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Abstract Chronic pain remains a significant medical challenge with complex underlying mechanisms, and an urgent need for new treatments. Our research built and utilized the iPain single-cell atlas to study chronic pain progression in dorsal root and trigeminal ganglia. We discovered that senescence of a small subset of pain-sensing neurons may be a driver of chronic pain. This mechanism was observed in animal models after nerve injury and in human patients diagnosed with chronic pain or diabetic painful neuropathy. Notably, treatment with senolytics, drugs that remove senescent cells, reversed pain symptoms in mice post-injury. These findings highlight the role of cellular senescence in chronic pain development, demonstrate the therapeutic potential of senolytic treatments, and underscore the value of the iPain atlas for future pain research.

Abstract Background The objective of this research is to clarify the impact of periodontitis on overall and cardiovascular-related death rates among hypertensive individuals. Method A total of 5665 individuals with hypertension were included from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data spanning 2001–2004 and 2009–2014. These individuals were divided into two groups based on the presence or absence of periodontitis and further stratified by the severity of periodontitis. We employed weighted multivariate Cox proportional hazards regression and Kaplan-Meier curves (log-rank test) to evaluate the impact of periodontitis on all-cause and cardiovascular mortality. Additional analyses, including adjustments for various covariates, subgroups, and sensitivity analyses, were conducted to ensure the robustness and reliability of our results. Result Over an average follow-up duration of 10.22 years, there were 1,122 all-cause and 297 cardiovascular deaths. Individuals with periodontitis exhibited an elevated risk of all-cause mortality (HR = 1.33, 95% CI 1.18–1.51; p

Abstract The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) has garnered attention for its important role in shaping surface air temperature (SAT) patterns over Eurasia. While Eurasian winter SAT was traditionally attributed to changes in large-scale atmospheric circulations associated with the AMO, a careful examination of the latest unforced CMIP6 simulations in this study unveils a significant contribution of the AMO’s thermodynamic effects. Specifically, the heat released from the North Atlantic Ocean and transported to northern Eurasia through westerlies takes precedence over the effect of dynamic Rossby waves, resulting in warm (cold) phases during positive (negative) AMO cycles, along with increased (decreased) warm extremes and reduced (enhanced) cold extremes. This study contributes to an improved understanding of the dominating mechanism of the AMO’s impact on Eurasian SAT.

Abstract Uterine corpus endometrial carcinoma (UCEC) is becoming a main malignant cancer that threaten to women's health. Thymidine kinase 1 (TK1) is considering to be associated with tumorigenesis and development. Nevertheless, the function of TK1 in UCEC is still unclear. Herein, we analyzed the TK1 expression level in pan-cancer and found that TK1 was upregulated in a variety of cancers including UCEC. Patients of UCEC with high expression of TK1 were related to poor outcome. TK1 was also related to clinical stage, histologic grade and lymph node metastasis. Abnormal expression of TK1 in UCEC was related to promoter methylation while gene mutation was not frequent. TK1 and its associated genes appeared to be prominent in cell cycle and DNA replication, according to GO and KEGG analysis. Analysis of immune infiltration revealed a negative correlation between TK1 and CD8 + T cells, macrophages, and dendritic cells. In vitro experiments, TK1 knockdown resulted in the inhibition of proliferation, migration, invasion and EMT in UCEC cell lines.

ABSTRACTOvarian cancer (OC) is a form of gynecological malignancy that is associated with worse patient outcomes than any other cancer of the female reproductive tract. Topoisomerase II α (TOP2A) is commonly regarded as an oncogene that is associated with malignant disease progression in a variety of cancers, its mechanistic functions in OC have yet to be firmly established. We explored the role of TOP2A in OC through online databases, clinical samples, in vitro and in vivo experiments. And initial analyses of public databases revealed high OC-related TOP2A expression in patient samples that was related to poorer prognosis. This was confirmed by clinical samples in which TOP2A expression was elevated in OC relative to healthy tissue. Kaplan-Meier analyses further suggested that higher TOP2A expression levels were correlated with worse prognosis in OC patients. In vitro, TOP2A knockdown resulted in the inhibition of OC cell proliferation, with cells entering G1 phase arrest and undergoing consequent apoptotic death. In rescue assays, TOP2A was confirmed to regulate cell proliferation and cell cycle through AKT/mTOR pathway activity. Mouse model experiments further affirmed the key role that TOP2A plays as a driver of OC cell proliferation. These data provide strong evidence supporting TOP2A as an oncogenic mediator and prognostic biomarker related to OC progression and poor outcomes. At the mechanistic level, TOP2A can control tumor cell growth via AKT/mTOR pathway modulation. These preliminary results provide a foundation for future research seeking to explore the utility of TOP2A inhibitor-based combination treatment regimens in platinum-resistant recurrent OC patients.

Background: Minimally invasive glaucoma surgery has become a popular research topic over the past decade. However, no published studies have provided a systematic overview for this field. A bibliometric analysis is urgently required to characterise current international trends and provide an intuitive description of past and emerging trends. Methods: This study analysed minimally invasive glaucoma surgery-related studies by searching the Web of Science for relevant articles published between 1992 and 2023. All the retrieved titles and abstracts were screened for eligibility, and only articles and reviews written in English were included in the analysis. CiteSpace (version 6.1.6), VOSviewer (version 1.6.19), and the bibliometric package in RStudio were used to construct and visualise the results. Results: A total of 1533 publications were included in the analysis with 26072 citations. A total of 4482 authors from 1191 organizations in 57 countries and regions published papers in 139 journals. After 2010, the number of publications increased significantly, with the highest annual productivity occurring in 2022 (n = 229, 15 %). Most of these studies were published in ophthalmology journals. The journal “Ophthalmology” ranked first with 30 papers and 5275 citations. Among the 10 most productive countries, the United States had the largest share of publications (n = 423, 36 %) and Switzerland had the highest proportion of multiple-country publications (70 %). Neodymium was the first keyword discovered, appearing in 1992 and continuing for 21 years. Kahook dual-blade, progression, gonioscopy-assisted transluminal trabeculotomy, efficacy, minimally invasive glaucoma surgery, cataract extraction, and primary open-angle glaucoma were the most recent keywords since 2020. Conclusions: This was the first bibliometric analysis of minimally invasive glaucoma surgery and provides an overview of the developments in this field. Our results identified outstanding studies, countries, institutions, journals, and authors in the field to point the way forward for scientific research and clinical applications of minimally invasive glaucoma surgery.

The micro crawling robot exhibits significant potential applications in various fields such as fault detection, disaster relief, and environmental monitoring. This article introduces a high‐performance millimeter scale crawling robot driven by a miniature electromagnetic linear actuator (MELA) with a body length of 5–6 mm and a mass of 80 mg. In this article, the working principle of the micro robot is analyzed and validated, and the influence of current, frequency, and angle α between the direction of actuator's force and the crawling surface on the crawling speed are analyzed through experiments. Results show that the optimal α ranges from 50° to 55°, and a specific current and frequency are identified to achieve maximum crawling speed for robot with particular α. When α is 50°, with a current of 300 mA and a frequency of 200 Hz, the robot reached the maximum speed of 20.2 Body Length s−1(BL s−1). The proposed robot can crawl at 12 BL s−1 with a load of 110 mg, and support a maximum load of 400 mg. Additionally, the robot demonstrated diverse capabilities such as climbing on a 10° slope with a load of 110 mg, jumping on a 1 mm obstacle, and crawling on surfaces of various materials.

