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This work proposes an ultrasonic leaky waveguide (ULWG) for in-situ structural integrity inspection during fused deposition modeling (FDM). Since the ultrasonic wave propagation speed (m·s−1) is much higher than the deposition speed (mm·s−1), a quasi-static finite element model is first established to simulate the wave propagation during this dynamic process. The amplitude and energy attenuation coefficients (α and ζ) are chosen as the inspection features. Processing parameters including deposition layer thickness and number, inspection frequency, plate thickness and interface impedance are explored. For the first layer printing, a thinner thickness, higher frequency and proper interface impedance will enable a better inspection with high sensitivity. For multilayer printing, the multimodal dispersion curves change continuously and α oscillation is observed due to waveform aliasing that ζ is more reliable. Printing failures such as detachment can be predicted as well from the model established. The ULWG is then integrated into a commercial FDM machine to capture the attenuation coefficients of an “S” shape sample. The poor adhesion, local and global detachments, path planning impact can all be revealed by ζ experimentally. Moreover, being consistent to the simulation, the fluctuation of α in multilayer printing increases, which prevents a further printing evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little information is available on the influence of the compound use of intercropping (IN) and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus (AMF) on Cd accumulation and the expression of Cd transporter genes in two intercropped plants. A pot experiment was conducted to study the influences of IN and AMF-Glomus versiforme on growth and Cd uptake of two intercropped plants-maize and Cd hyperaccumulator Sphagneticola calendulacea, and the expression of Cd transporter genes in maize in Cd-polluted soils. IN, AMF and combined treatments of IN and AMF (IN + AMF) obviously improved biomass, photosynthesis and total antioxidant capacities of two plants. Moreover, single and compound treatments of IN and AMF evidently reduced Cd contents in maize, and the greatest decreases appeared in the compound treatment. However, Cd contents of S. calendulacea in IN, AMF and IN + AMF groups were notably improved. Furthermore, the single and compound treatments of IN and AMF significantly downregulated the expression levels of Nramp1, HMA1, ABCC1 and ABCC10 in roots and leaves, and the largest decreases were observed in the combined treatment. Our work first revealed that the combined use of IN and AMF appeared to have a synergistic effect on decreasing Cd content by downregulating the expression of Cd transporter genes in maize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the discovery of the palladium/norbornene (Pd/NBE)‐catalyzed ortho amination in 2013, escaping the limitation of only yielding tertiary anilines has been a long‐standing challenge. Here, we describe that, by carefully choosing the phosphine ligand and NBE mediator, the installation of a N‐mono‐alkylamino group becomes feasible. The reaction tolerates a wide range of aryl iodide substrates and various N‐mono‐tertiary alkylamine‐derived electrophiles. Both ipso alkenylation and alkynylation can be realized. The synthetic utility of this method is exemplified by the formation of primary amino group via selective deprotection and streamlined access to N‐heterocycles. Preliminary success of installing a bulky N‐secondary alkylamino group and a mechanistic understanding of the decomposition pathways of mono N‐alkylamine electrophiles have been obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the discovery of the palladium/norbornene (Pd/NBE)‐catalyzed ortho amination in 2013, escaping the limitation of only yielding tertiary anilines has been a long‐standing challenge. Here, we describe that, by carefully choosing the phosphine ligand and NBE mediator, the installation of a N‐mono‐alkylamino group becomes feasible. The reaction tolerates a wide range of aryl iodide substrates and various N‐mono‐tertiary alkylamine‐derived electrophiles. Both ipso alkenylation and alkynylation can be realized. The synthetic utility of this method is exemplified by the formation of primary amino group via selective deprotection and streamlined access to N‐heterocycles. Preliminary success of installing a bulky N‐secondary alkylamino group and a mechanistic understanding of the decomposition pathways of mono N‐alkylamine electrophiles have been obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The potential efficacy of metformin in breast cancer (BC) has been hotly discussed but never conclusive. This genetics-based study aimed to evaluate the relationships between metformin targets and BC risk. Methods: Metformin targets from DrugBank and genome-wide association study (GWAS) data from IEU OpenGWAS and FinnGen were used to investigate the breast cancer (BC)-metformin causal link with various Mendelian Randomization (MR) methods (e.g., inverse-variance-weighting). The genetic association between type 2 diabetes (T2D) and the drug target of metformin was also analyzed as a positive control. Sensitivity and pleiotropic tests ensured reliability. Results: The primary targets of metformin are PRKAB1, ETFDH and GPD1L. We found a causal association between PRKAB1 and T2D (odds ratio [OR] 0.959, P = 0.002), but no causal relationship was observed between metformin targets and overall BC risk (PRKAB1: OR 0.990, P = 0.530; ETFDH: OR 0.986, P = 0.592; GPD1L: OR 1.002, P = 0.806). A noteworthy causal relationship was observed between ETFDH and estrogen receptor (ER)-positive BC (OR 0.867, P = 0.018), and between GPD1L and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-negative BC (OR 0.966, P = 0.040). Other group analyses did not yield positive results. Conclusion: The star target of metformin, PRKAB1, does not exhibit a substantial causal association with the risk of BC. Conversely, metformin, acting as an inhibitor of ETFDH and GPD1L, may potentially elevate the likelihood of developing ER-positive BC and HER2-negative BC. Consequently, it is not advisable to employ metformin as a standard supplementary therapy for BC patients without T2D. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, a multi‐event‐triggered (MET) near‐optimal tracking control algorithm is developed for a discrete‐time (DT) nonlinear non‐zero‐sum game (NZSG). Firstly, the iterative dual heuristic dynamic programming (DHP) approach is utilized to obtain the optimal tracking control set. Subsequently, distinct independent triggering conditions are formulated for control inputs to improve the utilization efficiency of resources and ensure that the independence between them and the closed‐loop system has an excellent control performance. Meanwhile, input‐to‐state stability (ISS) is proven for the MET tracking plant. Additionally, neural networks (NNs) are designed in the iterative DHP algorithm to construct the model module, the critic module and the action modules, with aims to identify the unknown system, approximate costate function and estimate optimal tracking control strategy set, respectively. Finally, two numerical experimental simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although MXenes have been synthesized by liquid phase and molten salt etching approaches, it still suffers from sluggish reaction kinetics of removing A species from MAX phases associated with an overlong production time (5–48 h). Here, a minute‐level production approach is developed to produce MXenes (Ti2CClx) by selectively etching MAX phases (Ti2AlC) under metal chloride (ZnCl2) vapor. In this synthetic protocol, metal chloride vapor possesses a very high chemical activity to the interlaminar A metal layers of MAX phases owing to negative Gibbs free energies, accompanied with the fast removal of gaseous A‐containing chlorides in the reaction system. Moreover, some M species can be controllably etched off from the lattice of MX slabs to generate metal vacancies, which have a high reducing ability to implant single‐atom Zn from ZnCl2 vapor. Finally, vacancy‐enriched MXenes are produced after the volatilization of Zn. In this manner, the etching time is less than one‐sixtieth those of liquid phase and molten salt etching approaches. The resultant MXenes can be employed as an efficient platform for implanting single‐atom Pt, showing a low overpotential of 41 mV at a current density of 10 mA cm−2 and a good long‐term stability up to 5000 cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herein, we aimed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of camrelizumab combined with docetaxel and carboplatin as a neoadjuvant treatment for locally