When an oblate droplet translates through a viscous fluid under linear shear, it experiences a lateral lift force whose direction and magnitude are influenced by the Reynolds number, the droplet’s viscosity and its aspect ratio. Using a recently developed sharp interface method, we perform three-dimensional direct numerical simulations to explore the evolution of lift forces on oblate droplets across a broad range of these parameters. Our findings reveal that in the low-but-finite Reynolds number regime, the Saffman mechanism consistently governs the lift force. The lift increases with the droplet’s viscosity, aligning with the analytical solution derived by Legendre & Magnaudet (Phys. Fluids, vol. 9, 1997, p. 3572), and also rises with the droplet’s aspect ratio. We propose a semi-analytical correlation to predict this lift force. In the moderate- to high-Reynolds-number regime, distinct behaviours emerge: the $L\hbox{-}$ and $S\hbox{-}$mechanisms, arising from the vorticity contained in the upstream shear flow and the vorticity produced at the droplet surface, dominate for weakly and highly viscous droplets, respectively. Both mechanisms generate counter-rotating streamwise vortices of opposite signs, leading to observed lift reversals with increasing droplet viscosity. Detailed force decomposition based on vorticity moments indicates that in the $L\hbox{-}$mechanism-dominated regime for weakly to moderately viscous droplets, the streamwise vorticity-induced lift approximates the total lift. Conversely, in the $S\hbox{-}$mechanism-dominated regime, for moderately to highly viscous droplets, the streamwise vorticity-induced lift constitutes only a portion of the total lift, with the asymmetric advection of azimuthal vorticity at the droplet interface contributing additional positive lift to counterbalance the $S\hbox{-}$mechanism’s effects. These insights bridge the understanding between inviscid bubbles and rigid particles, enhancing our comprehension of the lift force experienced by droplets in different flow regimes.

This paper provides an overview of the current status of ultrafast and ultra-intense lasers with peak powers exceeding 100 TW and examines the research activities in high-energy-density physics within China. Currently, 10 high-intensity lasers with powers over 100 TW are operational, and about 10 additional lasers are being constructed at various institutes and universities. These facilities operate either independently or are combined with one another, thereby offering substantial support for both Chinese and international research and development efforts in high-energy-density physics.

One hundred and thirteen mid-lactation cows fed same diets and supplemented with 20 g/d rumen-protected methionine (RPM) for 8 weeks were used to investigate the individual responses of dairy cows to RPM in terms of lactation performance, amino acids (AA) metabolism, and milk metabolites. Among the cows, 10 cows exhibited positive responses (PR) and 10 cows showed limited responses (LR) in energy-corrected milk yield to RPM were used for further analysis. The lactation performance changed from gradual decline to steady increase in PR cows, while kept downward trend in LR cows following RPM supplementation. In PR cows, the AA metabolism was notably enhanced after RPM supplementation, evidenced by increased mammary blood flow (69.4%, P = 0.05), mammary uptake and clearance rate and uptake-to-output ratio (U:O) of essential AA. The improved AA metabolism could be attributed to the enrichment of pyrimidine (P = 0.06) and pyruvate (P = 0.07) metabolism pathways, which may have stimulated mammary cell proliferation and enhanced AA uptake. Additionally, the upregulation of milk biotin (fold change > 2, variable importance projection > 1), known to support milk yield, likely contributed to the PR observed in PR cows. Conversely, in LR cows, RPM supplementation did not improve AA metabolism, decrease was observed in mammary uptake, mammary clearance rate, and U:O of cysteine, potentially due to cysteine being irreversibly converted from methionine. Moreover, the enrichment of central carbon metabolism in cancer pathway (P = 0.06), which also utilize methionine, along with the lysine degradation pathway (P = 0.04), suggests that methionine in the mammary glands may have been diverted toward non-lactational metabolic processes, resulting in absence of PR in LR cows. Our results indicate that the responses to RPM in dairy cows are individualized, with variation in lactation performance likely driven by differential AA metabolism.

This paper introduces a method to realize beam switching by using a substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) Butler matrix combined with a slot array antenna. The Butler matrix consists of two hybrid couplers, two crossovers, two −45-degree phase shifters, and two 0-degree phase shifters. The slot array antenna is a 4 × 2 array. The operating frequency band of the slot array antenna, where the reflection coefficient is below −10 dB, is 26.5–31.5 GHz. The measured beamforming angles from input port 1 to input Port 4 of the Butler matrix are +46, −16, +15, and −50°, respectively. The corresponding antenna gains from input Port 1 to input Port 4 are 11.57 dB, 14.284 dB, 10.94 dB, and 12.864 dB, respectively. The dimensions of the Butler matrix and the slot array antenna are 56.8 mm × 21.2 mm × 0.254 mm. The dimensions of the SIW transmission channels between the Butler matrix and input Ports 1– 4 are 16.9 mm × 34 mm × 0.254 mm.

