Machine learning (ML) models have been developed to identify randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to accelerate systematic reviews (SRs). However, their use has been limited due to concerns about their performance and practical benefits. We developed a high-recall ensemble learning model using Cochrane RCT data to enhance the identification of RCTs for rapid title and abstract screening in SRs and evaluated the model externally with our annotated RCT datasets. Additionally, we assessed the practical impact in terms of labour time savings and recall improvement under two scenarios: ML-assisted double screening (where ML and one reviewer screened all citations in parallel) and ML-assisted stepwise screening (where ML flagged all potential RCTs, and at least two reviewers subsequently filtered the flagged citations). Our model achieved twice the precision compared to the existing SVM model while maintaining a recall of 0.99 in both internal and external tests. In a practical evaluation with ML-assisted double screening, our model led to significant labour time savings (average 45.4%) and improved recall (average 0.998 compared to 0.919 for a single reviewer). In ML-assisted stepwise screening, the model performed similarly to standard manual screening but with average labour time savings of 74.4%. In conclusion, compared with existing methods, the proposed model can reduce workload while maintaining comparable recall when identifying RCTs during the title and abstract screening stages, thereby accelerating SRs. We propose practical recommendations to effectively apply ML-assisted manual screening when conducting SRs, depending on reviewer availability (ML-assisted double screening) or time constraints (ML-assisted stepwise screening).

This study examined the sour grapes/sweet lemons rationalization through 2 conditions: ‘attainable’ (sweet lemons) and ‘unattainable’ (sour grapes), reflecting China’s 2019-nCoV vaccination strategy. The aim was to find ways to change people’s beliefs and preferences regarding vaccines by easing their safety concerns and encouraging more willingness to get vaccinated. An online survey was conducted from January 22 to 27, 2021, with 3,123 residents across 30 provinces and municipalities in the Chinese mainland. The direction of belief and preference changed in line with the sour grapes/sweet lemons rationalization. Using hypothetical and real contrasts, we compared those for whom the vaccine was relatively unattainable (‘sour grapes’ condition) with those who could get the vaccine easily (‘sweet lemons’). Whether the vaccine was attainable was determined in the early stage of the vaccine roll-out by membership in a select group of workers that was supposed to be vaccinated to the greatest extent possible, or, by being in the second stage when the vaccine was available to all. The attainable conditions demonstrated higher evaluation in vaccine safety, higher willingness to be vaccinated, and lower willingness to wait and see. Hence, we propose that the manipulation of vaccine attainability, which formed the basis of the application of sour grapes/sweet lemons rationalization, can be utilized as a means to manipulate the choice architecture to nudge individuals to ease vaccine safety concerns, reducing wait-and-see tendencies, and enhancing vaccination willingness. This approach can expedite universal vaccination and its associated benefits in future scenarios resembling the 2019-nCoV vaccine rollout.

In this paper, we have experimentally demonstrated a high-power and high-brightness narrow-linewidth fiber amplifier seeded by an optimized fiber oscillator. In order to improve the temporal stability, the fiber oscillator consists of a composite fiber Bragg grating-based cavity with an external feedback structure. By optimizing the forward and backward pumping ratio, the nonlinear effects and stimulated Raman scattering-induced mode distortion of the fiber amplifier are suppressed comprehensively, accompanied with the simultaneous improvement of beam quality and output power. The laser brightness is enhanced further by raising the threshold of transverse mode instability by approximately 1.0 kW by coiling the gain fiber with a novel curvature shape. Finally, a 6 kW narrow-linewidth laser is achieved with beam quality (M2) of approximately 1.4. The laser brightness doubled compared to the results before optimization. To the best of our knowledge, it is the highest brightness narrow-linewidth fiber laser based on a one-stage master oscillator power amplification structure.

