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Abstract Background Childhood trauma (CT) is a major risk factor for psychiatric disorders. Emotional and cognitive functions are often affected in many psychiatric conditions, and these functions are mediated by the limbic system. However, previous research has primarily focused on patient populations. Therefore, we aim to examine the impact of CT on the limbic brain structure in healthy individuals. Methods We enrolled 48 individuals in health, evenly split into two groups: 24 healthy participants with CT (HP-CT) and 24 healthy participants without CT (HP-nCT). They underwent scale assessments and MRI data acquisition. Comparisons between the two groups were performed after subcortical subregion volume segmentation using FreeSufer. Lastly, we examined correlations between volume changes and scale scores. Results We found that HP-CT group had smaller volumes in several subregions of the hippocampus, amygdala, and cortical limbic structures, including the subiculum (Sub) head and body, cornu ammonis (CA)1 head, molecular layer (ML) head, granule cell layer of the dentate gyrus (GC-ML-DG) body, CA4 body, fimbria, hippocampus-amygdala transition area (HATA), whole hippocampus head and body, whole hippocampus, basal nucleus (Ba), accessory basal nucleus (AB), cortico-amygdaloid transition area (CAT), paralaminar nucleus (PL) of the left hemisphere; and hippocampal tail, presubiculum (PreSub) body, and basal forebrain of the right hemisphere. Volume changes in the CA4 body and GC-ML-DG body were correlated with sexual abuse. Changes in the volume of the right basal forebrain were linked to emotional neglect. However, these findings were not significant after correction for multiple comparisons. Conclusion CT impacts multiple structures of the limbic system, including the hippocampus, and amygdala. This also suggests that region-specific changes within the limbic system can serve as clinical biomarkers supporting cross-diagnostic psychiatric illnesses.

Abstract Whether small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are involved in the regulation of liver cancer stem cells (CSCs) self-renewal and serve as therapeutic targets remains largely unclear. Here we show that a functional snoRNA (SNORD88B) is robustly expressed in Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tumors and liver CSCs. SNORD88B deficiency abolishes the self-renewal of liver CSCs and hepatocarcinogenesis. Mechanistically, SNORD88B anchors WRN in the nucleolus, promoting XRCC5 interacts with STK4 promoter to suppress its transcription, leading to inactivation of Hippo signaling. Moreover, low expression of STK4 and high expression of XRCC5 are positively correlated with HCC poor prognosis. Additionally, snord88b knockout suppresses mouse liver tumorigenesis. Notably, co-administration of SNORD88B antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) with MST1 agonist adapalene (ADA) exert synergistic antitumor effects and increase overall murine survival. Our findings delineate that SNORD88B drives self-renewal of liver CSCs and accelerates HCC tumorigenesis via non-canonical mechanism, providing potential targets for liver cancer therapy by eliminating liver CSCs.

Purpose: This study highlights the feasibility of femtosecond laser-assisted large-diameter lamellar corneal-limbal keratoplasty and its efficacy in the treatment of ocular surface failure caused by bilateral ocular chemical injury. Observations: The series included 3 patients with ocular surface failure caused by bilateral ocular chemical burns. After dissection of the host cornea, a femtosecond laser-assisted large-diameter lamellar corneoscleral button, with varying thickness of 250–400 μm, was sutured to the recipient bed. Postoperatively, patients were maintained on topical corticosteroids drops and systemic immunosuppression. Patients were followed up for a minimum of 16 months. The preoperative best corrected visual acuity was counting fingers, hand motions, and hand motions respectively. Postoperatively, the preoperative best corrected visual acuity reached 20/50, 20/50 and 20/40 at the last follow-up, respectively. A stable ocular surface was achieved in all but one eye, due to the cessation of immunosuppressive drugs. Postoperative anterior segment optical coherence tomography revealed well apposed graft interface in all cases. Conclusions and importance: Compared with conventional techniques, femtosecond laser is useful to create varying thickness corneoscleral graft to rehabilitate ocular surface and visual acuity in patients with bilateral ocular chemical burns.

