Selenium (Se) deficiency causes impaired growth of fish skeletal muscle due to the retarded hypertrophy of muscle fibers. However, the inner mechanisms remain unclear. According to our previous researches, we infer this phenomenon is associated with Se deficiency-induced high concentration of reactive oxygen species (ROS), which could suppress the target of rapamycin complex 1 (TORC1) pathway-mediated protein synthesis by inhibiting protein kinase B (Akt), an upstream protein of TORC1. To test this hypothesis, juvenile zebrafish (45 days post fertilization) were fed a basal Se-adequate diet or a basal Se-deficient diet, or them supplemented with an antioxidant (DL-α-tocopherol acetate, designed as VE) or a TOR activator (MHY1485) for 30 days. Zebrafish fed Se-deficient diets exhibited a clear Se-deficient status in skeletal muscle, which was not influenced by dietary VE and MHY1485. Se deficiency significantly elevated ROS concentrations, inhibited Akt activity and TORC1 pathway, suppressed protein synthesis in skeletal muscle, and impaired hypertrophy of skeletal muscle fibers. However, these negative effects of Se deficiency were partly (except that on ROS concentration) alleviated by dietary MHY1485 and completely alleviated by dietary VE. These data strongly support our speculation that Se deficiency-induced high concentration of ROS exerts a clear inhibiting effect on TORC1 pathway-mediated protein synthesis by regulating Akt activity, thereby restricting the hypertrophy of skeletal muscle fibers in fish. Our findings provide a mechanistic explanation for Se deficiency-caused retardation of fish skeletal muscle growth, contributing to a better understanding of the nutritional necessity and regulatory mechanisms of Se in fish muscle physiology.

A single-stage accelerator mass spectrometer (GXNU-AMS) developed for radiocarbon and tritium measurements was installed and commissioned at Guangxi Normal University in 2017. After several years of operational and methodological upgrades, its performance has been continuously improved and applied in multidisciplinary fields. Currently, the measurement sensitivity for radiocarbon and tritium is 14C/12C ∼ (3.14 ± 0.05) ×10–15 and 3H/1H ∼ (1.23 ± 0.17)×10–16, respectively, and the measurement accuracy is ∼0.6%, which can meet the measurement requirements in the nuclear, earth, environmental and life science fields. This study presents the performance characteristics of GXNU-AMS and several interesting application studies.

The Moral Foreign Language Effect (MFLE) is characterized by increased utilitarian decision-making when bilinguals respond to moral dilemmas in their foreign language. While previous research has given us a better understanding of this phenomenon, few studies have investigated how foreign language experience influences the MFLE. The present study investigated whether differences in foreign language proficiency, immersion, or dominance modulated the emergence of the MFLE. Mandarin–English bilingual young adults responded to a series of moral dilemmas in either their native or foreign language. Participants also provided ratings of permissibility and distress after reading each dilemma. We report a dilemma-specific MFLE that was modulated by differences in foreign language experience. Most significant was the observation that separable dimensions of foreign language experience interact when modulating the MFLE in a manner that is dilemma-specific. These findings emphasize the importance of considering differences in foreign language experience across multiple dimensions when investigating the MFLE.

The deformation, movement and breakup of a wall-attached droplet subject to Couette flow are systematically investigated using an enhanced lattice Boltzmann colour-gradient model, which accounts for not only the viscoelasticity (described by the Oldroyd-B constitutive equation) of either droplet (V/N) or matrix fluid (N/V) but also the surface wettability. We first focus on the steady-state deformation of a sliding droplet for varying values of capillary number ($Ca$), Weissenberg number ($Wi$) and solvent viscosity ratio ($\beta$). Results show that the relative wetting area $A_r$ in the N/V system is increased by either increasing $Ca$, or by increasing $Wi$ or decreasing $\beta$, where the former is attributed to the increased viscous force and the latter to the enhanced elastic effects. In the V/N system, however, $A_r$ is restrained by the droplet elasticity, especially at higher $Wi$ or lower $\beta$, and the inhibiting effect strengthens with an increase of $Ca$. Decreasing $\beta$ always reduces droplet deformation when either fluid is viscoelastic. The steady-state droplet motion is quantified by the contact-line capillary number $Ca_{cl}$, and a force balance is established to successfully predict the variations of $Ca_{cl}/Ca$ with $\beta$ for each two-phase viscosity ratio in both N/V and V/N systems. The droplet breakup is then studied for varying $Wi$. The critical capillary number of droplet breakup monotonically increases with $Wi$ in the N/V system, while it first increases, then decreases and finally reaches a plateau in the V/N system.

