Oxygen isotope composition of surface snow collected along the traverse route from Zhongshan Station toward Dome A, Antarctica

Oxygen isotope composition of surface snow sampled in the austral summer of 1998/1999 along the traverse route from Zhongshan Station toward Dome A, Antarctica is measured with the conventional mass spectrometer technique. The results of measurement show that oxygen isotope composition of surface snow varies in a wide range from -22.51‰ to -50.67‰, and has a tendency that isotopic values gradually decrease with increase of distance from Zhongshan Station and altitude. Linear regression analysis indicates that there exists good correlation between oxygen isotope composition of surface snow and distance from Zhongshan Station, altitude and/or latitude, which actually reflects the close relation between stable isotope composition and air temperature

Design and baseline characteristics of the finerenone in reducing cardiovascular mortality and morbidity in diabetic kidney disease trial

Background: Among people with diabetes, those with kidney disease have exceptionally high rates of cardiovascular (CV) morbidity and mortality and progression of their underlying kidney disease. Finerenone is a novel, nonsteroidal, selective mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist that has shown to reduce albuminuria in type 2 diabetes (T2D) patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) while revealing only a low risk of hyperkalemia. However, the effect of finerenone on CV and renal outcomes has not yet been investigated in long-term trials. Patients and Methods: The Finerenone in Reducing CV Mortality and Morbidity in Diabetic Kidney Disease (FIGARO-DKD) trial aims to assess the efficacy and safety of finerenone compared to placebo at reducing clinically important CV and renal outcomes in T2D patients with CKD. FIGARO-DKD is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group, event-driven trial running in 47 countries with an expected duration of approximately 6 years. FIGARO-DKD randomized 7,437 patients with an estimated glomerular filtration rate >= 25 mL/min/1.73 m(2) and albuminuria (urinary albumin-to-creatinine ratio >= 30 to <= 5,000 mg/g). The study has at least 90% power to detect a 20% reduction in the risk of the primary outcome (overall two-sided significance level alpha = 0.05), the composite of time to first occurrence of CV death, nonfatal myocardial infarction, nonfatal stroke, or hospitalization for heart failure. Conclusions: FIGARO-DKD will determine whether an optimally treated cohort of T2D patients with CKD at high risk of CV and renal events will experience cardiorenal benefits with the addition of finerenone to their treatment regimen. Trial Registration: EudraCT number: 2015-000950-39; ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02545049

DYNAMIC COMPLEXITIES OF A CHEMOSTAT MODEL WITH PULSED INPUT AND WASHOUT AT DIFFERENT TIMES

In this paper, we consider a predator–prey chemostat model with ratio-dependent Monod type functional response and periodic input and washout at different fixed times. We obtain an exact periodic solution with substrate and prey. The stability analysis for this periodic solutions yields an invasion threshold for the period of pulses of the predator. When the impulsive period is more than the threshold, there are periodic oscillations in the substrate, prey, and predator. If the impulsive period further increases, the system undergoes a complex dynamic process. By analyzing bifurcation diagrams, we can see that the impulsive system shows two kinds of bifurcation, which are period-doubling and period-halving.Predator–prey system, impulsive invasion and washout, chemostat, complexity

Bridging the Domain Gap in Scene Flow Estimation via Hierarchical Smoothness Refinement

This article introduces SmoothFlowNet3D, an innovative encoder-decoder architecture specifically designed for bridging the domain gap in scene flow estimation. To achieve this goal, SmoothFlowNet3D divides the scene flow estimation task into two stages: initial scene flow estimation and smoothness refinement. Specifically, SmoothFlowNet3D comprises a hierarchical encoder that extracts multi-scale point cloud features from two consecutive frames, along with a hierarchical decoder responsible for predicting the initial scene flow and further refining it to achieve smoother estimation. To generate the initial scene flow, a cross-frame nearest-neighbor search operation is performed between the features extracted from two consecutive frames, resulting in forward and backward flow embeddings. These embeddings are then combined to form the bidirectional flow embedding, serving as input for predicting the initial scene flow. Additionally, a flow smoothing module based on the self-attention mechanism is proposed to predict the smoothing error and facilitate the refinement of the initial scene flow for more accurate and smoother estimation results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SmoothFlowNet3D approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic datasets and real LiDAR point clouds, confirming its effectiveness in enhancing scene flow smoothness

Formation of financial real estate risks and spatial interactions: Evidence from 35 cities in China

The real estate prices in urban China have been soaring sharply since the commercialization reform of the housing market in 1998, but have suffered from downward pressure recently. In addition to the peculiarities of the state-owned land system, newly built houses dominate market across the vast territories of China, and this study of China will further the understanding of the financial real estate risks. Based on theoretical analyses, a spatial Durbin model is adopted to evaluate the financial real estate risks based on various sectors' participation in the real estate market, because it can overcome the biased results brought about by the omission of possible spatial dependence. The results show the following: (1) the four sectors' participation in the real estate market promotes the rise of real estate prices in the both local and other cities with spatial contagion effects, while the most important factors are different across regions; (2) the real estate price fluctuations, the local government's land revenue, the bank credit provided to the real estate industry, the demand in the local city, and the real estate developers' investments in other cities increase the local financial real estate risks, and there are strong spatial diffusion effects among the cities. This study sheds light on the roles of the various sectors' participation in promoting the financial real estate risk as well as their spatial interactions from both theoretical and empirical aspects. Particularly, the different roles of local governments and real estate developers in China should be highlighted. The rules on the sector and spatial levels suggest that government policy should take the different features of various sectors and regions and spatial connections into account

An alkaline protease from Bacillus cereus NJSZ-13 can act as a pathogenicity factor in infection of pinewood nematode

Abstract Endophytic bacteria are an important biological control for nematodes. We isolated the nematicidal Bacillus cereus NJSZ-13 from healthy Pinus elliottii trunks. Bioassay experiments showed killing of all tested nematodes by proteins from the NJSZ-13 culture filtrate within 72 h. Degradation of the nematode cuticles was observed, suggesting the action of extracellular bacterial enzymes. The responsible protease was purified by ammonium sulfate precipitation, hydrophobic interaction chromatography, ion-exchange chromatography, and SDS-PAGE. The protease had a molecular weight of 28 kDa and optimal activity at 55 °C and pH 9, indicating an alkaline protease. The study suggests the potential for using this B. cereus NJSZ-13 strain protease to prevent pinewood nematode infection