advanced oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). Fifty-one patients with OSCC, treated from July 2020 to October 2022, were analyzed. Of them, 41 patients underwent surgery 4–8 weeks after undergoing two cycles of camrelizumab (200 mg IV Q3W) combined with docetaxel (75 mg/m2 IV Q3W) and carboplatin (area under the curve = 5–6 IV Q3W). The primary endpoint was the pathological complete response rate. All 51 patients (100%) experienced treatment-related grades 1–2 adverse events, and 2 patients (3.9%) experienced grade 4 events (including elevated alanine transaminase/aspartate transferase levels and Guillain–Barre syndrome). Fifty patients were evaluated for the treatment efficacy. Of them, 13 achieved complete response, and the objective response rate was 74%. Only 41 patients underwent surgical treatment. The pathological complete response rate was 17.1%, the major pathological response rate was 63.4%, and the R0 resection rate was 100%. Approximately 22% of the patients had tumor regression grades 0. Eight patients (19.5%) developed surgery-related complications. The median follow-up time was 18 months (range: 3–29 months). Four patients experienced disease progression, while four died. The median disease-free survival and overall survival were not reached. Camrelizumab combined with docetaxel and carboplatin is an effective and safe neoadjuvant treatment for locally advanced OSCC. This regimen may afford a potential strategy to treat patients with locally advanced OSCC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the first commercial cryptographic algorithm in China, SM4 algorithm is widely used in data encryption storage and information encryption communication and other fields due to its advantages of simple and easy implementation of algorithm structure, fast encryption and decryption speed and high security. With the variable pipeline stage SM4 encryption and decryption algorithm hardware design and FPGA implementation as the research topic, this study focuses on the performance differences in designs with different pipeline stages. A controllable pipeline stage SM4 encryption and decryption circuit is designed and encapsulated into an IP core with AXI and APB interfaces. Based on XILINX ZYNQ devices, a small SoC is constructed on the XILINX ZYNQ7020 development board, and the designed SM4 IP core is mounted onto the AXI bus for simulating real-world scenarios and conducting performance tests. The correctness of the design functionary is verified by comparing software encryption and decryption data with simulated data. Testing the performance of different pipeline stages helps identify the most suitable pipeline stage number. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is the largest membrane system in eukaryotic cells and is the primary site for the biosynthesis of lipids and carbohydrates, as well as for the folding, assembly, modification, and transport of secreted and integrated membrane proteins. The ER membrane complex (EMC) on the ER membrane is an ER multiprotein complex that affects the quality control of membrane proteins, which is abundant and widely preserved. Its disruption has been found to affect a wide range of processes, including protein and lipid synthesis, organelle communication, endoplasmic reticulum stress, and viral maturation, and may lead to neurodevelopmental disorders and cancer. Therefore, EMC has attracted the attention of many scholars and become a hot field. In this paper, we summarized the main contributions of the research of EMC in the past nearly 15 years, and reviewed the structure and function of EMC as well as its related diseases. We hope this review will promote further progress of research on EMC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psoriasis is an immune-mediated chronic inflammatory skin disease that affects 2% to 3% of the world's population. It is widely assumed that immune cells and cytokines acting together play a crucial part in the pathophysiology of psoriasis by promoting the excessive proliferation of skin keratinocytes and inflammatory infiltration. Interleukins (ILs), as a critical component of cytokines, have been closely associated with the pathogenesis and progression of psoriasis. This review summarizes the current contribution of ILs to psoriasis and describes the role each IL performs in psoriasis. Furthermore, the paper presents the therapeutic effects and application prospects of biologics developed for ILs in clinical treatment and experiments. The study aims to further the research on ILs in the treatment of psoriasis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this paper is to advance the concept of region reaching control for a single robot to the study of region reaching consistency for uncertain fully‐actuated multi‐robot systems formulated by Lagrange dynamics. By introducing a directed network communication topology and utilizing the pinning‐like control methods, a distributed region reaching consensus control strategy is proposed. The desired region shape can be specified by selecting an appropriate potential objective function. A feature of the developed region reaching consensus algorithm is fully distributed, which is also an important generalization of pinning‐like set point tracking scheme based on the typical proportion‐integration‐differentiation control scheme. More importantly, the scope of consistency in this paper can be explicitly defined, which is different from traditional consistency control algorithms. Subsequently, numerical examples are presented to illustrate the performance of the designed controllers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regarding the issue of information freshness in systems that aid in data collection using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a data collection algorithm that is based on freshness and UAV assistance is proposed. Under the limitations of wireless sensor node communication distance and UAV parameters, the optimization problem of minimizing the average spatial correlation age of information (SCAoI) of all nodes in the area is set up. This problem is solved by optimizing the number of clusters, UAV flight trajectories, and the order of data collection from cluster member nodes. The maximum communication distance of the nodes is used as the cluster formation radius, and the maximum-minimum distance clustering algorithm is used to cluster the nodes in the region to obtain the minimum number of clusters. After it has been proven that the trajectory optimization problem in this study is NP-hard, the ant colony algorithm is applied to obtain the minimum flight time and the corresponding trajectory. By using the greedy algorithm to determine the member nodes in the sequence of data collection for a cluster, the instantaneous SCAoI of the UAV arriving at the cluster head is solved. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm in this paper can effectively improve the freshness of data and reduce the average SCAoI of the system compared with the algorithm in the comparative literature, reducing the average SCAoI by about 61%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A quality teacher–student relationship facilitates students' psychological well-being, but the mechanism underlying this relationship remains unclear. To address this issue, we investigated the role of a supportive school climate in the link between teacher–student relationships and college students' psychological well-being. We used a paper-based questionnaire to collect data from 318 students enrolled in three universities in west China, and used Amos 22.0 software to establish a structural equation model. The results indicated there was a significant positive link between teacher–student relationships and students' psychological well-being, and that supportive school climate partially mediated this link. This study extends the conclusions of prior research and provides new insights into how teacher–student relationships affect the psychological well-being of college students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a unified experimental and numerical investigation on the transition from brittle to ductile behavior in a low-porosity sandstone under drained conditions. The experimental results demonstrate a transition in the mechanical behavior from brittle faulting to dilatant ductile flow at room temperature with an increase in effective confining pressure, suggesting that microcracking-controlled local friction is the underlying plastic deformation mechanism. For constitutive modeling, the sandstone is considered as a heterogeneous medium composed of a pores-weakened elastic solid matrix and distributed microcracks. By following a two-step homogenization procedure and irreversible thermodynamics framework, a