In order to realize effective monitoring of Zhixincun landslide, this paper selected 27 sentinel-1A data in 2017, and conducted deformation monitoring of Zhixincun landslide based on small baseline radar interferometry technology (SBAS-InSAR), and analyzed its temporal evolution situation. Using ALOS-2 data from 2016 and 2017, differential radar interferometry (D-InSAR) was used to monitor the characteristics of the landslide variant. SBAS-InSAR monitors the temporal evolution situation of landslide deformation, while D-InSAR mainly monitors the deformation of specific landslide shape and variation. Moreover, the penetration of L-band ALOS-2 data is stronger than that of C-band sentinel-1A data, which can obtain more complete interference information. The monitoring results of both can be cross-verified. Improve the reliability of the results. The SBAS-InSAR monitoring results showed that the slope end of the landslide catchment area in Zhixincun had subsidence during the monitoring period, and the surface subsidence at the landslide end reached 12.47mm from July 5 to July 29, with an average subsidence rate of 2.88mm/a during the monitoring period. Uplift occurred in the threatened residential areas in the valley, with an average cumulative uplift of 19.59mm on December 8 and an average uplift rate of 19.99mm/a during the monitoring period. The D-InSAR results showed that there were five major deformations on the slope of Zhixincun landslide catchment area. The largest deformations with an area of 17 973m2 were located on the west side of the slope, and the most unstable deformations were located on the east side of the slope. The average cumulative shape variable reached 49.9mm during the monitoring period. Both monitoring methods showed that the threat of landslide disaster mainly came from the west slope with poor vegetation cover, and the rainy season was the key period of landslide disaster prevention and control in Zhixincun.

Abstract With the rapid application of consortium chains, supervising these systems has become a challenge for governments. The centralized model fails to deliver supervision services that are both open and transparent. Given the benefits of decentralization, non‐tampering, and traceability offered by blockchains, researchers propose the concept of ‘governing the chain by chain’, which involves supervising multiple consortium chains by constructing a blockchain. Under this idea, the cross‐chain scheme becomes the key to achieving excellent supervision. Existing studies have shortcomings and cannot meet the requirements of universality, security, and efficiency in cross‐chain supervision scenarios. Aiming at the challenges, we propose ChainKeeper, a cross‐chain scheme for governing the chain by chain. The innovation of our work lies in three points. First, a modular node proxy program is designed to adapt to various implementations of consortium chains. Second, a verifiable node random selection method is put forward to improve the throughput of cross‐chain data transmission. Finally, a verifiable identity threshold signature method is proposed to prevent the cheating behavior of malicious nodes. To verify the universality of ChainKeeper, we built a prototype system on three types of consortium chains. The experimental results show that ChainKeeper can achieve high throughput, outperforming two state‐of‐the‐art cross‐chain schemes.

Preserving the privacy of the ever-increasing multimedia data on the cloud while providing accurate and fast retrieval services has become a hot topic in information security. However, existing relevant schemes still have significant room for improvement in accuracy and speed. Therefore, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving image–text retrieval scheme called PITR. To enhance model performance with minimal parameter training, we freeze all parameters of a multimodal pre-trained model and incorporate trainable modules along with either a general adapter or a specialized adapter, which are used to enhance the model’s ability to perform zero-shot image classification and cross-modal retrieval in general or specialized datasets, respectively. To preserve the privacy of outsourced data on the cloud and the privacy of the user’s retrieval process, we employ asymmetric scalar-product-preserving encryption technology suitable for inner product calculation, and we employ distributed index storage technology and construct a two-level security model. We construct a hierarchical index structure to speed up query matching among massive high-dimensional index vectors. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme can provide users with secure, accurate, fast cross-modal retrieval service while preserving data privacy.

Artificial organelles can potentially be used support cellular functions, but there is a trade-off between cellular uptake and cellular retention. Here, the authors report the dynamic assembly of DNA-ceria-based artificial peroxisomes in cells, and show they can be used to reduce intracellular ROS.