A high-energy pulsed vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) solid-state laser at 177 nm with high peak power by the sixth harmonic of a neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet (Nd:YAG) amplifier in a KBe2BO3F2 prism-coupled device was demonstrated. The ultraviolet (UV) pump laser is a 352 ps pulsed, spatial top-hat super-Gaussian beam at 355 nm. A high energy of a 7.12 mJ VUV laser at 177 nm is obtained with a pulse width of 255 ps, indicating a peak power of 28 MW, and the conversion efficiency is 9.42% from 355 to 177 nm. The measured results fitted well with the theoretical prediction. It is the highest pulse energy and highest peak power ever reported in the VUV range for any solid-state lasers. The high-energy, high-peak-power, and high-spatial-uniformity VUV laser is of great interest for ultra-fine machining and particle-size measurements using UV in-line Fraunhofer holography diagnostics.

Bacterial infection risk in work environments has been extensively reported for healthcare workers, while this risk is rarely researched in other occupations. This study aimed to identify occupational environments in Taiwan’s agricultural and healthcare industries with elevated bacterial infection risks by comparing risks for general bacterial infections and pneumonia. Using labour and health insurance claim data from 3.3 million workers (January 2004–December 2020), a retrospective cohort was constructed to estimate occupational infection risks with Cox regression and the Anderson-Gill extension. Significantly elevated hazard ratios were found for workers in vegetable growing, crop cultivation service, mushroom growing, flower growing, and fruit growing, ranging from 1.13 to 1.39 for general bacterial infections and 1.68 to 3.06 for pneumonia infections. In afforestation and the inland fishing industry, pneumonia risk was significantly elevated with, respectively, 1.87 and 1.21. In the healthcare section, especially workers in residential care services and residential care services for elderly stand out regarding their pneumonia risk, with significant hazard ratios of 3.49 and 1.75. The methods used in this study were proven to be effective in identification of occupation environments at risk and can be used in other settings. These findings call for prioritization of bacterial infection prevention by occupation.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to identify core and bridge symptoms between emergent neuropsychiatric symptoms and sleep disturbance in dementia-risk older adults with depressive symptoms in nursing homes using network analysis, and to further compare the structural differences in symptom networks between subthreshold depressive and depressive groups.

Methods: A total of 853 older adults in nursing homes participated in this study. We used the Mild Behavioral Impairment (MBI) and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) to assess the severity of emergent neuropsychiatric symptoms and sleep disturbances, respectively, and the analyses also generated a network model of the MBI-PSQI in the sample and examined subthreshold depressive and depressive groups’ potential differences between network structure and connectivity.

Results: The core symptom in the global MBI-PSQI network of older adults with depressive symptoms in nursing homes was MBI8’’ (Lack of pleasure experience: 8.340), and the bridge symptom was PSQI7’’ (Daytime Dysfunction: 3.894). The edges connecting the nodes MBI2’’ (Lost curiosity in usual interests) and MBI3’’ (Decreased social initiative) in the global MBI-PSQI network has the strongest weight (0.798). Compared to the global network, for participants in the depression group, MBI8’’ (7.647) remains the most core symptom, and PSQI7’’ (4.028) serves as a critical bridge symptom between emergent neuropsychiatric symptoms and sleep disturbances. However, in the subthreshold depression group, the MBI-PSQI network structure exhibits distinct characteristics, with MBI2’’ (5.563) being revealed as the most significant symptom, closely followed by MBI8’’ (5.453). Furthermore, the bridge symptom connecting emergent neuropsychiatric symptoms to sleep disturbances shifts to PSQI4’’ (Sleep Efficiency: 1.386). Intriguingly, the strongest edge in both the global network and the subgroup network is MBI2-MBI3.

Conclusions: There is an association between emergent neuropsychiatric symptoms and sleep disturbance in dementia-risk older adults with depressive symptoms in nursing homes. In addition, heterogeneity in the network structure of subthreshold depression and depression, with shifts in core and bridge symptoms, providing directions for designing novel and targeted interventions.