Study region: Yellow River Basin (YRB) in China. Study focus: This study attempts to shed new light on regional land-atmosphere coupling and relevant impacts on basin-scale water resource management. Specifically, the objectives are to investigate the driving factors and physical mechanisms of SM changes via land-atmosphere coupling. New hydrological insights for the region: Ecological conservation and the high-quality development in the YRB stand as a pivotal national strategy. The equilibrium of water availability (PME，precipitation minus evapotranspiration) poses a significant challenge to the sustainability of the basin's ecosystem. Unfortunately, a comprehensive examination of the regional response, spatiotemporal heterogeneity, and the mechanism governing soil moisture (SM) in response to PME remains limited. An enhanced multiple linear regression method is implemented to quantify monthly sensitivity coefficients, revealing a notable correlation: reduced SM in arid regions correlates with heightened PME. This decline in SM triggers a decrease in evapotranspiration, attenuates the cooling effect of evapotranspiration, and amplifies temperature disparities. Consequently, this process results in an intensified boundary layer and tropospheric ascending motion, thereby increasing water vapor transport. This feedback loop is most pronounced during drought conditions, particularly in summer arid areas (sensitivity coefficient =-0.27). The findings underscore the intricate interplay between land and atmosphere, elucidating the discernible impact of climate change on water resources at a sub-basin scale.

Abstract Northeast Asia experienced unprecedented abrupt warming in the 1990s since the last century. Based on a robust time series and rank frequency evaluation, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology Grand Ensembles of CMIP5 (MPI-GE5), CMIP6 (MPI-GE6), EC-Earth3 and IPSL-CM6A-LR were identified as the models that best simulate the external forcing and internal variability in observations and represent observations most adequately. The negative-to-positive phase transition of the Atlantic multidecadal variability (AMV), combined with the external forcing, can explain 88% [60%−111%] of the 1990s warming. With prescribed anthropogenic emissions in the near future, a phase shift in the AMV to +2 (-2) standard deviation will amplify (weaken) the warming over Northeast Asia by 37% [29%−49%] (19% [15%−25%]). This highlights the importance of natural climate variability in Northeast Asia’s government decision-making and risk management, and emphasizes that only climate models with an adequate representation of forced warming can quantify these contributions correctly.

The distribution network can continue to operate for a short time once a single-phase grounding fault arises, but if the defect is not monitored and corrected right away, it might cause serious harm. However, the bulk of fault monitoring algorithms struggle to identify faults when applied to complex distribution networks with a tree structure. In this article, a fault online monitoring method based on power line communication equipment is proposed. The method identifies the fault by monitoring the change of channel frequency response (CFR) of the distribution network in real-time, locates the fault branch by comparing the change amplitude of CFR of different receiving devices, calculates the impedance amplitude of the fault branch, and combines the relation between impedance and distance to further realize the accurate location of the fault point. A large number of simulations show that the method is accurate and stable, and can effectively monitor both high and low-resistance ground faults. Under the simulation conditions without considering signal interference, the fault branch detection accuracy reaches 100%, and the average error of fault distance localization is 19.38 m (1.98%). Compared with other methods, this method is highly applicable, with good real-time performance and high positioning accuracy.

The spatiotemporal evolution of vegetation and its influencing factors is crucial for understanding the relationship between vegetation and climate change, which helps guide the management of regional ecosystems effectively. Utilizing the Fractional Vegetation Cover (FVC) data and various meteorological elements from 1982 to 2021, this research employed methodologies, such as grey relational analysis, path analysis, and the time-lag effect, to examine the impact of climate change on FVC fluctuations. It introduced a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis of the multi-factor climate–vegetation relationship, enhancing the understanding of the interaction between the climate and vegetation growth. The findings indicate that 77.41% of the wetland vegetation cover in the Yellow River Basin (YRB) has significantly decreased. Precipitation and evapotranspiration emerged as the primary factors affecting FVC, with soil moisture and temperature having a lesser impact. Given the crucial influence of climate factors’ time lag on vegetation dynamics, especially the notable cumulative lag effects observed in arid regions, such as precipitation accumulating over approximately 1.963 months (on average) and evapotranspiration lagging by about 1.727 months (on average), this study offers valuable theoretical insights on vegetation restoration efforts amidst the challenges posed by climate change.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) enables models to recognize categories not encountered during training, which is crucial for categories with limited data. Existing methods overlook efficient temporal modeling in multimodal data. This paper proposes a Temporal–Semantic Aligning and Reasoning Transformer (TSART) for spatio-temporal modeling. TSART uses the pre-trained SeLaVi network to extract audio and visual features and explores the semantic information of these modalities through audio and visual encoders. It incorporates a temporal information reasoning module to enhance the capture of temporal features in audio, and a cross-modal reasoning module to effectively integrate audio and visual information, establishing a robust joint embedding representation. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of this approach, demonstrating outstanding Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) performance on the UCF101 Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (UCF-GZSL), VGGSound-GZSL, and ActivityNet-GZSL datasets, with notable improvements in the Harmonic Mean (HM) evaluation. These results indicate that TSART has great potential in handling complex spatio-temporal information and multimodal fusion.

The water diversion project in Central Yunnan Province (WDP-YN) is the largest water diversion project under construction in China. However, the ecological effects of this water diversion project are still unclear. This study utilized Sentinel-2 remote sensing data to estimate fractional vegetation cover (FVC), maps spatiotemporal variations of FVC in construction areas from 2017 to 2022, and evaluates the impact of the WDP-YN on regional vegetation coverage using buffer analysis and vegetation type transition matrix methods. The study led to the following findings: (1) From 2017 to 2022, FVC within 10 km of the tunnel construction route showed a slightly downward trend or remained relatively stable with no significant changes in the spatial pattern of FVC. (2) Before and after the construction of WDP-YN, over 60% of the area within 10 km of the tunnel construction route showed no change in FVC. On Construction Route Section I (CRS-I), vegetation improved and/or degraded within 12.90% (14.10%) of the area and the regions with degraded FVC concentrated in the northern CRS-I. For Construction Route Section II (CRS-II), 11.96% and 27.51% of the regions were dominated by improved and/or degraded FVC. Vegetation changes near Groundwater Monitoring Point a (GMPa) were relatively stable. (3) The WDP-YN degraded vegetation within 2 km of both sides of CRS-I, slowing down the increase in FVC, while the WDP-YN improved vegetation within 2–6 km of both sides of CRS-II, the closer the distance to CRS-II, the faster the increase in FVC and the decrease in FVC slowed down within 0–2 km of both sides of CRS-II. This study sheds light on the impacts of water diversion infrastructure on vegetation coverage and provides practical guidance and reference for eco-environment protection and ecological restoration given water conservancy projects in China and other regions of the world.

