Extrinsic mortality risks calibrating fast life history (LH) represent a species-general principle that applies to almost all animals including humans. However, empirical research also finds exceptions to the LH principle. The present study proposes a maternal socialization hypothesis, whereby we argue that the more human-relevant attachment system adds to the LH principle by up- and down-regulating environmental harshness and unpredictability and their calibration of LH strategies. Based on a longitudinal sample of 259 rural Chinese adolescents and their primary caregivers, the results support the statistical moderating effect of caregiver–child attachment on the relation between childhood environmental adversities (harshness and unpredictability) and LH strategies. Our theorizing and findings point to an additional mechanism likely involved in the organization and possibly the slowdown of human LH.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, adolescents (N = 1,330; Mages = 15 and 16; 50% female), mothers, and fathers from nine countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, United States) reported on adolescents’ internalizing and externalizing problems, adolescents completed a lab-based task to assess tendency for risk-taking, and adolescents reported on their well-being. During the pandemic, participants (Mage = 20) reported on changes in their internalizing, externalizing, and substance use compared to before the pandemic. Across countries, adolescents’ internalizing problems pre-pandemic predicted increased internalizing during the pandemic, and poorer well-being pre-pandemic predicted increased externalizing and substance use during the pandemic. Other relations varied across countries, and some were moderated by confidence in the government’s handling of the pandemic, gender, and parents’ education.

Background: The association between antimicrobial use (AMU) and emergence of antimicrobial resistance is well documented. The Canadian Nosocomial Infection Surveillance Program (CNISP) has conducted sentinel surveillance of AMU at participating Canadian hospitals since 2009 resulting in the largest pan-Canadian hospital database of dispensed antimicrobials. Objectives: Describe interhospital variability of AMU across Canada. Methods: Hospitals submit annual AMU data based on patient days (PD). Antimicrobials were measured in defined daily doses (DDD) for adults using the WHO Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) system. The AMU data among pediatric patients have been available since 2017 using days of therapy (DOT). Surveillance includes systemic antibacterial agents (J01 ATC codes), oral metronidazole, and oral vancomycin. AMU was assessed using quintiles, interquartile ranges (IQR), and relative IQRs (upper- and lower-quartile values divided by the median). Results: Between 2009 and 2018, 20–26 hospitals participated in adult surveillance each year (35 teaching hospitals and 3 nonteaching hospitals participated in ≥1 year). Over this period, overall AMU decreased by 13% at participating adult hospitals from 645 to 560 DDD per 1,000 PD. AMU varied substantially between hospitals, but this variability decreased over time (Fig. 1). In 2009, the IQRs for overall AMU spanned 309 DDD per 1,000 PD, and in 2018 it spanned only 103 DDD per 1,000 PD. This decrease in variability was due to large decreases in use among hospitals with high use in 2009–2010. Among hospitals in the highest use quintile in 2009–2010, AMU decreased, on average, 44 DDD per 1,000 PD each year. Among hospitals in the lowest use quintile in 2009–2010, AMU increased, on average, 6 DDD per 1,000 PD each year. In 2018, antibiotics with the largest absolute IQR variability were cefazolin (61–113 DDD per 1,000 PD), piperacillin-tazobactam (32–64 DDD per 1,000 PD), and vancomycin (24–49 DDD per 1,000 PD). Among antibiotics with ≥1 DDD per 1,000 PD, antibiotics with the largest relative IQR variability were tobramycin (0.3–6 DDD per 1,000 PD), cefadroxil (0.08–9 DDD per 1,000 PD), and linezolid (0.2–3 DDD per 1,000 PD). In 2018, the IQR for overall pediatric AMU (n = 7 teaching hospitals) was 426–581 DOT per 1,000 PD. Antibiotics with the largest IQRs were vancomycin (0.6–58 DOT per 1,000 PD), cefazolin (33–88 DOT per 1,000 PD), and tobramycin (3–57 DOT per 1,000 PD). Among antibiotics with ≥1 DOT per 1,000 PD in 2018, antibiotics with the largest relative IQRs were tobramycin (3–57 DOT per 1,000 PD), cefuroxime (1–6 DOT per 1,000 PD), and amoxicillin (8–42 DOT per 1,000 PD). Conclusions: There is wide variation in overall antibiotic use across hospitals. Variation between AMU at adult hospitals has decreased between 2009 and 2018; in 2018, antibiotics with the largest IQRs were cefazolin and piperacillin-tazobactam. Benchmarking AMU is crucial for informing antimicrobial stewardship efforts.