Introduction: Late-life depression (LLD) is associated with cognitive deficit with risk of future dementia. By examining the entropy of the spontaneous brain activity, we aimed to understand the neural mechanism pertaining to cognitive decline in LLD.

Methods: We collected MRI scans in older adults with LLD (n = 32), mild cognitive impairment [MCI (n = 25)] and normal cognitive function [NC, (n = 47)]. Multiscale entropy analysis (MSE) was applied to resting-state fMRI data. Under the scale factor (tau) 1 and 2, reliable separation of fMRI data and noise was achieved. We calculated the brain entropy in 90 brain regions based on automated anatomical atlas (AAL). Due to exploratory nature of this study, we presented data of group-wise comparison in brain entropy between LLD vs. NC, MCI vs. NC, and LLD and MCD with a p-value below 0.001.

Results: The mean Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score of LLD and MCI was 27.9 and 25.6. Under tau 2, we found higher brain entropy of LLD in left globus pallidus than MCI (p = 0.002) and NC (p = 0,009). Higher brain entropy of LLD than NC was also found in left frontal superior gyrus, left middle superior gyrus, left amygdala and left inferior parietal gyrus. The only brain region with higher brain entropy in MCI than control was left posterior cingulum (p-value = 0.015). Under tau 1, higher brain entropy was also found in LLD than in MCI in right orbital part of medial frontal gyrus and left globus pallidus (p-value = 0.007 and 0.005).

Conclusions: Our result is consistent with prior hypothesis where higher brain entropy was found during early aging process as compensation. We found such phenomenon particular in left globus pallidus in LLD, which could be served as a discriminative brain region. Being a key region in reward system, we hypothesis such region may be associated with apathy and with unique pathway of cognitive decline in LLD. We will undertake subsequent analysis longitudinally in this cohort

Key words: resting-state fMRI, Late-life depression, Brain entropy, globus pallidus, cognitive decline

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.

Rayleigh–Bénard convection in a rotating spherical shell provides a simplified model for convective dynamics of planetary and stellar interiors. Over the past decades, the problem has been studied extensively via numerical simulations, but most previous simulations set the Prandtl number $Pr$ to unity. In this study we build more than 200 numerical models of rotating convection in a spherical shell over a wide range of $Pr$ ($10^{-2}\le Pr \le 10^2$). By increasing the Rayleigh number $Ra$, we characterise four different flow regimes, starting from the linear onset to multiple modes, then transitioning to the geostrophic turbulence and eventually approaching the weakly rotating regime. In the multiple modes regime, we show evidence of triadic resonances in numerical models with different $Pr$, which may provide a generic mechanism for the transition from laminar to turbulence in rotating convection. We analyse scaling behaviours of the heat transfer and convective flow speeds in numerical simulations, paying particular attention to the $Pr$ dependence. We find that the so-called diffusion-free scaling for the heat transfer cannot reconcile all numerical models with different $Pr$ in the geostrophic turbulence regime. However, the characteristic flow speeds at different $Pr$ roughly follow a unified scaling that can be described by visco-Archimedean–Coriolis force balances, though the scaling tends to approach the Coriolis-inertial-Archimedean force balance at low $Pr$. We also show that transition behaviours from rotating to non-rotating convection depend on $Pr$. The transition criteria based on heat transfer and flow morphology would be rather different when $Pr>1$, but the two criteria are consistent for cases with $Pr\le 1$. Both scaling behaviours and transition behaviours suggest that the heat transfer is controlled by the boundary layers while the convective flow speeds are mainly determined by the force balance in the bulk for cases with $Pr>1$, which is in line with recent experimental results with moderate to high $Pr$. For cases with $Pr \le 1$, both the heat transfer and convective velocities are approaching the inviscid dynamics in the bulk. We also briefly analysed the magnitude and scaling of zonal flows at different $Pr$, showing that the zonal flow amplitude rapidly increases as $Pr$ decreases.