Currently, undetectable damage to workers and factory products is caused by the large number of oily fine particles present in the industrial environment. Previous studies have shown that different intensities of sound waves can promote the coalescence of fine particles, and the combination of water vapor condensation can further enhance the effect of acoustic coalescence. However, the research on acoustic coalescence is not extensive enough at present, especially research on the mechanism of the coalescence and growth of oily fine particles under acoustic and water vapor complex fields, which is even less studied. This paper focused on summarizing domestic and foreign research results on the interaction mechanism of acoustic convergence on particles and the agglomeration and growth of particles under the action of acoustic convergence and combined water vapor condensation, so as to explore the technical path of using acoustic convergence and combined water vapor condensation to regulate the size of oily fine particles and improve the purification efficiency in industrial situations. This research has significant scientific significance and application value for industrial environmental control, pollutant emission control, and healthy environment construction.

Abstract Low‐light images suffer from poor visibility and noise. In this paper, a low‐light image enhancement method based on Retinex decomposition is proposed. A pyramid network is first utilized to extract multi‐scale features to improve the quality of Retinex decomposition. Then the decomposed illumination is refined via an adaptive Gamma correction network to handle non‐uniform illumination, while the decomposed reflectance is refined with a lightweight network. Finally, the enhanced image is obtained by element‐wise multiplication between the refined illumination and reflectance components. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over state‐of‐the‐art image enhancement methods.

This study uses the bioecological model of human development to understand the academic career development of Chinese returnees with overseas Ph.D. degrees (CROPs). Focuses are placed on how CROPs engaged in this process through interactions with contexts, which lead to their differentiated and similar career development in Chinese higher education. Using a qualitative approach of semi-structured interviews with 31 CROPs, our findings reveal that CROPs’ academic career development is co-shaped by personal characteristics and multi-layered environmental contexts. The study highlights the dysfunctionality of Chinese higher education system in the context of China’s ambition to build First-class Universities and First-class Subjects (Double First-class), which constrains CROPs’ academic career development. The paper offers important implications for potential CROPs, policy, and future research studies.

Inefficient data transmission has been a development bottleneck of Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs), especially in urban areas. It has been proved that many complex IP-based solutions are difficult to be applied in the highly dynamic and link-interrupted vehicular environment. In recent years, Named Data Networking (NDN) has become the most popular realization of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) for future networks. Its characteristics of multi-source, multi-path and in-network caching are helpful for improving the data transmission in VANETs. However, the bottom layer of vehicles cannot provide multiple interfaces to different domains like the routers in wired networks. Thus interface-based forwarding degenerates into directionless broadcasting with low performance and high overhead. Against this problem, we propose COMPASS, a novel named data transmission protocol for VANETs. Firstly, a dynamic directional interface model is built as the cornerstone of our COMPASS. Secondly, the forwarding strategies are improved for rapid interest dissemination and named data retrieving. Besides, an interface remapping method and the update strategies of Forwarding Information Base (FIB) and Pending Interest Table (PIT) are designed to enhance the robustness in high-mobility environment. Finally, the performance of COMPASS is verified on ndnSIM. Compared with the other three state-of-the-art protocols, COMPASS obtains the highest interest satisfaction ratio and the shortest transmission delay in urban traffic scenarios with restricted communication and storage overhead.

In this work, the amorphous silicon carbide (a-SiC) with low cost and high extinction coefficient was used as the light absorption layer of solar cells, and the photonic crystal (PC) structure and defect structure were introduced. By optimizing the scatterer shape, structural parameters and defect types of photonic crystal, the absorption efficiency of the light absorption layer was further improved. The results show that the photonic crystal absorption layer with vacancy line defect is better than the perfect photonic crystal absorption layer. Meanwhile, the absorption efficiency of the photonic crystal absorption layer significantly improves in the case that the scatterer is an elliptical cylindrical air hole scatterer. When the incident light is in the wavelength range of 0.30~0.80 μm and the absorption layer height is 0.60 μm, the absorption efficiency of the absorption layer can reach 95.60%. Compared with the absorption layer without photonic crystal structure, the absorption layer is increased by 43.24%. At the same time, the absorption layer has little dependence on the incidence angle of sunlight. When the incidence angle is 65°, the absorption efficiency is still higher than 80%.

