Wellbeing refers to cognitive and emotional appraisal of an individual's life and social functioning, which is of great significance to the quality of life of an individual and society. Previous ...studies have revealed the neural basis of wellbeing, which mostly focused on human brain morphology or network-level connectivity. However, local-to-remote cortical connectivity, which plays a crucial role in defining the human brain architecture, has not been investigated in wellbeing. To examine whether wellbeing was associated with local-to-remote cortical connectivity, we acquired resting-state images from 60 healthy participants and employed the Mental Health Continuum Short Form to measure wellbeing, including three dimensions, namely, emotional wellbeing, psychological wellbeing, and social wellbeing. Functional homogeneity (ReHo) and seed-based functional connectivity were used to evaluate local-to-remote cortical connectivity in these participants. For local connectivity, our results showed that ReHo in the right orbitofrontal sulcus was significantly positively correlated with psychological wellbeing but negatively correlated with social wellbeing. For remote connectivity, connectivity within the right orbitofrontal cortex and interhemispheric connectivity of the orbitofrontal sulcus were both positively associated with psychological wellbeing; functional connectivity between the right orbitofrontal sulcus and the left postcentral sulcus was positively associated with social wellbeing. Our results showed that wellbeing was indeed associated with local-to-remote cortical connectivity, and our findings supplied a new perspective of distance-related neural mechanisms of wellbeing.
The prediction of embankment settlement is a critically important issue for the serviceability of subgrade projects,especially the post-construction settlement.A number of methods have been proposed ...to predict embankment settlement;however,all of these methods are based on a parameter,i.e.the initial time point.The difference of the initial time point determined by different designers can de?nitely induce errors in prediction of embankment settlement.This paper proposed a concept named"potential settlement"and a simpli?ed method based on the in situ data.The key parameter"b"in the proposed method was veri?ed using theoretical method and?eld data.Finally,an example was used to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method by comparing with other methods and the observation data.
•An innovative method is proposed to estimate flooding and potential exposure risk.•The urban drainage capacity was assessed using the urban road network density.•Actual flood points were used to ...verify the urban flood evaluation results.•Flooding and potential exposure risk have spatial heterogeneity.
Urban flooding is an important natural hazard that affects urban security in the context of global climate change and urbanization. The simulation of stormwater inundation and risk assessment in urban environments is critical for the sustainable development of urban agglomerations. However, few studies have focused on rainstorm flooding at the urban agglomeration scale. In this study, the Central and Southern Liaoning Urban Agglomeration (CSLN) was selected a case study. A method was proposed to assess the urban flooding and potential exposure risk. The urban flooding of CSLN was characterized by the average flooding depth (AFD) of each sub-catchment, and exposure risk was indicated by potential regional and population exposure risk. The results illustrate that the AFD increased with an increase in the rainfall return period, especially in the urban core. The AFD of each city in the CSLN ranged from 10 to 80 mm, and there were strong differences among cities. The spatial distribution of urban flooding in the nine cities presented aggregation characteristics, and hotspots were mainly concentrated in the old urban districts. The potential regional exposure risk tended to increase as the rainfall return period increased from 10 to 100 years; however, there were significant differences among cities. Among them, the area of potential regional exposure risk in Shenyang was the largest, increasing from 365 km2 under a 10-year rainfall return period to 463 km2 under a 100-year rainfall return period. The largest proportion of potential regional exposure risk was in Anshan, which increased from 3% under 10-year to 13.8% under 100-year rainfall return periods. Most cities had some potential population exposure risk. More residents in populous cities, such as Shenyang and Dalian, were subject to higher exposure risks. However, Benxi, Anshan, and Tieling had a high proportion of severely affected areas, although the size of their cities is much smaller than that of Shenyang and Dalian. Urban flooding and potential exposure risk were apparently higher in the business and government zones than in the industrial and greenspace zones. These methods and results may provide references for rainstorm flooding mitigation through urban planning in urban agglomeration areas.
