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Functional dyspepsia (FD) is a brain–gut interaction disorder located in the stomach and duodenum, which has complex pathophysiological mechanisms, and there is no effective treatment for FD. Acupuncture and moxibustion have been proven to have definite and significant efficacy on FD. Focusing on the affected area and combined with the potential pathophysiology of FD, here we discuss the possible mechanisms of acupuncture and moxibustion in treating FD to guide future clinical and experimental research. We argue that the pathological causes of FD can be roughly divided into gastrointestinal dysfunction, duodenal low-grade inflammation, visceral hypersensitivity, and duodenal intestinal barrier and microbial imbalance. Correspondingly, the possible mechanisms of acupuncture and moxibustion in treating FD are elucidated from the perspective of how they improve gastric accommodation, regulate gastrointestinal motility, reduce gastric visceral sensitivity, regulate eosinophil–mast cell axis, inhibit low-grade inflammatory responses, and possibly regulate intestinal microbial homeostasis and duodenal barrier function through the microbiota–gut–brain axis. Although some evidence is still lacking, acupuncture remains a promising treatment for FD. In the future, it is necessary to conduct additional clinical and experimental research on acupuncture and moxibustion in treating FD to further explore their effects and mechanisms.

Abstract Repeated sprint exercise (RSE) is a popular training modality for a wide variety of athletic activities. The purpose of this study was to assess the combined effects of systemic hypoxia and blood flow restriction (BFR) on muscle deoxygenation and RSE performance. Twelve healthy young men performed a standard RSE training modality (five sets of 10 s maximal sprint with a 60 s rest) under four different conditions: (1) normoxic control (NC), normoxia (N, 20.9%) + control BFR (C, 0 mmHg); (2) normoxic BFR (NB), normoxia (N, 20.9%) + BFR (B, 140 mmHg); (3) hypoxic control (HC), hypoxia (H, 13.7%) + control BFR (C, 0 mmHg); and (4) hypoxic BFR (HB): hypoxia (H, 13.7%) + BFR (B, 140 mmHg). BFR was only administered during the rest period of the respective RSE trials. In the local exercising muscles, muscle oxygen saturation (SmO2) and neuromuscular activity were measured using near‐infrared spectroscopy and surface electromyography, respectively. SmO2 was lower in systemic hypoxia conditions relative to normoxia conditions (P 0.05). Interestingly, an elevated neuromuscular activity was seen in response to the BFR, particularly during conditions of systemic hypoxia (P

Hyperthermia impairs physical performance and, when prolonged, results in heat stroke or other illnesses. While extensive research has investigated the effectiveness of various cooling strategies, including cold water immersion and ice-suit, there has been little work focused on overcoming the cutaneous vasoconstriction response to external cold stimulation, which can reduce the effectiveness of these treatments. Over-the-counter (OTC) topical analgesics have been utilized for the treatment of muscle pain for decades; however, to date no research has examined the possibility of taking advantage of their vasodilatory functions in the context of skin cooling. We tested whether an OTC analgesic cream containing 20% methyl salicylate and 6% L-menthol, known cutaneous vasodilators, applied to the skin during skin cooling accelerates heat loss in exercise-induced hyperthermia. Firstly, we found that cutaneous application of OTC topical analgesic cream can attenuate cold-induced vasoconstriction and enhance heat loss during local skin cooling. We also revealed that core body heat loss, as measured by an ingestible telemetry sensor, could be accelerated by cutaneous application of analgesic cream during ice-suit cooling in exercise-induced hyperthermia. A blunted blood pressure response was observed during cooling with the analgesic cream application. Given the safety profile and affordability of topical cutaneous analgesics containing vasodilatory agents, our results suggest that they can be an effective and practical tool for enhancing the cooling effects of skin cooling for hyperthermia.

Inferring the three-dimensional structure of objects from monocular images has far-reaching applications in the field of 3D perception. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised network (SSL-Net) to generate 3D point clouds from a single RGB image, unlike the existing work which requires multiple views of the same object to recover the full 3D geometry. To provide the extra self-supervisory signal, the generated 3D model is simultaneously rendered into an image and compared with the input image. In addition, a pose estimation network is integrated into the 3D point cloud generation network to eliminate the pose ambiguity of the input image, and the estimated pose is also used for rendering the 2D image with the same pose as input image from 3D point clouds. The extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets show that our method not only qualitatively generates point clouds with more details but also quantitatively outperforms the state-of-the-art in accuracy.

