Biomass-derived three-dimensional porous N-doped carbonaceous aerogel for efficient supercapacitor electrodes

Functionalized carbonaceous materials with hierarchical structure and developed porosity are highly desired in energy storage and conversion fields. In this work, a facile and scalable hydrothermal methodology was established to synthesise three-dimensional (3D) N-doped carbonaceous aerogels using biomass-based starting materials and polypyrrole as N-source. The effect of different calcination temperatures on the structural properties, type and content of N-species and electrochemical performance of the 3D N-doped carbonaceous aerogels were uncovered. Thanks to the combinatorial effect of the appropriate N content and porous structure, the obtained samples exhibited excellent electrochemical performance, in particular, an outstanding specific capacitance of 281.0 F g-1 achieved on the sample calcined at 600 °C. This methodology offers a new fabrication strategy to prepare nanoscale carbonaceous materials with desirable morphology and hierarchical architecture of great potentials for the applications in energy fields

Joint Learning of Answer Selection and Answer Summary Generation in Community Question Answering

Community question answering (CQA) gains increasing popularity in both academy and industry recently. However, the redundancy and lengthiness issues of crowdsourced answers limit the performance of answer selection and lead to reading difficulties and misunderstandings for community users. To solve these problems, we tackle the tasks of answer selection and answer summary generation in CQA with a novel joint learning model. Specifically, we design a question-driven pointer-generator network, which exploits the correlation information between question-answer pairs to aid in attending the essential information when generating answer summaries. Meanwhile, we leverage the answer summaries to alleviate noise in original lengthy answers when ranking the relevancy degrees of question-answer pairs. In addition, we construct a new large-scale CQA corpus, WikiHowQA, which contains long answers for answer selection as well as reference summaries for answer summarization. The experimental results show that the joint learning method can effectively address the answer redundancy issue in CQA and achieves state-of-the-art results on both answer selection and text summarization tasks. Furthermore, the proposed model is shown to be of great transferring ability and applicability for resource-poor CQA tasks, which lack of reference answer summaries.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2020 (oral

Analysis of the Factors Associated with Negative Conversion of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 RNA of Coronavirus Disease 2019

AIM: To understand the factors associated with negative conversion of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) RNA, targeted surveillance and control measures can be taken to provide scientific basis for the treatment of the disease and to improve the prognosis of the disease. METHODS: Using the method of retrospective cohort study, we collected the data of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients in Tongji Hospital of Wuhan, China from 10 January to 25 March, 2020. Among the data of 282 cases, 271 patients, according to whether the negative conversion happened, were divided into negative conversion group and control group. We made the quantitative variables into classification; Chi-square test single-factor and Cox regression were used in univariate analysis and extracted 30 meaningful variables, then through the collinearity diagnosis, excluded the existence of collinear variables. Finally, 22 variables were included in Cox regression analysis. RESULTS: The gender distribution was statistically significant between two groups (p < 0.05). While in the negative conversion group, the patients of non-severe group occupied a large proportion (p < 0.001). The median time for the negative conversion group was 17 days, and at the end of the observation period, the virus duration in control group was 24 days (p < 0.05). A total of 55 variables were included in univariate analysis, among which 30 variables were statistically different between the two groups. After screening variables through collinearity diagnosis, 22 variables were included in the Cox regression analysis. Last, lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), age, fibrinogen (FIB), and disease severity were associated with negative conversion of SARS-CoV-2 RNA. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that in the treatment of COVID-19, focus on the age of more than 65 years old, severe, high level of LDH, FIB patients, and take some targeted treatment, such as controlling of inflammation, reducing organ damage, so as to provide good conditions for virus clearance in the body

The effective expression of xylanase gene in Candida utilis by 18S rDNA targeted homologous recombination in pGLR9K

In order to test whether 18S rDNA can influence positively xylanase gene effective expression in the yeast of Candida utilis, a targeting vector pGLR9K-XA was constructed by adding an interested gene xynA from Streptomyces olivaceoviridis into the vector pGLR9K which is constructed by ourselves. pGLR9K contains the 18S rDNA, GAP promoter and CYH resistance gene sequence, all of which is from C. utilis. Then the vector pGLR9K-XA was transformed into C. utilis. To test the vector and transformed system, PCR, Southern blot and DNS methods were used. The results showed that xylanase gene can be detected in the chromosome DNA of recombinant C. utilis and the enzyme activity of xylanase is up to 60 IU ml(-1) in the study. It is suggested that this system can be used to express exogenous genes in C. utilis as a bioreactors. This is the first report that xylanase gene was expressed in C. utilis

Transgenic Technology can Accelerate Cotton Breeding: Transgenic <em>ScALDH21</em> Cotton Significantly Improve Drought Tolerance in Southern and Northern Xinjiang

