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Abstract Fusarium graminearum (F. graminearum) and its derivative mycotoxin deoxynivalenol (DON) are highly concerned with food safety and sustainability worldwide. Although several transcription factors (TFs) had been elucidated, molecular mechanism participates in DON biosynthesis regulation remains largely unrevealed. Here, we first characterized a zinc finger-contained TF in F. graminearum, FgSfp1, which is indispensable for DON production since its depletion resulting in a 95.4% DON yielding reduction. Interestingly, contrast to previous knowledge, all TRI-cluster genes were abnormally upregulated in ΔFgSfp1 while Tri proteins abundance rationally decreased simultaneously. Further evidence show FgSfp1 could coordinate genetic translation pace by manipulating ribosomal biogenesis process. Specifically, FgSfp1-depletion leads to ribosome biogenesis assembly factor (RiBi) expression attenuation along with DON precursor acetyl-CoA synthase reduction since FgSfp1 actively interacts with RNA 2’-O-methylation enzyme FgNop1 revealed by Bi-FC. It subsequently influences mRNA translation pace. In conclusion, we elucidated that the FgSfp1 orchestrates DON biosynthesis via participating RNA posttranscriptional modification for ribosomal RNA maturation, offering insights into the DON biosynthesis regulation. Ultimately, this TF might be a key regulator for DON contamination control in the whole food chain.

Abstract Background Few studies have clarified the mechanisms linking social anxiety and loneliness in older populations. The study aimed to explore how social network mediate the relationship between social anxiety and loneliness in older adults, with perceived social support playing a moderating role. Methods A total of 454 older patients completed the Social Avoidance and Distress Scale, Lubben Social Network Scale-6, Chinese version of the Short Loneliness Scale and Perceived Social Support Scale. Bootstrap and simple slope methods were used to test the moderated mediation model. Results Social anxiety had a significant positive predictive effect on loneliness and social network partially mediated this relationship. The relationship between social anxiety and social network, as well as the relationship between social network and loneliness, was moderated by perceived social support. Specifically, perceived social support buffered the effects of social anxiety on social network, but the buffering effect diminished with increasing levels of social anxiety. On the social network and loneliness pathway, the social network of older persons with higher perceived social support has a stronger prediction of loneliness. Conclusions The study found that social anxiety can contribute to loneliness by narrowing older adults’ social network. High perceived social support can buffer this process, but do not overstate its protective effects. Thus, interventions to reduce social anxiety and improve social network and social support may help prevent and alleviate loneliness in older adults.

Coastal zones, where land meets ocean, are home to a large portion of the global population and play a crucial role in human survival and development. These regions are shaped by complex geological processes and influenced by both natural and anthropogenic factors, making effective management essential for addressing population growth, environmental degradation, and resource sustainability. However, the inherent complexity of coastal zones complicates their study, and traditional in situ methods are often inefficient. Remote sensing technologies have significantly advanced coastal zone research, with different sensors providing diverse perspectives. These sensors are typically used for classification tasks (e.g., coastline extraction, coastal classification) and retrieval tasks (e.g., aquatic color, wetland monitoring). Recent improvements in resolution and the advent of deep learning have led to notable progress in classification, while platforms like Google Earth Engine (GEE) have enabled the development of high-quality, global-scale products. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of coastal zone interpretation, discussing platforms, sensors, spectral characteristics, and key challenges while proposing potential solutions for future research and management.

As one of the most critical features on the earth's surface, coastal zone mandates high-quality extraction of its representative feature, the coastline. Prior methodologies primarily emphasize on edge and small-scale information. However, during large-scale image processing, misclassification might occur due to the difficulty in determining whether a local area belongs to the land or sea. To address this, we propose a deep learning-based multiscale coastline extraction algorithm in this study. It comprises a multiscale coastal zone dataset built upon a tile map service structure and a scene classification-based multiscale coastal zone classifier, employing quadtree decomposition to identify coastal zones from low to high levels. Contrasting with conventional semantic segmentation, the scene classification network, owing to its larger receptive field, can accurately discern land and sea. This accuracy is further enhanced by using quadtree decomposition to process images with lower resolution and larger coverage. The results suggest that our proposed method effectively eliminates confusing features, with the overall experimental classification accuracy attesting to the effectiveness of our approach, yielding a 6% improvement. Moreover, the screening process in this study significantly reduces the number of input samples for the segmentation network, thus boosting computational speed.

