Social interactions occur between multiple individuals, but what is the detailed relationship between the neural dynamics across their brains? To address this question across timescales and levels of ...neural activity, we used wireless electrophysiology to simultaneously record from pairs of bats engaged in a wide range of natural social interactions. We found that neural activity was remarkably correlated between their brains over timescales from seconds to hours. The correlation depended on a shared social environment and was most prominent in high frequency local field potentials (>30 Hz), followed by local spiking activity. Furthermore, the degree of neural correlation covaried with the extent of social interactions, and an increase in correlation preceded their initiation. These results show that inter-brain correlation is an inherent feature of natural social interactions, reveal the domain of neural activity where it is most prominent, and provide a foundation for studying its functional role in social behaviors.
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•Simultaneous neural recording from pairs of bats during natural social interactions•LFP power and spiking activity highly correlated between socially interacting bats•Neural correlation between brains at timescales ranging from seconds to hours•Neural correlation between brains covaried with the extent of social interactions
Social interactions involve complex animal behaviors. In socially interacting bats, there is inter-brain correlation of neural activity, reflecting current and future states of social behavior.
Mechanical recycling of waste plastics is an environmental solution to the problem of waste plastic disposal, and has already become a common practice in industry. However, limited information can be ...found on either the industralised plastic recycling or the recycled materials, despite the use of recycled plastics has already extended to automobile production. This study investigates the life cycle environmental impacts of mechanical plastic recycling practice of a plastic recycling company in China. Waste plastics from various sources, such as agricultural wastes, plastic product manufacturers, collected solid plastic wastes and parts dismantled from waste electric and electronic equipments, are processed in three routes with products end up in different markets. The results of life cycle assessments show that the extrusion process has the largest environmental impacts, followed by the use of fillers and additives. Compared to production of virgin plastics and composites, the mechanical recycling is proved to be a superior alternative in most environmental aspects. Substituting virgin plastic composites with recycled plastic composites has achieved the highest environmental benefits, as virgin composite production has an impact almost 4 times higher that of the recycled composite production in each ReCiPe endpoint damage factor. Sensitivity analysis shows that the coverage of collecting network contribute affect little to overall environmental impact, and centralisation plays an important role in reducing overall environmental impacts. Among the fillers and additives, impact modifiers account for the most significant contributions to the environmental impacts of recycled composites. This study provides necessary information about the existing industrialised plastic recycling practice, and recommendations are given. Research implications are presented with the purpose to achieve higher substitution rate and lower environmental impact.
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•Extrusion and additives make most significant contributions to environmental impacts.•Centralised recycling is a more environmental mechanical plastic recycling practice.•Highest savings are achieved by substituting virgin composites by recycled ones.
Currently, there are more than 100,000 people on the US national transplant waiting list, and 17 people die each day waiting for an organ transplant ....
Tumor reinitiating cancer stem-like cells are responsible for cancer recurrence associated with conventional chemotherapy. We developed a doxorubicin-encapsulated polymeric nanoparticle ...surface-decorated with chitosan that can specifically target the CD44 receptors of these cells. This nanoparticle system was engineered to release the doxorubicin in acidic environments, which occurs when the nanoparticles are localized in the acidic tumor microenvironment and when they are internalized and localized in the cellular endosomes/lysosomes. This nanoparticle design strategy increases the cytotoxicity of the doxorubicin by six times in comparison to the use of free doxorubicin for eliminating CD44+ cancer stem-like cells residing in 3D mammary tumor spheroids (i.e., mammospheres). We further show these nanoparticles reduced the size of tumors in an orthotopic xenograft tumor model with no evident systemic toxicity. The development of nanoparticle system to target cancer stem-like cells with low systemic toxicity provides a new treatment arsenal for improving the survival of cancer patients.
A key goal of social neuroscience is to understand the inter-brain neural relationship-the relationship between the neural activity of socially interacting individuals. Decades of research ...investigating this relationship have focused on the similarity in neural activity across brains. Here, we instead asked how neural activity differs between brains, and how that difference evolves alongside activity patterns shared between brains. Applying this framework to bats engaged in spontaneous social interactions revealed two complementary phenomena characterizing the inter-brain neural relationship: fast fluctuations of activity difference across brains unfolding in parallel with slow activity covariation across brains. A model reproduced these observations and generated multiple predictions that we confirmed using experimental data involving pairs of bats and a larger social group of bats. The model suggests that a simple computational mechanism involving positive and negative feedback could explain diverse experimental observations regarding the inter-brain neural relationship.
A novel core-shell microcapsule system is developed in this study to mimic the miniaturized 3D architecture of pre-hatching embryos with an aqueous liquid-like core of embryonic cells and a ...hydrogel-shell of zona pellucida. This is done by microfabricating a non-planar microfluidic flow-focusing device that enables one-step generation of microcapsules with an alginate hydrogel shell and an aqueous liquid core of cells from two aqueous fluids. Mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells encapsulated in the liquid core are found to survive well (>92%). Moreover, ~20 ES cells in the core can proliferate to form a single ES cell aggregate in each microcapsule within 7 days while at least a few hundred cells are usually needed by the commonly used hanging-drop method to form an embryoid body (EB) in each hanging drop. Quantitative RT-PCR analyses show significantly higher expression of pluripotency marker genes in the 3D aggregated ES cells compared to the cells under 2D culture. The aggregated ES cells can be efficiently differentiated into beating cardiomyocytes using a small molecule (cardiogenol C) without complex combination of multiple growth factors. Taken together, the novel 3D microfluidic and pre-hatching embryo-like microcapsule systems are of importance to facilitate in vitro culture of pluripotent stem cells for their ever-increasing use in modern cell-based medicine.