micromechanics-based elastoplastic damage model incorporating a non-associated local plastic flow rule is formulated, in which the coupling between plasticity, damage and pore pressure is taken into account. In this context, a non-associated macroscopic effective strength criterion as an inherent part of the corresponding model is derived. Originally, a theoretical linear relation between critical state of damage at peak strength and effective confining pressure is established, which is efficient in describing post-peak softening behavior. Comparisons of numerical simulations with experimental data demonstrate that the proposed model effectively reproduces the main features of the sandstone with a brittle-ductile transition. • A transition from brittle to ductile behavior in a saturated low-porosity sandstone is observed. • A non-associated micromechanics-based constitutive model is developed. • A non-associated macroscopic effective strength criterion is derived. • A linear relation between critical damage and effective confining pressure is established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Menaquinone-4(MK-4), the isoform of vitamin K2 in the brain, exerts neuroprotective effects against a variety of central nervous system disorders. This study aimed to demonstrate the anti-ferroptosis effects of MK-4 in neurons after SAH. Methods: A subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) model was prepared by endovascular perforation in mice. In vitro hemoglobin stimulation of primary cortical neurons mimicked SAH. MK-4, Brequinar (BQR, DHODH inhibitor), and Selisistat (SEL, SIRT1 inhibitor) were administered, respectively. Subsequently, WB, immunofluorescence was used to determine protein expression and localization, and transmission electron microscopy was used to observe neuronal mitochondrial structure while other indicators of ferroptosis were measured. Results: MK-4 treatment significantly upregulated the protein levels of DHODH; decreased GSH, PTGS2, NOX1, ROS, and restored mitochondrial membrane potential. Meanwhile, MK-4 upregulated the expression of SIRT1 and promoted its entry into the nucleus. BQR or SEL partially abolished the protective effect of MK-4 on, neurologic function, and ferroptosis. Conclusions: Taken together, our results suggest that MK-4 attenuates ferroptosis after SAH by upregulating DHODH through the activation of SIRT1. SAH: subarachnoid hemorrhage; ROS: reactive oxygen species; MK-4: menaquinone-4; DHODH: dihydroorotate dehydrogenase; SLC7A11: solute carrier family 7 member 11; GPX4: glutathione peroxidase-4; SIRT1: sirtuin 1; CoQ: Coenzyme Q; MDA: malondialdehyde; PLOOH: phospholipid hydroperoxides. [Display omitted] • Menaquinone-4 improves neurologic function and attenuates ferroptosis after SAH. • Menaquinone-4 attenuates ferroptosis after SAH by upregulating DHODH. • Activation of SIRT1 is a potential mechanism for Menaquinone-4 upregulation of DHODH. • Vitamin K2 levels in cerebrospinal fluid of SAH patients was significantly reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electrode is an important component of electrical discharge machining (EDM), playing an important role in machining efficiency, surface quality and geometric accuracy. In this work, a new method combining equal channel angular pressing (ECAP), deep cryogenic treatment (DCT) and aging treatment (AT) was proposed. The ultrafine-grained Cu-0.5%Cr electrode has high strength and high electrical conductivity through this process, so as to improve the machining characteristics in EDM. The surface roughness (Ra), the workpiece corner sharpness (WCS), and the electrode wear rate (EWR) were investigated. The results showed that the treatment of the electrode with 4 passes of ECAP + DCT (12h) + AT (550℃ × 1h) can reduce the EWR and WCS by 63.6% and 49.7%, respectively. It also contributed to the enhancement of electrical conductivity and microhardness of the Cu-0.5%Cr electrode by ECAP + DCT + AT. Meanwhile, it revealed that the processing of the Cu-0.5%Cr electrode resulted in the excellent machined surface quality (Ra was reduced by 53.5%) which was confirmed by the results of the scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The ultrafine-grained Cu-0.5%Cr electrode with an excellent combination of strength and electrical conductivity has an outstanding EDM performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significance: As a new important gas signaling molecule like nitric oxide (NO) and carbon dioxide (CO), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), which can be produced by endogenous H2S-producing enzymes through l-cysteine metabolism in mammalian cells, has attracted wide attention for long. H2S has been proved to play an important regulatory role in numerous physiological and pathophysiological processes. However, the deep mechanisms of those different functions of H2S still remain uncertain. A better understanding of the mechanisms can help us develop novel therapeutic strategies. Recent Advances: H2S can play a regulating role through various mechanisms, such as regulating epigenetic modification, protein expression levels, protein activity, protein localization, redox microenvironment, and interaction with other gas signaling molecules such as NO and CO. In addition to discussing the molecular mechanisms of H2S from the above perspectives, this article will review the regulation of H2S on common signaling pathways in the cells, including the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)/protein kinase B (Akt), mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK), Janus kinase (JAK)/signal transducer, and activator of transcription (STAT) signaling pathway. Critical Issues: Although there are many studies on the mechanism of H2S, little is known about its direct target molecules. This article will also review the existing reports about them. Furthermore, the interaction between direct target molecules of H2S and the downstream signaling pathways involved also needs to be clarified. Future Directions: An in-depth discussion of the mechanism of H2S and the direct target molecules will help us achieving a deeper understanding of the physiological and pathophysiological processes regulated by H2S, and lay a foundation for developing new clinical therapeutic drugs in the future. Innovation: This review focuses on the regulation of H2S on signaling pathways and the direct target molecules of H2S. We also provide details on the underlying mechanisms of H2S functions from the following aspects: epigenetic modification, regulation of protein expression levels, protein activity, protein localization, redox microenvironment, and interaction with other gas signaling molecules such as NO and CO. Further study of the mechanisms underlying H2S will help us better understand the physiological and pathophysiological processes it regulates, and help develop new clinical therapeutic drugs in the future. Antioxid. Redox Signal. 40, 86–109. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sixth-generation wireless systems not only have more demanding communication requirements, they are also expected to have high-precision sensing capabilities and sufficient computing power. Integrated sensing, communication, and computation (ISCC) can meet the above system requirements and save spectrum resources. In this paper, we build a resource allocation and offloading decision problem in an ISCC scenario that makes considerations for user mobility and partial offloading policies. The established problem minimizes the average task cost when given constraints such as the typical sensing failure rate and task completion delay. We use Lyapunov optimization theory to transform the proposed problem and propose a two-level optimization algorithm based on matching theory to offer a solution for the transformed problem. The inner layer obtains the task offloading ratio through theoretical derivation, and the outer layer determines the base station access and channel assignment based on the inner layer results. The simulation results show that the average task cost can be effectively reduced while also guaranteeing high-quality sensing performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chilli pepper is one of the most important and widely cultivated pepper types in China. It has high nutritional and economic value. Capsicum frutescens L. is one of the chilli pepper types in production. In October 2022, a new disease showing blight of the entire chilli pepper plant was observed in Nanchang City, Jiangxi Province. The fungal isolates consistently obtained from the diseased samples were identified as Diaporthe caryae C. M. Tian & Qin Yang based on morphological characteristics, pathogenicity test and phylogenetic analysis of four genes, including internal transcribed spacer