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Cross-lingual text summarization is a highly desired service for overseas report editing tasks and is formulated in a distributed application to facilitate the cooperation of editors. The multilanguage pre-trained language model (MPLM) can generate high-quality cross-lingual text summaries with simple fine-tuning. However, the MPLM does not adapt to complex variations, like the word order and tense in different languages. When the model performs on these languages with separate syntactic structures and vocabulary morphologies, it will lead to the low-level quality of the cross-lingual summary. The matter worsens when the cross-lingual summarization datasets are low-resource. We use a knowledge distillation framework for the cross-lingual summarization task to address the above issues. By learning the monolingual teacher model, the cross-lingual student model can effectively capture the differences between languages. Since the teacher and student models generate summaries in two languages, their representations lie on different vector spaces. In order to construct representation relationships across languages, we further propose a similarity metric, which is based on bidirectional semantic alignment, to map different language representations to the same space. In order to improve the quality of cross-lingual summaries further, we use contrastive learning to make the student model focus on the differentials among languages. Contrastive learning can enhance the ability of the similarity metric for bidirectional semantic alignment. Our experiments show that our approach is competitive in low-resource scenarios on cross-language summarization datasets in pairs of distant languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of combined arsenic and antibiotics pollution in the environment has recently gained more attention. In this study, a new approach to eliminate tetracycline antibiotics (TCs) from water, via the fern speciesPteris vittata(L.), an arsenic hyperaccumulator, was investigated. The encouraging results showed that more than half of the TCs could be removed from the water solution (with the starting concentration of TCs about 1.0 mg kg−1respectively) after one day of treatment. No TCs (less than 0.01 mg kg−1) were detected in the solution after five days of treatment. The results showed thatPteris vittatahas high ability to eliminate TCs, which makes it suitable for practical application. Further research found that TCs concentrations were very low in both the roots and the pinnae ofPteris vittata, which indicates that accumulation in the fronds is not the main removal mechanism and that degradation in the fronds might be the main cause. Present results provide a feasible method for simultaneous removal of arsenic and TCs from livestock-polluted wastewater. However, more research work should be done before any real-world application is made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Evidence proved that gestational ozone (O 3 ) exposure can increase the risk of neonatal adverse respiratory outcomes, but offspring asthma is unclear., Objective: This study aimed to investigate whether gestational O 3 exposure could exacerbate offspring asthma, and to research the differences in effects of O 3 exposure at different gestational periods on offspring asthma., Methods: The pregnant ICR mice were randomly grouped and were administered O 3 (air as control) at gestational day (GD) 1-6, 7-12, and 13-18, respectively. The pups aged 2-4 weeks were treated with ovalbumin (OVA) to establish a model of early life asthma. Asthma characteristics such as pulmonary inflammation, goblet cell proliferation, airway remodeling, OVA-specific immunoglobulin (Ig) E secretion and cytokines were examined., Results: OVA sensitization and challenge successfully induced asthma in offspring. Compared with the air control, pulmonary inflammation infiltration, mucous secretion, the concentration of OVA-specific IgE, the level of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, and T helper (Th) 2-skewed response were significantly exacerbated when O 3 exposure at GD13-18 following inhaling OVA, while pulmonary inflammatory infiltration, mucus secretion, and Th2-skewed response were not significantly changed when O 3 exposure at both GD1-6 and GD7-12. What's more, the above indicators in asthmatic offspring due to O 3 exposure at GD13-18 were more severe than at GD1-6 and GD7-12. Interestingly, the signs of asthma only appeared in the offspring after OVA inhalation. When offspring were not treated with OVA, the prenatal O 3 exposure alone did not lead to asthmatic reactions in offspring. In addition, O 3 exposure at GD13-18 markedly increased the number of neutrophils and macrophages in Bronchoalveolar Lavage Fluid (BALF) of asthmatic offspring, and significantly exacerbated Th2 immune imbalance in asthmatic offspring, but had no effect on Th17 immune imbalance., Conclusion: Exposure to O 3 during pregnancy aggravated asthma in offspring, in which the third trimester is the most sensitive window., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background: Accumulating epidemiological studies showed that prenatal and early life exposure to ambient air pollution was important contributor to the development of childhood asthma. However, the effects and mechanisms of prenatal exposure to ozone (O 3 ), a type of ambient air pollution, on the progression of asthma in offspring remain unclear., Objective: This study aimed to determine the effects and mechanism of asthma in offspring after prenatal O 3 exposure., Methods: Pregnant BALB/c mice were exposed to O 3 or air on gestational days (GDs) 13-18. Their offspring were sensitized and challenged to ovalbumin (OVA) to establish asthma model, and the asthma features were evaluated. The splenic natural killer (NK) cells in the offspring were measured to explore the mechanism on the effects of asthma in the offspring. The responses of the pregnant mice and dams after O 3 exposure were evaluated., Results: Airway inflammation, mucus secretion, OVA-specific immunoglobulin (Ig) E, T helper (Th) 2-skewed response, the frequency of CD3ε - CD49b + splenic NK cells, the expression of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, and IL (interleukin)-17 were significantly exacerbated in the OVA-induced asthma offspring after prenatal O 3 exposure. In addition, airway inflammation, a lower number of CD3ε - CD49b + splenic NK cells, and systemic oxidative stress were caused at the end of pregnancy after O 3 exposure, which did not recover at the end of lactation for the first two responses., Conclusions: Prenatal O 3 exposure increased the severity of OVA-induced asthma in the offspring, which might be directly induced by CD3ε - CD49b + splenic NK cells in the offspring and indirectly related to the damaged maternal immune system., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)