Understanding precipitation recycling over the Tibetan Plateau using tracer analysis with WRF

The precipitation recycling (PR) ratio is an important indicator that quantifies the land-atmosphere interaction strength in the Earth system’s water cycle. To better understand how the heterogeneous land surface in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) contributes to precipitation, we used the water-vapor tracer (WVT) method coupled with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) regional climate model. The goals were to quantify the PR ratio, in terms of annual mean, seasonal variability and diurnal cycle, and to address the relationships of the PR ratio with lake treatments and precipitation amount. Simulations showed that the PR ratio increases from 0.1 in winter to 0.4 in summer when averaged over the TP with the maxima centered at the headwaters of three major rivers (Yangtze, Yellow and Mekong). For the central TP, the highest PR ratio rose to over 0.8 in August, indicating that most of the precipitation was recycled via local evapotranspiration in summer. The larger daily mean and standard deviation of the PR ratio in summer suggested a stronger effect of land-atmosphere interactions on precipitation in summer than in winter. Despite the relatively small spatial extent of inland lakes, the treatment of lakes in WRF significantly impacted the calculation of the PR ratio over the TP, and correcting lake temperature substantially improved both precipitation and PR ratio simulations. There was no clear relationship between PR ratio and precipitation amount; however, a significant positive correlation between PR and convective precipitation was revealed. This study is beneficial for the understanding of land-atmosphere interaction over high mountain regionsThis work is jointly supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA2006010202), by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research (STEP) program (2019QZKK010314), by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (91537105 and 91537211), and by the NCAR Water System Program. Support of the Fudan University-Tibet University Joint Laboratory for Biodiversity and Global Change is appreciated. We thank the ECMWF for the free access of the ERA-Interim Reanalysis dataset. The work was carried out at the National Supercomputer Center in TianjinS

Gender Difference of Unconscious Attentional Bias in High Trait Anxiety Individuals

By combining binocular suppression technique and a probe detection paradigm, we investigated attentional bias to invisible stimuli and its gender difference in both high trait anxiety (HTA) and low trait anxiety (LTA) individuals. As an attentional cue, happy or fearful face pictures were presented to HTAs and LTAs for 800 ms either consciously or unconsciously (through binocular suppression). Participants were asked to judge the orientation of a gabor patch following the face pictures. Their performance was used to measure attentional effect induced by the cue. We found gender differences of attentional effect only in the unconscious condition with HTAs. Female HTAs exhibited difficulty in disengaging attention from the location where fearful faces were presented, while male HTAs showed attentional avoidance of it. Our results suggested that the failure to find attentional avoidance of threatening stimuli in many previous studies might be attributed to consciously presented stimuli and data analysis regardless of participants' gender. These findings also contributed to our understanding of gender difference in anxiety disorder

Di-μ-bromido-tris­(triphenyl­phosphine)-1κP,2κ2 P-disilver(I) tetra­hydro­furan 0.85-solvate

In the title binuclear silver(I) complex, [Ag2Br2(C18H15P)3]·0.85C4H8O, the two independent silver(I) ions are briged by two bromide ions. One AgI ion is coordinated by two triphenyl­phosphine groups with a square-planar geometry, while the second is coordinated by one triphenyl­phine group with a trigonal-planar geometry. The structure is very similar to that of the dichloro­methane solvate reported by Zhu, Huang & Zheng [Chin. J. Struct. Chem. (1994), 13, 325–327]. The tetrahydrofuran solvent molecule is disordered and was refined with a fixed occupancy of 0.85

A study of health effects of long-distance ocean voyages on seamen using a data classification approach

Background: Long-distance ocean voyages may have substantial impacts on seamen’s health, possibly causing malnutrition and other illness. Measures can possibly be taken to prevent such problems from happening through preparing special diet and making special precautions prior or during the sailing if a detailed understanding can be gained about what specific health effects such voyages may have on the seamen. Methods: We present a computational study on 200 seamen using 41 chemistry indicators measured on their blood samples collected before and after the sailing. Our computational study is done using a data classification approach with a support vector machine-based classifier in conjunction with feature selections using a recursive feature elimination procedure. Results: Our analysis results suggest that among the 41 blood chemistry measures, nine are most likely to be affected during the sailing, which provide important clues about the specific effects of ocean voyage on seamen’s health. Conclusions: The identification of the nine blood chemistry measures provides important clues about the effects of long-distance voyage on seamen’s health. These findings will prove to be useful to guide in improving the living and working environment, as well as food preparation on ships

