Euwallacea interjectus, a recently discovered pest in poplar plantations, poses a significant economic threat due to its role in causing widespread tree mortality. This pest's cryptic behaviour has hindered research and control efforts, making laboratory rearing a valuable tool for studying its development and biology. We investigated the development period and biological characteristics of E. interjectus using artificial diets and fungal medium. Our findings revealed that the development time for eggs, larvae, and pupae averages approximately 6, 18, and 6 days, respectively. Notably, first and second instar larvae displayed peak moulting periods at 3.45 ± 0.64 SD and 7.92 ± 1.77 SD days, respectively. Furthermore, we measured head capsule widths of postmolt larvae, yielding values of 318.02 ± 7.38 SD μm for first-instar larvae, 403.01 ± 11.08 SD μm for second-instar larvae, and 549.54 ± 20.74 SD μm for third-instar larvae. Our research also uncovered a positive correlation between the number of progeny (eggs, larvae, pupae, and adults) and the mean length of the gallery system. Interestingly, the haplodiploid reproductive strategy did not significantly affect the number of offspring produced by the foundress. Additionally, we observed that foundresses displayed higher fecundity when subjected to nutrient-rich diets as compared to nutrient-poor diets. Our results will deepen our understanding of the biology of E. interjectus and provide criteria for larval instar classification. Additionally, managing nutrient availability within the colony could be considered a viable approach to regulating population size.

Adsorption of uranyl (UO22+) ions to mineral surfaces is a potentially effective method for removing this hazardous metal from water, but other toxic trace metal ions (Xn+: Rb+, Sr2+, Cr3+, Mn2+, Ni2+, Zn2+, Cd2+) in uraniferous wastewaters compete with UO22+ for adsorption sites and thus may diminish the capacity of adsorbents to sequester UO22+. A better understanding of competitive adsorption among these metal ions and the development of better adsorbents are, therefore, of critical importance. The purpose of the present study was to synthesize and characterize magnetic adsorbents, consisting of MFe2O4 (M = Mn, Fe, Zn, Co, or Ni) nanoparticles synthesized on montmorillonite (Mnt) edge sites, and to investigate their use as adsorbents for UO22+, including competitive adsorption with trace metal ions. Selective adsorption was studied using Langmuir, Freundlich, and Dubinin-Radushkevich isotherms, and the results showed that Xn+ ions were adsorbed primarily on MFe2O4-montmorillonite surfaces, and the UO22+ ions were adsorbed on the interfaces between montmorillonite edge surfaces and MFe2O4 nanoparticles. Using the Freundlich model, the interface adsorption capacity of UO22+ reached 25.1 mg·g–1 in mixed solution. Further, the UO22+ and Cr3+ ions had a redox reaction on the interfaces with synergistic adsorption. Herein, the adsorption capacity of Cr3+ was 60.2 mg·g–1 using the Freundlich isotherm. The results demonstrated that the MFe2O4-montmorillonite with highly selective adsorption of UO22+ ions is applicable to UO22+ treatment in the presence of toxic trace metal ions.

Graphical abstract

Rodents and shrews are major reservoirs of various pathogens that are related to zoonotic infectious diseases. The purpose of this study was to investigate co-infections of zoonotic pathogens in rodents and shrews trapped in four provinces of China. We sampled different rodent and shrew communities within and around human settlements in four provinces of China and characterised several important zoonotic viral, bacterial, and parasitic pathogens by PCR methods and phylogenetic analysis. A total of 864 rodents and shrews belonging to 24 and 13 species from RODENTIA and EULIPOTYPHLA orders were captured, respectively. For viral pathogens, two species of hantavirus (Hantaan orthohantavirus and Caobang orthohantavirus) were identified in 3.47% of rodents and shrews. The overall prevalence of Bartonella spp., Anaplasmataceae, Babesia spp., Leptospira spp., Spotted fever group Rickettsiae, Borrelia spp., and Coxiella burnetii were 31.25%, 8.91%, 4.17%, 3.94%, 3.59%, 3.47%, and 0.58%, respectively. Furthermore, the highest co-infection status of three pathogens was observed among Bartonella spp., Leptospira spp., and Anaplasmataceae with a co-infection rate of 0.46%. Our results suggested that species distribution and co-infections of zoonotic pathogens were prevalent in rodents and shrews, highlighting the necessity of active surveillance for zoonotic pathogens in wild mammals in wider regions.

