Association between platelet count and the risk and progression of hand, foot, and mouth disease among children

OBJECTIVE: We aimed to evaluate the association between platelet (PLT) count and the risk and progression of hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD). METHODS: In total, 122 HFMD patients and 40 healthy controls were enrolled in the study. The differences between variables among the different subgroups were compared. Logistic regression analyses were performed to assess the relationship between various parameters and HFMD risk/progression. Sensitivity analysis was conducted by detecting the trend of the association between PLT count quartiles and HFMD risk/progression. A generalized additive model was used to identify the nonlinear relationship between PLT count and HFMD risk/ progression. The relationship between gender and PLT count as well as the risk/progression of HFMD was detected using a stratified logistic regression model. RESULTS: Significant differences were observed in terms of age, male/female ratio, white blood cell (WBC) count, and PLT count between patients with stage I-II, III-IV HFMD and healthy controls. Moreover, the alanine aminotransferase and magnesium levels between patients with stage I-II and III-IV HFMD significantly differed. Moreover, a significant difference was noted in the male/female ratio among the different PLT groups. The group with a low PLT count had a lower risk of HFMD progression than the group with a high PLT count (Q4) (p=0.039). Lower age, male gender, and WBC count were found to be associated with HFMD risk. Meanwhile, PLT count was correlated to HFMD progression. The sensitivity analysis yielded a similar result using the minimally adjusted model (p for trend=0.037), and minimal changes were observed using the crude and fully adjusted model (p for trend=0.054; 0.090). A significant nonlinear relationship was observed between PLT count and HFMD progression after adjusting for age, gender, and WBC (p=0.039). CONCLUSIONS: PLT was independently associated with HFMD progression in a nonlinear manner

Using SVD on Clusters to Improve Precision of Interdocument Similarity Measure

Recently, LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) based on SVD (Singular Value Decomposition) is proposed to overcome the problems of polysemy and homonym in traditional lexical matching. However, it is usually criticized as with low discriminative power for representing documents although it has been validated as with good representative quality. In this paper, SVD on clusters is proposed to improve the discriminative power of LSI. The contribution of this paper is three manifolds. Firstly, we make a survey of existing linear algebra methods for LSI, including both SVD based methods and non-SVD based methods. Secondly, we propose SVD on clusters for LSI and theoretically explain that dimension expansion of document vectors and dimension projection using SVD are the two manipulations involved in SVD on clusters. Moreover, we develop updating processes to fold in new documents and terms in a decomposed matrix by SVD on clusters. Thirdly, two corpora, a Chinese corpus and an English corpus, are used to evaluate the performances of the proposed methods. Experiments demonstrate that, to some extent, SVD on clusters can improve the precision of interdocument similarity measure in comparison with other SVD based LSI methods

Probing darK Matter Using free leptONs: PKMUON

We propose a new method to detect sub-GeV dark matter, through their scatterings from free leptons and the resulting kinematic shifts. Specially, such an experiment can detect dark matter interacting solely with muons. The experiment proposed here is to directly probe muon-philic dark matter, in a model-independent way. Its complementarity with the muon on target proposal, is similar to, e.g. XENON/PandaX and ATLAS/CMS on dark matter searches. Moreover, our proposal can work better for relatively heavy dark matter such as in the sub-GeV region. We start with a small device of a size around 0.1 to 1 meter, using atmospheric muons to set up a prototype. Within only one year of operation, the sensitivity on cross section of dark matter scattering with muons can already reach $\sigma_D\sim 10^{-19 (-20,\,-18)}\rm{cm}^{2}$ for a dark mater $\rm{M_D}=100\, (10,\,1000)$ MeV. We can then interface the device with a high intensity muon beam of $10^{12}$/bunch. Within one year, the sensitivity can reach $\sigma_D\sim 10^{-27 (-28,\,-26)}\rm{cm}^{2}$ for $\rm{M_D}=100\, (10,\,1000)$ MeV.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, muons enlighten darknes

Regional features and seasonality of land – atmosphere coupling over Eastern China

Land–atmosphere coupling is a key process of the climate system, and various coupling mechanisms have been proposed before based on observational and numerical analyses. The impact of soil moisture (SM) on evapotranspiration (ET) and further surface temperature (ST) is an important aspect of such coupling. Using ERA-Interim data and CLM4.0 offline simulation results, this study further explores the relationships between SM/ST and ET to better understand the complex nature of the land–atmosphere coupling (i.e., spatial and seasonal variations) in eastern China, a typical monsoon area. It is found that two diagnostics of land–atmosphere coupling (i.e., SM–ET correlation and ST–ET correlation) are highly dependent on the climatology of SM and ST. By combining the SM–ET and ST–ET relationships, two “hot spots” of land–atmosphere coupling over eastern China are identified: Southwest China and North China. In Southwest China, ST is relatively high throughout the year, but SM is lowest in spring, resulting in a strong coupling in spring. However, in North China, SM is relatively low throughout the year, but ST is highest in summer, which leads to the strongest coupling in summer. Our results emphasize the dependence of land–atmosphere coupling on the seasonal evolution of climatic conditions and have implications for future studies related to land surface feedbacks

Low-mass dark matter search results from full exposure of PandaX-I experiment

We report the results of a weakly-interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter search using the full 80.1\;live-day exposure of the first stage of the PandaX experiment (PandaX-I) located in the China Jin-Ping Underground Laboratory. The PandaX-I detector has been optimized for detecting low-mass WIMPs, achieving a photon detection efficiency of 9.6\%. With a fiducial liquid xenon target mass of 54.0\,kg, no significant excess event were found above the expected background. A profile likelihood analysis confirms our earlier finding that the PandaX-I data disfavor all positive low-mass WIMP signals reported in the literature under standard assumptions. A stringent bound on the low mass WIMP is set at WIMP mass below 10\,GeV/c$^2$, demonstrating that liquid xenon detectors can be competitive for low-mass WIMP searches.Comment: v3 as accepted by PRD. Minor update in the text in response to referee comments. Separating Fig. 11(a) and (b) into Fig. 11 and Fig. 12. Legend tweak in Fig. 9(b) and 9(c) as suggested by referee, as well as a missing legend for CRESST-II legend in Fig. 12 (now Fig. 13). Same version as submitted to PR