Aldehyde dehydrogenases (ALDHs) contribute to cellular protection against oxidative stress. These enzymes are crucial to organisms’ ability to cope with environmental stress. The ALDH21 gene was introduced into upland cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) from desiccant-tolerant Syntrichia caninervis moss, created stable genetic transgenic lines. As a result, drought tolerance is increased and yield penalty is reduced in those transgenic lines. The first study to demonstrate overexpression of ALDH21 enhances drought tolerance in cotton under multi-location field experiments is presented here. Cotton genotypes containing ScALDH21 exhibit significant morphological, physiological, and economic benefits. ScALDH21 functions in the physiology of cotton plants to protect them by scavenging ROS and reducing osmotic stress. The yield of transgenic cotton in northern Xinjiang showed up to 10% improvement under full irrigation and up to 18% improvement in deficit irrigation conditions on fields with purple clay loam soils. Additionally, transgenic cotton can be grown in sandy loam soil in southern Xinjiang with an average yield increase of 40% on different irrigation levels in the desert-oasis ecotone. Using ScALDH21 as a candidate gene for cotton improvement in arid and semi-arid regions was demonstrated. In addition, we assessed different irrigation protocols and optimized irrigation methods with minimal water requirements for ScALDH21-transgenic cotton that could be used in production agriculture

Size-segregated particle number and mass concentrations from different emission sources in urban Beijing

Although secondary particulate matter is reported to be the main contributor of PM2.5 during haze in Chinese megacities, primary particle emissions also affect particle concentrations. In order to improve estimates of the contribution of primary sources to the particle number and mass concentrations, we performed source apportionment analyses using both chemical fingerprints and particle size distributions measured at the same site in urban Beijing from April to July 2018. Both methods resolved factors related to primary emissions, including vehicular emissions and cooking emissions, which together make up 76% and 24% of total particle number and organic aerosol (OA) mass, respectively. Similar source types, including particles related to vehicular emissions (1.6 +/- 1.1 mu gm(-3); 2.4 +/- 1.8 x 10(3) cm(-3) and 5.5 +/- 2.8 x 10(3) cm(-3) for two traffic-related components), cooking emissions (2.6 +/- 1.9 mu gm(-3) and 5.5 +/- 3.3 x 10(3) cm(-3)) and secondary aerosols (51 +/- 41 mu gm(-3) and 4.2 +/- 3.0 x 10(3) cm(-3)), were resolved by both methods. Converted mass concentrations from particle size distributions components were comparable with those from chemical fingerprints. Size distribution source apportionment separated vehicular emissions into a component with a mode diameter of 20 nm ("traffic-ultrafine") and a component with a mode diameter of 100 nm ("traffic-fine"). Consistent with similar day- and nighttime diesel vehicle PM2.5 emissions estimated for the Beijing area, traffic-fine particles, hydrocarbon-like OA (HOA, traffic-related factor resulting from source apportionment using chemical fingerprints) and black carbon (BC) showed similar diurnal patterns, with higher concentrations during the night and morning than during the afternoon when the boundary layer is higher. Traffic-ultrafine particles showed the highest concentrations during the rush-hour period, suggesting a prominent role of local gasoline vehicle emissions. In the absence of new particle formation, our re-sults show that vehicular-related emissions (14% and 30% for ultrafine and fine particles, respectively) and cooking-activity-related emissions (32 %) dominate the particle number concentration, while secondary particulate matter (over 80 %) governs PM2.5 mass during the non-heating season in Beijing.Peer reviewe

Analysis of the Correlationship between Prostate Specific Antigen Related Variables and Risk Factor in Patients with Prostate Carcinoma

Aim: To investigate the correlation between the related variables of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and risk factors in patients with prostate carcinoma. Methods: The clinical records of 187 cases with prostate carcinoma, diagnosed by biopsy, were retrospectively analyzed to assess the correlation of PSA density (PSAD), free PSA (FPSA), and FPSA/total PSA (TPSA) with risk factors in prostate carcinoma. Results: The results from "Spearman rank correlation analysis" and "rank sum test" revealed that TPSA and FPSA were positively correlated with risk factors for prostate cancer patients, whereas there was no correlation between F/TPSA and risk factors. Conclusion: PSAD, FPSA, and the related variables of PSA may serve as valuable tools to guide the treatment of prostate cancer

Three new species of Tomocerus from tropical zone of China (Collembola, Tomoceridae)

Yu, Daoyuan, Yang, Xiaodong, Liu, Manqiang (2018): Three new species of Tomocerus from tropical zone of China (Collembola, Tomoceridae). Zootaxa 4508 (2): 225-236, DOI: https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4508.2.