Caffeine intake and anxiety: a meta-analysis.

The results from studies on relationship between caffeine intake and risk of anxiety remains controversial, so we conducted a meta-analysis to summarize the evidence about the association between caffeine intake and risk of anxiety. Relevant articles were identified by researching PubMed, Web of Science, Cochrane library, Embase, CNKI, WANFANG DATA, SinoMed and VIP from the inception to December, 2022. Three investigators independently sifted through the literature, extracted the data, and evaluated the quality of the included studies based on predetermined selection criteria and assessed articles with Risk of bias assessment tool for Cochrane systematic reviews and analytical cross-sectional study quality assessment tool from JBI PACES. After assessing the quality of the literature, meta-analysis was performed using Revman 5.4 and Stata 12.0. Data were obtained from eight articles, and 546 participants from 14 studies in eight articles from healthy populations were included in the caffeine-anxiety analyses. As the scales used to assess anxiety vary in the literature, we chose standardized mean difference as the outcome indicator. In terms of overall effect, the results of the meta-analysis showed that caffeine intake increased the risk of anxiety [SMD = 0.94, 95% Cl = (0.28, 1.60), p < 0.05]. After suspecting that dose size might be responsible for the heterogeneity by sensitivity analysis, we performed subgroup analysis according to dose size and found that low-dose caffeine intake moderately increased the risk of anxiety [SMD = 0.61, 95%Cl = (0.42, 0.79), p < 0.05], whereas high-dose caffeine intake had a highly significant increase in the risk of anxiety [SMD = 2.86, 95%Cl = (2.50, 3.22), p < 0.05]. The results confirm that caffeine intake is associated with an elevated risk of anxiety in healthy individuals without psychiatric disorders, especially when the intake dose is greater than 400 mg.

In situ growth of ZIF-67 to construct core-shell mosaic structural composites for efficient extraction of benzoylurea insecticides.

A novel mosaic structure Silica@C/Co@ZIF-67 composite was synthesized by successfully embedding Co nanoparticles on the surface of silica spheres with the help of thermoplastic polyethyleneimine by carbon-reduction. The ZIF-67 half-shell layer structure was synthesized by the in-situ growth of ZIF-67 on the surface of silica spheres through the coordination of 2-methylimidazole with Co metal nodes. The composite was used as a magnetic solid-phase extraction adsorbent combined with high performance liquid chromatography-ultraviolet detector (HPLC-UV) for the extraction and determination of benzoylurea insecticides (BUs) in vegetables and tea. Based on the presence of π-π, hydrophobic and hydrogen bonding interactions between Silica@C/Co@ZIF-67 and BUs, the BUs were rapidly captured by the composites resulting in high adsorption performance. Under the optimal extraction parameters, the linear ranges were 0.3-200 µg L-1 for diflubenzuron, 0.6-200 µg L-1 for chlorbenzuron, and 1.0-200 µg L-1 for triflumuron, teflubenzuron, and flufenoxuron, with correlation coefficients (R2) greater than 0.9991. The limits of detection (LODs) of the method were 0.1-0.3 µg L-1, and the relative standard deviations (RSDs) were 1.2-3.0% for intra-day and 2.6-4.6% for inter-day. In the spiked recovery experiments of vegetables and tea, the recoveries of the five kinds of BUs ranged from 75.8 to 112.9%. In addition, after 10 repetitions using Silica@C/Co@ZIF-67, the recoveries of the five kinds of BUs were still as high as 78.4 to 83.9%.

Glycolysis related lncRNA SNHG3 / miR-139-5p / PKM2 axis promotes castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) development and enzalutamide resistance.

Although androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) by the anti-androgen drug enzalutamide (Enz) may improve the survival level of patients with castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), most patients may eventually fail due to the acquired resistance. The reprogramming of glucose metabolism is one type of the paramount hallmarks of cancers. PKM2 (Pyruvate kinase isozyme typeM2) is a speed-limiting enzyme in the glycolytic mechanism, and has high expression in a variety of cancers. Emerging evidence has unveiled that microRNAs (miRNAs) and long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have impact on tumor development and therapeutic efficacy by regulating PKM2 expression. Herein, we found that lncRNA SNHG3, a highly expressed lncRNA in CRPC via bioinformatics analysis, promoted the invasive ability and the Enz resistance of the PCa cells. KEGG pathway enrichment analysis indicated that glucose metabolic process was tightly correlated with lncRNA SNHG3 level, suggesting lncRNA SNHG3 may affect glucose metabolism. Indeed, glucose uptake and lactate content determinations confirmed that lncRNA SNHG3 promoted the process of glycolysis. Mechanistic dissection demonstrated that lncRNA SNHG3 facilitated the advance of CRPC by adjusting the expression of PKM2. Further explorations unraveled the role of lncRNA SNHG3 as a 'sponge' of miR-139-5p and released its binding with PKM2 mRNA, leading to PKM2 up-regulation. Together, Our studies suggest that lncRNA SNHG3 / miR-139-5p / PKM2 pathway promotes the development of CRPC via regulating glycolysis process and provides valuable insight into a novel therapeutic approach for the disordered disease.