Basmati rice is a popular, high-value aromatic rice which is an easy target for fraudulent activities such as mislabeling and substitution with non-basmati cultivars. Bulk isotope ratio mass ...spectrometry (IRMS) combined with multivariate analysis was employed to develop a model to identify the geographical origin of rice and authenticate different rice cultivars from Pakistan. ANOVA showed significant statistical differences for δ13C, δ15N, δ2H and δ18O isotopes amongst different basmati and non-basmati rice cultivars. δ2H and δ18O values showed a larger variation between basmati and non-basmati rice cultivars. Multivariate ANOVA showed a significant influence on rice from different regions, cultivars and their stable isotopic values. Regional effects contributed the highest variation for both δ13C and δ15N isotopes (56.6 % and 42.7 %), whereas cultivar type largely contributed to differences in δ2H and δ18O values. Finally, supervised classification models (LDA and PLS-DA) were constructed to assess origin classification ability. The PLS-DA model achieved a higher origin classification accuracy in both training and validation sets (76.7 % and 70.0 %, respectively). In conclusion, isotopic fingerprints along with multivariate statistical analysis showed good potential to characterize rice according to cultivar type and production region. This study provides valuable insights to authenticate Pakistan basmati rice from other non-basmati cultivars, and will be instrumental in developing new tools for industry and regulatory agencies to control fraudulent labeling of basmati rice.
•Authentication of Pakistani basmati rice using light stable isotopes.•ANOVA showed significant statistical differences for δ13C, δ15N, δ2H and δ18O isotopes among different rice cultivars.•δ2H and δ18O values showed a larger variation between basmati and non-basmati rice cultivars.•PLS-DA model achieved high classification percentages in discriminating basmati samples from different regions.
Studies have shown an association between depression and circulating metabolites, but the causal relationship between them has not been elucidated. The purpose of this study was to elucidate the ...causal relationship between circulating metabolites and depression and to explore the role of circulating metabolites in depression.
In this study, the top single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with circulating metabolites (
= 24,925) and depression (
= 322,580) were obtained based on the publicly available genome-wide association study using two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR). SNP estimates were summarized through inverse variance weighted, MR Egger, weighted median, MR pleiotropy residual sum and outlier, and "leave-one-out" methods.
Apolipoprotein A-I (OR 0.990, 95% CI 981-0.999) and glutamine (OR 0.985, 95% CI 0.972-0.997) had protective causal effects on depression, whereas acetoacetate (OR 1.021, 95% CI 1.009-1.034), glycoproteins (OR 1.005, 95% CI 1.000-1.009), isoleucine (OR 1.013, 95% CI 1.002-1.024), and urea (OR 1.020, 95% CI 1.000-1.039) had an anti-protective effect on depression. Reversed MR showed no effect of depression on the seven circulating metabolites.
In this study, MR analysis showed that apolipoprotein A-I and glutamine had a protective effect on depression, and acetoacetate, glycoprotein, isoleucine, glucose, and urea may be risk factors for depression. Therefore, further research must be conducted to translate the findings into practice.
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has been considered a promising solution that can address capacity and performance challenges in legacy systems such as Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC). In particular, such ...challenges include intolerable delay, congestion in the core network, insufficient Quality of Experience (QoE), high cost of resource utility, such as energy and bandwidth. The aforementioned challenges originate from limited resources in mobile devices, the multi-hop connection between end-users and the cloud, high pressure from computation-intensive and delay-critical applications. Considering the limited resource setting at the MEC, improving the efficiency of task offloading in terms of both energy and delay in MEC applications is an important and urgent problem to be solved. In this paper, the key objective is to propose a task offloading scheme that minimizes the overall energy consumption along with satisfying capacity and delay requirements. Thus, we propose a MEC-assisted energy-efficient task offloading scheme that leverages the cooperative MEC framework. To achieve energy efficiency, we propose a novel hybrid approach established based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) to solve the optimization problem. The proposed approach considers efficient resource allocation such as sub-carriers, power, and bandwidth for offloading to guarantee minimum energy consumption. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy is computational-efficient compared to benchmark methods. Moreover, it improves energy utilization, energy gain, response delay, and offloading utility.
