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New analytical techniques that overcome major drawbacks of current routinely used viral infection diagnosis methods, i.e., the long analysis time and laboriousness of real-time reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) and the insufficient sensitivity of "antigen tests", are urgently needed in the context of SARS-CoV-2 and other highly contagious viruses. Here, we report on an antifouling terpolymer-brush biointerface that enables the rapid and sensitive detection of SARS-CoV-2 in untreated clinical samples. The developed biointerface carries a tailored composition of zwitterionic and non-ionic moieties and allows for the significant improvement of antifouling capabilities when postmodified with biorecognition elements and exposed to complex media. When deployed on a surface of piezoelectric sensor and postmodified with human-cell-expressed antibodies specific to the nucleocapsid (N) protein of SARS-CoV-2, it made possible the quantitative analysis of untreated samples by a direct detection assay format without the need of additional amplification steps. Natively occurring N-protein-vRNA complexes, usually disrupted during the sample pre-treatment steps, were detected in the untreated clinical samples. This biosensor design improved the bioassay sensitivity to a clinically relevant limit of detection of 1.3 × 10

Background: Despite the substantial disease burden caused by nervous system diseases, few studies have examined the association between ambient temperature and nervous system diseases, especially during cold seasons. Evidence for specific disease subgroups such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's is also lacking. Objectives: This study examined the association between short-term changes in ambient temperature and nervous system diseases-related mortality in ten Japanese prefectures from 1 January 2010 to 31 December 2019. Methods: A two-stage analysis based on a time-stratified case-crossover study design was conducted. A conditional quasi-Poisson regression model with a distributed lag non-linear model for temperature was applied followed by a multivariate random-effects meta-analysis to obtain average associations. Mortality due to all and cause-specific nervous system diseases (major neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's) were analyzed, with consideration for sex and age (0–84 and 85+ years old) subgroups. Results: We analyzed 162,315 death cases due to nervous system diseases. Cold was associated with all categories of nervous system diseases-related mortality, but not heat. The estimated relative risks for cold, obtained by comparing the 2.5th percentile of daily mean temperature distribution to the minimum mortality temperature (MMT), were 1.43 (95 % CI: 1.28–1.60), 1.37 (95 % CI: 1.17–1.59), 1.53 (95 % CI: 1.07–2.01), and 1.54 (95 % CI: 1.13–2.10) for all nervous system diseases, major neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's, respectively. These associations were also observed in the sex and age subgroups in general but without evidence of effect modification. Heat (the 97.5th percentile of daily mean temperature distribution vs. MMT) was associated with Parkinson’s disease-related mortality among those aged 85 years and over. Discussion: Cold was associated with an increased risk of nervous system disease-related mortality. The effect of heat was not observed, except for mortality among the elderly aged 85 years and older with Parkinson's disease., Science of the Total Environment, 867, art. no. 161464; 2023

Esophageal motility disorders account for a large proportion of nonobstructive dysphagia cases, which constitute a heterogeneous group of diagnoses that commonly result in peristaltic derangement and impaired relaxation of the lower esophageal sphincter. We performed a single-institution retrospective study enrolling consecutive patients with chief complaints of dysphagia who underwent HRIM from December 2014 to December 2019, and analyzed demographic, clinical, and manometric data using descriptive statistics. In total, 277 identified patients were included in the final analysis. Ineffective esophageal motility (n = 152, 24.5%) was the most common diagnosis by HRIM, followed by absent contractility, EGJ outflow obstruction, type II achalasia, and type I achalasia. Furthermore, surgery including exploratory, laparoscopic, and robotic myotomy, as well as POEM, is considered the most effective treatment for patients with non-spastic achalasia and EGJOO, due to its effective symptom palliation and prevention of disease progression; surgery also contributes to an obvious improvement of dysphagia compared with slightly less efficacy for other related symptoms. Our study aimed to elaborate the clinical characteristics of patients with nonobstructive dysphagia based on HRIM in a Taiwanese population, and to analyze the therapeutic outcomes of such patients who ultimately underwent surgical interventions.

