We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
This article is dedicated to investigating limit behaviours of invariant measures with respect to delay and system parameters of 3D Navier–Stokes–Voigt equations. Firstly, the well-posedness of such a system is obtained on arbitrary open sets that satisfy the Poincaré inequality, and then a unique minimal pullback attractor is attained by using the energy equation method and asymptotic compactness property. Furthermore, we construct a family of invariant Borel probability measures, which are supported on the pullback attractors. Specifically, when the external forcing terms are periodic in time, the periodic invariant measure can be obtained. Finally, as the delay approaches zero and system parameters tend to some numbers, the limit of the invariant measure sequences for this class of equations must be the invariant measure of the corresponding limit equations.
Bronze mou vessels appear in Shu tombs in south-west China during the Eastern Zhou period (c. 771–256 BC). Examination of these vessels reveals major changes in the supply of metal and alloying technology in the Shu State, throwing new light on the social impact of the Qin conquest and later unification of China.
The emotion regulation network (ERN) in the brain provides a framework for understanding the neuropathology of affective disorders. Although previous neuroimaging studies have investigated the neurobiological correlates of the ERN in major depressive disorder (MDD), whether patients with MDD exhibit abnormal functional connectivity (FC) patterns in the ERN and whether the abnormal FC in the ERN can serve as a therapeutic response signature remain unclear.
Methods
A large functional magnetic resonance imaging dataset comprising 709 patients with MDD and 725 healthy controls (HCs) recruited across five sites was analyzed. Using a seed-based FC approach, we first investigated the group differences in whole-brain resting-state FC of the 14 ERN seeds between participants with and without MDD. Furthermore, an independent sample (45 MDD patients) was used to evaluate the relationship between the aforementioned abnormal FC in the ERN and symptom improvement after 8 weeks of antidepressant monotherapy.
Results
Compared to the HCs, patients with MDD exhibited aberrant FC between 7 ERN seeds and several cortical and subcortical areas, including the bilateral middle temporal gyrus, bilateral occipital gyrus, right thalamus, calcarine cortex, middle frontal gyrus, and the bilateral superior temporal gyrus. In an independent sample, these aberrant FCs in the ERN were negatively correlated with the reduction rate of the HAMD17 score among MDD patients.
Conclusions
These results might extend our understanding of the neurobiological underpinnings underlying unadaptable or inflexible emotional processing in MDD patients and help to elucidate the mechanisms of therapeutic response.
Ultrasonic scalpels are widely used in urological surgery. Although portable ultrasonic scalpels are convenient to use and install, the existing evidence on their safety and effectiveness is scarce. This study aimed to compare the safety and effectiveness of portable ultrasonic scalpels in urological surgery with traditional ultrasonic scalpels to aid clinical decision-making.
Methods
A multicenter, prospective, non-randomized controlled trial was conducted from February to August 2023 in three tertiary hospitals in China. The intervention group included 90 prospectively enrolled patients undergoing urological surgery during the same period of hospitalization: 45 with portable ultrasonic scalpels and 45 with traditional scalpels. Demographic and clinical data of patients in the study were collected. Data on quality of life were obtained using the EuroQol EQ-5D-5L scale preoperatively, at discharge, and one month and three months after surgery. Descriptive analysis and a generalized linear model were used in the data analysis.
Results
A total of 82 patients were included in the study: 39 in the intervention group and 43 in the control group. The average hospital stay and intraoperative and postoperative blood loss in the intervention group were lower than in the control group (p>0.05). From baseline to discharge, the decrease in quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) in the intervention group was smaller (–0.134 versus –0.287; p<0.05) than in the control group. During the follow-up period, there were no significant differences in the changes in QALYs between the two groups. The decline in QALYs was significantly influenced by variables such as intraoperative blood loss and surgical site.
Conclusions
There were no significant differences in baseline characteristics or changes in QALYs between the intervention and control groups. Portable ultrasonic scalpels in urological surgery may be as equally effective as traditional scalpels with respect to clinical outcomes, with additional benefits in reducing QALY decline at discharge. Further research with large samples and long-term follow-up should be conducted.