This paper proposes a low-divergence method to generate inhomogeneous and anisotropic turbulence. Based on the idea of correlation reconstruction, the proposed method uses the Cholesky decomposition matrix to re-establish turbulence correlation functions. This is in contrast with the time-consuming procedure used in conventional methods to solve eigenvalues and eigenvectors in each location required by coordinate transformation, thereby reducing the computational complexity and improving the efficiency of synthetic turbulence generation. The proposed method is based on the classical spectrum-based method that is widely used to generate homogeneous and isotropic turbulence. By adjusting the generation strategy of specific random vectors, inhomogeneous and anisotropic turbulence with a relatively low divergence level can be obtained in practice, with almost no additional computational burden. Two versions of the proposed method are presented: the inverter and shifter versions. Both the versions are highly efficient, easy to implement, and compatible with high-performance computing. This method is also suitable for providing high-quality initial or boundary conditions for scale-resolving turbulence simulations with large grid numbers (such as direct numerical simulations or large eddy simulations); it can be rapidly implemented using various open-source computational fluid dynamics codes or common commercial software.

We numerically investigated the global linear instability and bifurcations in electro-thermo-convection (ETC) of a dielectric liquid confined in a two-dimensional (2-D) concentric annulus subjected to a strong unipolar injection. Seven kinds of solutions exist in this ETC system due to the complex bifurcations, i.e. saddle-node, subcritical and supercritical Hopf bifurcations. These bifurcation routes constitute at most four solution branches. Global linear instability analysis and energy analysis were conducted to explain the instability mechanism and transition of different solutions and to predict the local instability regions. The linearized lattice Boltzmann method (LLBM) for global linear instability analysis, first proposed by Pérez et al. (Theor. Comput. Fluid Dyn., vol. 31, 2017, pp. 643–664) to analyse incompressible flows, was extended here to solve the whole set of coupled linear equations, including the linear Navier–Stokes equations, the linear energy equation, Poisson's equation and the linear charge conservation equation. A multiscale analysis was also performed to recover the macroscopic linearized Navier–Stokes equations from the four different discrete lattice Boltzmann equations (LBEs). The LLBM was validated by calculating the linear critical value of 2-D natural convection; it has an error of 1.39% compared with the spectral method. Instability with global travelling wave behaviour is a unique behaviour in the annulus configuration electrothermohydrodynamic system, which may be caused by the baroclinity. Finally, the chaotic behaviour was quantitatively analysed through calculation of the fractal dimension and Lyapunov exponent.

A single-shot measurement of electron emittance was experimentally accomplished using a focused transfer line with a dipole. The betatron phase of electrons based on laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) is energy dependent owing to the coupling of the longitudinal acceleration field and the transverse focusing (defocusing) field in the bubble. The phase space presents slice information after phase compensation relative to the center energy. Fitting the transverse size of the electron beam at different energy slices in the energy spectrum measured 0.27 mm mrad in the experiment. The diagnosis of slice emittance facilitates local electron quality manipulation, which is important for the development of LWFA-based free electron lasers. The quasi-3D particle-in-cell simulations matched the experimental results and analysis well.

Instrument delivery is critical part in vascular intervention surgery. Due to the soft-body structure of instruments, the relationship between manipulation commands and instrument motion is non-linear, making instrument delivery challenging and time-consuming. Reinforcement learning has the potential to learn manipulation skills and automate instrument delivery with enhanced success rates and reduced workload of physicians. However, due to the sample inefficiency when using high-dimensional images, existing reinforcement learning algorithms are limited on realistic vascular robotic systems. To alleviate this problem, this paper proposes discrete soft actor-critic with auto-encoder (DSAC-AE) that augments SAC-discrete with an auxiliary reconstruction task. The algorithm is applied with distributed sample collection and parameter update in a robot-assisted preclinical environment. Experimental results indicate that guidewire delivery can be automatically implemented after 50k sampling steps in less than 15 h, demonstrating the proposed algorithm has the great potential to learn manipulation skill for vascular robotic systems.