Abstract Eradication of MRSA osteomyelitis requires elimination of distinct biofilms. To overcome this, we developed bisphosphonate-conjugated sitafloxacin (BCS, BV600072) and hydroxybisphosphonate-conjugate sitafloxacin (HBCS, BV63072), which achieve “target-and-release” drug delivery proximal to the bone infection and have prophylactic efficacy against MRSA static biofilm in vitro and in vivo. Here we evaluated their therapeutic efficacy in a murine 1-stage exchange femoral plate model with bioluminescent MRSA (USA300LAC::lux). Osteomyelitis was confirmed by CFU on the explants and longitudinal bioluminescent imaging (BLI) after debridement and implant exchange surgery on day 7, and mice were randomized into seven groups: 1) Baseline (harvested at day 7, no treatment); 2) HPBP (bisphosphonate control for BCS) + vancomycin; 3) HPHBP (hydroxybisphosphonate control for HBCS) + vancomycin; 4) vancomycin; 5) sitafloxacin; 6) BCS + vancomycin; and 7) HBCS + vancomycin. BLI confirmed infection persisted in all groups except for mice treated with BCS or HBCS + vancomycin. Radiology revealed catastrophic femur fractures in all groups except mice treated with BCS or HBCS + vancomycin, which also displayed decreases in peri-implant bone loss, osteoclast numbers, and biofilm. To confirm this, we assessed the efficacy of vancomycin, sitafloxacin, and HBCS monotherapy in a transtibial implant model. The results showed complete lack of vancomycin efficacy while all mice treated with HBCS had evidence of infection control, and some had evidence of osseous integrated septic implants, suggestive of biofilm eradication. Taken together these studies demonstrate that HBCS adjuvant with standard of care debridement and vancomycin therapy has the potential to eradicate MRSA osteomyelitis.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases in the world. To reduce the incidence of AD, it’s essential to quantify the AD conversion risk of mild cognitive impaired (MCI) individuals. Here, we propose an AD conversion risk estimation system (CRES), which contains an automated MRI feature extractor, brain age estimation (BAE) module, and AD conversion risk estimation module. The CRES is trained on 634 normal controls (NC) from the public IXI and OASIS cohorts, then it is evaluated on 462 subjects (106 NC, 102 stable MCI (sMCI), 124 progressive MCI (pMCI) and 130 AD) from the ADNI dataset. Experimental results show that the MRI derived age gap (AG, chronological age subtracted from the estimated brain age) significantly distinguish NC, sMCI, pMCI and AD groups with ${p}$ -value $=0.000017$ . Considering AG as the primary factor, incorporating gender and Minimum Mental State Examination (MMSE) for more robust Cox multi-variate hazard analysis, we concluded that each additional year in AG is associated with 4.57% greater AD conversion risk for the MCI group. Furthermore, a nomogram was drawn to describe MCI conversion risk at the individual level in the next 1 year, 3 years, 5 years and even 8 years from baseline. This work demonstrates that CRES can estimate AG based on MRI data, evaluate AD conversion risk of the MCI subjects, and identify the individuals with high AD conversion risk, which is valuable for effective intervention and diagnosis within an early period.

Okawa et al. evaluate a fluorescent risedronate analogue, 800CW-pRIS, as a potential treatment for medication-related osteonecrosis of the jaw. The authors demonstrate an improvement in wound healing and inflammation with 800CW-pRIS pre-treatment in a mouse model of bisphosphonate-associated osteonecrosis following tooth extraction.