Echinococcosis lacks sensitive serological diagnostic tools. The echinococcosis-specific antigens Eg95, AgB8/1 and the Em18 gene sequences were fused and expressed as the novel recombinant antigens rAgB8/1-Em18-Eg95 (T3) and rEm18-Eg95 (T2), used for the diagnosis of hydatid disease, prepared into an enzyme-linked immunosorbent reaction (ELISA) kit, and evaluated for their serological diagnostic value. The relative molecular weight of the T3 protein was 88.1 kDa, the purified concentration was 1.5 mg mL−1, and the purity was 80%. The relative molecular weight of T2 protein was 79.9 kDa, the total protein concentration was 0.5 mg mL−1, and the purity was less than 50%. The overall coincidence rate of T2 protein was low, and it was impossible to distinguish between negative and positive sera. The T3 antigen was coated at 1.0 μg mL−1, the cutoff value was 0.5271, and the serum dilution ratio was 1:400. A T3 ELISA kits (96 tests) was constructed to detect the serum of 272 clinically and pathologically confirmed cases. The sensitivity of T3 was 93.8%, and the specificity was 83.3%. The parasite cross-reaction was 30%. Satisfactorily, the Pearson correlation coefficient between the T3 OD value and lesion diameter was 0.707, showing a strong correlation. T3 exhibits better antigenicity than T2, and the prepared T3 ELISA diagnostic kits reached the laboratory diagnostic level of a commercial kits. T3 can distinguish human cystic echinococcosis (CE) and alveolar echinococcosis (AE) more significantly and predict the diameter of lesions according to the OD value, which provides practical value for drug or surgical efficacy.
Predicting epidemic trends of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) remains a key public health concern globally today. However, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) reinfection rate in previous studies of the transmission dynamics model was mostly a fixed value. Therefore, we proposed a meta-Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered-Susceptible (SEIRS) model by adding a time-varying SARS-CoV-2 reinfection rate to the transmission dynamics model to more accurately characterize the changes in the number of infected persons. The time-varying reinfection rate was estimated using random-effect multivariate meta-regression based on published literature reports of SARS-CoV-2 reinfection rates. The meta-SEIRS model was constructed to predict the epidemic trend of COVID-19 from February to December 2023 in Sichuan province. Finally, according to the online questionnaire survey, the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate at the end of December 2022 in Sichuan province was 82.45%. The time-varying effective reproduction number in Sichuan province had two peaks from July to December 2022, with a maximum peak value of about 15. The prediction results based on the meta-SEIRS model showed that the highest peak of the second wave of COVID-19 in Sichuan province would be in late May 2023. The number of new infections per day at the peak would be up to 2.6 million. We constructed a meta-SEIRS model to predict the epidemic trend of COVID-19 in Sichuan province, which was consistent with the trend of SARS-CoV-2 positivity in China. Therefore, a meta-SEIRS model parameterized based on evidence-based data can be more relevant to the actual situation and thus more accurately predict future trends in the number of infections.
Major psychiatric disorders (MPDs) are delineated by distinct clinical features. However, overlapping symptoms and transdiagnostic effectiveness of medications have challenged the traditional diagnostic categorisation. We investigate if there are shared and illness-specific disruptions in the regional functional efficiency (RFE) of the brain across these disorders.
Methods
We included 364 participants (118 schizophrenia [SCZ], 80 bipolar disorder [BD], 91 major depressive disorder [MDD], and 75 healthy controls [HCs]). Resting-state fMRI was used to caclulate the RFE based on the static amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation, regional homogeneity, and degree centrality and corresponding dynamic measures indicating variability over time. We used principal component analysis to obtain static and dynamic RFE values. We conducted functional and genetic annotation and enrichment analysis based on abnormal RFE profiles.
Results
SCZ showed higher static RFE in the cortico-striatal regions and excessive variability in the cortico-limbic regions. SCZ and MDD shared lower static RFE with higher dynamic RFE in sensorimotor regions than BD and HCs. We observed association between static RFE abnormalities with reward and sensorimotor functions and dynamic RFE abnormalities with sensorimotor functions. Differential spatial expression of genes related to glutamatergic synapse and calcium/cAMP signaling was more likely in the regions with aberrant RFE.
Conclusions
SCZ shares more regions with disrupted functional integrity, especially in sensorimotor regions, with MDD rather than BD. The neural patterns of these transdiagnostic changes appear to be potentially driven by gene expression variations relating to glutamatergic synapses and calcium/cAMP signaling. The aberrant sensorimotor, cortico-striatal, and cortico-limbic integrity may collectively underlie neurobiological mechanisms of MPDs.
In practical applications, many robots equipped with embedded devices have limited computing capabilities. These limitations often hinder the performance of existing dynamic SLAM algorithms, especially when faced with occlusions or processor constraints. Such challenges lead to subpar positioning accuracy and efficiency. This paper introduces a novel lightweight dynamic SLAM algorithm designed primarily to mitigate the interference caused by moving object occlusions. Our proposed approach combines a deep learning object detection algorithm with a Kalman filter. This combination offers prior information about dynamic objects for each SLAM algorithm frame. Leveraging geometric techniques like RANSAC and the epipolar constraint, our method filters out dynamic feature points, focuses on static feature points for pose determination, and enhances the SLAM algorithm’s robustness in dynamic environments. We conducted experimental validations on the TUM public dataset, which demonstrated that our approach elevates positioning accuracy by approximately 54% and boosts the running speed by 75.47% in dynamic scenes.
