Soil organic matter and metolachlor sorption characteristics as affected by soil management.

Soil organic matter (SOM) plays an essential role in agriculture and in environments. It influences the productivity and physical well-being of soils. Therefore, it is important from both an economic and environmental standpoint to determine how agricultural practices will affect SOM and the biological cycling of carbon. Based on the changes of SOM characteristics, we further investigated the sorption dynamics and mechanisms of organic compounds in soil and SOM fractions under different soil managements. Several experiments were conducted and the results and conclusions were summarized as below. Long-term tillage experiment was initiated in 1979 at the Clemson University Pee Dee Research and Education Center (Darlington, SC). Cover crop experiment was conducted in the Connecticut River Valley at the Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station in South Deerfield, Massachusetts (since 1990). Cross-Polarization Magic-Angle-Spinning (CPMAS) and Total Sideband Suppression (TOSS) solid-state 13C Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and Diffuse Reflectance Fourier Transform Infrared (DRIFT) spectroscopic techniques were used to identify the structural and compositional changes of SOM. Metolachlor sorption experiments (3 days) were conducted using a batch-equilibrium method. Three desorption steps were carried out for a total of 9 days in a sequential decant-refill steps following the sorption experiment. Our NMR results indicated that humic acid (HA) from rye alone cover was more aromatic and less aliphatic in character than other cover crop systems without nitrogen fertilizers. Based on the DRIFT peak height O/R (reactive/recalcitrant) ratios, the highest ratio was found in the HA from vetch/rye system with nitrogen fertilizer. Compared to conventional tillage (CT), conservation tillage (CnT) held a higher SOM and light fraction (LF) in the surface layer (0–5 cm). Aromaticity of HA increased with soil depth in both tillages. Conversely, the aliphatic-C content decreased with soil depth. However, the aromaticity of HA in CT was higher than that of CnT in the top soil (0–5 cm). Sorption nonlinearity (N) of metolachlor and hysteresis were dependent on the structure and composition of SOM. These results showed that agricultural practices not only changed the structure of SOM, but also changed the pesticide sorption behavior in the soil

A Deep Learning Entity Extraction Model for Chinese Government Documents

In this paper, we propose a combined Whole-Word-Masking based Robustly Optimized BERT pretraining approach with dictionary embedding entities recognition model for Chinese documents. By using multiple feature vectors generated by such as Roberta and domain dictionaries as embedding layers, the contextual semantic information of the text is fully considered. Meanwhile, Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory(BiLSTM) and a multi-head attention mechanism are used to learn the information of long-distance dependency of the text. We use conditional random field(CRF) to obtain the global optimal annotation sequence, which is expected to improve the performance of the model. In this paper, we conduct comparison experiments with five baseline-based methods in the official document dataset of government affairs domain. The Precision of the model is 91.8%, Recall is 90.5%, and F1 value is 91.1%, which are better than other baseline models, indicating that the proposed model is more accurate for recognizing named entities in government documents

Case Report: Identification of a novel PRR12 variant in a Chinese boy with developmental delay and short stature

Proline Rich 12 (PRR12) protein is primarily expressed in the brain and localized in the nucleus. The variants in the PRR12 gene were reported to be related to neuroocular syndrome. Patients with PRR12 gene presented with intellectual disability (ID), neuropsychiatric disorders, some congenital anomalies, and with or without eye abnormalities. Here, we report an 11-year-old boy with a novel PRR12 variant c.1549_1568del, p.(Pro517Alafs*35). He was the first PRR12 deficiency patient in China and presented with ID, short stature, and mild scoliosis. He could not concentrate on his studies and was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGH-1) was low in our patient, which may be the cause of his short stature. Patients with neuroocular syndrome are rare, and further exploration is needed to understand the reason for neurodevelopmental abnormalities caused by PRR12 variants. Our study further expands on the PRR12 variants and presents a new case involving PPR12 variants

An investigation of high-order harmonics in the pressure field around a vertical cylinder in steep wave conditions

Offshore structures, encompassing foundations for offshore wind turbines, supports for marine renewable energy devices, bridge piers, and floating vessels, are consistently subjected to severe environmental loads. These loads often dictate the design criteria. Understanding the physics and statistics of wave-structure interaction, especially under non-linear loads experienced in extreme conditions, remains a complex and partially unresolved challenge. Notably, secondary load cycles significantly contribute to the ’ringing’ responses in cylindrical structures, as discussed in previous studies (e.g., Grue et al. (1993), Chaplin et al. (1997)). This paper focuses on analysing loads in focused wave groups, representing short-term extreme wave conditions, on bottom-mounted vertical cylinders relevant to fixed offshore wind turbines. Pressure contour plots over the cylinder’s surface were previously examined by Ghadirian & Bredmose (2020) while studying secondary load cycles. In this research, we adopt the phase-based harmonic separation method for wave forces (Fitzgerald et al. (2014)) to analyse the pressure contour plots. This method effectively isolates harmonic pressure components from the total pressures, enabling a novel exploration of the mechanisms behind secondary load cycles from the perspective of high-order harmonics on the cylinder surface

Relationship between hyperlipidemia and the risk of death in aneurysm: a cohort study on patients of different ages, genders, and aneurysm locations

Aims: The study aimed to assess the association of hyperlipidemia and the risk of death in the aneurysm population, focusing on age, gender, and aneurysm location differences.Methods: All patients’ data on this retrospective cohort study were obtained from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-III) database, and the baseline characteristics and laboratory parameters of all patients were collected. The COX regression model was established to explore the association of hyperlipidemia and the risk of death for patients with aneurysms. More importantly, subgroup analyses based on the age, gender, and aneurysm location differences were performed.Results: A total of 1,645 eligible patients were enrolled in this study. These patients were divided into the survival group (n = 1,098) and the death group (n = 547), with a total mortality rate of approximately 33.25%. The result displayed that hyperlipidemia was associated with a decreased death risk in aneurysm patients. In addition, we also found that hyperlipidemia was associated with a lower death risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm and thoracic aortic arch aneurysm among aneurysm patients aged ≥60 years; hyperlipidemia was only a protective factor for the death risk of male patients diagnosed with abdominal aortic aneurysm. For female patients diagnosed with abdominal aortic aneurysm and thoracic aortic arch aneurysm, hyperlipidemia was associated with a decreased death risk.Conclusion: The relationship of hyperlipidemia, hypercholesterolemia, and the risk of death for patients diagnosed with aneurysms was significantly associated with age, gender, and aneurysm location

Recent experimental wave load study on bottom fixed vertical cylinder study at the Kelvin Hydrodynamics Laboratory

Monopile wind turbines are typically anchored to the seabed using a large steel tube, when subjected to extreme wave loading, the monopile foundation can experience high stresses and strains that can lead to fatigue and failure, particularly when the higher-order components of the wave loading match the structural natural frequency. Therefore, a better understanding of extreme wave loading on a monopile structure is critical for engineers. The Kelvin Hydrodynamics Laboratory of the University of Strathclyde has been involved in extreme wave loading on bottom fixed cylinders since 2018, including utilising methods like four-phase decomposition and conducting research on various factors. Our recent experimental studies at the Kelvin Hydrodynamics Laboratory have provided valuable insights into wave loading on bottom fixed vertical cylinders. By utilizing the four phase separation method, we were able to extract higher order components in focus wave loading, allowing for a more comprehensive analysis. Additionally, the generation of 100 k waves allowed us to delve deeper into understanding the response of the cylinders to different wave loadings More recent experiments focus on secondary load cycle, breaking wave impact and wider design loading space. These findings contribute to the existing knowledge of wave cylinder interactions and provide a foundation for further research in this field