The 4H-SiC crystal is found to have great potential in terahertz generation via nonlinear optical frequency conversion due to its extremely high optical damage threshold, wide transparent range, etc. In this paper, optical rectification (OR) with tilted-pulse-front (TPF) setting based on the 4H-SiC crystal is proposed. The theory accounts for the optimization of incident pulse pre-chirping in the TPF OR process under high-intensity femtosecond laser pumping. Compared with the currently recognized LiNbO3-based TPF OR, which generates a single-cycle terahertz pulse within 3 THz, 4H-SiC demonstrates a significant advantage in producing ultra-widely tunable (up to over 14 THz, TPF angle 31°–38°) terahertz waves with high efficiency (~10–2) and strong field (~MV/cm). Besides, the spectrum characteristics, as well as the evolution from single- to multi-cycle terahertz pulses can be modulated flexibly by pre-chirping. The simulation results show that 4H-SiC enables terahertz frequency extending to an unprecedent range by OR, which has extremely important potential in strong-field terahertz applications.

The subduction model of the Neo-Tethys during the Early Cretaceous has always been a controversial topic, and the scarcity of Early Cretaceous magmatic rocks in the southern part of the Gangdese batholith is the main cause of this debate. To address this issue, this article presents new zircon U–Pb chronology, zircon Hf isotope, whole-rock geochemistry and Sr–Nd isotope data for the Early Cretaceous quartz diorite dykes with adakite affinity in Liuqiong, Gongga. Zircon U–Pb dating of three samples yielded ages of c. 141–137 Ma, indicating that the Liuqiong quartz diorite was emplaced in the Early Cretaceous. The whole-rock geochemical analysis shows that the Liuqiong quartz diorite is enriched in large-ion lithophile elements (LILEs) and light rare-earth elements (LREEs) and is depleted in high-field-strength elements (HFSEs), which are related to slab subduction. Additionally, the Liuqiong quartz diorite has high SiO2, Al2O3 and Sr contents, high Sr/Y ratios and low heavy rare-earth element (HREE) and Y contents, which are compatible with typical adakite signatures. The initial 87Sr/86Sr values of the Liuqiong adakite range from 0.705617 to 0.705853, and the whole-rock ϵNd(t) values vary between +5.78 and +6.24. The zircon ϵHf(t) values vary from +11.5 to +16.4. Our results show that the Liuqiong adakite magma was derived from partial melting of the Neo-Tethyan oceanic plate (mid-ocean ridge basalt (MORB) + sediment + fluid), with some degree of subsequent peridotite interaction within the overlying mantle wedge. Combining regional data, we favour the interpretation that the Neo-Tethyan oceanic crust was subducted at a low angle beneath the Gangdese during the Early Cretaceous.

Echinococcus shiquicus is currently limited to the Qinghai–Tibet plateau, a large mountainous region in China. Although the zoonotic potential remains unknown, progress is being made on the distribution and intermediate host range. In this study, we report E. shiquicus within Gansu and Qinghai provinces in regions located not only around the central areas but also the southeast edge of the plateau and describe their genetic relationship with previous isolates from the plateau. From 1879 plateau pikas examined, 2.39% (95% CI 1.79–3.18) were infected with E. shiquicus. The highest prevalence of 10.26% (4.06–23.58) was recorded in Makehe town, Qinghai province. Overall the prevalence was marginally higher in Qinghai (2.5%, CI 1.82–3.43) than in Gansu (2%, CI 1.02–3.89). The cox1 and nad1 genes demonstrated high and low haplotype and nucleotide diversities, respectively. The median-joining network constructed by the cox1–nad1 gene sequences demonstrated a star-like configuration with a median vector (unsampled haplotype) occupying the centre of the network. No peculiar distinction or common haplotype was observed in isolates originating from the different provinces. The presence of E. shiquicus in regions of the southeast and northeast edges of the Qinghai–Tibet plateau and high genetic variation warrants more investigation into the haplotype distribution and genetic polymorphism by exploring more informative DNA regions of the mitochondrial genome to provide epidemiologically useful insight into the population structure of E. shiquicus across the plateau and its axis.

