bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Decreasing COPD-related incidences and hospital admissions in a German health insurance population
Authors: Geyer Siegfried , Tetzlaff Juliane , Sperlich Stefanie , Safieddine Batoul , Epping Jelena , Eberhard Sveja , Stahmeyer Jona , Beller Johannes 
Published: December 2023

AbstractChronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is associated with smoking and work-related health hazards. Most studies have reported prevalences, and the number of studies examining incidences and social inequalities is small. We analyzed the development of social inequalities of COPD-incidences in terms of income and exacerbations in terms of hospital admissions. Findings were based on claims data from a German statutory health insurance covering 2008 to 2019. Outpatient diagnoses were used for defining COPD-cases, hospital admissions were used for detecting exacerbations. Analyses were performed using Cox-regression. Individual incomes were depicted at three levels defined according to national averages for each year. Data of 3,040,137 insured men and women were available. From 2008 to 2019 COPD-incidences in men decreased by 42% and 47% in women. After stratification by income the reduction at the lowest income level was 41% and 50% in women. Respectively, at the highest income level reductions were 28% and 41%. Disease exacerbations decreased over time, and also social inequalities between income groups emerged. COPD-rates decreased over time at all income levels, but at a faster pace in the lowest income group, thus leading to a positive development of diminishing social gradients in men as well as in women.
Environmental and health implications of Pb-bearing particles in settled urban dust from an arid city affected by Pb–Zn factory emissions
Authors: Soto-Jiménez M. F. , Roos-Muñoz S. , Soto-Morales S. , Gómez-Lizarrága L. E. , Bucio-Galindo L. 
Published: December 2023

AbstractMetal-rich particles originating from non-ferrous metallurgical activities are the primary source of atmospheric metals in urban environments. These particles vary in size, morphology, and elemental compositions and they undergo weathering processes that alter their composition and affect their toxicity. This study focuses on lead (Pb)-rich particles in settled urban dust within an arid and dusty city, Torreón in North Mexico, affected by Met–Mex Peñoles complex, one of the world's largest Ag–Cd–Pb–Zn smelting and refining facilities in operating since 1901. Torreón is characterized by arid conditions, temperature fluctuations, and low humidity. Dry atmospheric particles were collected in 2015 and 2017 from Torreón's urban area within a 3 km radius of the Met–Mex Peñoles complex. We used various analytical techniques, including scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDS), and X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) to determine the size, morphology, elemental composition and mineralogy of Pb-bearing particles. Our analysis revealed a range of Pb-bearing particle sizes and morphologies with varying Pb (0.3 to 51–87.2%) and other element contents, such as As (0.04 to 1–3.4%), Cd (0.4 to 3.3–5.1%), Cu (0.51–14.1%), Hg (ND-0.6%), and Zn (1.7 to 79–90.3%). XRD analysis confirmed the presence of Pb and Zn sulfides, Pb carbonates, Pb sulfate, and Pb oxides in urban dust, both as individual particles and agglomerates. Primary Pb minerals were linked to fugitive feed concentrates and smelter flue gas at Met–Mex Peñoles, while secondary Pb minerals, like Pb carbonates, Pb sulfate, and Pb oxides, resulted from direct emissions and weathering processes. Compared to galena, secondary Pb minerals exhibit higher chemical availability in the environment, posing greater risks to the environment and human health. As the particles analyzed are presumed to be resuspended rather than freshly emitted by Met–Mex, the presence of secondary Pb minerals in settled urban dust is predominantly linked to weathering processes. The physical and chemical transformations in Pb-rich particles contribute to increased Pb bioavailability and toxicity in urban dust, with substantial implications for environmental and human health. These findings highlight the potential consequences of weathered Pb-rich particle in urban areas, particularly in the arid and dusty city of Torreón.
Targeted indoor residual insecticide applications shift Aedes aegypti age structure and arbovirus transmission potential
Authors: Kirstein Oscar David , Culquichicon Carlos , Che-Mendoza Azael , Navarrete-Carballo Juan , Wang Joyce , Bibiano-Marin Wilberth , Gonzalez-Olvera Gabriela , Ayora-Talavera Guadalupe , Earnest James , Puerta-Guardo Henry , Pavia-Ruz Norma , Correa-Morales Fabian , Medina-Barreiro Anuar , Manrique-Saide Pablo , Vazquez-Prokopec Gonzalo M. 
Published: December 2023

