Maternal pre-pregnancy body mass index and risk of preterm birth: a collaboration using large routine health datasets

Background: Preterm birth (PTB) is a leading cause of child morbidity and mortality. Evidence suggests an increased risk with both maternal underweight and obesity, with some studies suggesting underweight might be a greater factor in spontaneous PTB (SPTB) and that the relationship might vary by parity. Previous studies have largely explored established body mass index (BMI) categories. Our aim was to compare associations of maternal pre-pregnancy BMI with any PTB, SPTB and medically indicated PTB (MPTB) among nulliparous and parous women across populations with differing characteristics, and to identify the optimal BMI with lowest risk for these outcomes. Methods: We used three UK datasets, two USA datasets and one each from South Australia, Norway and Denmark, together including just under 29 million pregnancies resulting in a live birth or stillbirth after 24 completed weeks gestation. Fractional polynomial multivariable logistic regression was used to examine the relationship of maternal BMI with any PTB, SPTB and MPTB, among nulliparous and parous women separately. The results were combined using a random effects meta-analysis. The estimated BMI at which risk was lowest was calculated via differentiation and a 95% confidence interval (CI) obtained using bootstrapping. Results: We found non-linear associations between BMI and all three outcomes, across all datasets. The adjusted risk of any PTB and MPTB was elevated at both low and high BMIs, whereas the risk of SPTB was increased at lower levels of BMI but remained low or increased only slightly with higher BMI. In the meta-analysed data, the lowest risk of any PTB was at a BMI of 22.5 kg/m2 (95% CI 21.5, 23.5) among nulliparous women and 25.9 kg/m2 (95% CI 24.1, 31.7) among multiparous women, with values of 20.4 kg/m2 (20.0, 21.1) and 22.2 kg/m2 (21.1, 24.3), respectively, for MPTB; for SPTB, the risk remained roughly largely constant above a BMI of around 25–30 kg/m2 regardless of parity. Conclusions: Consistency of findings across different populations, despite differences between them in terms of the time period covered, the BMI distribution, missing data and control for key confounders, suggests that severe under- and overweight may play a role in PTB risk

OLBS: Oblivious Location-Based Services

With the growing use of mobile devices, location-based services (LBS) are becoming increasingly popular. BLS deliver accurate services to individuals according to their geographical locations, but privacy issues have been the primary concerns of users. Privacy-preserving LBS (PPLBS) were proposed to protect location privacy, but there are still some problems: 1) a semi-trusted third party (STTP) is required to blur users\u27 locations; 2) both the computation and communication costs of generating a query are linear with the size of queried areas; 3) the schemes were not formally treated, in terms of definition, security model, security proof, etc. In this paper, to protect location privacy and improve query efficiency, an oblivious location-based services (OLBS) scheme is proposed. Our scheme captures the following features: 1) an STTP is not required; 2) users can query services without revealing their exact location information; 3) the service provider only knows the size of queried areas and nothing else; and 4) both the computation and communication costs of generating a query is constant, instead of linear with the size of queried areas. We formalise both the definition and security model of our OLBS scheme, and propose a concrete construction. Furthermore, the implementation is conducted to show its efficiency. The security of our scheme is reduced to well-known complexity assumptions. The novelty is to reduce the computation and communication costs of generating a query and enable the service provider to obliviously generate decrypt keys for queried services. This contributes to the growing work of formalising PPLBS schemes and improving query efficiency

Early dextral shear motion during the breakup of East Gondwana documented in clastic dykes in the Tethys Himalaya