Cysticercosis caused by the metacestode larval stage of Taenia hydatigena formerly referred to as Cysticercus tenuicollis is a disease of veterinary importance that constitutes a significant threat to livestock production worldwide, especially in endemic regions due to condemnation of visceral organs and mortality rate of infected young animals. While the genetic diversity among parasites is found to be potentially useful in many areas of research including molecular diagnostics, epidemiology and control, that of T. hydatigena across the globe remains poorly understood. In this study, analysis of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of adult worms and larval stages of T. hydatigena isolated from dogs, sheep and a wild boar in China showed that the population structure consists of two major haplogroups with very high nucleotide substitutions involving synonymous and non-synonymous changes. Compared with other cestodes such as Echinococcus spp., the genetic variation observed between the haplogroups is sufficient for the assignment of major haplotype or genotype division as both groups showed a total of 166 point-mutation differences between the 12 mitochondrial protein-coding gene sequences. Preliminary analysis of a nuclear protein-coding gene (pepck) did not reveal any peculiar changes between both groups which suggests that these variants may only differ in their mitochondrial makeup.

Echinococcus granulosus sensu stricto (s.s.), Echinococcus multilocularis and Echinococcus canadensis are the common causes of human echinococcosis in China. An accurate species identification tool for human echinococcosis is needed as the treatments and prognosis are different among species. The present work demonstrates a method for the simultaneous detection of these three Echinococcus species based on multiplex polymerase chain reaction (mPCR). Specific primers of this mPCR were designed based on the mitochondrial genes and determined by extensive tests. The method can successfully detect either separated or mixed target species, and generate expected amplicons of distinct size for each species. Sensitivity of the method was tested by serially diluted DNA, showing a detection threshold as less as 0.32 pg for both E. granulosus s.s. and E. canadensis, and 1.6 pg for E. multilocularis. Specificity assessed against 18 other parasites was found to be 100% except weakly cross-react with E. shiquicus. The assay was additionally applied to 69 echinococcosis patients and 38 healthy persons, confirming the high reliability of the method. Thus, the mPCR described here has high application potential for clinical identification purposes, and can further provide a useful tool for evaluation of serology and imaging method.

Existing data on folate status and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) prognosis are scarce. We prospectively examined whether serum folate concentrations at diagnosis were associated with liver cancer-specific survival (LCSS) and overall survival (OS) among 982 patients with newly diagnosed, previously untreated HCC, who were enrolled in the Guangdong Liver Cancer Cohort (GLCC) study between September 2013 and February 2017. Serum folate concentrations were measured using chemiluminescent microparticle immunoassay. Cox proportional hazards models were performed to estimate hazard ratios (HR) and 95 % CI by sex-specific quartile of serum folate. Compared with patients in the third quartile of serum folate, patients in the lowest quartile had significantly inferior LCSS (HR = 1·48; 95 % CI 1·05, 2·09) and OS (HR = 1·43; 95 % CI 1·03, 1·99) after adjustment for non-clinical and clinical prognostic factors. The associations were not significantly modified by sex, age at diagnosis, alcohol drinking status and Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) stage. However, there were statistically significant interactions on both multiplicative and additive scale between serum folate and C-reactive protein (CRP) levels or smoking status and the associations of lower serum folate with worse LCSS and OS were only evident among patients with CRP > 3·0 mg/l or current smokers. An inverse association with LCSS were also observed among patients with liver damage score ≥3. These results suggest that lower serum folate concentrations at diagnosis are independently associated with worse HCC survival, most prominently among patients with systemic inflammation and current smokers. A future trial of folate supplementation seems to be promising in HCC patients with lower folate status.

