Pore Characteristics and Computed Permeability of Pastes Subject to Freeze-thaw Cycles at Very Early Ages by X-ray CT

Freeze-thaw cycling can damage microstructure of concrete and reduce the service life of concrete structures. This is especially detrimental for concrete subject to freeze-thaw cycles at very early-ages, such as within the first few days after constructions. Typical low and high water-to-cement (w/c) ratio pastes are investigated experimentally and numerically in this study. The pastes are subject to freeze-thaw cycles at the age of 1, and 7 days and then sealed-cured to the age of 45 days. The pore size distribution is measured and quantified by X-ray computer tomography (CT) with high resolution. The permeability of the corresponding pastes is predicted numerically based on the reconstructed microstructure results obtained from the CT measurements. The pore size distribution and the permeability variations of different pastes are investigated, and the key affecting factors are recognized. The Katz-Thompson and Navier-Stokes methods for computing permeability of paste are compared. The detectable pore size range by MIP, BSE, and X-ray CT in hardened paste is identified. The results of this study will offer suggestions for material design and curing strategies for concrete structures which are prone to experiencing freeze-thaw cycles at very early-ages

Current situation and trend of non-coding RNA in rheumatoid arthritis: a review and bibliometric analysis

BackgroundRheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, systemic autoimmune disease that affects multiple joints and has adverse effects on various organs throughout the body, often leading to a poor prognosis. Recent studies have shown significant progress in the research of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) in RA. Therefore, this study aims to comprehensively assess the current status and research trends of ncRNAs in RA through a bibliometric analysis.MethodsThis study retrieved articles relevant to ncRNAs and RA from the Science Citation Index Expanded Database of the Web of Science Core Collection between January 1st, 2003, and July 31st, 2023. The relevant articles were screened based on the inclusion criteria. VOSviewer and CiteSpace are utilized for bibliometric and visual analysis.ResultsA total of 1697 publications were included in this study, and there was a noticeable increase in annual publications from January 1st, 2003, to July 31st, 2023. China, the United States, and the United Kingdom were the most productive countries in this field, contributing to 43.81%, 13.09%, and 3.87% of the publications. Anhui Medical University and Lu Qianjin were identified as the most influential institution and author. Frontiers In Immunology stood out as the most prolific journal, while Arthritis & Rheumatology was the most co-cited journal. Additionally, the research related to “circular RNA”, “oxidative stress”, “proliferation”, and “migration” have emerged as new hotspots in the field.ConclusionIn this study, we have summarized the publication characteristics related to ncRNA and RA and identified the most productive countries, institutions, authors, journals, hot topics, and trends

Genome-wide gene phylogeny of CIPK family in cassava and expression analysis of partial drought-induced genes

Cassava is an important food and potential biofuel crop that is tolerant to multiple abiotic stressors. The mechanisms underlying these tolerances are currently less known. CBL-interacting protein kinases (CIPKs) have been shown to play crucial roles in plant developmental processes, hormone signaling transduction, and in the response to abiotic stress. However, no data is currently available about the CPK family in cassava. In this study, a total of 25 CIPK genes were identified from cassava genome based on our previous genome sequencing data. Phylogenetic analysis suggested that 25 MeCIPKs could be classified into four subfamilies, which was supported by exon-intron organizations and the architectures of conserved protein motifs. Transcriptomic analysis of a wild subspecies and two cultivated varieties showed that most MeCIPKs had different expression patterns between wild subspecies and cultivatars in different tissues or in response to drought stress. Some orthologous genes involved in CIPK interaction networks were identified between Arabidopsis and cassava. The interaction networks and co-expression patterns of these orthologous genes revealed that the crucial pathways controlled by CIPK networks may be involved in the differential response to drought stress in different accessions of cassava. Nine MeCIPK genes were selected to investigate their transcriptional response to various stimuli and the results showed the comprehensive response of the tested MeCIPK genes to osmotic, salt, cold, oxidative stressors, and ABA signaling. The identification and expression analysis of CIPK family suggested that CIPK genes are important components of development and multiple signal transduction pathways in cassava. The findings of this study will help lay a foundation for the functional characterization of the CIPK gene family and provide an improved understanding of abiotic stress responses and signaling transduction in cassava

