Search Results (16)

In this study, large yellow croaker (Pseudosciaena crocea) protein isolates/gellan gum (PG) binary hydrogels with dense microstructure were used for embedding and delivery curcumin (Cur). The colitis-relieving effects of PG-Cur were further investigated using the dextran sulfate sodium (DSS)-induced ulcerative colitis (UC) mouse model. Following PG-Cur treatment, weight loss, diarrhea, and shortening of the colon were significantly alleviated. Compared with the free Cur group, weight loss and colon length in the PG-Cur group increased about 1.05- and 1.12-fold. IL-1β, IL-6, TNF-α, and IL-10 levels in PG-Cur group were not significantly different from those of the normal mice, and the MPO and iNOS activities of the PG-Cur group were 29% and 20% lower than those in the Cur group, respectively. Moreover, fecal microbiota analysis of mice revealed that PG-Cur effectively restored gut dysbiosis in DSS-induced colitis, enriching beneficial bacteria while reducing harmful ones. Overall, the PG hydrogels have the potential to serve as carriers for oral curcumin formulations aimed at alleviating UC. Full article

The nitrogen application rate (NAR) has a significant effect on the contents of wheat grain protein and its composition. There is still no consensus regarding the appropriate NAR, given the differences in studied conditions and influence of factors such as geographical location, climate, and soil nutrient contents. In this study, 66 papers related to wheat grain protein and its composition published from 1984 to 2021 were selected for meta-analysis in comprehensively evaluating the response of wheat grain protein content and composition to NAR in China. The results reveal that NAR significantly increased total protein content by 9.49–28.6%, gliadin by 9.13–30.5%, glutenin by 12.9–45.4%, albumin by 5.06–15.8%, and globulin by 8.52–24.0% of wheat grain in China, respectively, compared to no nitrogen application. The optimal NAR is 240–300 kg ha⁻¹ when specific planting conditions are not being considered. Under different growing conditions, the NAR that provided the greatest increase in wheat grain protein and its composition varied as follows: 180–240 kg ha⁻¹ in Northwest China and at >100 m altitudes; >300 kg ha⁻¹ in North China and at <100 m altitudes and lower soil base nutrient levels; 240–300 kg ha⁻¹ in Southeast China, with higher soil nutrients levels and for all average annual temperatures and precipitation ranges. In conclusion, the results of the present study reveal that it is feasible to systematically enhance the contents of wheat grain protein and its related fractions by appropriate NAR under different cropping conditions. Full article

Understanding the public’s diverse linguistic expressions about rainfall and flood provides a basis for flood disaster studies and enhances linguistic and cultural awareness. However, existing research tends to overlook linguistic complexity, potentially leading to bias. In this study, we introduce a novel algorithm capturing rainfall and flood-related expressions, considering the relationship between precipitation observations and linguistics expressions. Analyzing 210 million social media microblogs from 2017, we identified 594 keywords, 20 times more than usual manually created bag-of-words. Utilizing Large Language Model, we categorized these keywords into rainfall, flood, and other related terms. Semantic features of these keywords were analyzed from the viewpoint of popularity, credibility, time delay, and part-of-speech, finding rainfall-related terms most common-used, flood-related keywords often more time delayed than precipitation, and notable differences in part-of-speech across categories. We also assessed spatial characteristics from keyword and city-centric perspectives, revealing that 49.5% of the keywords have significant spatial correlation with differing median centers, reflecting regional variations. Large and disaster-impacted cities show the richest expression diversity for rainfall and flood-related terms. Full article

Glycyrrhiza has a long history of applications and a wide range of pharmacological effects. It is known as the “king of all herbs”. Glycyrrhiza is effective in clearing heat, detoxifying, relieving cough, and tonifying qi and has good bioactivity in multiple inflammatory, immune, and tumor diseases. This review aims to summarize the origin, distribution, and anti-digestive system tumor mechanism of glycyrrhiza and its homologous applications in medicine and food. The active compounds include triterpenoids, flavonoids, and coumarins, which are widely used in clinical treatments, disease prevention, and daily foods because of their “enhancement of efficacy” and “reduction of toxicity” against digestive system tumors. This paper reviews the use of glycyrrhiza in digestive system tumors and provides an outlook on future research and clinical applications. Full article

