Na₁₂(NbO)₃(PO₄)₇: A Congruent Melting Nonlinear Optical Crystal with Large NbO₆ Distortion and High Laser-Induced Damage Threshold

A new noncentrosymmetric crystal Na12(NbO)3(PO4)7 was successfully synthesized in the niobium phosphate system. Its structure characterizes isolated and highly distorted NbO6 octahedra joining with isolated PO4 groups to form a unit of a (Nb6P6O12) hexagonal star by sharing O atoms. In (Nb6P6O12) hexagonal stars, all Nb and P atoms are in a hexagonal star-like arrangement and all Na atoms are also in a hexagonal star-like arrangement, except for Na(3) and Na(10) atoms. Notably, it exhibits a strong phase-matched second harmonic response: 3 × KDP, which is rare in known niobium phosphate systems. Meanwhile, it also has a wide optically transparent window (0.29–4.44 μm) and a high laser-induced damage threshold (3.5 GW/cm2). More importantly, Na12(NbO)3(PO4)7 is a congruent melting compound that has the potential to be grown into large-sized single crystals by the Czochralski method. These excellent properties make it a promising candidate as a mid-infrared nonlinear optical crystal

Polyaniline-Coated Porous Vanadium Nitride Microrods for Enhanced Performance of a Lithium–Sulfur Battery

To solve the slow kinetics of polysulfide conversion reaction in Li-S battery, many transition metal nitrides were developed for sulfur hosts. Herein, novel polyaniline-coated porous vanadium nitride (VN) microrods were synthesized via a calcination, washing and polyaniline-coating process, which served as sulfur host for Li-S battery exhibited high electrochemical performance. The porous VN microrods with high specific surface area provided enough interspace to overcome the volume change of the cathode. The outer layer of polyaniline as a conductive shell enhanced the cathode conductivity, effectively blocked the shuttle effect of polysulfides, thus improving the cycling capacity of Li-S battery. The cathode exhibited an initial capacity of 1007 mAh g−1 at 0.5 A g−1, and the reversible capacity remained at 735 mAh g−1 over 150 cycles

ReqGen: Keywords-Driven Software Requirements Generation

Software requirements specification is undoubtedly critical for the whole software life-cycle. Currently, writing software requirements specifications primarily depends on human work. Although massive studies have been proposed to speed up the process via proposing advanced elicitation and analysis techniques, it is still a time-consuming and error-prone task, which needs to take domain knowledge and business information into consideration. In this paper, we propose an approach, named ReqGen, which can provide further assistance by automatically generating natural language requirements specifications based on certain given keywords. Specifically, ReqGen consists of three critical steps. First, keywords-oriented knowledge is selected from the domain ontology and is injected into the basic Unified pre-trained Language Model (UniLM) for domain fine-tuning. Second, a copy mechanism is integrated to ensure the occurrence of keywords in the generated statements. Finally, a requirements-syntax-constrained decoding is designed to close the semantic and syntax distance between the candidate and reference specifications. Experiments on two public datasets from different groups and domains show that ReqGen outperforms six popular natural language generation approaches with respect to the hard constraint of keywords’ (phrases’) inclusion, BLEU, ROUGE, and syntax compliance. We believe that ReqGen can promote the efficiency and intelligence of specifying software requirements

N6-Methyladenosine Regulates the Expression and Secretion of TGFβ1 to Affect the Epithelial–Mesenchymal Transition of Cancer Cells

N6-methyladenosine (m6A) is the most abundant modification on eukaryotic mRNA, which regulates all steps of the mRNA life cycle. An increasing number of studies have shown that m6A methylation plays essential roles in tumor development. However, the relationship between m6A and the progression of cancers remains to be explored. Here, we reported that transforming growth factor-β (TGFβ1)-induced epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) was inhibited in methyltransferase-like 3 (METTL3) knockdown (Mettl3Mut/−) cells. The expression of TGFβ1 was up-regulated, while self-stimulated expression of TGFβ1 was suppressed in Mettl3Mut/− cells. We further revealed that m6A promoted TGFB1 mRNA decay, but impaired TGFB1 translation progress. Besides this, the autocrine of TGFβ1 was disrupted in Mettl3Mut/− cells via interrupting TGFβ1 dimer formation. Lastly, we found that Snail, which was down-regulated in Mettl3Mut/− cells, was a key factor responding to TGFβ1-induced EMT. Together, our research demonstrated that m6A performed multi-functional roles in TGFβ1 expression and EMT modulation, suggesting the critical roles of m6A in cancer progression regulation

