In this work, we studied the influence of spring (SP) and summer (SU) El Niño events on the landfalling tropical cyclones (TCs) in China. The results showed that compared to SU El Niño years, the ...average latitude of the landfalling TCs in SP El Niño years shifted significantly southward and that the average TC intensity was significantly stronger, especially in the post-landfall period. Additionally, more severe tropical storm-level TCs generated over the South China Sea made landfall in China. Meanwhile, in SP El Niño years, landfalling TCs in southern China had a greater landfall intensity, but landfalling TCs in eastern China were the opposite. These changes in TC intensity during the SP El Niño years could be attributed to more favorable dynamical and thermodynamical conditions, which are beneficial for maintaining TC intensity and duration after landfall. These results could have important implications for an in-depth understanding of TC activities, as well as TC disaster prevention and mitigation.
Despite the increasing survival rates, liver transplant patients experience numerous postoperative complications and encounter significant challenges in long-term self-management. This study aims to ...examine the effectiveness of empowerment education in enhancing self-management skills and self-efficacy among liver transplant recipients.
A randomized, single-blind, single-center trial was conducted in China between August 2019 and September 2020, involving liver transplant recipients. The intervention group received 12 weeks of empowerment education, while the control group received 12 weeks of routine education. .The study assessed the patients' self-management and self-efficacy using the Liver Transplant Recipient Self-Management Questionnaire and the Self-efficacy for Managing Chronic Disease 6-Item Scale. Follow-up assessments were conducted at 1, 3, and 6 months after the intervention.
Eighty-four patients were initially randomized to either the intervention group (n1 = 42) or the routine education group (n2 = 42). Twelve patients were excluded from the analysis due to loss of follow-up or discontinuation of the intervention, leaving 72 patients (n1 = 35, n2 = 37) for the final analysis. The scores for exercise and lifestyle management were significantly higher in the intervention group than in the control group at 1, 3, and 6 months after the intervention (t = 3.047, 5.875, 8.356, and t = 5.759, 4.681, 11.759, respectively; P < 0.05). At 3 and 6 months after the intervention, the scores for cognitive symptom management, communication with physicians, and self-efficacy were significantly higher in the intervention group than in the control group (t = 5.609, 6.416, and t = 5.576, 11.601, and t = 6.867, 15.071, respectively; P < 0.001). Within the intervention group, self-management scores increased significantly over time, while within the control group, the scores for communication with physicians, lifestyle, and self-efficacy showed a significant decline from 3 to 6 months after routine health education.
The results of this study suggest that empowerment education is an effective means of improving the self-management and self-efficacy of liver transplant patients, with better outcomes compared to routine health education. These findings have important implications for nursing practice and provide valuable guidance for clinical education of liver transplant patients.
ChiCTR2200061561.
Abstract
Background
With the rising prevalence of obesity and overweight, increasing number of scholars paid attention to the negative effects on human health and life. Recent years, many studies ...have focused on the relation of socio-economic factors with the risk of overweight or obesity, but findings have been inconsistent. This study investigated the relationship between socio-economic factors and the risk of overweight and obesity among Chinese adults.
Methods
This study was based on the survey of the China Health and Nutrition Survey in 2015, with 9245 Chinese adults aged 18–65 years old. Overweight and obesity were assessed by physical measurements of weight, height, and waist circumference. Multiple logistic models were used to estimate the odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of the association.
Results
Overall, the prevalence rates of general obesity and abdominal obesity were 15.5% and 22.6%, respectively. We found that education and per capita household income were positively associated with overweight and obesity risk in men. However, the association between education and obesity status was negative in women general obesity: OR = 0.64, 95% CI (0.50–0.81); abdominal obesity: OR = 0.62, 95% CI (0.51–0.76). Occupational status was only associated with general overweight in men.
Conclusions
Results suggested that higher education and per capita household income were associated with an increased risk of overweight and obesity among Chinese men, whereas the associations were negative for women. We recommended that men with high levels of education and income, women with low levels of education, can engage in some physical activity, modify dietary, and adopt a new way of life to maintain their weight and general health.
Surface defects with abundant localized electrons on bismuth oxyhalide catalysts are proved to have the capability to capture and activate CO
2
. However, bismuth oxyhalide materials are susceptible ...to photocorrosion, making the surface defects easily deactivated and therefore losing their function as active sites. Construction of deactivation-resistant surface defects on catalyst is essential for stable CO
2
photoreduction, but is a universal challenge. In this work, the Bi
5
O
7
I nanotubes with surface tensile strain are synthesized, which are favorable for the visible light-induced dynamic I defects generation. The CO
2
molecules absorbed on I defects are constantly reduced by the incoming photogenerated electrons from I-deficient Bi
5
O
7
I nanotubes and the successive protonation of CO
2
molecules is thus highly promoted, realizing the selective CO
2
conversion process via the route of CO
2
-COOH
−
-CO. The efficient and stable photoreduction of CO
2
into CO with 100% selectivity can be achieved even under visible light (
λ
>420 nm) irradiation benefited from the dynamic I defects as active sites. The results presented herein demonstrate the unique action mechanism of light-induced dynamic defects during CO
2
photoreduction process and provide a new strategy into rational design of deactivation-resistant catalysts for selective CO
2
photoreduction.
