The Chinese economy is currently undergoing fundamental changes. In this context, the 2022 China Update examines the key characteristics of China's transition towards a new phase of economic growth ...and development. This year’s update book covers a range of diverse topics that reflect the complex and changing nature of the economy. It explores critical questions: Why does China need a new development paradigm, and what is the best way to achieve it? What are China’s choices when faced with the restructuring of global industrial value chains? What key roles will domestic consumption play in the next phase of China’s development? What does the digital transformation mean for the Chinese economy? What has been the domestic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on income inequality and labour market outcomes? What pathways exist for China in its transition towards carbon neutrality? How does China’s emissions-trading market compare with that of Europe? How will China’s carbon neutrality strategy affect the Australian economy? What are the political factors influencing bilateral trade flows between China and its trading partners? And what is at stake for China–US relations?
Breast cancer, the most prevalent cancer type among women worldwide, remains incurable once metastatic. Long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) and microRNA (miRNA) play important roles in breast cancer by ...regulating specific genes or proteins. In this study, we found miR-133b was silenced in breast cancer cell lines and in breast cancer tissues, which predicted poor prognosis in breast cancer patients. We also confirmed that lncRNA NEAT1 was up-regulated in breast cancer and inhibited the expression of miR-133b, and identified the mitochondrial protein translocase of inner mitochondrial membrane 17 homolog A (TIMM17A) that serves as the target of miR-133b. Both miR-133b knockdown and TIMM17A overexpression in breast cancer cells promoted cell migration and invasion both in vitro and in vivo. In summary, our findings reveal that miR-133b plays a critical role in breast cancer cell metastasis by targeting TIMM17A. These findings may provide new insights into novel molecular therapeutic targets for breast cancer.
This empirical study explores the effect of cultural intelligence (CQ) on migrant workers’ innovative behavior, as well as the mediating role of knowledge sharing on the CQ-innovative behavior ...relationship. Besides, it also examines the extent to which the mediating process is moderated by climate for inclusion. Using survey data collected from Chinese migrant workers and their supervisors working in South Korea (
n
= 386), migrant workers’ CQ is found to positively impact their innovative behavior through enhanced knowledge sharing. However, it is observed that this indirect relationship is significant, only for migrant workers in a strong climate for inclusion. Thus, these findings reveal the underlying mediation and moderation mechanism and consequently unveil the important role of migrant workers’ CQ in shaping their behavior. This study provides insightful and practical implications to a multicultural organization, where culturally diverse migrant workers work together.
Core Ideas
Compensatory growth and root water uptake are observed in heterogeneous saline soils.
Three types of indexes are proposed to determine the heterogeneous water and salt stresses.
Critical ...compensation factors for each growth stages of sunflower are determined and linked with heterogeneous soil water and salt.
ABSTRACT
To characterize the crop growth and root water uptake (RWU) under heterogeneous soil water and salt (SWS) conditions, 2‐yr subplot experiments with sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) were conducted at the Yichang experimental station in the Hetao Irrigation District (HID), China. Three types of stress indices, including average (αmean, ω), positional (αupper, αdeeper), and extreme (αsmax, αsmin) indices, were defined to quantify the heterogeneity of the SWS stresses at each growth stage of sunflower. The relative increase in the leaf area index (REDLAI) and height (REDH) of sunflower were quantified based on correlation analyses with SWS heterogeneity indices. The critical compensation factor (ωc) of RWU at different sunflower growth stages was inversely calculated based on the Feddes Jarvis (FJ) model and quantified using a defined soil environmental stress factor (δ). The results showed that the vertical heterogeneity of SWS gradually improved and that soil stress indices varied with sunflower growth. The relatively high correlations of REDLAI and REDH with the ω (average stress coefficient weighted by the root length density) were determined, and quantitative relationships of the REDLAI and REDH with the ω at different growth stages were established. Furthermore, relatively high coefficient of determination (R2) values of quantitative relationships between ωc and δ were acquired (0.75, 0.78, 0.64, and 0.46 at the seedling, budding, flowering, and maturity stages, respectively). The proposed methods could improve the prediction of crop leaf growth, height development, and compensatory root water uptake (CRWU) based on SWS information in salt‐affected regions.
