformation pattern. The active E-W trending Gulang and Tianjing Shan Fault Zone is located in the southern boundary of the Tengger Desert which plays a significant role in tectonic deformation and slip transfer in the NE Tibetan Plateau. Geomorphic mapping of the active fault traces reveal that the Gulang fault is composed of two segments, separated by the Guanjia Tai pull-apart basin. Offset geomorphic features indicate that the Gulang fault appears to be primarily sinistral strike-slip with no reverse component. Based on offset gullies/terraces and optically stimulated luminescence dating of offset-related sediments, we obtain a consistent late Pleistocene slip rate of ~2.5 mm/a along the western and eastern segments of the Gulang Fault. Meanwhile, the slip vectors indicate the Gulang fault redistributes strain and transforms displacement along the Haiyuan fault, accommodating the westward motion of the Gobi-Alashan block. Moreover, a devastating earthquake of Ms 8.0 struck Gulang on 23rd May 1927. Geomorphically fresh fault scarps and surface rupture zone are observed at Gulang Fault, we modify the Modified Mercalli Intensities (MMI) and revise the isoseismal map for the Gulang earthquake. Combining with the high-resolution deep seismic-reflection data, the Gulang fault may be the source of the earthquake. Regionally, GPS velocities indicate that faulting, crustal shortening, and basin/block rotation accommodate deformation of the plateau's northern margin. In conclusion, the fault geometry, kinematics, and regional GPS velocities reflect that this region experiences eastward movement of the northeastern Tibetan Plateau relative to the Gobi-Alashan.

A intracavity cascading pumped dual-wavelength output Nd:YAG/Yb:YAG laser is demonstrated for the first time. The system adopts a coaxial composite cavity structure, and using an all-solid-state Nd:YAG laser operating at 946 nm as intracavity pump source, a 1160 mW 946 nm laser and a 43 mW 1030 nm laser were obtained with 1.39 W absorbed pump power. The fluctuation of the output power was better than 5% in the given 30 min. The corresponding beam quality factors M2 are 1.25 and 1.27.

Corn cob is the secondary agricultural residue that can be easily hydrolyzed into hydrolysate with abundant d-xylose. Besides d-xylose, d-glucose, and l-arabinose are also utilizable sugars in corn cob hydrolysate. Here, we established a coutilization system through which recombinant Escherichia coli can use d-glucose and l-arabinose supporting its growth and convert d-xylose in corn cob hydrolysate into d-xylonate. First, biosynthetic pathway of d-xylonate was overexpressed and two xylonate dehydratases were knocked out in E. coli W3110 to enhance d-xylonate production from d-xylose. Then, the genes responsible for acetate, ethanol, and lactate synthesis were knocked out to decrease these byproducts production during the growth of the recombinant strain. Three successive strategies were employed to enhance the d-xylonate production—using lactose as the inducer, eliminating carbon catabolite repression, and inactivating the lactose degradation. Finally, 108.2 g/L d-xylonate was produced with a yield of 1....

Background The hepatotoxicity and cardiotoxicity caused by neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) are of increasing concern to clinicians in breast cancer (BC) patients. The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of chemotherapy-associated steatohepatitis (CASH), quantitate the epicardial adipose tissue (EAT) volume in BC patients, and explore the correlations of these parameters with blood lipid levels in BC patients who received NAC. Methods From October 2018 to April 2020, BC patients were retrospectively reviewed. Clinical and laboratory data were collected. The patients were divided into BC-non-NAC group and BC-NAC group (BC-NAC subgroups 1 ~ 4 according to the number of NAC cycles). The prevalence of CASH was evaluated using quantitative MRI mDIXON-Quant examinations, from which the proton density fat fraction (PDFF) was assessed. The EAT volume was quantified on chest CT by semi-automatic volume analysis software. Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated for the associations among PDFF values, EAT volumes and blood lipid levels. Results A total of 662 women (BC-non-NAC group: 445 patients; BC-NAC group: 217 patients) were included. The prevalence of CASH in BC-NAC group was significantly higher than the prevalence of hepatic steatosis in the BC-non-NAC group (42.8% vs. 33.3%, p p = 0.034). EAT volume was measured in 561 of 662 BC patients, and was significantly higher in the BC-NAC group than in the BC-non-NAC group (137.26 ± 53.48 ml vs. 125.14 ± 58.77 ml, p = 0.020). A moderate positive correlation was observed between the hepatic PDFF value and EAT volume (r = 0.411, p r = 0.386, p = 0.004; r = 0.338, p