Funding: CNISP is funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Disclosures: Allison McGeer reports funds to her institution from Pfizer and Merck for projects for which she is the principal investigator. She also reports consulting fees from Sanofi-Pasteur, Sunovion, GSK, Pfizer, and Cidara.

Hubei province in China has had the most confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases and has reported sustained transmission of the disease. Although Lu'an city is adjacent to Hubei province, its community transmission was blocked at the early stage, and the impact of the epidemic was limited. Therefore, we summarised the overall characteristics of the entire epidemic course in Lu'an to help cities with a few imported cases better contain the epidemic. A total of 69 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 11 asymptomatic carriers were identified in Lu'an during the epidemic from 12 January to 21 February 2020. Fifty-two (65.0%) cases were male, and the median age was 40 years. On admission, 56.5% of cases had a fever as the initial symptom, and pneumonia was present in 89.9% of cases. The mean serial interval and the mean duration of hospitalisation were 6.5 days (95% CI: 4.8–8.2) and 18.2 days (95% CI: 16.8–19.5), respectively. A total of 16 clusters involving 60 cases (17 first-generation cases and 43 secondary cases) were reported during the epidemic. We observed that only 18.9% (7/37) index cases resulted in community transmission during the epidemic in Lu'an, indicating that the scale of the epidemic was limited to a low level in Lu'an city. An asymptomatic carrier caused the largest cluster, involving 13 cases. Spread of COVID-19 by asymptomatic carriers represents an enormous challenge for countries responding to the pandemic.

This study used data from 12 cultural groups in 9 countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and United States; N = 1,315) to investigate bidirectional associations between parental warmth and control, and child externalizing and internalizing behaviors. In addition, the extent to which these associations held across mothers and fathers and across cultures with differing normative levels of parent warmth and control were examined. Mothers, fathers, and children completed measures when children were ages 8 to 13. Multiple-group autoregressive cross-lagged structural equation models revealed that evocative child-driven effects of externalizing and internalizing behavior on warmth and control are ubiquitous across development, cultures, mothers, and fathers. Results also reveal that parenting effects on child externalizing and internalizing behaviors, though rarer than child effects, extend into adolescence when examined separately in mothers and fathers. Father-based parent effects were more frequent than mother effects. Most parent- and child-driven effects appear to emerge consistently across cultures. The rare culture-specific parenting effects suggested that occasionally the effects of parenting behaviors that run counter to cultural norms may be delayed in rendering their protective effect against deleterious child outcomes.

The star formation history (SFH) of galaxies allow us to investigate when galaxies formed their stars and assembled their mass. We can constrain the SFH with high level of precision from galaxies with resolved stellar populations, since we are able to discriminate between stars of different ages from the spectrum they emit. However, the relative importance of secular evolution (nature) over nurture is not yet clear, and separating the effects of interaction-driven evolution in the observed galaxy properties is not trivial. The aim of this study is to use MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO) Integral Field Unit (IFU) data, in combination with multi-wavelength data, to constrain the SFH of nearby isolated galaxies. We present here the new techniques we are developing to constrain the SFH with high level of precision from Spectral Energy Distribution (SED) fitting. This study is part of a China-Chile collaboration program where we are applying these new techniques to investigate how galaxies formed and evolve in different environments.

The excessive use of plastic, especially polystyrene (PS), has caused serious environmental pollution. The efficient utilization of plastics and the conversion of plastics into value-added carbon materials are the concerns of researchers. Herein, we propose novel “pyrolysis–deposition” method to convert one popular plastic substance, PS, into ordered mesoporous carbons (OMCs). During the synthesis process, PS is pyrolyzed into small organic gases under high temperature, which is then adsorbed through capillary adsorption into the mesoporous of SBA-15 in the presence of catalyst. The obtained OMCs have high specific surface area, uniform pore size, and ordered pore structure. The OMCs exhibit specific capacitance of 118 F/g at a current density of 0.2 A/g and electrochemical stability of 87.2% at a current density of 2 A/g after 5000 cycles. The pyrolysis–deposition strategy provides a new idea to convert waste plastics into high-performance carbon materials for electrochemical applications.