Characteristics and ecological risks of microplastic pollution in a tropical drinking water source reservoir in Hainan province, China.

Microplastic (<5 mm) pollution has become a pressing environmental concern in recent years. The present study investigated the occurrence characteristics and assessed the ecological risk of microplastics in the surface water and sediment of the Chitian Reservoir, a drinking water source in Hainan province (China). The results indicated that microplastics were detected in the surface water and sediment of the Chitian Reservoir and its surrounding areas. The overall abundance of microplastics in the water was 3.05 ± 1.16 items per L and in the sediment was 0.15 ± 0.06 items per g dry weight, which is relatively low compared to other reservoirs in China. The dominant components of microplastics detected in the Chitian Reservoir were polypropylene (PP), rayon, and polyester. Physical morphology analysis of microplastics showed that fibers with small particle sizes (<1 mm) and white color were the predominant characteristics in both the surface water and sediment. The domestic sewage from surrounding residents and agricultural wastewater may be the primary sources of microplastics in the reservoir. Ecological risk assessment revealed that the overall pollution load index (PLI) in the surface water (0.65) and sediment (0.51) of the Chitian Reservoir and its surrounding area is at a low level. The potential ecological hazards (RI) of microplastics (0.13 to 336.78 in water; 0.23 to 465.93 in sediment) in most sites fall within the scope of level I, but those in a few sites are at level II due to the presence of polyvinyl chloride (PVC). This study enriches the data on microplastic pollution in inland reservoir systems, providing fundamental reference information for future ecotoxicological studies and the management of microplastic pollution control.

Interlayer coupling controlled electronic and magnetic properties of two-dimensional VOCl2/PtTe2 van der Waals heterostructure.

The coupling of hetero monolayers into van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures has become an effective way to obtain tunable physical and chemical properties of two dimensional (2D) materials. In this work, based on first principles calculations, we systematically explore the electronic and magnetic properties of a 2D VOCl2/PtTe2 heterostructure. Our results indicate that the ground state of the VOCl2/PtTe2 heterostructure is a ferromagnetic (FM) metal with large magnetic anisotropy energy, among which, the VOCl2 "sublayer" shows FM half metallic properties while the PtTe2 "sublayer" shows nonmagnetic metallic properties. The Curie temperature (TC) of VOCl2/PtTe2 is 111 K. Moreover, the FM-antiferromagnetic (AFM) phase transition can be obtained under biaxial strain. Our work provides an effective way to improve the performance of 2D monolayers in nano-electronic devices.

Practical NTRU Signcryption in the Standard Model.

Based on the NTRU trapdoor used in NIST's Falcon, a signcryption scheme following the sign-then-encrypt paradigm is constructed. The existing partitioning technique based on Waters hash over the lattice can not complete the security reduction in the standard model for the signature part due to the "partiality" of the pre-image generated with the NTRU trapdoor. To address this, a variant of Waters hash over small integers is proposed and, the probability of the successful reduction is analyzed. The resulting signcryption achieves existential unforgeability under the adaptive chosen-message attacks. By utilizing the uniqueness of the secret and the noise in an NTRU instance, the tag used in encryption is eliminated. Furthermore, a method to construct tamper-sensitive lattice public key encryption is proposed. This approach implants the ciphertext-sensitive information into the lattice public key encryption and binds it to the encrypted information. The malleability to the public key ciphertext triggers the change of the message-signature pair so that the IND-CCA2 security of the entire ciphertext can be guaranteed by the signature for the message. Thanks to the rational design and the efficiency of the NTRU trapdoor, the computational overhead of the proposed scheme is reduced significantly compared to the existing lattice-based signcryption scheme, reaching orders of magnitude improvement in efficiency. The experiment shows that the proposed scheme is efficient.

Effects of different soil and water conservation measures on plant diversity and productivity in Loess Plateau.