Polycarboxylate superplasticizer (PCE) is a widely used water-reducing agent that can reduce significantly the water demand of concrete, which reduces the porosity and enhances the strength and durability of the concrete. (The PCE consists of a single backbone with many long PEO side chains.) Generally, aggregate occupies >70 wt.% of concrete; clay minerals are ubiquitous in nature and are difficult to avoid in mined aggregates. Clay minerals in aggregate often render the PCE ineffective and give rise to rapid loss of the fluidity of the concrete; this phenomenon is referred to as ‘poor clay tolerance of PCE.’ Though the poor clay tolerance of PCE is known widely, the relationship between the clay tolerance and the molecular structure of the PCE, in particular the effect of the side-chain structures, on clay tolerance is not understood completely. The objective of the present study was to determine the effect of different grafting densities of polyethylene oxide (PEO) side chains on the clay tolerance of PCE. The raw materials included mainly PCE, which was synthesized using acrylic acid and isopentenol polyoxyethylene ether, and a natural montmorillonite (Mnt), one of the most common clay minerals. The loss of fluidity of the cement paste was tested to assess the clay tolerance; total organic carbon was used to measure the amount of PCE adsorbed; X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, and thermogravimetric analysis were used to investigate the microstructure of the intercalated Mnt. The results showed that preventing the superficially adsorbed PCE from being intercalated into Mnt was of great importance in terms of the improvement in clay tolerance of PCE, which increased with greater grafting density of PEO in the side chain of the PCE. The results also suggested the possibility that polymers which intercalate preferentially into the Mnt could improve significantly the clay tolerance of the PCE system.

Energy loss of protons with 90 and 100 keV energies penetrating through a hydrogen plasma target has been measured, where the electron density of the plasma is about 1016 cm−3 and the electron temperature is about 1-2 eV. It is found that the energy loss of protons in the plasma is obviously larger than that in cold gas and the experimental results based on the Bethe model calculations can be demonstrated by the variation of effective charge of protons in the hydrogen plasma. The effective charge remains 1 for 100 keV protons, while the value for 90 keV protons decreases to be about 0.92. Moreover, two empirical formulae are employed to extract the effective charge.

Phenol contaminants are highly biotoxic and have become a global problem threatening the environment and human health. The objective of the present study was to develop a very efficient and easily recyclable adsorbent to remove phenol. A magnetic montmorillonite composite with organic co-intercalation was fabricated by a simple one-step co-precipitation method and exhibited excellent phenol removal. Two surfactants, cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) and erucic acid amide (EA), were successfully co-intercalated into the interlayer of Ca-montmorillonite, and Fe3O4 nanoparticles were simultaneously decorated to obtain Fe3O4-CTAB/EA-montmorillonite composite (Fe3O4-C/E-Mnt). The morphology and structure of Fe3O4-C/E-Mnt composite were explored by using different techniques such as X-ray diffraction, Fourier-Transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron microscopy and so on. The adsorption capacity of Fe3O4-C/E-Mnt for phenol was investigated under various conditions including temperature, pH, contact time, various phenol concentrations, and adsorbent dosage. The results showed that Fe3O4-C/E-Mnt retained a lamellar structure of Ca-Mnt with mesopores. Its interlayer space, surface area, and pore volume were increased. The Fe3O4-C/E-Mnt composite exhibited a good adsorption capacity (31.45 mg·g–1) for phenol with a removal efficiency of 85.46% at optimized conditions. Moreover, the adsorbent still maintained 78.32% of the adsorption capacity after five cycles. The adsorption test data of Fe3O4-C/E-Mnt followed the pseudo-second order kinetic model and the Langmuir model. The adsorption was a spontaneous, exothermic, entropy-decreasing process, and a possible adsorption mechanism of Fe3O4-C/E-Mnt was finally proposed.

Recently, neural abstractive text summarization (NATS) models based on sequence-to-sequence architecture have drawn a lot of attention. Real-world texts that need to be summarized range from short news with dozens of words to long reports with thousands of words. However, most existing NATS models are not good at summarizing long documents, due to the inherent limitations of their underlying neural architectures. In this paper, we focus on the task of long document summarization (LDS). Based on the inherent section structures of source documents, we divide an abstractive LDS problem into several smaller-sized problems. In this circumstance, how to provide a less-biased target summary as the supervision for each section is vital for the model’s performance. As a preliminary, we formally describe the section-to-summary-sentence (S2SS) alignment for LDS. Based on this, we propose a novel NATS framework for the LDS task. Our framework is built based on the theory of unbalanced optimal transport (UOT), and it is named as UOTSumm. It jointly learns three targets in a unified training objective, including the optimal S2SS alignment, a section-level NATS summarizer, and the number of aligned summary sentences for each section. In this way, UOTSumm directly learns the text alignment from summarization data, without resorting to any biased tool such as ROUGE. UOTSumm can be easily adapted to most existing NATS models. And we implement two versions of UOTSumm, with and without the pretrain-finetune technique. We evaluate UOTSumm on three publicly available LDS benchmarks: PubMed, arXiv, and GovReport. UOTSumm obviously outperforms its counterparts that use ROUGE for the text alignment. When combined with UOTSumm, the performance of two vanilla NATS models improves by a large margin. Besides, UOTSumm achieves better or comparable performance when compared with some recent strong baselines.