AbstractWhile residual insecticide applications have the potential to decrease pathogen transmission by reducing the density of vectors and shifting the age structure of the adult mosquito population towards younger stages of development, this double entomological impact has not been documented for Aedes aegypti. Aedes collected from households enrolled in a cluster-randomized trial evaluating the epidemiological impact of targeted indoor residual spraying (TIRS) in Merida, Mexico, were dissected and their age structure characterized by the Polovodova combined with Christopher’s ovariole growth methods. In total, 813 females were dissected to characterize age structure at 1, 3, 6, and 9 months post-TIRS. Significant differences in the proportion of nulliparous Ae. aegypti females between the treatment groups was found at one-month post-TIRS (control: 35% vs. intervention: 59%), three months (20% vs. 49%) but not at six or nine months post-TIRS. TIRS significantly shiftted Ae. aegypti age structure towards younger stages and led to a non-linear reduction in survivorship compared to the control arm. Reduced survivorship also reduced the number of arbovirus transmitting females (those who survived the extrinsic incubation period). Our findings provide strong evidence of the full entomological impact of TIRS, with important implications for quantifying the epidemiological impact of vector control methods.
Genomic analysis of Coccomyxa viridis, a common low-abundance alga associated with lichen symbioses
Authors: Tagirdzhanova Gulnara , Scharnagl Klara , Yan Xia , Talbot Nicholas J. 
Published: December 2023

AbstractLichen symbiosis is centered around a relationship between a fungus and a photosynthetic microbe, usually a green alga. In addition to their main photosynthetic partner (the photobiont), lichen symbioses can contain additional algae present in low abundance. The biology of these algae and the way they interact with the rest of lichen symbionts remains largely unknown. Here we present the first genome sequence of a non-photobiont lichen-associated alga. Coccomyxa viridis was unexpectedly found in 12% of publicly available lichen metagenomes. With few exceptions, members of the Coccomyxa viridis clade occur in lichens as non-photobionts, potentially growing in thalli endophytically. The 45.7 Mbp genome of C. viridis was assembled into 18 near chromosome-level contigs, making it one of the most contiguous genomic assemblies for any lichen-associated algae. Comparing the C. viridis genome to its close relatives revealed the presence of traits associated with the lichen lifestyle. The genome of C. viridis provides a new resource for exploring the evolution of the lichen symbiosis, and how symbiotic lifestyles shaped evolution in green algae.
Phonon-assisted nearly pure spin current in DNA molecular chains: a multifractal analysis
Authors: Fathizadeh S. 
Published: December 2023

AbstractMotivated by the development of molecular spintronics, we studied the phonon-assisted spin transport along a DNA chain in the presence of environmental-induced dephasing using multifractal analysis. The results demonstrate that a nearly pure spin current is generated in the presence of the voltage gate. The pure spin current is enhanced by increasing thermal effects. The vibration modes due to the thermal phonon bath assist in generating the spin current, so the spin state is more delocalized in strong electron-phonon coupling. The phonon chirality can translate to the electron spin to create a nontrivial spin texture, including spin currents. The spin states become more extended by increasing the phonon temperature. On the other hand, the spin states are less localized in longer chains as the spin selectivity is higher in longer chains than in short ones. Therefore, we can engineer a molecular spintronic device by controlling phonon effects on the storage and transport of binary digits.
A critical review of rheological models in self-compacting concrete for sustainable structures
Authors: Onyelowe Kennedy C. , Kontoni Denise-Penelope N. 
Published: December 2023