In this study, the gluten/zein nanofibrous films were fabricated by blending electrospinning and then glycated with xylose via Maillard reaction. The average fiber diameter of the gluten film decreased from 551 to 343 nm with the increasing ratio of zein, but increased significantly to a range of 717–521 nm after glycation, which induced a higher thermal stability of the nanofibers with an order to disorder transition. The glycated composite films showed the reduced water vapor permeability and improved water stability with a stiffer and more elastic network structure, due to the enhanced intermolecular entanglements and interactions between polymer chains. The results from this work suggested that the composite gluten/zein electrospun films may be glycated via Maillard reaction to obtain desirable physical properties for active food-packaging applications.

Heart failure, as the leading cause of cardiovascular death, has seen an increased prevalence nowadays, along with renal insufficiency. It's estimated that 25–63% of heart failure patients have the comorbidity of renal insufficiency, an independent risk factor of various cardiovascular events and predictors of poor prognosis (1). A therapeutic principle of heart failure emphasizing decongestive treatment is limited by the demand for sufficient perfusion in terms of renal insufficiency therapy, making the treatment of both concomitant diseases more complicated and contradictory, with mild balance; hence, the great interest in cardiorenal interactions has broadened among researchers and clinicians, and the concept of cardiorenal syndrome (CRS) was first proposed in 2004. CRS, defined as a pathophysiological process of adverse interaction between the heart and kidneys, encompasses a spectrum of diseases involving acute or chronic dysfunction in one organ that induces decompensated dysfunction in the other, and eventually they evolve into an interrelated and vicious cycle of declining function in both organs. CRS was first categorized into five subtypes in 2008 based on sequential organ involvement and the course of progression over time (i.e., acute or chronic), including acute cardiorenal syndrome, chronic cardiorenal syndrome, and acute renocardiac syndrome, chronic renocardiac syndrome, secondary cardiorenal syndrome, of which a brief definition, etiology, and pathophysiology are given in Table 1 (2). With the consideration that the previous secondary CRS subtype has a shortcoming in that it is not as symmetrical as the first four subtypes, as well as the huge difference of pathophysiological changes, the treatment principles of the two organs, and of gradually increasing in-depth knowledge of fibrosis pathogenesis over the past few years, it's become quite necessary to propose a new CRS classification. And that's why we now first propose the sixth innovative CRS subtype on the basis of the concept of “chronic co-impairment” of the heart and kidneys, further classifying traditional secondary CRS as acute secondary CRS and chronic secondary CRS, thus making the novel six kinds of CRS categories paired and matched correspondingly. The most common precipitant of acute secondary CRS is biotoxin damage and a cytokine storm generated by acute sepsis, and the primary treatment principles are cause-related treatment as aggressive anti-infective therapy, as well as symptomatic treatment of cardiac and renal dysfunction. However, the novel type 6 CRS (chronic secondary CRS) is actually more prevalent in clinical practice, and its pathophysiological and clinical characteristics as well as diagnosis and treatment principles vary dramatically from other subtypes of CRS, which will be described in detail in the following article. Table 1 New classification of CRS based on disease acuity and sequential organ involvement.