The quantitative level and kinetics of neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) in individuals with Omicron breakthrough infections may differ from those of vaccinated individuals without infection. Therefore, ...we aimed to evaluate the difference in NAb levels to distinguish the breakthrough cases from the post-immunized population to identify early infected person in an outbreak epidemic when nasal and/or pharyngeal swab nucleic acid real-time PCR results were negative.
We collected 1077 serum samples from 877 individuals, including 189 with Omicron BA.2 breakthrough infection and 688 post-immunized participants. NAb titers were detected using the surrogate virus neutralization test, and were log(2)-transformed to normalize prior to analysis using Student's unpaired t-tests. Geometric mean titers (GMT) were calculated with 95% confidence intervals (CI). Linear regression models were used to identify factors associated with NAb levels. We further conducted ROC curve analysis to evaluate the NAbs' ability to identify breakthrough infected individuals in the vaccinated population.
The breakthrough infection group had a consistently higher NAb levels than the post-immunized group according to time since the last vaccination. NAb titers in the breakthrough infection group were 6.4-fold higher than those in the post-immunized group (GMT: 40.72 AU/mL and 6.38 AU/mL, respectively;
<0.0001). In the breakthrough infection group, the NAbs in the convalescent phase were 10.9-fold higher than in the acute phase (GMT: 200.48 AU/mL and 18.46 AU/mL, respectively; p<0.0001). In addition, the time since infection, booster vaccination, and the time since last vaccination were associated with log(2)-transformed NAb levels in the breakthrough infection group. ROC curve analysis showed that ROC area was largest (0.728) when the cut-off value of log(2)-transformed NAb was 6, which indicated that NAb levels could identify breakthrough infected individuals in the vaccinated population.
Our study demonstrates that the NAb titers of Omicron BA.2 variant breakthrough cases are higher than in the post-immunized group. The difference in NAb levels could be used to identify cases of breakthrough infection from the post-immunized population in an outbreak epidemic.
•Both liquid–solid and liquid–liquid phase change solvents critically reviewed.•Various mechanisms triggering phase separations in solvents elucidated in detail.•Advantages and challenges of phase ...change processes for CO2 capture assessed.•Gaps between state-of-the-art and ideal solvents analyzed.•Insights into research needs regarding solvents and desired properties provided.
Carbon Capture and Storage is regarded as an important component in a portfolio of low-carbon energy technologies for mitigating climate change. Absorption technologies are presently the most available and effective approach for post-combustion CO2 capture. However, state-of-the-art amine-based absorption technologies incur intensive energy use, as high as 3 times the thermodynamic minimum, thus resulting in prohibitively high costs. Solvents are key to the performance of absorption technologies. Recently, a new class of solvents, phase change solvents, have attracted growing interest due to their potential to substantially reduce energy use for CO2 capture. Phase change solvents are homogeneous (single-phase) solvents under normal conditions, but undergo a phase transition into a heterogenic (two-phase) system, triggered by changes in polarity, hydrophilicity, ionic strength, or hydrogen bond strength to form a CO2-lean liquid phase and a CO2-enriched liquid or solid phase. This review paper first examines different mechanisms that trigger phase separations in solvents. A comprehensive list of phase change solvents reported in the recent literature, including those subject to chemically or thermally triggered phase changes, non-aqueous or aqueous systems, and those forming either a CO2-enriched solid or a liquid phase are provided and their physiochemical properties for CO2 capture are discussed. Enabled by phase change solvents, different variants of CO2 absorption processes have been developed and tested in laboratory or pilot scales over the past ten years. The status of such emerging processes is summarized and their advantages and challenges for post-combustion CO2 capture are reviewed and commented. Solvent properties such as CO2 loading capacity, lean- and rich-phase partition, desorption pressure, absorption kinetics, viscosity, stability, and volatility are critical for both CO2 capture performance and scalability. Gaps between state-of-the-art and ideal solvents are analyzed, and insights into the research needs such as solvent structure–property–performance relations, computational solvent design, ideal vapor-liquid equilibrium behavior, and integration of capture processes with post-combustion emission sources are provided.
The start-up period is the most difficult period for enterprises to survive and innovate. How will government subsidies affect the innovation efficiency of enterprises in the start-up period? And, is ...there any heterogeneity? The academic research is still relatively preliminary and controversial. This study adopts the cash flow method to screen a sample of start-ups from Chinese GEM, STAR Market and SME board-listed companies from 2010 to 2020 for empirical research. The study found that financial subsidies can generally promote the innovation efficiency of start-ups, but there is also significant heterogeneity by industry, region and whether the subsidies are sustainable. Financial subsidies generally have a signaling effect that facilitates startups to attract external capital, and this effect is most significant in the industrial sector. Overall, fiscal decentralization negatively regulates the effect of subsidies on the innovation efficiency of start-ups, especially in the public utilities and industrial sectors. The government subsidies are relatively insignificant to improve the innovation efficiency of start-up enterprises in non-first-tier cities, especially in small and medium-sized cities, and the multiplier effect is relatively small. The effect of non-sustainable subsidies is not significant because they cannot produce a long-term mechanism and thus are difficult to influence future expectations and decisions. The subsidy effect is not significant in other industries outside the industrial sector, and the lower the level of industry competition, the weaker the signaling effect of enterprise credit, the less conducive to its access to external innovation resources to enhance innovation efficiency through the signaling effect of government subsidies. Moreover, financial decentralization does not improve the innovation efficiency of government subsidies as expected, but weakens the innovation efficiency of fiscal subsidies for start-up enterprises in general. The study proposed that the government (especially the small and medium-sized city government) should optimize the business environment and financial capital allocation, change the supervision and management mechanism, improve the efficiency of capital utilization and reduce the crowding out effect. The government’s subsidy policy should be further standardized and refined.
