IntroductionWe investigated public interest in shopping and point-of-sales (POS) of JUUL and Puff Bar products in the context of five regulatory, company sales policy and other events of interest ...that may have influenced the trajectory of these products during 2019–2021.MethodsOutcome variables included relative search volume (RSV) from Google search queries indicative of shopping interest in and aggregate dollar sales from Nielsen POS for JUUL and Puff Bar in the USA from March 2019 to May 2021. Adjusted autoregressive integrated moving average assessed the observed and predicted trends and adjusted linear regression analysis measured the relative rate of change in the outcome variables for each time period of interest.ResultsAfter the Trump administration announced its plans to ban flavoured e-cigarettes and JUUL Labs, Inc.’s decided to suspend the sales of its sweet and fruity flavoured products, JUUL’s shopping interest RSV and sales declined while Puff Bar’s shopping interest RSV peaked, and its sales increased. From the period following FDA’s announcement of its enforcement guidance policy on unauthorised flavoured cartridge-based e-cigarettes until May 2021, JUUL’s shopping interest RSV and sales continued to decline. Puff Bar’s shopping interest RSV increased, and its sales peaked until the House approved the flavoured e-cigarette ban bill. Puff Bar’s sales steeply declined following suspension of its sales in February 2020. The decline, however, slowed after Puff Bar products were relaunched as ‘synthetic nicotine’ e-cigarettes.ConclusionsPuff Bar’s unprecedented peak in the shopping interest and sales of Puff Bar warrants continued surveillance.
Nominally anhydrous minerals (e.g., olivine, clinopyroxene, and orthopyroxene) in peridotite xenoliths collected from the Colorado Plateau and southern Basin and Range in western North America were ...systematically analyzed by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy for water contents. Measured water contents range from 2 to 45 ppm for olivine, from 53 to 402 ppm for orthopyroxene, and from 171 to 957 ppm for clinopyroxene. The Colorado Plateau has the highest water contents (up to 45 ppm H2O in olivine, 402 ppm H2O in orthopyroxene, and 957 ppm H2O in clinopyroxene), while San Carlos in the southern Basin and Range has the lowest water contents (up to 4 ppm H2O in olivine, 82 ppm H2O in orthopyroxene, and 178 ppm H2O in clinopyroxene). With the exception of San Carlos, the olivine and pyroxenes from all other localities (Dish Hill, Grand Canyon, and Navajo) have water contents close to or higher than that inferred for the fertile asthenospheric mantle. We interpret the high water contents measured here to have been introduced into the base of the lithospheric mantle by rehydration associated with the subduction of the Farallon plate beneath North America during the early Cenozoic. Application of an updated flow law for dislocation creep of wet olivine to lithospheric mantle conditions beneath the Colorado Plateau predicts that for a given background shear stress, hydration alone can result in approximately 1 order of magnitude drop in the effective viscosity at the base of the lithosphere. If viscosity alone is used to distinguish the lithosphere from underlying asthenosphere, this suggests that hydration could have resulted in more than 10 km of lithospheric thinning. Viscosity reduction and lithospheric thinning of even larger extents (up to ∼100 km) are predicted when thicker lithosphere (such as Archean cratons) and larger water contents (up to water‐saturated conditions) are considered. If our interpretations are correct, the implications of our study go beyond western North America and hint at a possible way of recycling continental mantle, including cratonic mantle, back into the convecting mantle.
Geometric phases induced in quantum evolutions have built‐in noise‐resilient characters, and thus can find applications in many robust quantum manipulation tasks. Here, a feasible and fast scheme for ...universal quantum computation on superconducting circuits with nonadiabatic non‐Abelian geometric phases is proposed, using resonant interaction of three‐level quantum system. In this scheme, arbitrary single‐qubit quantum gates can be implemented in a single‐loop scenario by shaping both the amplitudes and phases of the two driving microwave fields resonantly coupled to a transmon device. Moreover, nontrivial two‐qubit gates can also be realized with an auxiliary transmon simultaneously coupled to the two target transmons in an effective resonant way. In particular, this proposal can be compatible to various optimal control techniques, which further enhances the robustness of the quantum operations. Therefore, this proposal represents a promising way toward fault‐tolerant quantum computation on solid‐state quantum circuits.
Geometric phases have built‐in noise‐resilient characters, and thus are promising for robust quantum information processing. Now, a fast scheme for holonomic quantum computation on superconducting circuits is proposed, which is also compatible to optimal control techniques, and thus can further enhance the gate robustness. Therefore, it represents a promising way toward fault‐tolerant quantum computation on solid‐state quantum circuits.
