：Vegetation blanket restoration techniques of different materials in mine drainage field provide different environments for plant growth, but effects of vegetation blanket cover on soil microbial community structure and their diversity characteristics were not well known， especially in arid areas. In this study, high-throughput sequencing was used on the study site, located at Dafeng Mine, the Helan Mountains, Ningxia, China. Soil microbial communities were analyzed under four different treatments: Straw, Straw-Coir, Coir vegetation blanket types, and a bare soil control. The results showed that the contents of soil total nitrogen, available potassium, urease, and catalase were significantly increased in different types of vegetation blankets. High-throughput sequencing showed that the straw vegetation blanket increased bacterial diversity while the coir vegetation blanket increased fungal diversity. The dominant bacterial phyla were Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Actinobacteria, and Chloroflexi, whose main influencing factors were total nitrogen, catalase, urease, and protease. The dominant fungal phylum was Ascomycota, whose main influencing factors were alkaline phosphatase, soil organic carbon, total nitrogen, and electrical conductance. These results indicate that vegetation blanket cover can improve the physicochemical properties of soil, increase the diversity and richness of soil microorganisms, and improve the structural composition of the community, thus improving the soil environment in the mining areas in arid regions, while laying a good foundation for further restoration measures.

Background: In low-income nations, Rheumatic valvular heart disease remains a major cause of morbidity and premature deaths. Accurate prevalence data in Egypt are still lacking yet highly desirable to facilitate health care planning. Methodology: An cluster sample of school children in eastern Egyptian Governorates was examined clinically and echocardiographically (using abbreviated protocol) for detection of rheumatic valvular heart disease based on 2012 World Heart Federation criteria (the Doppler and the morphological criteria) for diagnosis. According to echocardiography interpretation, participants were categorized as having definite RHD, borderline RHD or no RHD. Results: A total A total of 1680 students aged between 6 and 18 years were screened, 119 echocardiographic studies were non-interpretable; so, a total of 1560 studies were evaluated. From the total screened students, 1560 studies were adequate and interpretable according to the criteria specified in the methods section. This revealed a prevalence of 2.3% of the sample with RHD without adding the equivocal cases. The most prevalent lesion as detected by echocardiography was mitral regurgitation (29% of definite RHD cases). Conclusion: Rheumatic valvular heart disease remains prevalent in Egypt and the findings of this study should influence early detection, primary and secondary prevention, and adequate future national health plans.

A document by Stéphane Coupé. Click on the document to view its contents.

High-temperature damage characteristics related to the deformation behavior of Sanicro25 alloy were investigated under cyclic loading. The results show that the high mean stress can lead to creep-like deformation behavior. The increase of mean stress increased the strain rate and weakened the life. Comparatively, the increase in stress amplitude only accelerated the third-regime strain rate, leading to a decrease in life and fracture strain. Under different stress amplitudes, microcrack initiation at Z phase interfaces can be certified by observing micropore and high geometrically necessary dislocation (GND) density around Z phase. Subsequently, the increase in stress amplitude can significantly affect crack propagation. Under constant loading ( σ a =0MPa ), the recrystallization of the transgranular crack tip at the grain boundary can change the tendency of crack propagation, making crack propagation along the grain boundaries. Conversely, transgranular cracks can continue to propagate, assisted by intragranular dislocation accumulation at higher stress amplitude ( σ a =130MPa ).

Biodiversity may increase ecosystem resilience. However, we have limited understanding if this holds true for ecosystems that respond to gradual environmental change with abrupt shifts to an alternative state. We used a mathematical model of anoxic-oxic regime shifts and explored how trait diversity in three groups of bacteria influences resilience. We found that trait diversity did not always increase resilience: greater diversity in two of the groups increased but in one group decreased resilience of their preferred ecosystem state. We also found that simultaneous trait diversity in multiple groups often led to reduced or erased diversity effects. Overall, our results suggest that higher diversity can increase resilience but can also promote collapse when diversity occurs in a functional group that negatively influences the state it occurs in. We propose this mechanism as a potential management approach to facilitate the recovery of a desired ecosystem state.

Visual attention is mainly goal-directed and allocated based on the upcoming action to be performed. However, it is unclear how far this feature of gaze behavior generalizes in more naturalistic settings. The present study investigates active inference processes revealed by eye movements during interaction with familiar and novel tools with two levels of realism of the action affordance. In a between-subject design, a cohort of participants interacted with a VR controller in a low realism environment; another performed the task with an interaction setup that allowed differentiated hand and finger movements in a high-realism environment. We investigated the differences in odds of fixations and their eccentricity towards the tool parts before action initiation. The results show that participants fixate more on the tool’s effector part before action initiation when asked to use the tool and during interaction with unfamiliar tools. The spatial viewing bias on the tool reveals early fixations are influenced by the task and the familiarity of the tools. Our findings suggest that fixations are made in a task-oriented way to plan the intended action well before action initiation. With more realistic action affordances, more fixations were allocated toward the tool handle. We hypothesize that these fixations are made towards the proximal goal of planning the grasp even though the perceived action on the tools is identical for both experimental setups. Taken together, proximal and distal goal-oriented planning is contextualized to the realism of action/interaction afforded by an environment.

