Is there a processing advantage for verb-noun collocations in Chinese reading? Evidence from eye movements during reading

A growing number of studies show a processing advantage for collocations, which are commonly-used juxtapositions of words, such as “joint effort” or “shake hands,” suggesting that skilled readers are keenly perceptive to the occurrence of two words in phrases. With the current research, we report two experiments that used eye movement measures during sentence reading to explore the processing of four-character verb-noun collocations in Chinese, such as 修改文章 (“revise the article”). Experiment 1 compared the processing of these collocations relative to similar four-character expressions that are not collocations (e.g., 修改结尾, “revise the ending”) in neutral contexts and contexts in which the collocation was predictable from the preceding sentence context. Experiment 2 further examined the processing of these four-character collocations, by comparing eye movements for commonly-used “strong” collocations, such as 保护环境 (“protect the environment”), as compared to less commonly-used “weak” collocations, such as 保护自然 (“protect nature”), again in neutral contexts and contexts in which the collocations were highly predictable. The results reveal a processing advantage for both collocations relative to novel expressions, and for “strong” collocations relative to “weak” collocations, which was independent of effects of contextual predictability. We interpret these findings as providing further evidence that readers are highly sensitive to the frequency that words co-occur as a phrase in written language, and that a processing advantage for collocations occurs independently of contextual expectations.</p

A new pterosaur specimen from the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Liaoning Province, China: The oldest fossil record of Nurhachius

The Istiodactylidae is one of three ornithocheiroid pterosaur lineages, characterised by a large nasoantorbital fenestrae and labiolingually compressed teeth. Their remains have been reported from Early Cretaceous rocks of northeastern China and Western Europe. A new istiodactylid pterosaur from the upper part of the Yixian Formation (Jingangshan Member) of the Jehol Group, distributed in western Liaoning Province and neighbouring areas, is described on the basis of an incomplete specimen including the partial skull, forelimb and hindlimb bones, and pelvis. This individual, here designated as a referred specimen of Nurhachius (Nurhachius sp.) is a skeletally almost mature pterosaur with an estimated wingspan of 1.6 m. This specimen is not only the geologically oldest known occurrence of Nurhachius, but also a new component of the pterosaur assemblage of the Jingangshan Member, and provides new information on the pelvis and hindlimb of istiodactylids and the palaeobiology of this clade. Considering previous reports of the istiodactylid remains and the geological ages of the strata that yielded them, it is suggested that different istiodactylids existed in Europe and China during the late Barremian.</p

Fatty acid composition of habitual omnivore and vegetarian diets

High-fat diets are implicated in the onset of cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer, and obesity. Large intakes of saturated and trans FA, together with low levels of PUFA, particularly long-chain (LC) omega-3 (n−3) PUFA, appear to have the greatest impact on the development of CVD. A high n−6∶n−3 PUFA ratio is also considered a marker of elevated risk of CVD, though little accurate data on dietary intake is available. A new Australian food  composition database that reports FA in foods to two decimal places was used to assess intakes of FA in four habitual dietary groups. Analysis using the database found correlations between the dietary intakes of LC n−3 PUFA and the plasma phospholipid LC n−3 PUFA concentrations of omnivore and vegetarian subjects. High meat-eaters (HME), who consumed large  amounts of food generally, had significantly higher LC n−3 PUFA intakes (0.29 g/d) than moderate meat-eaters (MME) (0.14 g/d), whose intakes in turn were significantly higher than those of ovolacto-vegetarians or vegans (both 0.01 g/d). The saturated FA intake of MME subjects (typical of adult male Australians) was not different from ovolacto-vegetarian intakes, whereas n−6∶n−3 intake ratios in vegetarians were significantly higher than in omnivores. Thus, accurate dietary and plasma FA analyses suggest that regular moderate consumption of meat and fish maintains a plasma FA profile possibly more conducive to good health.<br

Code -Supplemental material for Determining risk factors that increase hospitalizations in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus

<p>Supplemental material, Code for Determining risk factors that increase hospitalizations in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus by D Li, H M Madhoun, W N Roberts Jr and W Jarjour in Lupus</p