Licorice is a remarkable traditional Chinese medicine obtained from the dried root and rhizomes of the Glycyrrhiza genus, and t has been utilized in China for many centuries. It consists of more than 300 compounds that are mainly divided into triterpene saponins, flavonoids, polysaccharides, and phenolic components. The active compounds of licorice have been found to possess multiple biological activities, including antitumor, anti-inflammatory, antiviral, antimicrobial, immunoregulatory, cardioprotective, and neuroprotective functions. In addition to providing a brief overview of licorice’s adjuvant properties, this review describes and analyzes the pharmacological mechanisms by which licorice components function to treat gastric cancer. Furthermore, licorice compounds are also found to be potent adjuvant chemotherapy agents, as they can improve the quality of life of cancer patients and alleviate chemotherapy-induced adverse effects. Full article

Perilla frutescens is an annual herb of the Labiatae family and is widely grown in several countries in Asia. Perilla frutescens is a plant that is used medicinally in its entirety, as seen in its subdivision into perilla seeds, perilla stalks, and perilla leaves, which vary more markedly in their chemical composition. Several studies have shown that Perilla frutescens has a variety of pharmacological effects, including anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, detoxifying, antioxidant, and hepatoprotective. In the absence of a review of Perilla frutescens for the treatment of cancer. This review provides an overview of the chemical composition and molecular mechanisms of Perilla frutescens for cancer treatment. It was found that the main active components of Perilla frutescens producing cancer therapeutic effects were perilla aldehyde (PAH), rosmarinic acid (Ros A), lignan, and isoestrogen (IK). In addition to these, extracts of the leaves and fruits of Perilla frutescens are also included. Among these, perilla seed oil (PSO) has a preventive effect against colorectal cancer due to the presence of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids. This review also provides new ideas and thoughts for scientific innovation and clinical applications related to Perilla frutescens. Full article

Sea cucumbers Apostichopus japonicus will vomit their intestines during certain stimulations, and the collagen of the body wall will then be degraded. To define the effect of the sea cucumber intestine extracts on the body wall, the intestinal extracts and crude collagen fibers (CCF) of sea cucumber A. japonicus were prepared. According to the gelatin zymography, the type of endogenous enzymes in intestinal extracts were mainly serine endopeptidases with optimal activities at pH 9.0 and 40 °C. According to the rheology results, the viscosity of 3% CCF decreased from 32.7 Pa·s to 5.3 Pa·s by adding intestine extracts. The serine protease inhibitor phenylmethanesulfonyl fluoride inhibited the activity of intestinal extracts and increased the viscosity of collagen fibers to 25.7 Pa·s. The results proved that serine protease in the intestinal extracts participated in the process of body wall softening in sea cucumbers. Full article

For high-tech manufacturing industries, developing large-scale complex nonlinear dynamic systems must be taken as one of the basic works, formulating problems to be solved, steering system design in a more preferable direction, and making correct strategic decisions. By using effective tools of big data mining, Dynamic Design Methodology was proposed to establish a technical platform for Multidiscipline Design Optimization such as High-Speed Rolling Stock, including three key technologies: analysis graph of full-vehicle stability properties and variation patterns, improved transaction strategy of flexible body to MBS interface, seamless collaboration with weldline fatigue damage assessments through correct Modal Stress Recovery. By applying the above methodology, a self-adaptive improved solution was formulated with optimal parameter configuration, which is one of the more favorable options for higher-speed bogies. While within a velocity (140–200) km/h at λ_e < 0.10, car body instability’s influence on ride comfort can be easily improved by using a semi-active vibration reduction technique between inter-vehicles through outer windshields. Comprehensive evaluations show that only under rational conditions of wheel-rail matching, i.e., 0.10 ≥ λ_eN > λ_emin and λ_emin = (0.03–0.06), can this low-cost solution achieve the three goals of low track conicity, optimal route planning, and investment benefit maximization. So, rail vehicle experts are necessary to collaborate and innovate intensively with passenger transportation and steel rail ones. Specifically, by adopting rail grinding treatment, occurrence probability is controlled at 85% and 5% for track conicity of (0.03–0.10) and (0.25–0.35). By optimizing routing planning, operating across dedicated lines of different speed grades can achieve self-cleaning of central hollow tread wear over time. According to the inherent rigid-flex coupling relationship, geometric nonlinearities of worn wheel-rail contact should be avoided as much as possible for HSR practices. Only under weak coupling interfaces in the floor frame can the structural integrity of an aluminum alloy car body be ensured. Full article