In this study, the petrology, zircon U–Pb ages, Lu–Hf isotopic compositions, whole-rock geochemistry and Sr–Nd isotopes for newly recognized low-Mg and high-Mg adakitic rocks from the North Altun orogenic belt were determined. The results will provide important insights for understanding the continuities of the North Qilian and North Altun orogenic belts during early Palaeozoic time. The low-Mg adakitic granitoids (445 to 439 Ma) are characterized by high SiO2 (69–70 wt %), low Mg no. (43–48) and low Cr and Ni contents. In contrast, the high-Mg adakitic granitoids (425 to 422 Ma) have relatively lower SiO2 (65–67 wt %), higher Mg no. (60–62) and higher Cr and Ni contents. The low-Mg adakitic rocks have high initial 87Sr/86Sr ratios (0.7073–0.7084), negative εNd(t) (−1.9 to −4.0) and εHf(t) values (−6.8 to −2.0), and old zircon Hf model ages (1.4–1.7 Ga). In contrast, the high-Mg adakitic rocks show lower initial 87Sr/86Sr ratios (0.7044–0.7057), higher εNd(t) (−0.7 to 3.1) and positive εHf(t) values (2.0 to 6.9), with younger zircon Hf model ages (0.9–1.2 Ga). These results suggest that the low-Mg adakitic rocks were probably generated by the partial melting of thickened crust, whereas the high-Mg adakitic rocks were derived from the anatexis of delaminated lower crust, which subsequently interacted with mantle magma upon ascent. The data obtained in this study provide significant information about the geological and tectonic processes after the closure of the Altun Ocean. The continent–continent collision and thickening probably occurred during 450–440 Ma with the formation of low-Mg adakitic rocks, and the transition of the tectonic regime from compression to extension probably occurred at 425–422 Ma with the formation of high-Mg adakitic rocks. The geochemical, geochronological and petrogenetic similarities between the North Altun and North Qilian adakitic rocks suggest that these two orogenic belts were subjected to similar tectonomagmatic processes during early Palaeozoic times.

In this paper, an alternative lattice Boltzmann (LB)model for incompressible flows is proposed. By modifying directly the moments of the equilibrium distribution function (EDF), the continuous expression of the EDF in tensor Hermite polynomials is derived using the moment expansion and then discretizedwith the discrete velocity vectors of the D2Q9 lattice. The present model as well as its counterpart, the incompressible LB model proposed by Guo, reproduces the incompressible Navier-Stokes (N-S) equations for both steady and unsteady flows. Besides, an alternative pressure formula, which represents the pressure as the diagonal part of the stress tensor, is adopted in the present model. Furthermore, in order to enhance the stability of the present LB model, an additional relaxation time pertaining to the non-hydrodynamic mode is added to the BGK collision operator. The present LB model is validated by two benchmark tests: the cavity flow with different Reynolds number (Re) and the flow past an impulsively started cylinder at Re=40 and 550.

The objective of the present study was to investigate the effect of feeding two transgenic corn lines containing the mCry1Ac gene from Bacillus thuringiensis strain (BT-799) and the maroACC gene from Agrobacterium tumefaciens strain (CC-2), respectively, on growth, egg quality and organ health indicators. Expression of the mCry1Ac gene confers resistance to Pyrausta nubilalis and the maroACC gene confers tolerance to herbicides. Healthy hens (n=96 placed in cages; 3 hens/cage) were randomly assigned to one of four corn–soybean meal dietary treatments (8 cages/treatment) formulated with the following corn: non-transgenic near-isoline control corn (control), BT-799 corn, CC-2 corn and commercially available non-transgenic reference corn (reference). The experiment was divided into three 4-week phases (week 1 to 4, week 5 to 8 and week 9 to 12), during which hens were fed mash diets. Performance (BW, feed intake and egg production) and egg quality were determined. Following slaughter at the end of 12 weeks of feeding (n=8/treatment), carcass yield and organ weights (heart, liver, spleen, lung, kidneys, stomach and ovary) were recorded; organs and intestines were sampled for histological analysis. Analysis of serum biochemistry parameters to assess the liver and kidney function were performed. No differences in BW, egg production and production efficiency were observed between hens consuming the control diet and hens consuming the BT-799 or CC-2 diet. Haugh unit measures and egg component weights were similar between the control and test groups. Carcass yield was not affected by the diet treatment. Similar organosomatic indices and serum parameters did not indicate the characteristics of organ dysfunction. All observed values of the BT-799 and CC-2 groups were within the calculated tolerance intervals. This research indicates that the performance, egg quality, organ health and carcass yield of laying hens fed diets containing the BT-799 or CC-2 corn line were similar to that of laying hens fed diets formulated with the non-transgenic near-isoline corn with comparable genetic backgrounds.

Quiver Hopf algebras are classified by means of ramification systems with irreducible representations. This leads to the classification of Nichols algebras over group algebras and pointed Hopf algebras of type one.

