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A rapid approach has been developed for the fluorescent carbon dots (CDs) by the hydrothermal treatment of lignin in the presence of H2O2. The as-synthesized CDs were found to emit blue photoluminescence with excellent photostability. Moreover, the CDs displayed biocompatibility, low cytotoxicity, and high water solubility properties. Finally, the as-resulted CDs were demonstrated to be excellent probes for bioimaging and biosensing applications.

In this study, drawing on firm life cycle theory, we focus on the corporate performance of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) engagement via financial stress and consider the moderate effect of transparency, financial slack, and environmental uncertainty. The industry-year fixed effects panel regression analysis is executed based on the data including 11,742 firm-year observations for 1,486 Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2020. The results show that ESG performance can significantly improve corporate performance at all life cycle stages, especially when the corporate is in the growth stage. Moreover, the mechanism analysis shows that the financial risk mediates the relation between ESG performance and corporate performance for the corporates in the growth and maturity stages. The association between ESG and corporate performance is more pronounced when corporate information disclosure quality is high. Moreover, financial slack moderates and undermine the association between ESG and corporate performance in the maturity stages. Similarly, for the maturity and decline stages of corporate, environmental uncertainty moderates and undermines the association between ESG and corporate performance. Besides offering scientific evidence for the role of ESG ratings in relieving financial pressure and promoting corporate performance in growth and maturity stages, the results can also inform the regulators and/or investors of the benefit of engaging in corporates sustainability transition, which has implications for both the success of the regulatory regime and the advancement of long-term investment philosophy.

Platinum-based nanocatalysts play a crucial role in various electrocatalytic systems that are important for renewable, clean energy conversion, storage and utilization. However, the scarcity and high cost of Pt seriously limit the practical application of these catalysts. Decorating Pt catalysts with other transition metals offers an effective pathway to tailor their catalytic properties, but often at the sacrifice of the electrochemical active surface area (ECSA). Here we report a single-atom tailoring strategy to boost the activity of Pt nanocatalysts with minimal loss in surface active sites. By starting with PtNi alloy nanowires and using a partial electrochemical dealloying approach, we create single-nickel-atom-modified Pt nanowires with an optimum combination of specific activity and ECSA for the hydrogen evolution, methanol oxidation and ethanol oxidation reactions. The single-atom tailoring approach offers an effective strategy to optimize the activity of surface Pt atoms and enhance the mass activity for diverse reactions, opening a general pathway to the design of highly efficient and durable precious metal-based catalysts. Platinum plays a crucial role in various electrocatalytic systems, but its scarcity and cost limit its practical application. Now, a single-atom tailoring strategy applied to platinum nanowires maximizes their specific and mass activities for the hydrogen evolution and methanol and ethanol oxidation reactions.

Background Breast cancer (BC) patients who undergo surgery followed by radiotherapy and chemotherapy have limitations on physical activity which will lead to a decreased quality of life and poor physical fitness level. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the combined exercise intervention based on internet and social media software (CEIBISMS) on postoperative breast cancer patients by evaluating their quality of life, muscle strength and cardiorespiratory capacity. Methods This study was a randomized control trial with an intervention period of 12 weeks. Sixty participants (30 in each group, 42–60 years old, female) were recruited through an outpatient department. Procedure of exercise in the intervention group included: via phone step-recording app, ask the individuals to complete the target number of steps within a specified period of exercise, four times per week; face-to-face remote video instruction of individuals on muscle training, three times per week; via social media apps daily push common knowledge of physical exercise BC rehabilitation. The control group received traditional treatment and rehabilitation according to daily specifications of the hospital. The primary outcome was quality of life and the secondary outcomes were muscle strength and cardiorespiratory capacity. Results Experiments using a Short Form 36 showed that the CEIBISMS yielded significantly better results than traditional methods, in vitality ( p  = 0.009), mental health ( p  = 0.001) and reported health transition ( p  = 0.048) by week 12. The CEIBISMS resulted in significant improvement in the stand-up and sit-down chair test ( p  < 0.0001), arm lifting test ( p  = 0.017). Conclusion The CEIBISMS offered rehabilitative effects in quality of life (QOL) and muscle strength of postoperative patients with breast cancer (BC) in China. Trial registration ChiCTR-IPR-17012368 . Trial registered on 14 August, 2017.