region (rDNA‐ITS), translation elongation factor 1‐alpha gene (TEF1), beta‐tubulin gene (TUB2), and calmodulin (CAL). Although other Diaporthe species have been reported as pathogens of peppers previously, to our knowledge, this is the first report of D. caryae causing stem blight of pepper in the world. D. caryae was reported to be able to infect various fruit trees such as kiwifruit, peach, pear, and pecan, resulting in kiwifruit rot, peach constriction canker, pear shoot canker, and pecan dieback, respectively. The host range of D. caryae has expanded from fruit trees to vegetable crops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Achieving robust yet reversible adhesion between hydrogels and diverse substrates is of great importance and technically challenging. A family of phase‐segregated hydrogel adhesives with cooperative energy dissipation is reported. The resultant hydrogels display abundant nano‐aggregates comprising hydrophobic clusters and hydrogen‐bonded nanocrystals for efficient dissipation, and accumulated interfacial physical bonding like hydrogen bonding and hydrophobic interactions for intrinsic adhesion work, thus synergistically leading to super tough yet reversible adhesion. Additionally, the size of nano‐aggregates can be well‐tuned by varying time of solvent exchange followed by dry‐annealing and swelling, thus enabling switchable mechanical robustness and water content as well as unprecedented interfacial toughness exceeding 3300 J m−2 on the polyhydric surfaces. Multifunctional stretchable and pressure sensors with high sensitivity and ionic conductivity are also demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] Nitrate (NO 3 −) is a widespread pollutant in the water environment. Due to its physicochemical properties, such as negative monovalent charge, traditional adsorption treatment processes have low selectivity for NO 3 − removal, resulting in low removal efficiency of NO 3 − by adsorbents in the presence of interfering ions. Therefore, to improve the adsorption selectivity and efficiency of NO 3 −. In this study, we used organosilicon quaternary modified derived nickel–iron layered double hydroxide (NiFe-MLDH/OQAS) for selective removal of NO 3 −. NiFe-MLDH/OQAS has a flowery globular structure, with interconnected nanosheets on the surface providing more adsorption sites for NO 3 −, which improves the adsorption rate and adsorption amount. What's more, the nitrate removal rate of NiFe-MLDH/OQAS only decreased by about 14.36% in the presence of the same concentration of interfering ions, and the maximum adsorption amount reached 61.05 mg/g, showing good selectivity and adsorption amount. Various characterization analyses indicate that the nitrate selectivity of NiFe-MLDH/OQAS is attributed to its unique layer spacing, as well as the abundant functional groups on the material surface. Finally, we demonstrated through experiments that NiFe-MLDH/OQAS has good cyclic regeneration ability and environmental safety. These findings demonstrate the great potential of NiFe-MLDH/OQAS for selective adsorption of NO 3 −. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To compare the safety and effectiveness of robot-assisted partial nephrectomy (RAPN) vs laparoscopic partial nephrectomy (LPN) in the treatment of central renal angiomyolipomas (AMLs). Methods: We retrospectively analyzed the clinical data of 103 patients who were treated with either RAPN or LPN for central AMLs between January 2017 and June 2022. Propensity scores were matched according to sex, age, laterality, body mass index, symptoms, diameter of tumor, location of tumor distribution, R.E.N.A.L score, preoperative hemoglobin, preoperative serum creatinine, preoperative estimated glomerular filtration rate, chronic disease, previous abdominal surgery, preoperative selective arterial embolization, American Society of Anesthesiologists scale, and duration of follow-up, and after matching, perioperative and prognostic data of the two groups were compared. Results: A total of 57 patients underwent RAPN, and 46 patients underwent LPN. Before matching, there were more complex AMLs in the RAPN group, and R.E.N.A.L scores differed between the two groups (10 vs 9, p < 0.001). After matching, the median warm ischemic time in the RAPN group was significantly shorter than that in the LPN group (21.5 minutes vs 28 minutes, p = 0.034), as well as the median time of postoperative mobilization (1 day vs 2 days, p < 0.001). The other indicators were not significantly different between the groups. Conclusions: For central AMLs, both RAPN and LPN were safe and feasible surgical treatments, but RAPN might be associated with shorter warm ischemia time and earlier postoperative mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discrete element simulation model and cutting tests are conducted to investigate the surface damage during the machining of green ZrO2 ceramics. The discrete element simulation model (DEM) is developed based on the macroscopic physical and mechanical properties of the isostatically pressed green ZrO2 ceramics. The validity of the simulation model is verified by cutting tests on green ZrO2 ceramics. The results show that the physical and mechanical properties of the DEM model established by the PFC2D software are consistent with the macroscopic physical and mechanical properties of the green ZrO2 ceramics. The depth of cut, the cutting speed, and the tool rake angles have a large effect on surface/subsurface cracks. The tool rear angle has large effect on the distribution of the peak residual stresses. When the cutting force increases suddenly, the number of cracks produced increases sharply. Smaller cutting force can reduce the number of cracks and surface damage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The parity-time (PT) symmetric magnetic coupling wireless power transfer (MC-WPT) system has received a great deal of attention since it was proposed. Its transmission efficiency has been greatly improved when compared with previous research. The operational amplifier (OA) is a typical construction method for PT symmetric MC-WPT systems. On this basis, to achieve a higher transmission efficiency and a longer effective power transmission distance at the same time, this paper constructs an OA-based tri-coil PT symmetric MC-WPT system. The analytical expressions of its singularity, PT symmetric state, and PT symmetric broken state are obtained. Then a complete set of parameter design criteria for the tri-coil PT symmetric system is derived. The transmission efficiency and resonant frequency of two-coil and tri-coil system are simulated on MATLAB software, and the simulation results are consistent with the theoretical analysis results. Finally, an experimental device is constructed to further verify the correctness of the theory. This paper demonstrates that the effective power transmission distance of the tri-coil PT symmetric MC-WPT system is more than twice that of the two-coil PT symmetric MC-WPT system, which can achieve a good balance between transmission efficiency and transmission distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intrauterine adhesions (IUA), characterized by endometrial fibrosis, is a challenging clinical issue in reproductive medicine. We previously demonstrated that epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and fibrosis of endometrial stromal cells (HESCs) played a vital role in the development of IUA, but the precise pathogenesis remains elucidated. Ferroptosis has now been recognized as a unique form of oxidative cell death, but whether it is involved in endometrial fibrosis remains unknown. In the present study, we performed an RNA-seq of the endometria from 4 severe IUA patients and 4 normal controls. Enrichment analysis and protein-protein interactions (PPIs) network analysis of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were conducted. Immunohistochemistry was used to assess ferroptosis levels and cellular localization. The potential role of ferroptosis for IUA was investigated by in vitro and in vivo experiments. Here, we demonstrated that ferroptosis load is increased in IUA endometria. In vitro experiments showed that erastin-induced ferroptosis promoted EMT and fibrosis in endometrial epithelial cells (P < 0.05), but did not lead to pro-fibrotic differentiation in endometrial stromal cells (HESCs). Cell co-culture experiments showed that erastin-stimulated epithelial cell supernatants promoted fibrosis in HESCs (P < 0.05). In vivo experiments suggested that elevation of ferroptosis level in mice by erastin led to mild endometrial EMT and fibrosis. Meanwhile, the ferroptosis inhibitor Fer-1 significantly ameliorated endometrial fibrosis in a dual-injury IUA murine model. Overall, our findings revealed that ferroptosis may serve as a potential therapeutic target for endometrial fibrosis in IUA. [Display omitted] • Ferroptosis levels were increased in the endometria of IUA patients. • Ferroptosis functioned as a facilitator in EMT and fibrosis of endometrial epithelial cells. • Fer-1 attenuated ferroptosis and ameliorated endometrial fibrosis in IUA experimental model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