Synthetic control circuits have demonstrated their effectiveness in molecular process control. However, current synthetic control circuits counteract the impact of disturbances by error signals. A ...disturbance suppression strategy that combines a disturbance observer with a controller to achieve better disturbance suppression is presented in this paper. A disturbance observer-based PID control system (DOB-PID) is implemented for the first time using chemical reaction networks (CRNs). The controller parameters are obtained using the flow direction algorithm, which significantly reduces the parameter setting time. The DOB-PID based on CRNs achieves improved disturbance suppression without affecting the setpoint tracking characteristics. To overcome the limitation of the classic disturbance observer relying on the inverse nominal model, a modified disturbance observer-based control system (MDOB) is realized using CRNs. The MDOB-PID eliminates the need for the inverse nominal model in the modeling process. Furthermore, the MDOB-PID control system is combined with a feedforward controller, resulting in a modified disturbance observer-based feedforward control system (FDOB). This system effectively decouples the set value following and disturbance suppression characteristics, simplifying the parameter tuning process. Additionally, a FDOB-PID control system is established using DNA strand displacement. The FDOB-PID control system proposed in this paper exhibits lower overshoot and better disturbance suppression compared to existing control systems. Finally, a FDOB-PID exponential gate control system is developed to suppress leakage response in calculation process. This system ensures accurate calculation results even in the presence of a leaky response in the exponential gate.
As an icon of sharing economy and product service systems, bicycle sharing is gaining an increasing global popularity, yet there is little knowledge about the environmental performance of this ...emerging traveling mode. To seek the answer to the question, the paper employs a survey-based method and a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. We first conduct a questionnaire-based survey to identify the changes in traveling modes after the introduction of shared bicycles. The survey results show that the use of shared bicycles is more popular among young and low-income populations, and shared bicycles are predominantly used to replace walking and bus-taking. Based on the survey results, we model the environmental impacts of the changed traveling behaviors and the life cycle of shared bicycle with the aid of Gabi software. The LCA results shows that bicycle sharing is currently an environmentally friendly practice, as it brings environmental savings in all the indicators except metal consumption. Further, the results of sensitivity analysis show that aging, rising rental fees, and increasing volume of shared bicycles would impart negative impacts on the environmental performance of bicycle sharing. The findings of this work facilitate the management and development of bicycle sharing.
Blackcurrant (Ribes nigrum L.), a member of the Saxifragaceae family, is a perennial deciduous shrub. Seeds, leaves, and fruits contain a large number of bioactive substances, which have high ...nutritional value and medicinal health functions. They can be widely used as natural resources in the food and pharmaceutical industries (Huo et al. 2011). Blackcurrant is mainly distributed in Heilongjiang, Jilin, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Qinghai, and other places in China. In the alpine region of Heilongjiang Province, the climate is cold, with a large temperature difference between day and night, sufficient sunlight, fertile soil, and high organic matter content, which is conducive to the accumulation of nutrients in the fruit (Zhu et al. 2022). At the same time, blackcurrant has become one of the characteristic and advantageous shrub species in Heilongjiang Province. The breeding and cultivation research on blackcurrant in this province is in its infancy, therefore the germplasm resources are relatively scarce. Currently, there are less than 10 cultivars available in production. Blackcurrant generally has shortcomings such as weak resistance to powdery mildew and poor cold resistance. Mudanjiang Branch of Heilongjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences has bred four blackcurrant cultivars, ‘Zaofeng’, ‘Heifeng’, ‘Hanfeng’, and ‘Wanfeng’, through hybridization and selection that are used in production. ‘Danjianghei’ (Heilongjiang Provincial Crop Variety Approval Committee 2012046) is a new cultivar approved (registered) by Heilongjiang Provincial Crop Variety Approval Committee in 2012. ‘Danjianghei’ has a large fruit size, high yield, good quality, and resistance to blackcurrant disease characters.
As the heat exchange component of the organic Rankine cycle (ORC) system, the evaporator directly affects the overall operation performance of the system. In this paper, an analytical method for ...energy level on the working fluid side of evaporator is proposed based on the energy level and enerty theory. The reliability, validity, and correlation of the proposed analytical method are studied by means of theoretical analysis, experimental evaluation, and Elman neural network (ElmanNN). The bilinear interpolation algorithm is used to analyze the non-linear relationship between the system parameters and the energy level on the working fluid side. In addition, the correlation between the heat exchange efficiency of the evaporator and the operating performance of the system is compared. Based on the back propagation neural network (BPNN), the high energy level area on working fluid side is accurately evaluated and verified, the direction and degree of the non-linear mapping relationship between the working fluid side energy level and the system performance are quantitatively evaluated, and the sensitivity of thermodynamic cycle parameters in the high energy level area on working fluid side is quantitatively evaluated. This study provides a novel approach to evaluate the operation of the evaporator in the ORC system. In addition, this study also provides guidance on how to keep the evaporator operating continuously in the high energy level area throughout the experiment.
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