Deep convolution network based emotion analysis towards mental health care

Facial expressions play an important role during communications, allowing information regarding the emotional state of an individual to be conveyed and inferred. Research suggests that automatic facial expression recognition is a promising avenue of enquiry in mental healthcare, as facial expressions can also reflect an individual’s mental state. In order to develop user-friendly, low-cost and effective facial expression analysis systems for mental health care, this paper presents a novel deep convolution network based emotion analysis framework to support mental state detection and diagnosis. The proposed system is able to process facial images and interpret the temporal evolution of emotions through a new solution in which deep features are extracted from the Fully Connected Layer 6 of the AlexNet, with a standard Linear Discriminant Analysis Classifier exploited to obtain the final classification outcome. It is tested against 5 benchmarking databases, including JAFFE,KDEF,CK+, and databases with the images obtained ‘in the wild’ such as FER2013 and AffectNet. Compared with the other state-of-the-art methods, we observe that our method has overall higher accuracy of facial expression recognition. Additionally, when compared to the state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms such as Vgg16, GoogleNet, ResNet and AlexNet, the proposed method demonstrated better efficiency and has less device requirements. The experiments presented in this paper demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the other methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency which suggests it could act as a smart, low-cost, user-friendly cognitive aid to detect, monitor, and diagnose the mental health of a patient through automatic facial expression analysis</p

Cloning and characterization of a cabbage <i>BoAOS</i> gene with enhanced drought tolerance

<div><p>Allene oxide synthase (<i>AOS</i>), which is a cytochrome P450 (<i>CYP74A</i>), catalyses the first step in the biosynthesis of jasmonic acid from lipoxygenase-derived hydroperoxides of free fatty acids. The full-length cDNA of an <i>AOS</i>-like gene was cloned from <i>Brassica oleracea</i> using rapid amplification of cDNA ends and was designated as <i>BoAOS</i>. The <i>BoAOS</i> expression level was higher in alabastrums and flowers than in other tissues of cabbage, as determined by real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). To characterize the <i>BoAOS</i> gene, <i>Arabidopsis</i> was transformed via <i>Agrobacterium tumefaciens</i> with a vector to express the gene under the control of a strong constitutive promoter, CaMV35S (Cauliflower Mosaic Virus). Based on analyses of tolerance to drought stress, compared with control plants, the overexpression of <i>BoAOS</i> in transgenic plants increased the endogenous jasmonic acid level and conferred higher tolerance to drought stress. Therefore, we suggest that <i>BoAOS</i> may be a suitable candidate gene to produce transgenic plants with tolerance to drought stress.</p></div

Cross-modality features fusion for synthetic aperture radar image segmentation

Synthetic  Aperture  Radar  (SAR)  image  segmenta-tion stands as a formidable research frontier within the domainof  SAR  image  interpretation.  The  fully  convolutional  network(FCN) methods have recently brought remarkable improvementsin  SAR  image  segmentation.  Nevertheless,  these  methods  donot  utilize  the  peculiarities  of  SAR  images,  leading  to  subop-timal  segmentation  accuracy.  To  address  this  issue,  we  rethinkSAR  image  segmentation  in  terms  of  sequential  informationof  transformers  and  cross-modal  features.  We  first  discuss  thepeculiarities  of  SAR  images  and  extract  the  mean  and  texturefeatures utilized as auxiliary features. The extraction of auxiliaryfeatures  helps  unearth  the  distinctive  information  in  the  SARimages. Afterward, a feature-enhanced FCN with the transformerencoder  structure,  termed  FE-FCN,  which  can  be  extracted  tocontext-level  and  pixel-level  features.  In  FE-FCN,  the  featuresof   a   single-mode   encoder   are   aligned   and   inserted   into   themodel  to  explore  the  potential  correspondence  between  modes.We  also  employ  long  skip  connections  to  share  each  modality’sdistinguishing  and  particular  features.  Finally,  we  present  theconnection-enhanced conditional random field (CE-CRF) to cap-ture  the  connection  information  of  the  image  pixels.  Since  theCE-CRF utilizes the auxiliary features to enhance the reliabilityof  the  connection  information,  the  segmentation  results  of  FE-FCN are further optimized. Comparative experiments conductedon  the  Fangchenggang  (FCG),  Pucheng  (PC),  and  Gaofen  (GF)SAR  datasets.  Our  method  demonstrates  superior  segmentationaccuracy  compared  to  other  conventional  image  segmentationmethods,  as  confirmed  by  the  experimental  results.</p

