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Background China has a long tradition of managing planted forests. Different species of Populus, Eucalyptus, Larix, Cunninghamia and Pinus are planted to satisfy the local demand for wood products and provide ecological services at the same time. Evidence of the greater resilience of natural forests provides the motivation to develop asymmetric planting patterns, which is the focus of this study. We present a new method for designing plantation patterns that follow those observed in natural ecosystems and to maintain some regularity for operational convenience. Methods Based on the uniform angle index, we analyzed the spatial structure of six natural forests in different regions of China. The uniform angle index describes the degree of spatial uniformity of the n nearest neighbors of a given reference tree. Accordingly, we identified all possible patterns of a neighborhood group within a regular planting pattern and developed a method to optimize planting point arrangements that contain some randomness as well as a minimum degree of regularity. Results (1) There are 13 types of structural units in a regular planting, including seven random units, five even units and one cluster unit; (2) Five near-natural arrangements are presented with a minimum proportion of 50% of random units. These five arrangements represent a combination of regularity for operational convenience and asymmetry. Conclusions The new planting patterns developed in this study are expected to increase the asymmetric competition and resilience of these important ecosystems. Some experimental plantings, based on our findings, have already been established, e.g., in Pinus tabulaeformis plantations in Tianshui, Gansu Province, and in a Populus deltoides plantation in Fangshan near Beijing. Open-Access-Publikationsfonds 2019

Shifting geographical ranges of crop pests and pathogens in response to climate change pose a threat to food security (1, 2). The orange wheat blossom midge (Sitodiplosis mosellana Géhin) is responsible for significant yield losses in China (3), the world’s largest wheat producer. Here we report that rising temperatures in the North China Plain have resulted in a mean northward range shift of 3.3° (58.8 km per decade) from the 1950s to 2010s, which accelerated to 91.3 km per decade after 1985 when the highly toxic pesticide hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) was banned (4). Phenological matching between wheat midge adult emergence and wheat heading in this new expanded range has resulted in greater damage to wheat production. Around $286.5 million worth of insecticides were applied to around 19 million hectares in an attempt to minimize wheat midge damage to crops between 1985 and 2016. Despite use of these pesticides, wheat midge caused losses of greater than 0.95 million metric tons of grain during this period. Our results demonstrate the potential for indirect negative impacts of climate change on crop production and food security, and constitute the first large scale example of plant pest range shift due to global warming.

Background Beta‐propeller protein‐associated neurodegeneration (BPAN, OMIM 300894) is an X‐linked neurodegenerative disorder caused by mutations in WDR45. WDR45 is required for autophagy, defect in WDR45 impaired autophagy which contributes for the pathogenesis of BPAN. Previously, we reported a novel de novo mutation (c.1040_1041del, p.Glu347GlyfsTer7) in WDR45 (NM_007075) in a 3‐year‐old Chinese girl with BPAN. Methods The protein structure was constructed using SWISS‐MODEL and the isoelectric point (pI) was predicted by the online pI/Mw tool at ExPASy. The functional effects of this mutation were predicted by two online software programs: PROVEN and MutationTaster. Stable overexpression of Flag‐tagged wild‐type or mutant WDR45 in HeLa cells was constructed. Protein levels of LC3 and p62 were analyzed by western blot upon treatment with/without autophagy inhibitor Bafilomycin A1, the formation of LC3 puncta were analyzed in HeLa cells transfected with mCherry‐LC3 by confocal microscopy. Results The mutation resulted in a shift of pI from 6.74 to 8.84 and was predicted to be pathogenic. The protein levels of LC3‐II and p62 were increased in cells overexpression of wild‐type and mutant WDR45 while the protein levels were not increased in cells overexpression of mutant WDR45 upon treatment with autophagy inhibitor Bafilomycin A1. Results from confocal microscopy revealed that LC3‐positive puncta were increased in cells expressing both wild‐type and mutant WDR45 while the number of LC3‐positive puncta was not increased in cells expressing mutant WDR45 upon treatment with Bafilomycin A1. Conclusion Our study evidenced that this novel mutation in WDR45 impaired autophagy in cells thus this mutation is the cause for BPAN in this patient.

One of the aims of sustainable forest management is to preserve the diversity and resilience of ecosystems. Unfortunately, changes in the soil microbial communities after forest management remain unclear. We analyzed and compared the soil microbial community of a natural Quercus aliena var. acuteserrata forest after four years of four different management methods using high-throughput sequencing technology. The forest management methods were close-to-nature management (CNFM), structure-based forest management (SBFM), secondary forest comprehensive silviculture (SFCS) and unmanaged control (CK). The results showed that: (1) the soil microbial community diversity indices were not significantly different among the different management methods. (2) The relative abundance of Proteobacteria in the SBFM treatment was lower than in the CK treatment, while the relative abundance of Acidobacteria in the SBFM was significantly higher than that in the CK treatment. The relative abundance of Ascomycota was highest in the CNFM treatment, and that of Basidiomycota was lowest in the CNFM treatment. However, the relative abundance of dominant bacterial and fungal phyla was not significantly different in CK and SFCS. (3) Redundancy analysis (RDA) showed that the soil organic matter (SOM), total nitrogen (TN), and available nitrogen (AN) significantly correlated with the bacterial communities, and the available potassium (AK) was the only soil nutrient, which significantly correlated with the composition of the fungal communities. The short-term SBFM treatment altered microbial bacterial community compositions, which may be attributed to the phyla present (e.g., Proteobacteria and Acidobacteria), and the short-term CNFM treatment altered microbial fungal community compositions, which may be attributed to the phyla present (e.g., Ascomycota and Basidiomycota). Furthermore, soil nutrients could affect the dominant soil microbial communities, and its influence was greater on the bacterial community than on the fungal community.

Background Hearing impairment is one of most frequent birth defects, which affects nearly 1 in every 1,000 live births. However, the molecular etiology of non‐syndromic deafness in China is not well studied. Here, we have investigated the presence of mutations in three genes commonly mutated in non‐syndromic deafness patients in Shanxi Province, which has the highest frequency of birth defects in China. Methods In total, 1,201 unrelated non‐syndromic deafness patients and 300 healthy individuals were enrolled. The hearing ability was confirmed by audiologic evaluation. Three major deafness‐related genes (GJB2, SLC26A4 (PDS), and mtDNA 12S rRNA) of all individuals enrolled were analyzed by Sanger sequencing. Results The results showed that GJB2 mutations accounted for 21.23% (255/1,201) in the patient group, with c.235delC, a hotspot mutation, accounting for 10.99% (132/1,201). Moreover, 11 new GJB2 mutations were identified. SLC26A4 mutations accounted for 9.33% (112/1,201) in the patient group, with IVS7‐2A>G as the most prevalent mutation accounting for 4.75% (57/1,201). In addition, 15 patients (1.25%) were found to carry mtDNA 12S rRNA c.1555A>G mutation, while only two cases had the mtDNA 12S rRNA c.1494C>T. Conclusion In our research, it was found that c.235delC in GJB2 and c.919‐2A>G (IVS7‐2A>G) in SLC26A4 were the highest frequency pathogenic variants in Shanxi Province. Taken together, our data will enrich the database of deafness mutations and will help clinical diagnosis, treatment, and genetic counseling of hearing impairment.