C-N bond formation, C-C coupling, palladium catalysis, cascade reaction, 2,6-disubstituted pyrazines Likewise, dehydrogenative dimerization of 1,2-diols with NH SB 3 sb in the presence of Ru catalyst [15] gives rise to symmetrical 2,6-disubstituted pyrazines, albeit accompanied by a mixture of unsymmetrical 2,5-disubstituted pyrazines (Scheme 1 A). Keywords: C-C coupling; C-N bond formation; palladium catalysis; cascade reaction; 2,6-disubstituted pyrazines EN C-C coupling C-N bond formation palladium catalysis cascade reaction 2,6-disubstituted pyrazines 2554 2560 7 07/31/23 20230817 NES 230817 Graph Pyrazines are important N-heterocycles and occur ubiquitously in a wide variety of natural products, [1][2] bioactive agents, [3] agrochemicals, [4] and dyes. [Extracted from the article]

Both the nanoscale helium (He) bubble and grain boundaries (GBs) play important roles in the dynamic mechanical behavior of irradiated nanocrystalline materials. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we study the shock-induced deformation and spallation failure of bicrystal copper with a nanoscale He bubble. Two extreme loading directions (perpendicular or parallel to the GB plane) and various impact velocities (0.5–2.5 km/s) are considered. Our results reveal that the He bubble shows hindrance to the propagation of shock waves at lower impact velocities but will accelerate shock wave propagation at higher impact velocities due to the local compression wave generated by the collapse of the He bubble. The parallel loading direction is found to have a greater effect on He bubble deformation during shock compression. The He bubble will slightly reduce the spall strength of the material at lower impact velocities but has a limited effect on the spallation process, which is dominated by the evolution of the GB. At lower impact velocities, the mechanism of spall damage is dominated by the cleavage fracture along the GB plane for the perpendicular loading condition but dominated by the He bubble expansion and void growth for the parallel loading condition. At higher impact velocities, micro-spallation occurs for both loading conditions, and the effects of GBs and He bubbles can be ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the Internet of things brings exponential growth of wireless traffic, which puts great pressure on the backhaul link. The proactive caching of some contents in the edge device of mobile network can effectively reduce the repeated transmission of the same contents and relieve the burden of the backhaul link. Moreover, the introduction of recommendation mechanisms can reshape user's request and improve cache hit ratio. However, the optimization of recommendation and caching decisions is highly dependent on the users' preference information for files. Here, a joint optimization algorithm of recommendation and caching based on users' preference prediction with multiple base stations cooperative caching is proposed. To improve the caching efficiency, the Deep Crossing model is adopted to predict users' preferences. Under the constraints of cache capacity, recommendation quantity and bandwidth, an optimization problem to minimize the total transmission delay of the system is formulated. Then, the NP‐hardness of the proposed optimization problem is proved and it is decoupled it into three sub‐problems, namely recommendation, user access and caching optimization sub‐problems. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the total transmission delay of the system. we propose a joint optimization algorithm of recommendation and caching based on users' preference prediction with multiple base stations cooperative caching. To improve the caching efficiency, we adopt the Deep Crossing model to predict users' preferences. Under the constraints of cache capacity, recommendation quantity and bandwidth, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the total transmission delay of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a special single‐well test with dual‐screened configuration, dipole flow test with a tracer (DFTT) has been an efficient tool for aquifer parameter interpretation. The tool is excellent for characterizing the vertical distribution of hydraulic conductivity, dispersivity and in situ reaction rate in aquifers. It is noteworthy that the effects of skin and ambient groundwater flow (AGF) on the solute transport, which have been widely investigated in terms of conventional tracer tests, have not been comprehensively studied with respect to DFTT. Meanwhile, it is important to elucidate the potentials of DFTT in identifying the primary skin properties as well as the methods to avoid the AGF effects on DFTT. Consequently, we developed a mathematical model for DFTT accounting for skin and AGF. The results show that a negative skin acts as a preferential pathway for tracer transport and the AGF effects on breakthrough curves (BTCs) can be easily mistaken for reaction. Through extensive mathematical model‐based experiments, the BTCs calculated from the DFTT models with skin effects were categorized into four types, each of which is able to imply a specific kind of skin. Additionally, a new dimensionless parameter ξ′$$ {\xi}^{\prime } $$, composed of injection/extraction rate, hydraulic conductivity, hydraulic gradient of AGF and screen parameters, was defined to quantitatively indicate the AGF effects on the overestimation degree of the in situ first‐order reaction, implying that one can adjust the field parameters of DFTT to keep ξ′$$ {\xi}^{\prime } $$ less than 3.7% to achieve an overestimation error of reaction rate below 50%. Article Impact Statement: The article describes novel modeling applications in aquifer parameter interpretation through vertical circulation well technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The teleoperation of robotic arms is expected to play a key role in dangerous or inaccessible construction workplaces. Most robot arms rely on mechanical designs that are completely different from human arms. It could lead to a risk that certain joints move with undesired poses and cause collisions because of the mismatch between robot mechanical design and human operators' egocentric perception of their own arms. This paper proposes an innovative robotic control method that mimics the human shoulder-arm structure, enabling human operators to teleoperate with unfamiliar robotic arms intuitively. A two-tracker system is used to map human arm motions into a revised robotic inverse kinematics (IK) algorithm called humanlike IK. One tracker controls the end effector of the robot, and the other tracker drives the middle joint of the robot, analogous to how a human moves the arm. A seven-degree-of-freedom robotic arm was repurposed based on the revised IK. A human-subject experiment (n=26) was performed to test the effectiveness of the proposed humanlike IK method in a pipe maintenance task. Results confirmed the performance and functional benefits of the proposed method. It can inspire the design of a new robot teleoperation method for dexterous tasks in construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Splenectomy is an effective treatment for correcting cytopenia caused by hypersplenism secondary to cirrhosis. However, other potential benefits have not been well characterized. In this study, we investigated the value of splenectomy as it relates to improvement in hepatic function, liver regeneration, and health-related quality of life, and their association with baseline characteristics to clarify which patients may benefit the most from splenectomy. Methods: Patients with hypersplenism secondary to cirrhosis treated by splenectomy were retrospectively reviewed. Hepatic function was reflected by hematologic indices and albumin-bilirubin score. Liver volume was measured by imaging software, and quality-of-life was assessed by a 36-question short-form questionnaire. The changes in these three aspects after splenectomy were evaluated in the whole cohort and compared between subgroups. Results: The hepatic function of the patients significantly improved after splenectomy, and this was reflected by elevated serum albumin, shortened prothrombin time, and decreased albumin-bilirubin score. Patients with baseline albumin-bilirubin grade 2 or 3 and age < 56 years showed significantly decreased albumin-bilirubin score after splenectomy, whereas other subgroups did