Serological Prevalence of Schistosoma japonicum in Mobile Populations in Previously Endemic but Now Non-Endemic Regions of China: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Background: Schistosomiasis japonica has been resurging in certain areas of China where its transmission was previously well controlled or interrupted. Several factors may be contributing to this, including mobile populations, which if infected, may spread the disease. A wide range of estimates have been published for S. japonicum infections in mobile populations, and a synthesis of these data will elucidate the relative risk presented from these groups. Methods: A literature search for publications up to Oct 31, 2014 on S. japonicum infection in mobile populations in previously endemic but now non-endemic regions was conducted using four bibliographic databases: China National Knowledge Infrastructure, WanFang, VIP Chinese Journal Databases, and PubMed. A meta-analysis was conducted by pooling one arm binary data with MetaAnalyst Beta 3.13. The protocol is available on PROSPERO (No. CRD42013005967). Results: A total of 41 studies in Chinese met the inclusion criteria, covering seven provinces of China. The time of post-interruption surveillance ranged from the first year to the 31st year. After employing a random-effects model, from 1992 to 2013 the pooled seroprevalence ranged from 0.9% (95% CI: 0.5-1.6%) in 2003 to 2.3% (95% CI: 1.5-3.4) in 1995; from the first year after the disease had been interrupted to the 31st year, the pooled seroprevalence ranged from 0.6% (95% CI: 0.2-2.1%) in the 27th year to 4.0% (95%CI: 1.3-11.3%) in the second year. The pooled seroprevalence in mobile populations each year was significantly lower than among the residents of endemic regions, whilst four papers reported a lower level of infection in the mobile populations than in the local residents out of only 13 papers which included this data. Conclusions: The re-emergence of S. japonicum in areas which had previously interrupted transmission might be due to other factors, although risk from re-introduction from mobile populations could not be excluded

Production of 1,3-propanediol from glycerol by engineered

1,3-Propanediol (1,3-PD) has versatile applications in polymers, cosmetics, foods and medicines. In order to consolidate the functions of glycerol dehydratase gene dhaB and 1,3-propanediol oxidoreductase gene dhaT and produce 1,3-PD from glycerol, the genes dhaB and dhaT from Klebsiellapneumoniae were inserted into a co-expression vector pACYCDuet-1 synchronously and the recombinant strain E. coli/pACYCDuet-dhaB-dhaT was obtained. Both enzymes were functionally coexpressed in E. coli at the presence of the selective pressure and the addition of the IPTG. The specificenzyme activity of DHAB and DHAT were 8.3 and 6.2 U/mg, respectively. When cultivated at 37°C for 30 h, the recombinant microorganisms produced 1,3-PD of 11.3 g with the consumption of 40 g glycerol per liter. The production of 1,3-PD by the strain E. coli/pACYCDuet-dhaB-dhaT was about 13-fold higher than the recombinant E. coli harboring the gene dhaB

The contribution of cause-effect link to representing the core of scientific paper—The role of Semantic Link Network

The Semantic Link Network is a general semantic model for modeling the structure and the evolution of complex systems. Various semantic links play different roles in rendering the semantics of complex system. One of the basic semantic links represents cause-effect relation, which plays an important role in representation and understanding. This paper verifies the role of the Semantic Link Network in representing the core of text by investigating the contribution of cause-effect link to representing the core of scientific papers. Research carries out with the following steps: (1) Two propositions on the contribution of cause-effect link in rendering the core of paper are proposed and verified through a statistical survey, which shows that the sentences on cause-effect links cover about 65% of key words within each paper on average. (2) An algorithm based on syntactic patterns is designed for automatically extracting cause-effect link from scientific papers, which recalls about 70% of manually annotated cause-effect links on average, indicating that the result adapts to the scale of data sets. (3) The effects of cause-effect link on four schemes of incorporating cause-effect link into the existing instances of the Semantic Link Network for enhancing the summarization of scientific papers are investigated. The experiments show that the quality of the summaries is significantly improved, which verifies the role of semantic links. The significance of this research lies in two aspects: (1) it verifies that the Semantic Link Network connects the important concepts to render the core of text; and, (2) it provides an evidence for realizing content services such as summarization, recommendation and question answering based on the Semantic Link Network, and it can inspire relevant research on content computing

Prospects for gravitational-wave observations of neutron-star tidal disruption in neutron-star/black-hole binaries

For an inspiraling neutron-star/black-hole binary (NS/BH), we estimate the gravity-wave frequency f_td at the onset of NS tidal disruption. We model the NS as a tidally distorted, homogeneous, Newtonian ellipsoid on a circular, equatorial geodesic around a Kerr BH. We find that f_td depends strongly on the NS radius R, and estimate that LIGO-II (ca. 2006-2008) might measure R to 15% precision at 140 Mpc (about 1 event/yr under current estimates). This suggests that LIGO-II might extract valuable information about the NS equation of state from tidal-disruption waves.Comment: RevTeX, 4 pages, 2 EPS figures. Revised slightly, corrected typo

In-situ STEM imaging of growth and phase change of individual CuAlX precipitates in Al alloy

Age-hardening in Al alloys has been used for over a century to improve its mechanical properties. However, the lack of direct observation limits our understanding of the dynamic nature of the evolution of nanoprecipitates during age-hardening. Using in-situ (scanning) transmission electron microscopy (S/TEM) while heating an Al-Cu alloy, we were able to follow the growth of individual nanoprecipitates at atomic scale. The heat treatments carried out at 140, 160, 180 and 200 degrees C reveal a temperature dependence on the kinetics of precipitation and three kinds of interactions of nano-precipitates. These are precipitate-matrix, precipitate-dislocation, and precipitate-precipitate interactions. The diffusion of Cu and Al during these interactions, results in diffusion-controlled individual precipitate growth, an accelerated growth when interactions with dislocations occur and a size dependent precipitateprecipitate interaction: growth and shrinkage. Precipitates can grow and shrink at opposite ends at the same time resulting in an effective displacement. Furthermore, the evolution of the crystal structure within an individual nanoprecipiate, specifically the mechanism of formation of the strengthening phase,theta', during heat-treatment is elucidated by following the same precipitate through its intermediate stages for the first time using in-situ S/TEM studies

High-level algorithm prototyping: An example extending the TVR-DART algorithm

Operator Discretization Library (ODL) is an open-source Python library for prototyping reconstruction methods for inverse problems, and ASTRA is a high-performance Matlab/Python toolbox for large-scale tomographic reconstruction. The paper demonstrates the feasibility of combining ODL with ASTRA to prototype complex reconstruction methods for discrete tomography. As a case in point, we consider the total-variation regularized discrete algebraic reconstruction technique (TVR-DART). TVR-DART assumes that the object to be imaged consists of a limited number of distinct materials. The ODL/ASTRA implementation of this algorithm makes use of standardized building blocks, that can be combined in a plug-and-play manner. Thus, this implementation of TVR-DART can easily be adapted to account for application specific aspects, such as various noise statistics that come with different imaging modalities