This case report describes a 21-year-old orthodontic patient experienced the external apical root resorption of maxillary central incisors with pulpitis during the orthodontic movement. The active cooperation of orthodontists and endodontists demonstrated the satisfactory treatment outcome and prevention of further apical root resorption.

Background and Purpose: How to prevent the damage of ionizing radiation to testis has become an urgent problem to be solved. The present aim is to investigate whether inhibition of p38MAPK signaling can alleviate radiation-induced testicular damage. Experimental Approaches: HE staining was used to measure the morphological changes of epididymis and testis. Immunohistochemistry staining was used to assess the expression of PLZF, SOX9, p-p38MAPK. RNA-Seq was used to profile gene expression. The expression of Mapk14, Atf2, Ddit3 and Ap1m1 genes was detected by qPCR. Western blotting was used to detect the protein expression of p38MAPK and p-p38MAPK. Key Results: There was a dose-response relationship between testicular injury and ionizing radiation. The sperm quality was significantly decreased at 6 and 8 weeks after 6Gy of radiation. Radiation led to the decrease of PLZF+ cells and increase of SOX9+ cells in testis. RNA-Seq data showed radiation induced 969 genes changed in the testis. The expression of genes related to p38MAPK signal pathway enriched by GO was significantly increased by qPCR. The expression of p-p38MAPK in testis was significantly increased at 4 weeks after irradiation. SB203580 treatment increased numbers of spermatozoa, the area and diameter of seminiferous tubules and numbers of SOX9+ cells in irradiated mice, which were consistent with the increased sperm movement rate and density under radiation with SB203580 administration. Conclusions and Implications: Ionizing radiation significantly changes testicular gene expression, in which p38MAPK signal pathway is activated. p38MAPK inhibitor SB203580 partially alleviates the testicular damage caused by radiation and accelerate the recovery of sperm quality.

Patents show how technology evolves in most scientific fields over time. The best way to use this valuable knowledge base is to use efficient and effective information retrieval and searches for related prior art. Patent classification, i.e., assigning a patent to one or more predefined categories, is a fundamental step towards synthesizing the information content of an invention. To this end, architectures based on Transformers, especially those derived from the BERT family have already been proposed in the literature and they have shown remarkable results by setting a new state-of-the-art performance for the classification task. Here, we study how domain adaptation can push the performance boundaries in patent classification by rigorously evaluating and implementing a collection of recent transfer learning techniques, e.g., domain-adaptive pretraining and adapters. Our analysis shows how leveraging these advancements enables the development of state-of-the-art models with increased precision, recall, and F1-score. We base our evaluation on both standard patent classification datasets derived from patent offices-defined code hierarchies and more practical real-world use-case scenarios containing labels from the agrochemical industrial domain. The application of these domain adapted techniques to patent classification in a multilingual setting is also examined and evaluated.

Carpal tunnel release must be preceded by complete investigation to avoid misdiagnosis and surgical complications

Leading edge erosion of wind turbine blades is one of the most critical issues in wind energy production, resulting in lower efficiency, as well as increased maintenance costs and downtime. Erosion is initiated by impacts from rain droplets and other atmospheric particles, so to protect the blades special protective coatings are applied to increase their lifetime without adding significantly to the weight or friction of the blade. These coatings should ideally absorb and distribute the force away from the point of impact, however, microscopic defects, such as bubbles, reduce the mechanical performance of the coating, leading to cracks and eventually erosion. In this work, Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is investigated for non-destructive, contactless inspection of coated glass-fiber composite samples to identify subsurface coating defects. The samples were tested using rubber projectiles to simulate rain droplet and particle impacts. The samples were subsequently imaged using both OCT, optical microscopy, and X-ray tomography. OCT scanning revealed both bubbles and cracks below the surface, which would not have been detected using ultrasonic or similar non-destructive methods. In this way, OCT can complement the existing quality control in turbine blade manufacturing, help improve the blade lifetime, and reduce the environmental impact from erosion.

Percheron’s artery (PA) occlusion is an uncommon type of stroke involving paramedian thalamus and/or midbrain infarction. It accounts for 4-18% of all thalamic infarcts and 0.1-2% of all strokes. Its clinical manifestations are variable and its mode of presentation as Weber’s syndrome is exceptional due to the unusual clinical presentatio

Digital twin (DT) has been around for many years, but there is no widely accepted standardized tool or method. In this study, system dynamics was proposed as a tool that can be integrated into multi-scale, multi-physics, and multi-disciplinary, which are continuously becoming issues in the DT field. Various heterogeneous data from multiple protocols or platforms could be integrated into one model. Through the five-step model building process, it was possible to integrate the theories and various models studied in the past. In this study, the operation and maintenance system of ROK Naval ships is implemented as a proposed method. Various physics, scales, and disciplines such as failures of ships, maintenance ability of repair shops and schedule pressure of mechanics were reflected. It was possible to observe non-intuitive correlations and potential problems caused by the latent effect of the high-fidelity DT model. The proposed method is also capable of updating through continuous data calibration or real-time interworking with external statistical analysis tools.