The ammonium (NH4+) pool in the water column of eutrophic lakes is dynamic and undergoes tightly coupled production and consumption processes because of the metabolism of bacterial and algal communities, particularly in summer. However, NH4+ recycling rates along nutrient gradients at river-lake transitional zones and the extent to which NH4+ regeneration can compensate for consumption have been poorly studied. In August (flood period) and November (normal period), 2016, NH4+ regeneration rates (REGs) and potential uptake rates (Upots) were measured in northwestern Lake Taihu and adjacent rivers. Results showed that the REGs ranged from 0.09 to 3.30 μmol N L−1 h−1 and the Upots ranged from 0.20 to 4.88 μmol N L−1 h−1, with higher recycling rates occurring at the river sites. Yet, the lake sites showed significantly higher water column NH4+ demand (WCAD) than that of the adjacent river sites during both seasons (p

Image-text matching by deep models has recently made remarkable achievements in many tasks, such as image caption and image search. A major challenge of matching the image and text lies in that they usually have complicated underlying relations between them and simply modeling the relations may lead to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we develop a novel approach Bi-directional Spatial-Semantic Attention Networks (BSSAN), which leverages both the word to regions (W2R) relation and image object to words (O2W) relation in a holistic deep framework for more effectively matching. Specifically, to effectively encode the W2R relation, we adopt LSTM with bilinear attention function to infer the image regions which are more related to the particular words, which is referred as the W2R attention network. On the other side, the O2W attention network is proposed to discover the semanticallyclose words for each visual object in the image, i.e., the visual object to words (O2W) relation. Then a deep model unifying both of the two directional attention networks into a holistic learning framework is proposed to learn the matching scores of image and text pairs. Compared to existing image-text matching methods, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the datasets of Flickr30K and MSCOCO.

To obtain accurate underwater target tracking results, an improved kernelized correlation filter (IKCF) algorithm is proposed to track the target in forward-looking sonar image sequences. Specifically, a base sample with a dynamically continuous scale is first applied to solve the poor performance of fixed-scale filters. Then, in order to prevent the filter from drifting when the target disappears and appears again, an adaptive filter update strategy with the peak to sidelobe ratio (PSR) of the response diagram is developed to solve the following target tracking errors. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed IKCF can obtain accurate tracking results for the underwater targets. Compared to other algorithms, the proposed IKCF has obvious superiority and effectiveness.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) has emerged and aroused widespread interest in recent years. Its purpose is to explore the close correlations between the image and question for answer inference. We have two observations about the VQA task: (1) the number of newly defined answers is ever-growing, which means that answer prediction on pre-defined labeled answers may lead to errors, as some unlabeled answers may be the right choice to the question–image pairs; (2) in the process of answering visual questions, the gradual change of human attention has an important guiding role in exploring the correlations between images and questions. Based on these observations, we propose a novel model for VQA, i.e., combining Inferential Attention and Semantic Space Mapping (IASSM). Specifically, our model has two salient aspects: (1) a semantic space shared by both the labeled and unlabeled answers is constructed to learn new answers, where the joint embedding of a question and the corresponding image is mapped and clustered around the answer exemplar; (2) a novel inferential attention model is designed to simulate the learning process of human attention to explore the correlations between the image and question. It focuses on the more important question words and image regions associated with the question. Both the inferential attention and the semantic space mapping modules are integrated into an end-to-end framework to infer the answer. Experiments performed on two public VQA datasets and our newly constructed dataset show the superiority of IASSM compared with existing methods.

Thermal treatment of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) contaminated soil was shown in earlier work to generate new PCBs, as well as polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs) and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs). In this study, this thermal desorption was conducted with addition of three distinct inhibitors, including ammonium sulphate, urea and calcium oxide, to inhibit the formation of PCDDs and PCDFs when remediating PCBs-contaminated soil. Experiments were conducted for 40 min at 400 °C after adding 1 wt.% of inhibitor. Both the total PCDD/Fs and international toxic equivalent quantity (I-TEQ) reduced when inhibitors were introduced. Of the three compounds tested, CaO shows the highest inhibition efficiency, 92.2 % for total PCDD/Fs and 95.6 % for I-TEQ. The amount of CaO added also influences the suppression efficiency of PCDD/Fs. These results suggest that promoting desorption and destruction of precursors is probably the mechanism of suppression.

Rivers serve as important water resources for socio-economic development as well as the sink of anthropogenic pollutants—especially pesticides, thus being responsible for the riverine transport and distribution of such chemicals. Therefore, the spatial-temporal distribution of organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) was investigated based on their content in major rivers located in the hilly region of southern China. The research objective was to identify this region's riverine transport of OCPs and their potential affecting factors. Higher concentrations of OCPs were detected in the wet season (52.0 ± 46.5 ng/g dw) than in the dry season (24.9 ± 26.5 ng/g dw). Wet-season OCP input from tributaries was associated with increased water runoff and sediment discharge. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethanes (DDTs) and hexachlorocyclohexanes (HCHs) were the major OCP contributors, accounting for 30.4% ± 20.4% and 24.3% ± 10.9% of the total OCPs, respectively. These results corresponded well with the historical production and application of OCPs in China. The spatial differences among rivers and basins were ascribed to the regional usages in history, while the transport of OCPs in rivers was along the water flow direction and related to suspended substances. Moreover, black carbon (BC) played a crucial role on retention and accumulation of OCPs in sediments. Ecological risk assessments based on sediment quality guidelines (SQGs) suggested that γ-HCH, p,p′-DDE, and p,p′-DDD posed high ecological risks, especially in the lower reaches of rivers. Additionally, the human health risk assessment revealed negligible carcinogenic risk associated with OCP contamination.

