Acceptor Copolymerized Axially Chiral Conjugated Polymers with TADF Properties for Efficient Circularly Polarized Electroluminescence.

Chiral conjugated polymer has promoted the development of the efficient circularly polarized electroluminescence (CPEL) device, nevertheless, it remains a challenge to develop chiral polymers with high electroluminescence performance. Herein, by the acceptor copolymerization of axially chiral biphenyl emitting skeleton and benzophenone, a pair of axially chiral conjugated polymers namely R-PAC and S-PAC are synthesized. The target polymers exhibit obvious thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) activities with high photoluminescence quantum yields of 81%. Moreover, the chiral polymers display significant circularly polarized luminescence features, with luminescence dissymmetry factor (|glum|) of nearly 3 × 10-3. By using the chiral polymers as emitters, the corresponding circularly polarized organic light-emitting diodes (CP-OLEDs) exhibit efficient CPEL signals with electroluminescence dissymmetry factor |gEL| of 3.4 × 10-3 and high maximum external quantum efficiency (EQEmax) of 17.8%. Notably, considering both EQEmax and |gEL| comprehensively, the device performance of R-PAC and S-PAC is the best among all the reported CP-OLEDs with chiral conjugated polymers as emitters. This work provides a facile approach to constructing chiral conjugated TADF polymers and discloses the potential of axially chiral conjugated luminescent skeletons in architecting high-performance CP-OLEDs.

HNF1A induces glioblastoma by upregulating EPS8 and activating PI3K/AKT signaling pathway.

Despite the exact biological role of HNF1 homolog A (HNF1A) in the regulatory mechanism of glioblastoma (GBM), the molecular mechanism, especially the downstream regulation as a transcription factor, remains to be further elucidated. Immunohistochemistry was used to detect the expression and clinical relevance of HNF1A in GBM patients. CCK8, TUNEL, and subcutaneous tumor formation in nude mice were used to evaluate the effect of HNF1A on GBM in vitro and in vivo. The correction between HNF1A and epidermal growth factor receptor pathway substrate 8 (EPS8) was illustrated by bioinformatics analysis and luciferase assay. Further mechanism was explored that the transcription factor HNF1A regulated the expression of EPS8 and downstream signaling pathways by directly binding to the promoter region of EPS8. Our comprehensive analysis of clinical samples in this study showed that upregulated expression of HNF1A was associated with poor survival in GBM patients. Further, we found that knockdown of HNF1A markedly suppressed the malignant phenotype of GBM cells in vivo and in vitro as well as promoted apoptosis of tumor cells, which was reversed by upregulation of HNF1A. Mechanistically, HNF1A could significantly activate PI3K/AKT signaling pathway by specifically binding to the promoter regions of EPS8. Moreover, overexpression of EPS8 was able to reverse the apoptosis of tumor cells caused by HNF1A knockdown, thereby exacerbating the GBM progression. Correctively, our study has clarified the explicit mechanism by which HNF1A promotes GBM malignancy and provides a new therapeutic target for further clinical application.

[Factors Influencing Willingness of Farmers to Pay for Agricultural Non-point Source Pollution Control Based on Distributed Cognitive Theory].

The analysis of the willingness of individual farmers to cover costs is an important basis for measuring the economic value of agricultural non-point pollution management， and determining the ecological and economic value of rural surface pollution control is a necessary measure to internalize the externalities of agricultural production. Based on the analysis of the hierarchy of factors influencing the cognition of farmers， this study constructed a theoretical framework based on distributed cognition theory to analyze their willingness to pay for agricultural non-point source pollution control from the perspective of individual farmers. On the basis of this framework， we used the Double-Hurdle model to empirically test the overall process of farmers'willingness to pay and their willingness to pay the amount for agricultural non-point source pollution control by combining 531 microscopic research datapoints in Guanzhong， Shaanxi Province. The results showed that： ① the number of farmers with willingness to pay for agricultural non-point source pollution control was 267， accounting for 50.30% of the total sample， and the average value of willingness to pay was 1 469.77 yuan·hm-2； the total economic value of agricultural non-point source pollution control in Shaanxi Province in 2020 was estimated to be 5.791 billion yuan based on the expected value of the willingness to pay level of the research sample. ② Farmers'willingness to pay for agricultural non-point source pollution control was influenced by the combined effects of personal， regional， and cultural forces， and the effects of each dimension were similar； farmers' willingness to pay for agricultural non-point source pollution control was mainly influenced by the cultural force factor， and the effects of personal and regional forces were very limited. ③ The results of the regressions by income level showed that personal and cultural strengths had a significant impact on the willingness to pay among the low-income group but did not contribute to the increase in the willingness to pay.

Risk factors and clinical characteristics of surgical site infections in athletes undergoing Achilles tendon repair surgery.

