Trends in Research about COVID-19 Vaccine Documented through Bibliometric and Visualization Analysis

Due to COVID-19, people’s lives have changed greatly. In accordance with former experience, an efficacious vaccine is the most effective way to curb the pandemic; thus, many researchers have published related publications in the short term. Hence, this study aims at using bibliometric analysis and visualization to document research trends regarding COVID-19 vaccines, and offer some directions and suggestions for future research. Initially, all eligible publications were downloaded from Web of Science on 1 January 2022. Subsequently, some publications published before December 2019 were removed since COVID-19 did not occur before that date. Finally, Microsoft Excel is used for bibliometric analysis to analyze publication date, author, affiliation, country, publication title, publisher, research area, document type, and language, and visualized software (VOSviewer) is used to visualize author, affiliation, country, and keywords. After analyzing a total of 17,392 publications, the results show that the overall research trend was upward. Moreover, the prominent authors, institutions, and countries inclined towards regional cooperation instead of international cooperation. Furthermore, the most popular research areas were immunology and medicine (general and internal). Ultimately, COVID-19, vaccine, and SARS-CoV-2 were the top 3 keywords. In conclusion, this study shows the approximate research trend for COVID-19 vaccine during the completely first two years of the pandemic. The research focuses moved from safety, effectiveness, and immunology at the early stage to the optimal allocation strategies for COVID-19 vaccine, and eventually to public attitudes and acceptance towards COVID-19 vaccination

Optimum dynamic characteristic control approach for building mass damper design

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142538/1/eqe2995.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142538/2/eqe2995_am.pd

Sampling Neural Radiance Fields for Refractive Objects

Recently, differentiable volume rendering in neural radiance fields (NeRF) has gained a lot of popularity, and its variants have attained many impressive results. However, existing methods usually assume the scene is a homogeneous volume so that a ray is cast along the straight path. In this work, the scene is instead a heterogeneous volume with a piecewise-constant refractive index, where the path will be curved if it intersects the different refractive indices. For novel view synthesis of refractive objects, our NeRF-based framework aims to optimize the radiance fields of bounded volume and boundary from multi-view posed images with refractive object silhouettes. To tackle this challenging problem, the refractive index of a scene is reconstructed from silhouettes. Given the refractive index, we extend the stratified and hierarchical sampling techniques in NeRF to allow drawing samples along a curved path tracked by the Eikonal equation. The results indicate that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art method both quantitatively and qualitatively, demonstrating better performance on the perceptual similarity metric and an apparent improvement in the rendering quality on several synthetic and real scenes.Comment: SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 Technical Communications. 4 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Project: https://alexkeroro86.github.io/SampleNeRFRO/ Code: https://github.com/alexkeroro86/SampleNeRFR

New Insights on 30 Dor B Revealed by High-Quality Multi-wavelength Observations

The supernova remnant (SNR) 30 Dor B is associated with the \ion{H}{2} region ionized by the OB association LH99. The complex interstellar environment has made it difficult to study the physical structure of this SNR. We have used Hubble Space Telescope H$\alpha$ images to identify SNR shocks and deep Chandra X-ray observations to detect faint diffuse emission. We find that 30 Dor B hosts three zones with very different X-ray surface brightnesses and nebular kinematics that are characteristic of SNRs in different interstellar environments and/or evolutionary stages. The ASKAP 888 MHz map of 30 Dor B shows counterparts to all X-ray emission features except the faint halo. The ASKAP 888 MHz and 1420 MHz observations are used to produce a spectral index map, but its interpretation is complicated by the background thermal emission and the pulsar PSR J0537$-$6910's flat spectral index. The stellar population in the vicinity of 30 Dor B indicates a continuous star formation in the past 8--10 Myr. The observed very massive stars in LH99 cannot be coeval with the progenitor of 30 Dor B's pulsar. Adopting the pulsar's spin-down timescale, 5000 yr, as the age of the SNR, the X-ray shell would be expanding at $\sim$4000 km\,s$^{-1}$ and the post-shock temperature would be 1--2 orders of magnitude higher than that indicated by the X-ray spectra. Thus, the bright central region of 30 Dor B and the X-ray shell requires two separate SN events, and the faint diffuse X-ray halo perhaps other older SN events

Arctigenin from Arctium lappa inhibits interleukin-2 and interferon gene expression in primary human T lymphocytes

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Arctium lappa </it>(<it>Niubang</it>), a Chinese herbal medicine, is used to treat tissue inflammation. This study investigates the effects of arctigenin (AC), isolated from <it>A. lappa</it>, on anti-CD3/CD28 Ab-stimulated cell proliferation and cytokine gene expression in primary human T lymphocytes.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Cell proliferation was determined with enzyme immunoassays and the tritiated thymidine uptake method. Cytokine production and gene expression were analyzed with reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>AC inhibited primary human T lymphocytes proliferation activated by anti-CD3/CD28 Ab. Cell viability test indicated that the inhibitory effects of AC on primary human T lymphocyte proliferation were not due to direct cytotoxicity. AC suppressed interleukin-2 (IL-2) and interferon-γ (IFN-γ) production in a concentration-dependent manner. Furthermore, AC decreased the IL-2 and IFN-γ gene expression in primary human T lymphocytes induced by anti-CD3/CD28 Ab. Reporter gene analyses revealed that AC decreased NF-AT-mediated reporter gene expression.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>AC inhibited T lymphocyte proliferation and decreased the gene expression of IL-2, IFN-γ and NF-AT.</p

High-Frequency Sea Level Variations Observed by GPS Buoys Using Precise Point Positioning Technique

In this study, sea level variation observed by a 1-Hz Global Positioning System (GPS) buoy system is verified by comparing with tide gauge records and is decomposed to reveal high-frequency signals that cannot be detected from 6-minute tide gauge records. Compared to tide gauges traditionally used to monitor sea level changes and affected by land motion, GPS buoys provide high-frequency geocentric measurements of sea level variations. Data from five GPS buoy campaigns near a tide gauge at Anping, Tainan, Taiwan, were processed using the Precise Point Positioning (PPP) technique with four different satellite orbit products from the International GNSS Service (IGS). The GPS buoy data were also processed by a differential GPS (DGPS) method that needs an additional GPS receiver as a reference station and the accuracy of the solution depends on the baseline length. The computation shows the average Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) difference of the GPS buoy using DGPS and tide gauge records is around 3 - 5 cm. When using the aforementioned IGS orbit products for the buoy derived by PPP, its average RMSE differences are 5 - 8 cm, 8 - 13 cm, decimeter level, and decimeter-meter level, respectively, so the accuracy of the solution derived by PPP highly depends on the accuracy of IGS orbit products. Therefore, the result indicates that the accuracy of a GPS buoy using PPP has the potential to measure the sea surface variations to several cm. Finally, high-frequency sea level signals with periods of a few seconds to a day can be successfully detected in GPS buoy observations using the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) method and are identified as waves, meteotsunamis, and tides