French direct investment in China: A survey report

This paper attempts to explain the economic effects of French direct investment in China on the French economy, based on our survey results using the relative data and case study. The paper begins with a brief description of the scale, location, industries, firms and forms of French direct investment in China, and then explains the economic effects of French FDI in China on both nations, such as the employment and income, import and export, balance of payments, industry hollowing, technological improvement, and others. Finally, the paper provides a case study about the success of Qingdao Hairun Water Supply Corp. Ltd, one of EJV of Sino French Water Development Company Ltd.

Using Volatile Organic Compounds In Exhaled Breath As A Biomarker For Early Lung Cancer Detection: A Systematic Review

Lung cancer has become the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer deaths globally. The major problem of the high mortality rate is the late diagnosis. Conventional methods utilized for clinical detection of lung cancer have employed expensive and invasive medical procedures that cause stress, discomfort, and pain to patients, and have demonstrated low sensitivity, substantial false negatives, and risk of radiation exposure. The drawbacks obviate their applicability to large-scale, population-wide screening efforts. This paper reviews the applications of using volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in exhaled breath as a potential approach for early lung cancer detection. An electronic search was conducted in PubMed and Scopus. A total of 41 studies were included in this review. The sampling method of exhaled breath employed in most of the included studies were leak-proof Tedlar bags. Mass spectrometry and electronic noses were two main techniques used in breath sample detection. In the recent years, electronic noses gained more popularity due to their portability and cost-effectiveness. In this review, a total of 40 VOCs, originated from both endogenous and exogenous sources, were found to be significant in discriminating between lung cancer patients and healthy controls in two or more of the included studies. The included studies demonstrated substantial sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of the method. Overall, the results showed that VOCs in exhaled breath is a promising biomarker for early detection of lung cancer. However, the large-scale practice of this method is constrained by the lack of standardized breath collection and analysis system and putative exhaled VOC biomarkers. Further studies with consistent sampling protocols should be used to demonstrate the reproducibility and repeatability of the detection tool before they are applied in clinical practice

Influence of Parental Expectations on Young Children’s Approaches to Learning

This study explores the level of young children’s Approaches to Learning (ATL) in Shanxi, China, with a specific on the impact of parental expectations on ATL. 360 parents with preschool-aged children were enlisted for a comprehensive questionnaire survey. Applying descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, correlation, and regression analyses on the data gathered revealed that children's ATL was moderate, with noticeable variations based on gender and age. Importantly, parental expectations were positively correlated with children's ATL and remained a significant predictor even when accounting for age and gender, highlighting the strong relationship between parental expectations and early learning development. &nbsp

Techniques for improving the water-flooding of oil fields during the high water-cut stage

International audienceThe multi-layer co-exploitation method is often used in offshore oilfields because of the large spacing between the injection and production wells. As oilfields gradually enter the high water-cut stage, the contradiction between the horizontal and vertical directions becomes more prominent, and the distribution of the remaining oil is more complex. Oilfields are facing unprecedented challenges in further enhancing oil recovery. Using oilfield A, which is in the high water-cut stage, as the research object, we compiled a detailed description of the remaining oil during the high water-cut stage using the information collected during the comprehensive adjustment and infilling of the oilfield. In addition various techniques for tapping the potential reservoir, stabilizing the oil, and controlling the water were investigated. A set of key techniques for the continuous improvement of the efficiency of water injection after comprehensive adjustment of high water-cut fields was generated. Based on the determined configuration of the offshore deltaic reservoir, a set of detailed descriptive methods and tapping technology for extracting the remaining oil in the offshore high water-cut oilfield after comprehensive adjustment was established. By considering the equilibrium displacement and using a new quantitative characterization method that includes displacement, a new technique for determining the quantity of water that needs to be injected into a stratified injection well during the high water-cut stage was established. Based on the principle of flow field intensity reconfiguration, a linear, variable-intensity, alternating injection and withdrawal technique was proposed. With the application of this series of techniques, the increase in the water content was controlled to within 1%, the natural reduction rate was controlled to within 9%, and the production increased by 1.060 × 107 m3

Effects of Simvastatin on Glucose Metabolism in Mouse MIN6 Cells

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of simvastatin on insulin secretion in mouse MIN6 cells and the possible mechanism. MIN6 cells were, respectively, treated with 0 μM, 2 μM, 5 μM, and 10 μM simvastatin for 48 h. Radio immunoassay was performed to measure the effect of simvastatin on insulin secretion in MIN6 cells. Luciferase method was used to examine the content of ATP in MIN6 cells. Real-time PCR and western blotting were performed to measure the mRNA and protein levels of inward rectifier potassium channel 6.2 (Kir6.2), voltage-dependent calcium channel 1.2 (Cav1.2), and glucose transporter-2 (GLUT2), respectively. ATP-sensitive potassium current and L-type calcium current were recorded by whole-cell patch-clamp technique. The results showed that high concentrations of simvastatin (5 μM and 10 μM) significantly reduced the synthesis and secretion of insulin compared to control groups in MIN6 cells (P<0.05). ATP content in simvastatin-treated cells was lower than in control cells (P<0.05). Compared with control group, the mRNA and protein expression of Kir6.2 increased with treatment of simvastatin (P<0.05), and mRNA and protein expression of Cav1.2 and GLUT2 decreased in response to simvastatin (P<0.05). Moreover, simvastatin increased the ATP-sensitive potassium current and reduced the L-type calcium current. These results suggest that simvastatin inhibits the synthesis and secretion of insulin through a reduction in saccharometabolism in MIN6 cells

ChemRL-GEM: Geometry Enhanced Molecular Representation Learning for Property Prediction