AbstractStudying the rheological behavior of concrete, especially self-compacting concrete is vital in the design and structural integrity of concrete structures for design, construction, and structural material sustainability. Both analytical and numerical techniques have been applied in the previous research works to study precisely the behavior of the yield stress and plastic viscosity of the fresh self-compacting concrete with the associated flow properties and these results have not been systematically presented in a critical review, which will allow researchers, designers and filed operators the opportunity to be technically guided in their design and model techniques selection in order to achieve a more sustainable concrete model for sustainable concrete buildings. Also, the reported analytical and numerical techniques have played down on the effect of the shear strain rate behavior and as to reveal the viscosity changes of the Bingham material with respect to the strain rate. In this review paper, a critical study has been conducted to present the available methods from various research contributions and exposed the inability of these contributions to revealing the effect of the shear strain rate on the rheological behavior of the self-compacting concrete. With this, decisions related to the rheology and flow of the self-compacting concrete would have been made with apt and more exact considerations.
Study on microstructure of 42CrMo steel by ultrasonic surface rolling process
Authors: Wang Haojie , Wang Xiaoqiang , Tian Yingjian , Ling Yuanfei 
Published: December 2023

AbstractTo explore the microstructure formation mechanism of 42CrMo steel under the strengthening of ultrasonic surface rolling process (USRP), the combination of theoretical analysis and experiment was used to conduct in-depth research on USRP. Firstly, according to contact mechanics and Hertz contact theory, the calculation model of contact stress distribution and elastoplastic strain between the rolling ball and the part during USRP is obtained. Secondly, the USRP processing test was carried out by single-factor experimental design method, and the microstructure of 42CrMo steel after USRP was analyzed by LEXT OLS5100 3D laser surface topography instrument and VEGA3 tungsten filament scanning electron microscopy, which found that with an increase in static pressure, residual stress and plastic strain gradually increase, the hardness firstly increases and then decreases, while surface roughness exhibits an initial decrease followed by an increase. The results show that USRP produces violent plastic deformation inside the material under the superposition of high-frequency impact and static pressure, at the same time, it refines the grains, so as to improve the surface performance of the part and improve its fatigue resistance.
Crowdsourced tick observation data from across 60 years reveals major increases and northwards shifts in tick contact areas in Finland
Authors: Sormunen Jani J. , Sääksjärvi Ilari E. , Vesterinen Eero J. , Klemola Tero 
Published: December 2023

AbstractThere is mounting evidence of increases in tick (Acari: Ixodidae) contacts in Finland during the past few decades, highlighted by increases in the incidence of Lyme borreliosis and tick-borne encephalitis (TBE). While nationwide field studies to map distributions of ticks are not feasible, crowdsourcing provides a comprehensive method with which to assess large-scale changes in tick contact areas. Here, we assess changes in tick contact areas in Finland between 1958 and 2021 using three different nationwide crowdsourced data sets. The data revealed vast increases in tick contact areas, with ticks estimated to be contacted locally approximately 400 km further north in western and approximately 100 km further north in eastern Finland in 2021 than 1958. Tick contact rates appeared to be highest along the coastline and on the shores of large lakes, possibly indicating higher tick abundance therein. In general, tick observations per inhabitant increased from 2015 to 2021. Tick contact areas have expanded in Finland over the past 60 years. It appears that taiga ticks (Ixodes persulcatus) are behind most of the northwards shifts in tick contact areas, with Ixodes ricinus contributing mostly to new contact areas in the south. While ticks are now present in most of Finland, there are still areas where tick abundance is low and/or establishment not possible, mainly in northern Finland.
A medical multimodal large language model for future pandemics
Authors: Liu Fenglin , Zhu Tingting , Wu Xian , Yang Bang , You Chenyu , Wang Chenyang , Lu Lei , Liu Zhangdaihong , Zheng Yefeng , Sun Xu , Yang Yang , Clifton Lei , Clifton David A. 
Published: December 2023

