The association between time-restricted eating (TRE) and the risk of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is less studied. Moreover, whether the association is independent of physical exercise or diet quality or quantity is uncertain. In this nationwide cross-sectional study of 3,813 participants, the timing of food intakes was recorded by 24-h recalls; NAFLD was defined through vibration-controlled transient elastography in the absence of other causes of chronic liver disease. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated using logistic regression. Participants with daily eating window of ≤ 8 h had lower odds of NAFLD (OR = 0.70, 95% CI: 0.52-0.93), compared to those with ≥ 10 h window. Early (5am-3pm) and late TRE (11am-9pm) showed inverse associations with NAFLD prevalence without statistical heterogeneity (p heterogeneity = 0.649) with ORs of 0.73 (95% CI: 0.36-1.47) and 0.61 (95% CI: 0.44-0.84), respectively. Such inverse association seemed stronger in participants with lower energy intake (OR = 0.58, 95% CI: 0.38-0.89, p interaction = 0.020). There are no statistical differences in the TRE-NAFLD associations according to physical activity (p interaction = 0.390) or diet quality (p interaction = 0.110). TRE might be associated with lower likelihood of NAFLD. Such inverse association is independent of physical activity and diet quality, and appears stronger in individuals consuming lower energy. Given the potential misclassification of TRE based on one- or two-day recall in the analysis, epidemiological studies with validated methods for measuring the habitual timing of dietary intake are warranted.

In social interactions, people frequently encounter gain (i.e., all outcomes are gains from the status-quo) or loss (all outcomes are losses from the status-quo) social dilemmas, where their personal interests conflict with social interests. We ask whether there are any behavioral differences in social interactions when it comes to gains and losses. Using the Prisoner’s Dilemma games, in three studies we observed that participants were less cooperative in the loss domain than in the gain domain. This effect was robust, not moderated by payoff amount (Study 1), cooperation index (Study 1), domain comparison (Studies 1 and 2), and personal loss aversion (Study 3). Social motive and belief explained this effect: compared to the gain domain, participants in the loss domain aroused more pro-self motive and less prosocial motive, and showed stronger beliefs that their partner would defect, which led them to cooperate less. These findings suggest that gain and loss domains affect individual motivation and belief, subsequently affecting strategic choices in social dilemmas.

Intertemporal choices involve tradeoffs between outcomes that occur at different times. Most of the research has used pure gains tasks and the discount rates yielding from those tasks to explain and predict real-world behaviors and consequences. However, real decisions are often more complex and involve mixed outcomes (e.g., sooner-gain and later-loss or sooner-loss and later-gain). No study has used mixed gain-loss intertemporal tradeoff tasks to explain and predict real-world behaviors and consequences, and studies involving such tasks are also scarce. Considering that tasks involving a combination of gains and losses may yield different discount rates and that existing pure gains tasks do not explain or predict real-world outcomes well, this study conducted two experiments to compare the discount rates of mixed gain-loss intertemporal tradeoffs with those of pure gains or pure losses (Experiment 1) and to examine whether these tasks predicted different real-world behaviors and consequences (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 suggests that the discount rate ordering of the four tasks was, from highest to lowest, pure gains, sooner-loss and later-gain, pure losses, and sooner-gain and later-loss. Experiment 2 indicates that the evidence supporting the claim that the discount rates of the four tasks were related to different real-world behaviors and consequences was insufficient.

Two new species of the lichenized genus Lasioloma are described from Asia: Lasioloma longiramosum W. C. Wang & A. Abas (collected from Malaysia), is characterized by a distinct woolly prothallus between dispersed thallus patches, comparatively small, muriform ascospores, long filiform conidia (main branch 22–28 μm in length, the other three branches 65–80 μm) and a foliicolous habitat; L. verrucosum W. C. Wang & X. L. Wei (collected from China), is characterized by a warted thallus, filiform conidia (main branch 22–32 μm in length, the other three branches 50–65 μm) and a corticolous habitat. The placement of both new species was confirmed by a molecular phylogenetic approach based on combined ITS, mtSSU and mtLSU sequences, and both are compared in detail to other similar species of the genus. Our study also revealed that the length of the conidial branches, which has not been explored in previous studies, should be regarded as an important feature for species delimitation in Lasioloma.

Industrial robots are widely used in the painting industry, such as automobile manufacturing and solid wood furniture industry. An important problem is how to improve the efficiency of robot programming, especially in the current furniture industry with multiple products, small batches and increasingly high demand for customization. In this work, we propose an outer loop adaptive control scheme, which allow users to realize the practical application of the zero-moment lead-through teaching method based on dynamic model without opening the inner torque control interface of robots. In order to accurately estimate the influence of joint friction, a friction model is established based on static, Coulomb and viscous friction characteristics, and the Sigmoid function is used to represent the transition between motion states. An identification method is used to quickly identify the dynamic parameters of the robot. The joint position/speed command of the robot’s inner joint servo loop is dynamically generated based on the user-designed adaptive control law. In addition, the zero-moment lead-through teaching scheme based on the dynamic model is applied to a spray-painting robot with closed control system. In order to verify our method, CMA GR630ST is used to conduct experiments. We identified the parameters of the dynamic model and carried out the zero-moment lead-through teaching experiment to track the target trajectory. The results show that the proposed method can realize the application of modern control methods in industrial robot with closed control systems, and achieve a preliminary exploration to improve the application scenarios of spray-painting robots.