Transplantation of Human Gingiva-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells Ameliorates Neurotic Erectile Dysfunction in a Rat Model

Cavernous nerve injury (CNI) is the main cause of erectile dysfunction (ED) following pelvic surgery. Our previous studies have demonstrated that transplantation of different sources of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) was able to alleviate ED induced by CNI in rat models. However, little is known about the therapeutic effects of human gingiva-derived MSCs (hGMSCs) in CNI ED rats. Herein, we injected the hGMSCs around the bilateral major pelvic ganglia (MPG) in a rat model of CNI and evaluated their efficacy. The results showed that treatment of hGMSCs could significantly promote the recovery of erectile function, enhance smooth muscle and endothelial content, restore neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) expression, and attenuate cell apoptosis in penile tissue. Moreover, penile fibrosis was significantly alleviated after hGMSC administration. In addition, potential mechanism exploration indicated that hGMSCs might exert its functions via skewed macrophage polarity from M1 toward M2 anti-inflammatory phenotype. In conclusion, this study found that transplantation of hGMSCs significantly improved CNI-related ED, which might provide new clues to evaluate their pre-clinical application

Implementation and performances of the IPbus protocol for the JUNO Large-PMT readout electronics

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a large neutrino detector currently under construction in China. Thanks to the tight requirements on its optical and radio-purity properties, it will be able to perform leading measurements detecting terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos in a wide energy range from tens of keV to hundreds of MeV. A key requirement for the success of the experiment is an unprecedented 3% energy resolution, guaranteed by its large active mass (20 kton) and the use of more than 20,000 20-inch photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs) acquired by high-speed, high-resolution sampling electronics located very close to the PMTs. As the Front-End and Read-Out electronics is expected to continuously run underwater for 30 years, a reliable readout acquisition system capable of handling the timestamped data stream coming from the Large-PMTs and permitting to simultaneously monitor and operate remotely the inaccessible electronics had to be developed. In this contribution, the firmware and hardware implementation of the IPbus based readout protocol will be presented, together with the performances measured on final modules during the mass production of the electronics

Validation and integration tests of the JUNO 20-inch PMTs readout electronics

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a large neutrino detector currently under construction in China. JUNO will be able to study the neutrino mass ordering and to perform leading measurements detecting terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos in a wide energy range, spanning from 200 keV to several GeV. Given the ambitious physics goals of JUNO, the electronic system has to meet specific tight requirements, and a thorough characterization is required. The present paper describes the tests performed on the readout modules to measure their performances.Comment: 20 pages, 13 figure

Mass testing of the JUNO experiment 20-inch PMTs readout electronics

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a multi-purpose, large size, liquid scintillator experiment under construction in China. JUNO will perform leading measurements detecting neutrinos from different sources (reactor, terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos) covering a wide energy range (from 200 keV to several GeV). This paper focuses on the design and development of a test protocol for the 20-inch PMT underwater readout electronics, performed in parallel to the mass production line. In a time period of about ten months, a total number of 6950 electronic boards were tested with an acceptance yield of 99.1%

Local Resistance in Early Medieval Chinese Historiography and the Problem of Religious Overinterpretation

Official Chinese historiography is a treasure trove of information on local resistance to the centralised empire in early medieval China (third to sixth century). Sinologists specialised in the study of Chinese religions commonly reconstruct the religious history of the era by interpreting some of these data. In the process, however, the primary purpose of the historiography of local resistance is often overlooked, and historical interpretation easily becomes ‘overinterpretation’—that is, ‘fabricating false intensity’ and ‘seeing intensity everywhere’, as French historian Paul Veyne proposed to define the term. Focusing on a cluster of historical anecdotes collected in the standard histories of the four centuries under consideration, this study discusses the supposedly ‘religious’ nature of some of the data they contain

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe