The sulfur microbial diet (SMD), a dietary pattern associated with 43 sulfur-metabolizing bacteria, may influence gut microbiota composition and contribute to aging process through gut-produced hydrogen sulfide (H2S). We aimed to explore the association between SMD and biological age acceleration, using the cross-sectional study included 71,579 individuals from the UK Biobank. The SMD score was calculated by multiplying β-coefficients by corresponding serving sizes and summing them, based on dietary data collected using the Oxford WebQ, a 24-hour dietary assessment tool. Biological age (BA) was assessed using Klemerae-Doubal (KDM) and PhenoAge methods. The difference between BA and chronological age refers to the age acceleration (AgeAccel), termed “KDMAccel” and “PhenoAgeAccel”. Generalized linear regression was performed. Mediation analyses were used to investigate underlying mediators including body mass index (BMI) and serum aspartate aminotransferase/alanine aminotransferase (AST/ALT) ratio. Following adjustment for multiple variables, a positive association was observed between consuming a dietary pattern with a higher SMD score and both KDMAccel (βQ4vsQ1 = 0.35, 95%CI = 0.27 to 0.44, P<0.001) and PhenoAgeAccel (βQ4vsQ1 = 0.32, 95%CI = 0.23 to 0.41, P<0.001). Each 1-standard deviation increase in SMD score was positively associated with the acceleration of biological age by 7.90% for KDMAccel (P<0.001) and 7.80% for PhenoAgeAccel (P<0.001). BMI and AST/ALT mediated the association. The stratified analysis revealed stronger accelerated aging impacts in males and smokers. Our study indicated a higher SMD score is associated with elevated markers of biological aging, supporting the potential utility of gut microbiota-targeted dietary interventions in attenuating the aging process.

The vitamin K (VK) levels vary greatly among different populations and in different regions. Currently, there is a lack of reference intervals for VK levels in healthy individuals, The aim of this study is to establish and validate the reference intervals of serum vitamin K1 (VK1) and vitamin K2 (VK2, specifically including menaquinone-4 (MK4) and menaquinone-7 (MK7)) levels in some healthy populations in Beijing. Serum VK1, MK4, and MK7 were firstly measured by high-performance liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry in 434 subjects. The reference intervals for three indicators were established by calculating the data of 2.5 and 97.5 percentiles. Finally, preliminary clinical validation was conducted on 60 apparent healthy individuals undergoing physical examination. In the young, middle-aged, and elderly groups, the reference intervals of VK1 were 0.180 ng/mL ∼ 1.494 ng/mL, 0.247 ng/mL ∼ 1.446 ng/mL, and 0.167 ng/mL ∼ 1.445 ng/mL, respectively. The reference intervals of MK4 were 0.009 ng/mL ∼ 0.115 ng/mL, 0.002 ng/mL ∼ 0.103 ng/mL, and 0.003 ng/mL ∼ 0.106 ng/mL, respectively. The reference intervals of MK7 were 0.169 ng/mL ∼ 0.881 ng/mL, 0.238 ng/mL ∼ 0.936 ng/mL, and 0.213 ng/mL ∼ 1.012 ng/mL, respectively. The reference intervals had been validated by the samples of healthy individuals for physical examination. In conclusion, the reference intervals of VK established in this study with different age groups have certain clinical applicability, providing data support for further multicentre studies.

Purple nutsedge (Cyperus rotundus L.) is one of the world’s resilient upland weeds, primarily spreading through its tubers. Its emergence in rice (Oryza sativa L.) fields has been increasing, likely due to changing paddy-farming practices. This study aimed to investigate how C. rotundus, an upland weed, can withstand soil flooding and become a problematic weed in rice fields. The first comparative analysis focused on the survival and recovery characteristics of growing and mature tubers of C. rotundus exposed to soil-flooding conditions. Notably, mature tubers exhibited significant survival and recovery abilities in these environments. Based on this observation, further investigation was carried out to explore the morphological structure, nonstructural carbohydrates, and respiratory mechanisms of mature tubers in response to prolonged soil flooding. Over time, the mature tubers did not form aerenchyma but instead gradually accumulated lignified sclerenchymal fibers, with lignin content also increasing. After 90 d, the lignified sclerenchymal fibers and lignin contents were 4.0 and 1.1 times higher than those in the no soil-flooding treatment. Concurrently, soluble sugar content decreased while starch content increased, providing energy storage, and alcohol dehydrogenase activity rose to support anaerobic respiration via alcohol fermentation. These results indicated that mature tubers survived in soil-flooding conditions by adopting a low-oxygen quiescence strategy, which involves morphological adaptations through the development of lignified sclerenchymal fibers, increased starch reserves for energy storage, and enhanced anaerobic respiration. This mechanism likely underpins the flooding tolerance of mature C. rotundus tubers, allowing them to endure unfavorable conditions and subsequently germinate and grow once flooding subsides. This study provides a preliminary explanation of the mechanism by which mature tubers of C. rotundus from the upland areas confer flooding tolerance, shedding light on the reasons behind this weed’s increasing presence in rice fields.