As the population ages globally, there seem to be more people with Alzheimer’s disease. Unfortunately, there is currently no specific treatment for the disease. At present, Huperzine A (HupA) is one of the best drugs used for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and has been used in clinical trials for several years in China. HupA was first separated from Huperzia serrata, a traditional medicinal herb that is used to cure fever, contusions, strains, hematuria, schizophrenia, and snakebite for several hundreds of years in China, and has been confirmed to have acetylcholinesterase inhibitory activity. With the very slow growth of H. serrata, resources are becoming too scarce to meet the need for clinical treatment. Some endophytic fungal strains that produce HupA were isolated from H. serrate in previous studies. In this article, the diversity of the endophytic fungal community within H. serrata was observed and the relevance to the production of HupA by the host plant was further analyzed. A total of 1167 strains were obtained from the leaves of H. serrata followed by the stems (1045) and roots (824). The richness as well as diversity of endophytic fungi within the leaf and stem were higher than in the root. The endophytic fungal community was similar within stems as well as in leaves at all taxonomic levels. The 11 genera (Derxomyces, Lophiostoma, Cyphellophora, Devriesia, Serendipita, Kurtzmanomyces, Mycosphaerella, Conoideocrella, Brevicellicium, Piskurozyma, and Trichomerium) were positively correlated with HupA content. The correlation index of Derxomyces with HupA contents displayed the highest value (CI = 0.92), whereas Trichomerium showed the lowest value (CI = 0.02). Through electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS), it was confirmed that the HS7-1 strain could produce HupA and the total alkaloid concentration was 3.7 ug/g. This study will enable us to screen and isolate the strain that can produce HupA and to figure out the correlation between endophytic fungal diversity with HupA content in different plant organs. This can provide new insights into the screening of strains that can produce HupA more effectively.

Image inpainting is a challenging computer vision task that aims to fill in missing regions of corrupted images with realistic contents. With the development of convolutional neural networks, many deep learning models have been proposed to solve image inpainting issues by learning information from a large amount of data. In particular, existing algorithms usually follow an encoding and decoding network architecture in which some operations with standard schemes are employed, such as static convolution, which only considers pixels with fixed grids, and the monotonous normalization style (e.g., batch normalization). However, these techniques are not well-suited for the image inpainting task because the random corrupted regions in the input images tend to mislead the inpainting process and generate unreasonable content. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic selection network (DSNet) to solve this problem in image inpainting tasks. The principal idea of the proposed DSNet is to distinguish the corrupted region from the valid ones throughout the entire network architecture, which may help make full use of the information in the known area. Specifically, the proposed DSNet has two novel dynamic selection modules, namely, the validness migratable convolution (VMC) and regional composite normalization (RCN) modules, which share a dynamic selection mechanism that helps utilize valid pixels better. By replacing vanilla convolution with the VMC module, spatial sampling locations are dynamically selected in the convolution phase, resulting in a more flexible feature extraction process. Besides, the RCN module not only combines several normalization methods but also normalizes the feature regions selectively. Therefore, the proposed DSNet can illustrate realistic and fine-detailed images by adaptively selecting features and normalization styles. Experimental results on three public datasets show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

To explore the repeating mud volcanoes influences on the seismicity behaviors, we measured the spatial distribution z and b value changes with the time in the mud volcanoes developing area. We find...

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected people’s daily lives and caused tremendous economic loss worldwide. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the pandemic has increased the depression level among the population. However, systematic studies of depression detection and monitoring during the depression are lacking. OBJECTIVE This study aims (1) to develop a method to accurately identify people with depression by analyzing their tweets and (2) to monitor the population-wise depression level on Twitter. METHODS To study this subject, we design an effective regular expression-based search method and create by far the largest English Twitter depression dataset containing 2,575 distinct identified depression users (N=2,575) with their past tweets. To examine the effect of depression on people’s Twitter language, we train three transformer-based depression classification models on the dataset, evaluate their performance with progressively increased training sizes, and compare the model’s “tweet chunk”-level and user-level performances. Furthermore, inspired by psychological studies, we create a fusion classifier that combines deep learning model scores with psychological text features and users’ demographic information and investigate these features’ relations to depression signals. Finally, we demonstrate our model’s capability of monitoring both group-level and population-level depression trends by presenting two of its applications during the COVID-19 pandemic. RESULTS Our fusion model demonstrates an accuracy of 78.9% on a test set containing 446 people (N=446), half of which are identified as suffering from depression. Conscientiousness, neuroticism, appearance of first-person pronouns, talking about biological processes such as eat and sleep, talking about power, and exhibiting sadness are shown to be important features in depression classification. Further, when used for monitoring the depression trend, our model shows that depressive users, in general, respond to the pandemic later than the control group based on their tweets. It is also shown that three states of the United States - New York (NY), California (CA), and Florida (FL) - share a similar depression trend as the whole US population. When compared to NY and CA, people in FL demonstrate a significantly lower level of depression. CONCLUSIONS This study proposes an efficient method that can be used to analyze the depression level of different groups of people on Twitter. We hope this study can raise awareness among researchers and the general public of COVID-19’s impact on people’s mental health. The non-invasive monitoring system can also be rapidly adapted to other big events besides COVID-19 and might be useful during future outbreaks.

Pyruvate is an important platform material widely used in food, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries. Pyruvate

Ransomware is a new business model for cybercrime which mainly targets individual users and machines. Many events have shown how profitable the technique can be. Industrial control systems (ICS) are becoming the next domain. More and more researchers and attackers have become the focus on this field and presented some ICS ransomware. But existing ICS ransomware is theoretically feasible and has a limited effect on real ICS. In this work, we present ICS-BROCK, a full-fledged ICS ransomware that can compromise a real-world. To demonstrate the capability of ICS-BROCK, we use SIEMENS S7-300 PLC, one of the most widely used devices in ICSs, to build a real water treatment environment. The results empirically demonstrate the feasibility of launching ICS ransomware attacks in a practical setting. In the end, we give some suggestions on ICS ransomware to aid in future study and defenses.

To enhance the inferior removal capability of aqueous Cr(VI) by commercial activated carbon under neutral conditions. The emerging ball milling technology was employed and the removal efficiency of Cr(VI) by ball-milled highly activated carbon (HAC) increased from 68.3% to 99.0% under pH 6 and from 42.7% to 77.8% under pH 7 compared to pristine activated carbon (AC), respectively. Raman spectra and Boehm's titration results signified that the enhanced Cr(VI) removal performance of HAC under neutral conditions was associated with the enriched surface acid functional groups, in which the content of COOH groups increased from 0.31 mmol/g to 0.97 mmol/g. Two Cr(VI) removal mechanisms were proposed established on the acid and alkalic solution washed chromium-loaded HAC, involving the reduction of Cr(VI) to Cr(III) subsequently accompany with the formation of chromium hydroxides on the surface and inside the pores of HAC, and the bonding of CrO42− on the surface COOH groups, as confirmed by SEM-EDX element mapping and specific surface area and porosity measurements. The Pseudo-second order model and Freundlich model fitted the adsorption kinetic and isotherm of AC and HAC well severally, suggesting that the specific interaction of Cr(VI) with the HAC surface and the Cr(VI) removal was multi-layer adsorption. Thermodynamic study exhibited the spontaneity of Cr(VI) removal on ball-milled HAC was increased. Reusability and regeneration studies of HAC denoted the potential application on Cr(VI) uptake under neutral conditions.

Cenozoic exhumation in the northeastern Tibetan Plateau provides insights into spatial-temporal patterns of crustal shortening, erosion, landscape evolution, and geodynamic drivers in the broad India-Eurasia collision system. The NW-SE trending West Qinling Belt has been a central debate as to when crustal shortening took place. Within the West Qinling Belt, a thick succession of Cretaceous sedimentary rocks has been deformed and exhumed along major basin-bounding thrust faults. We present new apatite (U-Th)/He ages from the hanging wall and footwall of this major thrust. Contrasting thermal histories show that rapid cooling commenced as early as ca. 45 Ma and continued for 15–20 Myr for the hanging wall, whereas the footwall experiences continuous cooling and slow exhumation since the late Mesozoic. We infer that accelerated exhumation was driven by thrusting in response to the northward growth of the Tibetan Plateau during the Eocene (ca. 45–35 Ma) based on regional sedimentological, structural, and thermochronological data.

With the widespread popularity of hyperuricemia, it has become a severe threat to human public health. Accumulating evidence suggests that dietary fructose has a close relationship with hyperuricemia, but the role of fructose intake in hyperuricemia remains unclear. Hyperuricemia is characterized by excessive production and deposition of urate crystals. Metabolism of fructose leads to the increased serum concentration of urate. In this review, we depict an update of fructose consumption worldwide and the epidemiology of hyperuricemia and summarize the progress in studying the relationship between fructose intake and the risk of hyperuricemia. This review highlights the metabolic process of fructose in the liver, small intestine, and kidney. Furthermore, we discuss molecular insights on fructose metabolism to reveal the underlying mechanism of fructose metabolism. Additionally, we elaborate on the effect of fructose metabolism on hyperuricemia to deeply understand the pathogenesis of hyperuricemia caused by fructose intake. Fructose consumption has a close correlation with an enhanced risk of developing hyperuricemia. More prospective studies are inevitable to understand the role of fructose intake in the development of hyperuricemia.

