Explore the vast range of titles available.

The genus Curculigo, as a folk herbal medicine, has been used for many years in China, treating impotence, limb limpness, and arthritis of the lumbar and knee joints. The last systematic review of the genus Curculigo was written in 2013, scientifically categorizing the phytochemistry and biological activities. Hitherto, the original compounds and their pharmacological activities were presented as the development of this genus, but there is not an updated review. To conclude the progression of the genus Curculigo, we collected the new literature published from 2013 to 2021 in PubMed, Web of Science, Google Scholar databases, and the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure. The novel chlorophenolic glucosides, curculigine, phenolic glycosides, orcinosides and polysaccharides were isolated from Curculigo. The new analyzing methods were established to control the quality of Curculigo as a herbal medicine. In addition, the pharmacological effects of Curculigo focused on anti-diabetes, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, osteoporosis, antioxidation, etc. The antitumor and neuroprotective activities were newly explored in recent years. The application of herbal medicine was gradually developed in scientific methods. The medicinal value of the genus Curculigo needs to further investigate its pharmacological mechanisms. This new review offers more insights into the exploitation of the pharmacological value of the genus Curculigo.

The cable-suspended PV system has gained increasing popularity due to its large span and good site adaptability. However, this structure is quite sensitive to wind actions, and wind-induced module damage and structure failure have been frequently reported. Therefore, in this study, we carried out wind tunnel tests to study wind load effects on PV arrays with different lengths and widths. Considering the wind sheltering effects of upstream modules, reduction factors for the wind load were proposed in different array zones. Numerical simulations of wind-induced vibration and equivalent static analysis were conducted to yield gust loading factors for the PV array. This study showed that the maximum wind suction and pressure for the middle zone occurred at 0° and 180°, respectively, while those for the outermost zone appeared under oblique flows (e.g., 30° and 150°). For the PV modules beyond the windward fourth row, the reduction factors of the wind loads were 0.4 (maximum suction) and 0.2 (maximum pressure) for the middle zone and 0.5 (maximum suction) and 0.75 (maximum pressure) for the outermost zone. The gust loading factors for the typical wind directions of 0° and 180° varied from 2.2 to 2.7 for the middle zone and from 1.3 to 1.5 for the outermost zone.

Accurate segmentation of leaf diseases is crucial for crop health management and disease prevention. However, existing studies fall short in addressing issues such as blurred disease spot boundaries and complex feature distributions in disease images. Although the vision foundation model, Segment Anything Model (SAM), performs well in general segmentation tasks within natural scenes, it does not exhibit good performance in plant disease segmentation. To achieve fine-grained segmentation of leaf disease images, this study proposes an advanced model: Enhanced Multi-Scale SAM (EMSAM). EMSAM employs the Local Feature Extraction Module (LFEM) and the Global Feature Extraction Module (GFEM) to extract local and global features from images respectively. The LFEM utilizes multiple convolutional layers to capture lesion boundaries and detailed characteristics, while the GFEM fine-tunes ViT blocks using a Multi-Scale Adaptive Adapter (MAA) to obtain multi-scale global information. Both outputs of LFEM and GFEM are then effectively fused in the Feature Fusion Module (FFM), which is optimized with cross-branch and channel attention mechanisms, significantly enhancing the model’s ability to handle blurred boundaries and complex shapes. EMSAM integrates lightweight linear layers as classification heads and employs a joint loss function for both classification and segmentation tasks. Experimental results on the PlantVillage dataset demonstrate that EMSAM outperforms the second-best state-of-the-art semantic segmentation model by 2.45% in Dice Coefficient and 6.91% in IoU score, and surpasses the baseline method by 21.40% and 22.57%, respectively. Particularly, for images with moderate and severe disease levels, EMSAM achieved Dice Coefficients of 0.8354 and 0.8178, respectively, significantly outperforming other semantic segmentation algorithms. Additionally, the model achieved a classification accuracy of 87.86% across the entire dataset, highlighting EMSAM’s effectiveness and superiority in plant disease segmentation and classification tasks.

