Search Results (13)

The control of A. tauschii is critical to ensuring food security. This study investigated a range of different aspects of the biology of A. tauschii, including its emergence characteristics, population development dynamics, and its impact on wheat yield. Moreover, the efficacy of different herbicides and cultural control measures for managing A. tauschii was explored. Through laboratory cultivation and statistical analysis of the emergence rate of A. tauschii, it was found that its emergence rate significantly increased when temperatures ranged from 10 °C to 20 °C and the environmental osmotic potential fell between −0.1 MPa and −0.5 MPa—conditions similar to those found in wheat fields. Additionally, by recording the emergence rates at different depths, A. tauschii emergence was found to occur optimally at a sowing depth of 1–5 cm, which aligns with the shallow rotary tillage currently employed in wheat production. The weed was also found to be tolerant to weakly acidic and alkaline environments, while also presenting with moderate salt tolerance. Through field experiments, it was found that, upon spreading to new areas, A. tauschii rapidly expanded its population size. While its impact on wheat yield was relatively mild during the early stages of growth, it escalated to severe outbreaks with the passage of time. Field experiments were conducted to test the efficacy of five herbicides on weed control. The analysis indicated that Mesosulfuron-methyl was the only effective herbicide in controlling A. tauschii. Adopting three two-year-three-crop rotation patterns reduced the density of A. tauschii from 186 stems/m² to 11–15 stems/m². Watering-induced emergence also proved effective. The most effective watering was performed 15 days before sowing. Deep plowing was another effective measure. The deeper the plowing, the lower the emergence of A. tauschii. Delayed sowing time resulted in the additional suppression of the emergence of A. tauschii. Full article

Superhydrophobic paper-based functional materials have emerged as a sustainable solution with a wide range of applications due to their unique water-repelling properties. Inspired by natural examples like the lotus leaf, these materials combine low surface energy with micro/nanostructures to create air pockets that maintain a high contact angle. This review provides an in-depth analysis of recent advancements in the development of superhydrophobic paper-based materials, focusing on methodologies for modification, underlying mechanisms, and performance in various applications. The paper-based materials, leveraging their porous structure and flexibility, are modified to achieve superhydrophobicity, which broadens their application in oil–water separation, anti-corrosion, and self-cleaning. The review describes the use of these superhydrophobic paper-based materials in diagnostics, environmental management, energy generation, food testing, and smart packaging. It also discusses various superhydrophobic modification techniques, including surface chemical modification, coating technology, physical composite technology, laser etching, and other innovative methods. The applications and development prospects of these materials are explored, emphasizing their potential in self-cleaning materials, oil–water separation, droplet manipulation, and paper-based sensors for wearable electronics and environmental monitoring. Full article

This study examined the risk of low energy availability (LEA) and eating disorders among elite adolescent female athletes from a mixed-sport cohort and ballet dancers in Singapore, where the accelerated biological needs of adolescent growth and maturation overlap with the pursuit of sport/ballet excellence and high-stakes academic testing. All of these are competing demands for adequate fuelling and seeking timely treatment, which consequently affect the risk of LEA. Eighty-nine participants (41 athletes, 48 dancers; age 16.00 [3.00] years old) were screened for the risk of LEA and eating disorders using the Low Energy Availability in Females Questionnaire (LEAF-Q) and Brief Eating Disorder in Athletes Questionnaire (BEDA-Q), respectively. The main effects of athlete/ballet status and age (≤15 years old versus 15.1 years–18 years old) on LEAF-Q and BEDA-Q scores was be determined via Spearman’s correlation coefficient and linear regression analyses. The Mann–Whitney U test and Fisher’s exact test were used to compare the groups for the risk of LEA and ED. We observed that adolescent athletes and ballet dancers had a similar prevalence of being at risk of LEA (61.98% versus 54.17%, respectively, p = 0.529), with the risk of eating disorders absent in most of them. It appeared that the risk of LEA is likely of an unintentional nature in this study as the risk of ED was absent in 90.2% of the adolescent athletes/ballet dancers that were at risk of LEA. The age of the participants was significantly correlated with the risk of LEA, while the number of training hours was negatively correlated with the same factor. Age was also found to be negatively correlated with the number of training hours. The findings suggest that the risk of LEA in Singapore youth athletes and dancers are multifaceted, involving factors such as type of activity, age, and training hours. Targeted and tailored interventions and programmes are thus needed to promote adequate energy availability for optimal physical and psychological growth in sport and dance. Full article