not. Moreover, liver volume increased remarkably after splenectomy in patients with baseline albumin-bilirubin grade 1, but not in those with grade 2 or 3. Significant improvement in quality-of-life occurred in the entire cohort after splenectomy, but more profound improvement was found in patients with albumin-bilirubin grade 2 or 3. Conclusions: Splenectomy improves hepatic function, increases liver volume, and also improves quality-of-life in different subsets of patients with cirrhosis and hypersplenism. Baseline characteristics, such as albumin-bilirubin grade and age, are helpful in estimating the potential benefits of splenectomy for patients before surgery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Fractional gradient direction replaces additional plastic potential. • The FEM implementation of the fractional elastoplastic constitutive model is presented. • The influence of the fractional order on the strain localization is investigated. • Examples are analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the implementation process. The plastic strain localization phenomenon is of critical importance for rock-like materials when undergoing non-homogeneous deformation. This paper presents a fractional plastic framework which is applied to take into account the plastic strain localization of rock-like materials. The novelty of the presented framework lies in the non-coaxial plastic flow that is controlled by the RiemannLiouville (RL) fractional derivative without additional plastic potential. The hardening response is described by a function of the generalized plastic shear strain. The capability of the fractional constitutive model to predict the main mechanical behaviors of rock-like materials is assessed by the conventional triaxial compression test data of Vosges sandstones from the literature. With the help of a MATLAB-based finite element method, several numerical examples (i.e., a plate, a plate with a hole, and a plate with a crack) are implemented, compared and analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and the influence of the fractional order on the strain localization. It can be found from the numerical application of the twin-tunnel that the fractional model is promising to flexibly capture the strain localization zone for rock-like materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) are widely used in diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). In practice, incomplete modality problem is unavoidable due to the cost of data acquisition. Deep learning based models especially generative adversarial networks (GAN) are usually adopted to impute missing images. However, there are still some problems: (1) there are many regions unrelated to the disease and have little significance in the actual diagnosis in brain images, which are very cumbersome to generate. (2) The image generated by GAN would introduce noises causing the poor performance in the diagnostic model. To address these problems, a pairwise feature-based generation adversarial network is proposed. Specifically, features from the original brain images are extracted firstly. For the paired data without modality loss, the extracted MRI features are used as input to generate its corresponding PET features, which not only reduces the scale of the model, but also ensures the direct correlation between the generated features and the diagnosis. In addition, the available real PET features of the paired samples are added as label to constrain the generated ones. Finally, the attention mechanism is adopted in both the generator and discriminator, which can effectively retain the structural information of the feature itself. A large number of experiments have demonstrated that our proposed method has achieved promising results in the diagnosis of AD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A general and practical approach for diverse dealkenylative functionalization of olefin‐containing substrates has been developed through the one‐pot formation and utilization of pro‐aromatic 1,4‐dihydropyridazines using tetrazine as the key cycloaddition reagent. Triggered by either excitation or oxidation, the targeted C−C bonds in the 1,4‐dihydropyridazine intermediates could be readily cleaved to generate alkyl radicals for subsequent transformations. Diverse carbon‐carbon and carbon‐hetero bond forming protocols, including Giese‐type addition, hydrazination, borylation, Minisci‐type alkylation, copper‐catalyzed NH alkylation, acylation, alkynylation, cyanation, and azidation, are achieved in a highly modular fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increased use of antibiotic medications, more and more ciprofloxacin (CIP) is contaminated into the environment, which could endanger both humans and ecosystems. In this work, chitosan modified Fe pretreated biochar (CS-FBC), which was produced utilizing a straightforward and reduced synthesis process, was tested for its effectiveness in the removal of CIP from an aqueous solution. CS-FBC was analyzed using XPS, XRD, BET, SEM, FTIR, and a zetasizer. In addition, we investigated how ciprofloxacin removal was influenced by a number of variables, including initial concentration, time, pH, and temperature. The findings of the experiment showed that the adsorption impact was very rapid and could reach 80% over the first 60 minutes of the overall adsorbent. The kinetic model of CS-FBC adsorbed CIP in solution was discovered to be comparable to the pseudo-second-order kinetic model, suggesting that it may be connected to chemical adsorption. By matching the adsorption properties, a maximum peak value of 76.72 mg g−1 at 35 °C was found, and the fitting was found to match better with the Langmuir isotherm model. Investigations into the adsorption thermodynamics revealed that the process was temperature dependent and instantaneous. By raising the amount of NaCl, the adsorptive power might be reduced to an extent. However, the adsorption action was seldom affected by amounts of less than 0.01 M NaCl. Furthermore, in addition to hydrogen bonding and hydrophobic interaction, the adsorption process for CS-FBC on CIP also involves electrostatic interaction and π–π electron-donor–acceptor (EDA) interaction. The adsorption rate could still be maintained at 61.25% after 7 experiments. The removal effect of CS-FBC on CIP can prove that CS-FBC is a green, economical, and sustainable adsorbent with a low preparation cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manganese-based materials are considered as potential cathode materials for aqueous zinc-ion batteries due to the advantages of high voltage platform, non-toxic, and environmental protection. However, the rapid decline capacity due to the dissolution of manganese and the low conductivity restrict its further development. In this paper, Ni2+-doped ZnMn2O4 nanoparticles were prepared and used as cathode materials for aqueous zinc-ion batteries. The Ni2+-doping effectively improves its electrochemical performance. The Ni2+-doped ZnMn2O4 cathode shows a discharge-specific capacity of 175 mAh g−1 after an activation process at current density of 100 mA g−1. At a high current density of 1A g−1, the cathode displays a specific capacity of 120 mAh g−1, and the Coulombic efficiency of above 97% can be maintained throughout the cycles except for the first cycle, indicating a high reversibility of charging/discharging. The Ni2+-doping increases the conductivity and zinc-ion diffusion coefficient of the material electrode through destroying the periodic potential field generated by the material. It shows that the synergistic effect of manganese and transition metal ions provides a possible direction for the future development of cathode materials for aqueous zinc-ion batteries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to study the effects of solid solution of group-VB (VB=V, Nb and Ta) transition metal diborides on HfB 2 ceramics, the particle size, sinterability, microstructure, and mechanical properties of Nb substituted HfB 2 -based ceramics were investigated, and compared with the reported (Hf,V)B 2 and (Hf,Ta)B 2 ceramics. The results showed that the solid solution of group-VB transition metal diborides could refine the particle size of powder and improve the densification by spark plasma sintering. This might be related to the solubility of diboride phase in B 2 O 3 liquid phase. With the addition of SiC, no obvious difference of densification could be observed between (Hf,VB)B 2 -SiC ceramics. Instead, after the substitution of V, Nb and Ta, the hardness of the (Hf,VB)B 2 -SiC ceramics was much improved, alongside the decreasing fracture toughness. The influence on mechanical properties of V, Nb and Ta substitution was discussed in combination of the microstructure analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HfB 