Pi-d2, which encodes a potential serine-threonine receptor-like kinase (RLK) membrane-spanning protein consisting of 825 amino acids, confers resistance to Magnaporthe oryzae strain ZB15 via an unidentified recognition mechanism. In this study, the Pid2 alleles of 303 rice (O. sativa) varieties from China's Yunnan region were amplified and sequenced in order to produce 24 haplotypes and 16 translation variants. Six of twenty-four alleles possessing the resistant site at the 441st amino acid were chosen for evaluating blast resistance by transforming into the blast-vulnerable rice variety Nipponbare. After being infected with 11 strains of M. oryzae, all transgenic lines exhibited resistance to ZB-15, whereas resistance to other strains varied. Notably, Pi-d2_H23 and Pi-d2_H24 exhibited resistance to all M. oryzae strains tested, indicating that these two alleles may have a broader resistance spectrum to M. oryzae. Alignment of these alleles’ amino acid sequences revealed that the differences in blast resistance spectra were primarily related to the amino acids present in the PAN domain at position 363 (valine/alanine). These findings suggested that the two extracellular signal recognition domains of PI-D2, B-lectin and PAN, may play a role in the identification of M. oryzae effectors. The present results provide insight into the mechanism of interaction between RLKs and M. oryzae.
We propose a new approach to the semiparametric analysis of panel data binary choice models with fixed effects and dynamics (lagged dependent variables). The model under consideration has the same random utility framework as in Honoré and Kyriazidou (2000, Econometrica 68, 839–874). We demonstrate that, with additional serial dependence conditions on the process of deterministic utility and tail restrictions on the error distribution, the (point) identification of the model can proceed in two steps, and requires matching only the value of an index function of explanatory variables over time, rather than the value of each explanatory variable. Our identification method motivates an easily implementable, two-step maximum score (2SMS) procedure – producing estimators whose rates of convergence, in contrast to Honoré and Kyriazidou’s (2000, Econometrica 68, 839–874) methods, are independent of the model dimension. We then analyze the asymptotic properties of the 2SMS procedure and propose bootstrap-based distributional approximations for inference. Evidence from Monte Carlo simulations indicates that our procedure performs satisfactorily in finite samples.
The Asian citrus psyllid, Diaphorina citri Kuwayama (Hemiptera: Psyllidae), is the key vector insect transmitting the Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus (CLas) bacterium that causes the devastating citrus greening disease (Huanglongbing, HLB) worldwide. The D. citri salivary glands (SG) exhibit an important barrier against the transmission of HLB pathogen. However, knowledge on the molecular mechanism of SG defence against CLas infection is still limited. In the present study, we compared the SG transcriptomic response of CLas-free and CLas-infected D. citri using an illumine paired-end RNA sequencing. In total of 861 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in the SG upon CLas infection, including 202 upregulated DEGs and 659 downregulated DEGs were identified. Functional annotation analysis showed that most of the DEGs were associated with cellular processes, metabolic processes, and the immune response. Gene ontology and Kyoto Encyclopaedia of Genes and Genomes enrichment analyses revealed that these DEGs were enriched in pathways involving carbohydrate metabolism, amino acid metabolism, the immune system, the digestive system, the lysosome, and endocytosis. A total of 16 DEGs were randomly selected to further validate the accuracy of RNA-Seq dataset by reverse-transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction. This study provides substantial transcriptomic information regarding the SG of D. citri in response to CLas infection, which may shed light on the molecular interaction between D. citri and CLas, and provides new ideas for the prevention and control of citrus psyllid.
The single ionization and dissociation of ethanol molecules induced by low-energy electrons (E0 = 90 eV) are investigated using multiparticle coincident momentum spectroscopy. By detecting two outgoing electrons (e1 and e2) and one fragment ion in coincidence, we obtain the energy deposition (E0 − E1 − E2) during electron ionization of the molecule, i.e., the binding energy spectra, for production of the different ionic fragments C2H5OH+, C2H4OH+, COH+, and H3O+. These data allow us to study the ionization channels for different ionic products. In particular, we focus on H3O+ as a product of double hydrogen migration. It is found that this channel mainly originates from the ionization of outer-valance orbitals (3a″,10a′, 2a″, 9a′, 8a′, 1a″, and 7a′). Additionally, there are minor contributions from the inner-valence orbitals such as 6a′, 5a′, and 4a′. Quantum chemistry calculations show two fragmentation pathways: concerted and sequential processes for formation of H3O+.