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. Full article

Three new nematode species belonging to the order Enoplida were discovered in the muddy and sandy sediment along the Shandong peninsula coast of the Yellow Sea during a biodiversity investigation of marine nematodes in the Yellow Sea. They are named Belbolla octobulba sp. nov., Ironella gracilis sp. nov. and Oxystomina longiseta sp. nov. Belbolla octobulba sp. nov. is characterized by having eight pharyngeal bulbs; spicules arcuate, broad and even; gubernaculum with a pair of dorso-caudal apophyses, about a third of the length of spicule; and two winged precloacal supplements. Ironella gracilis sp. nov. differs from known species by body slender, buccal cavity divided into conical vestibulum and cylindrical posterior portion, three sclerotized teeth located in the vestibulum; both circles of outer labial setae and cephalic setae 10 µm apart; elongated spicules weakly arcuate with central strip and cephalate proximal end; gubernaculum conical without apophysis; and a tubular precloacal supplement with a long seta at its anterior end. Oxystomina longiseta sp. nov. can be distinguished from other known species by the relatively long outer labial setae and cephalic setae; arcuate spicules expanded proximally with a median rib; gubernaculum small and oblong; and two unequal precloacal supplementary setae, anterior one short, posterior one very long. Updated keys to eighteen species of Belbolla and keys to four species of Ironella are given. Full article

The chemotherapy drug doxorubicin (DOX) is an anthracycline with over 30% incidence of liver injury in breast cancer patients, yet the mechanism of its hepatotoxicity remains unclear. To identify potential biomarkers for anthracycline-induced hepatotoxicity (AIH), we generated clinically-relevant mouse and rat models administered low-dose, long-term DOX. These models exhibited significant liver damage but no decline in cardiac function. Through untargeted metabolic profiling of the liver, we identified 27 differential metabolites in a mouse model and 28 in a rat model. We then constructed a metabolite-metabolite network for each animal model and computationally identified several potential metabolic markers, with particular emphasis on aromatic amino acids, including phenylalanine, tyrosine, and tryptophan. We further performed targeted metabolomics analysis on DOX-treated 4T1 breast cancer mice for external validation. We found significant (p < 0.001) reductions in hepatic levels of phenylalanine and tyrosine (but not tryptophan) following DOX treatment, which were strongly correlated with serum aminotransferases (ALT and AST) levels. In summary, the results of our study present compelling evidence supporting the use of phenylalanine and tyrosine as metabolic signatures of AIH. Full article

Research background and Objectives: Age is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD), but CVD risk factors are preventable, and lack of awareness of its risk factors is a contributing factor to CVDs. Middle-aged people may be more likely to engage in unhealthy lifestyle behaviours which can increase the risk of CVD. Health self-assessment is crucial for early detection and management of health issues and early lifestyle intervention for better personalised health management. This study aims to determine the self-assessment of INTERHEART risk classification among the middle-aged community in Malaysia. Method: Local community members aged 40–60 years and who are currently residing in Malaysia were recruited via non-randomised sampling. Sociodemographic characteristics and dietary pattern related to salt, fibre, fat (deep fried/snacks), poultry/meat intakes, and other cardiovascular risk factors (waist-hip ratio, medical history related to diabetes/hypertension, history/exposure of tobacco use, psychosocial status, and level of physical activity) were assessed; INTERHEART risk scores were then computed and stratified into low, medium and high risks. Results: Approximately 45% (n = 273/602) of middle-aged respondents in Malaysia are at moderate-to-high risk of cardiovascular events, with men being more likely to develop CVD compared to women. The results of the survey indicated that poultry/meat intake (61%), physical inactivity (59%), and second-hand smoke (SHS) exposure (54%) are the most prevalent risk factors among the respondents. One-third of the respondents consumed excessive salty food and deep fried foods/snacks/fast food, and only one-third of them consumed vegetables/fruits at a recommended level. It is worrying that about a quarter of the respondents felt several periodical/permanent stresses and even felt sad/blue/depressed for two weeks or more in a row. Males, labour workers, and those with lower educational levels are more likely to develop CVD events. Conclusions: This study found that 45% of the middle-aged respondents were having moderate-to-high risk for cardiovascular events with multiple risk factors related to unhealthy lifestyle habits and environmental factors. In addition to non-modifiable factors such as gender and age, sociodemographic factors, i.e., educational level and occupation, are equally important factors to determine CVD risk. Overall, the findings of this study emphasize the clinical relevance of assessing multiple factors in the determination of CVD risks for early prevention and management of cardiovascular diseases. Full article