Association between urbanisation and the risk of hyperuricaemia among Chinese adults: a cross-sectional study from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS)

Objective To explore the association between urbanicity and hyperuricaemia (HUA) and whether urbanicity is an independent risk factor for HUA in Chinese adults.Design Data analysis from a cross-sectional survey.Setting and participants 8579 subjects aged 18 years or older were enrolled in the study from the 2009 wave of the China Health and Nutrition Survey to analyse the association between urbanicity and HUA. We divided them into three categories according to urbanisation index (low, medium and highly urbanised groups).Main outcome measures HUA was defined as serum uric acid ≥7 mg/dL in men and ≥6 mg/dL in women.Results The prevalence of HUA in low, medium and highly urbanised groups was 12.2%, 14.6% and 19.8%, respectively. The independent factors influencing serum uric acid included age, gender, hypertension, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, drinking, obesity and community-level urbanisation index (β=0.016, p<0.001). The risk of HUA in the highly urbanised group was significantly higher than that of the low urbanised group (OR 1.771, 95% CI 1.545 to 2.029, p<0.001), even after adjusting for other covariates (OR 1.661, 95% CI 1.246 to 2.212, p=0.001). In a subgroup analysis, we found that age, gender, comorbidity (such as hypertension, diabetes, obesity and chronic kidney disease) and physical activity affected the association between urbanisation and the risk of HUA.Conclusions Our findings suggest that living in highly urbanised areas is linked with higher risk of HUA independent of cardiometabolic and health-related behavioural risk factors, which have been shown to increase along with urbanisation

Mass Spectrometric Multiplex Detection of MicroRNA and Protein Biomarkers for Liver Cancer

The occurrence of cancers is often accompanied by the abnormal expression of several sorts of biomarkers (e.g., nucleic acids and proteins). The multiplex assessment of them would substantially aid in the early detection and precise diagnosis, which is often hampered by their different detection schemes, different reaction matrix and reagents, and spectral overlapping. Herein, we propose a simple and sensitive mass spectrometric method for the multiplex detection of nucleic acid and protein, in which liver cancer-related biomarkers miRNA 223 and alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) were selected as model analytes. The self-amplification effect of metal atom-based nanoparticle probes can provide high sensitivity in complex serum samples without any additional amplification procedure. The detection limits for the simultaneous detection of miRNA 223 and AFP were 103 (2.1 pM) and 219 amol (0.15 ng/mL), respectively, with high specificity and selectivity. The proposed method is potentially useful for the rapid screening of cancers

Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction in haemodialysis patients: prevalence, diagnosis, risk factors, prognosis

Abstract Aims Heart failure (HF) is a common complication and the leading cause of mortality in maintenance haemodialysis (MHD) patients. Few studies have investigated heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), which is known to affect a majority of patients. The objective of this study is to explore the prevalence, clinical profiles, diagnosis, risk factors and prognosis of MHD patients with HFpEF. Methods and results Four hundred thirty‐nine patients haemodialyzsed for over 3 months were enrolled in the study and evaluated for HF according to the European Society of Cardiology guidelines. Clinical and laboratory parameters were recorded at baseline. The median follow‐up of the study was 22.5 months. A total of 111 (25.3%) MHD patients were diagnosed with HF, while 94 (84.7%) of the HF patients were classified into HFpEF. The cut‐off value of N‐terminal pro‐B‐type natriuretic peptide (NT‐proBNP) was 4922.5 pg/mL for predicting HFpEF (sensitivity 0.840, specificity 0.723, AUC 0.866) in MHD patients. Age, diabetes mellitus, coronary artery disease and serum phosphorus were independent risk factors for the incidence of HFpEF in MHD patients while normal urine volume, haemoglobin, serum iron and serum sodium were protective factors. MHD patients with HFpEF had a higher risk of all‐cause mortality than those without HF (hazard ratio 2.47, 95% confidence interval 1.55–3.91, P < 0.0001). Conclusions The majority of MHD patients with HF were categorized into HFpEF, with a poor long‐term survival rate. NT‐proBNP beyond 4922.5 pg/mL performed well in the prediction of HFpEF in MHD patients