Bifurcation Study of Thin Plate with an All-Over Breathing Crack

An all-over breathing crack on the plate surface having arbitrary depth and location is assumed to be nonpropagating and parallel to one side of the plate. Based on a piecewise model, the nonlinear dynamic behaviors of thin plate with the all-over breathing crack are studied to analyze the effect of external excitation amplitudes and frequencies on cracked plate with different crack parameters (crack depth and crack location). Firstly, the mode shape functions of cracked thin plate are obtained by using the simply supported boundary conditions and the boundary conditions along the crack line. Then, natural frequencies and mode functions of the cracked plate are calculated, which are assessed with FEM results. The stress functions of thin plate with large deflection are obtained by the equations of compatibility in the status of opening and closing of crack, respectively. To compare with the effect of breathing crack on the plate, the nonlinear dynamic responses of open-crack plate and intact plate are analyzed too. Lastly, the waveforms, bifurcation diagrams, and phase portraits of the model are gained by the Runge-Kutta method. It is found that complex nonlinear dynamic behaviors, such as quasi-periodic motion, bifurcation, and chaotic motion, appear in the breathing crack plate

Immunological Aspects of Fulminant Type 1 Diabetes in Chinese

Background. Fulminant type 1 diabetes (FT1D) is a novel subtype of type 1 diabetes characterized by extremely rapid onset and complete deficiency of insulin due to the destruction of pancreatic β cells. However, the precise mechanisms underlying the etiology of this disease remain unclear. Methods. A total of 22 patients with FT1D and 10 healthy subjects were recruited. Serum antibodies to GAD, IA2, and ZnT8 in patients were tested. And peripheral T cell responses to GAD65, insulin B9–23 peptide, or C peptide were determined in 10 FT1D patients and 10 healthy controls. The mRNA levels of several related cytokines and molecules, such as IFN-γ, IL-4, RORC, and IL-17 in PBMCs from FT1D patients were analyzed by qRT-PCR. Result. We found that a certain proportion of Chinese FT1D patients actually have developed islet-related autoantibodies after onset of the disease. The GAD, insulin, or C peptide-reactive T cells were found in some FT1D patients. We also detected a significant increase for IFN-γ expression in FT1D PBMCs as compared with that of healthy controls. Conclusion. Autoimmune responses might be involved in the pathogenesis of Chinese FT1D

Efficient Multi-Scale Attention Module with Cross-Spatial Learning

Remarkable effectiveness of the channel or spatial attention mechanisms for producing more discernible feature representation are illustrated in various computer vision tasks. However, modeling the cross-channel relationships with channel dimensionality reduction may bring side effect in extracting deep visual representations. In this paper, a novel efficient multi-scale attention (EMA) module is proposed. Focusing on retaining the information on per channel and decreasing the computational overhead, we reshape the partly channels into the batch dimensions and group the channel dimensions into multiple sub-features which make the spatial semantic features well-distributed inside each feature group. Specifically, apart from encoding the global information to re-calibrate the channel-wise weight in each parallel branch, the output features of the two parallel branches are further aggregated by a cross-dimension interaction for capturing pixel-level pairwise relationship. We conduct extensive ablation studies and experiments on image classification and object detection tasks with popular benchmarks (e.g., CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1k, MS COCO and VisDrone2019) for evaluating its performance.Comment: Accepted to ICASSP202

Primary care quality and provider disparities in China: a standardized-patient-based study

Background Primary health care is the foundation of high-performing health systems. Achieving an improved primary care system requires a thorough understanding of the current quality of care among various providers within the system. As the world's largest developing country, China has made significant investments in primary care over the past decade. This study evaluates the quality of primary care across different provider types in China, offering in-sights for enhancing China's primary care system. Methods We merged data from four standardized patient (SP) research projects to compare the quality of five major primary care providers in China: rural clinics, county hospitals, migrant clinics, urban community health cen-ters (CHCs), and online platforms. We evaluated quality of care across process quality (e.g., checklist completion), diagnosis quality (e.g., diagnostic accuracy), and case management (e.g., correct medication), employing multiple regression analyses to explore quality differences by provider type, and their associations with physician characteristics. Findings We document a poor quality of primary care in China, with no-table disparities across different providers. CHCs emerge as relatively reliable primary care providers in terms of process quality, diagnostic accuracy, and cor-rect medication prescriptions. Online platforms outpace rural clinics, county hospitals, and migrant clinics in many areas, showcasing their potential to en-hance access to quality healthcare resources in under-resourced rural regions. We observe a positive association between the qualifications of physicians and the quality of primary care, underscoring the necessity for a greater presence of more highly qualified practitioners. Interpretation Primary care quality in China varies greatly among providers, reflecting inequalities in healthcare access. While online platforms indicate po-tential for improving care in under-resourced areas, their high referral rates suggest they cannot completely substitute traditional care. The findings em-phasize the need for more qualified practitioners and stringent regulation to enhance care quality and reduce unnecessary treatments. Funding No founders had a role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report. We have acknowledged this in the revised manuscript

