Currently, the significance of social media in disseminating noteworthy information on topics such as health, politics, and the economy is indisputable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-vaxxers use ...social media to distribute fake news and anxiety-provoking information about the vaccine, which may harm the public. Here, we characterize the psycho-linguistic features of anti-vaxxers on the online social network Twitter. For this, we collected COVID-19 related tweets from February 2020 to June 2021 to analyse vaccination stance, linguistic features, and social network characteristics. Our results demonstrated that, compared to pro-vaxxers, anti-vaxxers tend to have more negative emotions, narrative thinking, and worse moral tendencies. This study can advance our understanding of the online anti-vaccination movement, and become critical for social media management and policy action during and after the pandemic.
Recipe is a set of instructions that describes how to make food. It can help
people from the preparation of ingredients, food cooking process, etc. to
prepare the food, and increasingly in demand on ...the Web. To help users find the
vast amount of recipes on the Web, we address the task of recipe
recommendation. Due to multiple data types and relationships in a recipe, we
can treat it as a heterogeneous network to describe its information more
accurately. To effectively utilize the heterogeneous network, metapath was
proposed to describe the higher-level semantic information between two entities
by defining a compound path from peer entities. Therefore, we propose a
metapath-enhanced recipe recommendation framework, RecipeMeta, that combines
GNN (Graph Neural Network)-based representation learning and specific
metapath-based information in a recipe to predict User-Recipe pairs for
recommendation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed
model, RecipeMeta, outperforms state-of-the-art methods for recipe
recommendation.
Cardiac function is important for patients treated by venovenous extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VV ECMO), but data about the effect of VV ECMO on the heart in nonneonates is absent. We studied ...the effect of VV ECMO on cardiac performance, cardiomyocyte and mitochondria in an animal model.
Twelve farm piglets were randomly assigned into two groups: control group and ECMO group. In the ECMO group, ECMO cannulaes were placed and ECMO was instituted. Hemodynamics was recorded at baseline, 1 hour after induction, and every 4 hours thereafter, to assess the cardiac performance. All animals were monitored for 24 hours and were euthanized and myocardium was harvested. Myocardial histology, ultrastructure of cardiomyocyte and mitochondria were observed, and activities of mitochondrial complexes I-V were measured, to assess the effect to cardiomyocyte and mitochondria.
Hemodynamics were stable in each group of animals throughout the experiment. Interstitial edema, disorderd and dissolved of focal myofilament, morphological deformations of mitochondria were observed in the ECMO group. The activities of mitochondrial complexes were decreased in the ECMO group, and complex I and IV reached significance.
VV ECMO therapy is associated with changes of ultrastructure and function of cardiomyocyte and mitochondria, inducing myocardium injury. However, the injury was mild and had no effect on the cardiac performance for healthy piglets.
Master of Science
Department of Grain Science and Industry
Yong Cheng Shi
Resistant starch (RS) is notable for having several health benefits in humans, including glucose control and intestinal ...well-being. Pullulanase is able to debranch amylopectin and result in higher RS content. Different levels of pullulanase have been used to debranch waxy maize starch in the literature, but the changes of structure during debranching are well documented. In this study, waxy maize starch was cooked and debranched by pullulanase with 80, 160 and 240 New Pullulanase Unit Novo (NPUN)/g starch pullulanase. One NPUN was defined as the amount of enzyme, which, under standard conditions, hydrolyzes pullulan, liberating reducing carbohydrate with reducing power equivalent to 1 µmole glucose per minute. The structure of waxy maize starch during debranching was investigated and the digestibility of the debranched products was measured. When pullulanase was increased from 80 to 240 NPUN/g, more amylopectin was debranched in the same debranching time, and the degree of crystallinity and the RS content increased. After the debranched starches were crystallized at 25°C for 24 hours, the RS contents were greater than 63%. When heated and recrystallized under highly regulated conditions, the linear material formed crystallites of a range of geometries, including spherulites of a highly organized structure. Debranched waxy maize starches were used to produce crystalline structure under four conditions: spherulites formed by adding ethanol and crystallized at 4°C (ES4); spherulites formed in water (WS4) at 4°C; particles formed at 50°C (WS50); and spherulites formed at 50°C then further precipitated at 4°C (WS50-4). Spherulites formed at 50°C (WS50) had a higher proportion of smaller molecules than existed in the parent starch (Rh<15nm). ES4 and WS4 were B-type crystalline structure; whereasWS50 and WS50-4 were A-type crystalline structure. ES4 had a larger proportion of molecules with a low degree of polymerization and the RS content was also the lowest of the four samples. With cooling from 50°C to 4°C (WS50-4), the RS content was increased from 60% to 73%. ES4 and WS50-4 contained particles with spherical symmetry and WS4 had partial radial symmetry with some distortions, whereas WS50 displayed oblate particles with a parallel crystal structure.