Germplasm innovation can provide materials for breeding sugarcane cultivars. Saccharum officinarum is the main source of high-sugar and high-yield genes in sugarcane breeding. ‘Nobilization’ is the theoretical basis for exploiting S. officinarum, and S. officinarum authenticity directly affects sugarcane nobility breeding efficiency. Herein, the authenticity of 22 SLC-series S. officinarum clones imported from Sri Lanka and preserved in the China National Germplasm Repository of Sugarcane (NGRS) was explored by four-primer amplification-arrested mutation PCR (ARMS PCR) and somatic chromosome number counting. The amplified bands from SLC 08 120 and SLC 08 131 were the same with those from S. officinarum clone Badila, i.e. a common band of 428 bp and a S. officinarum-specific band of 278 bp, hence they were tentatively assigned as S. officinarum clones. The other 20 SLC clones had both 278 bp (S. officinarum-specific) and 203 bp (S. spontaneum-specific) bands, which are hybrid characteristics. In addition, the chromosome numbers of SLC 08 120 and SLC 08 131 are both 80, belong to typical S. officinarum. While the chromosome numbers of the other 20 materials are ranging from 101 to 129, consistent with hybrids of S. officinarum and S. spontaneum. This molecular cytological characterization indicates that among the 22 introduced SLC-series clones, only two, SLC 08 120 and SLC 08 131, were S. officinarum. Future agronomic trait and resistance analyses could facilitate their use as crossing parents in sugarcane breeding.

Almost all creatinine is excreted by the kidney in individuals. Serum creatinine concentration, a widely used renal function index in clinical practice, can be affected by both genetic and environmental factors, as evidenced by current research exploring the relationship between these factors and kidney function. However, few studies have explored the heritability of serum creatinine in Asian populations. Therefore, we explored the genetic and environmental factors that affect the serum creatinine level in Asian populations. Participants in this study came from the Qingdao Twin Registry in China, and 374 pairs of twins were included, of which 139 pairs were dizygotic twins, whose ages ranged from 40 to 80 years old, and the serum creatinine level ranged from 10 to 126 μmol/L. Structural equation models were constructed using Mx software to calculate heritability, with adjusted covariates being age, sex, and body mass index. The results of heritability analysis showed that ACE was the best fit model. Serum creatinine level is influenced by genetic and environmental factors. The result of heritability was 35.44%, and the influence of shared environmental factors accounted for 52.13%. This study provided the relevant basis for future research on genetic and environmental factors affecting serum creatinine levels in Asian populations.

The concentration of suspended particulate organic carbon (POC) and its carbon isotopic composition (δ13CPOC) were analysed in this study with the aim of exploring the sources and factors influencing levels of POC in the surface water around the Antarctic Peninsula. The scanning electron microscopy results suggest that diatom particles formed the main component of suspended particulate matter, indicating that POC was mainly from in situ primary production. The high concentrations of chlorophyll a and POC in sea water mainly occurred in nearshore and sea-ice edge regions, which might be controlled by nutrient and reactive iron inputs stemming from sea-ice melting. The δ13CPOC in the study area is significantly lower than that in low-latitude waters, with a range of -31.8‰ to -22.8‰ (mean -28.9‰), which was controlled by the high CO2 concentration in the Southern Ocean and might be influenced by phytoplankton growth rates and assemblages. This study helps us to understand material cycling in the Antarctic region under the conditions of global climate change.

