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Variation in the rate at which humans age may be rooted in early life events acting through genomic regions that are influenced by such events and subsequently are related to health phenotypes in later life. The parent-of-origin-effect (POE)-regulated methylome includes regions either enriched for genetically controlled imprinting effects (the typical type of POE) or atypical POE introduced by environmental effects associated with parents. This part of the methylome is heavily influenced by early life events, making it a potential route connecting early environmental exposures, the epigenome and the rate of aging. Here, we aim to test the association of POE-influenced methylation of CpG dinucleotides (POE-CpG sites) with early and later environmental exposures and subsequently with health-related phenotypes and adult aging phenotypes. We do this by performing phenome-wide association analyses of the POE-influenced methylome using a large family-based population cohort (GS:SFHS, Ndiscovery=5,087, Nreplication=4,450). At the single CpG level, 92 associations of POE-CpGs with phenotypic variation were identified and replicated. Most of the associations were contributed by POE-CpGs belonging to the atypical class and the most strongly enriched associations were with aging (DNAmTL acceleration), intelligence and parental (maternal) smoking exposure phenotypes. We further found that a proportion of the atypical-POE-CpGs formed co-methylation networks (modules) which are associated with these phenotypes, with one of the aging-associated modules displaying increased internal module connectivity (strength of methylation correlation across constituent CpGs) with age. Atypical POE-CpGs also displayed high levels of methylation heterogeneity and epigenetic drift (i.e. information loss with age) and a strong correlation with CpGs contained within epigenetic clocks. These results identified associations between the atypical-POE-influenced methylome and aging and provided new evidence for the “early development of origin” hypothesis for aging in humans.

While the intrinsic safety and capacity merits of Li3VO4 endow it with great promising in LIBs, the moderate lifespan under high-rate hinders its practical application. Here, we demonstrate for the...

Lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries have attracted extensive attention along with the urgent increasing demand for energy storage owing to the high theoretical specific capacity and energy density, abundant reserves and low cost of sulfur. However, the practical application of Li-S batteries is still impeded due to the low utilization of sulfur and serious shuttle-effect of lithium polysulfides (LiPSs). Here, we fabricated the porous honeycomb-like C3N4 (PHCN) through a hard template method. As a polar material, graphitic C3N4 has abundant nitrogen content (∼58%), which can provide enough active sites to mitigate shuttle-effect, and then conductive reduced graphene oxide (rGO) was introduced to combine with PHCN to form PHCN/rGO composite in order to improve the utilization efficiency of sulfur. After sulfur loading, the PHCN/rGO/S cathode exhibited an initial discharge capacity of 1,061.1 mA h g−1 at 0.2 C and outstanding rate performance at high current density of 5 C (495.1 mA h g−1), and also retained 519 mA h g−1 after 400 cycles at 1 C. Even at high sulfur loading (4.3 mg cm−2), the capacity fade rate was only 0.16% per cycle at 0.5 C for 200 cycles. The above results de monstrate that the special design of PHCN/rGO composite as sulfur host has high potential application for Li-S rechargeable batteries.

Intertemporal choices are decisions with consequences in multiple time periods and constitute a significant part of social cognition. The shared neuropathological characteristics of patients with schizophrenia and their siblings might express intermediate phenotypes in behavior that could be used to further characterize the illness. Schizophrenic patients, unaffected siblings, and healthy controls underwent a computerized version of the "Intertemporal Choice Task". All participants could choose between sooner-smaller (SS) and later-larger (LL) options in now-trials and in not-now-trials. Subjects also underwent a battery of cognitive neuropsychological assessment. Our results indicated that schizophrenic patients and unaffected siblings both had a tendency to choose LL options in now-trials or not-now-trials compared to healthy controls. Schizophrenic patients had significantly lower scores in several cognitive tasks, including MoCA, attention, executive functions, and information processing when compared with the other two groups. Moreover, within the schizophrenic patient group, significant correlations were found between intertemporal decision-making performance and executive function. The present study showed that both schizophrenic patients and unaffected siblings preferred to choose larger-delayed rewards during intertemporal decision-making, which may result from frontal-striatal and frontal-parietal network dysfunction. Their intertemporal decision-making performance was associated with executive function performance.

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are a core symptom of schizophrenia, and resistant to antipsychotic medication in a substantial proportion of patients. This study aimed to investigate the neural correlates of AVHs in schizophrenia patients and its response to a modified continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) by transcranial magnetic stimulation. In a cross-sectional experiment, resting-state functional magnetic resonance images were collected from 31 AVH schizophrenia patients, 26 non-AVH schizophrenia patients, and 33 sex-/age-matched healthy controls (HCs). Functional connectivity strength (FCS) maps were compared among groups by 1-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). In a longitudinal experiment, 16 and 11 AVH patients received real and sham cTBS treatment for 15 days, respectively. Notably, this was not a randomized control trail. Changes in AVH and FCS were analyzed by 2-way ANOVA and 2-sample t-test, respectively. In the cross-sectional experiment, comparison of FCS maps identified 8 clusters among groups, but only one cluster (in left cerebellum) differed significantly in AVH patients compared to both HCs and non-AVH patients. In the longitudinal experiment, the real cTBS group showed a greater improvement in symptoms and a larger FCS decrease in left cerebellum than the sham group. Pearson’s correlation analysis indicated that baseline FCS of the overlapping cerebellum cluster (between the cross-sectional and longitudinal findings) was negatively correlated with symptom improvement in the real treatment group. These findings emphasize the role of the left cerebellum in both the pathophysiology and clinical treatment of AVHs in schizophrenia patients.

Because of the interference of angular and linear vibration in-moving initial alignment, information of the gravity and rotational angular velocity of the earth can't be separated from the measurement of the gyros and accelerometers to calculate the attitude. With the information of position from GPS, this paper takes inertial frame as computing reference to guarantee the accuracy of initial alignment direction cosine matrix. Ulteriorly, in-moving initial alignment is converted to the Wahba's problem (attitude determination based on measurement vector), and a new q-method recursive algorithm with memory exponential fading factor is proposed for this. Finally, the results of tests prove that the proposed method is of stronger robustness, higher alignment accuracy and faster convergence than the traditional method.

To avoid the problems caused by complex sea conditions, like high costs, ships passive movement could not be controlled that brought by the ship experiment, in this paper, a simulated ship motion model system is developed to resolve this problem, which improved the reusability and reduced the actual cost. Six degrees of freedom movement mathematical model and sea state interference model are established based on existing research of ship space motion model. Add the real device error to the raw data of the inertial devices which is obtained by the proposed model, then calculate it and take it as the benchmark information to evaluate attitude precision of the inertial navigation system that moved with the three-axes turntable. Considering with real work situation of inertial devices, detailed design and realization method are provided by the proposed model, which has functions like data dynamic real-time display, output, storage, and evaluate precision of inertial navigation system. So it has engineering and practical application significance.