In visual object tracking fields, the Siamese network tracker, based on the region proposal network (SiamRPN), has achieved promising tracking effects, both in speed and accuracy. However, it did not consider the relationship and differences between the long-range context information of various objects. In this paper, we add a global context block (GC block), which is lightweight and can effectively model long-range dependency, to the Siamese network part of SiamRPN so that the object tracker can better understand the tracking scene. At the same time, we propose a novel convolution module, called a cropping-inside selective kernel block (CiSK block), based on selective kernel convolution (SK convolution, a module proposed in selective kernel networks) and use it in the region proposal network (RPN) part of SiamRPN, which can adaptively adjust the size of the receptive field for different types of objects. We make two improvements to SK convolution in the CiSK block. The first improvement is that in the fusion step of SK convolution, we use both global average pooling (GAP) and global maximum pooling (GMP) to enhance global information embedding. The second improvement is that after the selection step of SK convolution, we crop out the outermost pixels of features to reduce the impact of padding operations. The experiment results show that on the OTB100 benchmark, we achieved an accuracy of 0.857 and a success rate of 0.643. On the VOT2016 and VOT2019 benchmarks, we achieved expected average overlap (EAO) scores of 0.394 and 0.240, respectively.

At present, food safety crimes frequently occur in China, which not only affects social stability and unity, but also affects the health and life safety of the general public. In this study, 3000 food safety crime judgments from the Wusong Cases Network are used as the data samples, and they are divided into corpus. Then the Word2vec algorithm is used to cluster the toxic and harmful additives in the corpus. The research shows that Word2vec algorithm can well complete the clustering of illegal additives in food safety crime cases, and found some unusual illegal additives which have a certain role in the future food safety crime.

This study aimed to isolate and investigate the potential of the peptide alanine-cysteine-glutamic acid-cysteine-aspartic acid (ACECD), a novel xanthine oxidase inhibitory (XODI) peptide derived from Skipjack tuna hydrolysate (HS). Ultrafiltration membranes were used to obtain HS-based peptides as successive ultrafiltration fractions (of decreasing molecular weight) of UF-1, UF-2, UF-3, and UF-4. Their antioxidant and xanthine oxidase (XOD) inhibitory activities were determined and further characterized by affinity-ultrafiltration coupled with HPLC-MALDI-TOF/TOF-MS and in silico techniques. The results showed that peptides with a molecular weight (MW) cutoff of 600–1000 Da (UF-2) exhibited the highest antioxidant and XODI activities. A novel XODI peptide (ACECD) was identified with an IC50 value of 13.40 mmol/L, which decreased by 21.24% and 51.40% compared to those of UF-2 and HS, respectively. Molecular docking indicated that ACECD inserted into the active center of Mo atoms in XOD, which led to competitive attachment with XOD and caused inhibition. The study findings indicated that the ACECD peptide could be useful as a safe XODI substance to alleviate hyperuricemia.

International audience; Flexible sensors play an increasing role in printed electronics and are of interest for optoelectronic applications in flexible robotics and industrial automation. Thus, we have investigated the hybrid inorganic-organic junction between ZnO and PEDOT:PSS (poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate). A thin ITO (indium tin oxide) layer on PET (polyethylene terephthalate) foils was used as substrate electrode. ZnO was deposited from a nanoparticle (NP) suspension by electrophoretic deposition. For comparison, we have used three different methods for the deposition of PEDOT:PSS, namely (i) drop casting, (ii) dip-coating, (iii) inkjet printing. For the resulting ZnO-PEDOT:PSS junctions, current-voltage characteristics were recorded using miBot micromanipulators, and analysed applying adapted models of thermionic emission, according to Cheung and Cheung, as well as Norde. For dip-coated samples we obtained barrier heights of (0.78±0.01) eV and (0.73±0.02) eV, respectively, while inkjet printed and drop casted structures show smaller values (0.53 eV to 0.66 eV, respectively). Thus, dip-coating can be used for a rapid upper estimation of the ZnO-PEDOT:PSS barrier heights for developing inkjet printable optoelectronic sensors. When using low concentrated PEDOT:PSS suspensions, we observed negative photoresponse of the junction; this is consistent with the formation of a ZnO-NPs and PEDOT:PSS nanocomposite which we obtained on porous semi-transparent ZnO-NP films.