AbstractDeep neural networks have been integrated into the whole clinical decision procedure which can improve the efficiency of diagnosis and alleviate the heavy workload of physicians. Since most neural networks are supervised, their performance heavily depends on the volume and quality of available labels. However, few such labels exist for rare diseases (e.g., new pandemics). Here we report a medical multimodal large language model (Med-MLLM) for radiograph representation learning, which can learn broad medical knowledge (e.g., image understanding, text semantics, and clinical phenotypes) from unlabelled data. As a result, when encountering a rare disease, our Med-MLLM can be rapidly deployed and easily adapted to them with limited labels. Furthermore, our model supports medical data across visual modality (e.g., chest X-ray and CT) and textual modality (e.g., medical report and free-text clinical note); therefore, it can be used for clinical tasks that involve both visual and textual data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our Med-MLLM by showing how it would perform using the COVID-19 pandemic “in replay”. In the retrospective setting, we test the model on the early COVID-19 datasets; and in the prospective setting, we test the model on the new variant COVID-19-Omicron. The experiments are conducted on 1) three kinds of input data; 2) three kinds of downstream tasks, including disease reporting, diagnosis, and prognosis; 3) five COVID-19 datasets; and 4) three different languages, including English, Chinese, and Spanish. All experiments show that our model can make accurate and robust COVID-19 decision-support with little labelled data.
Reduction in the activity of VTA/SNc dopaminergic neurons underlies aging-related decline in novelty seeking
Authors: Shan Qiang , Tian Ye , Chen Hang , Lin Xiaoli , Tian Yao 
Published: December 2023

AbstractCuriosity, or novelty seeking, is a fundamental mechanism motivating animals to explore and exploit environments to improve survival, and is also positively associated with cognitive, intrapersonal and interpersonal well-being in humans. However, curiosity declines as humans age, and the decline even positively predicts the extent of cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease patients. Therefore, determining the underlying mechanism, which is currently unknown, is an urgent task for the present aging society that is growing at an unprecedented rate. This study finds that seeking behaviors for both social and inanimate novelties are compromised in aged mice, suggesting that the aging-related decline in curiosity and novelty-seeking is a biological process. This study further identifies an aging-related reduction in the activity (manifesting as a reduction in spontaneous firing) of dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc). Finally, this study establishes that this reduction in activity causally underlies the aging-related decline in novelty-seeking behaviors. This study potentially provides an interventional strategy for maintaining high curiosity in the aged population, i.e., compensating for the reduced activity of VTA/SNc dopaminergic neurons, enabling the aged population to cope more smoothly with the present growing aging society, physically, cognitively and socioeconomically.
Novel WYL domain-containing transcriptional activator acts in response to genotoxic stress in rapidly growing mycobacteria
Authors: Keller Lena Maria Leone , Flattich Kim , Weber-Ban Eilika 
Published: December 2023

AbstractThe WYL domain is a nucleotide-sensing module that controls the activity of transcription factors involved in the regulation of DNA damage response and phage defense mechanisms in bacteria. In this study, we investigated a WYL domain-containing transcription factor in Mycobacterium smegmatis that we termed stress-involved WYL domain-containing regulator (SiwR). We found that SiwR controls adjacent genes that belong to the DinB/YfiT-like putative metalloenzymes superfamily by upregulating their expression in response to various genotoxic stress conditions, including upon exposure to H2O2 or the natural antibiotic zeocin. We show that SiwR binds different forms of single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) with high affinity, primarily through its characteristic WYL domain. In combination with complementation studies of a M. smegmatis siwR deletion strain, our findings support a role of the WYL domains as signal-sensing activity switches of WYL domain-containing transcription factors (WYL TFs). Our study provides evidence that WYL TFs are involved in the adaptation of bacteria to changing environments and encountered stress conditions.
A genome assembly for Orinus kokonorica provides insights into the origin, adaptive evolution and further diversification of two closely related grass genera
Authors: Qu Kunjing , Liu Ai , Yin Mou , Mu Wenjie , Wu Shuang , Hu Hongyin , Chen Jinyuan , Su Xu , Dou Quanwen , Ren Guangpeng 
Published: December 2023

