Solar-driven photothermal interfacial evaporation is considered as one of the most promising strategies in seawater desalination and wastewater treatment. In desalination, evaporation efficiency and ...salt resistance are regarded as two inter-constraint measures. Thus, it is still challenging to fabricate solar evaporators with both high evaporation efficiency and excellent salt resistance. In the present work, a self-floating Janus sponge composed of hydrophobic carbon black (CB) coating and hydrophilic porous thermoplastic polyurethane-carbon nanotube (TPC) nanofibrous substrate (TPC@CB) is fabricated via a simple electrospinning and gas templating expansion method. Attributing to the unique trilaminar functional architecture: the upper superhydrophobic solar-absorption coating, the intermediate ultrathin heat localization layer, and the lower cellular thermal insulation layer, the Janus TPC@CB sponge exhibits high evaporation efficiency (1.80 kg m–2 h–1 with an energy efficiency of 97.2% under 1.0 solar irradiation) and outstanding salt resistance ability. Moreover, zero liquid discharge in salt-containing wastewater treatment is realized using the Janus TPC@CB sponge as a solar-driven photothermal medium. This work provides a promising approach to seawater desalination and wastewater treatment.
Water contamination by emerging organic pollutants, such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs), is becoming more and more serious. Porous aromatic frameworks (PAFs) are considered as ...promising adsorbents to remove the PPCPs. To overcome the limitation of PAFs in their powder forms for large-scale applications, herein, we proposed a strategy to covalently anchor PAFs onto electrospun polymer fiber membranes. Polyaniline (PANI) played the role of aromatic seed layer, which was coated on the electrospun polyacrylonitrile (PAN) fiber membrane first. Then, PAF-45 modification was in situ synthesized in the presence of the PANI-coated electrospun PAN fiber membrane. This study could make the PAF-based materials be handled more easily and improve the surface area of electrospun fiber membrane. The obtained composite adsorbent (PAF-45-PP FM) was applied for the adsorption of three PPCPs: ibuprofen (IBPF), chloroxylenol (CLXN), and N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide (DEET), which exhibited high adsorption capacity and good recycling ability. According to the Langmuir model, the maximum adsorption capacities of PAF-45-PP FM toward IBPF, CLXN and DEET were 613.50, 429.18, and 384.61 mg/g, respectively. In addition, after ten adsorption–desorption cycles, the adsorption capacities toward the three PPCPs decreased slightly. Through an adsorption comparison test, the adsorption capacity of PAF-45-PP FM almost attributed to the loading PAF-45. The adsorption mechanism analysis illustrated that there were pore capture, hydrophobic interaction and π–π interaction between PPCPs and PAF-45-PP FM. Therefore, the PAF-45-PP FM can be potential adsorbents to purify water contaminated with PPCPs.
Most of the approaches used for Landslide inventory mapping (LIM) rely on traditional feature extraction and unsupervised classification algorithms. However, it is difficult to use these approaches ...to detect landslide areas because of the complexity and spatial uncertainty of landslides. In this letter, we propose a novel approach based on a fully convolutional network within pyramid pooling (FCN-PP) for LIM. The proposed approach has three advantages. First, this approach is automatic and insensitive to noise because multivariate morphological reconstruction is used for image preprocessing. Second, it is able to take into account features from multiple convolutional layers and explore efficiently the context of images, which leads to a good tradeoff between wider receptive field and the use of context. Finally, the selected PP module addresses the drawback of global pooling employed by convolutional neural network, FCN, and U-Net, and, thus, provides better feature maps for landslide areas. Experimental results show that the proposed FCN-PP is effective for LIM, and it outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of five metrics, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">Precision </tex-math></inline-formula>, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">Recall </tex-math></inline-formula>, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">Overall~Error </tex-math></inline-formula>, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">F </tex-math></inline-formula>-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">score </tex-math></inline-formula>, and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">Accuracy </tex-math></inline-formula>.