In the semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS) field, SiamMask has achieved competitive accuracy and the fastest running speed. However, the two-stage training procedure requires additional manual intervention, and using only single-level features does not maximize the rich hierarchical feature information. This paper proposes an efficient end-to-end Siamese network for VOS. In particular, a supervised sampling strategy is designed to optimize the training procedure. Such an optimization facilitates the training of the entire model in an end-to-end manner. Moreover, a multilevel feature aggregation module is developed to enhance feature representability and improve segmentation accuracy. Experimental results on DAVIS2016 and DAVIS2017 datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms the SiamMask in accuracy with similar FPS. Moreover, this approach also achieves good accuracy-speed trade-off compared with that of other state-of-the-art VOS algorithms.

The double-electrolyte etching method is a simple and effective way to fabricate ultra-sharp scanning tunnel microscopy (STM) tungsten tips. However, it is still challenging for this method to get ultra-sharp tungsten tips with high yield. In this work, significant enhancing of the yield is presented through optimized etching parameters as follows: temperature of 26 °C, applied voltage 7.5 V, electrolyte concentration 4 mol L−1 and length below the liquid lamellae of 2 mm. Under these conditions, the smallest tip radius is around 8 nm and the yield (radius

The aim of this study was to develop chitosan (CS)/polycaprolactone (PCL) electrospun nanofibers with chlorogenic acid (CGA) loaded halloysite nanotubes (HNTs) as a carrier for CGA to provide a long-term sustained release. Results showed that the addition of CGA@HNTs at the concentrations of 2–6 wt% resulted in continuous nanofibers with an average diameter range of 159–166 nm, with improved thermal stability caused by the formation of hydrogen bonds. The incorporation of CGA@HNTs induced a hydrophilic surface and enhanced water vapor barrier property, but impaired the mechanical properties. However, the 2%, 4%, and 6% CGA@HNTs incorporated fibrous mats exhibited an initial release of 18.3 %, 26.2 %, 33.1 % within 15 h, and 34.7 %, 41.4 %, 51.3 % release after 240 h, respectively, indicating a long-term sustained release with enhanced antioxidant and antimicrobial activities. These results suggested the promising applications of the prepared CGA@HNTs/PCL/CS electrospun fibrous mats for active food packaging.

Hyperuricemia may occur when there is an excess of uric acid in the blood. Hyperuricemia may result from increased production or decreased excretion of uric acid. Elevated uric acid levels are a risk factor for gout, and various risk factors, including some medications, alcohol consumption, kidney disease, high blood pressure, hypothyroidism, and pesticide exposure, as well as obesity, are associated with an elevated risk of hyperuricemia. Although the mechanisms underlying the pathogenesis of hyperuricemia are complex, previously reported studies have revealed that hyperuricemia is involved in a variety of biological processes and signaling pathways. In this review, we summarize common comorbidities related to hyperuricemia and describe an update of epidemiology, pathogenesis, and therapeutic options of hyperuricemia. This systematic review highlights the epidemiology and risk factors of hyperuricemia. Moreover, we discuss genetic studies on hyperuricemia to uncover current status and advances in the pathogenesis of hyperuricemia. Additionally, we conclude with a reflection on the underlying mechanisms of hyperuricemia and present the alternative drug strategies for the treatment of hyperuricemia to offer more effective clinical interventions.