Abstract Soil moisture–atmosphere coupling (SA) amplifies greenhouse gas-driven global warming via changes in surface heat balance. The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project projects an acceleration in SA-driven warming due to the ‘warmer climate – drier soil’ feedback, which continuously warms the globe and thereby exerts an acceleration effect on global warming. The projection shows that SA-driven warming exceeds 0.5 °C over extratropical landmasses by the end of the 21st Century. The likelihood of extreme high temperatures will additionally increase by about 10% over the entire globe (excluding Antarctica) and more than 30% over large parts of North America and Europe under the high-emission scenario. This demonstrates the high sensitivity of SA to climate change, in which SA can exceed the natural range of climate variability and play a non-linear warming component role on the globe.

Background: Excessive manganese (Mn) exposure has been linked to neurotoxicity, cognitive impairments. Neurotrophic Receptor Kinase 1 (NTRK1) encodes Tropomyosin kinase A (TrkA), a neurotrophic receptor, as a mediator of neuron differentiation and survival. Insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2), a pivotal member of the insulin gene family, plays a crucial role in brain development and neuroprotection. Despite this knowledge, the precise mechanisms through which NTRK1 and IGF2 influence cell responses to Mn-induced neuronal damage remain elusive. Methods: Cell apoptosis was assessed using CCK8, TUNEL staining, and Western blot analysis of cleaved Caspase-3. Lentiviral vectors facilitated NTRK1 overexpression, while small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) facilitated IGF2 knockdown. Real-time Quantitative PCR (qPCR) determined gene expression levels, while Western blotting measured protein expression. Results: The study reveals that NTRK1 inhibits MnCl2-induced apoptosis in SH-SY5Y cells. NTRK1 overexpression significantly upregulated IGF2 expression, and subsequent siRNA-IGF2 experiments confirmed IGF2's pivotal role in NTRK1-mediated neuroprotection. Notably, the study identifies that NTRK1 regulates the expression of IGF2 in the neuroprotective mechanism with the involvement of ER stress pathways. Discussion: The study reveals NTRK1's neuroprotective role via IGF2 against Mn-induced neurotoxicity and ER stress modulation in SH-SY5Y cells. These findings offer insights into potential therapies for neurodegenerative disorders related to Mn exposure and NTRK1 dysfunction, driving future research in this domain.

Abstract Background Accumulating evidence has demonstrated that arcuate nucleus (ARC) of the hypothalamus is likely responsible for the close association between chronic stress, depression, and diabetes. Xiaoyaosan (XYS), a Chinese herbal formula, remarkably improves depressive-like behavior and glucose intolerance, but the mechanism remains unclear. Leptin receptor (LepR) regulates energy expenditure and depression by mediating the action of leptin on the ARC. Therefore, we hypothesized that XYS may regulate depressive-like behavior and glucose intolerance via the leptin and its cascade LepR-STAT3/PI3K pathway in the ARC. Methods A rat model of depressive-like behavior and susceptibility to glucose intolerance was induced by exposure to chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) for six weeks. XYS (2.224 g/kg) was orally gavaged for six weeks, and fluoxetine (2.0 mg/kg) was administrated to the positive control group. Depressive-like behaviors were assessed using the open field test (OFT), sucrose preference test (SPT) and forced swim test (FST). Fasting blood glucose (FBG) and oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) were performed to evaluate the effects of XYS on blood glucose. Peripheral leptin and blood lipids were detected using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and an automatic biochemical analyzer, respectively. The effects of XYS on the LepR-STAT3/PI3K pathway were detected by quantitative real-time PCR and western blotting. Results XYS ameliorated CUMS-induced depressive-like behaviors and elevated blood glucose. XYS improved the food intake but have no significant effects on the body weight. Peripheral leptin and its central receptor were also suppressed by XYS, accompanied by the downregulation of JAK2/STAT3 and PI3K/AKT pathway in the ARC. Additionally, XYS increased AGRP and NPY expression but inhibited POMC in the ARC. Conclusions XYS improves depressive-like behaviors and susceptibility to glucose intolerance induced by CUMS, which may be achieved by the downregulation of the LepR-STAT3/PI3K signaling pathway in the ARC.

Objective An increasing number of studies have explored the clinical effects of antiglaucoma surgical procedures; however, economic evidence was scarce. We aimed to compare the cost-effectiveness between maximal medical treatment (MMT) and commonly used surgical procedures (trabeculectomy, Ahmed glaucoma valve implantation, gonioscopy-assisted transluminal trabeculotomy and ab interno canaloplasty).Design and setting A Markov model study.Participants A hypothetical cohort of 100 000 patients with mild-to-moderate primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG).Outcomes Data were obtained from public sources. The main outcomes were incremental cost–utility ratios (ICURs) using quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs). Sensitivity analyses were conducted to verify the robustness and sensitivity of base-case results.Main results Both cumulative costs and QALYs gained from surgical procedures (US$6045–US$13 598, 3.33–6.05 QALYs) were higher than those from MMT (US$3117–US$6458, 3.14–5.66 QALYs). Compared with MMT, all surgical procedures satisfied the cost-effectiveness threshold (lower than US$30 501 and US$41 568 per QALY gained in rural and urban settings, respectively). During the 5-year period, trabeculectomy produced the lowest ICUR (US$21 462 and US$15 242 per QALY gained in rural and urban settings, respectively). During the 10-year-follow-up, trabeculectomy still produced the lowest ICUR (US$13 379 per QALY gained) in urban setting; however, gonioscopy-assisted transluminal trabeculotomy (US$19 619 per QALY gained) and ab interno canaloplasty (US$18 003 per QALY gained) produced lower ICURs than trabeculectomy (US$19 675 per QALY gained) in rural areas. Base-case results were most sensitive to the utilities and costs of initial treatment and maintenance.Conclusions The long-term cost-effectiveness of commonly used surgical procedures could be better than the short-term cost-effectiveness for mild-to-moderate POAG patients in China. Health economic studies, supported by more rigorous structured real-world data, are needed to assess their everyday cost-effectiveness.

