Cleavers, an annual or winter annual broadleaf weed in the Rubiaceae family, has become troublesome in the wheat fields of the Huang-Huai-Hai region in China due to its herbicide resistance. In North America the common name of the plant is stickwilly; in China it known as cleavers. Four populations of cleavers (JS-15, SD-10, JS-22, and AH-20) were collected from wheat fields in Jiangsu, Shandong, and Anhui provinces, where the plant was not being controlled with applications of florasulam. The aims of this study were to identify the herbicide resistance patterns and investigate the mechanism underlying florasulam resistance. Whole-plant dose-response experiments revealed a notable variation in the degree of resistance exhibited by three specific populations toward florasulam, in comparison to the most sensitive population (S and AH-9), with the highest resistance index reaching 841.4. A gene-sequencing assay for acetolactate synthase (ALS) found that plants that were resistant to ALS from the JS-15, JS-22, and AH-20 populations had a Trp-574-Leu mutation, while no known ALS resistance mutations were discovered in SD-10 plants. In vitro ALS enzyme activity assays also indicated that the extractable ALS from JS-15, JS-22, and AH-20 plants was greatly resistant to florasulam relative to plants that are susceptible. Additionally, according to the resistance rating system, all resistant populations were susceptible to carfentrazone-ethyl + MCPA-sodium and bipyrazone + fluroxypyr-methyl. AH-20, JS-15, and JS-22 exhibited resistance to selected ALS, 4-hydroxyphenylpyruvate dioxygenase (HPPD), and photosystem II (PS II) complex inhibitors, demonstrating RR and RRR resistance profiles, whereas AH-9 displayed sensitivity to virtually all tested agents. The SD-10 population, on the other hand, exhibited RR and RRR resistance to HPPD and PS II inhibitors, and sensitivity to tribenuron-methyl. These findings indicate that a target site–based mechanism drives resistance to the ALS inhibitor florasulam in populations of cleavers, but nontarget site resistance may also have contributed to resistance, but this was not investigated. Other herbicides with different sites of action were tested and were active against cleavers.

In this paper, on–off switching digitization of a W-band variable gain power amplifier (VGPA) with above 60 dB dynamic range is introduced for large-scale phased array. Digitization techniques of on–off switching modified stacking transistors with partition are proposed to optimize configuration of control sub-cells. By the proposed techniques, gain control of a radio frequency variable gain amplifier (VGA) could be highly customized for both coarse and fine switching requirements instead of using additional digital-to-analog converters to tune the overall amplifier bias. The designed VGA in 130 nm SiGe has achieved switchable gain range from −46.4 to 20.6 dB and power range from −25.0 to 15.7 dBm at W band. The chip size of the fabricated VGPA is about 0.31 mm × 0.1 mm.

This paper examines turbulent Rayleigh–Bénard convection in a two-dimensional square cavity with partially isothermal conducting plates on the horizontal walls. The study reveals that controlling the relative locations of the partially isothermal plates can accelerate or completely suppress the reversals of large-scale circulation. The heat transfer efficiency, which is characterised by the time-averaged Nusselt number, is generally higher than that of the traditional Rayleigh–Bénard convection, and can be further enhanced when the reversal is fully suppressed. The reversal in our cases is mainly caused by the competition between the two alternately growing ‘corner’ vortices, fed by the detaching plumes from the hot/cold plates. This differs from those reported in traditional Rayleigh–Bénard convection. Fourier mode decomposition of the kinetic energy, reflecting the diverse contributors, in the reversing cases further emphasises the distinction between the current system and traditional Rayleigh–Bénard convection. In addition, multiple states were observed where the conducting plates were positioned at specific relative locations and had different initial conditions. It has been observed that the difference in Nusselt numbers between the anticlockwise and clockwise states increases linearly with the distance between the upper cold and lower hot plates. Moreover, the analysis of the buoyancy moment and the stability of the primary roll structure suggests that the higher heat transfer efficiency between the two states is strongly linked to a more stable primary roll structure. This study presents a new approach for controlling flow reversal and improving heat transfer efficiency by modifying the non-global conducting boundary and initial conditions.

Echinococcosis poses a significant threat to public health. The Chinese government has implemented prevention and control measures to mitigate the impact of the disease. By analyzing data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, we found that implementation of these measures has reduced the infection rate by nearly 50% between 2004 to 2022 (from 0.3975 to 0.1944 per 100,000 person-years). Nonetheless, some regions still bear a significant disease burden, and lack of detailed information limites further evaluation of the effects on both alveolar and cystic echinococcosis. Our analysis supports the continuing implementation of these measures and suggests that enhanced wildlife management, case-based strategies, and surveillance systems will facilitate disease control.