AbstractAncient whole-genome duplication (WGD) or polyploidization is prevalent in plants and has played a crucial role in plant adaptation. However, the underlying genomic basis of ecological adaptation and subsequent diversification after WGD are still poorly understood in most plants. Here, we report a chromosome-scale genome assembly for the genus Orinus (Orinus kokonorica as representative) and preform comparative genomics with its closely related genus Cleistogenes (Cleistogenes songorica as representative), both belonging to a newly named subtribe Orininae of the grass subfamily Chloridoideae. The two genera may share one paleo-allotetraploidy event before 10 million years ago, and the two subgenomes of O. kokonorica display neither fractionation bias nor global homoeolog expression dominance. We find substantial genome rearrangements and extensive structural variations (SVs) between the two species. With comparative transcriptomics, we demonstrate that functional innovations of orthologous genes may have played an important role in promoting adaptive evolution and diversification of the two genera after polyploidization. In addition, copy number variations and extensive SVs between orthologs of flower and rhizome related genes may contribute to the morphological differences between the two genera. Our results provide new insights into the adaptive evolution and subsequent diversification of the two genera after polyploidization.
Steam caps in geothermal reservoirs can be monitored using seismic noise interferometry
Authors: Sánchez-Pastor Pilar , Wu Sin-Mei , Hokstad Ketil , Kristjánsson Bjarni , Drouin Vincent , Ducrocq Cécile , Gunnarsson Gunnar , Rinaldi Antonio , Wiemer Stefan , Obermann Anne 
Published: December 2023

AbstractHarvesting geothermal energy often leads to a pressure drop in reservoirs, decreasing their profitability and promoting the formation of steam caps. While steam caps are valuable energy resources, they also alter the reservoir thermodynamics. Accurately measuring the steam fraction in reservoirs is essential for both operational and economic perspectives. However, steam content estimations are very limited both in space and time since current methods rely on direct measurements within production wells. Besides, these estimations normally present large uncertainties. Here, we present a pioneering method for indirectly sampling the steam content in the subsurface using the ever-present seismic background noise. We observe a consistent annual velocity drop in the Hengill geothermal field (Iceland) and establish a correlation between the velocity drop and steam buildup using in-situ borehole data. This application opens new avenues to track the evolution of any gas reservoir in the crust with a surface-based and cost-effective method.
MBMF: Constructing memory banks of multi‐scale features for anomaly detection
Authors: Sun Yanfeng , Wang Haitao , Hu Yongli , Jiang Huajie , Yin Baocai 
Published: December 2023

AbstractIn industrial manufacturing, how to accurately classify defective products and locate the location of defects has always been a concern. Previous studies mainly measured similarity based on extracting single‐scale features of samples. However, only using the features of a single scale is hard to represent different sizes and types of anomalies. Therefore, the authors propose a set of memory banks of multi‐scale features (MBMF) to enrich feature representation and detect and locate various anomalies. To extract features of different scales, different aggregation functions are designed to produce the feature maps at different granularity. Based on the multi‐scale features of normal samples, the MBMF are constructed. Meanwhile, to better adapt to the feature distribution of the training samples, the authors proposed a new iterative updating method for the memory banks. Testing on the widely used and challenging dataset of MVTec AD, the proposed MBMF achieves competitive image‐level anomaly detection performance (Image‐level Area Under the Receiver Operator Curve (AUROC)) and pixel‐level anomaly segmentation performance (Pixel‐level AUROC). To further evaluate the generalisation of the proposed method, we also implement anomaly detection on the BeanTech AD dataset, a commonly used dataset in the field of anomaly detection, and the Fashion‐MNIST dataset, a widely used dataset in the field of image classification. The experimental results also verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.