Summary: Background: Children and adolescents’ myopia is a major public problem. Although the clinical effect of various interventions has been extensively studied, there is a lack of national-level and integral assessments to simultaneously quantify the economics and effectiveness of comprehensive myopia prevention and control programs. We aimed to compare the cost-effectiveness between traditional myopia prevention and control strategy, digital comprehensive myopia prevention and control strategy and school-based myopia screening program in China. Methods: A Markov model was used to compare the cost-utility and cost-effectiveness among school-based myopia screening, traditional myopia prevention and control strategy, and digital comprehensive myopia prevention and control strategy among 6 to 18-year-old rural and urban schoolchildren. Parameters were collected from published sources. The primary outcomes were quality-adjusted life-year, disability-adjusted life-year, incremental cost-utility ratio, and incremental cost-effectiveness ratio. Extensive sensitivity analyses were performed to test the robustness and sensitivity of base-case analysis. Findings: Compared with school-based myopia screening strategy, after implementing digital comprehensive myopia prevention and control strategy, the prevalence of myopia among 18-year-old students in rural and urban areas was reduced by 3.79% and 3.48%, respectively. The incremental cost-utility ratio per quality-adjusted life-year gained with the digital myopia management plan ($11,301 for rural setting, and $10,707 for urban setting) was less than 3 times the per capita gross domestic product in rural settings ($30,501) and less than 1 time the per capita gross domestic product in urban settings ($13,856). In cost-effectiveness analysis, the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio produced by digital comprehensive myopia management strategy ($37,446 and $41,814 per disability-adjusted life-year averted in rural and urban settings) slightly exceeded the cost-effectiveness threshold. When assuming perfect compliance, full coverage of outdoor activities and spectacles satisfied the cost-effectiveness threshold, and full coverage of outdoor activities produced the lowest cost ($321 for rural settings and $808 for urban settings). Interpretations: Health economic evidence confirmed the cost-effectiveness of promoting digital comprehensive myopia prevention and control strategies for schoolchildren at the national level. Sufficient evidence provides an economic and public health reference for further action by governments, policy-makers and other myopia-endemic countries. Funding: National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC (82171051), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (JQ20029), Capital Health Research and Development of Special (2020-2-1081), National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC (82071000), National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC (8197030562).

Abstract Endometrial cancer (EC) is a common gynecological cancer that endangers women health. Although substantial progresses of EC management have been achieved in recent years, the incidence of EC still remains high. Obesity has been a common phenomenon worldwide that increases the risk of EC. However, the mechanism associating obesity and EC has not been fully understood. Metabolic reprogramming as a remarkable characteristic of EC is currently emerging. As the primary factor of metabolic syndrome, obesity promotes insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia and hyperglycaemia. This metabolic disorder remodels systemic status, which increases EC risk and is related with poor prognosis. Glucose metabolism in EC cells is complex and mediated by glycolysis and mitochondria to ensure energy requirement. Factors that affect glucose metabolism may have an impact on EC initiation and progression. In this study, we review the glucose metabolic reprogramming of EC not only systemic metabolism but also inherent tumor cell metabolism. In particular, the role of glucose metabolic regulation in malignant properties of EC will be focused. Understanding of metabolic profile and glucose metabolism-associated regulation mechanism in EC may provide novel perspective for treatment.

Beta-Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (βCaMKII) is known as a powerful regulator of lateral habenula neuron function and a key molecular determinant of depression. βCaMKII is also abundant in the hippocampus, especially in the dentate gyrus (DG). However, whether βCaMKII in the DG is also involved in emotional behaviors remains unknown. In this study, using βCaMKII-F90G transgenic mice, in which the overexpression of βCaMKII is restricted to the DG, we demonstrated that βCaMKII overexpression in the DG has no effect on the level of anxiety in mice in open field test or light–dark box test. Moreover, tail suspension test and forced swim test showed that the level of depression in βCaMKII-F90G transgenic mice and their littermates was comparable. Taken together, our findings indicate that βCaMKII overexpression in the DG does not result in depression- and anxiety-like behaviors in mice and provide evidence that the function of βCaMKII in emotional behaviors is brain region specific.

Abstract Background Hydrogels show great potential to be used for intraocular applications due to their high-water content and similarity to the native vitreous. Injectable thermosensitive hydrogels through a small-bore needle can be used as a delivery system for drugs or a tamponading substitute to treat posterior eye diseases with clear clinical potential. However, none of the currently available thermosensitive hydrogels can provide intraocular support for up to 3 months or more. Method In this study, an injectable polytetrahydrofuran (PTHF)-based thermosensitive hydrogel was synthesized by polyurethane reaction. We examined the injectability, rheological properties, microstructure, cytotoxicity, and in vivo compatibility and stability of the hydrogels in rabbit eyes. Results We found that the PTHF block type and PTHF component ratio could modulate thermogelation properties of the polyurethane polymers. The PTHF-based hydrogel implants retained normal retinal structure and function. Incorporating bioinert PTHF generated highly biocompatible and more stable thermogels in the vitreous cavity, with gel networks and the presence of polymer still observed after 3 months when other thermogels would have been completely cleared. Moreover, despite lacking hydrolytically cleavable linkages, the polymers could be most naturally removed from the native vitreous by bio-erosion without additional surgical interventions. Conclusion Our findings suggest the potential of incorporating hydrophobic bioinert blocks to enhance the in vivo stability of supramolecularly associated hydrogels for long-term intraocular applications. Graphical Abstract

The optimized location and allocation of earthquake emergency shelters are critical for improving the resilience of communities. However, the existing disaster shelters location–allocation optimization models usually select new shelters from candidate shelters neglecting the existing or planned shelters. The research into comparisons before and after location–allocation optimization between the current planning scenario (CLA scenario) and the supplementary new candidate shelter scenario (SLA scenario) is thus imperative for disaster risk reduction. This article develops a multi-criteria multi-objective multi-scenario supplemental location–allocation optimization model that addresses the concerns related to optimization comparison based on the above two scenarios and provides a higher degree of realism by integrating multi-criteria evaluation and optimization comparison into location–allocation problems. The solutions obtained under the two scenarios are then compared with a case study in Huairou Science City. The results show that the solution under the SLA scenario is superior to the corresponding CLA scenario regardless of the minimal-distance scheme or the minimal-area scheme. The proposed model is proven to be useful for the location–allocation optimization of earthquake emergency shelters, and the presented results can be used as a reference for balancing the interests of the government and residents during the reconstruction and expansion projects of shelters.

Abstract Widespread observed and projected increases in warm extremes, along with decreases in cold extremes, have been confirmed as being consistent with global and regional warming. Here we disclosed that the decadal variation in the frequency of the surface air temperature (SAT) extremes over Siberia in winter was primarily dominated by the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) rather than anthropogenic forcing. The stronger AMOC induced more warm and cold extremes through increasing the variance of winter SAT over Siberia while the direct effect of external forcings, especially anthropogenic greenhouse gases, had little impact on the summation of warm and cold extremes due to equivalent effects on the increases in warm extremes and decreases in cold extremes. The possible mechanism can be deduced that the stronger AMOC stimulated the propagation of the wave train originated in the North Atlantic Ocean, across mid- to high latitudes, thereby increasing the variabilities in the circulations over the Ural blocking region and Siberia, which are critical to the SAT extremes there.

