The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates goods accounting for 20% of US consumers' total expenditure. The agency's potential susceptibility to corporate lobbying and political influence ...may adversely affect the its abilities to fulfill its duties as a vital federal agency. This study assesses whether the FDA's product recall classifications in recall scenarios are influenced by firms' lobbying activities.
The universe of all FDA recalls between 2012 and 2019 is obtained from the FDA's website. Firm names are matched to federal-level lobbying data obtained from the Center for Responsive Politics - a non-profit and nonpartisan organization that tracks lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions. Analyses are conducted using ordinary-least-squares regressions, in which the dependent variable is recall classification and independent variables are three different measures of firms' lobbying activities in the one year prior to the recall.
Firms that engage in lobbying appear more likely to receive favourable classifications from the FDA. When examining the above results by product type, we find that classification of food recalls seems to be subject to lobbying influence, but the same does not appear to be true for drug and device recalls. Evidence is consistent with the conjecture that the distinction between medical and food firms may be a result of medical firms targeting lobbying efforts at FDA approvals, rather than recalls.
Between 2012 and 2019, the FDA's product recall classifications seem to be significantly influenced by firms' lobbying activities. Lobbying firms appear to have received more favorable (i.e., less severe) recall classifications compared to non-lobbying firms.
The purpose of formulating and implementing the “double reduction” policy is to reduce the heavy homework burden and off-campus training burden of students in the compulsory education stage and ...promote the all-round development of students, which objectively relieves the educational anxiety of parents.However, the “double reduction” policy not only alleviates parents’ original educational anxiety, but also leads to the generation of new educational anxiety, which presents a complex and diversified pattern.There are anxiety caused by increased time and energy, anxiety caused by learning mode and environment, anxiety caused by schooling, anxiety caused by collage entrance, anxiety caused by excessive expectations of parents.Therefore, only by joining hands to form educational forces can parents’ educational anxiety be relieved effectively: Setting up reasonable educational expectations; Improve the quality and efficiency of school;Improving the examination evaluation mechanism;Strengthen home-school cooperation.
The seven approximately Earth-sized transiting planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system provide a unique opportunity to explore habitable- and nonhabitable-zone small planets within the same system. Its ...habitable-zone exoplanets-due to their favorable transit depths-are also worlds for which atmospheric transmission spectroscopy is within reach with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). We present here an independent reduction and analysis of two HST Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) near-infrared transit spectroscopy data sets for six planets (b through g). Utilizing our physically motivated detector charge-trap correction and a custom cosmic-ray correction routine, we confirm the general shape of the transmission spectra presented by de Wit et al. Our data reduction approach leads to a 25% increase in the usable data and reduces the risk of confusing astrophysical brightness variations (e.g., flares) with instrumental systematics. No prominent absorption features are detected in any individual planet's transmission spectra; by contrast, the combined spectrum of the planets shows a suggestive decrease around 1.4 m similar to an inverted water absorption feature. Including transit depths from K2, the SPECULOOS-South Observatory, and Spitzer, we find that the complete transmission spectrum is fully consistent with stellar contamination owing to the transit light source effect. These spectra demonstrate how stellar contamination can overwhelm planetary absorption features in low-resolution exoplanet transit spectra obtained by HST and JWST and also highlight the challenges in combining multi-epoch observations for planets around rapidly rotating spotted stars.
Background and purposeCOVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Apart from respiratory complications, acute cerebrovascular disease ...(CVD) has been observed in some patients with COVID-19. Therefore, we described the clinical characteristics, laboratory features, treatment and outcomes of CVD complicating SARS-CoV-2 infection.Materials and methodsDemographic and clinical characteristics, laboratory findings, treatments and clinical outcomes were collected and analysed. Clinical characteristics and laboratory findings of patients with COVID-19 with or without new-onset CVD were compared.ResultsOf 219 patients with COVID-19, 10 (4.6%) developed acute ischaemic stroke and 1 (0.5%) had intracerebral haemorrhage. COVID-19 with new onset of CVD were significantly older (75.7±10.8 years vs 52.1±15.3 years, p<0.001), more likely to present with severe COVID-19 (81.8% vs 39.9%, p<0.01) and were more likely to have cardiovascular risk factors, including hypertension, diabetes and medical history of CVD (all p<0.05). In addition, they were more likely to have increased inflammatory response and hypercoagulable state as reflected in C reactive protein (51.1 (1.3–127.9) vs 12.1 (0.1–212.0) mg/L, p<0.05) and D-dimer (6.9 (0.3–20.0) vs 0.5 (0.1–20.0) mg/L, p<0.001). Of 10 patients with ischemic stroke; 6 received antiplatelet treatment with aspirin or clopidogrel; and 3 of them died. The other four patients received anticoagulant treatment with enoxaparin and 2 of them died. As of 24 March 2020, six patients with CVD died (54.5%).ConclusionAcute CVD is not uncommon in COVID-19. Our findings suggest that older patients with risk factors are more likely to develop CVD. The development of CVD is an important negative prognostic factor which requires further study to identify optimal management strategy to combat the COVID-19 outbreak.