Background Prolonged recovery is a severe issue in patients after Fontan operation. However, predictive factors related to this issue are not adequately evaluated. The present study aimed to ...investigate potential predictive factors which can predict Fontan postoperative recovery. Methods We retrospectively reviewed the perioperative medical records of patients with Fontan surgery between January 2015 and December 2018, and divided patients with > 75%ile cardiac intensive care unit stay into prolonged recovery group. The others were assigned to standard recovery group. Patients that died or underwent a Fontan takedown were excluded. Statistical analysis was performed to compare data difference of the two groups. Results 282/307 cases fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Seventy patients were considered in prolonged recovery and 212 patients were defined as standard recovery. Pre- and intra-operative data showed a higher incidence of heterotaxy syndrome, longer cardiopulmonary bypass and aortic cross-clamp time in the prolonged recovery group. Postoperative information analysis displayed that ventilation time, oxygen index after extubation, hemodynamic data, inotropic score (IS), drainage volume, volume resuscitation, pulmonary hypertension (PH) treatment, and surgical reintervention were significantly different between the two groups. Higher IS postoperatively, and PH treatment and higher fluid resuscitation within two days were independent predictive factors for prolonged recovery in our multivariate model. C-statistic model showed a high predictive ability in prolonged recovery by using the three factors. Conclusions Ventilation time, higher IS in postoperative day, and PH treatment and higher fluid resuscitation within two days were independent risk factors and have a high predictability for Fontan prolonged recovery. Keywords: Children, Fontan, Postoperative, Prolonged recovery
In this study, the C-turning, pitching, and flapping propulsion of a robotic dolphin during locomotion were explored. Considering the swimming action required of a three-dimensional (3D) robotic ...dolphin in the ocean, we propose a maneuverability model that can be applied to the flapping motion to provide precise and stable movements and function as the driving role in locomotion. Additionally, an added tail joint allows for the turning movement with efficient parameters obtained by a fluid-structure coupling method. To obtain a mathematical model, several disturbance signals were considered, including systematic uncertainties of the parameters, the perpetually changing environment, the interference from obstacles with effective fuzzy rules, and a sliding mode of control. Furthermore, a combined strategy of environment recognition was used for the positional control of the robotic dolphin, incorporating sonar, path planning with an artificial potential field, and trajectory tracking. The simulation results show satisfactory performance of the 3D robotic dolphin with respect to flexible movement and trajectory tracking under the observed interference factors.
Zinc oxide, a direct band gap semiconductor of ≥3.30 eV, is prevalent in potential requests for energy devices. The early-stage demonstration of ZnO provides a new method of developing high ionic ...conductivity in multifunctional semiconductors for electrolyte applications in ceramic fuel cells (CFCs). In the present work, we successfully synthesized Na-doped ZnO nanorods by a hydrothermal method and employed them as an electrolyte in CFCs. The synthesized Na-doped-ZnO nanorods showed an effective ionic conductivity of 8.75 × 10−2 S cm−1 along with an excellent power density of 609 mWcm−2 ± 5% when the fuel cell was operating at 550 °C. The enhanced ionic conductivity could be due to Na+ doping into Zn2+ and the high ionic radius of Na ions producing bulk oxygen vacancies in the ZnO structure to conduct oxygen ions or protons. Furthermore, we used experimental analysis, such as X-ray diffraction (XRD), high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), ultraviolet–visible (UV–visible), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), to evaluate the change in structural properties and mechanism of ionic transport in ZnO nanorods with sodium doping. The presented work provides insight into a novel approach of developing the high ionic conductivity of electrolytes in a low-cost ZnO semiconductor material.