The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is emerging as a global health threat and shows a higher risk for men than women. Thus far, the studies on andrological consequences of COVID-19 are ...limited. To ascertain the consequences of COVID-19 on sperm parameters after recovery, we recruited 41 reproductive-aged male patients who had recovered from COVID-19, and analyzed their semen parameters and serum sex hormones at a median time of 56 days after hospital discharge. For longitudinal analysis, a second sampling was obtained from 22 of the 41 patients after a median time interval of 29 days from first sampling. Compared with controls who had not suffered from COVID-19, the total sperm count, sperm concentration, and percentages of motile and progressively motile spermatozoa in the patients were significantly lower at first sampling, while sperm vitality and morphology were not affected. The total sperm count, sperm concentration, and number of motile spermatozoa per ejaculate were significantly increased and the percentage of morphologically abnormal sperm was reduced at the second sampling compared with those at first in the 22 patients examined. Though there were higher prolactin and lower progesterone levels in patients at first sampling than those in controls, no significant alterations were detected for any sex hormones examined over time following COVID-19 recovery in the 22 patients. Although it should be interpreted carefully, these findings indicate an adverse but potentially reversible consequence of COVID-19 on sperm quality.
Despite increased understanding of how viral infection is involved in asthma exacerbations, it is less clear which viruses are involved and to what extent they contribute to asthma exacerbations. ...Here, we sought to determine the prevalence of different respiratory viruses during asthma exacerbations. Systematic computerized searches of the literature up to June 2017 without language limitation were performed. The primary focus was on the prevalence of respiratory viruses, including AdV (adenovirus), BoV (bocavirus), CoV (coronavirus), CMV (cytomegalovirus), EnV (enterovirus), HSV (herpes simplex virus), IfV (influenza virus), MpV (metapneumovirus), PiV (parainfluenzavirus), RV (rhinovirus) and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) during asthma exacerbations. We also examined the prevalence of viral infection stratified by age, geographic region, type of respiratory secretion, and detection method. Sixty articles were included in the final analysis. During asthma exacerbations, the mean prevalence of AdV, BoV, CoV, CMV, EnV, HSV, IfV, MpV, PiV, RV and RSV was 3.8%, 6.9%, 8.4%, 7.2%, 10.1%, 12.3%, 10.0%, 5.3%, 5.6%, 42.1% and 13.6%, respectively. EnV, MPV, RV and RSV were more prevalent in children, whereas AdV, BoV, CoV, IfV and PiV were more frequently present in adults. RV was the major virus detected globally, except in Africa. RV could be detected in both the upper and lower airway. Polymerase chain reaction was the most sensitive method for detecting viral infection. Our findings indicate the need to develop prophylactic polyvalent or polyvirus (including RV, EnV, IfV and RSV) vaccines that produce herd immunity and reduce the healthcare burden associated with virus-induced asthma exacerbations.
Geometric phases are noise resilient, and thus provide a robust way towards high-fidelity quantum manipulation. Here we experimentally demonstrate arbitrary nonadiabatic holonomic single-qubit ...quantum gates for both a superconducting transmon qubit and a microwave cavity in a single-loop way. In both cases, an auxiliary state is utilized, and two resonant microwave drives are simultaneously applied with well-controlled but varying amplitudes and phases for the arbitrariness of the gate. The resulting gates on the transmon qubit achieve a fidelity of 0.996 characterized by randomized benchmarking and the ones on the cavity show an averaged fidelity of 0.978 based on a full quantum process tomography. In principle, a nontrivial two-qubit holonomic gate between the qubit and the cavity can also be realized based on our presented experimental scheme. Our experiment thus paves the way towards practical nonadiabatic holonomic quantum manipulation with both qubits and cavities in a superconducting circuit.
Using geometric phases to realize noise-resilient quantum computing is an important method to enhance the control fidelity. In this work, we experimentally realize a universal nonadiabatic geometric ...quantum gate set in a superconducting qubit chain. We characterize the realized single- and two-qubit geometric gates with both quantum process tomography and randomized benchmarking methods. The measured average fidelities for the single-qubit rotation gates and two-qubit controlled-Z gate are 0.9977(1) and 0.977(9), respectively. Besides, we also experimentally demonstrate the noise-resilient feature of the realized single-qubit geometric gates by comparing their performance with the conventional dynamical gates with different types of errors in the control field. Thus, our experiment proves a way to achieve high-fidelity geometric quantum gates for robust quantum computation.
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