Variable diameter rigid pile composite foundation are proposed for the multi-layer foundation. The bearing characteristics of composite foundation with variable diameter rigid pile under vertical load are numerically calculated and analysed. The research content of this paper focuses on the variation law of load and settlement of composite foundation, pile axial force, pile lateral friction resistance and distribution law of soil internal force between piles under different diameter ratios etc. The results showed that Variable diameter of rigid pile composite foundation can effectively improve bearing capacity and control settlement and reduce the stress level of soil; negative skin friction section at the top of pile decreases with variable diameter ratio D/d increases, Zero skin friction section in diameter produced and increases with variable diameter ratio D/d increases; Optimal diameter ratio of pile in the variable diameter rigid pile composite foundation should be at about 1.75.

Here, innovative nitrogen and sulfur co-doped bright orange fluorescent carbon dots (CDs) are easily obtained using methyl-β-cyclodextrin (Me-β-CD) and methylene blue as original materials via the hydrothermal method. The as-prepared CDs showed excellent fluorescence stability in the wide pH range and external anions and cations, while its fluorescence can be quenched by folate (FA), indicating its sensitivity to FA with a detection limit as low as 0.85 nM. The commendable biocompatibility and superior photobleaching resistance of CDs make it superior to applications in living cell imaging and drug tracking, respectively. Bioimaging of CDs in zebrafish larvae manifests that it is easily circulated to other tissues due to the small size. Moreover, the positively charged CDs exhibits drug loading capabilities of the antitumor drug mitoxantrone (MTO) to achieve a fluorescent nanomedicine system (CDs-MTO) combining tracking and therapy. It was found that the cells exposed to the CDs-MTO showed a significant reduction in numbers by both MTT assay and detection of cell morphology, indicating CDs-MTO has a good ability to inhibit cell growth. The results demonstrate that the CDs can be sensitive to FA and served as a good platform for drug delivery and imaging.

Flat dilatometer test (DMT) is a new kind of technology in situ test. This study, through sorting out and analyzing the flat dilatometer test data in subway engineering, obtains the experience of the application of the flat dilatometer test in engineering, and solves practical problems such as soil classification. The results of this study provide an effective basis for the application of flat dilatometer test technology in subway survey and provide sufficient and reliable data for the compilation of regional specifications.

IgA nephropathy (IgAN) is a mesangial proliferative glomerulonephritis which often shows proteinuria, an indicator for podocyte damage. TGF-β1 has been known to contribute to podocyte injury by inducing apoptosis, cytoskeleton relocation or cytoskeleton loss. And Decorin, a small proteoglycan known to neutralize TGF-β1, was reported to induce autophagy in vascular endothelial cells. However, it remains unknown how TGF-β1 and Decorin can affect podocyte autophagy in mesangial proliferative glomerulonephritis. In this study, we used in vivo and in vitro models to find out the effect of TGF-β1 and Decorin on podocyte autophagy. P-rpS6 and p-ULK1 were detected by Western blot to show the activation of mTORC1 pathway following TGF-β1 treatment. Also, we collected serum from IgAN patients and anti-Thy1.1 nephritis, and quantified TGF-β1 and Decorin using ELISA. Together, we showed that TGF-β1 could activate mTORC1 and inhibit autophagy, while Decorin has precisely the opposite effect. As the mesangial cells (MCs) proliferate, TGF-β1 increases and Decorin decreases in the serum of IgAN and anti-Thy1.1 nephritis. This finding deepened our understanding regarding how MC proliferation could finally result in podocyte dysfunction.

Research assessing on-road emission flow patterns from motor vehicles is essential in monitoring urban air quality, since it helps to mitigate atmospheric pollution levels. To reveal the influence of vehicle induced turbulence (VIT) caused by both front- and rear-vehicles on traffic exhaust and verify the applicability of the simplified line source emission model, a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) numerical simulation was used to investigate the micro-scale vehicle pollutant flow patterns. The simulation results were examined through sensitivity analysis and compared with the field measured carbon monoxide (CO) concentration. Conclusions indicate that the vehicle induced turbulence caused by the airflow blocking effect of both front- and rear-vehicles impedes the diffusion of front-vehicle traffic exhaust, compared with that of the rear vehicle. The front-vehicle isosurface with the CO mass fraction of 0.0012 extended to 6.0 m behind the vehicle, while that of the rear-vehicle extends as far as 12.7 m. But for the entire motorcade, VIT is beneficial to the diffusion of pollutants in car-following situations. Meanwhile, within the range of 9 m behind the rear of the lagging vehicle lies a vehicle induced turbulence zone. Furthermore, the influence of vehicle induced turbulence on traffic exhaust flow pattern is obvious within a range of 1 m on both sides of the vehicle body, where the concentration gradient of on-road emission is larger and contains severe mechanical turbulence. As a result, in the large concentration gradient area of the pollutant flow field, which accounts for 99.85% of the total concentration gradient, using the line source models to represent the on-road emission might introduce considerable errors due to neglecting the influence of vehicle induced turbulence. Findings of this study may shed lights on predicting emission concentrations in multiple locations by selecting appropriate on-road emission source models.

Radiation effect of electronic devices is a complex issue that attracted a lot of interest in the area of aviation industry and nuclear engineering. In order to investigate the relationship between structure damage and electrical performance of electronic devices, first-principle modeling and calculations were carried out to link SiO 2 /Si interfacial defect states and electron transport properties of electronic devices. We found that the oxygen vacancy (V O ) is much more easier to form than silicon vacancy ($\textbf{V}_{\mathbf {Si}}$) under the radiation environment. The band structure shows that two defect levels were localized inside the band gap of the SiO 2 /Si interface, approximately 0.19 eV and 0.25 eV below the conduction band minimum (CBM) as electronic traps, which were induced by a Si dangling bond defects. The $\textbf{V}_{\mathbf {O\, }}$ as the donor defect makes the interface restructuring and chemical bond changing, which leads to the defect level crossing the Fermi level ($E_{\mathbf {F}}$). Oxygen atoms of SiO 2 at the interface act as a potential well to keep electrons from tunneling. The barrier for carriers disappear after oxygen atom being moved, which will reduce the electrical gain and breakdown strength of devices. Our results gave a physical interpretation to the relationship between defects and electrical performance of electronic materials and indicated that the dangling bonds and $\textbf{V}_{\mathbf {O}}$textbf at the interface are needed to be suppressed generating in order to harden the electronic devices.

