During the COVID-19 pandemic, official social media became a critical channel for the public to obtain pandemic information. No matter the positive function or negative effect of information ...dissemination, it involves the public's risk perception and behavior. This study was designed to contribute to the existing research on how official social media information quality (IQ) and risk perception (RP) affect preventive behavior (PB) and continued use behavior (CB) of official social media during the first wave of COVID-19.
The required data were extracted from a national online survey of the Chinese Mainland during March 24-30 2020, a random sample was asked to participate in the survey (n = 666). Data analysis was performed using regression analysis, structural equation modeling, mediating effect analysis, and one-way ANOVA analysis.
The results show that IQ (10.010 ± 3.568) has direct and indirect positive impact on PB (9.475 ± 3.571), and has a low significant positive indirect impact on CB (3.739 ± 1.566). The IQ has a significant positive impact on RP (β = 0.548), which show that there is no "risk perception paradox" in COVID-19. Furth more, this study also provides new evidence indicating that RP mediates the relationship between IQ and PB. According to the region, gender, age and annual income, and there are significant differences in PB and CB.
The study findings have remarkable implications for improving the information quality and public behaviors. Too high or too low level of risk perception is not conducive to pandemic prevention and control. Official social media should indirectly affect information flow through the reasonable supply of pandemic information and constantly improve the quality of pandemic information to avoid public's undue panic and excessive health concerns during this ongoing outbreak and subsequent national public emergency events.
Current research on activities of daily living (ADLs) disability has mostly focused on the analysis of demographic characteristics, while research on the microcharacteristics of individuals and the ...macroenvironment is relatively limited, and these studies solely concern the impact of air quality on individual health.
This study innovatively investigated the impact of air quality on ADL disability by matching micro data of individuals from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study with data of urban environmental quality from 122 cities. In this study, an ordered panel logit model was adopted for the benchmark test, and the two-stage ordered probit model with IV was used for endogenous treatment.
This innovative study investigated the impact of air quality on ADL disability by matching individual micro data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study with urban environmental quality data for 122 cities. The results showed that air quality significantly increased the probability of ADL disability. The positive and marginal effect of air quality on moderate and mild disability was higher. Generally, the marginal effect of air quality on residents' health was negative. In terms of group heterogeneity, the ADL disability of individuals aged over 60 years, those in the high Gross Domestic Product (GDP) group, females, and those in the nonpilot long-term care insurance group was more affected by air quality, and the interaction between air quality and serious illness showed that the deterioration of air quality exacerbated the ADL disability caused by serious illness; that is, the moderating effect was significant.
According to the equilibrium condition of the individual health production function, the ADL disability caused by a 1% improvement in air quality is equivalent to the ADL disability caused by an 89.9652% reduction in serious illness, indicating that the effect of improved air quality is difficult to replace by any other method. Therefore, good air quality can not only reduce ADL disability directly but also reduce serious illness indirectly, which is equivalent to the reduction of ADL disability. This is called the health impact.
Modern society relies on high charge mobility for efficient energy production and fast information technologies. The power factor of a material-the combination of electrical conductivity and Seebeck ...coefficient-measures its ability to extract electrical power from temperature differences. Recent advancements in thermoelectric materials have achieved enhanced Seebeck coefficient by manipulating the electronic band structure. However, this approach generally applies at relatively low conductivities, preventing the realization of exceptionally high-power factors. In contrast, half-Heusler semiconductors have been shown to break through that barrier in a way that could not be explained. Here, we show that symmetry-protected orbital interactions can steer electron-acoustic phonon interactions towards high mobility. This high-mobility regime enables large power factors in half-Heuslers, well above the maximum measured values. We anticipate that our understanding will spark new routes to search for better thermoelectric materials, and to discover high electron mobility semiconductors for electronic and photonic applications.