In many rural edible mushroom growing sites, due to their growing environments and economic factors, growers are often unable to use industrial automation to pick edible mushrooms, resulting in ...losses of hundreds of millions of dollars each year due to missing the optimal picking cycles of edible mushrooms. For this reason, this project aimed to find an object detection algorithm that can be used with industrial cameras to help detect the growth statuses of edible mushrooms in real time and can be applied to future automatic picking machines. In this paper, based on the You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5) network, by introducing the idea of recursion, remerging the first output with the convolutional layer of the backbone part of the network, introducing atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) instead of SPP (as in the original algorithm), utilizing the complete intersection over union (CIOU) and distance IOU (DIOU) instead of the generalized IOU (GIOU), and employing DIOU_nonmaximum suppression (NMS) instead of the original NMS algorithm, we propose a new deep learning network called Recursive-YOLOv5. This network can effectively identify 98% of edible mushrooms when dealing with large-resolution, small-target situations; this is a 12.87% improvement over the accuracy of YOLOv5X. Although the algorithm proposed in this paper utilizes almost double the parameters of the original network, with today's computing power and the rapid development of cloud computing, this sacrifice of computing power for accuracy is very cost-effective.
Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) migration determines the healing capacity of bone and is crucial in promoting bone regeneration. Migration of MSCs is highly dependent on degradation of extracellular ...matrix by proteolytic enzymes. However, the underlying mechanisms of how enzymolysis paves the way for MSCs to migrate from their niche to the defect area is still not fully understood. Here, this study shows that high-temperature requirement A3 (HtrA3) overcomes the physical barrier and provides anchor points through collagen IV degradation, paving the way for MSC migration. HtrA3 is upregulated in MSCs at the leading edge of bone defect during the early stage of healing. HtrA3 degrades the surrounding collagen IV, which increases the collagen network porosity and increases integrin β1 expression. Subsequently, integrin β1 enhances the mechanotransduction of MSCs, thus remodeling the cytoskeleton, increasing cellular stiffness and nuclear translocation of YAP, eventually promoting the migration and subsequent osteogenic differentiation of MSCs. Local administration of recombinant HtrA3 in rat cranial bone defects significantly increases new bone formation and further validates the enhancement of MSC migration. This study helps to reveal the novel roles of HtrA3, explore potential targets for regenerative medicine, and offer new insights for the development of bioactive materials.
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•HtrA3, a novel serine protease, is upregulated in MSCs in early stage of bone repair.•HtrA3 play a key role in ECM remodeling via selective col IV degradation.•HtrA3 enhances migration and osteogenic differentiation of MSCs in vitro and in vivo.•Outside-in mechanotransduction in MSCs through integrin β1-YAP was increased by HtrA3.•HtrA3 potentially is a new therapeutic target in bone tissue repair and engineering.
How much the vaccine contributes to the induction and development of neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) of breakthrough cases relative to those unvaccinated-infected cases is not fully understood. We ...conducted a prospective cohort study and collected serum samples from 576 individuals who were diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 Delta strain infection, including 245 breakthrough cases and 331 unvaccinated-infected cases. NAbs were analysed by live virus microneutralization test and transformation of NAb titre. NAbs titres against SARS-CoV-2 ancestral and Delta variant in breakthrough cases were 7.8-fold and 4.0-fold higher than in unvaccinated-infected cases, respectively. NAbs titres in breakthrough cases peaked at the second week after onset/infection. However, the NAbs titres in the unvaccinated-infected cases reached their highest levels during the third week. Compared to those with higher levels of NAbs, those with lower levels of NAbs had no difference in viral clearance duration time (P>0.05), did exhibit higher viral load at the beginning of infection/maximum viral load of infection. NAb levels were statistically higher in the moderate cases than in the mild cases (P<0.0001). Notably, in breakthrough cases, NAb levels were highest longer than 4 months after vaccination (Delta strain: 53,118.2 U/mL), and lowest in breakthrough cases shorter than 1 month (Delta strain: 7551.2 U/mL). Cross-neutralization against the ancestral strain and the current circulating isolate (Omicron BA.5) was significantly lower than against the Delta variant in both breakthrough cases and unvaccinated-infected cases. Our study demonstrated that vaccination could induce immune responses more rapidly and greater which could be effective in controlling SARS-CoV-2.