Abstract Water electrolysis is an emerging energy conversion technology, which is significant for efficient hydrogen (H2) production. Based on the high‐activity transition metal ions and metal alloys of ultrastable bifunctional catalyst, the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) are the key to achieving the energy conversion method by overall water splitting (OWS). This study reports that the Co‐based coordination polymer (ZIF‐67) anchoring on an indium–organic framework (InOF‐1) composite (InOF‐1@ZIF‐67) is treated followed by carbonization and phosphorization to successfully obtain CoP nanoparticles–embedded carbon nanotubes and nitrogen‐doped carbon materials (CoP‐InNC@CNT). As HER and OER electrocatalysts, it is demonstrated that CoP‐InNC@CNT simultaneously exhibit high HER performance (overpotential of 153 mV in 0.5 m H2SO4 and 159 mV in 1.0 m KOH) and OER performance (overpotential of 270 mV in 1.0 m KOH) activities to reach the current density of 10 mA cm−2. In addition, these CoP‐InNC@CNT rods, as a cathode and an anode, can display an excellent OWS performance with η10 = 1.58 V and better stability, which shows the satisfying electrocatalyst for the OWS compared to control materials. This method ensures the tight and uniform growth of the fast nucleating and stable materials on substrate and can be further applied for practical electrochemical reactions.

In this study, we used LS174T cells as a model to investigate the protective effects of icariin and phosphorylated icariin on LPS-induced goblet cell dysfunction. Our results indicated that icariin and phosphorylated icariin increased the cell viability and decreased lactate dehydrogenase activity in LPS-treated LS174T cells. Icariin and phosphorylated icariin attenuated LPS-induced changes in mucin 2 synthesis and secretion. Besides, Icariin and phosphorylated icariin reduced the levels of ROS, MDA, and H 2 O 2 and increased the activity of SOD, GPx, CAT, and T-AOC in LPS-treated LS174T cells. Moreover, the levels of IL-1β, IL-6, IL-8, and TNF-α were reduced in the Icariin and phosphorylated icariin group. Furthermore, Icariin and phosphorylated icariin decreased gene abundance or enzyme activity of Bip, XBP1, GRP78, CHOP, caspase-3, and caspase-4 in LPS-treated LS174T cells. Our data suggest that Icariin and phosphorylated icariin effectively attenuate LPS-induced intestinal goblet cell function damage through regulating oxidative stress, inflammation, apoptosis, and mucin expression.

In the past decade, the rapid popularization of smartphone has provided a promising direction for human activity recognition. Despite identifying a variety of movements without any complicated wearable device, the smartphone-based activity recognition is still deeply affected by the differences between users and phone locations. To overcome this problem, post-process attempts to correct the errors in the classified activity sequence. In consideration of both the activity sequence continuity and the recognition result confidence, we propose WOODY, a novel post-process method that locates and corrects the errors in a classified activity sequence just like Woody Woodpecker pecking holes to catch the pests. In our method, the recognition result is considered as the weighted observation state, and a weighted observation hidden Markov model (WOHMM) is built to model the classified activity sequence. Consequently, a sequence labeling algorithm of the WOHMM is also designed to modify those recognition results with low confidence. To validate the effectiveness of WOODY, we make a series of contrast experiments on two public data sets collected from real scenarios. The results show that WOODY is not only able to improve the recognition accuracy but also significantly enhance the robustness.

This article investigates students' post-secondary education transition processes in Cameroon through the lens of agency. Situated in a country where the higher education participation rate is fairly low, our article explores how students agentically negotiate access to higher education within structural constraints of socio-economic status and gender. Semi-structured interviews with 25 students from two secondary schools in Yaoundé, Cameroon were conducted. The findings reveal that students enacted the four modes of reflexives (Archer, 2003) dynamically and discursively, with specific manifestations of agency relevant to gendered and classed structures in Cameroonian society. In this paper, we propose a person-centred, empowering approach to supporting students in higher education participation. We further confirm the importance of non-universal, contextually-situated employment of Archer's (2003) typology of four reflexive modes.