The low ionic conductivity of poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO)‐based polymer electrolytes at room temperature and the undesired lithium‐dendrite growth at Li|PEO interface impede their further application. ...Herein, a PEO polymer is regulated at the molecular level through a copper ion (Cu2+) coordination effect with both PEO and Li salts to achieve a high Li+ conductivity of 0.2 mS cm−1 and a transference number of 0.42 at 30 °C. Moreover, the Cu‐coordinated PEO electrolyte is neither sticky nor hygroscopic because the hydrophilic oxygen groups in PEO are terminated by Cu ions. Furthermore, the in situ formed F/Li‐rich inorganic layer induced by CuF2 additive accelerates Li+ transport kinetics and enables uniform Li+ deposition during Li plating/stripping. As a result, the Cu2+‐coordinated PEO electrolytes deliver a high critical current density of 1.5 mA cm−2 at 30 °C. An all‐solid‐state Li‐LiNi0.83Co0.12Mn0.05O2 (NCM83) battery with such a copper coordinated PEO electrolyte exhibits a long cycle life over 500 cycles with a capacity retention of 71% under 0.6 C at 30 °C. When the mass loading increases to a record high of 7 mg cm−2, the Li‐NCM83 cell delivers a high areal capacity of 1.07 mAh cm−2 under 0.1 C at 30 °C.
A molecular regulation poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) electrolyte is prepared through a Cu2+‐coordination effect with both PEO and LiTFSI, which is stable in moist air and presents high ionic conductivity, transference number, and mechanical strength due to the coordinated 3D structure. Moreover, the coordinated PEO electrolyte shows superb cycling stability when employed in high‐voltage lithium‐metal batteries.
Described herein is an imidazole ring formation strategy for the synthesis of axially chiral N‐arylbenzimidazoles by means of chiral phosphoric acid catalysis. Two sets of conditions were developed ...to transform two classes of 2‐naphthylamine derivatives into structurally diverse N‐arylbenzimidazole atropisomers with excellent chemo‐ and regioselectivity as well as high levels of enantiocontrol. It is worth reflecting on the unique roles played by the nitroso group in this domino reaction. It functions as a linchpin by first offering an electrophilic site (N) for the initial C−N bond formation while the resulting amine performs the nucleophilic addition to form the second C−N bond. Additionally, it could facilitate the final oxidative aromatization as an oxidant. The atropisomeric products could be conveniently elaborated to a series of axially chiral derivatives, enabling the exploitation of N‐arylbenzimidazoles for their potential utilities in asymmetric catalysis.
A benzimidazole ring formation strategy for the synthesis of axially chiral N‐arylbenzimidazoles by means of chiral phosphoric acid catalysis is presented. Two sets of conditions were developed to transform two classes of 2‐naphthylamine derivatives into structurally diverse N‐arylbenzimidazole atropisomers with excellent chemo‐ and regioselectivity as well as high levels of enantiocontrol.
We're surrounded by huge amounts of large-scale high-dimensional data, but learning tasks require reduced data dimensionality. Feature selection has shown its effectiveness in many applications by ...building simpler and more comprehensive models, improving learning performance, and preparing clean, understandable data. Some unique characteristics of big data such as data velocity and data variety have presented challenges to the feature selection problem. In this article, the authors envision these challenges for big data analytics. To facilitate and promote feature selection research, they present an open source feature selection repository (scikit-feature) of popular algorithms.
The rapid development of remote sensing technology allows us to get images with high and very high resolution (VHR). VHR imagery scene classification has become an important and challenging problem. ...In this paper, we introduce a framework for VHR scene understanding. First, the pretrained visual geometry group network (VGG-Net) model is proposed as deep feature extractors to extract informative features from the original VHR images. Second, we select the fully connected layers constructed by VGG-Net in which each layer is regarded as separated feature descriptors. And then we combine between them to construct final representation of the VHR image scenes. Third, discriminant correlation analysis (DCA) is adopted as feature fusion strategy to further refine the original features extracting from VGG-Net, which allows a more efficient fusion approach with small cost than the traditional feature fusion strategies. We apply our approach to three challenging data sets: 1) UC MERCED data set that contains 21 different areal scene categories with submeter resolution; 2) WHU-RS data set that contains 19 challenging scene categories with various resolutions; and 3) the Aerial Image data set that has a number of 10 000 images within 30 challenging scene categories with various resolutions. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. Using feature fusion technique achieves a higher accuracy than solely using the raw deep features. Moreover, the proposed method based on DCA fusion produces good informative features to describe the images scene with much lower dimension.