Isomorphous substitutions of Mg and Fe for Al generally appear in the octahedral sheets of montmorillonite, whereas they are infrequent in kaolinite. Therefore, the release of Mg and Fe from the octahedral sheets probably happens during the transformation of montmorillonite into kaolinite, which could affect the migration of Mg and Fe from clay minerals into surrounding environments. The objective of the current study was to investigate the relationship between Mg and Fe release during the transformation of montmorillonite into kaolinite. The results showed that the d060 value of clay minerals decreased slightly, and the intensities of both the AlMg–OH and AlFe–OH bending vibrations also decreased gradually. In addition, the (Mg+Fe)/Al (major octahedral ions) atomic ratio of kaolinite was lower than that of montmorillonite, especially in identical hydrothermal products. These results indicated that Mg and Fe ions were released progressively from the octahedral sheets during the transformation of montmorillonite into kaolinite. Moreover, the changed relative concentrations of Mg and Fe ions in the supernatant solutions after hydrothermal reactions suggested a random distribution of Mg and/or Fe in the octahedral sheets of the montmorillonite. These results improve understanding of the release relationship between Mg and Fe during clay mineral evolution and of the distribution of these two ions in the octahedral sheets, as well as the chemical composition of clay minerals as an indicator of geological environments.
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.
This systematic review aimed to investigate the association between dietary inflammatory potential and liver cancer to provide evidence regarding scientific dietary health education.
Design:
Systematic review and meta-analysis.
Setting:
A comprehensive literature review was conducted to identify case–control or cohort studies that involved dietary inflammation index (DII)/empirical dietary inflammation pattern (EDIP) and liver cancer in PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane, and Web of Science databases. Using a combination of DII/EDIP and liver cancer as the search terms, the associations between DII/EDIP and liver cancer were then assessed.
Participants:
Three case–control studies and two cohort studies were brought into the meta-analysis, with 225 713 enrolled participants.
Results:
Meta-analysis of categorical variables showed that DII/EDIP in the highest category increased the risk of liver cancer compared to DII/EDIP in the lowest category (relative risk (RR) = 2·35; 95 % CI 1·77, 3·13; P = 0·000) and with low heterogeneity across studies (I2 = 40·8 %, P = 0·119). Meta-analysis of continuous variables showed that significant positive association between liver cancer and DII/EDIP scores (RR = 1·24; 95 % CI 1·09, 1·40; P = 0·001), and no heterogeneity (I² = 0·0 %, P = 0·471). Stratified according to the study design, there was a significant positive association between liver cancer and DII/EDIP scores in both cohort studies (RR = 2·16; 95 % CI 1·51, 3·07; P = 0·000) and case–control studies (RR = 2·75; 95 % CI 1·71, 4·41; P = 0·000).
Conclusion:
The higher the DII/EDIP score, the higher the risk of liver cancer. This finding may have prominent implications for the general population.
The burden of mental disorders is increasing worldwide, thus, affecting society and healthcare systems. This study investigated the independent influences of age, period and cohort on the global prevalence of mental disorders from 1990 to 2019; compared them by sex; and predicted the future burden of mental disorders in the next 25 years.
Methods
The age-specific and sex-specific incidence of mental disorders worldwide was analysed according to the general analysis strategy used in the Global Burden of Disease Study in 2019. The incidence and mortality trends of mental disorders from 1990 to 2019 were evaluated through joinpoint regression analysis. The influences of age, period and cohort on the incidence of mental disorders were evaluated with an age–period–cohort model.
Results
From 1990 to 2019, the sex-specific age-standardized incidence and disability-adjusted life years (DALY) rate decreased slightly. Joinpoint regression analysis from 1990 to 2019 indicated four turning points in the male DALY rate and five turning points in the female DALY rate. In analysis of age effects, the relative risk (RR) of incidence and the DALY rate in mental disorders in men and women generally showed an inverted U-shaped pattern with increasing age. In analysis of period effects, the incidence of mental disorders increased gradually over time, and showed a sub-peak in 2004 (RR, 1.006 for males; 95% CI, 1.000–1.012; 1.002 for women, 0.997–1.008). Analysis of cohort effects showed that the incidence and DALY rate decreased in successive birth cohorts. The incidence of mental disorders is expected to decline slightly over the next 25 years, but the number of cases is expected to increase.
Conclusions
Although the age-standardized burden of mental disorders has declined in the past 30 years, the number of new cases and deaths of mental disorders worldwide has increased, and will continue to increase in the near future. Therefore, relevant policies should be used to promote the prevention and management of known risk factors and strengthen the understanding of risk profiles and incidence modes of mental disorders, to help guide future research on control and prevention strategies.