Recently, many researchers have been dedicated to using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to extract global-context features (GCFs) for remote-sensing scene classification. Commonly, accurate ...classification of scenes requires knowledge about both the global context and local objects. However, unlike the natural images in which the objects cover most of the image, objects in remote-sensing images are generally small and decentralized. Thus, it is hard for vanilla CNNs to focus on both global context and small local objects. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel end-to-end CNN by integrating the GCFs and local-object-level features (LOFs). The proposed network includes two branches, the local object branch (LOB) and global semantic branch (GSB), which are used to generate the LOFs and GCFs, respectively. Then, the concatenation of features extracted from the two branches allows our method to be more discriminative in scene classification. Three challenging benchmark remote-sensing datasets were extensively experimented on; the proposed approach outperformed the existing scene classification methods and achieved state-of-the-art results for all three datasets.
Although behavioral risk factors are strongly associated with urinary tract infection (UTI) risk, the role of genetics in acquiring this disease is poorly understood.
To test the hypothesis that ...polymorphisms in Toll-like receptor (TLR) pathway genes are associated with susceptibility to UTIs, we conducted a population-based case-control study of women ages 18-49 years. We examined DNA variants in 9 TLR pathway genes in 431 recurrent cystitis (rUTI) cases, 400 pyelonephritis cases, and 430 controls with no history of UTIs. In the Caucasian subgroup of 987 women, polymorphism TLR4_A896G was associated with protection from rUTI, but not pyelonephritis, with an odds ratio (OR) of 0.54 and a 95% confidence interval (CI) of 0.31 to 0.96. Polymorphism TLR5_C1174T, which encodes a variant that abrogates flagellin-induced signaling, was associated with an increased risk of rUTI (OR(95%CI): 1.81 (1.00-3.08)), but not pyelonephritis. Polymorphism TLR1_G1805T was associated with protection from pyelonephritis (OR(95%CI): 0.53 (0.29-0.96)).
These results provide the first evidence of associations of TLR5 and TLR1 variants with altered risks of acquiring rUTI and pyelonephritis, respectively. Although these data suggest that TLR polymorphisms are associated with adult susceptibility to UTIs, the statistical significance was modest and will require further study including validation with independent cohorts.
Tebuconazole is widely used as fungicide and has frequently been detected at elevated concentrations in environmental media. To characterize the potential toxicity of tebuconazole on vertebrate and ...humans. Using zebrafish as a vertebrate model, the toxic effects in liver that produced by low-toxic concentrations of tebuconazole were assessed in adult zebrafish. We further focused on tebuconazole-induced toxicity and its possible mechanism in larval zebrafish using a hepatotoxicity assay. The induction of oxidative stress in adult fish was evaluated by superoxide dismutase (T-SOD), catalase (CAT), peroxidase (POD), glutathione S-transferase (GST) activity, and the increased aspartate aminotransferase (AST)/alanine aminotransferase (ALT) ratio. Significantly increased enzyme activity was observed in the liver of male and female fish at both exposure and depuration stage. Exposure to maximum non-lethal (MNLC) concentration of tebuconazole from 72 to 120 h post-fertilization (hpf) affected the liver size and yolk retention in larval zebrafish. Decreased fluorescence intensity was observed in larval Tg(Apo14:GFP) zebrafish, indicating liver degeneration after tebuconazole treated. Histopathological examination confirmed the alterations in liver histoarchitecture in exposed zebrafish. Significant 1.28-fold and 1.65-fold increases in reactive oxygen species levels were observed in juveniles exposed to MNLC and lethal concentration 10 (LC10) group, respectively. The acridine orange staining assay showed that apoptotic cells occurred in the liver regions. These results indicated that tebuconazole exposure resulted in impacts on the ecological risk in fish and vertebrate. Overall, the present study suggested further research in needed to better understand the tebuconazole-induced toxicity mechanism that associated with oxidative stress.
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•Tebuconazole induced hepatotoxicity in both adult and larval zebrafish.•Tg(Apo14: GFP) zebrafish was used for hepatotoxicity assay.•Histopathological results showed alterations in liver histoarchitecture after exposure.•ROS-mediated pathway might induce apoptosis in zebrafish after tebuconazole exposure.
Pregnant women are more prone to ketosis due to the relative insulin resistance, accelerated lipolysis and increased free fatty acids.
We report a pregnant woman with hyperlipidemia, who experienced ...severe metabolic acidosis after a short period of starvation.