Milk spectral data on 2118 cows from nine herds located in northern China were used to access the association of days open (DO). Meanwhile, the parity and calving season of dairy cows were also studied to characterize the difference in DO between groups of these two cow-level factors. The result of the linear mixed-effects model revealed that no significant differences were observed between the parity groups. However, a significant difference in DO exists between calving season groups. The interaction between parity and calving season presented that primiparous cows always exhibit lower DO among all calving season groups, and the variation in DO among parity groups was especially clearer in winter. Survival analysis revealed that the difference in DO between calving season groups might be caused by the different P/AI at the first TAI. In addition, the summer group had a higher chance of conception in the subsequent services than other groups, implying that the micro-environment featured by season played a critical role in P/AI. A weak linkage between DO and wavenumbers ranging in the mid-infrared region was detected. In summary, our study revealed that the calving season of dairy cows can be used to optimize the reproduction management. The potential application of mid-infrared spectroscopy in dairy cows needs to be further developed. Full article

The mosquito Aedes albopictus can transmit various arboviral diseases, posing a severe threat to human health. As an environmentally friendly method, sterile insect technology (SIT) is considered an alternative to traditional methods such as chemical pesticides to control Ae. albopictus. In SIT, the sterility of male mosquitoes can be achieved by γ-ray or X-ray radiation. Compared with γ-rays, X-rays are easier to obtain, cheaper, and less harmful. However, there is a lack of comparative assessment of these two types of radiation for SIT under the same controlled conditions. Here, we compared the effects of X-ray and γ-ray radiation on the sterility of Ae. albopictus males under laboratory-controlled conditions. Neither type of radiation affected the number of eggs but significantly reduced the survival time and hatch rate. The same dose of γ-rays caused a higher sterility effect on males than X-rays but had a more significant impact on survival. However, X-rays could achieve the same sterility effect as γ-rays by increasing the radiation dose. For example, X-rays of 60 Gy induced 99% sterility, similar to γ-rays of 40 Gy. In the test of male mating competitiveness, the induced sterility and the male mating competitiveness index were also identical at the same release ratio (sterile males/fertile males). At a release ratio of 7:1, nearly 80% of eggs failed to hatch. Sterile males produced by X-ray and γ-ray radiation had similar male competitiveness in competition with field males. In conclusion, a higher dose of X-rays is required to achieve the same sterility effect, compared to γ-rays. When γ-rays are not readily available, high-dose X-rays can be used instead. This study provides data supporting the selection of more suitable radiation for the field release of sterile male mosquitoes. Full article

Every year typhoons severely disrupt the normal rhythms of human activities and pose serious threats to China’s coast. Previous studies have shown that the impact extent and degree of a typhoon can be inferred from various geolocation datasets. However, it remains a challenge to unravel how dwellers respond to a typhoon disaster and what they concern most in the places with significant human activity changes. In this study, we integrated the geotagged microblogs with the Tencent’s location request data to advance our understanding of dweller’s collective response to typhoon Hato and the changes in their concerns over the typhoon process. Our results show that Hato induces both negative and positive anomalies in humans’ location request activities and such anomalies could be utilized to characterize the impacts of wind and rainfall brought by Hato to our study area, respectively. Topic analysis of Hato-related geotagged microblogs reveals that the negative location request anomalies are closely related to damage-related topics, whereas the positive anomalies to traffic-related topics. The negative anomalies are significantly correlated with economic loss and population affected at city level as suggested by an over 0.7 adjusted R². The changes in the anomalies can be used to portray the response and recovery processes of the cities impacted. Full article

Positron emission tomography (PET) can provide functional images and identify abnormal metabolic regions of the whole-body to effectively detect tumor presence and distribution. The filtered back-projection (FBP) algorithm is one of the most common images reconstruction methods. However, it will generate strike artifacts on the reconstructed image and affect the clinical diagnosis of lesions. Past studies have shown reduction in strike artifacts and improvement in quality of images by two-dimensional morphological structure operators (2D-MSO). The morphological structure method merely processes the noise distribution of 2D space and never considers the noise distribution of 3D space. This study was designed to develop three-dimensional-morphological structure operators (3D MSO) for nuclear medicine imaging and effectively eliminating strike artifacts without reducing image quality. A parallel operation was also used to calculate the minimum background standard deviation of the images for three-dimensional morphological structure operators with the optimal response curve (3D-MSO/ORC). As a result of Jaszczak phantom and rat verification, 3D-MSO/ORC showed better denoising performance and image quality than the 2D-MSO method. Thus, 3D MSO/ORC with a 3 × 3 × 3 mask can reduce noise efficiently and provide stability in FBP images. Full article