Achilles tendon ruptures are common in athletes, requiring surgical intervention. However, the risk of surgical site infections (SSIs) post-surgery poses significant challenges. This study aims to analyse the risk factors and microbial aetiology associated with SSIs in athletes undergoing Achilles tendon repair. A comprehensive retrospective analysis was conducted from May 2021 to July 2023. The study included 25 patients with SSIs (case group) and 50 patients without SSIs (control group) post Achilles tendon repair surgery. Inclusion criteria encompassed patients with medically confirmed Achilles tendon ruptures who underwent surgical repair. Exclusion criteria included prior tendon pathologies and significant chronic illnesses. Diagnostic criteria for SSIs involved symptoms like elevated body temperature and localized tenderness, along with laboratory confirmations such as positive microbiological cultures. The study utilized VITEK® 2 for bacterial identification and involved statistical analyses like univariate and multivariate logistic regression. The study identified Staphylococcus aureus as the primary pathogen in SSIs. Significant risk factors included lack of prophylactic antibiotic use, presence of diabetes, open wounds and prolonged surgery duration. Univariate analysis revealed stark contrasts in these factors between infected and non-infected groups, while multivariate analysis underscored their importance in SSI development. S. aureus emerged as the predominant pathogen in SSIs post Achilles tendon repair. Critical risk factors such as absence of prophylactic antibiotics, diabetes, open wounds and extended surgery duration play a vital role in SSIs. Addressing these factors is essential for better postoperative outcomes in Achilles tendon repair surgeries.

Downregulation of S100A11 promotes T cell infiltration by regulating cancer-associated fibroblasts in prostate cancer.

OBJECTIVE: This study aims at revealing the relationship between S100A11 and cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) in prostate cancer and improving T cell infiltration into solid tumors. METHODS: H&E, IHC and Sirius red staining were used to detect the stroma content in prostate cancer tissues. Stable S100A11 knockdown cell lines DU 145, 22Rv1, RM-1 and NOR-10 were established by lentivirus transfection. Co-culture system of RM-1 and CAFs was established. CCK-8, wound healing and transwell were proceeded to determine proliferation, migration and invasion of prostate cancer cells. Stably knocked-down RM-1 and CAFs were co-injected into C57BL/6 mice to detect the role of S100A11 in vivo. CAFs, CD4+ T cell and CD8+ T cell in these tumors were assessed by IF. T cell profile was analyzed by flow cytometry. RESULTS: A significant amount of stroma exists in prostate cancer tissues. Downregulation of S100A11 inhibits proliferation, migration and invasion of human prostate cancer cells in vitro, and suppresses the expression of cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) in vivo. Knockdown of S100A11 enhances the inhibitory effect of Erdafitinib on CAFs in both the co-culture system and in vivo. The combined knockdown of S100A11 in tumor cells and CAFs shows a superior therapeutic effect compared to the individual knockdown in tumor cells alone. Knockdown of S100A11, both in RM-1 and CAFs, combined with Erdafitinib treatment reduces tumorigenicity by suppressing the content of CAFs and increasing the infiltration of CD4+ T cell and effective CD8+ T cell in tumor. CONCLUSION: Downregulation of S100A11 plays a crucial role in enhancing the therapeutic response to Erdafitinib and reversing immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment.

Effect of laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy on related variables of obesity complicated with polycystic ovary syndrome.

BACKGROUND: Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is closely related to obesity, and weight loss can significantly improve the metabolic, endocrine and reproductive functions of obese individuals with PCOS. However, the efficacy of laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (LSG) for obesity with PCOS are unclear. AIM: The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of LSG on related variables in obese patients with PCOS. METHODS: A retrospective analysis was performed on 32 obese patients with PCOS who received LSG treatment at the Third Hospital of Shanxi Medical University from 2013 to 2020. The changes in anthropometric indices, insulin, testosterone, estradiol, follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), luteinizing hormone (LH), menstrual cycle and LH/FSH ratio before and 1 mo, 3 mo, 6 mo and 12 mo after the operation were statistically analyzed. RESULTS: At 1 mo, 3 mo, 6 mo and 12 mo after surgery, the anthropometric indices, such as body weight and body mass index, of all patients were lower than those before the operation. The percentage excess weight loss (EWL%) at 1 mo, 3 mo, 6 mo and 1 year of follow-up were 25, 40, 46 and 65, respectively. The PCOS-related indices, such as insulin, testosterone, estradiol, follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), luteinizing hormone (LH) and menstrual cycle, were improved to varying degrees. During the 1-year follow-up, the average serum testosterone decreased from preoperative 0.72 ng/mL to 0.43 ng/mL (P < 0.05), average fasting insulin level (9.0 mIU/mL, preoperative 34.2 mil, LH level, 4.4 mIU/mL, preoperative 6.1 mIU/mL). The level of FSH (3.8 U/L, 4.8 U/p0.05) and the ratio of LH/FSH (0.7, 1.3/p0.05) were more relieved than those before surgery. During the postoperative follow-up, it was found that the menstrual cycle of 27 patients (nasty 27) returned to normal, and 6 patients (18%) who intended to become pregnant became pregnant within 1 year after surgery. CONCLUSION: The weight loss effect of LSG is obvious and affirmative, and the endocrine index of obese patients with PCOS is also improved to some extent, although the mechanism is not clear. Laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy is expected to become a backup choice for patients with polycystic ovaries in the future.

