Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Synergistic warming- and catchment-driven mid-Holocene cyanobacterial development: Pigment evidence from shallow eutrophic Lake Mayinghai on the Chinese Loess Plateau

The current lake environmental problem of harmful cyanobacterial blooms cannot be mitigated effectively despite numerous eutrophication control strategies, and climate warming may have been considered as a potential key driver. However, it is still unclear how climate change and associated natural processes influence cyanobacterial development. Here we use a sedimentary pigment record from a remote, alpine, small and eutrophic lake (Lake Mayinghai) on the Chinese Loess Plateau and take the mid-Holocene as an analog to explore the possible influences of temperature, precipitation and terrestrial vegetation on in-lake and catchment processes, algal compositional changes and cyanobacterial development. The pigment data indirectly suggest that a distinctly low β-carotene to chlorophyll a ratio during the mid-Holocene is likely due to an increase in non-nitrogen-fixing colonial coccoid cyanobacteria at the expense of nitrogen-fixing filamentous cyanobacteria. There are two probable synergistic driving mechanisms, of which one is high temperatures and associated increased lake thermal stratification and the other is high inorganic nitrogen supply and resultant increased lake nitrogen to phosphorus ratio. This study provides implications for the potential influences of future climate change on cyanobacterial development under a warmer, wetter and re-forested environment on the Chinese Loess Plateau.
Comparison of the Canadian vs. the international risk scoring tool for respiratory syncytial virus prophylaxis in moderate-to-late preterm infants

Aim The study objective was to compare the Pediatric Investigators Collaborative Network on Infections in Canada risk scoring tool (CRST) that determines need for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) prophylaxis in infants 33–35 weeks gestational age during the RSV season, with the newly developed international risk scoring tool (IRST). Methods Children 33–35 weeks gestational age born during the 2018–2021 RSV seasons were prospectively identified following birth and scored with the validated CRST and IRST, that comprises seven and three variables respectively, into low- moderate- and high-risk groups that predict RSV-related hospitalization. Correlations between total scores on the two tools, and cut-off scores for the low-, moderate- and high-risk categories were conducted using the Spearman rank correlation. Results Over a period of 3 RSV seasons, 556 infants were scored. Total risk scores on the CRST and the IRST were moderately correlated (rs = 0.64, p < 0.001). A significant relationship between the risk category rank on the CRST and the risk category rank on the IRST (rs = 0.53; p < 0.001) was found. The proportion of infants categorized as moderate risk for RSV hospitalization by the CRST and IRST were 19.6% (n = 109) and 28.1% (n = 156), respectively. Conclusion The IRST may provide a time-efficient scoring alternative to the CRST with three vs. seven variables, and it selects a larger number of infants who are at moderate risk for RSV hospitalization for prophylaxis. A cost-utility analysis is necessary to justify country-specific use of the IRST, while in Canada a cost comparison is necessary between the IRST vs. the currently approved CRST prior to adoption.
The value of ultrasonography combined with carbohydrate antigen 125 and 19-9 detection in the diagnosis of borderline ovarian tumors and prediction of recurrence

Objective This study aimed to investigate the clinical value of ultrasonography combined with tumor markers in the diagnosis and prediction of recurrence of borderline ovarian tumors (BOTs) and analyze the value of the combination of two different auxiliary examinations in the diagnosis and prediction of recurrence of BOTs. Methods Here, 221 patients with BOTs confirmed by postoperative pathology were enrolled. Their clinical data, including the ultrasonography features, tumor markers, and clinicopathological data, were retrospectively analyzed. Results The statistical data of the 221 cases with BOTs were as follows: 94 (42.5%) with left-sided lesions, 102 (46.2%) with right-sided lesions, and 25 (11.3%) with bilateral lesions. Moreover, 93 cases (42.1%) had a borderline serous tumor, 110 (49.8%) had a borderline mucinous tumor, 12 (5.4%) had a borderline serous mucinous tumor, 2 (0.9%) had a borderline endometrioid tumor, 1 (0.5%) had a borderline Brenner tumor, and 2 (0.9%) had a clear cell BOT. There were 104 cases (47.1%) with a tumor diameter of ≤10 cm and 117 cases (52.9%) with a tumor diameter of >10 cm as suggested by ultrasonography. There were 89 cases (40.3%) with septation, 44 (19.9%) with papilla, and 97 (43.9%) with blood flow as demonstrated by ultrasonography. Carbohydrate antigen 125 (CA 125) was elevated in 132 cases (59.7%), and CA 19-9 was elevated in 52 cases (23.5%). Conclusion In general, BOTs are difficult to diagnose preoperatively and have a certain recurrence rate. Ultrasonography combined with CA 125 and CA 19-9 is significant for the preoperative diagnosis and selection of surgical modality for BOTs and could be used as a guideline to achieve good preoperative preparation and avoid secondary surgery.
Advances in research on the relationship between thymoquinone and pancreatic cancer

