Epidemiological and Immunological Features of Obesity and SARS-CoV-2

Obesity is a key correlate of severe SARS-CoV-2 outcomes while the role of obesity on risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection, symptom phenotype, and immune response remain poorly defined. We examined data from a prospective SARS-CoV-2 cohort study to address these questions. Serostatus, body mass index, demographics, comorbidities, and prior COVID-19 compatible symptoms were assessed at baseline and serostatus and symptoms monthly thereafter. SARS-CoV-2 immunoassays included an IgG ELISA targeting the spike RBD, multiarray Luminex targeting 20 viral antigens, pseudovirus neutralization, and T cell ELISPOT assays. Our results from a large prospective SARS-CoV-2 cohort study indicate symptom phenotype is strongly influenced by obesity among younger but not older age groups; we did not identify evidence to suggest obese individuals are at higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection; and remarkably homogenous immune activity across BMI categories suggests immune protection across these groups may be similar

Mental Health Professionals’ Experience of Providing Tele-mental Health to Children and Adolescents during The COVID-19 Pandemic

The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of child and adolescent mental health professionals who transitioned to telemental health services during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Within the framework of qualitative research design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight licensed child/adolescent mental health professionals who transitioned to telemental health for the first time due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Descriptive phenomenological analysis revealed five major themes describing the experiences of the participants. These themes include the impact of providing telemental health on well-being of mental health professionals, challenges associated with transitioning to telemental health, challenges of providing mental health services to children and adolescents online, coping and adaptation to telemental health, and the benefits of telemental health to clients and mental health professionals during the pandemic. The findings highlight the need for mental health organizations and policymakers to create supportive environments and provide resources to support the well-being of mental health professionals during periods of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and identified several key factors that can help clinicians transition to telemental health. Limitations of the study include a small sample size, potential for self-selection bias, and the potential for researcher bias

Location-Aware Deep Interaction Forest for Web Service QoS Prediction

With the rapid development of the web service market, the number of web services shows explosive growth. QoS is an important factor in the recommendation scene; how to accurately recommend a high-quality service for users among the massive number of web services has become a tough problem. Previous methods usually acquired feature interaction information by network structures like DNN to improve the QoS prediction accuracy, but this generates unnecessary computations. Aiming at addressing the above problem, inspired by the multigrained scanning mechanism in a deep forest, we propose a location-aware deep interaction forest approach for web service QoS prediction (LDIF). This approach offers the following innovations: The model fuses the location similarity of users and services as a latent feature representation of them. In addition, we designed a scanning interaction structure (SIS), which obtains multiple local feature combinations from the interaction between user and service features, uses interactive computing to extract feature interaction information, and concatenates the feature interaction information with original features, which aims to enhance the dimension of the features. Equipped with these, we compose a layer-by-layer cascade by using SIS to fuse low- and high-order feature interaction information, and the early-stop mechanism controls the cascade depth to avoid unnecessary computation. The experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms eight other state-of-the-art methods on MAE and RMSE common metrics on real public datasets

The mitochondrial genome and phylogenetic position of a conehead katydid Euconocephalus pallidus (Insecta: Orthoptera)

The complete mitochondrial genome of a conehead katydid Euconocephalus pallidus was determined. The mitochondrial genome is 15,888 bp in size with an A + T content of 71.67%. It contains 13 protein-coding genes, 22 transfer RNA genes, two ribosomal RNA genes, and a control region. The order and orientation of these genes conform to the ancestral form of insects. Phylogenetic analysis supports a close relationship between E. pallidus and E. nasutus

Template-free synthesis and photocatalytic activity of CdS nanorings

Cadmium sulfide (CdS) nanorings were synthesized through a convenient and economical chemical bath deposition (CBD) process without the use of any surfactant and template. SEM and TEM studies reveal that these nanorings are composed of connected nanoparticles. A self-assembly mechanism was proposed for the formation process of these nanorings on the basis of a series of time-dependent experiments. Furthermore, the photodegradation of rhodamine B (RhB) demonstrated that the CdS nanorings exhibited enhanced photocatalytic activity than that of commercial CdS powders under irradiation of visible light, which is due to the small crystallites can provide more reactive sites for photocatalytic reaction and the nanoscale facilitates the transfer of photogenerated electron-hole pairs to the surface. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Materials Science, MultidisciplinaryPhysics, AppliedSCI(E)EI4ARTICLE141-14410