You Can Be Strong: An animation about a young woman fighting against breast cancer

Many young women don’t take cancer as a potential threat. They consider this situation only when they attain a certain age. But in fact, cancer is a serious threat. Breast cancer has become the fastest-growing type of cancer in urban areas. The age of women between 25-39 years old are diagnosed with advanced breast cancer, accounting for 10-15 percent of all patients. Being stressed, depressed, lacking of sleep, eating unhealthy food, and smoking are among the factors that are potential causes for breast cancer. It should be taken seriously by young women. In order to improve awareness of this disease, and to call on the public to care more about women’s health and express the care for breast health and patients, I created this animation. In this animation, the story introduces a young woman who is diagnosed with breast cancer. After she suffers from feelings of hopelessness and loss, she regains her courage and desire to face the disease and her life. Finally, she goes back to her normal life with her family and friends’ support. In the meantime, the story builds a connection with the audience members who are diagnosed with breast cancer and encourages them to confront the illness positively, and let them know the mastectomy is not the end of the world. The story popularizes education regarding breast cancer through this form of health education, thus improving patients’ and public’s awareness of this disease and helping them find and face themselves. Young women should actively participate in disease prevention and control, and the management of health

Why reducing urban traffic congestion can help the American middle class

No-one likes to be stuck in traffic - but what are the larger effects of delays due to congestion beyond just being late for work? Using data from Los Angeles, Yuting Hou examines how these sorts of delays influence house prices. She finds that peak-period congestion delays are linked to lower house prices because they make jobs less accessible. The negative effects of these delays are most felt in middle income neighborhoods compared to low and high income areas

Human Resource Management Strategies in the Chinese Multinational Corporations: Ideology, Institutions, and Culture

With the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) having inextricably been interconnected with the international economy and with the increasing footprints of the Chinese firms globally, management styles too needed to be evolved accordingly. The generic literature on internationalization of firms does not account for the ideological and institutional aspects specific to China and thus does not do justice to the way the Chinese Multinational Corporations (MNCs) have evolved. Unlike most Western MNCs, the Chinese MNCs keep their roots, in letter and spirit, as they expand internationally. That said, increasing global engagement means they somehow need to align and absorb globally recognized human resource management (HRM) practices. Differences in terms of industries, provincial regulations, national priorities as expressed in the communist party policies, etc., could also be observed. In this literature review, various key aspects of global human resource management that are applicable to the Chinese MNCs are presented

Light Field Depth Estimation Based on Stitched-EPI

Depth estimation is one of the most essential problems for light field applications. In EPI-based methods, the slope computation usually suffers low accuracy due to the discretization error and low angular resolution. In addition, recent methods work well in most regions but often struggle with blurry edges over occluded regions and ambiguity over texture-less regions. To address these challenging issues, we first propose the stitched-EPI and half-stitched-EPI algorithms for non-occluded and occluded regions, respectively. The algorithms improve slope computation by shifting and concatenating lines in different EPIs but related to the same point in 3D scene, while the half-stitched-EPI only uses non-occluded part of lines. Combined with the joint photo-consistency cost proposed by us, the more accurate and robust depth map can be obtained in both occluded and non-occluded regions. Furthermore, to improve the depth estimation in texture-less regions, we propose a depth propagation strategy that determines their depth from the edge to interior, from accurate regions to coarse regions. Experimental and ablation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves accurate and robust depth maps in all regions effectively.Comment: 15 page

Centrifugal blood sample preparation for metabolite derivatization and analysis by solid matrix laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (SMALDI-MS)

A microfluidic approach is developed to automate and simplify multiplexed metabolite assays. Solid matrix assisted laser desorption ionization mass spectrometry (SMALDI-MS) on nanoporous thin films is suitable for analyzing small molecules, particularly metabolites, with a simple spot test. We present a system for blood sample preparation for metabolite analysis using centrifugal fluidics, coupled with derivatization and SMALDI-MS. This centrifugal microfluidic device enables semi-automated on-chip cleanup of blood samples, delivering a clean matrix for MS detection. A derivatization reagent is applied in our work to label the target molecules with fluorous affinity tags, so that higher S/N is observed by SMALDI-MS

Soil microbial community parameters affected by microplastics and other plastic residues