Deep learning (DL) has been widely used in bearing fault diagnosis. In particular, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) improve diagnosis accuracy by extracting excellent fault features. However, CNN lacks an explicit learning mechanism to distinguish between different fault characteristics in the input signal to the diagnosis results. This article presents a new end-to-end depth framework called multi-head self-attention convolution neural network (MSA-CNN) for bearing fault diagnosis. Firstly, we adopt a data pre-processing method that directly converts one-dimensional (1D) original signals into two-dimensional (2D) grayscale images, which is simple to implement and preserves the complete information of the original signal. Secondly, multi-head self-attention (MSA) is first constructed to aggregate the global information and adaptively assign weights to the input signal's features. Thirdly, the CNN with small-scale kernels extracted detailed local features. Finally, the learned high-level representations are fed into the full connect (FC) layer for fault diagnosis. The performance of the MSA-CNN is validated on different datasets. The results show that the proposed MSA-CNN can significantly improve fault diagnosis accuracy compared with the other state-of-the-art methods and has excellent noise immunity performance.

Purple nutsedge (Cyperus rotundus L.) is a globally distributed noxious weed that poses a significant challenge for control due to its fast and efficient propagation through the tuber, which is the primary reproductive organ. Gibberellic acid (GA3) has proven to be crucial for tuberization in tuberous plants. Therefore, understanding the relationship between GA3 and tuber development and propagation of C. rotundus will provide valuable information for controlling this weed. This study shows that the GA3 content decreases with tuber development, which corresponds to lower expression of bioactive GA3 synthesis genes (CrGA20ox, two CrGA3ox genes) and two upregulated GA3 catabolism genes (CrGA2ox genes), indicating that GA3 is involved in tuber development. Simultaneously, the expression of two CrDELLA genes and CrGID1 declines with tuber growth and decreased GA3, and yeast two-hybrid assays confirm that the GA3 signaling is DELLA-dependent. Furthermore, exogenous application of GA3 markedly reduces the number and the width of tubers and represses the growth of the tuber chain, further confirming the negative impact that GA3 has on tuber development and propagation. Taken together, these results demonstrate that GA3 is involved in tuber development and regulated by the DELLA-dependent pathway in C. rotundus and plays a negative role in tuber development and propagation.

We report high-precision K isotopes, apatite U–Pb ages, whole-rock elements and Sr–Nd isotopes for the Saima nephelite syenite in the North China Craton. Trace-element and Sr–Nd–Hf–O isotope data indicate the presence of subducting sediments in the source region, while K isotopic compositions show a narrow range between –0.54 ‰ and –0.28 ‰, with an average of –0.41 ± 0.06 ‰, identical to the value of the asthenosphere. The nearly identical K isotopic compositions are low probability events compared with the K isotopic compositions of island arc lavas reported previously (–1.55 ‰ to +0.2 ‰). Although crustal contamination is consistent with the Sr–Nd–K isotopic data, alternatively we propose that the isotopic data also reconcile with the interaction between cratonic roots and the underlying convective asthenosphere, if this interaction is over prolonged periods of time. Numerical simulations successfully reproduced the observed data, if the metasomatism of the lithospheric mantle root, the source of the Saima alkaline rocks, occurred 500 Ma ago. Our study reveals that the isotopic compositions of fast-diffusion components in a lithospheric mantle metasomatized by ancient subducting melts can be effectively homogenized by convective asthenosphere through diffusion over a long time interval.

In recent years, obesity is a growing pandemic in the world and has likely contributed to increasing the incidence of obesity-related diseases. Fat mass and obesity-associated gene (FTO) is the first gene discovered which has a close connection with fat. Recent studies suggested that FTO gene has played an important role in the molecular mechanisms of many diseases. Obesity is considered to be a hereditary disease and can evoke many kinds of diseases, including polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), cancer, etc., whose exact possible molecular mechanisms responsible for the effect of FTO on obesity and obesity-related diseases remain largely unknown. In this review, we comprehensively discuss the correlation between FTO gene and obesity, cancer, PCOS, T2DM, as well as the molecular mechanism involved in these diseases.

