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An analysis method for improving the shear strength for the single-lap joints of dissimilar materials based on the cohesive zone model (CZM) is presented in this paper. The shear-lag model is established for the single-lap joint, and the stress distribution of joints is derived on the basis of this model, which is verified by simulation. The bilinear CZM is constructed to simulate the fracture process of joints, and the influence of lap length and adhesive layer thickness on the stress distribution of adhesive layers is comprehensively analyzed through simulation. Therefore, the effects of different properties of adhesive layers on the bonded structure strength are discussed with experiments. Results show that the reasonable lap length and thickness in this work are, respectively, 20–22 and 0.4–0.6 mm. The research results will serve as a guide for the parameter design, fracture prediction, and performance optimization of bonded joints.

Background: Pulmonary neuroendocrine tumors, including small cell lung cancer (SCLC) and non-small cell neuroendocrine tumor (NSCLC-NET), have obvious heterogeneity. The comparison between SCLC and NSCLC-NET, and prognostic nomogram of resected NSCLC-NET have not been performed.Methods: We retrieved patients’ information with pulmonary neuroendocrine tumors from SEER database. Age-adjusted incidence and prognostic impacts of histological subtypes, surgery strategies and smoking were compared between SCLC and NSCLC-NET. Independent prognostic factors, screened by Cox regression, were enrolled for prognostic nomogram of resected NSCLC-NET. The nomogram were evaluated and compared to the 8th AJCC TNM staging system. A Chinese cohort was used for external validation.Results: Age-adjusted incidence of SCLC declined after 1991 but the incidence of NSCLC-NET continuously rose. Patients with typical carcinoid had the best prognosis in both overall survival and lung cancer specific survival after operation. Sleeve and segmental resection were more recommended in NSCLC-NET and SCLC, respectively. High-smoking index was associated with worse prognosis in both SCLC and NSCLC-NET. Histological subtype, age, surgery type, N, M stage and chemotherapy were independent prognostic factors and used to construct prognostic nomogram of resected NSCLC-NET. The nomogram performed well with good discrimination, calibration and clinical usefulness, which was validated by Chinese cohort (1, 3, 5-year AUC: SEER cohort 0.873, 0.901, 0.875; Chinese cohort 0.867, 0.892, 0.874). Compared to 8th staging system, the nomogram had higher C-index (0.87 vs 0.728, P < 0.001), clinical usefulness, increasing AUC value over time and improved 68%. The online server can be accessed at https://nsclc-net-prognostic-prediction.shinyapps.io/DynNomapp/. Conclusion: NSCLC-NET had increasing incidence over the past decades. The nomogram had high discrimination, calibration and clinical usefulness and performed better than 8th staging system. It may have certain value in risk stratification and survival prediction of patients with resected NSCLC-NET and help clinicians to take measures for high-risk patients in advance.

As an innate feature of human beings, gender differences have an influence on various biological phenotypes, yet it does not attract enough attention in genomics studies. The prognosis of multiple carcinomas usually exhibits a favorable ending for female patients, but the neglect of gender differences can cause serious bias in survival analysis. Enhancer RNAs (eRNAs) are mostly downstream of androgens or estrogen. The present study was aimed to screen eRNAs in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer. The findings revealed that eRNA TBX5-AS1 was expressed differently between female and male patients. Meanwhile, its prognostic significance appeared only in male patients with squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) type. The Gene Set Enrichment Analysis proved that the expression level of TBX5-AS1 increased following the activation of the androgen signaling pathway. In pan-cancer analysis, the prognostic prediction based on gender grouping obtained more meaningful results, and the synergy between TBX5-AS1 and its homologous target was more consistent. Furthermore, immunity variations between sexes prompted us to explore the role that TBX5-AS1 played in tumor microenvironment and immunotherapy. The robust evidence proved that male patients with high expression of TBX5-AS1 possessed a malignant immune microenvironment and urgently needed immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment. In conclusion, TBX5-AS1 may be one of the strongest candidates to predict prognosis for male patients with SCC and provide a reference for immunotherapy.

Biochar stability is a key factor affecting the efficiency of soil carbon sequestration. Mineral calcium carbonate (M-CaCO3) can enhance the stability of biochar, and the mechanism has been extensively studied; however, similar studies on biological calcium carbonate (Bio-CaCO3), another natural form of calcium carbonate, are lacking. In this work, Bio-CaCO3 was used as an additive to explore the mechanism by which it enhances the stability of biochar. The results showed that Bio-CaCO3 improved the stability of biochar at pyrolysis temperatures ranging from 250 to 700 °C, and the enhancement effects increased upon increasing the pyrolysis temperature. The enhancement effects of M-CaCO3 were better at lower temperatures (250 and 400 °C) while Bio-CaCO3 was better at higher temperatures (550 and 700 °C). Mechanistic studies showed that the enhanced stability of Bio-CaCO3 at 250 °C was due to the fact that the inorganic component in Bio-CaCO3 promoted the deoxidation of the carbon matrix and the aromatization of aliphatic carbon at 400 °C. The reasons for the increased stability using Bio-CaCO3 at high temperatures included two mechanisms. One is that the inorganic components in Bio-CaCO3 promoted the aromatization of the carbon matrix. The other is that the unique organic nitrogen-containing functional groups in Bio-CaCO3 underwent dimerization and cyclization with the organic carbon components in biomass to form a more stable pyridinic-N structure. This work provides novel ideas for enhancing biochar stability using Bio-CaCO3.