Many soil and water conservation measures (SWCM) have been implemented in the Loess Plateau of China, and they have an impact on ecosystems all levels and involve complicated mechanisms. Previously, studies typically focused on a single factor's effect on diversity or productivity. With this background, the current investigation embarked on an extensive study, with vegetation survey conducted in the no measure plots (NM), vegetation measure plots (VM) and engineering measure plots (EM) in the Loess Plateau of China. We used structural equation models (SEM) to explain the mechanism by which SWCM affects plant productivity and diversity. VM have direct effects on plant diversity, and EM have direct effects on soil properties and community structure. The two measures also had indirect effects on plant functional traits and community structure. The results show that the changes in plant functional traits and community structure by SWCM decreased plant diversity, whereas the increase of productivity was primarily dominated by improvements in community structure, and we conclude that variability in plant diversity and productivity across different measures on the Loess Plateau was primarily due to the responses of different plants to variable soil properties and the community responses. It was also emphasized that vegetation measures were beneficial to the increase of biomass per plant, while engineering measures were more beneficial to the growth of dominant species. These findings provide a theoretical foundation for vegetation management and restoration after the application of different SWCM.

An immunogenic cell death-related classification predicts prognosis and response to immunotherapy in kidney renal clear cell carcinoma.

Introduction: Immunogenic cell death (ICD) is a form of regulated cell death that activates an adaptive immune response in an immunocompetent host and is particularly sensitive to antigens from tumor cells. Kidney clear cell carcinoma (KIRC) is an immunogenic tumor with extensive tumor heterogeneity. However, no reliable predictive biomarkers have been identified to reflect the immune microenvironment and therapeutic response of KIRC. Methods: Therefore, we used the CIBERSORT and ESTIMATE algorithms to define three ICD clusters based on the expression of ICD-related genes in 661 KIRC patients. Subsequently, we identified three different ICD gene clusters based on the overlap of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) within the ICD clusters. In addition, principal component analysis (PCA) was performed to calculate the ICD scores. Results: The results showed that patients with reduced ICD scores had a poorer prognosis and reduced transcript levels of immune checkpoint genes regulated with T cell differentiation. Furthermore, the ICD score was negatively correlated with the tumor mutation burden (TMB) value of KICD. patients with higher ICD scores showed clinical benefits and advantages of immunotherapy, indicating that the ICD score is an accurate and valid predictor to assess the effect of immunotherapy. Discussion: Overall, our study presents a comprehensive KICD immune-related ICD landscape that can provide guidance for current immunotherapy and predict patient prognosis to help physicians make judgments about the patient's disease and treatment modalities, and can guide current research on immunotherapy strategies for KICD.

A stable core-shell metal-organic framework@covalent organic framework composite as solid-phase extraction adsorbent for selective enrichment and determination of flavonoids.

Hydrophobization and stability is crucial for the practical application of most metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) in extraction technique. In this study, a stable core-shell MOF@COF composite (NH2-MIL-101(Fe)@TAPB-FPBA-COF) was successfully prepared by Schiff base reaction and applied to solid-phase extraction (SPE) of hydrophobic flavonoids. Notably, the TAPB-FPBA-COF shell acts as a hydrophobic "shield", which not only improves the hydrophobicity and stability of hydrophilic NH2-MIL-101(Fe), but also makes the extraction efficiency of flavonoids from MOF@COF composite significantly higher than that of pure NH2-MIL-101(Fe) and TAPB-FPBA-COF. In addition, a sensitive analytical method with excellent linearities (0.1-500 ng mL-1, R2 ≥ 0.9967), low limits of detection (0.02-0.04 ng mL-1 for water; 0.04-0.07 ng mL-1 for grape juice; 0.06-0.08 ng mL-1 for honey), good repeatability (intra-day/inter-day precision are 1.86-5.37%/1.82-7.79%, respectively) and only 5 mg of adsorbent per cartridge was established by optimizing the SPE process combined with high performance liquid chromatography with ultraviolet-visible detector (HPLC-UV). Meanwhile, selectivity study and comparative experiments with the commercial C18 adsorbent showed that the MOF@COF adsorbent exhibited satisfactory extraction efficiency for flavonoids due to multiple interactions such as hydrogen bonding, hydrophobic, and π-π interactions. Finally, the good recoveries in grape juice (84.5-102.5%) and honey (87.5-104.6%) samples further validated the applicability of the proposed method in complex samples.

Occurrence and ecological risks of flonicamid and its metabolites in multiple substrates from intensive rice-vegetable rotations in tropical China.

