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.
Timing of food intake is an emerging aspect of nutrition; however, there is a lack of research accurately assessing food timing in the context of the circadian system. The study aimed to investigate the relation between food timing relative to clock time and endogenous circadian timing with adiposity and further explore sex differences in these associations among 151 young adults aged 18–25 years. Participants wore wrist actigraphy and documented sleep and food schedules in real time for 7 consecutive days. Circadian timing was determined by dim-light melatonin onset (DLMO). The duration between last eating occasion and DLMO (last EO-DLMO) was used to calculate the circadian timing of food intake. Adiposity was assessed using bioelectrical impedance analysis. Of the 151 participants, 133 were included in the statistical analysis finally. The results demonstrated that associations of adiposity with food timing relative to circadian timing rather than clock time among young adults living in real-world settings. Sex-stratified analyses revealed that associations between last EO-DLMO and adiposity were significant in females but not males. For females, each hour increase in last EO-DLMO was associated with higher BMI by 0·51 kg/m2 (P = 0·01), higher percent body fat by 1·05 % (P = 0·007), higher fat mass by 0·99 kg (P = 0·01) and higher visceral fat area by 4·75 cm2 (P = 0·02), whereas non-significant associations were present among males. The findings highlight the importance of considering the timing of food intake relative to endogenous circadian timing instead of only as clock time.
Bringing together eminent International Relations (IR) scholars from China and the West, this book examines moral realism from a range of different perspectives. Through its analyses, it verifies the robustness of moral realism in IR theory.
The production and industrial use of asbestos cement and other asbestos-containing materials have been restricted in most countries because of the potential detrimental effects on human health and the environment. Chrysotile is the most common form of asbestos and investigations into how to recycle this serpentine phyllosilicate mineral have attracted extensive attention. Chrysotile asbestos tailings can be transformed thermally, at high temperature, by in situ carbothermal reduction (CR). The CR method aims to maximize use of the chrysotile available and uses high temperatures and carbon to change the mineral form and structure of the chrysotile asbestos tailings. When chrysotile asbestos is employed as the raw material and coke (carbon) powder is used as the reducing agent for CR transformation, stable, high-temperature composites consisting of forsterite, stishovite, and silicon carbide are formed. Forsterite (Mg2SiO4) was the most abundant crystalline phase formed in samples heat treated below 1500ºC. At 1600ºC, forsterite was exhausted through decomposition and β-SiC formed by reduction of stishovite. A larger proportion of β-SiC was generated as the carbon content was increased. This research revealed that both temperature and carbon addition play key roles in the transformation of chrysotile asbestos tailings.
In order to establish a compact all-optical Thomson scattering source, experimental studies were conducted on the 45 TW Ti: sapphire laser facility. By including a steel wafer, mixed gas, and plasma mirror into a double-exit jet, several mechanisms, such as shock-assisted ionization injection, ionization injection, and driving laser reflection, were integrated into one source. So, the source of complexity was remarkably reduced. Electron bunches with central energy fluctuating from 90 to 160 MeV can be produced. Plasma mirrors were used to reflect the driving laser. The scattering of the reflected laser on the electron bunches led to the generation of X-ray photons. Through comparing the X-ray spots under different experimental conditions, it is confirmed that the X-ray photons are generated by Thomson scattering. For further application, the energy spectra and source size of the Thomson scattering source were measured. The unfolded spectrum contains a large amount of low-energy photons besides a peak near 67 keV. Through importing the electron energy spectrum into the Monte Carlo simulation code, the different contributions of the photons with small and large emitting angles can be used to explain the origin of the unfolded spectrum. The maximum photon energy extended to about 500 keV. The total photon production was 107/pulse. The FWHM source size was about 12 μm.
In order to solve the problems of low loading capacity and low driving efficiency for the powered exoskeleton, this paper presents a bionic multi-chamber pneumatic actuator based on muscle scale mechanism. Firstly, the bionic muscle scale mechanism and multi-chamber structure design for the novel pneumatic actuator are introduced. Afterward, the driving characteristics of the multi-chamber actuator are analyzed theoretically, including analysis of output force and analysis of energy efficiency. Then, the load matching control strategy for the novel actuator is optimized, and the load matching performance, displacement tracking accuracy, and energy efficiency are studied by simulation. Finally, the prototype of the multi-chamber actuator is developed, and the exoskeleton testing platform is built, experiment and discussion are conducted for the driving characteristics, which realized the high energy efficiency and the feasibility of load matching.
How do six collaborators—a medical sociologist, two law professors, and three graduate students at different stages of their PhD programs—meld their disparate perspectives into one coherent essay memorializing Lauren Edelman, who brought them together for a multi-year study of judicial reasoning in federal disability discrimination cases and then left them, so suddenly and so young, to carry on without her?