A Pd/UiO-66 catalyst was synthesized with well-dispersed Pd nanoparticles. The obtained catalyst was tested in the hydrogenation of furfural to tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol in various solvents, Water was found to be the most suitable solvent. Pd/UiO-66 exhibited much higher activity than Pd/SiO2 and Pd/γ-Al2O3, completely converting furfural to tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol with 100% selectivity under mild conditions. The hydrogenation of CO moiety in tetrahydrofurfural was rate-determining step. Static adsorption measurement indicated that the adsorption of furfural on UiO-66 was significantly stronger than that on SiO2 or γ-Al2O3, suggesting that the adsorption play an important role in the gas-liquid-solid furfural hydrogenation reaction.

3-D vision plays an important role in intelligent perception of robot, while it requires extra 3-D sensors. Depth estimation from monocular videos provides an alternative mechanism to recover the 3-D information. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised learning framework that uses the perceptual loss for depth estimation. Depth and pose networks are first trained to estimate the depth and the camera motion of the video sequence, respectively. With the estimated depth and pose of the original frame, the adjacent frame can be reconstructed. The pixel-wise differences between the constructed frame and the original frame are used as per-pixel loss. Meanwhile, reconstructed views and original views can be used to extract advanced features from a pre-trained network to define and optimize perceptual loss functions to assess the quality of reconstructions. We combine the respective advantages of these two methods and present an approach of generating a depth map by training the feed-forward network with per-pixel loss function and perceptual loss function. The experimental results show that our method can significantly improve the estimation accuracy of depth map.

Upgrading furfural (FAL) to cyclopentanone (CPO) is of great importance for the synthesis of high-value chemicals and biomass utilization. The hydrogenative ring-rearrangement of FAL is catalyzed by metal-acid bifunctional catalysts. The Lewis acidity is a key factor in promoting the rearrangement of furan rings and achieving a high selectivity to CPO. In this work, highly dispersed Pd nanoparticles were successfully encapsulated into the cavities of a Zr based MOF, UiO-66-NO2, by impregnation using a double-solvent method (DSM) followed by H2 reduction. The obtained Pd/UiO-66-NO2 catalyst showed a significantly better catalytic performance in the aforementioned reaction than the Pd/UiO-66 catalyst due to the higher Lewis acidity of the support. Moreover, by using a thermal treatment. The Lewis acidity can be further increased through the creating of missing-linker defects. The resulting defective Pd/UiO-66-NO2 exhibited the highest CPO selectivity and FAL conversion of 96.6% and 98.9%, respectively. In addition, the catalyst was able to maintain a high activity and stability after four consecutive runs. The current study not only provides an efficient catalytic reaction system for the hydrogenative ring-rearrangement of furfural to cyclopentanone but also emphasizes the importance of defect sites.

In this work, a series of modified metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have been prepared by pre- and post-treatment with transition metal oxodiperoxo complexes (MoO(O2)2, WO(O2)2, and KVO(O2)2). The obtained materials are characterized by XRD, FTIR, SEM, TEM, inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), as well as by N2 adsorption/desorption measurement. The characterization results show that transition metal oxodiperoxo complexes are uniformly incorporated into the MOF materials without changing the basic structures. The performance of cyclohexane oxidation on metal oxodiperoxo complex modified MOFs are evaluated. UiO-67-KVO(O2)2 shows the best performance for cyclohexane oxidation, with 78% selectivity to KA oil (KA oil refers to a cyclohexanol and cyclohexanone mixture) at 9.4% conversion. The KA selectivity is found to depend on reaction time, while hot-filtration experiments indicates that the catalytic process is heterogeneous with no leaching of metal species.

Biochar is typically made via pyrolysis of organic materials under anoxic conditions, due to its high surface area and significant negative charge. It also has the ability to minimize the mass or volume of waste items. As a result, biochar is frequently used in the remediation of environmental contamination. To overcome the shortcoming of biochar in the application, the magnetic Fe3O4@Biochar from walnut shells were prepared. The magnetic Fe3O4@Biochar from walnut shells is used to study the adsorption of U(VI) in the solution. SEM, XRD, and FT-IR are used to determine the properties of magnetic Fe3O4@Biochar. The results revealed that magnetic Fe3O4@Biochar has a fragmented and irregular form. On the surface of magnetic Fe3O4@Biochar, several functional groups can aid in the adsorption of pollutants. The adsorption capacity of U(VI) by magnetic Fe3O4@Biochar is influenced by the contact time and initial concentration of U(VI). For the adsorption of U(VI) in solution by magnetic Fe3O4@Biochar, the pseudo-first-order kinetic equation and the Langmuir isotherm equation can be fitted. The adsorption of the process is chemical adsorption and monolayer adsorption. The chemical stability of magnetic Fe3O4@Biochar is very well.