Numerous studies indicated the physical benefits of regular exercise, but the neurophysiological mechanisms of regular exercise in elders were less investigated. We aimed to compare changes in brain activity during exercise in elderly people and in young adults with and without regular exercise habits. A total of 36 healthy young adults (M/F:18/18) and 35 healthy elderly adults (M/F:20/15) participated in this study. According to exercise habits, each age group were classified into regular and occasional exerciser groups. ECG, EEG, and EMG signals were recorded using V-AMP with a 1-kHz sampling rate. The participants were instructed to perform three 5-min bicycle rides with different exercise loads. The EEG spectral power of elders who exercised regularly revealed the strongest positive correlation with their exercise intensity by using Pearson correlation analysis. The results demonstrate that exercise-induced significant cortical activation in the elderly participants who exercised regularly, and most of the p-values are less than 0.001. No significant correlation was observed between spectral power and exercise intensity in the elders who exercised occasionally. The young participants who exercised regularly had greater cardiac and neurobiological efficiency. Our results may provide a new exercise therapy reference for adult groups with different exercise habits, especially for the elders.

To provide the significantly increased number of devices and demands in bandwidth for various applications, the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) is considered as an approach. Further, the domain proxy is integrated into a self-organized networking (SON) server to assist Citizens Broadband Radio Service Devices (CBSDs) following CBRS protocol to communicate with Spectrum Access System (SAS) for 3.5 GHz spectrum access. In this paper, we design and implement a domain proxy following the CBRS communication protocol to proxy a CBSD for spectrum acquisition and relinquishment. The communication protocol can be presented in two state machines, and the state transition is performed according to the data transmission relationship between the SAS and the CBSD, indicating the use of the 3.5 GHz spectrum. Further, the implemented communication protocol is verified by the SAS simulator published by WInnForum. In the future, we will develop and integrate a dynamical spectrum allocation algorithm in domain proxy to arrange the acquired spectrum for CBSDs according to different scenarios.

With the increased exposure to Western cultures and the transition towards modernization, Chinese society has experienced substantial social change, which has influenced marital relationships. Although recent research has documented contemporary patterns of marital interaction, less is known about what Chinese adults consider to be an ideal marital partner. The values of contemporary Chinese adults about mate selection preferences were addressed by conducting six focus groups in Taipei, Taiwan. The focus groups included a total of 51 participants (male=25; female=26) and included separate groups for middle-aged married men, middle-aged married women, younger married men, younger married women, never-married young adult men, and never-married young adult women. The results from qualitative analysis indicated three major themes in an ideal partner: family-of-origin, which included similar family background and good relationship with in-laws, personal qualities, which included financially stability and being responsible, and relationship qualities, which included getting along, communicating well, mutual respect, and gender equality. These results indicate that contemporary Chinese adults value a combination of traditional Chinese (e.g., similar family background) and Western (e.g., good communication) values. Overall, the young Chinese participants showed greater incorporation of Western values than the older participants. These findings suggest that modern Chinese society is being increasingly influenced by individualistic Western values.

Sleep is important for the restoration and renewal of the human body. Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS), which is caused by repetitive episodes of partial or complete upper airway obstruction during sleep, is the most common type of sleep apnea. The sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) analysis has been an important tool to investigate brain activity. In this study, we used the spectral analysis and fuzzy entropy to analyze the EEG signals collected from the OSAS patients and normal control. Results obtained from the EEG power spectrum and fuzzy entropy with and without principal component analysis (PCA) process were used as the features and fed into four different classifiers, namely, linear Support Vector Machines (SVM), Liner Discriminant Analysis (LDA), subspace k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) and subspace discriminant analysis, to differentiate these two groups. Our results demonstrated that the feature resulted from power spectrum with PCA process and subspace discriminate method using 5-fold cross-validation produces the superior classification rate which is 89 ± 3.74%.