Contaminant-transport modeling requires information about the charge of subsurface particle surfaces. Because values are commonly reused many times in a single simulation, small errors can be magnified greatly. Goethite (α-FeOOH) and pyrolusite (β-MnO2) are ubiquitous mineral phases that are especially contaminant reactive. The objective of the present study was to measure and compare the point of zero charge (PZC) using different methods. The pyrolusite PZC was measured with three methods: mass titration (MT) (PZC = 5.9±0.1), powder addition (PA) (PZC = 5.98±0.08), and isoelectric point, IEP (PZC = 4.4±0.1). The IEP measurement was in agreement with literature values. However, MT and PA resulted in a statistically larger PZC than the IEP measurement. The surface area of pyrolusite, 2.2 m2g−1, was too small to permit PZC determination by the potentiometric titration (PT) method. Goethite PZC values were measured using MT (7.5±0.1), PT (7.46±0.09), and PA (7.20±0.08). The present work presents the first reported instance where MT and PA have been applied to measure the point of zero charge of either pyrolusite or goethite. The results illustrate the importance of using multiple, complementary techniques to measure PZC values accurately.

The large-aperture pulse compression grating (PCG) is a critical component in generating an ultra-high-intensity, ultra-short-pulse laser; however, the size of the PCG manufactured by transmission holographic exposure is limited to large-scale high-quality materials. The reflective method is a potential way for solving the size limitation, but there is still no successful precedent due to the lack of scientific specifications and advanced processing technology of exposure mirrors. In this paper, an analytical model is developed to clarify the specifications of components, and advanced processing technology is adopted to control the spatial frequency errors. Hereafter, we have successfully fabricated a multilayer dielectric grating of 200 mm × 150 mm by using an off-axis reflective exposure system with Φ300 mm. This demonstration proves that PCGs can be manufactured by using the reflection holographic exposure method and shows the potential for manufacturing the meter-level gratings used in 100 petawatt class high-power lasers.

To alleviate the growth inhibition, and intestinal damage of Chinese mitten crab (Eriocheir sinensis) induced by low fishmeal diets (LF), an 8-week feeding trial was conducted to evaluate the addition of dietary soybean-derived bioactive peptides (SBP) in LF diets on the regulation of growth, digestion and intestinal health. The crabs were fed isonitrogenous and isoenergetic conventional diet and LF diets (10 % fishmeal replaced by soybean meal, LF) supplemented with 0, 1 %, 2 %, 4 % and 6 % SBP, respectively. The results showed that LF diet inhibited growth while inclusion of SBP quadratically remitted the growth inhibition induced by LF. For digestive function, increasing addition level of SBP quadratically improved the α-amylase and trypsin activities. For antioxidant function, LF group significantly increased the malondialdehyde content, while SBP linearly decreased the malondialdehyde level and cubically increased the anti-superoxide anion activity and total antioxidant capacity level. For intestinal health, the peritrophic membrane (PM) almost completely separated from the inner wall of the intestinal lumen, the epithelial cells reduced, the muscularis became thinner and the apoptotic signals increased in LF group; with SBP addition, the intestinal morphology was improved, with the PM adhering to the inner wall of the intestinal lumen, an increase in the number of epithelial cells and an increase in the thickness of the muscularis. Additionally, there was a decrease in apoptotic signals. Dietary SBP also increased the expression of PT and Crustin1 quadratically and decreased the expression of ALF1 linearly, ALF3 and ILF2 quadratically.

According to the public data collected from the Health Commission of Gansu Province, China, regarding the COVID-19 pandemic during the summer epidemic cycle in 2022, the epidemiological analysis showed that the pandemic spread stability and the symptom rate (the number of confirmed cases divided by the sum of the number of asymptomatic cases and the number of confirmed cases) of COVID-19 were different among 3 main epidemic regions, Lanzhou, Linxia, and Gannan; both the symptom rate and the daily instantaneous symptom rate (daily number of confirmed cases divided by the sum of daily number of asymptomatic cases and daily number of confirmed cases) in Lanzhou were substantially higher than those in Linxia and Gannan. The difference in the food sources due to the high difference of the population ethnic composition in the 3 regions was probably the main driver for the difference of the symptom rates among the 3 regions. This work provides potential values for prevention and control of COVID-19 in different regions.

Instrument delivery is critical part in vascular intervention surgery. Due to the soft-body structure of instruments, the relationship between manipulation commands and instrument motion is non-linear, making instrument delivery challenging and time-consuming. Reinforcement learning has the potential to learn manipulation skills and automate instrument delivery with enhanced success rates and reduced workload of physicians. However, due to the sample inefficiency when using high-dimensional images, existing reinforcement learning algorithms are limited on realistic vascular robotic systems. To alleviate this problem, this paper proposes discrete soft actor-critic with auto-encoder (DSAC-AE) that augments SAC-discrete with an auxiliary reconstruction task. The algorithm is applied with distributed sample collection and parameter update in a robot-assisted preclinical environment. Experimental results indicate that guidewire delivery can be automatically implemented after 50k sampling steps in less than 15 h, demonstrating the proposed algorithm has the great potential to learn manipulation skill for vascular robotic systems.

