Tentative evidence of spatially extended GeV emission from SS433/W50

We analyze 10 years of Fermi-LAT data towards the SS433/W50 region. With the latest source catalog and diffuse background models, the gamma-ray excess from SS433/W50 is detected with a significance of 6{\sigma} in the photon energy range of 500 MeV - 10 GeV. Our analysis indicates that an extended flat disk morphology is preferred over a point-source description, suggesting that the GeV emission region is much larger than that of the TeV emission detected by HAWC. The size of the GeV emission is instead consistent with the extent of the radio nebula W50, a supernova remnant being distorted by the jets, so we suggest that the GeV emission may originate from this supernova remnant. The spectral result of the GeV emission is also consistent with an supernova remnant origin. We also derive the GeV flux upper limits on the TeV emission region, which put moderate constrains on the leptonic models to explain the multiwavelength data.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Value of superb microvascular imaging ultrasonography in the diagnosis of carpal tunnel syndrome: Compared with color Doppler and power Doppler.

The aim of this study was to compare the value of superb microvascular imaging (SMI) in carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) with that of color Doppler ultrasonography (CDUS) and power Doppler ultrasonography (PDUS).Fifty patients with symptomatic CTS and 25 healthy volunteers were enrolled. The cross-sectional area (CSA), CDUS score, PDUS score, and SMI score of the median nerve (MN) at the carpal tunnel were recorded. The value of different ultrasonography (US) diagnostic strategies was calculated.The blood flow display ratio in the MN of the healthy volunteers had no statistical difference between CDUS, PDUS, and SMI (20%, 32%, and 48%, respectively, P \u3e.05). The blood flow display ratio for SMI in patients was significantly higher than that of CDUS and PDUS (90%, 52%, and 60%, respectively,

New estimation of the nuclear de-excitation line emission from the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A

MeV nuclear de-excitation lines serve as a unique tool to study low-energy cosmic rays (CRs), containing both spectral and elemental information of the interacting material. In this paper, we estimated the possible nuclear de-excitation lines from the young supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. Given different CR spectral shapes and interacting materials, we found the predicted fluxes of strong narrow line emissions from the remnant are highly model-dependent, ranging from about $1\times10^{-10}\,{\rm \,cm^{-2}\,s^{-1}}$ to $1\times10^{-6}\, {\rm \,cm^{-2}\,s^{-1}}$ for the 4.44 MeV narrow line and from about $4\times10^{-11}\,{\rm \,cm^{-2}\,s^{-1}}$ to $2\times10^{-7}{\rm \,cm^{-2}\,s^{-1}}$ for the 6.13 MeV narrow line, respectively. Based on the new estimation, we also discussed the detection probability of these line emissions against the MeV diffuse Galactic background under different assumptions of instrument response functions.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Anti-inflammatory effects of bitongling granules are mediated through the suppression of miR-21/p38 MAPK/TLR4/NF-κB signaling in H9C2 rat cardiac cells exposed to lipopolysaccharides

Purpose: To assess the protective effects of bitongling granules on H9C2 cells exposed to lipopolysaccharides (LPS) in the management of rheumatoid arthritis (RA)-induced myocardial inflammation.Methods: The effects of bitongling granule (BTLG) drug-containing serum were assessed in myocarditis models established in rat cardiac cells. MicroRNA-21 (miR-21) levels were evaluated by qRT-PCR while MTT assays were performed to assess cell viability. ELISA assay was used to evaluate tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α), interleukin 17 (IL-17) and interleukin 6 (IL-6) levels in cell culture supernatants. Apoptosis was determined by flow cytometry (FCM). Quantitative mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK)/p38, toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) and nuclear factor kappa B (NF-kB)/p65 levels were evaluated by western blot and immunofluorescenceResults: BTLG increased cardiac cell activity and exhibited anti-inflammatory effect. It also inhibited LPS-induced H9C2 apoptosis and suppressed p65 NF-κB phosphorylation (p-p65 NF-κB), TLR4, and p38 MAPK phosphorylation (p-p38 MAPK). BTLG also reduced miR-21 expression, and the overexpression of the miR-21 inhibitor in H9C2 suppressed apoptosis. Moreover, p-p38 MAPK, TLR4 and p-p65 NF-κB expression were down-regulated in miR-21 inhibitor transfected H9C2s. The inhibition of p38/TLR4/ NF-κB signaling might have occurred via the suppression of miR-21 by BTLG.Conclusion: The results show that BTLG inhibits the inflammatory reaction involved in p38MAPK/TLR4/ NF-κB signaling pathway and can prevent RA-induced cardiac disease, suggesting that BTLP treatment may be beneficial for the management of arthritic cardiomyopathy