Nanostructured transition metal nitrides (TMNs) have been considered as a promising substitute for precious metal catalysts toward ORR due to their multi-electron orbitals, metallic properties, and low cost. To design TMN catalysts with high catalytic activity toward ORR, the intrinsic features of the influencing factor on the catalytic activity toward ORR of nanostructured TMNs need to be investigated. In this paper, titanium nitride (TiN), zirconium nitride (ZrN), and hafnium nitride (HfN) nanoparticles (NPs) are highly efficient and synthesized in one step by the direct current arc plasma. TiN, ZrN, and HfN NPs with an oxidation layer are applied as the catalysts of hybrid sodium–air batteries (HSABs). The effect of the composition and structural attributes of TMNs on ORR catalysis is defined as follows: (i) composition effect. With the increase in the oxygen content, the catalytic ORR capability of TMNs decreases progressively due to the reduction in oxygen adsorption capacity; (ii) structure effect. The redistribution of the density of states (DOS) of ZrN indicates higher ORR activity than TiN and HfN. HSABs with ZrN exhibit an excellent cyclic stability up to 137 cycles (about 140 h), an outstanding rate performance, and a specific capacity of 2817 mAh·g−1 at 1.0 mA·cm−2.

Ternary chalcogenides are gaining interest as nontoxic, stable solar absorbers. Here, the authors investigate NaBiS2, finding cation disorder to be a critical parameter that enables its high absorption strength and unusual charge-carrier kinetics.

Summary: Background: More than 90% of vision impairment is avoidable. However, in China, a routine screening programme is currently unavailable in primary health care. With the dearth of economic evidence on screening programmes for multiple blindness-causing eye diseases, delivery options, and screening frequencies, we aimed to evaluate the costs and benefits of a population-based screening programme for multiple eye diseases in China. Methods: We developed a decision-analytic Markov model for a cohort of individuals aged 50 years and older with a total of 30 1-year cycles. We calculated the cost-effectiveness and cost–utility of screening programmes for multiple major blindness-causing eye diseases in China, including age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, cataracts, and pathological myopia, from a societal perspective (including direct and indirect costs). We analysed rural and urban settings separately by different screening delivery options (non-telemedicine [ie, face-to-face] screening, artificial intelligence [AI] telemedicine screening, and non-AI telemedicine screening) and frequencies. We calculated incremental cost–utility ratios (ICURs) using quality-adjusted life-years and incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) in terms of the cost per blindness year avoided. One-way deterministic and simulated probabilistic sensitivity analyses were used to assess the robustness of the main outcomes. Findings: Compared with no screening, non-telemedicine combined screening of multiple eye diseases satisfied the criterion for a highly cost-effective health intervention, with an ICUR of US$2494 (95% CI 1130 to 2716) and an ICER of $12 487 (8773 to 18 791) in rural settings. In urban areas, the ICUR was $624 (395 to 907), and the ICER was $7251 (4238 to 13 501). Non-AI telemedicine screening could result in fewer costs and greater gains in health benefits (ICUR $2326 [1064 to 2538] and ICER $11 766 [8200 to 18 000] in rural settings; ICUR $581 [368 to 864] and ICER $6920 [3926 to 13 231] in urban settings). AI telemedicine screening dominated no screening in rural settings, and in urban settings the ICUR was $244 (–315 to 1073) and the ICER was $2567 (–4111 to 15 389). Sensitivity analyses showed all results to be robust. By further comparison, annual AI telemedicine screening was the most cost-effective strategy in both rural and urban areas. Interpretation: Combined screening of multiple eye diseases is cost-effective in both rural and urban China. AI coupled with teleophthalmology presents an opportunity to promote equity in eye health. Funding: National Natural Science Foundation of China.

There is a significant drawback associated with blockchain networks in terms of their processing speed, which is one of the biggest. Due to the fact that sharding has the capability of solving this problem, the scalability of the network can be increased. One of the significant challenges in this study was determining how sharding would affect the probability of forks arising as a consequence of sharding. Towards this end, we have performed a number of experiments on the network EIP-1559 using 120 nodes in order to achieve this objective. During our analysis, we were able to determine that the number of orphan blocks on average decreases by 60% as a result of adding a shard to the system. The new on- chain governance model has also been implemented that utilizes Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) in order to ensure that forks between different shards are reduced, as well as the probability of them occurring. The results obtained from our study give us the confidence that the proposed on- chain governance model reduces the risks associated with forking and maintains a positive user experience as a result of the results obtained.

Due to the close relationship between power grid fault and impedance, there is a significant defect in the use of power line communication (PLC) equipment to monitor and locate power grid faults, which is the lack of real-time impedance information. Therefore, this study proposes a new fault monitoring method based on impedance estimation of power line communication equipment. The channel frequency response (CFR) obtained from the PLC receiver is used to estimate the high-frequency input impedance to monitor and locate the ground fault of the power grid in real time. Firstly, based on the multi-conductor transmission line theory, bottom-up channel modeling method and impedance estimation technology, the basic principles of fault monitoring and location methods are clarified. Then, modeling and analysis of cables in different situations are carried out, and the characteristics of the factors affecting the impedance in CFR are extracted by variational modal decomposition (VMD), and the estimation results of impedance are obtained by inversion analysis. Based on this, the impedance change and machine learning algorithm are used to track and identify the abnormal state of the power line to achieve high-sensitivity positioning of the cable fault. The simulation results show that the method has a good identification effect on high and low impedance cable fault, and has a better effect on low resistance fault monitoring. The fault location error is less than 2.13%, and has a good positioning accuracy.

Abstract Background Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is one of the most common malignancies in head and neck. Platinum-based chemotherapy is an important treatment for NPC. However, the molecular mechanism of resistance to platinum drug remains unknown. Endoplasmic reticulum resident protein 44(ERp44), an unfolded protein response (UPR)-induced endoplasmic reticulum(ER) protein, is induced during ER stress. This research explored the mechanism of ERp44 in strengthening cisplatin resistance in NPC. Methods Western blot and immunohistochemistry were used to investigate the expression of ERp44 and Glucose-Regulated Protein 78(GRP78) in NPC. We took CCK8 to detect the role of ERp44 on cell chemosensitivity. Flow cytometric analysis and western blot were taken to analyze cell apoptosis. We performed differential centrifugation to isolate exosomes from serum or conditioned media of cells and analyzed the impact of exosomal ERp44 on cells cisplatin sensitivity. Finally, the results were confirmed in vivo. Results We found the increased expression of ERp44 and GRP78 in NPC and ERp44 was highly expressed in ER-stressed tissues. Cell proliferation was inhibited after cisplatin treatment when ERp44 was knocked down and ERp44 strengthened cisplatin resistance by influencing cell apoptosis and pyroptosis. Then we also collected exosomes and cell viability was increased after the addition of NPC-derived-exosomes with cisplatin treatment. More importantly, our results showed under ERS, NPC cells secreted exosomes containing ERp44 and could transfer them to adjacent cells to strengthen chemoresistance. Conclusion Our data suggested that exosomal ERp44 derived from ER-stressed NPC cells took an inevitable role in NPC chemoresistance and might act as a treatment target.