The accounting information of a firm is analogous to the characteristics of an organism that contain biological information that influences decisions; such characteristics result from organizational routines (genes). Organizational routines result from organizational learning, and learning from an associated company is an efficient approach for a new venture to establish routines. The study results revealed that the subsidiaries inherited routines from the parent companies related to financial ratios, so we suggest that people should judge the adequacy of a firm’s financial situation by not only referring to the standard of its industry but also to its parent company.

Using multilevel models, we examined mother-, father-, and child-reported (N = 1,336 families) externalizing behavior problem trajectories from age 7 to 14 in nine countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States). The intercept and slope of children's externalizing behavior trajectories varied both across individuals within culture and across cultures, and the variance was larger at the individual level than at the culture level. Mothers’ and children's endorsement of aggression as well as mothers’ authoritarian attitudes predicted higher age 8 intercepts of child externalizing behaviors. Furthermore, prediction from individual-level endorsement of aggression and authoritarian attitudes to more child externalizing behaviors was augmented by prediction from cultural-level endorsement of aggression and authoritarian attitudes, respectively. Cultures in which father-reported endorsement of aggression was higher and both mother- and father-reported authoritarian attitudes were higher also reported more child externalizing behavior problems at age 8. Among fathers, greater attributions regarding uncontrollable success in caregiving situations were associated with steeper declines in externalizing over time. Understanding cultural-level as well as individual-level correlates of children's externalizing behavior offers potential insights into prevention and intervention efforts that can be more effectively targeted at individual children and parents as well as targeted at changing cultural norms that increase the risk of children's and adolescents’ externalizing behavior.

Using data from 1,177 families in eight countries (Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States), we tested a conceptual model of direct effects of childhood family adversity on subsequent externalizing behaviors as well as indirect effects through psychological mediators. When children were 9 years old, mothers and fathers reported on financial difficulties and their use of corporal punishment, and children reported perceptions of their parents’ rejection. When children were 10 years old, they completed a computerized battery of tasks assessing reward sensitivity and impulse control and responded to questions about hypothetical social provocations to assess their hostile attributions and proclivity for aggressive responding. When children were 12 years old, they reported on their externalizing behavior. Multigroup structural equation models revealed that across all eight countries, childhood family adversity had direct effects on externalizing behaviors 3 years later, and childhood family adversity had indirect effects on externalizing behavior through psychological mediators. The findings suggest ways in which family-level adversity poses risk for children's subsequent development of problems at psychological and behavioral levels, situated within diverse cultural contexts.

Population decline among Asian horseshoe crabs in Asia is increasingly reported, but knowledge of their population and ecological status in China is limited. We conducted community interviews in 30 fishing villages around Beibu Gulf in Guangxi, China, to collect distribution information about the potential spawning/nursery grounds of Tachypleus tridentatus and Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda, and any imminent threats to their populations. Based on the results from 400 respondents we identified 45 potential spawning/nursery grounds distributed widely along the shores of Beibu Gulf. We visited 10 of these sites and verified the presence of juvenile horseshoe crabs by field surveys. Nearly all respondents reported an overall depletion in horseshoe crab populations from these 45 sites, which they attributed mainly to unsustainable fishing practices. Respondents who reported having seen horseshoe crab mating pairs on shores were mostly older people, which may suggest a considerable reduction in horseshoe crabs coming to the shores to spawn in recent years. The mean daily harvest of adult T. tridentatus offshore, as indicated by fishers, has declined from c. 50–1,000 in the 1990s to 0–30 individuals during 2011–2016. Our Wisdom of Crowds approach, supported by confirmatory field surveys, is a cost-effective method for assessing the population status of horseshoe crabs, and the level of threat they face. Similar approaches with other species are likely to be particularly valuable in the Asia–Pacific region, where well-structured population monitoring is largely unaffordable.