Data on pathologic changes of the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) are scarce. To gain knowledge about the pathology that may contribute to disease progression and fatality, we performed ...postmortem needle core biopsies of lung, liver, and heart in four patients who died of COVID-19 pneumonia. The patients' ages ranged from 59 to 81, including three males and one female. Each patient had at least one underlying disease, including immunocompromised status (chronic lymphocytic leukemia and renal transplantation) or other conditions (cirrhosis, hypertension, and diabetes). Time from disease onset to death ranged from 15 to 52 days. All patients had elevated white blood cell counts, with significant rise toward the end, and all had lymphocytopenia except for the patient with leukemia. Histologically, the main findings are in the lungs, including injury to the alveolar epithelial cells, hyaline membrane formation, and hyperplasia of type II pneumocytes, all components of diffuse alveolar damage. Consolidation by fibroblastic proliferation with extracellular matrix and fibrin forming clusters in airspaces is evident. In one patient, the consolidation consists of abundant intra-alveolar neutrophilic infiltration, consistent with superimposed bacterial bronchopneumonia. The liver exhibits mild lobular infiltration by small lymphocytes, and centrilobular sinusoidal dilation. Patchy necrosis is also seen. The heart shows only focal mild fibrosis and mild myocardial hypertrophy, changes likely related to the underlying conditions. In conclusion, the postmortem examinations show advanced diffuse alveolar damage, as well as superimposed bacterial pneumonia in some patients. Changes in the liver and heart are likely secondary or related to the underlying diseases.
Key message
This paper demonstrates that BBX28 and BBX29 proteins in Arabidopsis promote flowering in association with the CO-FT regulatory module at low ambient temperature under LD conditions.
...Flowering plants integrate internal developmental signals with external environmental stimuli for precise flowering time control. The expression of
BBX29
is up-regulated by low temperature treatment, but the biological function of BBX29 in low temperature response is unknown. In the current study, we examined the biological role of BBX29 and its close-related protein BBX28 in flowering time control under long-day conditions. Although neither
BBX28
single mutant nor
BBX29
single mutant has a flowering-associated phenotype, the
bbx28 bbx29
double mutant plants have an obvious delayed flowering phenotype grown at low ambient temperature (16°C) compared to the wild-type (WT) plants. The expression of
FT
and
TSF
was lower in
bbx28 bbx29
double mutant plants than in wild-type plants at 16°C. Both BBX28 and BBX29 interact with CONSTANS (CO), an important flowering integrator that directly binds to the
FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT
) promoter. In the effector-reporter assays, transcriptional activation activity of CO on the
FT
promoter was reduced in
bbx28 bbx29
double mutant plants compared to that in WT plants. Taken together, our results reveal that BBX28 and BBX29 are promoters of flowering in Arabidopsis, especially at low ambient temperature.
The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 has been undergoing mutations and is highly glycosylated. It is critically important to investigate the biological significance of these mutations. Here, we ...investigated 80 variants and 26 glycosylation site modifications for the infectivity and reactivity to a panel of neutralizing antibodies and sera from convalescent patients. D614G, along with several variants containing both D614G and another amino acid change, were significantly more infectious. Most variants with amino acid change at receptor binding domain were less infectious, but variants including A475V, L452R, V483A, and F490L became resistant to some neutralizing antibodies. Moreover, the majority of glycosylation deletions were less infectious, whereas deletion of both N331 and N343 glycosylation drastically reduced infectivity, revealing the importance of glycosylation for viral infectivity. Interestingly, N234Q was markedly resistant to neutralizing antibodies, whereas N165Q became more sensitive. These findings could be of value in the development of vaccine and therapeutic antibodies.
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•Over 100 mutations were selected for analyses on their infectivity and antigenicity•The dominant D614G itself and combined with other mutations are more infectious•Ablation of both N331 and N343 glycosylation at RBD drastically reduced infectivity•Ten mutations such as N234Q, L452R, A475V, and V483A was markedly resistant to some mAbs
Eighty natural variants and 26 glycosylation spike mutants of SARS-CoV-2 were analyzed in terms of infectivity and antigenicity using high throughput pseudovirus assay in conjunction with neutralizing antibodies.
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