Distant metastasis remains the leading cause of mortality in breast cancer, yet comprehensive population-based evaluations of metastatic site combinations and their survival implications are limited. This study aimed to explore the clinicopathological determinants and prognostic outcomes of site-specific and multi-organ metastases in breast cancer using SEER data. A total of 200,558 female breast cancer patients diagnosed between 2014 and 2023 were extracted from the SEER database. Logistic regression was used to assess associations between clinicopathological features and metastatic patterns. Kaplan–Meier analysis and Cox proportional hazards models were applied to evaluate overall survival (OS) across different metastatic site combinations. Among patients with distant metastasis classified into 15 common metastatic patterns, bone was the most common metastatic site (21.3%), followed by lung (16.1%), liver (9.2%), and brain (2.9%). Molecular subtypes showed distinct organotropism: HR+/HER2 − tumors were prone to bone-only metastasis, whereas HER2-positive and triple-negative subtypes were more likely to involve visceral and brain metastases. Multi-organ metastases, especially combinations including the brain (e.g., brain + liver + lung), were associated with the poorest prognosis (median OS: 4.0 months). Younger age (≤ 40 years), higher histological grade (Grade III), and tumor location in the axillary tail or unspecified regions were independently associated with increased metastatic risk. Grade III tumors exhibited broader visceral spread and significantly worse survival compared to lower-grade tumors. This is the first population-based study to systematically characterize 15 metastatic site combinations and their survival outcomes across molecular subtypes. The findings highlight the heterogeneity of breast cancer metastasis and underscore the need for subtype-specific, site-targeted surveillance strategies and prognostic assessment tools.

Understanding co-occurrence patterns and prognostic implications of immune-related adverse events is crucial for immunotherapy management. However, previous studies have been limited by sample size and generalisability. In this study, we leveraged a multi-institutional cohort and a population-level database to investigate co-occurrence patterns of and survival outcomes after multi-organ immune-related adverse events among recipients of immune checkpoint inhibitors. In this retrospective study, we identified individuals who received immune checkpoint inhibitors between May 31, 2015, and June 29, 2022, from the Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Boston, MA, USA; MGBD cohort), and between April 30, 2010, and Oct 11, 2021, from the independent US population-based TriNetX network. We identified recipients from all datasets using medication codes and names of seven common immune checkpoint inhibitors, and patients were excluded from our analysis if they had incomplete information (eg, diagnosis and medication records) or if they initiated immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy after Oct 11, 2021. Eligible patients from the MGBD cohort were then propensity score matched with recipients of immune checkpoint inhibitors from the TriNetX database (1:2) based on demographic, cancer, and immune checkpoint inhibitor characteristics to facilitate cohort comparability. We applied immune-related adverse event identification rules to identify patients who did and did not have immune-related adverse events in the matched cohorts. To reduce the likelihood of false positives, patients diagnosed with suspected immune-related adverse events within 3 months after chemotherapy were excluded. We performed pairwise correlation analyses, non-negative matrix factorisation, and hierarchical clustering to identify co-occurrence patterns in the MGBD cohort. We conducted landmark overall survival analyses for patient clusters based on predominant immune-related adverse event factors and calculated accompanying hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% CIs, focusing on the 6-month landmark time for primary analyses. We validated our findings using the TriNetX cohort. We identified 15 246 recipients of immune checkpoint inhibitors from MGBD and 50 503 from TriNetX, of whom 13 086 from MGBD and 26 172 from TriNetX were included in our propensity score-matched cohort. Median follow-up durations were 317 days (IQR 113–712) in patients from MGBD and 249 days (91–616) in patients from TriNetX. After applying immune-related adverse event identification rules, 8704 recipients of immune checkpoint inhibitors were retained from MGBD, of whom 3284 (37·7%) had and 5420 (62·3%) did not have immune-related adverse events, and 18 162 recipients were retained from TriNetX, of whom 5538 (30·5%) had and 12 624 (69·5%) did not have immune-related adverse events. In both cohorts, positive pairwise correlations of immune-related adverse events were commonly observed. Co-occurring immune-related adverse events were decomposed into seven factors across organs, revealing seven distinct patient clusters (endocrine, cutaneous, respiratory, gastrointestinal, hepatic, musculoskeletal, and neurological). In the MGBD cohort, the patient clusters that predominantly had endocrine (HR 0·53 [95% CI 0·40–0·70], p<0·0001) and cutaneous (0·61 [0·46–0·81], p=0·0007) immune-related adverse events had favourable overall survival outcomes at the 6-month landmark timepoint, while the other clusters either had unfavourable (respiratory: 1·60 [1·25–2·03], p=0·0001) or neutral survival outcomes (gastrointestinal: 0·86 [0·67–1·10], p=0·23; musculoskeletal: 0·97 [0·78–1·21], p=0·78; hepatic: 1·20 [0·91–1·59], p=0·19; and neurological: 1·30 [0·97–1·74], p=0·074). Similar results were found in the TriNetX cohort (endocrine: HR 0·75 [95% CI 0·60–0·93], p=0·0078; cutaneous: 0·62 [0·48–0·82], p=0·0007; respiratory: 1·21 [1·00–1·46], p=0·044), except for the neurological cluster having unfavourable (rather than neutral) survival outcomes (1·30 [1·06–1·59], p=0·013). Reliably identifying the immune-related adverse event cluster to which a patient belongs can provide valuable clinical information for prognosticating outcomes of immunotherapy. These insights can be leveraged to counsel patients on the clinical impact of their individual constellation of immune-related adverse events and ultimately develop more personalised surveillance and mitigation strategies. US National Institutes of Health.