In the wave of the Internet era created by computer and communication technology, flexible sensors play an important role in accurately collecting information owing to their excellent flexibility, ductility, freeform bending or folding, and versatile structural shapes. By endowing elastomeric polymers with conductivity, researchers have recently devoted extensive efforts toward developing high-performance flexible sensors based on elastomeric conductive layers and exploring their potential applications in diverse fields ranging from project manufacturing to daily life. This review reports the recent advancements in elastomeric polymers used to make conductive layers, as well as the relationships between elastomeric polymers and the performance and application of flexible sensors are comprehensively summarized. First, the principles and methods for using elastomeric polymers to construct conductive layers are provided. Then, the fundamental design, unique properties, and underlying mechanisms in different flexible sensors (pressure/strain, temperature, humidity) and their related applications are revealed. Finally, this review concludes with a perspective on the challenges and future directions of high-performance flexible sensors.

A computational study of Non-Newtonian (Casson) free convective MHD unsteady fluid flow has been highlighted in this article with mass and heat transit property through a vertical infinite porous plate. A sinusoidal boundary conditions have been considered as well as chemical reaction and thermal radiation. Using a collection of non-dimensional variables, the flow related equations are also turned into non-dimensional form. The EFDM algorithm is employed in order to arrive at a numerical solution via Compaq Visual Fortran 6.6a. The reliability of the numerical solution has been confirmed using stability testing and convergence analysis. The whole system is convergent at the value of and . A visual depiction of the impact of the pertinent factors on dimensionless velocity, temperature, and concentration profiles is displayed along with thorough explanations and graphical representation as well as tabular representation. Key finding of this work is that when the magnetic component is regarded in sinusoidal form, it greatly affects the heat transfer factors of Casson fluid and the heat rises as the results of heat source parameter, radiation parameter and Eckert number. It is also found that the Sherwood number is increased as the impact of chemical reaction parameter and the Lewis number, also the skin friction is decreased as the influence of porosity term got accelerated. As a last step in verifying the earlier study, the present results are contrasted with the results that were previously published.

The evolution of body size, both within and between species, has been long predicted to be influenced by multifarious environmental factors. However, the specific drivers of body size variation have remained difficult to understand because of the wide range of proximate factors that consistently covary with ectotherm body sizes across populations with varying local environmental conditions. Here, we used a widely distributed lizard (Eremias argus) collected from different populations situated across China to assess how climatic conditions and/or available resources at different altitudes shape the geographical patterns of lizard body size across populations. We used body size data from locations differing in altitudes across China to construct linear mixed models to test the relationship between lizard body size and ecological and climate conditions across altitudes. Lizard populations showed significant differences in body size across altitudes. Furthermore, we found that variation in body size among populations was also explained by climatic and seasonal changes along the altitudinal gradient. Specifically, body size decreased with colder and drier environmental conditions at high altitudes, resulting in a reversal of Bergmann’s rule. Limited resources at high altitudes, as measured by net primary productivity, may also constrain body size. Therefore, our study demonstrates that the intraspecific variation in female lizards’ body size may be strongly influenced by multifarious local environments as adaptive plasticity for female organisms to possibly maximise reproductive ecology along geographic clines.

Texas horned lizards (Phrynosoma cornutum) have disappeared from many areas in Texas, especially from urbanized areas, probably in large part due to loss of suitable habitat. Our previous studies have found that horned lizards persist and occur at high densities in some small towns in southern Texas. Nevertheless, this species has continued to decline and disappear from these towns. Long-term data from Kenedy and Karnes City indicate that when study sites experienced significant shrub and vegetation removal horned lizards declined by 79%. We hypothesize this may in part be due to the degradation of the thermal landscape for these lizards. We determined the preferred temperature range (Tset25 −Tset75) of lizards at our study sites and took field measurements of body temperature (Tb). Temperature loggers were also placed in three microhabitats across our study sites. Shrubs and vegetation provided the highest quality thermal environment, especially for about 5 hours midday when temperatures in the open and buried under the surface exceeded the lizards’ critical maximum temperature (CTmax) or were above their preferred temperature range. Horned lizard density was positively related to the thermal quality of the habitat across our sites. Texas horned lizards in these towns require a heterogenous mix of closely spaced microhabitats and especially thermal refugia, such as shrubs and vegetation along fence lines and in open fields. Maintaining thermal refugia is one of the most important and practical conservation actions that can be taken to help small ectotherms persist in human modified landscapes and cope with increasing temperatures due to climate change.

Mucormycosis is a serious and relatively rare invasive fungal infection. The rhino-orbito-cerebral localization is the most frequent. Mucormycosis of external ear with facial palsy is extremely rare. We describe a case of auricular mucormycosis complicated by parotid abscess and facial palsy in a diabetic patient.