We propose a novel superpixel extraction method named USEQ to generate regular and compact superpixels. To reduce the computational burden of iterative optimization procedures used in most recent approaches, the spatial and color quantizations are performed in advance to represent pixels and superpixels. Maximum a posteriori estimation in both pixel and region levels is then adopted to aggregate pixels into spatially and visually coherent superpixels. The resultant superpixels are extremely efficient to generate and can more precisely adhere to object boundaries. Compared to the state-of-the-art approaches to superpixel extraction, USEQ can achieve better or competitive performance in terms of boundary recall, undersegmentation error and achievable segmentation accuracy, and is significantly faster than these approaches.

Few studies have investigated changes in brain activity during exercise. It is still unclear how exercise affects the brain cortical activity. The aim of this study is to investigate different physiological features during a sustained cycling exercise. We recorded Electrocardiography (ECG) and Electroencephalography (EEG) from participants before, during, and after exercise. We investigate the correlation between heart rate and other physiological parameters such as EEG spectral power and EEG complexity. Forty-four healthy subjects participated in this study. The EEG was recorded from 4 scalp sites, which were C1, C2, P1, and P2. Subjects were asked to ride the bicycle continuously for nine minutes. Signals of EEG and ECG in resting condition were recorded for four minutes before exercise and another four minutes after exercise. In addition, we recorded subjects' rating of perceived exertion (RPE) since each subject has different physical strength and tolerance of non-stopping exercise. The average-to-maximal heart rate ratio (AMHRR) was calculated for each subject, which will be used to explore the relationship between exercise workload and physiological parameters. Moreover, we employed Morlet wavelet and Higuchi's fractal dimension analysis methods on EEG signals. Finally, we use regression analysis to examine the relationship between the various physiological parameters and AMHRR. Results indicate that RPE had a linearly correlation with AMHRR, which allows us to investigate the changes of EEG objectively from AMHRR. We found that the EEG normalized power had a positive correlation with heart rate or with exercise workload. The highest increased in EEG normalized power occurred when the participants were in their highest heart rate. On the other hand, we observed the EEG Higuchi's fractal dimension (HFD) had a negative correlation with heart rate. It may infer that a reduction of EEG complexity during exercise may cause by the increase of neuronal synchrony. The same phenomenon, an increase in EEG power at a specific frequency, is typically observed due to a synchronized firing of neurons. In summary, these results demonstrated that the EEG can be used as a salient tool to differentiate different exercise workload.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a common tool to study the changes in brain activity during exercise. In this study, we used recorded Electrocardiography (ECG) to define an average-to-maximal heart rate ratio (AMHRR) as a gauge of relative exercise workload, and explored how the increase of AMHRR affected the brain activity. The EEG signals were recorded from forty-four healthy subjects on four scalp sites, including C1, C2, P1, and P2 during nine minutes non-stop cycling exercise. The relationships between AMHRR and EEG power spectral or EEG fuzzy entropy (FuzzyEn) were established. Results of EEG power spectral and FuzzyEn displayed similar increasing patterns with AMHRR at all electrodes. Compared with EEG power spectral, the FuzzyEn has better specificity in selecting effective frequency bands, namely theta, alpha and beta bands. The FuzzyEn method can be applied in a wearable device for human machine interface (HMI) in monitoring the EEG during exercise in the future.