Pancreatic cancer has one of the worst prognoses among the most common cancers in the world. Its characteristics include a high rate of metastasis and chemotherapeutic resistance, which present major challenges to the medical community. The potential anticancer effects of thymoquinone (TQ), which is the main bioactive compound of the black seeds of the Nigella sativa plant, have recently received widespread attention for their potential use in treating pancreatic cancer. TQ can inhibit cell proliferation, promote cancer cell apoptosis, inhibit cell invasion and metastasis, enhance chemotherapeutic sensitivity, inhibit angiogenesis, and exert anti-inflammatory effects. These anticancer effects predominantly involve the nuclear factor (NF)-κB, phosphoinositide 3 kinase (PI3K)/Akt, Notch, transforming growth factor (TGF)-β, c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK), and p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling pathways as well as the regulation of the cell cycle, matrix metallopeptidase (MMP)-9 expression, and pyruvate kinase isozyme type M2 (PKM2) activity. TQ regulates the occurrence and development of pancreatic cancer at multiple levels and through multiple targets that communicate with each other. In this review, we summarize and discuss the analogs and carriers of TQ that have been developed in recent years. Given its multilevel anticancer effects, TQ may become a new therapeutic drug for treating pancreatic cancer in the future. This review presents a brief introduction to the research that has been conducted on TQ in relation to pancreatic cancer to provide a theoretical basis for future studies on the topic.
Homeless in the hospital: A call to strengthen multidisciplinary care for children awaiting out-of-home and psychiatric placements

Increasingly more school-age and adolescent children continue to await psychiatric or out-of-home placements across pediatric healthcare systems. These children comprise the growing overstay pediatric population. The medical, developmental, socioemotional, behavioral and academic needs of these patients are complex and diverse. The uncertainty of waiting times for placement further continues. This growing pediatric issue emphasizes the importance of mobilizing a myriad of resources across healthcare and community contexts to support these patients during this precarious time. The reality is that there is a significant scarcity of placement resources which contributes to extended waiting times for placement. This contemporary issue brings child development, ethical and moral considerations, and healthcare operations to the forefront. We discuss a myriad of dimensions surrounding this growing issue from our clinical practice. We present a wealth of recommendations in working through each of these dimensions through a multi-systems approach that include development of individualized care plan, access to consistent psychiatric services, and implementing short-term and long-term goals pertaining to treatment and placement. We also review our clinical practices that have supported these patients on a continuum at our healthcare institution which integrate our recommendations and also involve an open line of communication with established community partners involved in the care of these children. Furthermore, we propose suggestions from an operational perspective on developing a comprehensive, multidisciplinary care model for this fragile and oftentimes neglected patient population across the healthcare system as the basis to achieve equity and translational impact in the quality and delivery of healthcare care services across pediatric healthcare systems.
Latilactobacillus sakei Furu2019 and stachyose as probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics alleviate constipation in mice

Introduction Slow transit constipation (STC) is a common disorder in the digestive system. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of stachyose (ST) and Latilactobacillus sakei Furu 2019 (L. sakei) alone or combined on diphenoxylate-induced constipation and explore the underlying mechanisms using a mouse model. Methods ICR mice were randomly divided into five groups. The normal and constipation model groups were intragastrically administrated with PBS. The ST, L. sakei, and synbiotic groups were intragastrically administrated with ST (1.5 g/kg body weight), alive L. sakei (3 × 109 CFU/mouse), or ST + L. sakei (1.5 g/kg plus 3 × 109 CFU/mouse), respectively. After 21 days of intervention, all mice except the normal mice were intragastrically administrated with diphenoxylate (10 mg/kg body weight). Defecation indexes, constipation-related intestinal factors, serum neurotransmitters, hormone levels, short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), and intestinal microbiota were measured. Results Our results showed that three interventions with ST, L. sakei, and synbiotic combination (ST + L. sakei) all alleviated constipation, and synbiotic intervention was superior to ST or L. sakei alone in some defecation indicators. The RT-PCR and immunohistochemical experiment showed that all three interventions relieved constipation by affecting aquaporins (AQP4 and AQP8), interstitial cells of Cajal (SCF and c-Kit), glial cell-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF), and Nitric Oxide Synthase (NOS). The three interventions exhibited a different ability to increase the serum excitatory neurotransmitters and hormones (5-hydroxytryptamine, substance P, motilin), and reduce the serum inhibitory neurotransmitters (vasoactive intestinal peptide, endothelin). The result of 16S rDNA sequencing of feces showed that synbiotic intervention significantly increased the relative abundance of beneficial bacteria such as Akkermansia, and regulated the gut microbes of STC mice. In conclusion, oral administration of ST or L. sakei alone or combined are all effective to relieve constipation and the symbiotic use may have a promising preventive effect on STC.
Sequence and structural similarities of ACCase protein of Phalaris minor and wheat: An insight to explain herbicide selectivity