Background: Adenocarcinoma (AD) accounts for more than 30% of pulmonary carcinoma with the highest morbidity and mortality in the world. LncRNA regulates various biological processes and shows great potential to become a therapeutic target for AD patients. Methods: In this research, we combined normal lung tissue sample from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) database and AD cohort in the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project to screen the significant Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA). Besides, Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database and in vitro experiment were applied to subsequent verification. Findings: After screening, we selected PCPB1-AS1 as the core of follow-up research. Bioinformatic analyses indicated that PCBP1-AS1 specifically influenced intratumoral infiltration of T regulatory cell (Treg), which was verified by the experiments based on our cohort and AD cell lines. Meanwhile, ceRNA network suggested that RORA might be potential target of PCBP1-AS1 to regulate the Treg infiltration. In addition, the prediction of response to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) treatment indicated PCBP1-AS1 expression level was able to become reference for ICIs treatment application. Interpretation: The compelling evidence demonstrated he rich biological functions of PCBP1-AS1 and its strong possibility to become the potential target for AD therapy. Funding Statement: National Natural Science Foundation (81672288), Focus on Research and Development Plan in Shandong Province (2018GSF118028) and Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2019PH002). Declaration of Interests: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. Ethics Approval Statement: This research was approved by Ethics Review Committee of Shandong Provincial Hospital, and was performed based on the Declaration of Helsinki and Good Clinical Practice guidelines, as defined by the International Conference on Harmonisation.

This paper presents an adaptive Nelder–Mead algorithm to inversely reconstruct the non-uniform strain field from the reflected intensity spectrum of the fiber grating sensor. In this algorithm, the standard operating parameters are modified to adapt to the variable strain profiles, and an improved transfer matrix method is adopted to rapidly calculate the reflected intensity spectrum with a high precision. Thus, the performance of high-dimensional optimization involved in the reconstruction of complex strain distributions is significantly improved. Several numerical examples firstly demonstrate the advantages of the proposed algorithm compared with the standard Nelder–Mead algorithm. Then, experimental investigations are conducted on aluminum alloy plates with central circular hole under tensile and bending loading. A penalty function is added to the objective function to meet the constraints of the optimization variables under experimental conditions. The experimental results are compared with the finite element analysis results, which verifies the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed algorithm. Finally, we provide some insights about the strain distribution and the resulting spectral distortion. Based on the measured spectrum, a spectral feature parameter (slope of the deflection–intensity ratio) is proposed as an indicator to reveal the size of the hole.

Embedded systems are vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks. In this paper, we propose a hardware memory monitor module that aims to detect buffer overflow attacks by analyzing the security of an embedded processor at the instruction level. The functionality of the memory monitor module does not rely on the source code and can perform security check through dynamic methods. Compared with several existing countermeasures that protect only part of the program's data space, our proposed memory monitor module can protect the program's entire data space. The proposed memory monitor module has negligible performance overhead because it runs in parallel with the embedded processor. As demonstrated in an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based prototype, the experimental results show that our memory monitor module can effectively resist several types of buffer overflow attacks with approximately a 15% hardware cost overhead and only a 0.1% performance penalty.

Most research on copolymers with fluorinated monomers has focused on the relationship between fluorinated monomer content and the corresponding surface structure. However, the influence of the non-fluorinated block on the surface structure of the copolymer film is unknown. Various molecular weight poly(butyl methacrylates) (PBMA) end-capped with 2-perfluorooctylethyl methacrylate (FMA) units (PBMA-ec-FMA) have been synthesized by atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP). The effect of the PBMA block length on the surface structure and properties of the polymers both in the solid state and in solution was investigated using various techniques. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), sum frequency generation (SFG) vibrational spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses indicated that longer PBMA blocks enhanced both the enrichment of the fluorinated moieties and the order of the packing orientation of the perfluoroalkyl side chains on the surface. This enhancement was attributed mainly to the molecular aggregate structure of the end-capped polymers with long PBMA blocks in the solution and to the interfacial structure at the air/liquid interface, which favors the -(CF2)7CF3 moieties self-assembling on the polymer surface during film formation. This observation suggests that the polyacrylate block structure in fluorinated diblock copolymers, in addition to the fluorinated monomer content, plays an important role in structure formation on the solid surface.