Measurement(s) Human Brainwave • spoken language Technology Type(s) EEG collector • audio recorder Sample Characteristic - Organism Homo Sapiens Sample Characteristic - Location China

Studies have shown that attention bias can affect behavioral indicators in patients with depression, but it is still unclear how this bias affects the brain network topology of patients with mild depression (MD). Therefore, a novel functional brain network analysis and hierarchical clustering methods were used to explore the abnormal brain topology of MD patients based on EEG signals during the visual search paradigm. The behavior results showed that the reaction time of MD group was significantly higher than that of normal group. The results of functional brain network indicated significant differences in functional connections between the two groups, the amount of inter-hemispheric long-distance connections are much larger than intra-hemispheric short-distance connections. Patients with MD showed significantly lower local efficiency and clustering coefficient, destroyed community structure of frontal lobe and parietal-occipital lobe, frontal asymmetry, especially in beta band. In addition, the average value of long-distance connections between left frontal and right parietal-occipital lobes presented significant correlation with depressive symptoms. Our results suggested that MD patients achieved long-distance connections between the frontal and parietal-occipital regions by sacrificing the connections within the regions, which might provide new insights into the abnormal cognitive processing mechanism of depression.

IntroductionAging brings with an increased risk of chronic diseases among older adults, which could affect health outcomes. Evidence has showed that health literacy is associated with health outcomes. However, limited studies explore the underlying mechanism between health literacy and health outcomes. Hence, this study aimed to determine whether self-efficacy for managing chronic disease mediates the relationship between health literacy and health outcomes among older patients with chronic diseases, and to explore whether disease duration moderates the relationship between health literacy, self-efficacy for managing chronic disease, and health outcomes.MethodsParticipants were recruited from tertiary hospitals in Zhejiang Province, China from May 2019 to June 2020 using a convenience sampling method. A total of 471 older patients with chronic diseases completed questionnaires measuring demographics, disease-related information, health literacy, self-efficacy for managing chronic disease, and health outcomes. The mediation effect was examined using the structural equation model method, based on the bias-corrected bootstrapping method. The moderation effect was tested by the multiple-group analysis.ResultsA good fit model suggested that self-efficacy for managing chronic disease partially mediated the relationships between health literacy and health outcomes. In addition, disease duration moderated the relationships between health literacy, self-efficacy for managing chronic disease, and health outcomes.DiscussionThe findings highlight that adequate health literacy improved health outcomes among older patients with chronic diseases, which was further promoted by self-efficacy for managing chronic diseases. Moreover, a long disease duration could enhance the effect.

Nearshore bathymetry plays an essential role in various applications, and satellite-derived bathymetry (SDB) presents a promising approach due to its extensive coverage and comprehensive bathymetric map production capabilities. Nevertheless, existing retrieval techniques, encompassing physics-based and pixel-based statistical methodologies such as support vector regression (SVR), band ratio, and Kriging regression, exhibit limitations stemming from the intricate water reflectance process and the under-exploitation of the spatial component inherent in SDB. To surmount these obstacles, we introduce employment of deep convolutional networks (DCNs) for SDB in this study. We assembled multiple scenes utilizing networks with varying scale emphasis and an assortment of satellite datasets characterized by distinct spatial and spectral resolutions. Our findings reveal that these deep learning models yield high-caliber bathymetry outcomes, with nonlinear normalization further mitigating residuals in shallow water regions and substantially enhancing retrieval performance. A comparative analysis with the prevalent SVR technique substantiates the efficacy of the proposed methodology.

BackgroundTo identify gender differences in factors associated with the health literacy of hospitalized older patients with chronic diseases.MethodsA total of 471 hospitalized older patients with chronic diseases in four hospitals were investigated from May 2019 to June 2020. The self-developed demographic information questionnaire, the “Health Literacy Scale for Patients with Chronic Diseases” and the “Self-Efficacy for Managing Chronic Diseases 6-item Scale” were applied in this study. Multiple linear regression was used to assess the factors influencing health literacy among older patients with chronic diseases by gender.ResultsThe factors influencing health literacy differed by gender. Male health literacy was related to education background, number of children, monthly income, duration of chronic disease and chronic disease self-efficacy. For females, health literacy was associated with age, education background, monthly income, duration of chronic disease and chronic disease treatment.ConclusionHealthcare providers should focus on the above-mentioned factors that could help identify those with low health literacy differ base on gender. Gender-specific strategies should be developed to improve the health literacy of older patients with chronic diseases and strengthen their chronic disease management.

