Social network, intra-network education spillover effect and rural–urban migrants\u27 wages: Evidence from China

This study examines the determinants of rural–urban migrant wages, paying special attention to the intra-network education spillover effect of the migrants\u27 social network in China. Using the new migrant sample of Rural Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) 2009 survey data, we find that the migrants\u27 social network does have a significant impact on their own earnings. In particular, we find evidence that there exists an education spillover effect of the migrants\u27 social network, which indicates that the education level of the migrants\u27 social network has a significant positive effect on their earnings. We also find that the education spillover effects differ with gender. The results are robust after considering the potential problem of endogeneity

Ectodomain Architecture Affects Sequence and Functional Evolution of Vertebrate Toll-like Receptors

Toll-like receptors (TLRs) are crucial components of innate immunity that specifically recognize diverse pathogen-associated molecular patterns from pathogens. The continuous hydrogen-bond network (asparagine ladder) formed among the asparagine residues on the concave surfaces of neighboring leucine-rich repeat modules assists in stabilizing the overall shape of TLR ectodomains responsible for ligand recognition. Analysis of 28 types of vertebrate TLRs showed that their ectodomains possessed three types of architectures: a single-domain architecture with an intact asparagine ladder, a three-domain architecture with the ladder interrupted in the middle, and a trans-three-domain architecture with the ladder broken in both termini. Based on a phylogenetic analysis, the three vertebrate TLR architectures arose during early evolution. The 1428 vertebrate TLRs can be divided into eight families based on sequence and structural differences. TLRs ligand specificities are affected by their ectodomain architectures. Three-domain TLRs bind hydrophobic ligands, whereas single-domain and trans-three-domain TLRs mainly recognize hydrophilic ligands. Analysis of 39 vertebrate genomes suggested that the number of single-domain TLR genes in terrestrial vertebrate genomes decreased by half compared to aquatic vertebrate genomes. Single-domain TLR genes underwent stronger purifying selective pressures than three-domain TLR genes in mammals. Overall, ectodomain architecture influences the sequence and functional evolution of vertebrate TLRs

Overexpression of luxS Promotes Stress Resistance and Biofilm Formation of Lactobacillus paraplantarum L-ZS9 by Regulating the Expression of Multiple Genes

Probiotics have evoked great interest in the past years for their beneficial effects. The aim of this study was to investigate whether luxS overexpression promotes the stress resistance of Lactobacillus paraplantarum L-ZS9. Here we show that overexpression of luxS gene increased the production of autoinducer-2 (AI-2, quorum sensing signal molecule) by L. paraplantarum L-ZS9. At the same time, overexpression of luxS promoted heat-, bile salt-resistance and biofilm formation of the strain. RNAseq results indicated that multiple genes encoding transporters, membrane proteins, and transcriptional regulator were regulated by luxS. These results reveal a new role for LuxS in promoting stress resistance and biofilm formation of probiotic starter

A Parallel Feature-preserving Mesh Variable Offsetting Method with Dynamic Programming

Mesh offsetting plays an important role in discrete geometric processing. In this paper, we propose a parallel feature-preserving mesh offsetting framework with variable distance. Different from the traditional method based on distance and normal vector, a new calculation of offset position is proposed by using dynamic programming and quadratic programming, and the sharp feature can be preserved after offsetting. Instead of distance implicit field, a spatial coverage region represented by polyhedral for computing offsets is proposed. Our method can generate an offsetting model with smaller mesh size, and also can achieve high quality without gaps, holes, and self-intersections. Moreover, several acceleration techniques are proposed for the efficient mesh offsetting, such as the parallel computing with grid, AABB tree and rays computing. In order to show the efficiency and robustness of the proposed framework, we have tested our method on the quadmesh dataset, which is available at [https://www.quadmesh.cloud]. The source code of the proposed algorithm is available on GitHub at [https://github.com/iGame-Lab/PFPOffset]

Simulation Study on Quantitative Measurement of Plutonium in MOX Fuel Pellets Based on Neutron Multiplicity

MOX (mixed oxide) fuel plays a positive role in promoting sustainable development in nuclear energy. The quantitative determination of plutonium in mixed MOX fuel is also essential to nuclear security and safeguards. In this regard，neutron multiplicity measurement methods serve as crucial non-destructive testing techniques and play a vital role in quantitatively detecting plutonium in MOX fuel. In order to study the factors that influence the quantification process of plutonium，enhance measurement accuracy，and streamline the process，this study develops a comprehensive and specific simulation system for the multiplicity-based plutonium quantification method in MOX fuel. Based on the AWCC device as the basic model (simulation model with a detection efficiency of 23.89% and a die-away time of 45.42 μs)，the combination of MCNP and MATLAB software is utilized to recombine the detector capture times of fission neutrons and (α，n) neutrons obtained from MCNP software with the particle emission time series obtained by MATLAB sampling，forming a complete pulse time series. After receiving the multiplicity moments of fission neutrons in MOX fuel (vs1=2.157，vs2=3.808，vs3=5.283，vi1=2.855，vi2=6.953，vi3=13.899)，simulated pulse sequence acquisition，multiplicity analysis，and quantitative calculation are performed on four samples with different shapes and sizes. Each sample is measured for 300 s with a pre-delay time of 3 μs，a gate width of 54 μs，a long delay of 2 ms，and repeated three time’s measurements. Additionally，the simulated quantitative calculation results 240Pu are compared with the set values. The results indicate that the mass of 240Pu and the α-value obtained through simulated pulse analysis meet the requirement of less than 5% relative error compared to the actual input values. This work provides technical support for data interpretation in the quantitative measurement of plutonium in MOX fuel

(5S*,6R*,7R*)-6-Formyl-5-phenyl-7-propyl­perhydro­pyrazolo[1,2-a]pyrazol-1-one

The title compound, C16H20N2O2, was obtained by catalytic asymmetric cyclo­addition of trans-3-propyl­acrolein with 1-benzyl­idenepyrazolid-3-one betaine. There are two symmetry-independent mol­ecules in the asymmetric unit. In both mol­ecules, the two five-membered heterocyclic rings adopt envelope conformations

Dual-Reference Source-Free Active Domain Adaptation for Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Tumor Segmentation across Multiple Hospitals

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a prevalent and clinically significant malignancy that predominantly impacts the head and neck area. Precise delineation of the Gross Tumor Volume (GTV) plays a pivotal role in ensuring effective radiotherapy for NPC. Despite recent methods that have achieved promising results on GTV segmentation, they are still limited by lacking carefully-annotated data and hard-to-access data from multiple hospitals in clinical practice. Although some unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has been proposed to alleviate this problem, unconditionally mapping the distribution distorts the underlying structural information, leading to inferior performance. To address this challenge, we devise a novel Sourece-Free Active Domain Adaptation (SFADA) framework to facilitate domain adaptation for the GTV segmentation task. Specifically, we design a dual reference strategy to select domain-invariant and domain-specific representative samples from a specific target domain for annotation and model fine-tuning without relying on source-domain data. Our approach not only ensures data privacy but also reduces the workload for oncologists as it just requires annotating a few representative samples from the target domain and does not need to access the source data. We collect a large-scale clinical dataset comprising 1057 NPC patients from five hospitals to validate our approach. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the UDA methods and achieves comparable results to the fully supervised upper bound, even with few annotations, highlighting the significant medical utility of our approach. In addition, there is no public dataset about multi-center NPC segmentation, we will release code and dataset for future research