Effective molecular representation learning is of great importance to facilitate molecular property prediction, which is a fundamental task for the drug and material industry. Recent advances in graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown great promise in applying GNNs for molecular representation learning. Moreover, a few recent studies have also demonstrated successful applications of self-supervised learning methods to pre-train the GNNs to overcome the problem of insufficient labeled molecules. However, existing GNNs and pre-training strategies usually treat molecules as topological graph data without fully utilizing the molecular geometry information. Whereas, the three-dimensional (3D) spatial structure of a molecule, a.k.a molecular geometry, is one of the most critical factors for determining molecular physical, chemical, and biological properties. To this end, we propose a novel Geometry Enhanced Molecular representation learning method (GEM) for Chemical Representation Learning (ChemRL). At first, we design a geometry-based GNN architecture that simultaneously models atoms, bonds, and bond angles in a molecule. To be specific, we devised double graphs for a molecule: The first one encodes the atom-bond relations; The second one encodes bond-angle relations. Moreover, on top of the devised GNN architecture, we propose several novel geometry-level self-supervised learning strategies to learn spatial knowledge by utilizing the local and global molecular 3D structures. We compare ChemRL-GEM with various state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines on different molecular benchmarks and exhibit that ChemRL-GEM can significantly outperform all baselines in both regression and classification tasks. For example, the experimental results show an overall improvement of 8.8% on average compared to SOTA baselines on the regression tasks, demonstrating the superiority of the proposed method

Epidemiology of human papillomavirus infection in women from Xiamen, China, 2013 to 2023

BackgroundCervical cancer is primarily caused by HPV infection. The epidemiology of HPV infection in specific areas is of great meaning of guide cervical cancer screening and formulating HPV vaccination strategies. Here, we evaluated the epidemiological characteristics of HPV infection in Xiamen population.MethodsIn total, 159,049 cervical exfoliated cell samples collected from female outpatients in Women and Children’s Hospital, School of Medicine, Xiamen between January 2013 and July 2023 were analyzed. HPV DNA detection was performed using HPV genotyping kits (Hybribio Limited Corp, China). An analysis was conducted on the prevalence of HPV infection, taking into account factors such as age, year, and multiple patterns of HPV infection. The differences in prevalence among age groups and years were compared using χ2 test.ResultsThe overall prevalence of any 21 HPV genotypes was 18.4%, of which the high-risk HPV (HR-HPV) positive rate was 14.6%. The age-specific prevalence of HPV infection showed a bimodal distribution, with two distinct peaks, one at &lt;25 years (31.2%) and the other at 60–64 years (32.9%). There was a downward trend in the prevalence of HPV infection over time, decreasing from 26.2% in 2013 to 14.5% in 2021, and then increasing to 19.0% in 2023. The five most prevent HR-HPV genotypes were HPV52 (4.0%), 58 (2.6%), 16 (2.5%), 51 (1.8%), and 39 (1.7%). Among the positive cases, 76.7% were detected with only one genotype and 23.3% with multiple genotypes. The most common co-infection was HPV52 + HPV58 (0.24%), followed by HPV16 + HPV52 (0.24%), HPV52 + HPV53 (0.21%), HPV52 + HPV81 (0.21%), HPV51 + HPV52 (0.19%), HPV16 + HPV58 (0.18%), and HPV39 + HPV52 (0.17%).ConclusionThe study provided the largest scale information on the recent epidemiological characteristics of HPV infection in Xiamen, and even in Fujian Province, China, which would support making the prevention and control strategies for cervical cancer in the region

BRD4 Inhibitor Inhibits Colorectal Cancer Growth and Metastasis

Post-translational modifications have been identified to be of great importance in cancers and lysine acetylation, which can attract the multifunctional transcription factor BRD4, has been identified as a potential therapeutic target. In this paper, we identify that BRD4 has an important role in colorectal cancer; and that its inhibition substantially wipes out tumor cells. Treatment with inhibitor MS417 potently affects cancer cells, although such effects were not always outright necrosis or apoptosis. We report that BRD4 inhibition also limits distal metastasis by regulating several key proteins in the progression of epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT). This effect of BRD4 inhibitor is demonstrated via liver metastasis in animal model as well as migration and invasion experiments in vitro. Together, our results demonstrate a new application of BRD4 inhibitor that may be of clinical use by virtue of its ability to limit metastasis while also being tumorcidal

Population pharmacokinetics and individualized dosing of vancomycin for critically ill patients receiving continuous renal replacement therapy: the role of residual diuresis

Background: Vancomycin dosing is difficult in critically ill patients receiving continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT). Previous population pharmacokinetic (PopPK) models seldom consider the effect of residual diuresis, a significant factor of elimination, and thus have poor external utility. This study aimed to build a PopPK model of vancomycin that incorporates daily urine volume to better describe the elimination of vancomycin in these patients.Methods: We performed a multicenter retrospective study that included critically ill patients who received intermittent intravenous vancomycin and CRRT. The PopPK model was developed using the NONMEM program. Goodness-of-fit plots and bootstrap analysis were employed to evaluate the final model. Monte Carlo simulation was performed to explore the optimal dosage regimen with a target area under the curve of ≥400 mg/L h and 400–600 mg/L h.Results: Overall, 113 observations available from 71 patients were included in the PopPK model. The pharmacokinetics could be well illustrated by a one-compartment model with first-order elimination, with the 24-h urine volume as a significant covariate of clearance. The final typical clearance was 1.05 L/h, and the mean volume of distribution was 69.0 L. For patients with anuria or oliguria, a maintenance dosage regimen of 750 mg q12h is recommended.Conclusion: Vancomycin pharmacokinetics in critically ill patients receiving CRRT were well described by the developed PopPK model, which incorporates 24-h urine volume as a covariate. This study will help to better understand vancomycin elimination and benefit precision dosing in these patients