145 research outputs found
Smoking cessation and related factors in middle-aged and older Chinese adults: Evidence from a longitudinal study
Objectives There are more than 300 million smokers in China. This study aimed to evaluate the rate of smoking cessation, smoking relapse and related factors in middle-aged and older smokers in China. Methods We performed a secondary analysis of data from China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) that recruited a nationally representative sample of adults aged 45 and older. Participants were 3708 smokers in 2011 who completed two waves of follow-up interviews in 2013 and 2015. Self-reported quit and relapse rates at follow-ups were estimated. Multiple logistic regressions were conducted to identify factors associated with smoking cessation and relapse. Results The overall quit rate was 8.5% (95% CI 7.7% - 9.5%) at the 2-year follow-up in 2013, and 16.6% (95% CI 15.5% - 17.9%) at the 4-year follow up. Smoking cessation in 2013 was associated with not living in the northeast region (p = 0.003), fewer cigarettes smoked daily (p <0.001), and longer time to the first cigarette in the morning (p<0.001). Smoking cessation in 2015 was associated with older age (p = 0.049), smoking initiation at age ≥20 years (p<0.001), longer time to the first cigarette in the morning (p<0.001), and self-perceived poor health (p<0.001). Of the 317 participants who stopped smoking in 2013, 13.3% (95% CI 9.9% - 17.5%) relapsed by 2015. Smoking relapse was associated with younger age (p = 0.025), shorter time to the first cigarette in the morning (p = 0.003), and self-perception of not poor health (p = 0.018). Conclusion The overall quit rate was 8.5% at the 2-year follow up, and 16.6% at the 4-year follow up in the middle-aged and older smokers, but 13% of quitters returned to smoking in two years. Successful smoking cessation was associated with older age, lower nicotine dependence, and self-perceived poor health
War, Tool, Race or Building? : A comparison of vaccine metaphors between (translated) media and scientific reports in the age of COVID-19
News reportage is one of the major means of scientific communication to the public, but science information can be misrepresented in news. In this study, we used a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach to examine the use of COVID-19 vaccine metaphors across news, translated news and scientific articles and how metaphorical frames may have differed based on genre and translation. Results reveal that there are shared (HUMAN, RACE and WAR) and unique (BUILDING, PASSPORT and TOOL) source domains between news articles (original and translated) and scientific reports. Interestingly, the study reveals that translation plays a role in the discursive construction of news values, such as Proximity and Negativity, which engenders frame shifts in news production for different target readers. The study concludes by advocating the use of a BUILDING metaphor to map COVID-19 vaccine/vaccination for the benefits of health communication. It has further revealed the complicated nature of scientific communication through (translated) news and calls attention to the political intention of news translation
Chemical Vapor Deposition of High-Quality Large-Sized MoS2 Crystals on Silicon Dioxide Substrates
Large???sized MoS2 crystals can be grown on SiO2/Si substrates via a two???stage chemical vapor deposition method. The maximum size of MoS2 crystals can be up to about 305 ??m. The growth method can be used to grow other transition metal dichalcogenide crystals and lateral heterojunctions. The electron mobility of the MoS2 crystals can reach ???30 cm2 V???1 s???1, which is comparable to those of exfoliated flakes.ope
AATCT-IDS: A Benchmark Abdominal Adipose Tissue CT Image Dataset for Image Denoising, Semantic Segmentation, and Radiomics Evaluation
Methods: In this study, a benchmark \emph{Abdominal Adipose Tissue CT Image
Dataset} (AATTCT-IDS) containing 300 subjects is prepared and published.
AATTCT-IDS publics 13,732 raw CT slices, and the researchers individually
annotate the subcutaneous and visceral adipose tissue regions of 3,213 of those
slices that have the same slice distance to validate denoising methods, train
semantic segmentation models, and study radiomics. For different tasks, this
paper compares and analyzes the performance of various methods on AATTCT-IDS by
combining the visualization results and evaluation data. Thus, verify the
research potential of this data set in the above three types of tasks.
Results: In the comparative study of image denoising, algorithms using a
smoothing strategy suppress mixed noise at the expense of image details and
obtain better evaluation data. Methods such as BM3D preserve the original image
structure better, although the evaluation data are slightly lower. The results
show significant differences among them. In the comparative study of semantic
segmentation of abdominal adipose tissue, the segmentation results of adipose
tissue by each model show different structural characteristics. Among them,
BiSeNet obtains segmentation results only slightly inferior to U-Net with the
shortest training time and effectively separates small and isolated adipose
tissue. In addition, the radiomics study based on AATTCT-IDS reveals three
adipose distributions in the subject population.
Conclusion: AATTCT-IDS contains the ground truth of adipose tissue regions in
abdominal CT slices. This open-source dataset can attract researchers to
explore the multi-dimensional characteristics of abdominal adipose tissue and
thus help physicians and patients in clinical practice. AATCT-IDS is freely
published for non-commercial purpose at:
\url{https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/AATTCT-IDS/23807256}.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure
Energy-time Entanglement Coexisting with Fiber Optical Communication at Telecom C-band
The coexistence of quantum and classical light in the same fiber link is
extremely desired in developing quantum communication. It has been implemented
for different quantum information tasks, such as classical light coexisting
with polarization-entangled photons at telecom O-band, and with quantum signal
based quantum key distribution (QKD). In this work, we demonstrate the
coexistence of energy-time entanglement based QKD and fiber optical
communication at the telecom C-band. The property of noise from the classical
channel is characterized with classical light at different wavelengths. With
the largest noise, i.e., the worst case, the properties of energy-time
entanglement are measured at different fiber optical communication rates. By
measuring the two-photon interference of energy-time entanglement, our results
show that a visibility of 82.011.10\% is achieved with a bidirectional 20
Gbps fiber optical communication over 40 km. Furthermore, by performing the
BBM92 protocol for QKD, a secret key rate of 245 bits per second could be
generated with a quantum bit error rate of 8.88\% with the coexisted
energy-time entanglement.~Our demonstration paves the way for developing the
infrastructure for quantum networks compatible with fiber optical
communication.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures
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