Based on her clinical symptoms, exclusion diagnosis and therapeutic diagnosis, her condition was diagnosed as starvation ketoacidosis.
An emergency caesarean section under general anesthesia was implemented 2 hours after her admission. The metabolic acidosis was treated with fluid resuscitation using compound sodium lactate, bicarbonate, and 5% dextrose together with insulin 6U.
Both mother and baby were discharged clinically well.
Starvation ketoacidosis may happen in special patient who was in pregnancy and with severe hypertriglyceridemia, after just one day fasting and vomiting.
Extended target tracking (ETT) based on random matrices typically assumes that the measurement model is linear. However, nonlinear measurements (such as range and azimuth) depending on locations of a ...series of unknown scattering centers always exist in many practical tracking applications. To address this issue, this paper proposes an iteratively extended target tracking based on random matrices by using decorrelated unbiased conversion of nonlinear measurements (ETT-IDUCM). First, we utilize a decorrelated unbiased converted measurement (DUCM) method to convert nonlinear measurements depending on unknown scatters of target extent in polar coordinates into the ones in Cartesian coordinates with equivalent measurement noise covariances. Subsequently, a novel method, combining iteratively extended Kalman filter (IEKF) updates with variational Bayesian (VB) cycles is developed for precise estimation of the target's kinematic state and extension. This method leverages the synergy between external IEKF iterations, which use the estimated state as a new prediction and input for DUCM, and internal VB iterations, which realize a closed-form approximation of the joint posterior probability. This approach progressively enhances estimation accuracy. Simulation results demonstrate the ETT-IDUCM algorithm's superior precision in estimating the target's kinematic state and extension compared to existing methods.
An ultrasensitive sandwich-type analysis method has been initially developed for probing low-level free microRNAs (miRNAs) in blood by a maximal signal amplification protocol of catalytic silver ...deposition. Gold nanoclusters (AuNCs) were first synthesized and in-site incorporated into alkaline phosphatase (ALP) to form the ALP-AuNCs. Unexpectedly, the so incorporated AuNCs could dramatically enhance the catalysis activities of ALP-AuNCs versus native ALP. A sandwiched hybridization protocol was then proposed using ALP-AuNCs as the catalytic labels of the DNA detection probes for targeting miRNAs that were magnetically caught from blood samples by DNA capture probes, followed by the catalytic ligation of two DNA probes complementary to the targets. Herein, the ALP-AuNC labels could act as the bicatalysts separately in the ALP-catalyzed substrate dephosphorylation reaction and the AuNCs-accelerated silver deposition reaction. The signal amplification of ALP-AuNCs-catalyzed silver deposition was thereby maximized to be measured by the electrochemical outputs. The developed electroanalysis strategy could allow for the ultrasensitive detection of free miRNAs in blood with the detection limit as low as 21.5 aM, including the accurate identification of single-base mutant levels in miRNAs. Such a sandwich-type analysis method may circumvent the bottlenecks of the current detection techniques in probing short-chain miRNAs. It would be tailored as an ultrasensitive detection candidate for low-level free miRNAs in blood toward the diagnosis of cancer and the warning or monitoring of cancer metastasis in the clinical laboratory.
Aberrant sperm flagella impair sperm motility and cause male infertility, yet the genes which have been identified in multiple morphological abnormalities of the flagella (MMAF) can only explain the ...pathogenic mechanisms of MMAF in a small number of cases. Here, we identify and functionally characterize homozygous loss-of-function mutations of QRICH2 in two infertile males with MMAF from two consanguineous families. Remarkably, Qrich2 knock-out (KO) male mice constructed by CRISPR-Cas9 technology present MMAF phenotypes and sterility. To elucidate the mechanisms of Qrich2 functioning in sperm flagellar formation, we perform proteomic analysis on the testes of KO and wild-type mice. Furthermore, in vitro experiments indicate that QRICH2 is involved in sperm flagellar development through stabilizing and enhancing the expression of proteins related to flagellar development. Our findings strongly suggest that the genetic mutations of human QRICH2 can lead to male infertility with MMAF and that QRICH2 is essential for sperm flagellar formation.
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