Real-word phenomena, such as ocean eddies and clouds, tend to split and merge while they are moving around within a space. Their trajectories usually bear one or more branches and are accordingly defined as complex trajectories in this study. The trajectories may show significant spatiotemporal variations in terms of their structures and some of them may be more prominent than the others. The identification of prominent structures in the complex trajectories of such real-world phenomena could better reveal their evolution processes and even shed new light on the driving factors behind them. Methods have been proposed for the extraction of periodic patterns from simple trajectories (i.e., those with linear structure and without any branches) with a focus on mining the related temporal, spatial or semantic information. Unfortunately, it is not appropriate to directly use such methods to examine complex trajectories. This study proposes a novel method to study the periodic patterns of complex trajectories by considering the inherent spatial, temporal and topological information. First, we use a sequence of symbols to represent the various structures of a complex trajectory over its lifespan. We then, on the basis of the PrefixSpan algorithm, propose a periodic pattern mining of structural evolution (PPSE) algorithm and use it to identify the largest and most frequent patterns (LFPs) from the symbol sequence. We also identify potential periodic behaviors. The PPSE method is then used to examine the complex trajectories of the mesoscale eddy in the South China Sea (SCS) from 1993 to 2016. The complex trajectories of ocean eddies in the southeast of Vietnam show are different from other regions in the SCS in terms of their structural evolution processes, as indicated by the LFPs with the longest lifespan, the widest active range, the highest complexity, and the most active behaviors. The LFP in the southeast of Vietnam has the longest lifespan, the widest active range, the highest complexity, and the most active behaviors. Across the SCS, we found seven migration channels. The LFPs of the eddies that migrate through these channels have a temporal cycle of 17–24 years. These channels are also the regions where eddies frequently emerge, as revealed by flow field data. Full article

Many real-world dynamic features such as ocean eddies, rain clouds, and air masses may split or merge while they are migrating within a space. Topologically, the migration trajectories of such features are structurally more complex as they may have multiple branches due to the splitting and merging processes. Identifying the spatial aggregation patterns of the trajectories could help us better understand how such features evolve. We propose a method, a Global Similarity Measuring Algorithm for the Complex Trajectories (GSMCT), to examine the spatial proximity and topologic similarity among complex trajectories. The method first transforms the complex trajectories into graph structures with nodes and edges. The global similarity between two graph structures (i.e., two complex trajectories) is calculated by averaging their topologic similarity and the spatial proximity, which are calculated using the Comprehensive Structure Matching (CSM) and the Hausdorff distance (HD) methods, respectively. We applied the GSMCT, the HD, and the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) methods to examine the complex trajectories of the 1993–2016 mesoscale eddies in the South China Sea (SCS). Based on the similarity evaluation results, we categorized the complex trajectories across the SCS into four groups, which are similar to the zoning results reported in previous studies, though difference exists. Moreover, the yearly numbers of complex trajectories in the clusters in the northernmost (Cluster 1) and the southernmost SCS (Cluster 4) are almost the same. However, their seasonal variation and migration characteristics are totally opposite. Such new knowledge is very useful for oceanographers of interest to study and numerically simulate the mesoscale ocean eddies in the SCS. Full article

Natural disasters cause significant casualties and losses in urban areas every year. Further, the frequency and intensity of natural disasters have increased significantly over the past couple of decades in the context of global climate change. Understanding how urban dwellers learn about and response to a natural hazard is of great significance as more and more people migrate to cities. Social media has become one of the most essential communication platforms in the virtual space for users to share their knowledge, information, and opinions about almost everything in the physical world. Geo-tagged posts published on different social media platforms contain a huge amount of information that can help us to better understand the dynamics of collective geo-tagged human activities. In this study, we investigated the spatiotemporal distribution patterns of the collective geo-tagged human activities in Beijing when it was afflicted by the “6-22” rainstorm. We used a variety of machine learning and statistical methods to examine the correlations between rainstorm-related microblogs and the rainstorm characteristics at a fine spatial and a fine temporal scale across Beijing. We also studied factors that could be used to explain the changes of the rainstorm-related blogging activities. Our results show that the human response to a disaster is very consistent, though with certain time lags, in the virtual and physical spaces at both the grid and city scales. Such a consistency varies significantly across our study area. Full article