Previous studies have indicated an association between vitamin D and thyroid- and parathyroid-related diseases. However, it remains unclear whether it is a cause of the disease, a side effect of treatment or a consequence of the disease. The Mendelian randomisation (MR) study strengthens the causal inference by controlling for non-heritable environmental confounders and reverse causation. In this study, a two-sample bidirectional MR analysis was conducted to investigate the causal relationship between serum vitamin D levels and thyroid- and parathyroid-related diseases. Inverse variance weighted, weighted median and MR-Egger methods were performed, the Cochran Q test was used to evaluate the heterogeneity and the MR-PRESSO and MR-Egger intercepts were utilised to assess the possibility of pleiotropy. The Bonferroni-corrected significance threshold was 0·0038. At the Bonferroni-corrected significance level, we found that vitamin D levels suggestively decreased the risk of benign parathyroid adenoma (OR = 0·244; 95 % CI 0·074, 0·802; P = 0·0202) in the MR analyses. In the reverse MR study, a genetically predicted risk of thyroid cancer suggestively increased the risk of elevated vitamin D (OR = 1·007; 95 % CI 1·010, 1·013; P = 0·0284), chronic thyroiditis significantly increased the risk of elevated vitamin D (OR = 1·007; 95 % CI 1·002, 1·011; P = 0·0030) and thyroid nodules was significantly decreased the vitamin D levels (OR = 0·991; 95 % CI 0·985, 0·997; P = 0·0034). The findings might be less susceptible to horizontal pleiotropy and heterogeneity (P > 0·05). This study from a gene perspective indicated that chronic thyroiditis and thyroid nodules may impact vitamin D levels, but the underlying mechanisms require further investigation.

Thanks to its real-time computation efficiency, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been widely applied in motion planning for mobile robots. In DRL-based methods, a DRL model computes an action for a robot based on the states of its surrounding obstacles, including other robots that may communicate with it. These methods always assume that the environment is attack-free and the obtained obstacles’ states are reliable. However, in the real world, a robot may suffer from obstacle localization attacks (OLAs), such as sensor attacks, communication attacks, and remote-control attacks, which cause the robot to retrieve inaccurate positions of the surrounding obstacles. In this paper, we propose a robust motion planning method ObsGAN-DRL, integrating a generative adversarial network (GAN) into DRL models to mitigate OLAs in the environment. First, ObsGAN-DRL learns a generator based on the GAN model to compute the approximation of obstacles’ accurate positions in benign and attack scenarios. Therefore, no detectors are required for ObsGAN-DRL. Second, by using the approximation positions of the surrounding obstacles, ObsGAN-DRL can leverage the state-of-the-art DRL methods to compute collision-free motion commands (e.g., velocity) efficiently. Comprehensive experiments show that ObsGAN-DRL can mitigate OLAs effectively and guarantee safety. We also demonstrate the generalization of ObsGAN-DRL.

Trauma is a significant health issue that not only leads to immediate death in many cases but also causes severe complications, such as sepsis, thrombosis, haemorrhage, acute respiratory distress syndrome and traumatic brain injury, among trauma patients. Target protein identification technology is a vital technique in the field of biomedical research, enabling the study of biomolecular interactions, drug discovery and disease treatment. It plays a crucial role in identifying key protein targets associated with specific diseases or biological processes, facilitating further research, drug design and the development of treatment strategies. The application of target protein technology in biomarker detection enables the timely identification of newly emerging infections and complications in trauma patients, facilitating expeditious medical interventions and leading to reduced post-trauma mortality rates and improved patient prognoses. This review provides an overview of the current applications of target protein identification technology in trauma-related complications and provides a brief overview of the current target protein identification technology, with the aim of reducing post-trauma mortality, improving diagnostic efficiency and prognostic outcomes for patients.

Malnutrition is a key factor in metabolic syndrome (MS) and sarcopenia, assessing the nutritional status of these patients is a pressing issue. The purpose of this study was to clarify sarcopenia and sarcopenic obesity in patients with MS based on nutritional status. This was a case–control study between MS/non-MS. Body composition was measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. Muscle function was assessed by handgrip strength, five times sit-to-stand test, gait speed test and short physical performance battery (SPPB). The Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) was performed to assess the nutritional status in the participants in this study. Overall, a total of 56 % and 13 % of participants suffered from possible sarcopenia and sarcopenia, respectively. There was a higher rate of possible sarcopenic obesity in the MS group than in the non-MS group (48·9 % v. 24·7 %, P < 0·01), and all the sarcopenia participants in the MS group had sarcopenic obesity. MNA score was significantly associated with sarcopenia status (P < 0·01). The MNA combined with body fat score showed better acceptable discrimination for detecting sarcopenic obesity and sarcopenia in MS (AUC = 0·70, 95 % CI 0·53, 0·86). In summary, there was a higher prevalence of possible sarcopenic obesity in MS, and all the MS patients with sarcopenia had sarcopenic obesity in the present study. We suggest that the MNA should be combined with body fat percentage to assess the nutritional status of MS participants, and it also serves as a good indicator for sarcopenia and sarcopenic obesity in MS.