The discharged capillary plasma channel has been extensively studied as a high-gradient particle acceleration and transmission medium. A novel measurement method of plasma channel density profiles has been employed, where the role of plasma channels guiding the advantages of lasers has shown strong appeal. Here, we have studied the high-order transverse plasma density profile distribution using a channel-guided laser, and made detailed measurements of its evolution under various parameters. The paraxial wave equation in a plasma channel with high-order density profile components is analyzed, and the approximate propagation process based on the Gaussian profile laser is obtained on this basis, which agrees well with the simulation under phase conditions. In the experiments, by measuring the integrated transverse laser intensities at the outlet of the channels, the radial quartic density profiles of the plasma channels have been obtained. By precisely synchronizing the detection laser pulses and the plasma channels at various moments, the reconstructed density profile shows an evolution from the radial quartic profile to the quasi-parabolic profile, and the high-order component is indicated as an exponential decline tendency over time. Factors affecting the evolution rate were investigated by varying the incentive source and capillary parameters. It can be found that the discharge voltages and currents are positive factors quickening the evolution, while the electron-ion heating, capillary radii and pressures are negative ones. One plausible explanation is that quartic profile contributions may be linked to plasma heating. This work helps one to understand the mechanisms of the formation, the evolutions of the guiding channel electron-density profiles and their dependences on the external controllable parameters. It provides support and reflection for physical research on discharged capillary plasma and optimizing plasma channels in various applications.
The intensive major power rivalry, the increasing uncertainty of international relations, the decline of democracy, the prevailing deglobalization, the devastating impacts of pandemics, and many other emerging global issues are becoming daunting. In the wake of these escalating challenges, there is a need for robust international leadership, which unfortunately is absent. Regarding the global spread of pandemics, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director- General of the World Health Organization (WHO), notes that the major threat we are facing now is not from the COVID- 19 pandemic, but from the lack of global leadership.1 The reality could be even worse than mere lack of a global leadership because the prevalence of populist leadership in major powers is driving the world towards a more conflicting, rather than cooperative, order.
The absence of a positive global leadership has its root in both power structure and individual causes. Structurally, there is a leadership dilemma accompanying the power transition process, with both the declining hegemon and the rising state. With a declining relative comprehensive capability, it is difficult for a hegemon to continue to bear the burden of providing necessary common goods for maintenance of the global order. However, reneging on such commitments will deteriorate its leadership and leave the opportunity for the rising power to replace it. For the rising state, the leadership dilemma exists as well, because if it lobbies for leadership in international affairs, it will provoke hostility and containment from the hegemon and its client states. Meanwhile, the rising power is unable to provide the same amount of public goods to the world as the hegemon because of its material power being less than the latter. Due to the leadership dilemma, a vacuum of interstate leadership is likely to occur during the power transition between major states.
Another factor often overlooked is the strategic preferences of leaders of major powers, which was vividly demonstrated in the case of the United States (US) during the administration of Donald Trump. When taking over the reins from the Barack Obama administration, it possessed the same power resources as its predecessor.
The purpose of writing this book is to strengthen the study of the international relations (IR) theory of moral realism through discussions between myself and eight IR scholars who are also interested in moral realism. Since the publication of Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers in 2019, more than 40 reviews have appeared. I found it necessary to sponsor discussions on IR moral realism and put some of them into a collection. On the one hand, it is important to clarify certain misunderstandings about IR moral realism; on the other, it is helpful for further development of this theory.
Producing a book of this kind meant there were some difficult decisions to make, giving the writers’ multiplex perspectives and portraying aspects such as morality, ideology, leadership types, leadership formation, political institutions, power structure, level analysis, international norms, international order, China– US rivalry, and so on. It became clear that there are too many outstanding essays about moral realism to be included in one volume. For the sake of following a specific theoretical theme, fresh chapters would be necessary. To provide readers with an understanding of the significance of moral realism, I invited the eight IR scholars to contribute new chapters to this project. With a solid grounding in IR theories and remarkable views on Chinese political culture, these scholars have been successful with their writings on IR theory and Chinese foreign policy.
Chapters in this collection set the stage for the understanding of and debating on IR moral realism. In addition, those debates will give IR students new insight into aspects of ontology, epistemology, and methodology in IR theory construction. For other readers, this collection may provide insightful opinions about the differences between interstate leadership and domestic leadership, the relations between leadership and political institutions, the different views on leadership morality's influence on the historical trends of international politics, and the impacts of major powers’ leadership on the present world order.
In addition, the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in 2022 adds a practical dimension to the theoretical significance of this book. Since the war began, many IR scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of world leaders along with the war- impacted international order.