Bisphosphonate-related osteonecrosis of the jaw (BRONJ) presents as a morbid jawbone lesion in patients exposed to a nitrogen-containing bisphosphonate (N-BP). Although it is rare, BRONJ has caused apprehension among patients and healthcare providers and decreased acceptance of this antiresorptive drug class to treat osteoporosis and metastatic osteolysis. We report here a novel method to elucidate the pathological mechanism of BRONJ by the selective removal of legacy N-BP from the jawbone using an intra-oral application of hydroxymethylene diphosphonate (HMDP) formulated in liposome-based deformable nanoscale vesicles (DNV). After maxillary tooth extraction, zoledronate-treated mice developed delayed gingival wound closure, delayed tooth extraction socket healing and increased jawbone osteonecrosis consistent with human BRONJ lesions. Single cell RNA sequencing of mouse gingival cells revealed oral barrier immune dysregulation and unresolved proinflammatory reaction. HMDP-DNV topical applications to nascent mouse BRONJ lesions resulted in accelerated gingival wound closure and bone socket healing as well as attenuation of osteonecrosis development. The gingival single cell RNA sequencing demonstrated resolution of chronic inflammation by increased anti-inflammatory signature gene expression of lymphocytes and myeloid-derived suppressor cells. This study suggests that BRONJ pathology is related to N-BP levels in jawbones and demonstrates the potential of HMDP-DNV as an effective BRONJ therapy.

Abstract Background Currently, coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) is continuously and rapidly circulating, resulting in serious and extensive effects on human health. Due to the absence of antiviral medicine for COVID-19 thus far, there is a desperate need to develop effective medicine. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been widely applied in the treatment of epidemic diseases in China, with the aim of achieving clinical efficacy and decreasing the use of antibiotics and glucocorticoids. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of Baidu Jieduan granules in treating COVID-19. Methods/design This multicentre, open-label, randomized controlled trial will be conducted in 300 patients with COVID-19. The patients will be randomly (1:1) divided into a treatment group and a control group. All patients will receive standard therapy at the same time. Patients in the experimental group will receive Baidu Jieduan granule treatment twice a day for 14 days. The outcomes will be assessed at baseline and at 3, 5, 7 and 14 days after treatment initiation. The primary outcome will be the rate of symptom (fever, fatigue and coughing) recovery. Adverse events (AEs) will be monitored throughout the trial. Discussion The study will provide high-quality clinical evidence to support the efficacy and safety of Baidu Jieduan granules in the treatment of moderate COVID-19, and enrich the theory and practice of TCM in treating COVID-19. Trial registration Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR2000029869 . Registered on 15 February 2020

S. aureus infection of bone is difficult to eradicate due to its ability to colonize the osteocyte-lacuno-canalicular network (OLCN), rendering it resistant to standard-of-care (SOC) antibiotics. To overcome this, we proposed two bone-targeted bisphosphonate-conjugated antibiotics (BCA): bisphosphonate-conjugated sitafloxacin (BCS) and hydroxybisphosphonate-conjugate sitafloxacin (HBCS). Initial studies demonstrated that the BCA kills S. aureus in vitro. Here we demonstrate the in vivo efficacy of BCS and HBCS versus bisphosphonate, sitafloxacin, and vancomycin in mice with implant-associated osteomyelitis. Longitudinal bioluminescent imaging (BLI) confirmed the hypothesized “target and release”-type kinetics of BCS and HBCS. Micro-CT of the infected tibiae demonstrated that HBCS significantly inhibited peri-implant osteolysis versus placebo and free sitafloxacin (p < 0.05), which was not seen with the corresponding non-antibiotic-conjugated bisphosphonate control. TRAP-stained histology confirmed that HBCS significantly reduced peri-implant osteoclast numbers versus placebo and free sitafloxacin controls (p < 0.05). To confirm S. aureus killing, we compared the morphology of S. aureus autolysis within in vitro biofilm and infected tibiae via transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Live bacteria in vitro and in vivo presented as dense cocci ~1 μm in diameter. In vitro evidence of autolysis presented remnant cell walls of dead bacteria or “ghosts” and degenerating (non-dense) bacteria. These features of autolyzed bacteria were also present among the colonizing S. aureus within OLCN of infected tibiae from placebo-, vancomycin-, and sitafloxacin-treated mice, similar to placebo. However, most of the bacteria within OLCN of infected tibiae from BCA-treated mice were less dense and contained small vacuoles and holes >100 nm. Histomorphometry of the bacteria within the OLCN demonstrated that BCA significantly increased their diameter versus placebo and free antibiotic controls (p < 0.05). As these abnormal features are consistent with antibiotic-induced vacuolization, bacterial swelling, and necrotic phenotype, we interpret these findings to be the initial evidence of BCA-induced killing of S. aureus within the OLCN of infected bone. Collectively, these results support the bone targeting strategy of BCA to overcome the biodistribution limits of SOC antibiotics and warrant future studies to confirm the novel TEM phenotypes of bacteria within OLCN of S. aureus-infected bone of animals treated with BCS and HBCS.