2 -based ceramics, such as HfB 2 -SiC, are promising materials of neutron control rods. Under nuclear conditions, the interfacial compatibility between the HfB 2 -SiC control rod and the guide tube (made of Zr-4 alloy) is critical in the operation. The present study demonstrated the high compatibility of the two heterogeneous materials even at 1400 °C. The formation of an in-situ assembled triple diffusion layer with stable phases and dense structures largely improved the interface compatibility. In addition, the as-produced phases with unique microstructures were organized at the interface. ZrSi formed typical columnar crystals with strong [001] fiber texture, which extended in the direction favorable to the interface. ZrB 2 grains grew as needle shapes and entered the Zr-4 alloy substrate. These unique morphologies clearly revealed an interface with strong stability and high compatibility. The results provide the basis for the application of HfB 2 -based ceramics in nuclear infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long persistent luminescence materials developed to commercial standards are primarily concentrated in the blue and green regions, with only a few in the red region. Red, as one of the three basic colors, can be mixed in various proportions with blue and green to yield various colors. The development of red persistent phosphors has a broader application potential but remains a challenge. A solid-state reaction method was used to synthesize new red persistent luminescent materials of Ba 1- x Sr x Ga 2 O 4 :Sm3+ (x = 0–0.09). In BaGa 2 O 4 , both Sr2+ and Sm3+ preferentially occupy the Ba2+ site rather than the Ga3+ site. When exposed to UV light at 254 nm, the phosphors emit the characteristic red emission of Sm3+ at wavelengths ranging from 500 nm to 750 nm. After removing the UV light source, an intense red afterglow that lasted more than 1400 s was observed. The red afterglow signal reappears after a heating process. Doping Sr2+ reduces the trap depth and improves the red persistent luminescence significantly. Because the escaped electrons from traps compensate for the emission loss of Sm3+ during the heating process, the red phosphors have unimaginably luminescent thermal stability. Thus, the emission intensity at 200 °C is 1.6 times that at room temperature. The prepared red persistent phosphors show multimode luminescence, with the output signal being time and temperature sensitive, indicating that they are potential luminescent materials for anti-counterfeiting applications. Finally, a building-block strategy for advanced anti-counterfeiting applications of dynamic display information is proposed, with red persistent phosphors serving as an important component combined with upconversion phosphors of NaYF 4 :Yb3+, Tm3+, and green persistent phosphors of SrAl 2 O 4 :Eu2+, Dy3+. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ice shelves play an essential role in the dynamics of the Antarctic ice sheet. The surface meltwater is important, as it can irreversibly weaken ice shelves by exerting additional hydrostatic pressure. Therefore, high-resolution snowmelt products are urgently needed to accurately analyze melting patterns of ice shelves and further estimate mass loss. In this study, a new high-resolution (40 m) snowmelt dataset over all of the Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves larger than 100 km 2 was developed based on the modified snowmelt detection framework by using a co-orbit normalization method. The dataset provides detailed snowmelt information on each ice shelf, including the image coverage, melting area and melting ratio every 5 days. The melting patterns of three typical ice shelves (George VI, Wilkins and Larsen C Ice Shelves) and the spatio-temporal melting distribution of the Antarctic Peninsula (AP) were further analyzed. The snowmelt information indicates that both the extent and duration of snowmelt have been increasing in the Antarctic Peninsula from 2015 to 2021, and we found that the snowmelt on the Antarctic Peninsula showed a spatial pattern of significantly intense snowmelt on the western side. We believe this study will provide essential data for ice shelf investigation to support other fields of polar research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text based Visual Question Answering (TextVQA) is a recently raised challenge requiring models to read text in images and answer natural language questions by jointly reasoning over the question, textual information and visual content. Introduction of this new modality - Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tokens ushers in demanding reasoning requirements. Most of the state-of-the-art (SoTA) VQA methods fail when answer these questions because of three reasons: (1) poor text reading ability; (2) lack of textual-visual reasoning capacity; and (3) choosing discriminative answering mechanism over generative couterpart (although this has been further addressed by M4C). In this paper, we propose an end-to-end structured multimodal attention (SMA) neural network to mainly solve the first two issues above. SMA first uses a structural graph representation to encode the object-object, object-text and text-text relationships appearing in the image, and then designs a multimodal graph attention network to reason over it. Finally, the outputs from the above modules are processed by a global-local attentional answering module to produce an answer splicing together tokens from both OCR and general vocabulary iteratively by following M4C. Our proposed model outperforms the SoTA models on TextVQA dataset and two tasks of ST-VQA dataset among all models except pre-training based TAP. Demonstrating strong reasoning ability, it also won first place in TextVQA Challenge 2020. We extensively test different OCR methods on several reasoning models and investigate the impact of gradually increased OCR performance on TextVQA benchmark. With better OCR results, different models share dramatic improvement over the VQA accuracy, but our model benefits most blessed by strong textual-visual reasoning ability. To grant our method an upper bound and make a fair testing base available for further works, we also provide human-annotated ground-truth OCR annotations for the TextVQA dataset, which were not given in the original release. The code and ground-truth OCR annotations for the TextVQA dataset are available at https://github.com/ChenyuGAO-CS/SMA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Melatonin (MT) can improve the effect of cryopreservation on oocytes by suppressing oxidative stress and maintaining the permeability of the oolemma. In this study, MT was firstly applied to human oocytes' cryopreservation to explore the effect of prolonged cryopreservation on developmental competence and its role. Collected in vitro-matured human oocytes were cryopreserved in MT-containing or MT-free medium for 0 and 6 months; after warming, viable oocytes were assessed for developmental viability, intracellular protein expression, mitochondrial function, and oxidation-antioxidant system. Meanwhile, fresh oocytes were set as the control. The results showed that with the extension of cryopreservation time, the developmental competence of oocytes gradually declined, accompanied by the down-regulation of most mitochondrial function-related proteins, the reduction in ATP and GSH production, the increase in ROS accumulation, and the aggravation of the imbalance of ROS/GSH in oocytes. However, the participation of MT seemed to effectively mitigate these negative effects. Therefore, we speculate that melatonin may maintain normal ATP production and ROS/GSH balance in cryopreserved oocytes by protecting mitochondrial function and inhibiting oxidative damage, thereby effectively maintaining the developmental competence of human oocytes in prolonged cryopreservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text based Visual Question Answering (TextVQA) is a recently raised challenge requiring models to read text in images and answer natural language questions by jointly reasoning over the question, textual information and visual content. Introduction of this new modality - Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tokens ushers in demanding reasoning requirements. Most of the state-of-the-art (SoTA) VQA methods fail when answer these questions because of three reasons: (1) poor text reading ability; (2) lack of textual-visual reasoning capacity; and (3) choosing discriminative answering mechanism over generative couterpart (although this has been further addressed by M4C). In this paper, we propose an end-to-end structured multimodal attention (SMA) neural network to mainly solve the first two issues above. SMA first uses a structural graph representation to encode