Can low-carbon cities increase urban housing prices? Evidence from China's low-carbon city pilot.

The low-carbon transformation is a broad and profound systemic change that will inevitably impact many areas of the urban environment, economy, and social system. We evaluated the impact of China's ongoing "low-carbon pilot policy" on urban housing prices as a "quasi-natural experiment." Existing research findings and hedonic theory predictions suggest that the low-carbon city pilot (LCCP) policy is increasing urban housing prices through air quality improvements. However, this study contradicts these speculations based on the situation in China. This study employed the analytical framework of staggered difference-in-differences (DID), which revealed that the LCCP policy had generally reduced housing prices; the implementation of the policy had led to an average decrease of 6.2% in housing prices in pilot cities, compared to non-pilot cities. The LCCP policy affected housing prices by influencing both the "demand side" and "supply side" of housing. In terms of the demand side, the policy significantly reduced the level of urban air pollution but did not impact housing prices. Instead, it negatively affected housing prices by lowering labor wages. In terms of the supply side, housing prices were negatively affected, mainly by increasing the cost of emission reduction of real estate enterprises, which impacted the original longstanding housing production process. Additionally, there were significant differences in the impact of the LCCP policy on housing prices in cities across different geographical locations and different tiers of cities. This study suggests important policy insights for achieving stable market housing prices and promoting high-quality urban development in the process of low-carbon transformation.

Excavating Trajectory Planning of a Mining Rope Shovel Based on Material Surface Perception.

The mining rope shovel (MRS) is one of the core pieces of equipment for open-pit mining, and is currently moving towards intelligent and unmanned transformation, replacing traditional manual operations with intelligent mining. Aiming at the demand for online planning of an intelligent shovel excavation trajectory, an MRS excavating trajectory planning method based on material surface perception is proposed here. First, point cloud data of the material stacking surface are obtained through laser radar to perceive the excavation environment and these point cloud data are horizontally calibrated and filtered to reconstruct the surface morphology of the material surface to provide a material surface model for calculation of the mining volume in the subsequent trajectory planning. Second, kinematics and dynamics analysis of the MRS excavation device are carried out using the Product of Exponentials (PoE) and Lagrange equation, providing a theoretical basis for calculating the excavation energy consumption in trajectory planning. Then, the trajectory model of the bucket tooth tip is established by the method of sixth-order polynomial interpolation. The unit mass excavation energy consumption and unit mass excavation time are taken as the objective function, and the motor performance and the geometric size of the MRS are taken as constraints. The grey wolf optimizer is used for iterative optimization to realize efficient and energy-saving excavation trajectory planning of the MRS. Finally, trajectory planning is carried out for material surfaces with four different shapes (typical, convex, concave, and convex-concave). The results of experimental validation show that the actual hoist and crowd forces are essentially consistent with the planned hoist and crowd forces in terms of the peak value and trend variations, verifying the accuracy of the calculation model and confirming that the full bucket rate and various parameters meet the constraints. Therefore, the trajectory planning method based on material surface perception are feasible for application to different excavation conditions.

Enantioselective synthesis of chiral quinohelicenes through sequential organocatalyzed Povarov reaction and oxidative aromatization.

Heterohelicenes are of increasing importance in the fields of materials science, molecular recognition, and asymmetric catalysis. However, enantioselective construction of these molecules, especially by organocatalytic methods, is challenging, and few methods are available. In this study, we synthesize enantioenriched 1-(3-indol)-quino[n]helicenes through chiral phosphoric acid-catalyzed Povarov reaction followed by oxidative aromatization. The method has a broad substrate scope and offers rapid access to an array of chiral quinohelicenes with enantioselectivities up to 99%. Additionally, the photochemical and electrochemical properties of selected quinohelicenes are explored.

Self-assemblies with cascade effect to boost antitumor systemic immunotherapy.

Bio-organic hybrid self-assemblies based on amino acids, conjugated polymers, Fe3+ and enzymes are fabricated with tumor environment-responsive and light-triggered NO release properties. By sequential energy consumption, NO attack and immune activation, FFPG shows boosted antitumor activity toward both primary and distant tumors. The three-level cascade strategy (starvation/NO/immunotherapy) adopted in this work offers a pathway to address the dilemma of low cure rate of malignant tumors.