Uncontrolled growth of Phalaris minor in the wheat (Triticum aestivum) crop has remained a problem, leading to a massive reduction in wheat grain production. Herbicides have been used to control the weed, which leads to the development of frequent resistance in P. minor and mutant biotypes were also reported (Trp2027Cys and Ile2041Asn). Development of resistance enforced agro researchers to analyses the action of herbicide on P. minor. In this study, the sequence and structure of P. minor and T. aestivum Acetyl CoA Carboxylase (ACCase) have been analysed to locate the differences in their sequence and structure and to formulate a plausible explanation of the selectivity of herbicides which may help in the rationale discovery of noble herbicides. The sequence and 3D structure analysis of weed and wheat ACCase indicate minute differences in the distantly located amino acid residues. However, proteins are conserved at the binding site of herbicides with no mutation at the catalytic site. Analysis indicates that herbicides selectively target P. minor ACCase might be due to unknown other reasons, but not due to differences in their protein sequence and structure.
Automated seizure onset zone locator from resting-state functional MRI in drug-resistant epilepsy

Objective Accurate localization of a seizure onset zone (SOZ) from independent components (IC) of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) improves surgical outcomes in children with drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE). Automated IC sorting has limited success in identifying SOZ localizing ICs in adult normal rs-fMRI or uncategorized epilepsy. Children face unique challenges due to the developing brain and its associated surgical risks. This study proposes a novel SOZ localization algorithm (EPIK) for children with DRE. Methods EPIK is developed in a phased approach, where fMRI noise-related biomarkers are used through high-fidelity image processing techniques to eliminate noise ICs. Then, the SOZ markers are used through a maximum likelihood-based classifier to determine SOZ localizing ICs. The performance of EPIK was evaluated on a unique pediatric DRE dataset (n = 52). A total of 24 children underwent surgical resection or ablation of an rs-fMRI identified SOZ, concurrently evaluated with an EEG and anatomical MRI. Two state-of-art techniques were used for comparison: (a) least squares support-vector machine and (b) convolutional neural networks. The performance was benchmarked against expert IC sorting and Engel outcomes for surgical SOZ resection or ablation. The analysis was stratified across age and sex. Results EPIK outperformed state-of-art techniques for SOZ localizing IC identification with a mean accuracy of 84.7% (4% higher), a precision of 74.1% (22% higher), a specificity of 81.9% (3.2% higher), and a sensitivity of 88.6% (16.5% higher). EPIK showed consistent performance across age and sex with the best performance in those < 5 years of age. It helped achieve a ~5-fold reduction in the number of ICs to be potentially analyzed during pre-surgical screening. Significance Automated SOZ localization from rs-fMRI, validated against surgical outcomes, indicates the potential for clinical feasibility. It eliminates the need for expert sorting, outperforms prior automated methods, and is consistent across age and sex.
On the use of pseudoword reading as estimate of premorbid intelligence in brain injured, psychopathological, or cognitively impaired patients

COPYRIGHT © 2023 Pérez-Sánchez and Marín. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. On the use of pseudoword reading as estimate of premorbid intelligence in brain injured, psychopathological, or cognitively impaired patients
Leveraging SOLOv2 model to detect heat stress of poultry in complex environments

Heat stress is one of the most important environmental stressors facing poultry production. The presence of heat stress will reduce the antioxidant capacity and immunity of poultry, thereby seriously affecting the health and performance of poultry. The paper proposes an improved FPN-DenseNet-SOLO model for poultry heat stress state detection. The model uses Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) and DropBlock regularization to optimize the DenseNet-169 network to enhance the extraction of poultry heat stress features and suppress the extraction of invalid background features. The model takes the SOLOv2 model as the main frame, and uses the optimized DenseNet-169 as the backbone network to integrate the Feature Pyramid Network to detect and segment instances on the semantic branch and mask branch. In the validation phase, the performance of FPN-DenseNet-SOLO was tested with a test set consisting of 12,740 images of poultry heat stress and normal state, and it was compared with commonly used object detection models (Mask R CNN, Faster RCNN and SOLOv2 model). The results showed that when the DenseNet-169 network lacked the ECA module and the DropBlock regularization module, the original model recognition accuracy was 0.884; when the ECA module was introduced, the model's recognition accuracy improved to 0.919. Not only that, the recall, AP0.5, AP0.75 and mean average precision of the FPN-DenseNet-SOLO model on the test set were all higher than other networks. The recall is 0.954, which is 15, 8.8, and 4.2% higher than the recall of Mask R CNN, Faster R CNN and SOLOv2, respectively. Therefore, the study can achieve accurate segmentation of poultry under normal and heat stress conditions, and provide technical support for the precise breeding of poultry.
Coordinated voltage control for improved power system voltage stability by incorporating the reactive power reserve from wind farms