Much of the geological record of the northern Indian passive continental margin has been lost due to erosion or obscured due to tectonic burial associated with the India-Eurasia collision. Consequently, tectonic models of India\u27s breakup from East Gondwana incorporate limited data from the northern margin of Greater India. We present evidence of the Late Jurassic clastic dykes crosscutting contemporaneous sedimentary sequences in the Tethys Himalaya. We propose that the original orientation of the clastic dykes provides kinematic information about Greater India\u27s breakup from East Gondwana. The clastic dykes are meters to hundreds of meters long and centimeters to meters wide. They taper downwards and crosscut country rocks at high angles. The clastic dykes and their host strata are quartzose sandstones and share similar textures and detrital zircon age populations (dominantly 600–500 Ma and 1000–800 Ma zircon grains). These similarities indicate the clastic dykes and their host rocks share a common source as well as comparable transport and deposition dynamics. Notably, the clastic dykes lack distinct signs of ptygmatic folds, shale/mudrock clasts, surface orientated structures, or bifurcations on dyke margins. Decompaction and structural restoration of the sequences show that the sandstone dykes/fractures and en échelon dyke arrays can be classified into three distinct orientation groups NW (349° − 295°), SW (∼210°) and NE (∼40°). There is no apparent difference in the age or provenance of the clastic material within the different orientation groups. We propose that the clastic dykes signify passively infilled tensile fractures formed within a NW-SE dextral strike-slip megashear system during the Late Jurassic. This system likely developed in a transform zone within Greater India prior to the separation of the Indian Plate from East Gondwana

Neurodesk: an accessible, flexible and portable data analysis environment for reproducible neuroimaging

Neuroimaging research requires purpose-built analysis software, which is challenging to install and may produce different results across computing environments. The community-oriented, open-source Neurodesk platform (https://www.neurodesk.org/) harnesses a comprehensive and growing suite of neuroimaging software containers. Neurodesk includes a browser-accessible virtual desktop, command-line interface and computational notebook compatibility, allowing for accessible, flexible, portable and fully reproducible neuroimaging analysis on personal workstations, high-performance computers and the cloud

A low-complexity DOA estimation algorithm using UAMP with Bernoulli-Gaussian prior

In this paper, we design a low-complexity direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm based on the unitary approximate message passing (UAMP) and Bernoulli-Gaussian (BG) prior. We first show that the estimation of DOA can be transferred into a sparse signal recovery problem, where we turn to UAMP with damping technique to solve this problem. Furthermore, we assume the BG prior on the sparse vector to be estimated, resulting in the fast estimation of the positions of non-zero elements. Moreover, expectation maximum (EM) is leveraged to automatically learn the BG parameters. Compared to the state-of-the-art UAMP-based algorithm with sparse Bayesian learning (SBL), the proposed approach can achieve the same DOA mean square error (MSE) performance with a much faster convergence speed

A communication link lifetime prediction-supported V2V partial computation offloading scheme for autonomous driving

Vehicle Edge Computing (VEC) is a promising technique to improve the quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) in autonomous driving by exploiting the resources at the network edge. However, the high mobility of the vehicles leads to stochastic communication link duration, and the tasks generated by various applications in autonomous driving incur fierce competition for resources. These challenges cause excessive task completion delays. In this paper, we propose a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) partial computation offloading scheme that leverages the prediction results of the communication link lifetime between vehicles. A History track, Current interactions and Future planning trajectory-aware Gated Recurrent Units (HCF-GRU) network is built to capture the essential factors to improve the prediction accuracy. Then, we design a GRU-based Proximal Policy Optimization (GRU-PPO) algorithm to obtain an optimal one-to-many offloading decision to minimize the task execution cost. The HCF-GRU prediction algorithm is evaluated on a real world vehicle trajectory dataset, and the performance of the GRU-PPO algorithm is analyzed on extensive numerical simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that our prediction network and offloading decision algorithm outperform the baseline methods in terms of prediction accuracy and task execution cost

Investigating shear behaviour of fibreglass rock bolts reinforcing infilled discontinuities for various pretension loads