As described in this paper, we specifically examine the structural learning problem of a supertagging task. Supertagging is a task to assign the most probable lexical entry to each word in a sentence. A supertagger is extremely important for a lexicalized grammar parser because an accurate supertagger can greatly reduce lexical ambiguity in downstream parser. Supertagging is more challenging than conventional sequence labeling tasks (e.g., part-of-speech tagging). First, the supertags are numerous. Supertags are the lexical entries defined in a lexicalized grammar, which consists of rich syntactic/semantic information. Second, the inter-supertag relation is more complex. A proper supertag assignment is expected to be compatible with other supertag assignments in a sentence to construct a parse tree. Commonly used adjacent label features (e.g., first-order edge feature) in a sequence labeling model are too rough for the supertagging task. Long-range information is extremely important for the supertagging task. Two approaches to consider long-range information in a supertagger's training stage are proposed. Specifically, we propose a dependency-informed supertagger to use word-to-word dependency derived from a dependency parser and generate long-range features as soft constraints in the training. In the forest-guided supertagger, we constrain the classifier to learn in a grammar-satisfying space and use a CFG filter to impose grammar constraints for the update of model parameters. The experiments show that the proposed structure-guided supertaggers perform significantly better than the baseline supertaggers. Based on the improved supertaggers, the F-score of the final parser is also improved. Using the forest-guided supertagger in a shift-reduce HPSG parser, we achieved a competitive parsing performance of 89.31% F-score with higher parsing speed than that of a state-of-the-art HPSG parser.

Based on Haldane's spherical geometrical formalism of the two-dimensional quantum Hall fluids, the relation between the noncommutative geometry of S2 and the two-dimensional quantum Hall fluids is exhibited. A finite matrix model on the two-sphere is explicitly constucted as an effective description of the fractional quantum Hall fluids of finite extent, and the complete sets of physical quantum states of this matrix model are determined. We also describe how the low-lying excitations in the model are constructed in terms of the quasi-particle and quasi-hole excitations. It is shown that there exists a Haldane hierarchical structure in the two-dimensional quantum Hall fluid states of the matrix model. These hierarchical fluid states are generated by the parent fluid state by condensing the quasi-particle and quasi-hole excitations level by level.

Successful production of cloned animals derived from somatic cells has been achieved in sheep, cattle, goats, mice, pigs, rabbits, etc. But the efficiency of nuclear transfer is very low in all species. The present study was conducted to examine somatic nucleus remodelling and developmental ability in vitro of rabbit embryos by transferring somatic cells into enucleated germinal vesicle (GV), metaphase I (MI) or metaphase II (MII) oocytes. Microtubules were organized around condensed chromosomes after the nucleus had been transferred into any of the three types of cytoplasm. A bipolar spindle was formed in enucleated MII cytoplasm. Most of the nuclei failed to form a normal spindle within GV and MI cytoplasm. Some chromosomes scattered throughout the cytoplasm and some formed a monopolar spindle. Pseudopronucleus formation was observed in all three types of cytoplasm. Reconstructed embryos with MI and MII cytoplasm could develop to blastcysts. Nuclei in GV cytoplasm could develop only to the 4-cell stage. These results suggest that (1) GV material is important for nucleus remodelling after nuclear transfer, and (2) oocyte cytoplasm has the capacity to dedifferentiate somatic cells during oocyte maturation.

The recently introduced two-parameter eight-state Uq [gl(3|1)] supersymmetric fermion model is extended to include boundary terms. Nine classes of boundary conditions are constructed, all of which are shown to be integrable via the graded boundary quantum inverse scattering method. The boundary systems are solved by using the coordinate Bethe ansatz and the Bethe ansatz equations are given for all nine cases.

Let Uq(G(1)) be a quantised non-twisted affine Lie algebra with Uq(G) the corresponding quantised simple Lie algebra. Using the previously obtained universal R-matrices for and , explicitly spectral-dependent universal R-matrices for Uq(A1) and Uq(A2) are determined. These spectral-dependent universal R-matrices are evaluated in some concrete representations; well-known results for the fundamental representations are reproduced, and an explicit formula for the spectral-dependent R-matrix associated with the V(3) ⊗ V(6) module is derived, where V(3) and V(6) carry the 3- and 6-dimensional representations of Uq(A2), respectively.