As a common malignant tumor of the female reproductive system, endometrial carcinoma (EC) seriously endangers women’s health with an increasing incidence. The oncogenesis and progression of cancer are closely linked with immune microenvironment, of which interleukins are the important components. In order to illustrate the roles and clinical applications of interleukins in EC, literature of interleukins and EC were reviewed. Based on the present studies, interleukins play crucial roles in the oncogenesis and development of EC via regulating the proliferation, migration, invasion, angiogenesis, apoptosis, pyroptosis and autophagy of EC as well as the immune function against EC. And some of the interleukins seems to have prospective clinical applications in EC, such as evaluating the risk of tumorigenesis, discriminating the malignancy from benign disorders or normal condition, indicating cancer aggressiveness, predicting the prognosis of patients and serving as the novel therapy. However, there is still a long way to go before the clinical applications of interleukins in EC come into reality. Nevertheless, it is certain that the exploration of interleukins will definitely be of great benefit to the screening, diagnosis and treatment of EC in the future.

Ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin (YRB), China, aroused remarkable concerns from China’s Central Government, and has been a major national strategy. The Inner Mongolia reach of the Yellow River Basin (IM-YRB) is a typical dryland with pervasive vegetation restoration through the actions of the ecological projects that have been conducted in recent years. However, how climate changes and human activities, such as land use and land cover (LULC) changes, jointly impact vegetation variations in this region remains poorly understood. Here, using an explainable machine learning technique, we evaluated linkages between the kernel normalized difference vegetation index (kNDVI) and air temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, and LULC changes, and relevant marginal contributions of these four drivers to the observed vegetation changes. The grassland fraction on a pixel level was selected as the quantitative LULC variable due to its key role in regional LULC. We found that interannual kNDVI changes in most areas of this study region were negatively sensitive to temperature, but positively sensitive to precipitation and soil moisture, with area fractions of 71.74%, 96.93%, and 89.33%, respectively. The area fraction of negative kNDVI sensitivity to LULC was roughly equivalent to that of positive kNDVI sensitivity. The contributions of air temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, and LULC to overall kNDVI changes were 21.54%, 33.32%, 32.19%, and 12.95%, respectively. Moisture conditions also play a critical role in vegetation changes, which was reflected by the fluctuating growth of kNDVI as interannual changes in precipitation. Nonetheless, kNDVI changes are also affected by LULC, and LULC became the dominant factor behind the kNDVI anomalies over the grassland restoration regions from barren over the IM-YRB. This research provides theoretical support for dryland vegetation restoration under the influence of climate change.

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has been considered to be one of the most common chronic liver diseases. However, no validated pharmacological therapies have been officially proved in clinic due to its complex pathogenesis. The purpose of this study was to examine the protective effects of Corilagin (referred to Cori) against NAFLD in mice under a high fat diet (HFD) condition. Mice were fed either a normal control diet (NCD) or HFD with or without Cori (5 or 10 mg/kg body weight) for 15 weeks. In our results, Cori treatment significantly attenuated HFD-induced hepatic steatosis, high NAFLD activity score (NAD) and liver injury. Consistently, Cori treatment remarkably alleviated HFD-induced hepatic lipid accumulation (e.g., triglycerides (TG) and total cholesterol (TC) contents in liver), and improved plasma lipid concentrations (e.g., plasma TG, TC, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-c), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-c)). Moreover, Cori treatment ameliorated NAFLD associated metabolic disorders such as glucose intolerance and insulin resistance in HFD-fed mice. Additionally, Cori treatment dramatically changed HFD-induced liver gene expression profiles, and identified overlapped differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between NCD vs. HFD group and HFD vs. HCR (high fat diet plus treatment with Cori) group. With these DEGs, we observed a marked enrichment of Gene Ontology (GO) terms and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways, which were closely associated with the metabolic balance in liver. Particularly, we found several potential hub proteins against NAFLD development with analyses of protein-protein interaction (PPI) network and qPCR assays. Collectively, our results revealed the important protective effects of Cori against the progress of NAFLD, which was probably mediated through improving dysregulated lipid metabolism and insulin resistance in HFD-fed mice. Additionally, Cori-dependent overlapped DEGs might serve as a featured NAFLD-associated gene expression signature for the diagnosis, treatment, as well as drug discovery and development of NAFLD in the near future.

Abstract Distant metastasis accompanied by angiogenesis is the main cause of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC)-related death. Nuclear exosomes (nEXOs) are potential tumour biomarkers. High mobility group box 3 (HMGB3), a nuclear protein, is known to be overexpressed in cancers. However, its role in NPC has not been elucidated. Here, we explore for the first time the function of nEXO HMGB3 in tumour angiogenesis involved in NPC metastasis using a series of in vitro experiments with NPC cell lines and clinical specimens and in vivo experiments with tumour xenograft zebrafish angiogenesis model. We found a high expression of HMGB3 in NPC, accompanied by the formation of micronuclei, to be associated with metastasis. Furthermore, the NPC-secreted HMGB3 expression was associated with tumour angiogenesis. Moreover, HMGB3-containing nEXOs, derived from the micronuclei of NPC cells, were ingested by the human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs), and accelerated angiogenesis in vitro and in vivo. Importantly, western blotting and flow cytometry analysis showed that circulating nEXO HMGB3 positively correlated with NPC metastasis. In summary, nEXO HMGB3 can be a significant biomarker of NPC metastasis and provide a novel basis for anti-angiogenesis therapy in clinical metastasis.

Abstract Tumour‐associated angiogenesis plays a critical role in metastasis, the main cause of malignancy‐related death. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) can regulate angiogenesis to participate in tumour metastasis. Our previous study showed that EVs rich in HAX1 are associated with in metastasis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). However, the mechanism by which HAX1 of EVs promotes metastasis and angiogenesis is unclear. In this study, we demonstrated that EVs rich in HAX1 promote angiogenesis phenotype by activating the FAK pathway in endothelial cells (ECs) by increasing expression level of ITGB6. The expression level of HAX1 is markedly correlated with microvessel density (MVDs) in NPC and head and neck cancers based on an analysis of IHC. In addition to a series of in vitro cellular analyses, in vivo models revealed that HAX1 was correlated with migration and blood vessel formation of ECs, and metastasis of NPC. Using ribosome profiling, we found that HAX1 regulates the FAK pathway to influence microvessel formation and promote NPC metastasis by enhancing the translation efficiency of ITGB6. Our findings demonstrate that HAX1 can be used as an important biomarker for NPC metastasis, providing a novel basis for antiangiogenesis therapy in clinical settings.

In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end neural model based on graph convolutional networks (GCN) for jointly extracting entities and relations between them. It divides the joint extraction into two sub-tasks, first detecting entity spans and identifying entity relations type simultaneously. To consider the complete interaction between entities and relations, we propose a novel relation-aware attention mechanism to obtain the relation representation between two entity spans. Therefore, a complete graph is constructed based on all extracted entity spans where the nodes are entity spans and the edges are relation representation. Besides, we improve original GCN to utilize both adjacent node features and edge information when encoding node feature. Experiments are conducted on two public datasets and our model outperforms all baseline methods.