In the era of rapid product update and intense competition, aesthetic design has been increasingly important in various fields, as aesthetic feelings of customers largely influence their purchase preferences. However, the quantification of aesthetic feeling is still a very subjective process due to vague evaluations. The determination of form parameters according to aesthetics is difficult hitherto. Aesthetic measure recently arises as a prominent tool for this purpose using formulas derived from aesthetic theory. But as revealed by existing studies, it needs to be customized with deterministic and objective methods to be reliable in practice use. To facilitate this application, this paper proposes an evolutionary form design method, integrating aesthetic dimension selection and parameter optimization. After summarizing initial aesthetic dimensions, aesthetic dimension selection based on expert decision-making and particle swarm optimization (PSO) is carried out. With filtered aesthetic dimensions, design parameters are optimized with NSGA-II (non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm). The quality of pareto solutions obtained to be design schemes is assessed by three criteria to conduct sensitivity analysis of cross and mutation probability and population size. Our experiment using bicycle form design shows that the proposed evolutionary form design method can generate numerous and variant aesthetic design schemes rapidly. This is very useful for both product redesign and innovative new product development.

Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) virus has caused a large number of human infections since discovered in 2009. This study elucidated epidemiological features and fatal risk factors of SFTS cases accumulated up to ten years in Taizhou, a coastal prefecture of Zhejiang Province in Eastern China. A total of 188 hospitalised SFTS cases (including 40 deaths) reported to Taizhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during 2011–2020 were enrolled in the study. In the past decade, the annual incidence of SFTS increased over the years (P < 0.001) along with an expanding epidemic area, and the case fatality of hospitalised cases has remained high (21.3%). Although most cases occurred in hilly areas, a coastal island had the highest incidence and case fatality. The majority of cases were over the age of 60 years (72.3%), and both incidence and case fatality of SFTS increased with age. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that age (OR 7.47, 95% CI 1.32–42.33; P = 0.023), and haemorrhagic manifestations including petechiae (OR 7.76, 95% CI 1.17–51.50; P = 0.034), gingival haemorrhage (OR 5.38, 95% CI 1.25–23.15; P = 0.024) and melena (OR 5.75, 95% CI 1.18–28.07; P = 0.031) were significantly associated with the death of SFTS cases. Five family clusters identified were farmers, among four of which the index patients were female with a history of hypertension. Based on the study, age is a critical risk factor for incidence and case fatality of SFTS. With an increased annual incidence over the last ten years, SFTS remains a public health threat that should not be ignored. Further study is needed to look at the natural foci in the coastal islands.

As an important index to quantitatively measure the motion performance of a manipulator, motion reliability is affected by many factors, such as joint clearance. The present research utilized a UR10 manipulator as the research object. A factor mapping model for influencing the motion reliability was established. The link flexibility factor, joint flexibility factor, joint clearance factor, and Denavit–Hartenberg (DH) parameters were comprehensively considered in this model. The coupling relationship among the various factors was concisely expressed. Subsequently, the nonlinear response surface method was used to calculate the reliability and sensitivity of the manipulator, which provided an applicable reference for its trajectory planning and motion control. In addition, a data-driven fault diagnosis method based on the kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) was used to verify the motion accuracy and sensitivity of the manipulator, and joint rotation failure was considered as an example to verify the accuracy of the KPCA method. This study on the motion reliability of the manipulator is of great significance for the current motion performance, adjusting the control strategy and optimizing the completion effect of the motion task of a manipulator.

Thermal convection of fluid is a more efficient way than diffusion to carry heat from hot sources to cold places. Here, we experimentally study the Rayleigh–Bénard convection of aqueous glycerol solution in a cubic cell with suspensions of rod-like particles made of polydimethylsiloxane. The particles are inertial due to their large thermal expansion coefficient and finite sizes. The thermal expansion coefficient of the particles is three times larger than that of the background fluid. This contrast makes the suspended particles lighter than the local fluid in hot regions and heavier in cold regions. The heat transport is enhanced at relatively large Rayleigh number ($\textit {Ra}$) but reduced at small $\textit {Ra}$. We demonstrate that the increase of Nusselt number arises from the particle–boundary layer interactions: the particles act as ‘active’ mixers of the flow and temperature fields across the boundary layers.