Tensile Deformation and Fracture Behavior of Nickel-Based Superalloy DZ951G.

DZ951G is a novel developed nickel-based directional solidified superalloy with an incipient high melting point and low density. Compared with DZ417G superalloy, DZ951G superalloy has a higher ultimate tensile strength. At intermediate temperatures, the plasticity and strength were both markedly improved, and an obviously anomalous yield behavior could be observed where the yield strength reached its maximum at 760 °C. Below 600 °C, two competitive modes of dislocations shearing γ' particles existed, in which one was the formation of stacking faults and another was a/2<101> dislocations shearing. At intermediate temperatures, a transitional phase between shearing γ' particles and bypassing appeared, and the fracture translated from brittle fracture into ductile fracture. Exceeding 900 °C, bypassing of dislocations was operated under thermal activation. Moreover, short continuous stacking faults still existed at 760 °C. Finally, the various dislocation configurations were rationally illuminated and explained with the intrinsic connection of mechanical properties.

Drug-drug interaction prediction with Wasserstein Adversarial Autoencoder-based knowledge graph embeddings.

An interaction between pharmacological agents can trigger unexpected adverse events. Capturing richer and more comprehensive information about drug-drug interactions (DDIs) is one of the key tasks in public health and drug development. Recently, several knowledge graph (KG) embedding approaches have received increasing attention in the DDI domain due to their capability of projecting drugs and interactions into a low-dimensional feature space for predicting links and classifying triplets. However, existing methods only apply a uniformly random mode to construct negative samples. As a consequence, these samples are often too simplistic to train an effective model. In this paper, we propose a new KG embedding framework by introducing adversarial autoencoders (AAEs) based on Wasserstein distances and Gumbel-Softmax relaxation for DDI tasks. In our framework, the autoencoder is employed to generate high-quality negative samples and the hidden vector of the autoencoder is regarded as a plausible drug candidate. Afterwards, the discriminator learns the embeddings of drugs and interactions based on both positive and negative triplets. Meanwhile, in order to solve vanishing gradient problems on the discrete representation-an inherent flaw in traditional generative models-we utilize the Gumbel-Softmax relaxation and the Wasserstein distance to train the embedding model steadily. We empirically evaluate our method on two tasks: link prediction and DDI classification. The experimental results show that our framework can attain significant improvements and noticeably outperform competitive baselines. Supplementary information: Supplementary data and code are available at https://github.com/dyf0631/AAE_FOR_KG.

Screening of agricultural land productivity and returning farmland to forest area for sensitivity to rural labor outward migration in the ecologically fragile Loess Plateau region.

The mechanism of the non-agricultural transfer of rural labor to agricultural production efficiency and their interrelationships is a problem worthy of further discussion at this stage in China. The mediating effect model is constructed, the least square method is used for regression, and the instrumental variable method is used to solve the possible endogeneity problem. Through the investigation of farmers in Loess Plateau region, this paper analyzes the effects of factor substitution and planting structure adjustment after agricultural labors work outside and its impact on agricultural land output from the theoretical and empirical aspects, as well as the impact of off-farm employment on agricultural land output under different constraints. Results showed that the negative influence of labor non-agricultural transfer on farmland land output rate is - 7.264, and farmers' participation in returning farmland to forests can alleviate the negative impact of non-agricultural transfer on the agricultural land output. Labor substitution factor investment plays a part in the mediating effect, and part of the mediating effect is - 0.879. The adjustment of agricultural planting structure plays the whole mediating effect, that is to say, the larger the scale of labor non-agricultural transfer in Loess Plateau area, the more unfavorable for farmers to invest in labor substitution agricultural factors of production, and the more they are inclined to grow food crops. When the constraint conditions of factor substitution difficulty and planting structure adjustment space are considered, the higher the factor substitution difficulty is, the smaller the planting structure adjustment space; the negative effect of the non-agricultural transfer of labor on the agricultural land output rate is more obvious. It provides effective reference value to judge the development stage and trend of regional agriculture and puts forward relevant policy suggestions to guarantee the development of regional agriculture and farmers' life.

Synthesis of Fused or Spiro Polyheterocyclic Compounds via the Dehydrogenative Annulation Reactions of 2-Arylindazoles with Maleimides.

A dehydrogenative annulation of 2-arylindazoles with maleimides for the switchable synthesis of indazolo[2,3-a]pyrrolo[3,4-c]quinolinones or spiroindolo[1,2-b]indazole-11,3'-pyrrolidinones is presented. Mechanistically, the formation of the title compounds involves a Rh(III)-catalyzed C-H metalation of 2-arylindazole, followed by maleimide insertion and intramolecular cyclization. Interestingly, the selectivity to form the fused or spiro compounds could be switched by resorting to different additives. The notable features of this protocol include simple substrates and excellent atom economy and regioselectivity.