This study aims to understand the epidemiological characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the paediatric population during the outbreak of the Omicron variant in Shanghai. We retrospectively analysed the population-based epidemiological characteristics and clinical outcome of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant infection in children in Minhang District, Shanghai, based on the citywide surveillance system during the outbreak period in 2022 (March to May). During this time, a total of 63,969 cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection were notified in Minhang District, out of which 4,652 (7.3%) were children and adolescents <18 years. The incidence rate of SARS-CoV-2 infections in children was 153 per 10,000. Of all paediatric cases, 50% reported to be clinically symptomatic within 1–3 days after PCR confirmation by parents or themselves, with 36.3% and 18.9% of paediatric cases reporting fever and cough. Also, 58.4% of paediatric cases had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and 52.1% had received two doses of the COVID-19 vaccination. Our findings are informative for the implementation of appropriate measures to protect children from the threat of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

The analytical expression of driving force is helpful to quickly plan the kinematic trajectory of parallel mechanism for automatic drilling and riveting. For parallel posture alignment mechanism, because of its closed-loop characteristics, the inverse dynamic solution is more complex, especially for parallel bracket with actuation redundancy. Considering that the telescopic rods are actually flexible parts, the dynamic analytical modeling is carried out with deformation supplementary equation. Taking the force at the spherical joint as the intermediate variable and the driving force of each active prismatic pair are analytically analyzed by vector cross-product. The modeling was verified by experiment. Compared with previous research methods, the analytical method proposed improves the solution accuracy of driving force slightly and reduces the driving force solution time by 56.28%, which is high efficiency. The maximum error percentage is 1.61%, and the experimental results show that the method of inverse dynamics modeling is practical. This paper can be used for driving force analysis of parallel posture alignment mechanism based on positioner in the field of aircraft assembly.

My 5 moments (M5M) was used less frequently among cleaning staff members, suggesting that a poor compliance score in this group may not indicate deficient handwashing. This quasi-experimental study compared hand hygiene compliance (HHC), hand hygiene (HH) moments, and HH time distribution in the control group (no HH intervention; n = 21), case group 1 (normal M5M intervention; n = 26), case group 2 (extensive novel six moments (NSM) training; n = 24), and case group 3 (refined NSM training; n = 18). The intervention’s effect was evaluated after 3 months. The HHC gap among the four groups gradually increased in the second intervention month (control group, 31.43%; case group 1, 38.74%; case group 2, 40.19%; case group 3, 52.21%; p < 0.05). After the intervention period, the HHC of case groups 2 and 3 improved significantly from the baseline (23.85% vs. 59.22%, 27.41% vs. 83.62%, respectively; p < 0.05). ‘After transferring medical waste from the site’ had the highest HHC in case group 3, 90.72% (95% confidence interval, 0.1926–0.3967). HH peak hours were from 6 AM to 9 AM and 2 PM to 3 PM. The study showed that the implementation of an NSM practice can serve as an HHC monitoring indicator and direct relevant training interventions to improve HH among hospital cleaning staff.

Sleep apnea is one of the most common sleep disorders. The consequences of undiagnosed sleep apnea can be very serious, increasing the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and Alzheimer’s disease over a long period of time. However, many people are often unaware of their condition. The gold standard for diagnosing sleep apnea is nighttime polysomnography monitoring in a specialized sleep laboratory. However, these diagnoses are expensive and the number of beds is limited, and there is insufficient monitoring in terms of time dimension. Existing methods for automated detection use no more than three physiological signals, but all other signals are also associated with the patient’s sleep. In addition, the limited amount of medical real annotation data, especially abnormal samples, lead to weak model generalization capability. The gap between model generalization capability and medical field needs still exists. In this paper, we propose a method for integrating medical interpretation rules into a long short-term memory neural network based on self-attention with multichannel respiratory signals as input. We obtain attention weights through a token-level attention mechanism and then extract key rules of medical interpretation to assist the weights, improving model generalization and reducing the dependence on data volume. Compared with the best prediction performance of existing methods, the average improvements of our method in accuracy, precision, and f1-score are 3.26%, 7.03%, and 1.78%, respectively. The algorithm tested the performance of our model on the Sleep Heart Health Study data set and found that the model outperformed existing methods and could help physicians make decisions in their practices.

How do corporate political ties impact firm performance in a transition economy? This topic has attracted wide attention in the strategy field. Accordingly, our study replicates a highly influential study, ‘Managerial ties and firm performance in a transition economy: The nature of a micro-macro link’ (Peng & Luo, 2000). The original study found that managerial political ties greatly improve organizational performance, and that this ‘micro-macro’ link varies across ownership types, business sectors, firm sizes, and industry growth rates. This replication study offers a hierarchical view of political ties by extending it from the individual to the organizational level and explores the complex link between the two levels of corporate political ties and firm performance. The results of a staged quasi-replication exercise show some similarities with the original study in the mechanism of corporate political ties on firm performance but, more importantly, reveal some key differences in the effect size and contingent effects. Furthermore, an extended test shows that corporate political ties are multilevel, and different levels of political ties vary in their mechanisms and effects on firm performance. The findings reveal temporal and contextual sensitivities of political ties studies in transition economies.