Myasthenia gravis (MG) and Lambert-Eaton myasthenic syndrome (LEMS) are both neuromuscular junction diseases, and some controversy exists whether the 2 diseases occur at the same time.We report a case that a patient with presentation of acetylcholine receptor (AChR) antibody positive MG and LEMS associated with small cell lung cancer (SCLC).The patient firstly suffered from fluctuant symptoms, including slurred speech, double eyelid ptosis, and weakness of limbs. His clinical characteristics were consistent with the diagnosis of MG and were effective with the treatment of pyridostigmine bromide and corticosteroids. After 8 months, the performance of repeated electrical stimulation suggested presynaptic lesion, which supported the patient with LEMS. After further examination, malignant tumors were found in the liver and right lung, and the pathology proved small cell carcinoma.His clinical characteristics were effective with the treatment of pyridostigmine bromide and corticosteroids. Right hilar lesion and multiple metastatic tumors in liver shrunk after chemotherapy.The patient's condition improved gradually. He was followed up for 17 months without tumor progression.The case report illustrates that MG and LEMS may be coexisted in the same patient. In MG and LEMS, clinicians should consider the possibility of malignant tumors as early detection and treatment may significantly improve the patient's prognosis.

Learning the embedding for social media data has attracted extensive research interests as well as boomed a lot of applications, such as classification and link prediction. In this paper, we examine the scenario of a multimodal network with nodes containing multimodal contents and connected by heterogeneous relationships, such as social images containing multimodal contents (e.g., visual content and text description), and linked with various forms (e.g., in the same album or with the same tag). However, given the multimodal network, simply learning the embedding from the network structure or a subset of content results in sub-optimal representation. In this paper, we propose a novel deep embedding method, i.e., Attention-based Multi-view Variational Auto-Encoder (AMVAE), to incorporate both the link information and the multimodal contents for more effective and efficient embedding. Specifically, we adopt LSTM with attention model to learn the correlation between different data modalities, such as the correlation between visual regions and the specific words, to obtain the semantic embedding of the multimodal contents. Then, the link information and the semantic embedding are considered as two correlated views. A multi-view correlation learning based Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) is proposed to learn the representation of each node, in which the embedding of link information and multimodal contents are integrated and mutually reinforced. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model in two applications, i.e., multi-label classification and link prediction.

Staphylococcus species, categorized into Staphylococcus aureus and non-aureus staphylococci (NAS), are frequent causes of mastitis in dairy cattle around the world. Current treatments using antimicrobials are under increasing scrutiny due to rising prevalence of multi-drug resistance in S. aureus. Objectives of this study were to determine: (1) genetic diversity of Staphylococcus species isolated from clinical mastitis in cows from large Chinese dairy farms; and (2) prevalence and distribution of antimicrobial resistance genes (ARG) in these isolates. Staphylococcus aureus (n = 96) were isolated from 26 herds located in 12 provinces of China, whereas NAS (n = 112) were isolated from 59 herds located in 18 provinces of China. The NAS were identified at the species level using a partial 16S rRNA sequencing method, whereas random amplification of polymorphic DNA (RAPD) PCR was done to determine genetic relationships of isolates. Finally, PCR was used to detect resistance and biofilm formation genes. Staphylococcus chromogenes (33%) was the most common NAS species, followed by Staphylococcus sciuri (17%) and Staphylococcus epidermidis (8%). Staphylococcus aureus was grouped in 12 genotypes, of which 2 types represented 56% of isolates. Staphylococcus chromogenes (n = 37) clustered into 8 RAPD types, with 2 prevalent types containing 73% of isolates. The most prevalent ARG in S. aureus isolates was blaZ (95%), followed by tetM (33%), tetK (31%), ermT (26%), and aacA-aphD (23%). The mecA and vanA were detected in 16 and 4% of isolates, respectively. In NAS, blaZ (100%), mecA (73%), tetK (79%), tetM (96%), mphC (63%), and msrA (54%) were frequently detected. Antimicrobial resistance genes mecA, tetK, tetL, tetM, dfrG, ermB, msrA, mphC, aadD, and aphA3 were more commonly detected in NAS than in S. aureus. Biofilm formation genes (icaA and icaD) were frequently detected in staphylococci isolated from bovine clinical mastitis. The existence of predominant RAPD types in S. aureus and S. chromogenes isolates across Chinese dairy farms indicated that specific genotypes had disseminated within herds and become more udder-adapted. High prevalence of ARG, especially in NAS, highlighted the risk of selection of multi-drug resistant staphylococci with potential as a reservoir of ARG.

Smartphone-based Passive Entry & Passive Start (PEPS) has become a promising choice for next generation PEPS in automotive industry. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) with its low-cost, low power consumption, short delay and high reliability makes smartphone-based PEPS with the potential to replace the existing PEPS. Localization-based Service (LBS) in vehicles requires centimeter-level positioning accuracy and millisecond-Ievel response, which becomes a big challenge for Iocalization scheme and algorithm. This paper studies the critical problem of locating and identifying the interior and exterior ofvehicle based on BLE received signal strength (RSS). A comparative study on interior and exterior positioning in vehicle is presented in this paper by applying deterministic method, probabilistic method and pattern recognition method based on experiments in vehicle. Experiment results show that fingerprint-based probabilistic method gets higher Iocalization accuracy in vehicular application scenario than other methods.

Purpose The characteristic expression of DNA damage response proteins in familial breast cancers with BRCA1, BRCA2, or non-BRCA1/2 mutations has not been analyzed in Chinese patients. Our study aimed to assess the differential expression of microcephalin 1 (BRIT1), ATM serine/threonine kinase (ATM), checkpoint kinase 2 (CHEK2), BRCA1, RAD51 recombinase (RAD51), and poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase 1 (PARP-1) and establish the profile of Chinese familial breast cancers with different mutation status. Methods We constructed five tissue microarrays from 183 familial breast cancer patients (31 with BRCA1 mutations; 14 with BRCA2 mutations, and 138 with non-BRCA1/2 mutations). The DNA response and repair markers used for immunohistochemistry analysis included BRIT1, ATM, CHEK2, BRCA1, RAD51, and PARP-1. The expressions of these proteins were analyzed in BRCA1/2 mutated tumors. The association between pathologic characteristics with BRCA1/2 mutation status was also analyzed. Results In familial breast cancer patients, BRCA1 mutated tumors were more frequent with high nuclear grade, estrogen receptor/progesterone receptor/human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 negative, low Ki-67, and positive CK5/6. BRCA1 mutated tumors had lower CHEK2 and higher cytoplasmic BRIT1 expression than BRCA2 and non-BRCA1/2 mutation tumors. BRCA2-associated tumors showed higher CHEK2 and cytoplasmic RAD51 expression than those in other groups. Nuclear PARP-1 expression in BRCA1/2-associated tumors was significantly higher than in non-BRCA1/2 mutation tumors. Moreover, we found quite a few of negative PARP-1 expression cases in BRCA1/2 mutated groups. Conclusion The clinicopathologic findings of BRCA1-associated Chinese familial breast cancers were similar to the results of other studies. Chinese familial breast cancer patients with BRCA1/2 mutations might have distinctive expression of different DNA damage response proteins. The reduced expression of PARP-1 in Chinese BRCA1/2 mutated breast cancer patients could influence the therapeutic outcome of PARP-1 inhibitors.

