Diversity and evolution of the Confuciusornithidae: Evidence from a new 131- million-year-old specimen from the Huajiying Formation in NE China

The Huajiying Formation contains the earliest deposits of the Jehol Biota, representing the world’s second oldest avifauna. This avifauna includes the early confuciusornithid Eoconfuciusornis zhengi, the oldest occurrence of this clade and one of the earliest divergences of pygostylian birds. Although E. zhengi shows unique traits, the holotype’s immature age makes comparisons with the better known Confuciusornis sanctus problematic. As a result, the taxonomic validity of E. zhengi is controversial. We describe a small, osteologically adult confuciusornithid from the same deposits as E. zhengi. The new fossil is most similar to E. zhengi but also shares traits with the stratigraphically younger Confuciusornis. The humerus of the new fossil is straighter and more slender, and bears a less dorsally-developed deltopectoral crest compared with similarly-sized and smaller specimens of Confuciusornis. The morphology of the humerus is intermediate between E. zhengi and Confuciusornis and its proximal portion is pierced by a small deltopectoral foramen, absent in the holotype of E. zhengi. However, this foramen is much smaller than in any other confuciusornithid. Shape analyses (geometric morphometrics) of the humerus of confuciusornithids of different ages and representatives of other basal avians and closely-related non-avian theropods supports our observations and indicate that the humeral differences between the holotype of E. zhengi and the new specimen are not easily explained as ontogenetic variation within a single species. However, the limited number of early confuciursornithids does not allow us to confidently interpret such differences as interspecific. Nonetheless, these analyses support the morphological distinctiveness of the early confuciusornithids from the Huajiying Formation and suggest a stepwise acquisition of the unique humeral morphology of ConfuciusornithidaeGN is supported by a PG Scholarship/Studentship from The Alumni Foundation, University of Bristol, UK. JML is supported by the Spanish MINECO, Project CGL-2013-42643. Innovative Team Program of the Beijing Academy of Science and Technology, the Beijing Millions of Talents Project in the New Century, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41602006), and theBeijing Natural Science Foundation (No. 5174032) provided funding for this researc

Midlife suicide:A systematic review and meta-analysis of socioeconomic, psychiatric and physical health risk factors

Suicide is an increasing contributing cause of mortality in middle-aged adults; however, knowledge to guide prevention is limited. This first systematic review and meta-analysis of studies on midlife suicide has provided an overview of published research on this issue and synthesized the evidence on socioeconomic and physical and mental health factors associated with this mortality. Using PRISMA guidelines MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, Scopus and Web of Science were searched for English-language publications that involved persons aged 35 to 65, used individual-level data, and reported prevalence of exposure(s) or relative risks. The search identified 62 studies on midlife suicides and associated factors (28 for SES, 22 for psychiatric disorder and 23 for physical illness). All studies were from high income countries, and most (80.6%) used data from population registries. Meta-analyses showed that the pooled prevalence of exposure in suicide decedents was 57.8% for psychiatric disorder, 56.3% for low income, 43.2% for unemployment, and 27.3% for physical illness. The associated pooled risk ratio was 11.68 (95% confidence intervals: 5.82–23.47) for psychiatric illness of any type, 12.59 (8.29–19.12) for mood disorders, 3.91 (2.72–5.59) for unemployment, 3.18 (2.72–3.72) for being separated or divorced, 2.64 (2.26–3.10) for cancer, 2.50 (0.96–6.38) for central nervous system illness, and 2.26 (1.16–4.41) for low income. In conclusion, midlife suicide is strongly associated with socioeconomic difficulties and physical and psychiatric illnesses that are common in this age population. Future investigations should consider the interactions between risk factors, the intersectionality of sex and ethnicity, and include data from low- and middle-income countries

Quasi-Two-Dimensional Fermi Surface and Heavy Quasiparticles in CeRh2As2

The recent discovery of multiple superconducting phases in CeRh2As2 has attracted considerable interest. These rich phases are thought to be related to the locally noncentrosymmetric crystal structure, although the possible role of a quadrupole density wave preceding the superconductivity remains an open question. While measurements of physical properties imply that the Ce 4f electrons could play an essential role, the momentum-resolved electronic structure remains hitherto unreported, hindering an in-depth understanding of the underlying physics. Here, we report a high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission study of CeRh2As2. Our results reveal fine splittings of conduction bands, which are directly related to the locally noncentrosymmetric structure, as well as a quasi-two-dimensional Fermi surface, implying weak interlayer hopping and possible nesting instabilities. Our experiments also uncover the fine structures and pronounced temperature evolution of the Kondo peak, demonstrating strong Kondo effect facilitated by excited crystal electric field states. Our results unveil the salient electronic features arising from the interplay between the crystal structure and strong electron correlation, providing spectroscopic insight for understanding the heavy fermion physics and unconventional quadrupole density wave in this enigmatic compound