In this paper, we present a methodology for quantifying the decentralization degree of a blockchain network. To accomplish this, we use two well-known graph models of Erdös-Rény and Barabási–Albert in order to study the blockchain network topology. We then quantify the decentralization degree using the clustering coefficient of our network models. We validate our approach through extensive simulations and analyze the decentralization degree with respect to network parameters such as the number of connections per node and the peer selection algorithm. Our results expose the trade-off between the average shortest path and the decentralization degree. Furthermore, we observe the impact of the average shortest path on the network speed and traffic overhead. Finally, we demonstrate that the presence of hub-like nodes such as relay gateways negatively impacts the decentralization degree of blockchain networks.

The ecological conservation and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin (YRB) has been declared as a major national strategy of China. Surface water availability (precipitation minus evapotranspiration, PME) poses challenges to the sustainability of ecosystems of the YRB. Noteworthy is that the Mongolian section of the YRB (IMYRB) is a critical ecological barrier in Northern China. Soil moisture (SM) changes are highly sensitive to PME and important for regional ecological security. However, SM vs. PME interactions and relevant mechanisms within the IMYRB are poorly understood. We found significant decreases in SM and PME over the east IMYRB (r = 0.7, p < 0.05). During the wet (July, August, and September) and dry (April, May, and June) seasons, as well as the whole year, decreased SM drives increased PME through land-atmosphere interactions over more than 90% of the IMYRB. Reduction in SM decreased evapotranspiration over more than 80% of the IMYRB, increased surface temperature across more than 79% of the IMYRB, boosted atmospheric vertical ascent over more than 75% of the IMYRB, and enhanced moisture convergence and PME. This study highlights the land-atmosphere interactions over the IMYRB, implicating basin-scale impacts of climatic changes on water resources.

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is the most common malignant tumor of the head and neck cancer (HNC). Metastasis is the main cause of treatment failure. However, the molecular mechanism for NPC metastasis is still unclear. As one of the most common host immune cells in the tumor microenvironment, macrophages have been proven to regulate metastasis. Besides, exosomes are the important bridge connecting various cells in TME. Currently, the role of NPC-exos on macrophages and their impact on metastasis remains to be unexplored. In this study, we found that MIF was highly expressed in NPC cells, and the exosomes secreted by NPC cells could be taken up by macrophages, thereby, inhibiting the ferroptosis of macrophages and then promoting the metastasis of NPC. Targeting MIF may be a potential treatment to reduce the rate of metastasis.

The extracellular matrix (ECM) is made up of noncellular components that have special properties for influencing cell behavior and tissue structure. Small leucine-rich proteoglycans (SLRPs) are nonfibrillar ECM components that serve as structural scaffolds and signaling molecules. osteoglycin (OGN), a class III SLRP, is a ubiquitous ECM component that not only helps to organize the extracellular matrix but also regulates a number of important biological processes. As a glycosylated protein in the ECM, OGN was originally considered to be involved in fiber assembly and was reported to have a connection with fibrosis. In addition to these functions, OGN is found in a variety of cancer tissues and is implicated in cellular processes linked to tumorigenesis, including cell proliferation, invasion, metastasis, and epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). In this review, we summarize the structure and functions of OGN as well as its biological and clinical importance in the context of fibrotic illness and tumorigenesis. This review aims to improve our understanding of OGN and provide some new strategies for the treatment of fibrosis and cancer.

Mechanical tissue properties contribute to tissue shape change during development. Emerging evidence suggests that gradients of viscoelasticity correspond to cell movement and gene expression patterns. To accurately define mechanisms of morphogenesis, a combination of precise empirical measurements and theoretical approaches are required. Here, we review elastography as a method to characterize viscoelastic properties of tissue in vivo. We discuss its current clinical applications in mature tissues and its potential for characterizing embryonic tissues.

Firewalls are located at the front line of the network against outside threats. Performance modeling and analysis of network firewalls help to better understand their behavior and characteristics. Moreover, having an analytical model in hand helps firewall designers avoid developing multiple design alternatives and thus considerably reduce the design costs. Moreover, the network administrators can proactively identify the performance bottlenecks of the network and fix them before any malicious attack which targets the network or the firewall itself. In this paper, we propose a novel analytical approach for performance modeling and analysis of network firewalls based on a discrete-time queuing system in which the bursty nature of the incoming traffic is taken into account, where traditional queuing models such as M/M/1 model fails to capture peculiar characteristics of the Internet traffic. Throughput, packet loss, delay, and firewalls CPU utilization are employed as performance evaluation indicators in our proposed model. In addition, we introduce a potential DoS attack with a very low rate which can be launched against firewalls with different burstiness factors.

With the advent of modern technologies, including the IoT and blockchain, smart-parking (SP) systems are becoming smarter and smarter. Similar to other automated systems, and particularly those that require automation or minimal interaction with humans, the SP system is heuristic in delivering performances, such as throughput in terms of latency, efficiency, privacy, and security, and it is considered a long-term cost-effective solution. This study looks ahead to future trends and developments in SP systems and presents an inclusive, long-term, effective, and well-performing smart autonomous vehicle parking (SAVP) system that explores and employs the emerging fog-computing and blockchain technologies as robust solutions to strengthen the existing collaborative IoT–cloud platform to build and manage SP systems for autonomous vehicles (AVs). In other words, the proposed SAVP system offers a smart-parking solution, both indoors and outdoors, and mainly for AVs looking for vacant parking, wherein the fog nodes act as a middleware layer that provides various parking operations closer to IoT-enabled edge devices. To address the challenges of privacy and security, a lightweight integrated blockchain and cryptography (LIBC) module is deployed, which is functional at each fog node, to authorize and grant access to the AVs in every phase of parking (e.g., from the parking entrance to the parking slot to the parking exit). A proof-of-concept implementation was conducted, wherein the overall computed results, such as the average response time, efficiency, privacy, and security, were examined as highly efficient to enable a proven SAVP system. This study also examined an innovative pace, with careful considerations to combatting the existing SP-system challenges and, therefore, to building and managing future scalable SP systems.

The reverse thrust in the deep site causes the upward propagation of stress and displacement in the overlying soil. The displacement field around the fault zone is maximum. As the spatial location becomes shallower, the soil displacement gradually becomes smaller. The deformation of the overlying soil is mainly affected by the vertical dislocation of the fracture zone. The monitoring curve showed no abrupt change value, indicating that the top surface of soil did not rupture, and only the influence of fault on the displacement transfer of the top surface of the soil. When a creeping dislocation occurs in the bottom fracture zone, the maximum principal stress of the upper boundary of the deep site is dominated by compressive stress. The maximum principal stress of the soil on both sides of the fracture zone has a maximum value, and the soil on the right side of the fracture zone has a significant compression effect. The maximum principal stress monitoring curve varies greatly, indicating the plastic failure development of soil, which is the same as the research results of the plastic failure zone in the following paper. When the bottom fracture zone starts to move, the plastic zone first appears at the junction area between the front end of the bottom fracture zone and the overlying soil. As the amount of dislocation of the fracture zone increases, the plastic zone continues to extend into the inner soil. The left and right sides of the fracture zone show tensile failure and compression failure, respectively. The development of the upper envelope curve in the plastic zone of the overlying soil satisfies the Boltzmann equation with a first-order exponential growth, while the development of the lower envelope curve satisfies the Gauss equation with a second-order exponential growth. The development curve equation of the plastic zone is verified according to the residual figures of the fitting result and the correlation parameters.