Berberine is a natural plant alkaloid isolated from a diverse range of genera, it obtains anti-inflammatory, anti-obesity, and hepatoprotective properties, and is a promising agent for non-alcoholic ...steatohepatitis (NASH). Farnesoid X receptor (FXR) is a bile acid receptor and a drug target for NASH, however, the underlying mechanisms of berberine on regulating FXR are still unknown. In the present study, we feed mice with a 12-week high-fat diet with interval dextran sulfate sodium (0.5% in drinking water) diet to induce NASH, and treat the mice with berberine (100 mg/kg per day)
via
oral gavage for additional 4 weeks. We demonstrate that administration of berberine alleviates steatosis and infiltration of inflammatory cells in the liver of NASH mice. We apply 16S ribosomal DNA sequencing to screen the structure of gut microbiota, and ultra-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry analysis to determine the bile acid profiles. The results show that berberine modulates gut dysbiosis, and specifically increases the relative abundance of
Clostridiales
,
Lactobacillaceae,
and
Bacteroidale
. Berberine modulated microbiomes are associated with bile acid de-conjugation and transformation, which are consistent with the altered bile acid species (e.g., deoxycholic acid, ursodeoxycholic acid) upon berberine treatment. BA species that respond to berberine treatment are known FXR agonists, thus we performed quantitative Real Time-PCR and western blot to examine the FXR pathway, and find that berberine up-regulates intestinal FXR and fibroblast growth factor 15 (FGF15) expression, and the secretion of FGF15 further inhibits lipogenesis and nuclear factor-κB activation in the liver. Whereas the beneficial effects of berberine are blunted in FXR knockout mice. Our results reveal that berberine alleviates NASH by modulating the interplay of gut microbiota and bile acid metabolism, as well as the subsequent intestinal FXR activation.
Currently, mobile devices are becoming the popular instrument for accessing the cloud environment. Mobile devices are resource and energy limited; they can rely on cloud computing resource to perform ...computationally intensive operations such as data mining and multimedia processing. This paper presents the cost and energy aware service provisioning scheme for mobile client in mobile cloud, which includes two-stage optimization process. In the first-stage optimization process, the mobile cloud user gives the unique optimal payment to the cloud provider under the cost and energy constraint and optimizes its benefit. In the second-stage optimization process, mobile cloud provider runs multiple VMs to execute the jobs for mobile cloud users; the cloud providers also need to maximize the revenue. The cost and energy aware service provisioning algorithm in mobile cloud is proposed. The proposed algorithm is involved with the cloud datacenter provider’s optimization and mobile cloud user’s optimization, which are conducted by two routines. In the simulation, the proposed cost and energy aware mobile cloud service provisioning algorithm is compared with other related algorithm.
Vitamin D deficiency is a common phenomenon in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and the progressive non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). Jiangzhi Granule (JZG) formula is a Traditional ...Chinese medicine prescription, and has been found effective against NAFLD/NASH. Here we showed that vitamin D deficiency could accelerate NASH development, and reduce vitamin D receptor (VDR) expression. JZG treatment alleviated high-fat vitamin D deficient (HF-VDD) diet-induced NASH in C57BL/6 J mice, and up-regulated both the liver and intestinal VDR expression independent of 1,25-dihydroxy-vitamin D3 level. We analyzed the fecal BA profile using liquid chromatography coupled with triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (UPLC-TQMS) -based metabolomics, and found that JZG modulated fecal BA profile, predominantly increased the ratio of secondary BA species, as well as the expression of tight junction proteins Zona occludens 1(ZO-1) and occludin in the colon. In vitro experiment further confirmed the representative secondary BA species lithocholic acid (LCA) and keto-LCA upregulated the expression of and ZO-1 through VDR in LPS-stressed Caco-2 cells. Our results identified the endogenous VDR activation by JZG through modulating BA species in vitamin D deficiency-related NASH mice, thus providing evidence for the clinical application of JZG in treating NASH.
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