In this paper, collision avoidance problem is investigated for differential drive robot running in pedestrian environment, which requires for natural and safe interaction between robot and human. Based on deep reinforcement learning, a human-aware collision avoidance algorithm is proposed to find a smooth and collision-free path. A well designed reward function ensures the robot navigates without collision and obeys right-pass norm simultaneously. The slow convergence problem during training is addressed by pre-training the neural network using supervised learning. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can find a feasible and norm-obeyed path which achieves a natural human-robot interaction compared with traditional method.

Accurately predicting social unrest events is crucial to improve public security. Currently, with the large scale news event datasets available such as GDELT, we can use the amount of unrest news to estimate the risk of instability which is particularly helpful in resource allocation and policy making. Thus in this paper we propose a context-aware attention based long short-term memory (LSTM) prediction framework named CA-LSTM to accurately predict the amount of unrest news of each country or state in the future. Specifically, we first use LSTM to learn the hidden representation from the raw time series data, and then we employ a temporal attention mechanism to learn the importance weight of each time slot. Finally, a fully connected layer is adopted to predict the future unrest news amount by combining the context information and the time series embedding vectors. We conduct extensive experiments on the GDELT data of the United States, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Reservoirs play more and more important role in providing potable water in many developing countries, including the China. In the present study, pollution characteristics, source and health risk of dissolved heavy metals in 19 representative reservoirs in the hilly area of southern China were investigated. The results presented great spatial heterogeneity in heavy metal concentrations among the studied reservoirs due to the disturbances by different anthropogenic activities. Several reservoirs had significantly higher concentrations of heavy metals compared with others, FengTan (FT) reservoir (0.34μg/L in dry season), Cr in reservoirs of HuangShi (HS) and ZheLin (ZL) with values of 4.16μg/L and 3.45μg/L in dry season respectively, and Al in reservoirs of JiaoKou (JK), GuTian (GT) and DouShui (DS) with values of 1011μg/L, 1036μg/L and 1001μg/L in wet season, respectively. Furthermore, there was a great difference in the seasonal variation of heavy metals, especially for Al and Pb in wet season characterized with relatively high values of 643μg/L and 0.67μg/L, respectively. Accordingly, Al was identified with a great health risk to living beings in view of its mean value in wet season, which greatly exceeded the criteria for drinking water of China, WHO and US EPA. Furthermore, As might be the greatest concern of health risk in this region considering its high carcinogenic risk to the local residents around the reservoirs of OuYangHai (OYH), DS, ZhiXi (ZX) and HS. Multivariate statistical analysis suggested that there was great heterogeneity in the sources of these heavy metals in the hilly area of southern China. Therefore, specific measures, such as controls on point source pollution control and tailings, should be taken for maintaining drinking water safety and aquatic ecosystem health.

Learning social media data embedding by deep models has attracted extensive research interest as well as boomed a lot of applications, such as link prediction, classification, and cross-modal search. However, for social images which contain both link information and multimodal contents (e.g., text description, and visual content), simply employing the embedding learnt from network structure or data content results in sub-optimal social image representation. In this paper, we propose a novel social image embedding approach called Deep Multimodal Attention Networks (DMAN), which employs a deep model to jointly embed multimodal contents and link information. Specifically, to effectively capture the correlations between multimodal contents, we propose a multimodal attention network to encode the fine-granularity relation between image regions and textual words. To leverage the network structure for embedding learning, a novel Siamese-Triplet neural network is proposed to model the links among images. With the joint deep model, the learnt embedding can capture both the multimodal contents and the nonlinear network information. Extensive experiments are conducted to investigate the effectiveness of our approach in the applications of multi-label classification and cross-modal search. Compared to state-of-the-art image embeddings, our proposed DMAN achieves significant improvement in the tasks of multi-label classification and cross-modal search.

Seasonal variations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the surface sediments from 13 rivers in hilly regions of southern China were studied. Concentrations of PAHs analyzed in the wet season were higher than those analyzed in the dry season, with residues ranging from 74.3 to 1930.9 ng g−1 dw in the wet season and from 96.9 to 1388.9 ng g−1 dw in the dry season. The primary contributors were 3- and 4-ringed congeners accounting for 59.8% ± 10.1% and 58.3% ± 9.3% of the identified PAHs in the wet and the dry seasons, respectively. Proximity to sources and locations susceptible to high atmospheric depositional inputs results in high concentrations of PAH. Diagnostic ratios have indicated that the sources of PAHs in different seasons make no apparent difference. Furthermore, a principal component analysis and multiple linear regression (PCA-MLR) studies indicate that combustion sources such as vehicle emissions and coal combustion are the primary sources of PAHs. Toxicological risk assessments based on TEQcare suggested that Benzo[a]pyrene, benz[a]anthracene, dibenz[a,h]anthracene could pose high ecological risks in this area.

As an important part of cultural heritage, the protection of intangible cultural heritage is of great significance for the promotion of traditional culture and national image. In this paper, we propose a novel digital protection method of intangible cultural heritage. Firstly, we analyze main characteristics of the Intangible cultural heritage, which contains products and processes of a culture which can be preserved and passed on through a long history. Intangible cultural heritage is widely distributed all over the world. Secondly, we carefully analyze the augmented reality technology, which can greatly improve user experiences. Thirdly, we discuss how to construct the system for the digital protection of intangible cultural heritage. Particularly, our proposed system contains three components: 1) Intelligent terminal, 2) Fusion of cultural digital content and realistic scene video images, and 3) Object target tracking in realistic scene. Finally, we conclude the whole paper and point our future works.

Sulforaphane (SFN), the bioactive component of cruciferous vegetables, is a potent indirect antioxidant. Oxidative stress and activation of glycogen synthase kinase 3beta (GSK3β) are two major contributors to the pathogenesis of diabetic nephropathy (DN). Here, we investigated whether and how SFN affected GSK3β in experimental models of DN in vivo and in vitro. SFN treatment obviously prevented the increase in urine albumin excretion, matrix expansion, transforming growth factor-β1 expression, fibronectin and type IV collagen deposition in the diabetic kidney. Simultaneously, the level of 8-oxo-deoxyguanosine, an indicator of oxidative damage, was markedly lowered in SFN-treated diabetic rats, together with a significant reduction in activity of the GSK-3β/Fyn axis and an evident activation of Nrf2 signaling. Similarly, antifibrotic effects of SFN, parallel to enhanced inhibitory Ser9-phosphorylation of GSK3β and Fyn/Nrf2 nuclear export/import, were observed in the cultured rat mesangial cells (RMC) exposed to high glucose. The salutary effects of SFN on high-glucose-stimulated RMC were abolished by overexpression of GSK3β while being rescued by lithium chloride, a well-known GSK3β inhibitor. Taken together, our findings suggested that SFN ameliorated experimental diabetic nephropathy, at least in part, via GSK3β/Fyn/Nrf2 signaling pathway.