This paper presents a robust train localisation system by fusing a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) with an Inertial Navigation System (INS) in a tightly-coupled (TC) strategy. To improve navigation performance in GNSS partly blocked areas, an advanced map-matching (MM) measurement-augmented TC GNSS/INS method is proposed via an error-state unscented Kalman filter (UKF). The advanced MM generates a matched position using a one-step predicted position from a UKF time update step with binary search algorithm and a point–line projection algorithm. The matched position inputs as an additional measurement to fuse with the INS position to augment the degraded GNSS pseudorange measurement to optimise the state estimation in the UKF measurement update step. Both the real train test on the Qinghai–Tibet railway and the simulation were carried out and the results confirm that the proposed advanced MM measurement-augmented TC GNSS/INS with error-state UKF provides the best horizontal positioning accuracy of 0 ⋅ 67 m, which performs an improvement of about 71% and 90% with respect to TC GNSS/INS with only error-state UKF and only error-state Extended Kalman filter in GNSS partly blocked areas.

Coastal eutrophication and hypoxia remain a persistent environmental crisis despite the great efforts to reduce nutrient loading and mitigate associated environmental damages. Symptoms of this crisis have appeared to spread rapidly, reaching developing countries in Asia with emergences in Southern America and Africa. The pace of changes and the underlying drivers remain not so clear. To address the gap, we review the up-to-date status and mechanisms of eutrophication and hypoxia in global coastal oceans, upon which we examine the trajectories of changes over the 40 years or longer in six model coastal systems with varying socio-economic development statuses and different levels and histories of eutrophication. Although these coastal systems share common features of eutrophication, site-specific characteristics are also substantial, depending on the regional environmental setting and level of social-economic development along with policy implementation and management. Nevertheless, ecosystem recovery generally needs greater reduction in pressures compared to that initiated degradation and becomes less feasible to achieve past norms with a longer time anthropogenic pressures on the ecosystems. While the qualitative causality between drivers and consequences is well established, quantitative attribution of these drivers to eutrophication and hypoxia remains difficult especially when we consider the social economic drivers because the changes in coastal ecosystems are subject to multiple influences and the cause–effect relationship is often non-linear. Such relationships are further complicated by climate changes that have been accelerating over the past few decades. The knowledge gaps that limit our quantitative and mechanistic understanding of the human-coastal ocean nexus are identified, which is essential for science-based policy making. Recognizing lessons from past management practices, we advocate for a better, more efficient indexing system of coastal eutrophication and an advanced regional earth system modeling framework with optimal modules of human dimensions to facilitate the development and evaluation of effective policy and restoration actions.

In 2016, an outbreak of paratyphoid fever occurred in 40 cases at Qingyang town, in China. A case-control study was carried out to determine the source of this outbreak. Case-control study was conducted to identify the risk factors of this outbreak. The cases were identified as patients with isolation of S. Paratyphi, controls were confirmed cases’ healthy classmates, colleagues or neighbors and matched by age (±5 y) and gender. Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis was performed to source tracking. Totally, 40 cases were reported: 24 cases were students, and 20 (20/24) of them were Qingyang High School students. For the case-control study, consuming Chinese egg pancakes was detected as a risk factor (OR1:1 = 5.000; 95% CI: 1.710-14.640), and hand-washing before meals was protective behavior compared with seldom hand-washing (OR1:1 = 23.256; 95% CI: 2.451-200.000). S. Paratyphi was cultured from a well water sample used for washing contents of the pancakes. Isolates from well water and paratyphoid cases showed the same PFGE patterns. Contaminated well water and Chinese egg pancakes were likely source and vehicle of this outbreak. Health education, especially handwashing, and food safety supervision should be promoted particularly in schools.

Population suppression is an effective way for controlling insect pests and disease vectors, which cause significant damage to crop and spread contagious diseases to plants, animals and humans. Gene drive systems provide innovative opportunities for the insect pests population suppression by driving genes that impart fitness costs on populations of pests or disease vectors. Different gene-drive systems have been developed in insects and applied for their population suppression. Here, different categories of gene drives such as meiotic drive (MD), under-dominance (UD), homing endonuclease-based gene drive (HEGD) and especially the CRISPR/Cas9-based gene drive (CCGD) were reviewed, including the history, types, process and mechanisms. Furthermore, the advantages and limitations of applying different gene-drive systems to suppress the insect population were also summarized. This review provides a foundation for developing a specific gene-drive system for insect population suppression.