In this paper, eight shear tests were carried out utilising a double shear with infilled shear interfaces after determining an appropriate experimental design and modified testing scheme. For this, two rock bolts, 20 and 30 tonnes, were tested with modified double shear testing apparatus at different pretension loads. The infilled test scheme was conducted with 5 mm thick sandy clay infilled shear interfaces. A 40 MPa small aggregate concrete was used for all samples to simulate the host rock. Based on the shear profiles, it was found that all samples followed a three-part failure profile consisting of elastic, strain softening, and failure regions. The results of double shear tests revealed that the 20 tonne rock bolt saw a significant overall decrease of approximately 30% in its failure displacement response as opposed to the 30 tonne samples, which saw a 6% increase. Also, it was concluded that the 30 tonne samples outperformed the 20 tonne rock bolts by up to 30%, irrespective of initial pretension settings. Comparing the physical failure characteristics of the samples found that both the 20 and 30 tonne samples exhibited the same response to increased pretension. As the pretension increased, the angle experienced at the hinge point also increased incrementally

Minimizing gold amount by alloying silver in hard gold

A novel Au–Ag alloy coating was investigated as a contact in electrical circuits to reduce Au usage. The Ag content in the coating varied with the current density and Ag concentration in the plating solution, and the effects of different Ag concentrations on the coating characteristics were explored to optimize the Ag content. Increasing the current density to 1 A/dm2 decreased the Ag atomic percentage, which remained stable at current densities higher than 1 A/dm2. The addition of Ag to the plating solution increased the amount of Ag in the electrodeposit, and the current efficiency of alloy electrodeposition increased with increasing Ag concentration. The structure of the coatings was investigated via phase identification, morphological observation, and surface roughness determination. The Au–Ag alloy coatings generally showed decreasing contact resistance with increasing Ag content, and the Au–Ag alloy coating with 6.9 at.% Ag showed higher hardness than pure Au. The hardness was slightly reduced with the addition of more than 6.9 at.% Ag, before abruptly decreasing at 58.2 at.% Ag. The influence of Ag content integrated with self-assembled monolayer as a corrosion inhibitor on corrosion resistance was also ascertained

Multifunctional Separator Enables High-Performance Sodium Metal Batteries in Carbonate-Based Electrolytes

Sodium metal has become one of the most promising anodes for next-generation cheap and high-energy-density metal batteries; however, challenges caused by the uncontrollable sodium dendrite growth and fragile solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) restrict their large-scale practical applications in low-cost and wide-voltage-window carbonate electrolytes. Herein, a novel multifunctional separator with lightweight and high thinness is proposed, assembled by the cobalt-based metal–organic framework nanowires (Co-NWS), to replace the widely applied thick and heavy glass fiber separator. Benefitting from its abundant sodiophilic functional groups and densely stacked nanowires, Co-NWS not only exhibits outstanding electrolyte wettability and effectively induces uniform Na+ ion flux as a strong ion redistributor but also favors constructing the robust N,F-rich SEI layer. Satisfactorily, with 10 µL carbonate electrolyte, a Na|Co-NWS|Cu half-cell delivers stable cycling (over 260 cycles) with a high average Coulombic efficiency of 98%, and the symmetric cell shows a long cycle life of more than 500 h. Remarkably, the full cell shows a long-term life span (over 1500 cycles with 92% capacity retention) at high current density in the carbonate electrolyte. This work opens up a strategy for developing dendrite-free, low-cost, and long-life-span sodium metal batteries in carbonate-based electrolytes

Topological Vortex Domain Engineering for High Dielectric Energy Storage Performance

Enhancing the energy storage performance of dielectric material through the adoption of a novel domain strategy is highly desirable. In this study, Bi0.5Na0.5TiO3-based thin films are fabricated with topological vortex domains (VDs) by controlling the grain size and investigated the correlation between these VDs and the macroscopic polarization response, which is crucial for the energy storage performance. The emergence of VDs, in contrast to conventional ferroelectric domains, promotes polarization reversal in dielectric materials. Additionally, in contrast to the severely reduced saturation polarization typically noted in conventional relaxor ferroelectrics (RFE), the presence of VDs in RFE leads to only a slight reduction in saturation polarization. These two advantages contribute to the superior energy storage performance of the films with VDs. This approach offers a novel and promising direction for developing dielectrics with high-energy storage capabilities