With the increasing demand for a personalized product and rapid market response, many companies expect to explore online user-generated content (UGC) for intelligent customer hearing and product redesign strategy. UGC has the advantages of being more unbiased than traditional interviews, yielding in-time response, and widely accessible with a sheer volume. From online resources, customers’ preferences toward various aspects of the product can be exploited by promising sentiment analysis methods. However, due to the complexity of language, state-of-the-art sentiment analysis methods are still not accurate for practice use in product redesign. To tackle this problem, we propose an integrated customer hearing and product redesign system, which combines the robust use of sentiment analysis for customer hearing and coordinated redesign mechanisms. Ontology and expert knowledges are involved to promote the accuracy. Specifically, a fuzzy product ontology that contains domain knowledges is first learned in a semi-supervised way. Then, UGC is exploited with a novel ontology-based fine-grained sentiment analysis approach. Extracted customer preference statistics are transformed into multilevels, for the automatic establishment of opportunity landscapes and house of quality table. Besides, customer preference statistics are interactively visualized, through which representative customer feedbacks are concurrently generated. Through a case study of smartphone, the effectiveness of the proposed system is validated, and applicable redesign strategies for a case product are provided. With this system, information including customer preferences, user experiences, using habits and conditions can be exploited together for reliable product redesign strategy elicitation.

Stochastic models are essential for precise navigation and positioning of the global navigation satellite system (GNSS). A stochastic model can influence the resolution of ambiguity, which is a key step in GNSS positioning. Most of the existing multi-GNSS stochastic models are based on the GPS empirical model, while differences in the precision of observations among different systems are not considered. In this paper, three refined stochastic models, namely the variance components between systems (RSM1), the variances of different types of observations (RSM2) and the variances of observations for each satellite (RSM3) are proposed based on the least-squares variance component estimation (LS-VCE). Zero-baseline and short-baseline GNSS experimental data were used to verify the proposed three refined stochastic models. The results show that, compared with the traditional elevation-dependent model (EDM), though the proposed models do not significantly improve the ambiguity resolution success rate, the positioning precision of the three proposed models has been improved. RSM3, which is more realistic for the data itself, performs the best, and the precision at elevation mask angles 20°, 30°, 40°, 50° can be improved by 4⋅6%, 7⋅6%, 13⋅2%, 73⋅0% for L1-B1-E1 and 1⋅1%, 4⋅8%, 16⋅3%, 64⋅5% for L2-B2-E5a, respectively.

Global warming will directly influence agricultural production and present new challenges for food security in semiarid regions of China. A warming experiment was conducted in Guyuan, China using infrared ray radiators to study the impact of warming on crop growth, yield and quality of a potato–broad bean–winter wheat crop rotation system. Warming significantly affected the crop photosynthesis rates of the potato–broad bean–winter wheat rotation system. In the podding stage of broad bean and the heading, blooming and booting stages of winter wheat, the photosynthesis rate was significantly decreased when the temperature increased by 0.5–2.0°C. The growing period of the potato–broad bean–winter wheat rotation system was shortened by 20–40 days per 3-year-period, and the fallow period was prolonged by 4–13 days per 3-year-period. The water use efficiency of the potato–broad bean–winter wheat rotation decreased by 8.6% when the temperature increased by 1.02.0°C. The yield of the potato–broad bean–winter wheat rotation increased by 6.1–7.7% when the temperature increased by 0.5–1.0°C. However, yield decreased 12.9–13.4% when temperature increased by 1.0–2.0°C. Potato protein significantly decreased by 9.3–17.6% and the winter wheat fat significantly decreased by 6.7% when the temperature increased by 0.5–2.0°C. The results indicate that global warming could seriously affect the crop growth, yield and water use of the potato–broad bean–winter wheat rotation in semiarid regions of China.

Nitrogen is an important element for the growth of flue-cured tobacco and is closely related to its yield and quality. In order to pursue higher economic benefits, excessive fertilizer is generally applied in flue-cured tobacco production, which is unfavourable for the sustainable development of flue-cured tobacco production and for the environment. In 2016 and 2017, experiments using different nitrogen fertilizer application rates in flue-cure tobacco were conducted in Yunnan province, and the changes in agronomic, economic and chemical indices as well as in residual soil nitrogen were compared. Linear and quadratic models were used to compare the response of tobacco to nitrogen fertilizer. With increasing nitrogen fertilizer rate, the proportions of superior to medium tobacco and the average price of flue-cured tobacco leaves initially increased and then decreased, while fresh weight, dry weight and the proportion of inferior tobacco showed the opposite trend. Total sugar and reducing sugar contents decreased with increasing nitrogen fertilizer rates, while total nitrogen and nicotine contents increased. Sensory evaluation scores had the highest value when 90 kg N/ha and 120 kg N/ha were applied. Soil nitrate contents increased as nitrogen fertilizer rate increased. The quadratic model was suitable for the response of cultivar K326 to nitrogen and 90 kg N/ha could meet the needs of cultivar K326.