Revisiting the complex time-varying effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 transmission in the United States

IntroductionAlthough the global COVID-19 emergency ended, the real-world effects of multiple non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and the relative contribution of individual NPIs over time were poorly understood, limiting the mitigation of future potential epidemics.MethodsBased on four large-scale datasets including epidemic parameters, virus variants, vaccines, and meteorological factors across 51 states in the United States from August 2020 to July 2022, we established a Bayesian hierarchical model with a spike-and-slab prior to assessing the time-varying effect of NPIs and vaccination on mitigating COVID-19 transmission and identifying important NPIs in the context of different variants pandemic.ResultsWe found that (i) the empirical reduction in reproduction number attributable to integrated NPIs was 52.0% (95%CI: 44.4, 58.5%) by August and September 2020, whereas the reduction continuously decreased due to the relaxation of NPIs in following months; (ii) international travel restrictions, stay-at-home requirements, and restrictions on gathering size were important NPIs with the relative contribution higher than 12.5%; (iii) vaccination alone could not mitigate transmission when the fully vaccination coverage was less than 60%, but it could effectively synergize with NPIs; (iv) even with fully vaccination coverage >60%, combined use of NPIs and vaccination failed to reduce the reproduction number below 1 in many states by February 2022 because of elimination of above NPIs, following with a resurgence of COVID-19 after March 2022.ConclusionOur results suggest that NPIs and vaccination had a high synergy effect and eliminating NPIs should consider their relative effectiveness, vaccination coverage, and emerging variants

Tunable replica symmetry breaking in random laser

Replica symmetry breaking (RSB) has been widely recognized as a statistical analysis approach to understand the disorder and nonlinear interactions in complex systems ranging from atoms to the cosmic scale. However, it is challenging to analyze the nonlinear optical characteristics of random laser (RL) in disordered gain medium via RSB due to the lack of a general RSB-based statistical analysis framework. In this work, we report the tunable RSB in polymer fiber RL, where the effects of temperature and different structures on RSB are investigated experimentally and theoretically. It experimentally proves that RSB in RL is not robust, and disorder and temperature are responsible for tunable RSB in RL, which contributes to the improvement of the statistical analysis framework for investigating the optical principles of RL using RSB. And the finding of the tunable RSB allows to investigate the dynamical differences for various RL systems, which broadens the directions for the use of spin-glass theory to explore the physical mechanism of RL

Enhanced Light Emission of Light-Emitting Diodes with Silicon Oxide Nanobowls Photonic Crystal without Electrical Performance Damages

Unencapsulated GaN-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) with two-dimensional (2D) hexagonal closely-packed silicon oxide nanobowls photonic crystal (PhC) on the indium tin oxide (ITO) transparent conductive layer were fabricated by using polystyrene spheres and sol–gel process. Compared to conventional LEDs with planar ITO layers, the light output power of 600-nm-lattice PhC LEDs was improved by 25.6% at an injection current of 20 mA. Furthermore, electrical performance of the PhC LEDs was damage-free via this chemical technique. </jats:p

Design, Synthesis and Biological Evaluation of Multi-Target Anti-Cancer Agent PYR26

This study investigates the synthesis of a new compound, PYR26, and the multi-target mechanism of PYR26 inhibiting the proliferation of HepG2 human hepatocellular carcinoma cells. PYR26 significantly inhibits the growth of HepG2 cells (p CDK4, c-Met and Bak genes in HepG2 cells were significantly inhibited (p p c-Met, CDK4 and Bak, up-regulating the mRNA expression of caspase-3 and Cyt c genes, down-regulating PI3K, pERK and CDK4 proteins and up-regulating the protein level of caspase-3. In a certain range, with the increase in PYR26 concentration, the tumor growth was slower and the tumor volume was smaller. Preliminary results showed that PYR26 also had an inhibitory effect on the tumors of Hepa1-6 tumor-bearing mice. These results suggest that PYR26 has an inhibitory effect on the growth of liver cancer cells, therefore it has potential to be developed into a new anti-liver cancer drug