The plant Camellia fascicularis, belonging to family Theaceae, has high ornamental and medicinal value, and rare gene resources for genetic improvement of Camellia crops, but is currently threatened with extinction because of the unique and extremely small wild populations. Molecular markers have clarified the wild plant species’ genetic diversity structure, new gene resources and relationship with crops. This will be beneficial for conservation of these valuable crop-related wild species and crop improvement. In this study, we identified 95,979 microsatellite loci from 155,011 transcriptome unigenes, and developed 14 polymorphic expressed sequence tag-derived simple sequence repeat (EST-SSR) microsatellite markers for C. fascicularis. The number of alleles (Na) per locus was 2–8 with a mean of 4.86. The genetic diversity of 40 individuals from four natural populations of C. fascicularis was analysed using these polymorphic markers. The number of alleles (Na) for EST-SSR ranged from 2 to 5, with the expected heterozygosities (He) and observed heterozygosities (Ho) in all loci ranging from 0.183 to 0.683, and from 0.201 to 0.700, respectively, implying a rich genetic variation present in wild C. fascicularis populations. Moreover, the phylogenetic analysis among four populations, using the 14 EST-SSR markers developed in this study, grouped 40 individuals into three groups, which coincide with their geographic distribution. These results showed that 14 EST-SSR markers are available for the analysis of genetic variation in C. fascicularis populations and genetic improvement of new Camellias cultivars by interspecific hybridization, and are beneficial for conservation of the endangered species.

One of the most common harmful mites in edible fungi is Histiostoma feroniarum Dufour (Acaridida: Histiostomatidae), a fungivorous astigmatid mite that feeds on hyphae and fruiting bodies, thereby transmitting pathogens. This study examined the effects of seven constant temperatures and 10 types of mushrooms on the growth and development of H. feroniarum, as well as its host preference. Developmental time for the total immature stages was significantly affected by the type of mushroom species, ranging from 4.3 ± 0.4 days (reared on Pleurotus eryngii var. tuoliensis Mou at 28°C) to 17.1 ± 2.3 days (reared on Auricularia polytricha Sacc. at 19°C). The temperature was a major factor in the formation of facultative heteromorphic deutonymphs (hypopi). The mite entered the hypopus stage when the temperature dropped to 16°C or rose above 31°C. The growth and development of this mite were significantly influenced by the type of species and variety of mushrooms. Moreover, the fungivorous astigmatid mite preferred to feed on the ‘Wuxiang No. 1’ strain of Lentinula edodes (Berk.) Pegler and the ‘Gaowenxiu’ strain of P. pulmonarius (Fr.) Quél., with a shorter development period compared with that of feeding on other strains. These results therefore quantify the effect of host type and temperature on fungivorous astigmatid mite growth and development rates, and provide a reference for applying mushroom cultivar resistance to biological pest control.

Pie charts are often used to communicate risk, such as the risk of driving. In the foreground-background salience effect (FBSE), foreground (probability of bad event) has greater salience than background (no bad event) in such a chart. Experiment 1 confirmed that the displays format of pie charts showed a typical FBSE. Experiment 2 showed that the FBSE resulted from a difference in cognitive efforts in processing the messages and that a foreground-emphasizing display was easier to process. Experiment 3 manipulated subjects’ information processing mindset and explored the interaction between displays format and information processing mindset. In the default mindset, careless subjects displayed a typical FBSE, while those who were instructed to be careful reported similar risk-avoidant behavior preference reading both charts. Suggestions for improving risk communication are discussed.