The apparent gas permeability of a porous medium is an important parameter in the prediction of unconventional gas production, which was first investigated systematically by Klinkenberg in 1941 and found to increase with the reciprocal mean gas pressure (or equivalently, the Knudsen number). Although the underlying rarefaction effects are well known, the reason that the correction factor in Klinkenberg’s famous equation decreases when the Knudsen number increases has not been fully understood. Most of the studies idealize the porous medium as a bundle of straight cylindrical tubes; however, according to the gas kinetic theory, this only results in an increase of the correction factor with the Knudsen number, which clearly contradicts Klinkenberg’s experimental observations. Here, by solving the Bhatnagar–Gross–Krook equation in simplified (but not simple) porous media, we identify, for the first time, two key factors that can explain Klinkenberg’s experimental results: the tortuous flow path and the non-unitary tangential momentum accommodation coefficient for the gas–surface interaction. Moreover, we find that Klinkenberg’s results can only be observed when the ratio between the apparent and intrinsic permeabilities is ${\lesssim}30$; at large ratios (or Knudsen numbers) the correction factor increases with the Knudsen number. Our numerical results could also serve as benchmarking cases to assess the accuracy of macroscopic models and/or numerical schemes for the modelling/simulation of rarefied gas flows in complex geometries over a wide range of gas rarefaction. Specifically, we point out that the Navier–Stokes equations with the first-order velocity-slip boundary condition are often misused to predict the apparent gas permeability of the porous medium; that is, any nonlinear dependence of the apparent gas permeability with the Knudsen number, predicted from the Navier–Stokes equations, is not reliable. Worse still, for some types of gas–surface interactions, even the ‘filtered’ linear dependence of the apparent gas permeability with the Knudsen number is of no practical use since, compared to the numerical solution of the Bhatnagar–Gross–Krook equation, it is only accurate when the ratio between the apparent and intrinsic permeabilities is ${\lesssim}1.5$.

Magnesium alloy has great potential for bone implantation. However, its corrosion rate is fast in physiological environment. In this paper, biological Mg–Zn–Ca alloy was processed by high pressure torsion (HPT) and subsequently annealed at 90–270 °C for 30 min. The microstructure and corrosion resistance in simulated body fluid were investigated. The results revealed that with the rise of the annealing temperature, the grain size of the HPT alloy gradually increased and the relative diffraction peak intensity of (0002) grain orientation decreased. The amount of second phases increased first and then decreased, while the surface stress decreased first and then increased. All of these changes affected the corrosion rate simultaneously. The corrosion resistance of the HPT alloy increased first and then decreased with the rise of annealing temperature. After annealing at 210 °C for 30 min, the corrosion resistance was the best. Therefore, it was feasible to control the corrosion rate via annealing treatment.

For the first time, we estimated the population sizes of two swan species and four goose species from observations during the non-breeding period in East Asia. Based on combined counts from South Korea, Japan and China, we estimated the total abundance of these species as follows: 42,000–47,000 Whooper Swans Cygnus cygnus; 99,000–141,000 Tundra Swans C. columbianus bewickii; 56,000–98,000 Swan Geese Anser cygnoides; 157,000–194,000 Bean Geese A. fabalis; 231,000–283,000 Greater White-fronted Geese A. albifrons; and 14,000–19,000 Lesser White-fronted Geese A. erythropus. While the count data from Korea and Japan provide a good reflection of numbers present, there remain gaps in the coverage in China, which particularly affect the precision of the estimates for Bean, Greater and Lesser White-fronted Geese as well as Tundra Swans. Lack of subspecies distinction of Bean Geese in China until recently also limits our ability to determine the true status of A. f. middendorffii there, but all indications suggest this population numbers around 18,000 individuals and is in need of urgent attention. The small, highly concentrated and declining numbers of Lesser White-fronted Geese give concern for this species, as do the major declines in Greater White-fronted Geese in China (in contrast to numbers in Japan and Korea, considered to be a separate flyway). In the absence of any demographic data, it is impossible to interpret the causes of these changes in abundance. Improved monitoring, including demographic and tracking studies are required to provide the necessary information to retain populations in favourable conservation status.