Structural deformation of shale pores in the fold-thrust belt: The Wufeng-Longmaxi shale in the Anchang Syncline of Central Yangtze Block

The gas-rich Wufeng-Longmaxi shale has been intensely deformed within the fold-thrust belt of the Yangtze Block. To better understand the impact of structural deformation on the shale pore system, this paper systematically investigated the matrix components, porosity and pore structures in core samples from theWufeng-Longmaxi shale, newly collected from various structural domains in the first commercial shale gas field of the Central Yangtze Block, the Anchang Syncline. The shale porosity generally showed a positive relationship with total organic carbon content. Nevertheless, even at a constant total organic carbon content, the shale porosity decreased from the syncline limb to the syncline hinge zone and with a decreasing interlimb angle in the syncline hinge zone, which aligned with the structural deformation strain during folding. The artificial axial compression of shale samples also confirmed that the decrease in shale porosity was stronger at an elevated axial compression stress and was relatively higher in samples with higher total organic carbon content. The organic pore size decreased with higher structural deformation strain, but the aspect ratio of the pore shape increased. Even quartz failed to resist the effective stress under the intensive structural deformation, changing the correlation between porosity and quartz from positive to negative. In contrast, pore spaces generated by the slipping between clay flakes under intensive deformation accounted for a positive relationship between clay content and bulk porosity. Considering the shale porosity reduction caused by the intensive structural deformation of shale pores, the Wufeng-Longmaxi shale, that is rich in fracture networks between roof and floor layers, may still be an excellent exploration target in the fold-thrust belt of the Yangtze Block.Cited as: Guo, X., Liu, R., Xu, S., Feng, B., Wen, T., Zhang, T. Structural deformation of shale pores in the fold-thrust belt: The Wufeng-Longmaxi shale in the Anchang Syncline of Central Yangtze Block. Advances in Geo-Energy Research, 2022, 6(6): 515-530. https://doi.org/10.46690/ager.2022.06.0

Cross-Lingual Low-Resource Set-to-Description Retrieval for Global E-Commerce

With the prosperous of cross-border e-commerce, there is an urgent demand for designing intelligent approaches for assisting e-commerce sellers to offer local products for consumers from all over the world. In this paper, we explore a new task of cross-lingual information retrieval, i.e., cross-lingual set-to-description retrieval in cross-border e-commerce, which involves matching product attribute sets in the source language with persuasive product descriptions in the target language. We manually collect a new and high-quality paired dataset, where each pair contains an unordered product attribute set in the source language and an informative product description in the target language. As the dataset construction process is both time-consuming and costly, the new dataset only comprises of 13.5k pairs, which is a low-resource setting and can be viewed as a challenging testbed for model development and evaluation in cross-border e-commerce. To tackle this cross-lingual set-to-description retrieval task, we propose a novel cross-lingual matching network (CLMN) with the enhancement of context-dependent cross-lingual mapping upon the pre-trained monolingual BERT representations. Experimental results indicate that our proposed CLMN yields impressive results on the challenging task and the context-dependent cross-lingual mapping on BERT yields noticeable improvement over the pre-trained multi-lingual BERT model.Comment: AAAI 202