The absorption and output characteristics of reactive power of the doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG) greatly influence the voltage stability of PCC (Point of Common Coupling) where the wind farms are integrated into the bulk power grid. This study proposes a reactive power compensation strategy for coordinated voltage control (CVC) of PCC with large-scale wind farms to achieve the expected voltage quality of the power grid through a minimum amount of control actions in emergencies. To this end, the mechanism of reactive power and voltage control inside DFIG is first analyzed. Then, the concept of reactive power reserve (RPR) sensitivity concerning control actions is introduced and an index of voltage stability margin is proposed to evaluate and analyze the distance between the current operating point and the voltage collapse point by analyzing the relationship between reactive power reserve and voltage stability margin. In the event of an emergency, critical reactive power reserves are obtained to reduce the dimension and complexity of the control problem. The sensitivity of reactive power reserve and the control are formulated into a convex quadratic programming problem to optimize the control strategies for voltage stability. The proposed technology has been validated on the IEEE 39-bus system.
Stories of hope created together: A pilot, school-based workshop for sharing eco-emotions and creating an actively hopeful vision of the future

The climate and ecological crises challenge all communities across the world, with the greatest impact upon the most vulnerable and the youngest. There are multiple impacts on mental health, including the psychological burdens that arise with increasing awareness of the loss, threat and injustice caused by these crises. Large numbers of young people globally are understandably concerned and distressed about these crises, whilst simultaneously reporting that their concerns are regularly dismissed and ignored, particularly by those in power. This can increase feelings of isolation and distress, particularly if they have no recourse to effect change. This pilot project sought to explore how a schools-based, co-created workshop for school pupils aged 16 to 18 years could use a community-oriented space to explore their eco-emotions, address feelings of isolation and engender a sense of realistic, active hope, using storytelling and images of possible futures. A 3-h workshop for delivery in schools was co-designed with young people, researchers, educators and clinicians, using principles of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). Six school pupils aged 16–18 years consented and four completed the workshop, which involved a range of group-based activities to explore their understanding of the climate and ecological crises, support emotional expression related to these and engage in storytelling about hopeful and realistic futures. A live illustrator in attendance created shared images of the participants’ fears and hopes. The workshop was recorded, transcribed and analysed using Thematic Analysis and sentiment analysis. Feedback was sought from participants at 1 and 4 weeks after completion and analysed using content analysis. Results indicated that participants reported a range of painful and positive emotions about the crises. They highly valued having space to express their experience alongside others. Storytelling and creativity appeared to help them articulate their feelings and hopes for the future, and gave them greater motivation and confidence in talking to others about these topics. This innovative pilot study suggests that a school-based youth participatory group could offer a novel way of helping young people to engage more with the climate and ecological crises in a way that supports their wellbeing. It provides strong support for future, larger-scale projects in this area.
A new method for classifying maize by combining the phenological information of multiple satellite-based spectral bands

Introduction: Using satellite data to identify the planting area of summer crops is difficult because of their similar phenological characteristics. Methods: This study developed a new method for differentiating maize from other summer crops based on the revised time-weighted dynamic time warping (TWDTW) method, a phenology-based classification method, by combining the phenological information of multiple spectral bands and indexes instead of one single index. First, we compared the phenological characteristics of four main summer crops in Henan Province of China in terms of multiple spectral bands and indexes. The key phenological periods of each band and index were determined by comparing the identification accuracy based on the county-level statistical areas of maize. Second, we improved the TWDTW distance calculation for multiple bands and indexes by summing the rank maps of a single band or index. Third, we evaluated the performance of a multi-band and multi-period TWDTW method using Sentinel-2 time series of all spectral bands and some synthetic indexes for maize classification in Henan Province. Results and Discussion: The results showed that the combination of red edge (740.2 nm) and short-wave infrared (2202.4 nm) outperformed all others and its overall accuracy of maize planting area was about 91.77% based on 2431 field samples. At the county level, the planting area of maize matched the statistical area closely. The results of this study demonstrate that the revised TWDTW makes effective use of crop phenological information and improves the extraction accuracy of summer crops’ planting areas over a large scale. Additionally, multiple band combinations are more effective for summer crops mapping than a single band or index input.