ObjectivesSeveral studies have shown abnormal network topology in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). However, changes in functional brain networks associated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) remission based on electroencephalography (EEG) signals have yet to be investigated.MethodsNineteen-channel resting-state eyes-closed EEG signals were collected from 24 MDD patients pre- and post-ECT treatment. Functional brain networks were constructed by using various coupling methods and binarization techniques. Changes in functional connectivity and network metrics after ECT treatment and relationships between network metrics and clinical symptoms were explored.ResultsECT significantly increased global efficiency, edge betweenness centrality, local efficiency, and mean degree of alpha band after ECT treatment, and an increase in these network metrics had significant correlations with decreased depressive symptoms in repeated measures correlation. In addition, ECT regulated the distribution of hubs in frontal and occipital lobes.ConclusionECT modulated the brain’s global and local information-processing patterns. In addition, an ECT-induced increase in network metrics was associated with clinical remission.SignificanceThese findings might present the evidence for us to understand how ECT regulated the topology organization in functional brain networks of clinically remitted depressive patients.

Currently, the world is in a period of urbanization that will accelerate the processes of land-use cover and ecological change. Thus, establishing a land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) prediction and simulation model is of great significance for understanding the process of urban change and assessing its ecological impact. In previous studies, LUCC prediction models have been mainly based on cellular automata structures that calculate a future state pixel by pixel through transition rules. Because these transition rules are usually based on the global state and each pixel is calculated according to these fixed rules, the results of these methods have room for improvement in terms of generating details and heterogeneity. In this article, a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based LUCC prediction model using multiscale local spatial information is proposed. The model is based on a pix2pix GAN and an attention structure that predicts future land use through multiscale local spatial information. To validate our model, Shenzhen, a region that is experiencing rapid urbanization, was chosen as the source of the experimental data. The results indicate that the proposed method achieved the highest accuracy in both short-time interval and long-time interval scenarios. In addition, the results of the proposed method were also closest to the ground truth from the perspective of the landscape pattern.

Abstract Background Currently, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is continuously and rapidly circulating, causing heavy damage on public health. No effective antiviral treatment has been proved thus far. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been widely applied in the treatment of a variety of infection diseases in China, hoping to produce clinical effects and reduce the use of antibiotics and glucocorticoid. The aim of this study is to evaluate the efficacy and safety of Shenhuang granule in treatment of severe COVID-19. Methods/design This multicenter, open-label randomized controlled trial is conducted in 160 participants with severe COVID-19. The participants will be randomly (1:1) divided into treatment group or control group. All participants are given standard therapy at the same time. The experiment will receive Shenhuang granule treatment twice a day for 14 days. The clinical indicators of patients will be assessed at baseline and at 3, 5, 7, and 14 days after treatment initiation. The primary outcome is 14-day clinical outcome. Adverse events will be monitored throughout the trial. Discussion This will be the first randomized controlled trial, which evaluate the effect of Shenhuang granule in patients with severe COVID-19 in China. The results of this trial may not only provide evidence-based recommendations to clinicians to treat severe COVID-19, but also enrich the theory and practice of TCM in treating infectious diseases. Trial registration Chinese Clinical Trial Registry, ChiCTR2000029777 . Registered on 13 February 2020.