Rice-vegetable rotations are dominant in (sub)-tropical agriculture worldwide. However, fate and risks of the insecticide flonicamid (FLO) and its main degradates (collectively called FLOMs) in multiple substrates from those cropping systems remain largely unknown. In this study, we characterized residual concentrations, driving factors, transport, and potential ecological risks of FLOMs in different substrates in 28 tropical rice-vegetable rotations. Concentrations (median) of FLOMs were 0.013-3.03 (0.42) ng g-1 in plants, 0.012-1.92 (0.23) ng g-1 in soil, 0.029-0.63 (0.126) µg L-1 in water, and 0.002-0.398 (0.055) ng g-1 in sediments. Flonicamid and its metabolite N-(4-trifluoromethylnicotinoyl) glycine were the dominant species in the four substrates (84.1 % to 88.5 %). Plants had the highest levels of FLOMs, with the highest bioconcentration factor in peppers. According to boosted regression trees coupled with a partial least squares structural equation model, levels and composition of FLOMs showed high spatiotemporal and crop-related patterns in different substrates, with patterns highly codetermined by agricultural practices (e.g., crop type and FLO/neonicotinoid/pyrethroid applications), substrate parameters (e.g., pH, organic matter or total organic carbon), and climate features (e.g., wet/dry seasons). Moreover, a fugacity method indicated differences in transport and partitioning patterns in different substrates during rice and vegetable planting periods. Integrated substrate risk assessment of FLOMs contamination was conducted based on species-sensitive distributions and substrate weight index. Although overall risks of FLOM contamination in tropical rice-vegetable rotations were negligible to low, the highest risks were in soils, vegetable planting periods, and a central intensively planted area.

Experimental study on evacuation behaviour of children in a three-storey kindergarten.

Avoiding injury and ensuring safe evacuations of children in disasters has always been a central issue requiring close attention in policymaking. However, there is little behavioural data on children's evacuation on stairs. In this study, evacuation drills were conducted in a three-storey kindergarten in Dalian, China. The article explores the well-trained children's vertical evacuation behaviour on stairs and horizontal evacuation behaviour in other areas such as corridors and lobbies. According to the vertical behavioural evacuation data collected in this study, the mean speed of children aged 4-6 is 0.55 ± 0.12 m/s, and children of different age groups exhibit distinctive evacuation behaviours on stairs. The mean speed of children on a horizontal plane is 0.87 ± 0.22 m/s. Then, the relationship between behavioural data (movement time, density, velocity, and flow rate) is compared and analyzed. It is found that the density and flow rate of the crowd at the stairwell entrance and the exit are higher than that of adults, and the children's walking speed is relatively slow. This study can provide reference for safety design, evacuation strategies and evacuation simulation settings of multi-storey kindergartens.

Observation of delocalization transition in topological waveguide arrays with long-range interactions.

Topological edge states are a generic feature of topological insulators, and the long-range interactions, which break certain properties of topological edge states, are always non-negligible in real physical systems. In this Letter, we investigate the influence of next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) interactions on the topological properties of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model by extracting the survival probabilities at the boundary of the photonic lattices. By introducing a series of integrated photonic waveguide arrays with different strengths of long-range interactions, we experimentally observe delocalization transition of light in SSH lattices with nontrivial phase, which is in good agreement with our theoretical predictions. The results indicate that the NNN interactions can significantly affect the edge states, and that the localization of these states can be absent in topologically nontrivial phase. Our work provides an alternative way to investigate the interplay between long-range interactions and localized states, which may stimulate further interest in topological properties in relevant structures.

Inverse design of plasmonic nanoantenna using generative adversarial network.

The local surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) effect has been widely used in various nanophotonic applications. However, because the LSPR effect is highly sensitive to the structure and geometry, it is desirable to efficiently search viable geometries for predefined local field enhancement spectrum. Herein we present a generative adversarial network-based LSPR nanoantenna design scheme. By encoding the antenna structure information into an red-green-blue (RGB) color image, the corresponding nanoantenna structure can be inverse-designed to achieve the required enhancement spectrum of the local field. The proposed scheme can accurately offer the multiple geometry layout for the customized specific spectrum in seconds, which could be beneficial for fast design and fabrication of plasmonic nanoantenna.

PP-DDP: a privacy-preserving outsourcing framework for solving the double digest problem.