We consider the Borcherds-Cartan matrix obtained from a symmetrizable generalized Cartan matrix by adding one imaginary simple root. We extend the result of Gebert and Teschner (Lett. Math. Phys., 1994, 31: 327-334) to the quantum case. Moreover, we give a connection between the irreducible dominant representations of quantum Kac-Moody algebras and those of quantum generalized Kac-Moody algebras. As the result, a large class of irreducible dominant representations of quantum generalized Kac-Moody algebras were obtained from representations of quantum Kac-Moody algebras through tensor algebras.

Podocyte injury is a pivotal factor during the progression of glomerular diseases. It has been demonstrated that the expression of ubiquitin carboxy-terminal hydrolase L1 (UCH-L1) is increased in injured podocytes in a number of types of glomerulonephritis. However, its mechanism of regulation remains to be elucidated. A previous study by our group suggested that UCH-L1 is a downstream protein of nuclear factor (NF)-κB signaling. In the present study, the involvement of NF-κB in the regulation of the expression of UCH-L1 was investigated in diseased podocytes in vivo and in vitro. Increases in the expression of phosphorylated NF-κB at p65 and UCH-L1 were detected using immunohistochemical analysis of kidney biopsy tissues from 56 cases of nephritis, including immunoglobulin A nephropathy, membranous glomerulonephritis and lupus nephritis. The two indicators were also analyzed using western blot analysis in cultured murine podocytes stimulated by inflammatory factors. The results of the present study demonstrated that in human renal biopsies of several cases of immune complex-mediated glomerulonephritis, the increases of NF-κB and UCH-L1 were positively correlated with the number of diseased podocytes. By contrast, in non-immune complex-mediated glomerulonephritis, no clear activation of NF-κB and increase of UCH-L1 expression was observed. In vitro, immune stimulation also led to the upregulation of UCH-L1 through the NF-κB signaling pathway in mouse podocytes. In conclusion, the results of the present study suggested that the activation of NF-κB and upregulation of UCH-L1 in podocytes may be vital in podocyte injury associated with immune complex-mediated glomerulonephritis.

Seasonal distribution of organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and their possible interactions with phytoplankton species in water from Lake Taihu were investigated. OCP concentrations ranged from 69.95 to 223.08 ng L(-1) in winter and from 80.95 to 376.03 ng L(-1) in summer, while PAHs ranged from 45.40 to 232.74 ng L(-1) in winter and 49.53 to 197.72 ng L(-1) in summer. Such physicochemical and biological parameters as the larger amounts of pollutants taken up by phytoplankton, the increased atmospheric wet deposition, the discharge of wastewater, and the resuspension of polluted sediments in summer time were responsible for the higher residues of both OCPs and PAHs than in winter. Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) between phytoplankton biomass and micropollutants indicated high affinity of OCPs to Bacillariophyta and Cryptophyta and PAHs to Cyanophyta and Chlorophyta, documenting the ecological effects of phytoplankton on the biogeochemical processes of OCPs and PAHs and thus should be further investigated especially in hyper-eutrophic lakes.

Antibiotic resistance disseminating from animals and their environments is a public issue that poses significant threats to human health. In the present study, the diversity and abundance of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in 15 samples from the guts and related aquaculture environments (water and sediment) of shrimp were investigated. In total, 60 ARGs, 102 ARGs and 67 ARGs primarily belonging to 13, 15 and 15 different types were detected in the shrimp gut, pond water and sediment samples, respectively. Efflux pump and target modification were the predominant resistance mechanisms in all samples. It was found that Aeromonas, Yersinia and Clostridium XlVb were significantly correlated with the distribution of the ARGs. Besides, the relative abundance of ARGs was positively correlated with the levels of mobile genetic elements (MGEs). Moreover, variation partitioning analysis showed that MGEs, contributing to 74.46% of the resistome variation, played an important role in the affecting of the antibiotic resistome than the bacterial communities and their joint effects. Collectively, this study provides comprehensive information to better understand the ARG dissemination in aquaculture environments and to improve the ecological management of aquatic ecosystems.

The enormous amount of tweets generated every day contain remarkably theoretical and practical value in numerous researches and applications. Although the prediction of information propagation has been extensively studied, most previous work mainly focuses on whether the event will break out and when it will burst out. It is still a huge challenge to predict the final size due to the great uncertainty. This study aims at finding out the best combination of the method and features to predict the final size of the certain event. In the best parameter settings, we compare the method of Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) with other methods both in same and different strategies, and find that the GBDT performs much better. In the process of feature extracting and computing, we find that the amount of the early uids, the amount of fans, and the field of the topic matter in the early stage of the prediction while other features begin to show differences over time. That is to say, we achieve the more accurate prediction with fewer features in the early stage of the event which make sense.

Podocyte injury is a key event in proteinuric kidney disease and eventually glomerular scarring. While adrenomedullin (AM), a potent vasodilatory peptide, has been reported to confer renoprotection in several experimental models of kidney diseases, its effect on injured podocytes and the related mechanism is still largely unknown. Employing Western blotting analysis, immunoprecipitation and immunofluorescence, we investigated the effects of AM on the expressions of podocyte cytoskeletal proteins and Rho-family small GTPases (Rho GTPases) in puromycin aminonucleoside (PAN)-induced podocyte injury, both in cultured podocytes and in PAN nephrosis rats. Urinary protein excretion and the morphologic changes of kidney in PAN nephrosis rats were evaluated. Glutathione-S-transferase pull-down assay was applied for Rho GTPases activity. PAN induced massive albuminuria and morphologic injury, which were significantly mitigated by AM administration. AM significantly antagonized not only the PAN-decreased expressions of synaptopodin, nephrin, CD2AP and podocin, but also the PAN-disrupted interactions between synaptopodin–RhoA, nephrin–CD2AP, and CD2AP–Rac1–cortactin. These effects of AM in cultured podocytes were mostly significantly blocked by H89, a PKA inhibitor. AM dramatically upregulated the PAN-induced Rho GTPases protein expressions and their activities. PAN increased the expressions of endogenous AM and its receptor RAMP2 which was furthermore upregulated by AM administration. AM alleviated podocyte injury induced by PAN both in cell culture and in PAN nephrosis. The beneficial effects of AM on podocytes can be attributable to direct modulation of podocyte cytoskeletal proteins and Rho GTPases, mainly via a PKA-dependent pathway.

