Urban vegetable production in Beijing, China: current progress, sustainability, and challenges

Urbanization in China has entered a stage of accelerated development that is accompanied by a range of issues concerning resource, ecological and society. Urban vegetable production (UVP), an important part of urban agriculture, has the potential to be an effective countermeasure for dealing with these problems. Here, we review the current state of UVP with its related technology and equipment, and show the major models of UVP in China with three representative implementation cases in Beijing. Through this review, we found the impact of UVP on urban vegetable supply should not be underestimated, while it is still considered as an urban entertainment by public now. Moreover, UVP extension is still limited when compared with China’s urbanization process. We analyze the possible reasons that restrict the development of UVP and give corresponding suggestions to improve it. Considering the scale of urbanization in China, and the potential contribution of UVP to food supply, environmental sustainability and social harmony, there is still much room for UVP development, which will bring opportunities and challenges to the government and scientific researchers

Hospital and? Hospital of the future

The outbreak of Covid-19 has suddenly jumped into our everyday life in the first part of 2020. Each of us inevitably has to face it without any chance to fight back. Our city has been turned into an empty space. People have to suffer from endless quarantine at home. Definitely, under this pandemic, numerous problems have been exposed. We realized how fragile our medical system and psychological health are. However, a series of reactions responding to the epidemic has also shown wisdom in an architectural way. Hospitals were built in ten days. Huge public buildings were transformed into temporary hospitals in order to treat patients. There are many more possibilities for hospitals today than in ancient times. This master thesis questions the classic principle "Form follows function" and imagines the future of hospitals. Starting from an experiment in Barcelona transforming four historical buildings into hospitals, the extra program is considered to be added to each hospital. The design part is mainly focused on one of the buildings, La Model. Preservation is architecture's saving retreat and we should make full use of it

Microfluidic Organoid Cultures Derived from Pancreatic Cancer Biopsies for Personalized Testing of Chemotherapy and Immunotherapy

Abstract Patient‐derived cancer organoids (PDOs) hold considerable promise for personalizing therapy selection and improving patient outcomes. However, it is challenging to generate PDOs in sufficient numbers to test therapies in standard culture platforms. This challenge is particularly acute for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) where most patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage with non‐resectable tumors and where patient tissue is in the form of needle biopsies. Here the development and characterization of microfluidic devices for testing therapies using a limited amount of tissue or PDOs available from PDAC biopsies is described. It is demonstrated that microfluidic PDOs are phenotypically and genotypically similar to the gold‐standard Matrigel organoids with the advantages of 1) spheroid uniformity, 2) minimal cell number requirement, and 3) not relying on Matrigel. The utility of microfluidic PDOs is proven by testing PDO responses to several chemotherapies, including an inhibitor of glycogen synthase kinase (GSKI). In addition, microfluidic organoid cultures are used to test effectiveness of immunotherapy comprised of NK cells in combination with a novel biologic. In summary, our microfluidic device offers considerable benefits for personalizing oncology based on cancer biopsies and may, in the future, be developed into a companion diagnostic for chemotherapy or immunotherapy treatments

Mott insulator state in a van der Waals flat-band compound

When many-body effects dominate over the kinetic energy of electrons, they will lead to exotic quantum phenomena, such as the fractional quantum Hall effect, unconventional superconductivity, Mott insulator, quantum spin liquid, ferromagnetism, heavy fermion behavior and so on. Flat-band systems, in which the kinetic energy is strongly quenched, are promising for realizing many-body quantum phases, such as the Mott-like insulator states and superconductivity associated with the flat bands emerging in twisted bilayer graphene. In this work, we have discovered a room-temperature Mott insulator state, which is derived from a half-filled flat band in a van der Waals compound Nb3Cl8. Since the half-filled flat band is well separated from the other bands, the Mott insulator state in Nb3Cl8 is a straightforward realization of the celebrated single-band Hubbard model. Our discovery provides an intriguing platform for studying the fundamental physics of Mott insulator, and paves the way for more correlated electronic states and Mott insulator-based devices by taking advantage of the high tunability of the electronic states of two-dimensional materials.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