The dispersed phase in turbulence can vary from almost inviscid fluid to highly viscous fluid. By changing the viscosity of the dispersed droplet phase, we experimentally investigate how the deformability of dispersed droplets affects the global transport quantity of the turbulent emulsion. Different kinds of silicone oil are employed to result in the viscosity ratio, $\zeta$, ranging from $0.53$ to $8.02$. The droplet volume fraction, $\phi$, is varied from 0 % to 10 % with a spacing of 2 %. The global transport quantity, quantified by the normalized friction coefficient $c_{f,\phi }/c_{f,\phi =0}$, shows a weak dependence on the turbulent intensity due to the vanishing finite-size effect of the droplets. The interesting fact is that, with increasing $\zeta$, $c_{f,\phi }/c_{f,\phi =0}$ first increases and then saturates to a plateau value which is similar to that of the rigid particle suspension. By performing image analysis, this drag modification is interpreted from the point of view of droplet deformability, which is responsible for the breakup and coalescence effect of the droplets. The statistics of the droplet size distribution show that, with increasing $\zeta$, the stabilizing effect induced by interfacial tension becomes substantial and the pure inertial breakup process becomes dominant. The measurement of the droplet distribution along the radial direction of the system shows a bulk-clustering effect, which can be attributed to the non-negligible coalescence effect of the droplet. It is found that the droplet coalescence effect could be suppressed as $\zeta$ increases, thereby affecting the contribution of interfacial tension to the total stress, and accounting for the observed emulsion rheology.

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.

This paper presents a new concept of the control strategy in prevention program for the airlines to prevent the injuries of passengers and crew members for transport aircraft. A twin-jet transport aircraft encountered severe clear-air turbulence at transonic flight in descending phase is the study case of the present paper. The nonlinear and unsteady flight controllability models based on flight data mining and the fuzzy-logic modeling of artificial intelligence technique, are utilised to support this new concept. The proposed flight controllability models with the function of nonlinear dynamic inversion are employed to provide flight control strategy through flight simulations of dynamic inversion process; it is an innovation in mathematical modelling of aerospace engineering. Since the sudden plunging motion with the abrupt change in attitude and gravitational acceleration (i.e. the normal load factor) to affect the flight safety the most, hazard mitigation is a great concern for the aviation community. The present study is initiated to examine possible mitigation concepts of accident prevention to provide a training course for loss of control in-flight program to the airlines.

Mechanistic studies have suggested that antioxidants have beneficial effects on age-related macular degeneration (AMD). This study aimed to investigate the association between the types and sources of dietary vitamin and carotenoid intakes and AMD risk in China. A matched case–control study of 260 AMD cases and 260 matched controls was performed. The participants were interviewed for dietary information and potential confounders, and comprehensive ophthalmic examinations were performed. Conditional logistic models were used to estimate the odds ratio (OR) and 95 % confidence interval (CI) of specific vitamins and carotenoids and their main sources. When comparing the extreme quartiles, the ORs (95 % CI) were 0·30 (0·10, 0·88) for lutein and 0·28 (0·11, 0·74) for β-cryptoxanthin. The associations for other dietary vitamin and carotenoid intakes were generally weaker and non-significant. Higher intakes of spinach and egg, which are important sources of lutein, were associated with a reduced odds of AMD. ORs (95% CIs) comparing extreme categories were 0·42 (0·20, 0·88) for spinach and 0·52 (95% CI: 0·27, 0·98) for egg. Participants who were in the highest category of both egg intake and spinach intake had a much greater reduced odds of having AMD (OR: 0·23; 95% CI: 0·08, 0·71) than those in the lowest category of egg intake and spinach intake. In conclusion, a higher intake of lutein and lutein-rich foods was associated with a significantly decreased odds of AMD. These findings provide further evidence of the benefits of lutein and lutein-rich foods in the prevention of AMD.

Se is an indispensable trace element for the human body, and telomere length is considered a marker of biological ageing. Previous studies have shown that dietary Se intake is associated with telomere length. However, the relationship between Se intake and telomere length in patients with diabetes has not been well studied. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the relationship between dietary Se intake and telomere length in patients with diabetes. We extracted 878 participants with diabetes from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey database for 1990–2002. Dietary Se intake was assessed using the 24 h dietary recall method, and telomere length was measured using quantitative PCR. Generalised linear models were constructed to assess the relationship between dietary Se intake and telomere length. After controlling for the confounders, 1 μg increase in dietary Se intake in female patients with diabetes, and telomere length increased by 1·84 base pairs (β = 1·84 (95 % CI: 0·15, 3·53)), there was a line relationship between dietary Se intake and telomere length in female patients with diabetes and telomere length increased with increasing dietary Se intake within the range of 0–250 μg. The study demonstrates that dietary Se intake is significantly associated with telomere length only in the female population with diabetes in the USA. However, further prospective studies are required to confirm this finding.