Parallel manipulators are increasingly utilized in extensive industrial applications due to their high accuracy, compact structure, and significant stiffness characteristics. However, most of the time, massive actuators are involved in constructing and controlling a parallel manipulator, which burdens the structure design and controller development. In this paper, a novel underactuated positioning system been built by different sets of linear motion units (defined as the positioning lines) is proposed, enabling to actuate the multiple degree-of-freedom manipulators with one motor. To achieve this, a smart shape memory alloy (SMA) clutch is presented to obtain the positioning function of each positioning line. Further, to get the decoupled motion regulation of the positioning lines, a new thermal kinematic model of the SMA clutch, which considers the heat dissipation influence on the metal components, was built and validated by the physical prototypes. The experimental results show that the constitutive model of the SMA clutch developed in this paper can be validated within the error of 5.3%. It can also be found that the heat dissipation of the metal component has a significant influence on the model accuracy of the SMA clutch (i.e., 2.6% of the model accuracy). The experiments on the underactuated positioning system produce the following results: the single positioning line can achieve high positioning (i.e., average error: 1.01%) and tracking (i.e., average error $\leq$1 mm) abilities; the underactuated positioning system can perform decoupled motions in the three positioning lines with high accuracy (i.e., ±2 mm within the stroke of 180 mm).

Insulin-like growth factor 1 receptor (IGF1R) is a cell surface receptor, belonging to the tyrosine kinase receptor superfamily. IGF1R plays a role not only in normal cell development but also in malignant transformation, which has become a candidate therapeutic target for the treatment of human cancer. This study aimed to explore insertions and deletions (indels) in IGF1R gene and investigate their association with growth traits in four Chinese cattle breeds (Xianan cattle, Jinnan cattle, Qinchuan cattle and Nanyang cattle). The current paper identified a 28-bp indel by polymerase chain reaction within IGF1R gene. The analysis showed that there was a significant correlation between the locus and the hucklebone width of Nanyang cattle in four periods, in which it was highly correlated at 6, 12 and 18 months. At the age of 6 months, it was also significantly correlated with body height, body weight and body length. Association analysis showed that the locus in Jinnan cattle was extremely significantly correlated with body slanting length and body weight, and significantly correlated with chest circumference. There was no significant correlation between this locus and growth traits of Xianan cattle and Qinchuan cattle. The detected indel in the IGF1R gene was significantly associated with growth traits in Jinnan and Nanyang cattle, and could be used as a molecular marker for growth trait selection.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, whether and when the world can reach herd immunity and return to normal life and a strategy for accelerating vaccination programmes constitute major concerns. We employed Metropolis–Hastings sampling and an epidemic model to design experiments based on the current vaccinations administered and a more equitable vaccine allocation scenario. The results show that most high-income countries can reach herd immunity in less than 1 year, whereas low-income countries should reach this state after more than 3 years. With a more equitable vaccine allocation strategy, global herd immunity can be reached in 2021. However, the spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants means that an additional 83 days will be needed to reach global herd immunity and that the number of cumulative cases will increase by 113.37% in 2021. With the more equitable vaccine allocation scenario, the number of cumulative cases will increase by only 5.70% without additional vaccine doses. As SARS-CoV-2 variants arise, herd immunity could be delayed to the point that a return to normal life is theoretically impossible in 2021. Nevertheless, a more equitable global vaccine allocation strategy, such as providing rapid vaccine assistance to low-income countries/regions, can improve the prevention of COVID-19 infection even though the virus could mutate.

We assessed the association between the dietary inflammatory index (DII) and the development of metabolic syndrome in the elderly over 55 years in Northern China. The data of 1936 Chinese adults aged 55 years and over from a community-based neurological disease cohort study from 2018 to 2019 were analysed. Multiple logistic regression and restricted cubic splines regression were used for analysis, and social demographics, lifestyle and health-related factors were adjusted. In the fully adjusted model, the risk of metabolic syndrome increased by 1·28-fold in people with a pro-inflammatory diet. When we divide the metabolic syndrome by its components, high pro-inflammatory diet and hyperglycaemia, TAG, hypertension and abdominal obesity, we failed to observe a significant association between a high pro-inflammatory diet and HDL-cholesterol. However, these associations are moving in the expected direction. At the same time, the results of BMI subgroup analysis showed that with the increase of DII, obese people are at increased risk of metabolic syndrome, hyperglycaemia, high TAG, hypertension and abdominal obesity. Also in overweight people, the increase in DII is accompanied by an increased risk of hyperglycaemia and abdominal obesity. Higher inflammatory diet is related to metabolic syndrome, hypertension, hyperglycaemia, abdominal obesity and hypertriglyceridaemia. Further research is needed to confirm the role of inflammation and diet in the development of metabolic syndrome; however, it is desirable to reduce the dietary components associated with inflammation.