When motile algal cells are exposed to gyrotactic torques, their swimming directions are guided to form radial accumulation, well known as hydrodynamic focusing. The origin of hydrodynamic focusing from the effects of active swimming, ambient flow and particle anisotropy is elucidated in the present study on the pre-asymptotic dispersion of active particles through a vertical pipe. With an extension of the Galerkin method to pipe flows, time-dependent solutions directly from the Smoluchowski equation in the position and orientation space are derived by series expansions of spherical harmonics and Bessel functions. Ballistic and diffusive scaling laws are examined with the predominance of self-propelled swimming, and computation is validated against an explicit benchmark solution and Lagrangian particle simulation. In the limit of extreme shear, the competitive roles of shear dispersion and Brownian rotation are reflected concretely in the pre-asymptotic phase of hydrodynamic focusing. For flows with various shear strengths, a concentration peak in near-wall regions with a smooth transition to hydrodynamic focusing is illustrated with richer phenomena in upwelling and downwelling flows. A newly observed regime through a vertical pipe, named transient effective trapping, is revealed as a transitional mode towards hydrodynamic focusing. The pre-asymptotic approach to hydrodynamic focusing is elaborated intensively through extensive solutions of concentration moments and macroscopic transport coefficients characterised by swimming and flow Péclet numbers. The unique findings for the origin of hydrodynamic focusing could provide insight into related micro-algae reactor technology and contribute to flow control and biomass transfer in confined environments.

Horses and chariots played a crucial social, cultural and military role in the emergence and development of early states in China. Little research, however, has explored the life histories of individual chariot horses or assessed their role as working animals. Here, the authors present a detailed zooarchaeological and palaeopathological study of eight adult male horses, used for pulling chariots, recovered from a single chariot-horse pit at the burial site of Shijia in north-western China. The characterisation of key osteological differences between chariot horses and ridden horses is offered as a contribution to the toolkit available for the archaeological investigation of human-horse interactions around the globe.

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Self-monitoring (SM) improves adherence to low-fat low-calorie (LFLC) diet for weight management. Ketogenic diet (KD) is a promising alternative to LFLC, however, it is unclear whether SM improves KD adherence. We examined the association between SM and KD adherence during the first 12 weeks of a 6-month technology-assisted lifestyle intervention. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: We included 30 (50.8 ± 12.4 years, 70% female) overweight/obese (body mass index: 37.1 ± 7.2 kg/m2) participants in the analysis. They received personalized KD goals with very low-carbohydrate (22–62 g/d), moderate protein (52 -87 g/d), and high-fat (115 - 219g/d) and calorie intake goals (1338–2554 kcal/d). Additionally, participants performed daily diet, exercise, and weight SM. Adherence to KD was measured by (1) self-monitored dietary intake, and (2) percent of days in ketosis state (blood ketone≥0.5 mmol/L) captured by a fingerstick blood ketone meter. SM frequency was defined as percent of days participant logged food intake, wore fitness tracker, and weighed body weight. Pearson correlation coefficients were computed to examine the correlation between SM in diet, exercise, and weight with KD adherence. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Percentage of days participants SM for diet, exercise, and weight was 58.4 ± 32.2%, 66.4 ± 30.9%, and 59.0 ± 32.6%, respectively. Correlational analysis more frequent diet SM was positively correlated with more days in ketosis (r = 0.58, p = 0.003), higher fat intake (r = 0.68, p = 0.0001), and higher calorie intake (r = 0.67, p = 0.002) within the fat and calorie goals set; more frequent weight SM was positively correlated with more days in ketosis (r = 0.48, p = 0.02), higher fat intake (r = 0.45, p = 0.023), and higher calorie intake (r = 0.44, p = 0.027). DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: We found that diet and weight SM were positively associated with fat and calorie intake, as well as days in ketosis. Given the reported promising effect of KD on weight loss and the challenges of adhering to KD, our findings suggested that promoting SM on diet and weight might be a promising avenue for improving KD adherence leading to successful weight loss.