Research on hot water chemical flooding technology in Bohai heavy oil field

Introduction: The hot water chemical flooding technology effectively improves the fluidity ratio and enhances the horizontal and vertical oil displacement efficiency of the reservoir through the synergistic effect of thermal energy and chemicals, which can further enhance the recovery rate on the basis of throughput thermal recovery.Methods: Based on the geological reservoir parameters of Bohai B oilfield, an oil recovery system evaluation experiment and scheme design study were carried out. Injection parameters such as hot water temperature, chemical agent concentration, and chemical agent dosage that affect the oil recovery effect of hot water chemical flooding were optimized and designed. The development characteristics and effects of two thermal recovery technologies, namely multi thermal fluid throughput and hot water chemical flooding, were compared and analyzed.Results: The results show that with the increase of temperature, the effect of chemical agents on improving the water-oil mobility ratio and reducing the viscosity of crude oil is weakened, and the thermal energy plays a leading role in enhancing oil recovery, but when the temperature is higher than 115°C, the improvement of oil recovery is slowed down, and the comprehensive economic indicators decline rapidly. As the concentration of chemical agent increases, the enhanced oil recovery increases monotonously. When the concentration is 1500 mg/L, the comprehensive economic indicators reach the peak and then decline, indicating that the efficiency of chemical agent decreases. The total amount of chemical agent shall be controlled within 0.25 ~ 0.30 PV. The case calculation shows that hot water chemical flooding can expand the effective radius from 80 m to 400 m, more effectively use the reserves between injection and production wells, increase the oil recovery by 4.8 percentage points, and increase the oil yield by 31.7 m3/t per ton of agent.Discussion: It is suggested that Bohai B Oilfield can adopt hot water chemical flooding after the multiple thermal fluid huff and puff to continuously guarantee the oilfield production

Author Correction: Bitter taste receptor activation by cholesterol and an intracellular tastant

Correction to "Bitter taste receptor activation by cholesterol and an intracellular tastant

Advances in the mechanism of inflammasomes activation in herpes virus infection

Herpesviruses, prevalent DNA viruses with a double-stranded structure, establish enduring infections and play a part in various diseases. Despite their deployment of multiple tactics to evade the immune system, both localized and systemic inflammatory responses are triggered by the innate immune system’s recognition of them. Recent progress has offered more profound understandings of the mechanisms behind the activation of the innate immune system by herpesviruses, specifically through inflammatory signaling. This process encompasses the initiation of an intracellular nucleoprotein complex, the inflammasome associated with inflammation.Following activation, proinflammatory cytokines such as IL-1β and IL-18 are released by the inflammasome, concurrently instigating a programmed pathway for cell death. Despite the structural resemblances between herpesviruses, the distinctive methods of inflammatory activation and the ensuing outcomes in diseases linked to the virus exhibit variations.The objective of this review is to emphasize both the similarities and differences in the mechanisms of inflammatory activation among herpesviruses, elucidating their significance in diseases resulting from these viral infections.Additionally, it identifies areas requiring further research to comprehensively grasp the impact of this crucial innate immune signaling pathway on the pathogenesis of these prevalent viruses

Genome-wide Analysis of the Interplay Between Chromatin-associated Rna and 3d Genome Organization in Human Cells

The interphase genome is dynamically organized in the nucleus and decorated with chromatin-associated RNA (caRNA). It remains unclear whether the genome architecture modulates the spatial distribution of caRNA and vice versa. Here, we generate a resource of genome-wide RNA-DNA and DNA-DNA contact maps in human cells. These maps reveal the chromosomal domains demarcated by locally transcribed RNA, hereafter termed RNA-defined chromosomal domains. Further, the spreading of caRNA is constrained by the boundaries of topologically associating domains (TADs), demonstrating the role of the 3D genome structure in modulating the spatial distribution of RNA. Conversely, stopping transcription or acute depletion of RNA induces thousands of chromatin loops genome-wide. Activation or suppression of the transcription of specific genes suppresses or creates chromatin loops straddling these genes. Deletion of a specific caRNA-producing genomic sequence promotes chromatin loops that straddle the interchromosomal target sequences of this caRNA. These data suggest a feedback loop where the 3D genome modulates the spatial distribution of RNA, which in turn affects the dynamic 3D genome organization