Intrinsic surface p-wave superconductivity in layered AuSn4

Abstract The search for topological superconductivity (TSC) is currently an exciting pursuit, since non-trivial topological superconducting phases could host exotic Majorana modes. However, the difficulty in fabricating proximity-induced TSC heterostructures, the sensitivity to disorder and stringent topological restrictions of intrinsic TSC place serious limitations and formidable challenges on the materials and related applications. Here, we report a new type of intrinsic TSC, namely intrinsic surface topological superconductivity (IS-TSC) and demonstrate it in layered AuSn4 with T c of 2.4 K. Different in-plane and out-of-plane upper critical fields reflect a two-dimensional (2D) character of superconductivity. The two-fold symmetric angular dependences of both magneto-transport and the zero-bias conductance peak (ZBCP) in point-contact spectroscopy (PCS) in the superconducting regime indicate an unconventional pairing symmetry of AuSn4. The superconducting gap and surface multi-bands with Rashba splitting at the Fermi level (E F ), in conjunction with first-principle calculations, strongly suggest that 2D unconventional SC in AuSn4 originates from the mixture of p-wave surface and s-wave bulk contributions, which leads to a two-fold symmetric superconductivity. Our results provide an exciting paradigm to realize TSC via Rashba effect on surface superconducting bands in layered materials

Culture media composition influences patient-derived organoid ability to predict therapeutic responses in gastrointestinal cancers

BACKGROUND. A patient-derived organoid (PDO) platform may serve as a promising tool for translational cancer research. In this study, we evaluated PDO's ability to predict clinical response to gastrointestinal (GI) cancers.METHODS. We generated PDOs from primary and metastatic lesions of patients with GI cancers, including pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, colorectal adenocarcinoma, and cholangiocarcinoma. We compared PDO response with the observed clinical response for donor patients to the same treatments. RESULTS. We report an approximately 80% concordance rate between PDO and donor tumor response. Importantly, we found a profound influence of culture media on PDO phenotype, where we showed a significant difference in response to standard-of-care chemotherapies, distinct morphologies, and transcriptomes between media within the same PDO cultures.CONCLUSION. While we demonstrate a high concordance rate between donor tumor and PDO, these studies also showed the important role of culture media when using PDOs to inform treatment selection and predict response across a spectrum of GI cancers

Effects of Antenatal Maternal Depressive Symptoms and Socio-Economic Status on Neonatal Brain Development are Modulated by Genetic Risk

This study included 168 and 85 mother-infant dyads from Asian and United States of America cohorts to examine whether a genomic profile risk score for major depressive disorder (GPRSMDD) moderates the association between antenatal maternal depressive symptoms (or socio-economic status, SES) and fetal neurodevelopment, and to identify candidate biological processes underlying such association. Both cohorts showed a significant interaction between antenatal maternal depressive symptoms and infant GPRSMDD on the right amygdala volume. The Asian cohort also showed such interaction on the right hippocampal volume and shape, thickness of the orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Likewise, a significant interaction between SES and infant GPRSMDD was on the right amygdala and hippocampal volumes and shapes. After controlling for each other, the interaction effect of antenatal maternal depressive symptoms and GPRSMDD was mainly shown on the right amygdala, while the interaction effect of SES and GPRSMDD was mainly shown on the right hippocampus. Bioinformatic analyses suggested neurotransmitter/neurotrophic signaling, SNAp REceptor complex, and glutamate receptor activity as common biological processes underlying the influence of antenatal maternal depressive symptoms on fetal cortico-limbic development. These findings suggest gene-environment interdependence in the fetal development of brain regions implicated in cognitive-emotional function. Candidate biological mechanisms involve a range of brain region-specific signaling pathways that converge on common processes of synaptic development