the object-object, object-text and text-text relationships appearing in the image, and then designs a multimodal graph attention network to reason over it. Finally, the outputs from the above modules are processed by a global-local attentional answering module to produce an answer splicing together tokens from both OCR and general vocabulary iteratively by following M4C. Our proposed model outperforms the SoTA models on TextVQA dataset and two tasks of ST-VQA dataset among all models except pre-training based TAP. Demonstrating strong reasoning ability, it also won first place in TextVQA Challenge 2020. We extensively test different OCR methods on several reasoning models and investigate the impact of gradually increased OCR performance on TextVQA benchmark. With better OCR results, different models share dramatic improvement over the VQA accuracy, but our model benefits most blessed by strong textual-visual reasoning ability. To grant our method an upper bound and make a fair testing base available for further works, we also provide human-annotated ground-truth OCR annotations for the TextVQA dataset, which were not given in the original release. The code and ground-truth OCR annotations for the TextVQA dataset are available at https://github.com/ChenyuGAO-CS/SMA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Symbiotic radio (SR) is a new spectrum sharing paradigm that allows backscatter device (BD) to transmit information over the ambient radio frequency signal, where the BD is parasitic in the primary transmission, and the secondary system (i.e. backscatter system) shares not only the same spectrum but also the same receiver with the primary system. Here, a multi‐BD SR system with a primary transmitter (PT), a cooperative receiver (CR) and two backscatter devices (BDs), that is, BD1 and BD2 is studied. The accurate expressions for the outage probability of both primary system and secondary system are derived. Simulation results verify the correctness of this theoretical analysis. Additionally, the effect of the distance parameters (i.e. the distance of the backscatter links) on the outage probability of BD1 and BD2 when the backscatter coefficients are fixed is investigated. Simulation results indicate that the desired outage performance can be obtained by adjusting the distance parameters. Finally, the performance of the multi‐BD SR system is compared with the SR system containing only one BD, and the results show that the multi‐BD SR system can enable the backscatter system to achieve better rate performance, which highlights the importance of applying multi‐BD to the SR system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-modal imaging data fusion has attracted much attention in medical data analysis because it can provide complementary information for more accurate analysis. Integrating functional and structural multi-modal imaging data has been increasingly used in the diagnosis of brain diseases, such as epilepsy. Most of the existing methods focus on the feature space fusion of different modalities but ignore the valuable high-order relationships among samples and the discriminative fused features for classification. In this paper, we propose a novel framework by fusing data from two modalities of functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) for epilepsy diagnosis, which effectively captures the complementary information and discriminative features from different modalities by high-order feature extraction with the attention mechanism. Specifically, we propose a triple network to explore the discriminative information from the high-order representation feature space learned from multi-modal data. Meanwhile, self-attention is introduced to adaptively estimate the degree of importance between brain regions, and the cross-attention mechanism is utilized to extract complementary information from fMRI and DTI. Finally, we use the triple loss function to adjust the distance between samples in the common representation space. We evaluate the proposed method on the epilepsy dataset collected from Jinling Hospital, and the experiment results demonstrate that our method is significantly superior to several state-of-the-art diagnosis approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a one-dimensional (1D) thermomechanical model for clays and its optimisation method for identifying the parameters from only limited laboratory tests. First, a new thermomechanical model accounting for the volumetric expansion and shrinkage behaviour under heating–cooling cycle is proposed for test simulations. Then, the optimisation-based parameter identification is proposed. A newly developed mutation is adopted to enhance the original Nelder–Mead differential evolution algorithm (NMDE). In the optimisation, the laboratory tests on Bangkok clay are selected as objective, with two temperature-controlled oedometer tests and three heating–cooling cycle tests under different overconsolidation ratios (OCRs). The sensitivity of model parameters is analysed by a sensitivity analysis method. Five state-of-the-art optimisation algorithms are chosen as comparison to highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed NMDE. Finally, the optimal parameters are verified by comparing with other experimental results and predictions on two other clays. All comparisons show that a reliable solution can be acquired by the proposed optimisation together with the thermomechanical model, which is practically useful with a reduction in testing costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is regarded as a promising technology with great potential to boost wireless networks. Affected by the “double fading” effect, however, conventional passive RIS cannot bring considerable performance improvement when users are not close enough to RIS. Recently, active RIS is introduced to combat the double fading effect by actively amplifying incident signals with the aid of integrated reflection-type amplifiers. In order to reduce the hardware cost and energy consumption due to massive active components in the conventional fully-connected active RIS, a novel hardware-and-energy efficient sub-connected active RIS architecture has been proposed recently, in which multiple reconfigurable electromagnetic elements are driven by only one amplifier. In this paper, we first develop an improved and accurate signal model for the sub-connected active RIS architecture. Then, we investigate the joint transmit precoding and RIS reflection beamforming (i.e., the reflection phase-shift and amplification coefficients) designs in multiuser multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) communication systems. Both sum-rate maximization and power minimization problems are solved by leveraging fractional programming (FP), block coordinate descent (BCD), second-order cone programming (SOCP), alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), and majorization-minimization (MM) methods. Extensive simulation results verify that compared with the conventional fully-connected structure, the proposed sub-connected active RIS can significantly reduce the hardware cost and power consumption, and achieve great performance improvement when power budget at RIS is limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, numerous studies have adopted rs-fMRI to construct dynamic functional connectivity networks (DFCNs) and applied them to the diagnosis of brain diseases, such as epilepsy and schizophrenia. Compared with the static brain networks, the DFCNs have a natural advantage in reflecting the process of brain activity due to the time information contained in it. However, most of the current methods for constructing DFCNs fail to aggregate the brain topology structure and temporal variation of the functional architecture associated with brain regions, and often ignore the inherent multi-dimensional feature representation of DFCNs for classification. In order to address these issues, we propose a novel DFCNs construction and representation method and apply it to brain disease diagnosis. Specifically, we fuse the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal and interactions between brain regions to distinguish the brain topology within each time domain and across different time domains, by embedding block structure in the adjacency matrix. After that, a sparse tensor decomposition method with sparse local structure preserving regularization is developed to extract DFCNs features from a multi-dimensional perspective. Finally, the kernel discriminant analysis is employed to provide the decision result. We validate the proposed method on epilepsy and schizophrenia identification tasks, respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in the diagnosis of brain diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]