In this work, hierarchically porous SiC ceramics were prepared via the foaming method. Porous ceramics with tunable, uniform, and bimodal pore structures were successfully fabricated in a facile way. The formation mechanisms of the 1st and 2nd modal macropores are the H₂O₂ foaming process and SiC particle overlap, respectively. The effect of pore-foaming agent amount, foaming temperature, and surfactant was investigated. According to the results, with increasing H₂O₂ amount, the porosity, pore size, and interconnectivity of the 1st modal pores increased, whereas bulk density and strength decreased. The porosity increased while the strength decreased as the foaming temperature increased. Surfactants increased pore interconnectivity and porosity. When the foaming temperature was 85 °C, and the addition of H₂O₂ was 5 wt.%, the porosity, bulk density, flexural strength, and compressive strength were 56.32%, 2.8301 g/cm³, 11.94 MPa, and 24.32 MPa, respectively. Moreover, SiC porous ceramics exhibited excellent corrosion resistance to acids and alkalis. Full article

At the end of 2019, COVID-19 outbreaks occurred one after another in countries worldwide. Managing the outbreak efficiently and stably is an essential public health issue facing countries worldwide. In this paper, based on the SEIR model, we propose a SCEIR model that incorporates close contacts (C) and self-protectors (P). Firstly, the epidemic data of China, the USA, and Italy are predicted and compared with the actual data. Secondly, sensitivity analysis of each parameter in the SCEIR model was conducted using Anylogic. The study shows that the SCEIR model established in this paper has a certain validity. The infection rate in contact with E (𝛽) etc., has positive effects on the basic regeneration number (R₀); the self-isolation rate (φ) etc., has a negative effect on the basic regeneration number (R₀). Emergency management measures are proposed according to the influencing factors corresponding to the model parameters. These can provide theoretical guidance for developing effective epidemic prevention and control measures in areas where the epidemic has not yet been controlled. It also provides some reference for formulating prevention and control policies for similar epidemics that may occur in the future. Full article

Purpose: (1) To measure the corneal endothelium-Descemet membrane (EDM) layer thickness in Descemet membrane detachment (DMD) patients in vivo using high-definition optical coherence tomography (HD-OCT), and to investigate its correlation with age. (2) To explore whether the detachment time will affect the EDM thickness. (3) To explore whether the EDM thickness of cornea with DMD was different from that without DMD. Participants: Patients with DMD were divided into three groups. Group 1 included twenty-three patients whose Descemet membrane (DM) was partial or complete detached from the corneal stroma after various ocular surgeries. Group 2 included eight patients from group 1 who underwent twice HD-OCT examination on different days before the DM reattached to the stroma. Group 3 included nine patients from group 1 who had clear grayscale boundary between the DM and stroma in HD-OCT images after DM reattachment. Methods: All patients underwent HD-OCT and EDM thickness was measured using Image -Pro Plus 6.0. In Group 1, regression analyses were used to evaluate the correlation between EDM thickness and age, and the thickness difference between the ≤50-year-old group and the >50-year-old group was analyzed by independent sample t-test. In Group 2, paired samples t-test was used to check whether detachment time would affect EDM thickness. In Group 3, paired samples t-test was used to check whether the EDM thickness of cornea with DMD was different from that without DMD. p < 0.05 was considered significant. Results: In Group 1, the EDM thickness measured on the first post-operative day was 27.8 ± 3.6 μm, and a positive correlation was found between EDM thickness and age (r = 0.619, p < 0.05). The EDM thickness of ≤50-year-old group and >50-year-old group were 23.9 ± 3.2 and 29.2 ± 2.6 μm, and there was a significant difference between the two groups (p = 0.001). In Group 2, the first measurement of EDM thickness was 27.5 ± 4.0 μm, the second measurement was 27.6 ± 4.2 μm, the interval between the two measurements was 2.1 ± 1.6 days, and there was no significant difference between the two measurements (p = 0.328). In Group 3, the EDM thickness with DM detachment was 28.3 ± 3.5 μm, with DM reattachment was 23.4 ± 2.4 μm, there was a significant difference between the two measurements (p = 0.002). Conclusions: The EDM thickness in the state of DMD is thicker than its actual thickness in normal cornea, and EDM thickness of the >50-year-old group is much thicker than that of the ≤50-year-old group. Full article