Objective:
Venoarterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation is an effective mechanical circulatory support that is used to rescue critically ill patients after congenital heart surgery. As there was ...still no recommended guideline for monitoring parameters during extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), this study aimed to investigate the role of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) in the early period of venoarterial (VA)-ECMO.
Method:
This study enrolled patients with NIRS monitoring during ECMO after pediatric cardiac surgery at Shanghai Children's Medical Center (2018–2020). The information obtained from the retrospective, the observational dataset included the demographic information, diagnoses, baseline characteristics, procedural details, ECMO data, monitoring data, in-hospital mortality, and complications of the patients.
Results:
The overall mortality rate was 43.6%. Lactate was significantly higher in non-survivors compared to survivors at 12 h (11.25 ± 7.26 vs. 6.96 ± 5.95 mmol/l,
p
= 0.022) and 48 h 2.2 (0.7, 20) vs. 1.4 (0.7, 5.8) mmol/l,
p
= 0.008 after initiation of ECMO. The cranial regional oxygen saturation (CrSO
2
) was significantly higher in survivors compared to non-survivors at 24 h (62.5 ± 14.61 vs. 52.05 ± 13.98%,
p
= 0.028), 36 h (64.04 ± 14.12 vs. 51.27 ± 15.65%,
p
= 0.005), and 48 h (65.32 ± 11.51 vs. 55.00 ± 14.18%,
p
= 0.008). Multivariate logistics regression analysis of the hemodynamic and laboratory parameters revealed that the CrSO
2
at 36 h (OR = 0.945,
p
= 0.049) and 48 h (OR = 0.919,
p
= 0.032) was related to mortality. The use of continuous renal replacement therapy (OR = 14.940,
p
= 0.039) was also related to mortality. The optimal cutoff values for CrSO
2
for predicting mortality after weaning off ECMO at 36 and 48 h were 57% (sensitivity: 61.5%, specificity: 80%) and 56% (sensitivity: 76.9%, specificity: 70%), respectively. The risk of mortality was higher among patients with a CrSO
2
(36h) < 57% (
p
= 0.028) by Kaplan-Meier analysis.
Conclusion:
Near-infrared spectroscopy may be a useful tool for monitoring the hemodynamic stability during the early period of ECMO, while CrSO
2
can predict the in-hospital mortality after ECMO.
•Combining Transformer with U-Net to overcome the drawback that convolutional operation cannot learn the long-range interaction of semantic information well.•The UpSample module is proposed in the ...decoder network to alleviate the overfitting problem caused by too many parameters.•Introducing the CBAM in the skip connection structure to make the network focus more on the region of interest in the global information. Using focal loss and dice loss as network loss functions to alleviate the target-to-background pixel ratio imbalance problem of the ice-covered dataset.•An optimized network SGAN_UNet composed by Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and S_Unet is proposed, which uses the ground truth labeled images to compare with predicted images to improve segmentation performance. SGAN_UNet introduces the JPU module in the discriminator network to enable the network to capture more dense features.•Regarding the ice-covered dataset, S_UNet performs better than DeepLabV3+ and Ocrnet in both mIoU and mPA, and shows higher mIoU results compared with Vit. In all three indexes, SGAN_UNet performs better than DeepLabV3+, Ocrnet, and Vit.
Severe ice cover can cause line dancing, insulator flashing, tower tilting, and even collapse of the tower. which is threatening the safety of transmission line system and has great impact on the industry production and people life. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based ice-cover segmentation method (S_UNet), which is promising for the intelligent operation of the power grid. It uses the encoder-decoder structure from U-Net to improve the backbone network performance, at the same time it is a lightweight network structure with attention mechanism, migration learning, and auxiliary loss, etc. Through experimental analysis, S_UNet's false and partial detection phenomenon still need to be improved. So an optimized network SGAN_UNet composed by Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and S_Unet is proposed. It uses the ground truth labeled images to compare with predicted images to improve segmentation performance. The experimental results showed that the SGAN_UNet network reduces false and partial detection problems in the ice-cover segmentation, which has 1.10% improvement in mIoU comparing with S_UNet.
PDF
