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Along with the rapid global development, the course load of primary and secondary school students increases proportionally as well as the time input of students on their studies. The workload from school and the after-school tutoring burden the students at the compulsory education stage just to gain better resources for future education. Thus, they lose a significant amount of their time which is supposed to be an opportunity for them to pursue their interests and discover their potential. More seriously, the overwhelming workload may also significantly affect their physical and mental health. Moreover, this “exploitation” of students can socially stimulate educational involution as well, decreasing fertility desire due to the difficulty of raising children. Under this background, the Chinese government issued the Double Burden Reduction Policy to reduce students' workload from school and outside studying. The policy aims to cool down and avoid overheated social involution through the partial closure of out-school tutoring as a primary means. This paper analyzes these existing short-term effects and gives probable predictions of long-term impacts.

Fungal pathogens represent an expanding global health threat for which treatment options are limited. Self-splicing group II introns have emerged as promising drug targets, but their development has been limited by a lack of information on their distribution and architecture in pathogenic fungi. To meet this challenge, we developed a bioinformatic workflow for scanning sequence data to identify unique RNA structural signatures within group II introns. Using this approach, we discovered a set of ubiquitous introns within thermally dimorphic fungi (genera of Blastomyces, Coccidioides and Histoplasma). These introns are the most biochemically reactive group II introns ever reported, and they self-splice rapidly under near-physiological conditions without protein cofactors. Moreover, we demonstrated the small molecule targetability of these introns by showing that they can be inhibited by the FDA-approved drug mitoxantrone in vitro. Taken together, our results highlight the utility of structure-based informatic searches for identifying riboregulatory elements in pathogens, revealing a striking diversity of reactive self-splicing introns with great promise as antifungal drug targets.

Small molecule targeting of self-splicing RNAs like group I and II introns has been limited in part by the lack of a universal high-throughput screening platform for studies of splicing inhibition and kinetics. Here, we present the development of a molecular beacon assay for monitoring the accumulation of spliced exons during RNA splicing reactions. In this case, we applied it to the autocatalyzed reaction of the H.c.LSU group II intron found in the mitochondria of the pathogenic dimorphic fungus Histoplasma capsulatum. We find that a molecular beacon with the loop length of 18 nucleotides selectively recognizes ligated exons formed during self-splicing and exhibits high fluorescent signal upon binding of its target. We demonstrate that the fluorescent assay using molecular beacons can be successfully applied to kinetic characterization of the splicing reaction and determination of inhibition constants for small molecules. The results presented herein offer support for a molecular beacon approach to identifying small molecule inhibitors of intron splicing.

A series of bimetallic Ni–Co catalysts supported on Mn–Al oxide with different Ni/Co molar ratios were synthesized using a sol–gel method and applied for CO hydrogenation to higher alcohols. The physical and chemical properties of the as-prepared catalysts were investigated by various characterization methods such as XRD, N2 adsorption/desorption, H2-TPR, TEM, XPS, CO-TPD, H2-TPD, and CO-TPSR. The results indicated that a stronger interaction between Ni and Co ions led to the formation of a Ni–Co alloy in the reduced catalysts, and CO conversion and alcohol selectivity changed depending on the Ni/Co molar ratio that significantly influenced the properties of the catalysts. The appropriate Ni/Co molar ratio can improve the reducibility, increase the amount of non-dissociated CO on the catalyst surface for CO insertion, and enhance the catalytic performance for higher alcohol synthesis. In particular, a Ni/Co molar ratio of 5/3 was found to be the most suitable for the physical–chemical and catalytic properties of the bimetallic Ni–Co catalysts for CO hydrogenation to higher alcohols.

Eutectic Gallium-Indium (EGaIn) is a promising technique to fabricate self-assembled monolayers (SAMs)-based molecular devices. However, several abnormal signals had been reported in previous measurements on the as-fabricated devices, like the offset of zero-bias current and others. To date, the limited study has been taken to explore the origin of the offset, which prevents the understanding of electrical transport through large-area molecular tunneling junctions, and hinders the development of high-performance devices. To explore the offset of zero-bias current, we built a new EGaIn automatic instrument platform, which allowed a systematic study on the electrical behavior of SAMs of n-alkanethiolate (n = 14, 16, 18). The measurements showed that the ambient water affected charge transport through as-fabricated molecular junctions. With the presence of water, a primary cell was established at the interface between SAMs and EGaIn/GaOx, which generated an internal potential and caused the offset of zero-bias current when the geometry contact area of the molecular junction is smaller than 600 μm2.

A green approach for the generation of β-keto sulfones through a reaction of aryldiazonium tetrafluoroborates, sulfur dioxide, with silyl enol ether under catalyst-free and additive-free conditions is realized. This reaction proceeds efficiently at room temperature, and goes to completion in half an hour. During the reaction process, aryldiazonium tetrafluoroborate would react with DABCO.(SO2)2 to provide sulfonyl radical as the key intermediate, which would initiate the transformation. Oxidants or metal catalysts are avoided, and the presence of DABCO plays an important role in the reaction as well.