A book review of Yan Xuetong's Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers (2019)
Rajesh Rajagopalan
First published in India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs 75, no. 3 [2019]: 405– 9
Realism is dying a slow death in its current motherland, the US. It has not been popular in Europe or other parts of the world for quite some time, and America seems set to follow the same trend. Poisoned by Kenneth Waltz's expectation of the inevitable recurrence of balances of power, prominent realists (including, while he was alive, Waltz himself) have spent the better part of the last three decades looking for an elusive counter to America's unipolar power. More radical proponents of the ‘defensive’ realism that Waltz spawned have gone so far as to suggest that the security dilemma – one of the central tenets of realism – can be overcome through reassurance. It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish realism from liberalism in American international relations (IR) scholarship. While there are honourable exceptions to this trend, it is difficult not to despair at the state of realism as a theory.
If realism is dying in America, it seems to be prospering in China, as others have also noted. Yan Xuetong's latest book, Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers, is a good example. Understandably, given China's rise, Yan's focus is on how a rising power can catch up and displace the established dominant power. Much of the literature on power transitions, and indeed much of realist theory, take for granted that uneven growth of wealth in different states over time leads to the rise of new powers. Because realist theory largely refuses to look inside states, preferring only to examine how states interact with others given this uneven growth, they ignore the question of why states grow at this uneven pace to begin with. Even the latest variant within realism, neoclassical realism, which explicitly focuses on domestic variables to understand how states cope with international pressures, do not examine this question.
The purpose of this study was to analyse the clinical characteristics of patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-COV-2) PCR re-positivity after recovering from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Patients (n = 1391) from Guangzhou, China, who had recovered from COVID-19 were recruited between 7 September 2021 and 11 March 2022. Data on epidemiology, symptoms, laboratory test results and treatment were analysed. In this study, 42.7% of recovered patients had re-positive result. Most re-positive patients were asymptomatic, did not have severe comorbidities, and were not contagious. The re-positivity rate was 39%, 46%, 11% and 25% in patients who had received inactivated, mRNA, adenovirus vector and recombinant subunit vaccines, respectively. Seven independent risk factors for testing re-positive were identified, and a predictive model was constructed using these variables. The predictors of re-positivity were COVID-19 vaccination status, previous SARs-CoV-12 infection prior to the most recent episode, renal function, SARS-CoV-2 IgG and IgM antibody levels and white blood cell count. The predictive model could benefit the control of the spread of COVID-19.
Understanding various historical entity information (e.g., persons, locations, and time) plays a very important role in reasoning about the developments of historical events. With the increasing concern about the fields of digital humanities and natural language processing, named entity recognition (NER) provides a feasible solution for automatically extracting these entities from historical texts, especially in Chinese historical research. However, previous approaches are domain-specific, ineffective with relatively low accuracy, and non-interpretable, which hinders the development of NER in Chinese history. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid deep learning model called “subword-based ensemble network” (SEN), by incorporating subword information and a novel attention fusion mechanism. The experiments on a massive self-built Chinese historical corpus CMAG show that SEN has achieved the best with 93.87% for F1-micro and 89.70% for F1-macro, compared with other advanced models. Further investigation reveals that SEN has a strong generalization ability of NER on Chinese historical texts, which is not only relatively insensitive to the categories with fewer annotation labels (e.g., OFI) but can also accurately capture diverse local and global semantic relations. Our research demonstrates the effectiveness of the integration of subword information and attention fusion, which provides an inspiring solution for the practical use of entity extraction in the Chinese historical domain.
High-molecular-weight glutenin subunits (HMW-GS) contribute to dough elasticity and bread baking quality in wheat. In this study, wheat varieties were classified based on their HMW-GS composition into three groups: 1Dx5 (5 + 10, Gaoyou 8901, Xinmai 28, Xinmai 19, Xinmai 26 and Jinbaoyin), 1Dx2 (2 + 12, Zhoumai 24, Xinmai 9 and Yumai) and 1Dx4 (4 + 12, Aikang 58). Sequence analysis showed that 1Dx-GY8901, 1Dx-XM28, 1Dx-XM19 and 1Dx-XM26 were similar to the 1Dx5 gene and clustered on the same branch, while 1Dx-AK58, 1Dx-ZM24, 1Dx-JBY, 1Dx-YM, 1Dx-XM9 and 1Dx-JBY were more similar to the 1Dx2 gene and clustered on the same branch with 1Dx.2.2. There was a mutation of Ser to Cys at position S2, for an extra Cys in the repeat regions of 1Dx-XM19, 1Dx-XM26, 1Dx-XM28 and 1Dx-GY8901. The wheat HMW-GS genes exhibited similar percentages of α-helix, extended strand, β-turn and random coil structure, with ranges of 13.33–13.59, 4.77–5.78, 7.08–9.18 and 72.3–73.94%, respectively. Sequence conservation and the composition of HMW-GS subunits were also analysed for a series of strong gluten wheat varieties, Xinmai 9 (1, 7 + 8, 2 + 12), Xinmai 19 (1, 7 + 9, 5 + 10), Xinmai 26 (1, 7 + 8, 5 + 10) and Xinmai 28 (1, 7 + 9, 5 + 10). The results of this work should facilitate future breeding efforts and provide the theoretical basis for wheat quality improvement.