Glucose is a direct energy source for eukaryotic cells, and its deficiency elicits complex stress responses and diverse cellular outcomes. Although several signaling pathways involved have been ...identified, how they coordinately dictate the cell fate remains obscure. We propose a minimal network model for the cellular response to glucose restriction, characterizing the glucose uptake and signaling of the AMPK, Akt, mTOR, and p53 pathways. We demonstrate that in the presence of sufficient growth factors and amino acids, cells may undergo proliferation, senescence, or apoptosis, depending on the extracellular glucose level. AMPK is first activated upon glucose limitation, activating p53 to induce cell-cycle arrest; possibly, cells resume proliferation after timely glucose restoration. For long-term energy stress, cell senescence is maintained by low/intermediate levels of p53 and persistent activation of mTOR and Akt, or cells commit apoptosis when the proteins undergo biphasic dynamics, e.g., p53 switches from intermediate levels to high levels while mTOR and Akt become inactivated in the later phase. The biphasic dynamics of p53 are associated with flipping of two bistable switches. Appropriate mTOR levels are required for optimal cell-fate decision. This work suggests that senescence and apoptosis occur sequentially in glucose-depleted cells, and a theoretical framework is provided for exploring the cellular response to energy stress.
The integration and interaction of vision, touch, hearing, smell, and taste in the human multisensory neural network facilitate high-level cognitive functionalities, such as crossmodal integration, ...recognition, and imagination for accurate evaluation and comprehensive understanding of the multimodal world. Here, we report a bioinspired multisensory neural network that integrates artificial optic, afferent, auditory, and simulated olfactory and gustatory sensory nerves. With distributed multiple sensors and biomimetic hierarchical architectures, our system can not only sense, process, and memorize multimodal information, but also fuse multisensory data at hardware and software level. Using crossmodal learning, the system is capable of crossmodally recognizing and imagining multimodal information, such as visualizing alphabet letters upon handwritten input, recognizing multimodal visual/smell/taste information or imagining a never-seen picture when hearing its description. Our multisensory neural network provides a promising approach towards robotic sensing and perception.
The Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) near-IR channel is extensively used in time-resolved observations, especially for transiting exoplanet spectroscopy as well as brown dwarf and ...directly imaged exoplanet rotational phase mapping. The ramp effect is the dominant source of systematics in the WFC3 for time-resolved observations, which limits its photometric precision. Current mitigation strategies are based on empirical fits and require additional orbits to help the telescope reach a thermal equilibrium. We show that the ramp-effect profiles can be explained and corrected with high fidelity using charge trapping theories. We also present a model for this process that can be used to predict and to correct charge trap systematics. Our model is based on a very small number of parameters that are intrinsic to the detector. We find that these parameters are very stable between the different data sets, and we provide best-fit values. Our model is tested with more than 120 orbits (∼40 visits) of WFC3 observations and is proved to be able to provide near photon noise limited corrections for observations made with both staring and scanning modes of transiting exoplanets as well as for starting-mode observations of brown dwarfs. After our model correction, the light curve of the first orbit in each visit has the same photometric precision as subsequent orbits, so data from the first orbit no longer need to be discarded. Near-IR arrays with the same physical characteristics (e.g., JWST/NIRCam) may also benefit from the extension of this model if similar systematic profiles are observed.
Abstract
Stretchable ionic conductors are considerable to be the most attractive candidate for next-generation flexible ionotronic devices. Nevertheless, high ionic conductivity, excellent mechanical ...properties, good self-healing capacity and recyclability are necessary but can be rarely satisfied in one material. Herein, we propose an ionic conductor design, dynamic supramolecular ionic conductive elastomers (DSICE), via phase-locked strategy, wherein locking soft phase polyether backbone conducts lithium-ion (Li
+
) transport and the combination of dynamic disulfide metathesis and stronger supramolecular quadruple hydrogen bonds in the hard domains contributes to the self-healing capacity and mechanical versatility. The dual-phase design performs its own functions and the conflict among ionic conductivity, self-healing capability, and mechanical compatibility can be thus defeated. The well-designed DSICE exhibits high ionic conductivity (3.77 × 10
−3
S m
−1
at 30 °C), high transparency (92.3%), superior stretchability (2615.17% elongation), strength (27.83 MPa) and toughness (164.36 MJ m
−3
), excellent self-healing capability (~99% at room temperature) and favorable recyclability. This work provides an interesting strategy for designing the advanced ionic conductors and offers promise for flexible ionotronic devices or solid-state batteries.
Acoustic sensing provides crucial data for anomalous sound detection (ASD) in condition monitoring. However, building a robust acoustic-sensing-based ASD system is challenging due to the unsupervised ...nature of training data, which only contain normal sound samples. Recent discriminative models based on machine identity (ID) classification have shown excellent ASD performance by leveraging strong prior knowledge like machine ID. However, such strong priors are often unavailable in real-world applications, limiting these models. To address this, we propose utilizing the imbalanced and inconsistent attribute labels from acoustic sensors, such as machine running speed and microphone model, as weak priors to train an attribute classifier. We also introduce an imbalanced compensation strategy to handle extremely imbalanced categories and ensure model trainability. Furthermore, we propose a score fusion method to enhance anomaly detection robustness. The proposed algorithm was applied in our DCASE2023 Challenge Task 2 submission, ranking sixth internationally. By exploiting acoustic sensor data attributes as weak prior knowledge, our approach provides an effective framework for robust ASD when strong priors are absent.
The integration and cooperation of mechanoreceptors, neurons and synapses in somatosensory systems enable humans to efficiently sense and process tactile information. Inspired by biological ...somatosensory systems, we report an optoelectronic spiking afferent nerve with neural coding, perceptual learning and memorizing capabilities to mimic tactile sensing and processing. Our system senses pressure by MXene-based sensors, converts pressure information to light pulses by coupling light-emitting diodes to analog-to-digital circuits, then integrates light pulses using a synaptic photomemristor. With neural coding, our spiking nerve is capable of not only detecting simultaneous pressure inputs, but also recognizing Morse code, braille, and object movement. Furthermore, with dimensionality-reduced feature extraction and learning, our system can recognize and memorize handwritten alphabets and words, providing a promising approach towards e-skin, neurorobotics and human-machine interaction technologies.
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