GPS-MBA: Computational Analysis of MHC Class II Epitopes in Type 1 Diabetes

As a severe chronic metabolic disease and autoimmune disorder, type 1 diabetes (T1D) affects millions of people world-wide. Recent advances in antigen-based immunotherapy have provided a great opportunity for further treating T1D with a high degree of selectivity. It is reported that MHC class II I-Ag7 in the non-obese diabetic (NOD) mouse and human HLA-DQ8 are strongly linked to susceptibility to T1D. Thus, the identification of new I-Ag7 and HLA-DQ8 epitopes would be of great help to further experimental and biomedical manipulation efforts. In this study, a novel GPS-MBA (MHC Binding Analyzer) software package was developed for the prediction of I-Ag7 and HLA-DQ8 epitopes. Using experimentally identified epitopes as the training data sets, a previously developed GPS (Group-based Prediction System) algorithm was adopted and improved. By extensive evaluation and comparison, the GPS-MBA performance was found to be much better than other tools of this type. With this powerful tool, we predicted a number of potentially new I-Ag7 and HLA-DQ8 epitopes. Furthermore, we designed a T1D epitope database (TEDB) for all of the experimentally identified and predicted T1D-associated epitopes. Taken together, this computational prediction result and analysis provides a starting point for further experimental considerations, and GPS-MBA is demonstrated to be a useful tool for generating starting information for experimentalists. The GPS-MBA is freely accessible for academic researchers at: http://mba.biocuckoo.org

Genetic Basis of Phenotypic Differences Between Chinese Yunling Black Goats and Nubian Goats Revealed by Allele-Specific Expression in Their F1 Hybrids

Chinese Yunling black goats and African Nubian goats are divergent breeds showing significant differences in body size, milk production, and environmental adaptation. However, the genetic mechanisms underlying these phenotypic differences remain to be elucidated. In this report, we provide a detailed portrait of allele-specific expression (ASE) from 54 RNA-Seq analyses across six tissues from nine F1 hybrid offspring generated by crossing the two breeds combined with 13 genomes of the two breeds. We identified a total of 524 genes with ASE, which are involved in bone development, muscle cell differentiation, and the regulation of lipid metabolic processes. We further found that 38 genes with ASE were also under directional selection by comparing 13 genomes of the two breeds; these 38 genes play important roles in metabolism, immune responses, and the adaptation to hot and humid environments. In conclusion, our study shows that the exploration of genes with ASE in F1 hybrids provides an efficient way to understand the genetic basis underlying the phenotypic differences of two diverse goat breeds

DEF-Net: A Dual-Encoder Fusion Network for Fundus Retinal Vessel Segmentation

The deterioration of numerous eye diseases is highly related to the fundus retinal structures, so the automatic retinal vessel segmentation serves as an essential stage for efficient detection of eye-related lesions in clinical practice. Segmentation methods based on encode-decode structures exhibit great potential in retinal vessel segmentation tasks, but have limited feature representation ability. In addition, they don’t effectively consider the information at multiple scales when performing feature fusion, resulting in low fusion efficiency. In this paper, a newly model, named DEF-Net, is designed to segment retinal vessels automatically, which consists of a dual-encoder unit and a decoder unit. Fused with recurrent network and convolution network, a dual-encoder unit is proposed, which builds a convolutional network branch to extract detailed features and a recurrent network branch to accumulate contextual features, and it could obtain richer features compared to the single convolution network structure. Furthermore, to exploit the useful information at multiple scales, a multi-scale fusion block used for facilitating feature fusion efficiency is designed. Extensive experiments have been undertaken to demonstrate the segmentation performance of our proposed DEF-Net