Association of bone morphogenetic protein-2 gene polymorphisms with susceptibility to ossification of the posterior longitudinal ligament of the spine and its severity in Chinese patients

A case–control study was conducted to examine the association between two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in exon 2 of the bone morphogenetic protein-2 gene (BMP-2) and ossification of the posterior longitudinal ligament (OPLL), and to investigate whether SNPs of the Ser37Ala (T/G) and the Ser87Ser (A/G) in the BMP-2 gene are associated with genetic susceptibility to OPLL and its severity in Chinese subjects. The Ser87Ser (A/G) SNP has been implicated in bone mineral density (BMD) and increases the risk of OA in women. The Ser37Ala (T/G) SNP is associated with BMD and the rate of bone loss in osteoporosis and osteoporosis fractures. A total of 57 OPLL patients and 135 non-OPLL controls were studied. Radiographs of the cervical spine were analyzed to determine the presence and the severity of OPLL. The association of two SNPs with the occurrence and the extent of OPLL were statistically evaluated. There was a significant association between the Ser37Ala (T/G) polymorphism and the occurrence of OPLL in the cervical spine. However, no significant association was found between the Ser37Ala (T/G) polymorphism and the more number of ossified cervical vertebrae in OPLL patients. There was a significant association between the Ser87Ser (A/G) polymorphism and the more number of ossified cervical vertebrae in OPLL patients. However, there was no statistical difference between the Ser87Ser (A/G) SNP and the occurrence of OPLL in the cervical spine. In addition, the Ser87Ser (A/G) polymorphism in male patients and in female patients showed no statistical difference between cases and controls. The present results demonstrate that BMP-2 Gene is not only a factor associated with the occurrence of OPLL, but also a factor related to more extensive OPLL. The “G” allele in the Ser37Ala (T/G) polymorphism is associated with the occurrence of OPLL, but not more extensive OPLL in the cervical spine. The “G” allele in the Ser87Ser (A/G) polymorphism promotes the extent of OPLL, whereas the “A” allele in the Ser87Ser (A/G) polymorphism restricts ectopic ossification in the cervical spine at least in Chinese subjects

Large Eddy Simulation of a Realistic Gas Turbine Combustor

This paper proposes a large eddy simulation approach for the modeling of combusting flow with spray in realistic gas turbine combustors. A one equation subgrid model is used to model the effect of the unresolved subgrid scales on the resolved large scales. Subgrid combustion is modeled by an extended eddy dissipation model in which the filtered reaction rate is controlled by the turbulent mixing rate between the fine structures and the surrounding fluids. An Eulerian-Lagrangian approach is used to model the two-phase spray flow, and spray particles are tracked by a two-way coupling Lagrangian approach. Then the proposed approach is applied to simulate a combusting spray flow in an industrial annular combustor. The objectives of this study are to demonstrate its capability to investigate the complex flow and combustion dynamics in realistic gas turbine combustors. The predicted instantaneous and time averaged fields of velocity, temperature, pressure, fuel mass fraction are investigated. The precessing vortex core caused by the swirling flow as well as pressure oscillations is examined. The predicted results nicely reproduce the flow, spray and combustion dynamics and successfully capture the main features of the studied combustor, such as the processing vortex core. Finally, the predicted exit temperature and the total pressure loss are compared with experimental data and good agreements are obtained.</jats:p

Inference-Domain Network Evolution : A New Perspective for One-Shot Multi-Object Tracking

The supervised one-shot multi-object tracking (MOT) algorithms have achieved satisfactory performance benefiting from a large amount of labeled data. However, in real applications, acquiring plenty of laborious manual annotations is not practical. It is necessary to adapt the one-shot MOT model trained on a labeled domain to an unlabeled domain, yet such domain adaptation is a challenging problem. The main reason is that it has to detect and associate multiple moving objects distributed in various spatial locations, but there are obvious discrepancies in style, object identity, quantity, and scale among different domains. Motivated by this, we propose a novel inference-domain network evolution to enhance the generalization ability of the one-shot MOT model. Specifically, we design a spatial topology-based one-shot network (STONet) to perform the one-shot MOT task, where a self-supervision mechanism is employed to stimulate the feature extractor to learn the spatial contexts without any annotated information. Furthermore, a temporal identity aggregation (TIA) module is proposed to assist STONet to weaken the adverse effects of noisy labels in the network evolution. This designed TIA aggregates historical embeddings with the same identity to learn cleaner and more reliable pseudo labels. In the inference domain, the proposed STONet with TIA performs pseudo label collection and parameter update progressively to realize the network evolution from the labeled source domain to an unlabeled inference domain. Extensive experiments and ablation studies conducted on MOT15, MOT17, and MOT20, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model