From the discovery of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) to tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR), their subsequent application in large capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) greatly speeded up the information era ...over the past decades. However, the growing demand for big-data storage and processing is limited by the von-Neumann architecture due to the memory bottleneck and power dissipation. Taking advantage of nonvolatility, high speed, and low power, magnetic random access memory (MRAM) becomes a promising candidate to overcome this limitation through processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures. In this article, we provide an overview of existing technology and give a roadmap of spintronic devices for future energy-efficient computing and its relevant integration architectures. We begin with the fundamentals of Toggle-MRAM and spin-transfer torque (STT)-MRAM, which already have commercial applications. We then introduce spin-orbit torque (SOT), a critical mechanism to realize low-power data manipulation in the next generation of MRAM and summarize the recent experimental breakthroughs of field-free SOT switching schemes. Finally, we present MRAM-based PIM architectures and novel spintronic devices, provide an application outlook, and deliver the future development potential of energy-efficient computing systems.
•Identified the critical issues and ideal models in window thin film designs.•Applied the novel photothermal nano coatings to windows for the first time.•A new design of window structure is proposed ...for energy-efficient windows.
This review deals with critical issues in the development of energy-efficient windows from two fundamentally different approaches, namely, spectral selectivity and photothermal effect. This review is therefore divided into two parts. The first part reviews the engineering considerations based on an ideal window concept in terms of spectral selectivity, glazing scale, seasonal factors, and related thermal transfer. In particular, spectrally selective window designs and metal-based thin films are introduced with optimized engineering parameters and physical properties. The second part introduces a new approach of thermal insulation via the photothermal effect of the nanostructured thin films and coatings. The key that limits the heat flow through windows is the thermal insulation, which is traditionally constructed by multi-pane structures with an insulating layer. A novel concept not relying on any insulating media, but photothermal effects of nanomaterial coatings has been recently proposed and experimental verified. Both concepts of spectral selectivity and photothermal effects are introduced for energy-efficient window applications. A new direction is proposed in the development of the energy-efficient windows via the photothermal effects in various nanostructures of thin films and coatings.
Purpose
The pathological risk degree of gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs) has become an issue of great concern. Computed tomography (CT) is beneficial for showing adjacent tissues in detail and ...determining metastasis or recurrence of GISTs, but its function is still limited. Radiomics has recently shown a great potential in aiding clinical decision-making. The purpose of our study is to develop and validate CT-based radiomics models for GIST risk stratification.
Methods
Three hundred and sixty-six patients clinically suspected of primary GISTs from January 2013 to February 2018 were retrospectively enrolled, among which data from 140 patients were eventually analyzed after exclusion. Data from patient CT images were partitioned based on the National Institutes of Health Consensus Classification, including tumor segmentation, radiomics feature extraction and selection. A radiomics model was then proposed and validated.
Results
The radiomics signature demonstrated discriminative performance for advanced and nonadvanced GISTs with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.935 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.870–1.000 and an accuracy of 90.2% for validation cohort. The radiomics signature demonstrated favorable performance for the risk stratification of GISTs with an AUC of 0.809 (95% CI 0.777–0.841) and an accuracy of 67.5% for the validation cohort. Radiomics analysis could capture features of the four risk categories of GISTs. Meanwhile, this CT-based radiomics signature showed good diagnostic accuracy to distinguish between nonadvanced and advanced GISTs, as well as the four risk stratifications of GISTs.
Conclusion
Our findings highlight the potential of a quantitative radiomics analysis as a complementary tool to achieve an accurate diagnosis for GISTs.
A graphdiyne-based artificial synapse (GAS), exhibiting intrinsic short-term plasticity, has been proposed to mimic biological signal transmission behavior. The impulse response of the GAS has been ...reduced to several millivolts with competitive femtowatt-level consumption, exceeding the biological level by orders of magnitude. Most importantly, the GAS is capable of parallelly processing signals transmitted from multiple pre-neurons and therefore realizing dynamic logic and spatiotemporal rules. It is also found that the GAS is thermally stable (at 353 K) and environmentally stable (in a relative humidity up to 35%). Our artificial efferent nerve, connecting the GAS with artificial muscles, has been demonstrated to complete the information integration of pre-neurons and the information output of motor neurons, which is advantageous for coalescing multiple sensory feedbacks and reacting to events. Our synaptic element has potential applications in bioinspired peripheral nervous systems of soft electronics, neurorobotics, and biohybrid systems of brain-computer interfaces.
Grain size effects on the physical properties of polycrystalline ferroelectrics have been extensively studied for decades; however there are still major controversies regarding the dependence of the ...piezoelectric and ferroelectric properties on the grain size. Dense BaTiO3 ceramics with different grain sizes were fabricated by either conventional sintering or spark plasma sintering using micro- and nano-sized powders. The results show that the grain size effect on the dielectric permittivity is nearly independent of the sintering method and starting powder used. A peak in the permittivity is observed in all the ceramics with a grain size near 1 μm and can be attributed to a maximum domain wall density and mobility. The piezoelectric coefficient d33 and remnant polarization Pr show diverse grain size effects depending on the particle size of the starting powder and sintering temperature. This suggests that besides domain wall density, other factors such as back fields and point defects, which influence the domain wall mobility, could be responsible for the different grain size dependence observed in the dielectric and piezoelectric/ferroelectric properties. In cases where point defects are not the dominant contributor, the piezoelectric constant d33 and the remnant polarization Pr increase with increasing grain size.
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