A series of new metal-free organic donor-bridge-acceptor dyes comprising a triphenylamine moiety as the electron donor, and a cyanoacrylic acid (dye series A) or a carboxylic acid moiety (dye series B) as the electron acceptor were synthesized and utilized for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). The triphenylamine moiety was linked to the main chromophore through either a para or a meta position across a phenyl group in order to examine the difference of structural effect. Both types of compounds exhibited apparent solvatochromic shift in their fluorescence spectra, showing the ready formation of charge separated states in both the para and meta -isomers. Quantum mechanical calculations were performed by using the density functional theory (DFT) at the B3LYP/6-31G(d,p) level to gain insight into the electron distributions surrounding the para and meta -substituted triphenylamine groups. The movement of an electron from the donor to the acceptor under the irradiation of light can be depicted by the time-dependent DFT (TDDFT) calculations, and the results were compared with experimental observations. These dyes were used effectively as sensitizers in DSSCs after being absorbed on surface of nanocrystalline TiO 2 . The incident photo-to-current conversion efficiency (IPCE) spectra of the para isomers are broader than that of the corresponding meta isomers, and the short-circuit current density ( J sc ) values of the former is also higher than the latter. Dyes of series A exhibited overall conversion efficiencies of 1.27–4.12%, depending on the relative values of J sc , under AM 1.5 G irradiation (100 mW cm −2 ). For dyes of series B, the para isomers showed overall better performance than the meta isomers, i.e., higher values for all three parameters J sc , V oc (open-circuit voltage), and ff (fill factor), thus led to a higher conversion efficiency.

In the paper, the mixing property of ℤ2 subshift of finite type (SFT) is studied, some checkable conditions are provided to examine the property of mixing. Once the mixing property is checked, a class of examples can be found to show it possesses an entropy conjugacy property proposed in [Quas & Trow, 2000]. Finally, we construct an example of two shift spaces X and Y that are entropy conjugate but not conjugate.

In this study, we employed Morlet wavelet, sample entropy, and fractal dimension on EEG and EMG signal to extract the feature of physical fatigue in the exercise. The result may be helpful for rehabilitation in effectiveness evaluation. Twenty healthy subjects participated in cycling exercise, and their physiological signals, including EEG, EMG, and ECG were recorded. In addition, we recorded subjects' feeling of fatigue since each subject has different physical strength and tolerance of non-stopping exercise. Signals in different stages, namely, resting, early, middle and late stages of exercising, were analyzed. ECG signal was used to categorize subjects into two groups, namely, moderate fatigue and severe fatigue. In EEG results, the averaged power, sample entropy, and fractal dimension of signals indicated that resting stages before and after the exercise were distinct from exercising stage. In severe fatigue, the averaged power within each frequency band of EEG increased with the duration of exercise whereas the power ratio, denoted by (theta+ alpha)/ beta, decreased gradually from the beginning of exercise until the resting after exercise. In addition, the EEG (C3) results of SE complexity ratio and FD complexity ratio decreased gradually from resting to last session of exercise in the moderate fatigue whereas in severe fatigue these ratios increased at the late exercising stage. Our results demonstrate that different patterns between moderate fatigue and severe fatigue can be effectively extracted by using the proposed methods.

Background: Despite a long history of safe use and the incorporation of probiotics into current therapeutic guidelines, the ability of yogurt and its probiotics to colonize the gastrointestinal tract, the appropriate mode of administration in order to maximize probiotic efficacy remain uncertain. Aim: To determine the effect of daily probiotic supplementation of Lactobacillus acidophilus La5 (La5) and Bifidobacterium animalis subsp lactis BB12 (BB12) from capsules and the whole food (yogurt) form, on faecal counts of La5, BB12, and total Bifidobacteria. Methods: Following a 3-week washout period, 156 men and women over 55 y were randomized to a 6-week double-blinded parallel study. The four intervention groups were: A) probiotic yogurt plus probiotic capsules; B) probiotic yogurt plus placebo capsules; C) control milk plus probiotic capsules; and D) control milk plus placebo capsules. Results are presented as the median (IQR) number of bacteria per g feces. Results: When compared to control milk, probioti...

Since authentication is the key to access control security in Internet access for every user, therefore, how to verify a user is who he claimed to be is a very important requirement in Internet security. In some situations, users need to be re-authenticated to make sure that they are still actively engaged in real time interaction. For instance, people will be notified to dial to a specific server phone number to reconfirm his identity again before re-login using their account ID and passwords pairs. This approach has been adopted by many online game servers. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach for re-authentication protocol using personalized information with CAPTCHA.