With the emergence of new smart technologies, including the Internet of Things, wireless media are playing an important role to connect numerous devices to fulfill the requirements of newly developed communication systems. The massive connectivity, therefore, made the wireless spectrum too crowded and gave several challenges to resisting against potential wireless jammers. Note that, the two main challenges that have always been a part of any communication system, especially in the case of wireless communication, are information security and information jamming. Carefully considering the given challenges, this study uses a new advanced anti-jamming approach, a modulation technique based on the frequency-hopping spread spectrum, which has notably high resistance accounted against various potential jammers. The objective of this study is two-fold. First, the physical channel properties are considered, and the random bits are transmitted, employing a cryptographic secured hoping-spread pattern, having a set of carrier frequencies, known at both sides of the transmission. Second, the hashing code is computed only for the key, and transmitted along the original hopset, but with distinct frequencies set. The deployed practical anti-jamming approach, therefore, computed a high efficiency to examine the information secrecy well and primarily the connection availability even in the presence of the jammers. Moreover, this study considered and modeled a communication system and evaluated the proposed system’s performance, applying the theories of Shannon’s entropy and Wyner’s entropy (i.e. Wyner’s wiretap channel), to anticipate the system’s perfect secrecy, even in the worst case when jammer has unlimited computational capabilities.

The mechanical properties of tissues are pivotal for morphogenesis and disease progression. Recent approaches have enabled measurements of the spatial distributions of viscoelastic properties among embryonic and pathological model systems and facilitated the generation of important hypotheses such as durotaxis and tissue-scale phase transition. There likely are many unexpected aspects of embryo biomechanics we have yet to discover which will change our views of mechanisms that govern development and disease. One area in the blind spot of even the most recent approaches to measuring tissue stiffness is the potentially anisotropic nature of that parameter. Here, we report a magnetic micromanipulation device that generates a uniform magnetic field gradient within a large workspace and permits measurement of the variation of tissue stiffness along three orthogonal axes. By applying the device to the organ-stage mouse embryo, we identify spatially heterogenous and directionally anisotropic stiffness within the mandibular arch. Those properties correspond to the domain of expression and the angular distribution of fibronectin and have potential implications for mechanisms that orient collective cell movements and shape tissues during development. Assessment of anisotropic properties extends the repertoire of current methods and will enable the generation and testing of hypotheses.

Semantic segmentation has been a fundamental task in interpreting remote sensing imagery (RSI) for various downstream applications. Due to the high intra-class variants and inter-class similarities, inflexibly transferring natural image-specific networks to RSI is inadvisable. To enhance the distinguishability of learnt representations, attention modules were developed and applied to RSI, resulting in satisfactory improvements. However, these designs capture contextual information by equally handling all the pixels regardless of whether they around edges. Therefore, blurry boundaries are generated, rising high uncertainties in classifying vast adjacent pixels. Hereby, we propose an edge distribution attention module (EDA) to highlight the edge distributions of leant feature maps in a self-attentive fashion. In this module, we first formulate and model column-wise and row-wise edge attention maps based on covariance matrix analysis. Furthermore, a hybrid attention module (HAM) that emphasizes the edge distributions and position-wise dependencies is devised combing with non-local block. Consequently, a conceptually end-to-end neural network, termed as EDENet, is proposed to integrate HAM hierarchically for the detailed strengthening of multi-level representations. EDENet implicitly learns representative and discriminative features, providing available and reasonable cues for dense prediction. The experimental results evaluated on ISPRS Vaihingen, Potsdam and DeepGlobe datasets show the efficacy and superiority to the state-of-the-art methods on overall accuracy (OA) and mean intersection over union (mIoU). In addition, the ablation study further validates the effects of EDA.

Thermogels are also known as thermo-sensitive or thermo-responsive hydrogels and can undergo a sol–gel transition as the temperature increases. This thermogelling behavior is the result of combined action from multiscale thermo-responsive mechanisms. From micro to macro, these mechanisms can be attributed to LCST behavior, micellization, and micelle aggregation of thermogelling polymers. Due to its facile phase conversion properties, thermogels are injectable yet can form an in situ gel in the human body. Thermogels act as a useful platform biomaterial that operates at physiological body temperatures. The purpose of this review is to summarize the recent progress in thermogel research, including investigations on the thermogel gelation mechanism and its applications in drug delivery, 3D cell culture, and tissue engineering. The review also discusses emerging directions in the study of thermogels.

Indoor localization provides robust solutions in many applications, and Wi-Fi-based methods are considered some of the most promising means for optimizing indoor fingerprinting localization accuracy. However, Wi-Fi signals are vulnerable to environmental variations, resulting in data across different times being subjected to different distributions. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an across-time indoor localization solution based on channel state information (CSI) fingerprinting via multi-domain representations and transfer component analysis (TCA). We represent the format of CSI readings in multiple domains, extending the characterization of fine-grained information. TCA, a domain adaptation method in transfer learning, is applied to shorten the distribution distances among several CSI readings, which overcomes various CSI distribution problems at different time periods. Finally, we present a modified Bayesian model averaging approach to integrate the multi-domain outcomes and give the estimated positions. We conducted test-bed experiments in three scenarios on both personal computer (PC) and smartphone platforms in which the source and target fingerprinting data were collected across different days. The experimental results showed that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in localization accuracy.

Undoubtedly, the supply chain management (SCM) system is an important part of many organizations worldwide; over time, the technologies used to manage a supply chain ecosystem have, therefore, a great impact on businesses’ effectiveness. Among others, numerous developments have been made that targeted to have robust supply chain systems to efficiently manage the growing demands of various supplies, considering the underlying requirements and main challenges such as scalability, specifically privacy and security, of various business networks. Internet of things (IoT) comes with a solution to manage a complex, scalable supply chain system, but to provide and attain enough security during information exchange, along with keeping the privacy of its users, is the great inherent challenge of IoT. To fulfill these limitations, this study designs and models a scaled IoT-based supply chain (IoT-SC) system, comprising several operations and participants, and deploys mechanisms to leverage the security, mainly confidentially, integrity, authentication (CIA), and a digital signature scheme to leverage potentially secured non-repudiation security service for the worst-case scenario, and to leverage privacy to keep users sensitive personal and location information protected against adversarial entities to the IoT-SC system. Indeed, a scaled IoT-SC system certainly opens new challenges to manage privacy and security while communicating. Therefore, in the IoT-SC system, each transaction writes from edge computing nodes to the IoT-SC controller is thoroughly examined to ensure the proposed solutions in bi-directional communication, and their robustness against adversarial behaviors. Future research works, employing blockchain and its integrations, are detailed as paces to accelerate the privacy and security of the IoT-SC system, for example, migrating IoT-centric computing to an immutable, decentralized platform.