Protein is one of the most abundant natural polymeric materials, but only a few studies on nanoproteins have been conducted. In this paper, a novel approach based on ultrasound-assisted enzymatic hydrolysis was employed for the preparation of microkeratin and nanokeratin from wool. The hydrolysis system included a solution containing enzyme (esperase) and reductant (L-cysteine) and treated ultrasonically to remove the scales and amorphous regions within wool. Results showed that the reaction was most effective at 50 °C and pH 7, when incubated for 3 h, followed by sonication for 6 h. The products included spindle-shaped microkeratin (4–7 μm in diameter and 70–120 μm in length) and cone-shaped nanokeratin (50–300 nm in diameter and less than 15 μm in length). Under ultrasonic-assisted conditions, the yields of microkeratin and nanokeratin increased significantly, while the treatment time decreased. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) showed that the chemical structures of microkeratin and nanokeratin did not change, compared to that of wool. X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis showed that the microkeratin was mainly composed of α-helical structure, while the β-sheet structure was more prevalent in nanokeratin. The presented method is facile and eco-friendly, thereby paving new pathways for the preparation of microkeratin and nanokeratin.

Early childhood caries (ECC) is the most common, yet preventable chronic disease in children under the age of 6. Treatments on severe ECC are extremely expensive and unaffordable for socioeconomically disadvantaged families. The identification of ECC in an early stage usually requires expertise in the field, and hence is often ignored by parents. Therefore, early prevention strategies and easy-to-adopt diagnosis techniques are desired. In this study, we propose a multistage deep learning-based system for cavity detection. We create a dataset containing RGB oral images labeled manually by dental practitioners. We then investigate the effectiveness of different deep learning models on the dataset. Furthermore, we integrate the deep learning system into an easy-to-use mobile application that can diagnose ECC from an early stage and provide real-time results to untrained users.

DNA Primase Subunit 1 (PRIM1) is crucial for cancer development and progression. However, there remains a lack of comprehension concerning the clinical implication of PRIM1 in HCC. Here, aberrant expression of PRIM1 was identified in HCC according to available databases. The prognostic value of PRIM1 in patients presenting with HCC was further assessed based on TCGA data. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was subsequently conducted to investigate the potential function of PRIM1. Additionally, the correlations between tumor-infiltrating immune cells (TIICs) and PRIM1 expression were evaluated. The data from TCGA, GEO, ONCOMINE, and HCCDB databases illustrated that PRIM1 was overexpressed in HCC tissues, compared to normal liver tissues (all p<0.05). Kaplan-Meier analysis revealed that high PRIM1 expression in HCC was closely correlated with worse overall survival (p<0.05). The univariate and multivariate analyses illustrated that PRIM1 expression was an independent novel prognostic indicator in HCC. Additionally, the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curve for PRIM1 reached 0.8651, indicating the diagnostic significance of PRIM1 in patients with HCC. GSEA showed that PRIM1 overexpression was significantly enriched in several tumor-related signaling pathways. Besides, TIIC analysis clarified the association between PRIM1 expression and TIICs in HCC. The findings disclose that PRIM1 profoundly implicated in promoting tumorigenesis might work as a desirable biomarker for HCC.

While in the learning using privileged information paradigm, privileged information may not be as informative as example features in the context of making accurate label predictions, it may be able to provide some effective comments (e.g., the values of the auxiliary function) like a human teacher on the efficacy of the learned model. In a departure from conventional static manipulations of privileged information within the support vector machine framework, this paper investigates iterative privileged learning within the context of gradient boosted decision trees (GBDTs). As the learned model evolves, the comments learned from privileged information to assess the model should also be actively upgraded instead of remaining static and passive. During the learning phase of the GBDT method, new DTs are discovered to enhance the performance of the model, and iteratively update the comments generated from the privileged information to accurately assess and coach the up-to-date model. The resulting objective function can be efficiently solved within the gradient boosting framework. Experimental results on real-world data sets demonstrate the benefits of studying privileged information in an iterative manner, as well as the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Offensive and abusive language is a pressing problem on social media platforms. In this work, we propose a method for transforming offensive comments, statements containing profanity or offensive language, into non-offensive ones. We design a RETRIEVE, GENERATE and EDIT unsupervised style transfer pipeline to redact the offensive comments in a word-restricted manner while maintaining a high level of fluency and preserving the content of the original text. We extensively evaluate our method's performance and compare it to previous style transfer models using both automatic metrics and human evaluations. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other models on human evaluations and is the only approach that consistently performs well on all automatic evaluation metrics., Comment: COLING 2020