The effective detection of driver drowsiness is an important measure to prevent traffic accidents. Most existing drowsiness detection methods only use a single facial feature to identify fatigue status, ignoring the complex correlation between fatigue features and the time information of fatigue features, and this reduces the recognition accuracy. To solve these problems, we propose a driver sleepiness estimation model based on factorized bilinear feature fusion and a long- short-term recurrent convolutional network to detect driver drowsiness efficiently and accurately. The proposed framework includes three models: fatigue feature extraction, fatigue feature fusion, and driver drowsiness detection. First, we used a convolutional neural network (CNN) to effectively extract the deep representation of eye and mouth-related fatigue features from the face area detected in each video frame. Then, based on the factorized bilinear feature fusion model, we performed a nonlinear fusion of the deep feature representations of the eyes and mouth. Finally, we input a series of fused frame-level features into a long-short-term memory (LSTM) unit to obtain the time information of the features and used the softmax classifier to detect sleepiness. The proposed framework was evaluated with the National Tsing Hua University drowsy driver detection (NTHU-DDD) video dataset. The experimental results showed that this method had better stability and robustness compared with other methods.

To explore the diagnostic performance of [ 99m Tc]Tc-FAPI SPECT/CT for gastrointestinal cancer, compared to [ 18 F]FDG PET/CT. In this analysis of a prospective trial, consecutively recruited patients from a single center with pathologically confirmed gastrointestinal cancer were prospectively enrolled from September 2022 to June 2024 and underwent paired v and [ 18 F]FDG PET/CT examinations at intervals of more than 1 day and within 7 days of each other.The activity of tracer accumulation in lesions was assessed by maximum standardized uptake value(SUV max ) and TBR (lesions SUV max /ascending aorta SUV mean ). Histopathologic and clinical follow-up results were used as reference standards for final diagnoses. Seventy-eight patients (46 men; median age, 58.8 ± 14.5 years) were evaluated. Compared with the TBR for [ 18 F]FDG uptake, TBR for [ 99m Tc]Tc-FAPI uptake was higher in primary tumor(4.6 ± 2.0 vs. 3.4 ± 1.7; P  = 0.001) ,peritoneal spread (1.3 [1.1,7.3] vs. 1.1[1.1,1.1]; P  = 0.001 ) and liver metastases( 2.5[1.1,8.5] vs. 1.1[1.1,3.4]; P  = 0.031). For diagnostic accuracy in a total of 253 lesions in 78 patients, compared with [ 18 F]FDG PET/CT, [ 99m Tc]Tc-FAPI SPECT/CT demonstrated a higher sensitivity (100% [15 of 15 lesions] vs. 20% [3 of 15]; P  < 0.001), accuracy (100% [48 of 48 lesions] vs. 75% [36 of 48]; P  < 0.001), and negative predictive value (100% [33 of 33 lesions] vs. 69% [36 of 48 lesions]; P  = 0 0.001) in detecting peritoneal spread, and a higher sensitivity (85% [17 of 20 lesions] vs. 50% [10 of 20]; P  = 0.041) in detecting liver metastases. Patients with metastatic gastrointestinal carcinomas negative on the [ 99m Tc]Tc-FAPI scan showed improved clinical prognosis after immunotherapy ( P< 0.006). TBR-FDG/TBR-FAPI was the main predictor of better prognosis post-immunotherapy ([stable disease, SD]+[partial response, PR]), with an optimal cut-off of 3.82. [ 99m Tc]Tc-FAPI SPECT/CT can better evaluate peritoneal spread and liver metastases in gastrointestinal cancer. Furthermore, TBR-FDG/TBR-FAPI is a valuable imaging parameter for monitoring immunotherapy responses.