Evaluation of the turn-off transient controllability for high-power IGBT modules

The efficient and flexible conversion of electrical energy is increasingly accomplished by megawatt insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) modules. Their dynamic performance is influenced by the gate driver control, operating points and the switching loop parasitics, which are crucial to their optimized operational behaviours, efficiency and field reliability. This paper investigates the controllability of the transient voltage and current slopes of megawatt IGBT modules during their turn-off transitions and proposes an efficient assessment method accordingly. Firstly, the causal relationship of transient characteristic variations and controllability is investigated analytically. Then, major factors impacting the controllability are analysed and validated, including the charge carrier profile, the operating points (i.e. the load voltage, the load current, and the junction temperature), and the gate resistance. Finally, an efficient method using the MOS-channel turn-off point on calibrated gate voltage waveform is proposed for the controllability evaluation, which can guide the IGBT, gate driver, and converter design

Detection of SNPs in the BMP6 Gene and Their Association with Carcass and Bone Traits in Chicken

<div><p>ABSTRACT BMP6, a member of the subfamilies of the morphogenetic proteins (BMPs), plays a crucial role in osteogenic and chondrocyte differentiation in vitro and stimulates chondrogenesis, making chondrocytes differen-tiate on their terminal stage. The objective of this study is to explore the relationship between polymorphism of BMP6 gene and slaughter traits in chicken respectively. We screened the exonic and intronic regions of BMP6 gene by DNA pool construction and amplified DNA fragment by PCR, and finally, we got nine SNPs. Association analysis revealed that BMP6 had no significant association among all slaughter traits in Yellow bantam chicken. However, BMP6 had a significant difference with femur weight, tibia weight, femur length (p<0.05), and was extremely significant with tibia length (p<0.01) in Avian chicken. Moreover, femur perimeter also had significant correlation with BMP6 in Avian chicken. These results provide useful information for further investigation on the function of chicken BMP6 gene.</p></div

Computer simulation of the SARS-CoV-2 contamination risk in a large dental clinic

COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) virus, has been rapidly spreading worldwide since December 2019, causing a public health crisis. Recent studies showed SARS-CoV-2's ability to infect humans via airborne routes. These motivated the study of aerosol and airborne droplet transmission in a variety of settings. This study performs a large-scale numerical simulation of a real-world dentistry clinic that contains aerosol-generating procedures. The simulation tracks the dispersion of evaporating droplets emitted during ultrasonic dental scaling procedures. The simulation considers 25 patient treatment cubicles in an open plan dentistry clinic. The droplets are modeled as having a volatile (evaporating) and nonvolatile fraction composed of virions, saliva, and impurities from the irrigant water supply. The simulated clinic's boundary and flow conditions are validated against experimental measurements of the real clinic. The results evaluate the behavior of large droplets and aerosols. We investigate droplet residence time and travel distance for different droplet diameters, surface contamination due to droplet settling and deposition, airborne aerosol mass concentration, and the quantity of droplets that escape through ventilation. The simulation results raise concerns due to the aerosols' long residence times (averaging up to 7.31 min) and travel distances (averaging up to 24.45 m) that exceed social distancing guidelines. Finally, the results show that contamination extends beyond the immediate patient treatment areas, requiring additional surface disinfection in the clinic. The results presented in this research may be used to establish safer dental clinic operating procedures, especially if paired with future supplementary material concerning the aerosol viral load generated by ultrasonic scaling and the viral load thresholds required to infect humans