T-cell lymphomas arise from a single neoplastic clone and exhibit identical patterns of deletions in T-cell receptor (TCR) genes. Whole genome sequencing (WGS) data represent a treasure trove of information for the development of novel clinical applications. However, the use of WGS to identify clonal T-cell proliferations has not been systematically studied. In this study, based on WGS data, we identified monoclonal rearrangements (MRs) of T-cell receptors (TCR) genes using a novel segmentation algorithm and copy number computation. We evaluated the feasibility of this technique as a marker of T-cell clonality using T-cell lymphomas (TCL, n = 44) and extranodal NK/T-cell lymphomas (ENKTLs, n = 20), and identified 98% of TCLs with one or more TCR gene MRs, against 91% detected using PCR. TCR MRs were absent in all ENKTLs and NK cell lines. Sensitivity-wise, this platform is sufficiently competent, with MRs detected in the majority of samples with tumor content under 25% and it can also distinguish monoallelic from biallelic MRs. Understanding the copy number landscape of TCR using WGS data may engender new diagnostic applications in hematolymphoid pathology, which can be readily adapted to the analysis of B-cell receptor loci for B-cell clonality determination. Full article

Background: GMC1 (2-(1H-benzimidazol-2-ylsulfanyl)-N-[(Z)-(4-methoxyphenyl) methylideneamino] acetamide) effectively inhibits androgen receptor function by binding directly to FKBP52. This is a novel mechanism for the treatment of castration resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). Methods: an LC-MS/MS method was developed and validated to quantify GMC1 in plasma and urine from pharmacokinetics studies in rats. An ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) system equipped with a Waters XTerra MS C18 column was used for chromatographic separation by gradient elution with 0.1% (v/v) formic acid in water and methanol. A Sciex 4000 QTRAP^® mass spectrometer was used for analysis by multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) in positive mode; the specific ions [M+H]⁺m/z 340.995 → m/z 191.000 and [M+H]⁺ m/z 266.013 → m/z 234.000 were monitored for GMC1 and internal standard (albendazole), respectively. Results: GMC1 and albendazole had retention times of 1.68 and 1.66 min, respectively. The calibration curves for the determination of GMC1 in rat plasma and urine were linear from 1–1000 ng/mL. The LC-MS/MS method was validated with intra- and inter-day accuracy and precision within the 15% acceptance limit. The extraction recovery values of GMC1 from rat plasma and urine were greater than 95.0 ± 2.1% and 97.6 ± 4.6%, respectively, with no significant interfering matrix effect. GMC1 is stable under expected sample handling, storage, preparation and LC-MS/MS analysis conditions. Conclusions: Pharmacokinetic evaluation of GMC1 revealed that the molecule has a biexponential disposition in rats, is distributed rapidly and extensively, has a long elimination half-life, and appears to be eliminated primarily by first order kinetics. Full article

Plasmon-enhanced second-harmonic generation (PESHG) based on hybrid metal-dielectric nanostructures have extraordinary importance for developing efficient nanoscale nonlinear sources, which pave the way for new applications in photonic circuitry, quantum optics, and biosensors. However, the relatively high loss of excitation energies and the low spatial overlapping between the locally enhanced electromagnetic field and nonlinear materials still limit the promotion of nonlinear conversion performances in such hybrid systems. Here, we design and fabricate an array of silver nanoparticle-ZnO (AgNP-ZnO) nanocavities to serve as an efficient PESHG platform. The geometry of AgNP-ZnO nanocavity arrays provides a way to flexibly modulate hot spots in three-dimensional space, and to achieve a good mutual overlap of hot spots and ZnO material layers for realizing efficient SH photon generation originating from ZnO nanocavities. Compared to bare ZnO nanocavity arrays, the resulting hybrid AgNP-ZnO design of nanocavities reaches the maximum PESHG enhancement by a factor of approximately 31. Validated by simulations, we can further interpret the relative contribution of fundamental and harmonic modes to Ag-NP dependent PESHG performances, and reveal that the enhancement stems from the co-cooperation effect of plasmon-resonant enhancements both for fundamental and harmonic frequencies. Our findings offer a previously unreported method for designing efficient PESHG systems and pave a way for further understanding of a surface plasmon-coupled second-order emission mechanism for the enhancement of hybrid systems. Full article