Negative conspecific density dependence is one of the principal mechanisms affecting plant performance and community spatial patterns. Although many studies identified the prevalence of density dependent effects in various vegetation types by analyzing conspecific spatial dispersal patterns (spatial patterning) of forest trees, interactions between individuals and heterospecific neighboring trees caused by density-dependent effects are often neglected. The effects of negative density dependence lead us to expect that neighbourhood species segregation would increase with increasing tree size and that larger trees would be surrounded by more heterospecific neighbours than would smaller trees. We studied four mapped 1-Ha plots on Changbaishan Mountain in North-eastern China and used marked point pattern analysis to explore whether trees of different sizes exhibited differences in neighbourhood species segregation; we also determined whether larger trees were more likely to have heterospecific neighbours than smaller trees were. Our results show that bigger trees generally have higher species mingling levels. Neighborhood species segregation ranged from lower than expected levels to random or nearly random patterns at small scales as tree size classes increased under heterogeneous Poisson null model tests. This study provides some evidence in support of negative density dependent effects in temperate forests.

Organ toxicity, particularly liver toxicity, remains one of the major reasons for the termination of drug candidates in the development pipeline as well as withdrawal or restrictions of marketed drugs. A screening-amenable alternative in vivo model such as zebrafish would, therefore, find immediate application in the early prediction of unacceptable organ toxicity. To identify highly upregulated genes as biomarkers of toxic responses in the zebrafish model, a set of well-characterized reference drugs that cause drug-induced liver injury (DILI) in the clinic were applied to zebrafish larvae and adults. Transcriptome microarray analysis was performed on whole larvae or dissected adult livers. Integration of data sets from different drug treatments at different stages identified common upregulated detoxification pathways. Within these were candidate biomarkers which recurred in multiple treatments. We prioritized 4 highly upregulated genes encoding enzymes acting in distinct phases of the drug metabolism pathway. Through promoter isolation and fosmid recombineering, eGFP reporter transgenic zebrafish lines were generated and evaluated for their response to DILI drugs. Three of the 4 generated reporter lines showed a dose and time-dependent induction in endodermal organs to reference drugs and an expanded drug set. In conclusion, through integrated transcriptomics and transgenic approaches, we have developed parallel independent zebrafish in vivo screening platforms able to predict organ toxicities of preclinical drugs.

The selection of harvested trees is key to the success of near-natural forest management, yet few people have focused on the structural characteristics of harvested woods. Here, we examined the structural characteristics of harvested trees in Korean pine-broadleaf forest and pine–oak mixed forest in China using bivariate distributions of spatial structure parameters and the distribution of diameter classes. The stands were strictly managed according to the principles of structure-based forest management. We found that trees cut from both types of forest had wide structural diversity: they were widely distributed across vertical levels of the forest stand, including dominant, medium, and suppressed trees. Most trees from the Korean pine-broadleaf forest were of small–medium size and were highly mixed and randomly distributed in relation to their neighbors. In contrast, trees cut from pine–oak mixed forest tended to be clumped in relation to their neighbors. The majority were dominant trees surrounded by other species or distributed randomly, and were generally evenly distributed across stem diameters. In both forest types, most individuals were highly mixed and distributed in a random pattern, and trees in a clumped or regular distribution were more likely to be retained. In addition, the distribution of diameter at breast height size classes retained a reversed-J-shaped curve before and after management. These structural features closely matched the prior conditions of both forests and the purpose of management. They may also be conducive to quick selection of trees cut from the same forest type in the future, and can aid the recognition and interpretation of forest structure.

The residual levels, tissue distribution and human health risk assessment of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in edible fishes, bighead carp (Aristichthys nobilis) and silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix), from the largest freshwater lake in China, Poyang Lake, were studied. PAH concentrations ranged from 105 to 513ng g(-1)ww and from 53.9 to 401ng g(-1)ww in different tissues of bighead carp and silver carp, respectively. Low molecular weight (LMW) PAHs were the predominant compounds, suggesting the gill-water transfer might be the major exposure route for PAHs in the studied fish species. Tissue distribution indicated that the hepatobiliary system accumulated higher concentrations of PAHs than the extrahepatic tissues with bile being the most predominant tissue for both species. Composition analysis demonstrated that PAHs were from the combined petrogenic and pyrogenic origin, and the gasoline combustion might be the main source. A preliminary evaluation of human health risk using benzo[a]pyrene (BaP) potency equivalent concentration (PEC) as well as the incremental lifetime cancer risk (ILCR) indicated that PAHs in fish would induce potential carcinogenic effects.

Concentrations and tissue distribution of organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) in different tissues of freshwater fish, silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix) and bighead carp (Aristichthys nobilis), collected from Poyang Lake, China's largest shallow lake, and were studied. OCPs were detected with the observed concentrations ranging from 280.67 to 1,006.58 ng/g wet weight (ww) for bighead carp and from 67.28 to 930.06 ng/g ww for silver carp. Composition analysis demonstrated OCPs in both fish were from the same polluted environment, and then, the species-specific bioaccumulation might be mainly due to the different fish age as well as the different feeding habits elucidating from the stable carbon (δ(13)C) and nitrogen (δ(15)N) isotope analysis. Tissue distribution indicated that dietary intake was the major exposure route of OCPs for both fish and higher accumulation potency of OCPs by the hepatobiliary-related tissues (such as liver, kidney, bile, and heart). The higher metabolic activities of these tissues elucidating from the higher values of δ(15)N might be the potential-determined factor responsible for the tissue-specific accumulation.

Many indices can be used to describe the structural characteristics of tree populations at the forest stand scale. However, each of these indices can only express the whole or unilateral structure, i.e., none can simultaneously provide two or more aspects of the structural attributes of a tree population. The purpose of this study is to validate the bivariate distribution of structural parameters—a spatial structure analysis method based on the relationships between nearest-neighbor tree groups and to display its ability of analyzing tree population. Three common associated tree species, China ash (Fraxinus mandshurica Rupr.), Manchurian walnut (Juglans mandshurica Maxim.), and Amur lilac (Syringa amurensis Rupr.), in a mixed forest of China ash–Manchurian walnut were used as an example to validate the method. This type of mixed forest is one of the most common Korean pine broad-leaved forests in northeast China. Each population and resident individuals within different size classes were analyzed in detail. Our results demonstrate that the new method not only effectively reflects the similarities and differences among the three populations from two aspects, but also well represents the structural differentiation among trees within a species. The method provides much more structural information than most traditional methods, which may be helpful to further our understanding of population structure and to discover and protect biodiversity in the future.