A series of organic dyes were prepared that displayed remarkable solar-to-energy conversion efficiencies in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). These dyes are composed of a 4-tert- butylphenylamine donor group (D), a cyanoacrylic-acid acceptor group (A), and a phenylene-thiophene-phenylene (PSP) spacer group, forming a D-p-A system. A dye containing a bulky tert- butylphenylene-substituted carbazole (CB) donor group showed the highest performance, with an overall conver- sion efficiency of 6.70 %. The perfor- mance of the device was correlated to the structural features of the donor groups; that is, the presence of a tert- butyl group can not only enhance the electron-donating ability of the donor, but can also suppress intermolecular aggregation. A typical device made with the CB-PSP dye afforded a maxi- mum photon-to-current conversion ef- ficiency (IPCE) of 80 % in the region 400-480 nm, a short-circuit photocur- rent density Jsc = 14.63 mA cm 2 ,a n open-circuit photovoltage Voc = 0.685 V, and a fill factor FF = 0.67. When che- nodeoxycholic acid (CDCA) was used as a co-absorbent, the open-circuit volt- age of CB-PSP was elevated signifi- cantly, yet the overall performance de- creased by 16-18 %. This result indicat- ed that the presence of 4-tert-butyl- phenyl substituents can effectively in- hibit self-aggregation, even without CDCA.

The influence of the cathode electrode on the characteristics of pentacene/perylene derivatives based organic solar cells was analysed by means of absorption, photoluminescence, and X-ray spectroscopies. We report the characteristics of a series of organic solar cells fabricated with Al, Ag, and Au electrodes for the interface between metals and organic semiconductors, which play a central role in the physics of organic solar cells. Donor and acceptor layers of a solar cell were pentacene and N,N'-dioctyl-3,4,9,10-perylenetetracarboxylic diimide (PTCDI-8C) and N,N'-ditridecyl-3,4,9,10-perylene-tetracarboxylic diimide (PTCDI-13C) respectively. Two organic solar cells with pentacene/PTCDI-8C and pentacene/PTCDI-13C heterojunctions as active layers were fabricated to compare the influence of power conversion efficiency among perylene derivatives with various numbers of carbon molecules by means of J-V measurements. Under the sunlight simulator with an AM1.5G filter and power of 100 mW/cm 2 , the solar cells of the pentacene/PTCDI-13C heterojunction with the Ag cathode had J-V characteristics of short-circuit current density of 0.415 mA/cm 2 , open-circuit voltage of 0.413 V, fill factor of 0.55, and power conversion efficiency of 0.1%, which were better than those of the pentacene/PTCDI-8C heterojunction. Moreover, according to the thin film analysis, the PTCDI-13C thin film's excitons at the interface of the heterojunction for dissociation were more, and the probability of radiative recombination of the electron-hole pair was less than for the PTCDI-8C. The PTCDI-13C thin-film possessed better carrier mobility than PTCDI-8C. Therefore, we could conclude that the factors mentioned above are keys to the pentacene/PTCDI-13C-based solar cells' better power conversion efficiency. The carrier transportation mechanism of these solar cells is discussed clearly.

Blue phase liquid crystal displays (BPLCDs) have attracted considerable attention in recent years because of its many advantages. However, BPLCDs exhibit narrow temperature range, high driving voltage, and tough process. In our works, polymer-stabilized technology using newly optimized BPLC material was applied to enlarge BP temperature range. In order to overcome high driving voltage, 2D1G design was used to apply conventional source driver IC for cost. Furthermore, novel groove cell structure which could gain more effective electric field without adding special masks for the groove was successfully implemented. Finally, 10-inch BPLCDs was demonstrated by optimization of ODF process.