Introduction: The impact of plastics on terrestrial ecosystems is receiving increasing attention. Although of great importance to soil biogeochemical processes, how plastics influence soil microbes have yet to be systematically studied. The primary objectives of this study are to evaluate whether plastics lead to divergent responses of soil microbial community parameters, and explore the potential driving factors. Methods: We performed a meta-analysis of 710 paired observations from 48 published articles to quantify the impact of plastic on the diversity, biomass, and functionality of soil microbial communities. Results and discussion: This study indicated that plastics accelerated soil organic carbon loss (effect size = −0.05, p = 0.004) and increased microbial functionality (effect size = 0.04, p = 0.003), but also reduced microbial biomass (effect size = −0.07, p < 0.001) and the stability of co-occurrence networks. Polyethylene significantly reduced microbial richness (effect size = −0.07, p < 0.001) while polypropylene significantly increased it (effect size = 0.17, p < 0.001). Degradable plastics always had an insignificant effect on the microbial community. The effect of the plastic amount on microbial functionality followed the “hormetic dose–response” model, the infection point was about 40 g/kg. Approximately 3564.78 μm was the size of the plastic at which the response of microbial functionality changed from positive to negative. Changes in soil pH, soil organic carbon, and total nitrogen were significantly positively correlated with soil microbial functionality, biomass, and richness (R2 = 0.04–0.73, p < 0.05). The changes in microbial diversity were decoupled from microbial community structure and functionality. We emphasize the negative impacts of plastics on soil microbial communities such as microbial abundance, essential to reducing the risk of ecological surprise in terrestrial ecosystems. Our comprehensive assessment of plastics on soil microbial community parameters deepens the understanding of environmental impacts and ecological risks from this emerging pollution

Sm3+-Mn4+ activated Sr2GdTaO6 red phosphor for plant growth lighting and optical temperature sensing

Optical temperature sensing and plant growth lighting multifunctional applications can be realized by red luminescent materials. In this paper, novel Sm3+ and Sm3+-Mn4+ activated Sr2GdTaO6 (SGTO) red phosphors for plant growth and optical temperature sensing were comprehensively analyzed. The phase, luminescence property and thermal stability of the material were tested. For PL performance, SGTO:0.075Sm3+ exhibits the maximum emission intensity in the range (560–670 nm). The emission range of SGTO:0.075Sm3+ after introducing Mn4+ is mainly dark red light emission in the range from 630 to 750 nm, and the optimum dopingconcentration of Mn4+ is determined to be 0.3 %. The emission band of SGTO:0.075Sm3+ and SGTO:0.075Sm3+, 0.003Mn4+ matches the absorption band of the plants. For optical temperature sensing properties, the relative sensitivity (Sr) and absolute sensitivity (Sa) of SGTO:0.075Sm3+, 0.003Mn4+ are 2.94

How Does Adult Attachment Affect Human Recognition of Love-related and Sex-related Stimuli: An ERP Study

Journal articleThis paper reports the descriptive analysis of a large sample of safety climate survey data (n = 110,014) collected over 10 years from U.S. Naval aircrew using the Command Safety Assessment Survey (CSAS)

Selection of Suitable Reference Genes for Quantitative Real-time PCR in Sapium sebiferum

Chinese tallow (Sapium sebiferum L.) is a promising landscape and bioenergy plant. Measuring gene expression by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) can provide valuable information on gene function. Stably expressed reference genes for normalization are a prerequisite for ensuring the accuracy of the target gene expression level among different samples. However, the reference genes in Chinese tallow have not been systematically validated. In this study, 12 candidate reference genes (18S, GAPDH, UBQ, RPS15, SAND, TIP41, 60S, ACT7, PDF2, APT, TBP, and TUB) were investigated with qRT-PCR in 18 samples, including those from different tissues, from plants treated with sucrose and cold stresses. The data were calculated with four common algorithms, geNorm, BestKeeper, NormFinder, and the delta cycle threshold (ΔCt). TIP41 and GAPDH were the most stable for the tissue-specific experiment, GAPDH and 60S for cold treatment, and GAPDH and UBQ for sucrose stresses, while the least stable genes were 60S, TIP41, and 18S respectively. The comprehensive results showed APT, GAPDH, and UBQ to be the top-ranked stable genes across all the samples. The stability of 60S was the lowest during all experiments. These selected reference genes were further validated by comparing the expression profiles of the chalcone synthase gene in Chinese tallow in different samples. The results will help to improve the accuracy of gene expression studies in Chinese tallow