In this paper, we construct the Gröbner-Shirshov bases for degenerate Ringel-Hall algebras of types A and G2 from the multiplication formulas of the corresponding generic extension monoid algebras.

Cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated antigen 4 (CTLA-4), a potent immunoregulatory molecule, can down-regulate T-cell activation and inhibit anti-tumor immune response. This study showed that LPS-stimulated human dendritic cells (DCs) decreased the expression of HLA-DR, CD83 and costimulatory molecules (CD40, CD80 and CD86) following coculturing with CTLA-4+ breast cancer cells. Moreover, the suppressed DCs further inhibited proliferation of allogeneic CD4+/CD8+ T-cells, differentiation of Th1 and function of cytotoxic lymphocytes (CTLs). However, CTLA-4 blockade in breast cancer cells could recover DC maturation and cytokine production, elevate antigen-presenting function of DCs, reverse Th1/CTLs response and cytokine secretion. Subsequent study demonstrated that the activation of extracellular-signal regulated kinase and signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 of DCs caused by CTLA-4+ breast cancer cells were the predominant mechanism of DC suppression. In addition, CTLA-4 blockade treatment also directly inhibited proliferation and induced apoptosis of CTLA-4+ breast cancer cells. Collectively, CTLA-4 was expressed and functional on human breast cancer cells through influencing maturation and function of DCs in vitro, and CTLA-4 blockage not only recovered the antigen-presenting function of DCs and T-cells activation but also suppressed the biological activity of breast cancer cells themselves. This study highlights the clinical application of CTLA-4 blockade therapy in breast cancer.

This paper presents a foot-mounted inertial sensor system for pedestrian localization, and aims to find an adaptive stance detection method for pedestrian gait analysis. The approach is based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, which divides the gaits into two types: walking and running. For walking, the algorithm uses two threshold conditions and a median filter to detect stance and still phases. For running, a new step detection method based on Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is used to roughly identify every step of running at first, and then empirical formulas are summarized between the average velocity of each step and thresholds. The corrected thresholds based on empirical formulas are used in the second-round accurate stance detection. The localization accuracy for running is largely improved in this algorithm.

Human activities in and around Lake Wuliangsu, in the upper reaches of the Yellow River, triggered environmental changes for which evidence is preserved in the lake sediments. We investigated the past ~150 years of human impacts on Lake Wuliangsu using high-resolution records of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) in the sediments. Prior to the 1950s, there were very low concentrations of contaminants in the lake deposits. In the 1950s, relatively higher OCP concentrations and proportions of low molecular weight (LMW) PAHs were related to the intensification of agricultural activity. Since the 1990s, increases in high molecular weight (HMW) PAH concentrations and their proportions, and decreases in OCP concentrations and proportions of LMW PAHs, indicated human impacts on the lake were dominated by industry and urban development. Thus, there have been three periods of human-mediated environmental change in the Lake Wuliangsu basin, inferred from the PAH and OCP records (pre-1950s, 1950s-1990s, and 1990s to present). The inferred changes are consistent with the local socioeconomic data. The agreement between paleolimnologic records from Lake Wuliangsu and socioeconomic data suggests that the lake sediments provide a reliable archive for investigating the environmental history of human impacts on the lake.

In this paper, we give a recursive formula for the interesting PBW basis [Formula: see text] of composition subalgebras [Formula: see text] of Ringel–Hall algebras [Formula: see text] of cyclic quivers after [Generic extensions and canonical bases for cyclic quivers, Canad. J. Math. 59(6) (2007) 1260–1283], and another construction of canonical bases of [Formula: see text] from the monomial bases [Formula: see text] following [Multiplication formulas and canonical basis for quantum affine, [Formula: see text], Canad. J. Math. 70(4) (2018) 773–803]. As an application, we will determine all the canonical basis elements of [Formula: see text] associated with modules of Loewy length [Formula: see text]. Finally, we will discuss the canonical bases between Ringel–Hall algebras and affine quantum Schur algebras.

The correlation between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and competitive advantage (CA) has been studied for decades, however, a consistent conclusion has still not been reached. This may be due to the lack of discussion about the variables that affect the relationship between them. We extended the examination of the relationship between CSR and CA through largely ignored perspectives of organization resources and capabilities. Drawing on the multiple mediations of social capital (SC) and dynamic capabilities (DCs), we generated propositions concerning the relationship of CSR with CA. Based on 112 enterprises in China, the data from 269 surveys were used to test our theoretical model. The results showed that CSR can positively affect CA directly and indirectly with mediations of structure and relational dimensions of CA. The results also showed that, in the dynamic environment, CSR indirectly created CA by enhancing DCs, such as resource integration capability and organizing learning capability, but not by innovation and transformation capability. From these results, the paper concluded that with a proper combination of external social measures, internal competitive resources and capabilities, enterprises can realize the creation of a shared value of economy and society, which in turn will become the sustainable power with which enterprises can gain CA.

Concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were measured in 22 surface sediment samples and an approximately 100-year scale sediment core collected from Poyang Lake. This valuable sediments enable analysis of spatial and temporal distribution patterns of PAH sources, and determine the anthropogenic impacts on Poyang Lake. Total PAH concentrations in the surface sediments ranged from 73.2 to 367.2 ng/g dw, and higher residues were encountered in regions with high-density populations and intensive human activities. Total PAH concentrations in the sediment core ranged from 42.0 to 334.0 ng/g dw and were grouped in two clusters (pre-1990s and post-1990s to the present). PAH concentrations in sediments changed both temporally and spatially, suggesting a difference in PAH sources. Before the 1990s, major PAH sources in the sediment core were from coal, wood and grass combustion. This finding naturally agrees with open lake conditions on a spatial scale, which were related to agricultural activities. Petroleum combustion from industrialization and urbanization has become the predominant PAH source in the sediment core from the 1990s to the present and corresponds to sources observed in the southwestern lake near the relatively developed Nanchang City. In the northern lake leading to the Yangtze River, certain petroleum-related contaminants from shipping have become the main PAH sources. The different PAH sources observed in sediments generally reflect the degree of socio-economic development in the Poyang Lake valley, which is consistent with the local written records, indirectly validating the connection of sediment PAH records to the history of human activities in and around Poyang Lake.