BACKGROUND: As one of the fundamental problems in bioinformatics, the double digest problem (DDP) focuses on reordering genetic fragments in a proper sequence. Although many algorithms for dealing with the DDP problem were proposed during the past decades, it is believed that solving DDP is still very time-consuming work due to the strongly NP-completeness of DDP. However, none of these algorithms consider the privacy issue of the DDP data that contains critical business interests and is collected with days or even months of gel-electrophoresis experiments. Thus, the DDP data owners are reluctant to deploy the task of solving DDP over cloud. RESULTS: Our main motivation in this paper is to design a secure outsourcing computation framework for solving the DDP problem. We at first propose a privacy-preserving outsourcing framework for handling the DDP problem by using a cloud server; Then, to enable the cloud server to solve the DDP instances over ciphertexts, an order-preserving homomorphic index scheme (OPHI) is tailored from an order-preserving encryption scheme published at CCS 2012; And finally, our previous work on solving DDP problem, a quantum inspired genetic algorithm (QIGA), is merged into our outsourcing framework, with the supporting of the proposed OPHI scheme. Moreover, after the execution of QIGA at the cloud server side, the optimal solution, i.e. two mapping sequences, would be transferred publicly to the data owner. Security analysis shows that from these sequences, none can learn any information about the original DDP data. Performance analysis shows that the communication cost and the computational workload for both the client side and the server side are reasonable. In particular, our experiments show that PP-DDP can find optional solutions with a high success rate towards typical test DDP instances and random DDP instances, and PP-DDP takes less running time than DDmap, SK05 and GM12, while keeping the privacy of the original DDP data. CONCLUSION: The proposed outsourcing framework, PP-DDP, is secure and effective for solving the DDP problem.

Ultralow birefringent glass waveguide fabricated by femtosecond laser direct writing.

Optical waveguides prepared by femtosecond laser direct writing have birefringent properties, which can affect polarization encoding and entanglement on chips. Here, we first propose a shape-stress dual compensation fabrication scheme to decrease birefringence. Ultralow birefringent waveguides (1 × 10-9) were obtained by controlling the cross sectional shape of the main waveguide and adjusting the position of the auxiliary lines. In addition, we prepared polarization-independent directional coupler and demonstrated the evolution of polarization-independent waveguide array with different polarized light. In the future, ultralow birefringent waveguides will be widely applied in polarization encoding and entangled quantum photonic integrated circuits.

One-step fabrication of hydrophobic metal-organic framework@covalent organic framework hybrid as sorbent for high-performance solid-phase extraction of flavonoids.

Metal-organic framework (MOF) and covalent organic framework (COF) exhibit excellent extraction performance in sample pretreatment, but their wider application is hindered by some inherent drawbacks. Herein, we successfully synthesized a novel MOF@COF hybrid material with large specific surface area, good chemical stability and reusability, which is suitable as a solid phase extraction (SPE) sorbent for the efficient extraction of flavonoids. Importantly, due to the synergistic effect, the obtained MOF@COF hybrid material showing a higher extraction efficiency than individual MOF and COF. This is mainly due to the obtained MOF@COF hybrid material combines the high specific surface area of MOF and multiple interactions (hydrophobic interaction, hydrogen bonding and π-π stacking interaction) with flavonoids conferred by the COF structure. Then, a sensitive analytical method for flavonoids with ideal linear range (1-500 ng mL-1), low detection limit (0.15-0.41 ng mL-1) and good repeatability (2.64-6.20%) was developed under optimized conditions. In addition, the MOF@COF hybrid sorbent has better selectivity for hydrophobic targets containing multiple hydrogen bond acceptors/donors. Finally, the established method was applied to the determination of flavonoids in different food samples, and satisfactory recoveries (81.4-102.1%) were obtained, which initially confirmed its applicability.

Proportional-Integral Observer Design for Multirate-Networked Systems Under Constrained Bit Rate: An Encoding-Decoding Mechanism.

In this article, the proportional-integral observer design problem is studied for a class of multirate networked systems subject to constrained bit rate. The sensor sampling period is allowed to be different from the system updating period and, to facilitate the observer design, the underlying multirate system is cast into a general single-rate one by resorting to the lifting technique. In order to curb the communication burden and promote the data security, the encoding-decoding procedure is implemented on the sensor-to-observer channel to convert the measurement signals into binary codewords. A sufficient condition is first proposed to reveal the fundamental relationship between the bit-rate constraints and the decoding accuracy, and then the exponentially ultimate boundedness of the error dynamics is assessed with the aid of the Lyapunov method. Subsequently, the desired observer gains are determined by solving two optimization problems with the aim to achieve two distinct performance indices, namely, the smallest ultimate bound and the fastest decay rate. Finally, the validity of the developed observer design approach is thoroughly demonstrated via the simulation examples.