Bisphosphonates drugs target the skeleton and are used globally for the treatment of common bone disorders. Nitrogen-containing bisphosphonates act by inhibiting the mevalonate pathway in bone-resorbing osteoclasts but, surprisingly, also appear to reduce the risk of death from pneumonia. We overturn the long-held belief that these drugs act only in the skeleton and show that a fluorescently labelled bisphosphonate is internalised by alveolar macrophages and large peritoneal macrophages in vivo. Furthermore, a single dose of a nitrogen-containing bisphosphonate (zoledronic acid) in mice was sufficient to inhibit the mevalonate pathway in tissue-resident macrophages, causing the build-up of a mevalonate metabolite and preventing protein prenylation. Importantly, one dose of bisphosphonate enhanced the immune response to bacterial endotoxin in the lung and increased the level of cytokines and chemokines in bronchoalveolar fluid. These studies suggest that bisphosphonates, as well as preventing bone loss, may boost immune responses to infection in the lung and provide a mechanistic basis to fully examine the potential of bisphosphonates to help combat respiratory infections that cause pneumonia.

Resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) studies have shown significant group differences in functional connectivity networks between patients with depression and healthy controls. The present study aims to identify the altered EEG resting-state functional connectivity patterns of depressed patients, which can be used to test the feasibility of distinguishing individuals with depression from healthy controls. In the present study, the phase lag index was employed to construct functional connectivity matrices. An altered Kendall rank correlation coefficient was used to identify the features with high discriminative power, and several classifiers were employed to classify a total of 27 depressed patients and 28 demographically matched healthy volunteers. Permutation tests were used to evaluate classifier performance. The best classification results demonstrate that more than 92% of subjects were correctly classified by binary linear SVM through leave-one-out cross-validation for the full frequency band, and the AUC was 0.98. Our findings suggest that the depression affects brain activity in nearly the whole cortex and that changes in brain oscillation patterns in the delta, theta, and beta frequency bands are more significant than those in the alpha frequency band. The current study sheds new light on the pathological mechanism of depression and suggests that EEG resting-state functional connectivity analysis may identify potentially effective biomarkers for its clinical diagnosis.

The use of local antibiotics to treat bone infections has been questioned due to a lack of clinical efficacy and emerging information about Staphylococcus aureus colonization of the osteocyte-lacuno canalicular network (OLCN). Here we propose bisphosphonate-conjugated antibiotics (BCA) using a “target and release” approach to deliver antibiotics to bone infection sites. A fluorescent bisphosphonate probe was used to demonstrate bone surface labeling adjacent to bacteria in a S. aureus infected mouse tibiae model. Bisphosphonate and hydroxybisphosphonate conjugates of sitafloxacin and tedizolid (BCA) were synthesized using hydroxyphenyl and aminophenyl carbamate linkers, respectively. The conjugates were adequately stable in serum. Their cytolytic activity versus parent drug on MSSA and MRSA static biofilms grown on hydroxyapatite discs was established by scanning electron microscopy. Sitafloxacin O-phenyl carbamate BCA was effective in eradicating static biofilm: no colony formation units (CFU) were recovered following treatment with 800 mg/L of either the bisphosphonate or α-hydroxybisphosphonate conjugated drug (p < 0.001). In contrast, the less labile tedizolid N-phenyl carbamate linked BCA had limited efficacy against MSSA, and MRSA. CFU were recovered from all tedizolid BCA treatments. These results demonstrate the feasibility of BCA eradication of S. aureus biofilm on OLCN bone surfaces and support in vivo drug development of a sitafloxacin BCA.