Elevated temperatures limit plant growth and reproduction and pose a growing threat to agriculture. Plant heat stress response is highly conserved and fine-tuned in multiple pathways. Spinach ( L.) is a cold tolerant but heat sensitive green leafy vegetable. In this study, heat adaptation mechanisms in a spinach sibling inbred heat-tolerant line Sp75 were investigated using physiological, proteomic, and phosphoproteomic approaches. The abundance patterns of 911 heat stress-responsive proteins, and phosphorylation level changes of 45 phosphoproteins indicated heat-induced calcium-mediated signaling, ROS homeostasis, endomembrane trafficking, and cross-membrane transport pathways, as well as more than 15 transcription regulation factors. Although photosynthesis was inhibited, diverse primary and secondary metabolic pathways were employed for defense against heat stress, such as glycolysis, pentose phosphate pathway, amino acid metabolism, fatty acid metabolism, nucleotide metabolism, vitamin metabolism, and isoprenoid biosynthesis. These data constitute a heat stress-responsive metabolic atlas in spinach, which will springboard further investigations into the sophisticated molecular mechanisms of plant heat adaptation and inform spinach molecular breeding initiatives.

The rapid pace of urbanization has led to an increasing frequency of road collapses, posing a significant threat to urban traffic safety. Underground pipeline leakage stands out as the primary cause of such collapses. This paper presents a macroscopic analysis of the subgrade seepage erosion process caused by pipeline leakage. Model tests were conducted to investigate the formation mechanism and explore the influence of water level, water flow rate, and soil type. The study revealed that the subgrade seepage erosion caused by pipeline leakage undergoes four distinct stages: infiltration, slow erosion, rapid erosion, and erosion convergence. Soil erosion shares similarities with sand erosion in its developmental process. The water level plays a pivotal role in determining the shape and size of the eroded area caused by sand seepage erosion. The size of the erosion cavities formed during the soil seepage erosion increased along with the increase in the water flow rate. The size of the erosion cavity increased by up to 55.7% when the flow rate was increased by three times. In addition, clay soils do not undergo significant erosional damage but do produce significant settlement. The soil erosion process caused by underground leakages in pipelines was investigated using model tests in this study, which provided valuable information for researchers performing an in-depth analysis of the mechanism of roadbed cavities generated by urban underground pipeline leakage, which is critical for safeguarding people’s travel safety and decreasing social and economic losses.