Characterization of water use efficiency changes in Tibetan Plateau grasslands based on eco-geographic zoning.

Water use efficiency (WUE) is an effective indicator to study the coupling of terrestrial carbon and water cycles. The Tibetan Plateau (TP) is the most important ecological security barrier in China, and it is important to understand the characteristics of WUE and the change mechanism to study the carbon and water cycles of plateau ecosystems and the rational use of water resources. This study analyzes the spatial and temporal characteristics of WUE on the TP and the influence of climate factors on WUE based on the gross primary productivity (GPP) and evapotranspiration (ET) data from GLASS. The results show that from 1985 to 2018, the WUE of the TP is on the rise under the combined effect of GPP and ET; the regions with higher mean WUE values are the southeastern and eastern parts of the plateau, and the low value areas are the central and northwestern parts of the plateau. Compared with precipitation, WUE is influenced by temperature over a larger area. The correlations between precipitation and temperature and WUE in different eco-geographic regions are complex, and there is a threshold effect on the correlation between WUE and temperature and precipitation. Temperature is the main driver of WUE changes in HIIA and HIB1 regions, while precipitation has a greater impact on WUE changes in HIIC2, HIIC2, HIC2, HIID3, and HIIC regions. Precipitation, temperature, and elevation are the main factors explaining the variation of WUE in the TP. According to the risk detector, it can be determined that grassland vegetation in warm and humid steep areas of low and medium elevations is more able to maintain efficient use of water. Meanwhile, grasslands located in the shade of northern slopes have weaker transpiration, which is conducive to vegetation accumulation of growth water, and thus can ensure higher WUE. The related study can provide a reference for the response of vegetation WUE to global changes in key climatic regions.

Nocardia sputi sp. nov. isolated from the sputum of patients with pulmonary infection.

Two Gram-stain-positive, aerobic and rod-shaped actinomycetes (strains CY18T and CY8) were isolated from the sputum of two patients with pulmonary infections, and their taxonomic status was investigated. The 16S rRNA gene sequences and the results of phylogenetic analyses indicated that CY18T and CY8 were identical (100 %) and were most closely related to Nocardia beijingensis CGMCC 4.1521T (99.9 %) and Nocardia araoensis NBRC 100135T (99.5 %). The predominant cellular fatty acids of CY18T and CY8 were C16 : 0, C18 : 0, C18 : 1ω9c and summed feature 3 (comprising C16 : 1É·7c and/or C16 : 1É·6c), and the major menaquinone was MK-8(H4ω-cycl).The diagnostic diamino acid in the cell-wall peptidoglycan was meso-diaminopimelic acid. The whole-cell hydrolytic sugar pattern consisted of arabinose and glucose. The polar lipid profile contained diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylethanolamine, phosphatidylinositol, phosphatidylinositol mannoside, two unidentified phospholipids, three unidentified glycolipids and two unidentified lipids.The DNA G+C contents of CY18T and CY8 were 67.9 and 68.0 % respectively. The digital DNA-DNA hybridization and average nucleotide identity values between the two novel strains and closely related species were well under the 70 % and 95-96 % thresholds, respectively, but these values between the two novel strains were 95.5 % and 99.5 %, respectively. On the basis of morphological and chemotaxonomic characteristics and the results of phylogenetic analyses, strains CY18T and CY8 represent a novel species of the genus Nocardia, for which the name Nocardia sputi sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is CY18T (=GDMCC 1.3318T = JCM 33932T).

Edge State, Localization Length, and Critical Exponent from Survival Probability in Topological Waveguides.

Edge states in topological phase transitions have been observed in various platforms. To date, verification of the edge states and the associated topological invariant are mostly studied, and yet a quantitative measurement of topological phase transitions is still lacking. Here, we show the direct measurement of edge states and their localization lengths from survival probability. We employ photonic waveguide arrays to demonstrate the topological phase transitions based on the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. By measuring the survival probability at the lattice boundary, we show that in the long-time limit, the survival probability is P=(1-e^{-2/ξ_{loc}})^{2}, where ξ_{loc} is the localization length. This length derived from the survival probability is compared with the distance from the transition point, yielding a critical exponent of ν=0.94±0.04 at the phase boundary. Our experiment provides an alternative route to characterizing topological phase transitions and extracting their key physical quantities.