Remote sensing building extraction is of great importance to many applications, such as urban planning and economic status assessment. Deep learning with deep network structures and back-propagation optimization can automatically learn features of targets in high-resolution remote sensing images. However, it is also obvious that the generalizability of deep networks is almost entirely dependent on the quality and quantity of the labels. Therefore, building extraction performances will be greatly affected if there is a large intra-class variation among samples of one class target. To solve the problem, a subdivision method for reducing intra-class differences is proposed to enhance semantic segmentation. We proposed that backgrounds and targets be separately generated by two orthogonal generative adversarial networks (O-GAN). The two O-GANs are connected by adding the new loss function to their discriminators. To better extract building features, drawing on the idea of fine-grained image classification, feature vectors for a target are obtained through an intermediate convolution layer of O-GAN with selective convolutional descriptor aggregation (SCDA). Subsequently, feature vectors are clustered into new, different subdivisions to train semantic segmentation networks. In the prediction stages, the subdivisions will be merged into one class. Experiments were conducted with remote sensing images of the Tibet area, where there are both tall buildings and herdsmen’s tents. The results indicate that, compared with direct semantic segmentation, the proposed subdivision method can make an improvement on accuracy of about 4%. Besides, statistics and visualizing building features validated the rationality of features and subdivisions.

Mechanical properties, electronic properties, and Debye temperatures of NixBy (Ni3B, Ni2B, Ni4B3 and NiB) compounds were obtained by the first principles calculations based on the density functional theory (DFT). The results showed that the formation enthalpy of the NixBy compounds were stable with negative formation enthalpy. NiB had the largest B, G, and E, and the smallest υ; it also had the highest hardness (10.8 GPa) and Debye temperature (681.8 K). Ni4B3 had the strongest anisotropy. It was found that the valence bonds of the NixBy compounds studied were composed of both metal bond and covalent bond, and the mechanical properties and Debye temperature of the NixBy compounds increased with the increase of the B atomic ratio.

Zoledronic acid, a highly potent nitrogen-containing bisphosphonate used for the treatment of pathological bone loss, is excreted unmetabolized via the kidney if not bound to the bone. In cancer patients receiving high doses of the compound renal excretion may be associated with acute tubular necrosis. The question of how zoledronic acid is internalized by renal tubular cells has not been answered until now. In the current work, using a primary human tubular cell culture system, the pathway of cellular uptake of zoledronic acid (fluorescently/radiolabeled) and its cytotoxicity were investigated. Previous studies in our laboratory have shown that this primary cell culture model consistently mimics the physiological characteristics of molecular uptake/transport of the epithelium in vivo. Zoledronic acid was found to be taken up by tubular cells via fluid-phase-endocytosis (from apical and basolateral side) as evidenced by its co-localization with dextran. Cellular uptake and the resulting intracellular level was twice as high from the apical side compared to the basolateral side. Furthermore, the intracellular zoledronic acid level was found to be dependent on the administered concentration and not saturable. Cytotoxic effects however, were only seen at higher administration doses and/or after longer incubation times. Although zoledronic acid is taken up by tubular cells, no net tubular transport could be measured. It is concluded that fluid-phase-endocytosis of zoledronic acid and cellular accumulation at high doses may be responsible for the acute tubular necrosis observed in some cancer patients receiving high doses of the compound.

Existing studies have revealed that prior educational experience plays an important role in student learning, and many international students are encountering challenges while undertaking academic studies at Anglophone universities. However, few studies have examined how the pre-university preparation international students experience assists them in transitioning to university. This study explores, through the perceptions of students, the effectiveness of different university preparation pathways of a cohort of international students in a leading Australian university. Using a mixed-method research design, a questionnaire and focus group interviews were conducted to collect data about overseas student perceptions of the pathway program they undertook. The results show that international students who undertook different pathway programs had different perspectives about the extent to which they felt prepared for university in terms of important aspects of their education, such as subject content knowledge and English language proficiency. Based on the students' perceptions, the findings of this exploratory study contribute new insights to help improve education practices at universities through a deeper understanding of the diverse preparation international students receive. Overall, the article highlights the heterogeneous nature of international students' academic preparedness for university transition, and offers some practical implications for university educators, administrators, and curriculum designers.

The article explores the dialectics of freedom in the poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats and its connection with the concepts of truth and beauty according to interpretations by philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. It discusses Hegel's aesthetics in reading the poem as an embodiment of subjectivity and transcendence of freedom in Romantic art drawing from the Eleusinian mystery. It examines the Marxian aesthetics oriented around historicity and immanence of freedom.