Photon emission may be continuously produced from mechanical work through self-recoverable mechanoluminescence (ML). Significant progress has been made in high-performance ML materials in the past decades, but the rate-dependent ML kinetics remains poorly understood. Here, we have conducted systematic studies on the self-recoverable ML of Mn 2+ -doped SrZnOS (SrZnOS: Mn 2+ ) under rapid compression up to ~10 GPa. Rate-dependent distinct kinetics is revealed: a diffuse-like ML behavior below ~1.2 GPa/s, oscillatory emission with a series of ML peaks at critical rate of ~1.2–1.5 GPa/s, and suppression of ML above 1.5 GPa/s. Analysis from the rate-independent structural evolution and photoluminescence under high pressures show that the oscillatory ML emission at the critical rate corresponds to multi-cyclic piezoelectrically-induced excitation (PIE) and self-recoverable processes. Both characteristic time ( τ ) for the PIE and self-recoverable processes are minimized at the critical rate, indicating the time limit of ML in the dynamic response to rapid compression. High temperature is slightly favorable for PIE, but is unfavorable for the self-recoverable process. The present work uncovers the temporal characteristics of self-recoverable ML and provides insight into understanding the rate-dependent ML kinetics in the mechanical-photon energy conversion, conducive to the design of ML-based optoelectronic devices. This work investigates the mechanoluminescence of Mn 2+ -doped SrZnOS under rapid compression up to 10 GPa at different rates. Oscillatory mechanoluminescent phenomenon and rate-dependent mechanoluminescent kinetics are reported.

Background The job performance of clinicians is a clear indicator of both hospital capacity and the level of hospital service. It plays a crucial role in maintaining the effectiveness and quality of medical care. Clinical pathways are a systematic method of quality improvement successfully recommended by broader healthcare systems. Since clinicians play a key role in implementing clinical pathways in public hospitals, this study aims to investigate the effect of the satisfaction of clinicians in public hospitals with clinical pathway implementation on their job performance. Methods A cross-sectional study design was used. Questionnaires were administered online. A total of 794 clinicians completed the questionnaires in seven tertiary public hospitals in Sichuan Province, China, of which 723 were valid for analysis. Questionnaires contained questions on social demographic characteristics, satisfaction with clinical pathway implementation, work engagement, and job performance. Structural Equation Model (SEM) was used to test the hypotheses. Results The satisfaction of clinicians in public hospitals with clinical pathway implementation was significantly positively correlated with work engagement ( r  = 0.570, P  < 0.01) and job performance ( r  = 0.522, P  < 0.01). A strong indirect effect of clinicians’ satisfaction with clinical pathway implementation on job performance mediated by work engagement was observed, and the value of this effect was 0.383 (boot 95%CI [0.323, 0.448]). Conclusion The satisfaction of clinicians in public hospitals with clinical pathway implementation not only directly influences their job performance, but also indirectly affects it through the mediating variable of work engagement. Therefore, managers of public hospitals need to pay close attention to clinicians’ evaluation and perception of the clinical pathway implementation. This entails taking adequate measures, such as providing strong organizational support and creating a favorable environment for the clinical pathway implementation. Additionally, focusing on teamwork to increase clinicians’ satisfaction can further enhance job performance. Furthermore, managers should give higher priority to increasing employees’ work engagement to improve clinicians’ job performance.

Autapses are synaptic contacts of a neuron’s axon onto its own dendrite and soma. In the neocortex, self-inhibiting autapses in GABAergic interneurons are abundant in number and play critical roles in regulating spike precision and network activity. Here we examine whether the principal glutamatergic pyramidal cells (PCs) also form functional autapses. In patch-clamp recording from both rodent and human PCs, we isolated autaptic responses and found that these occur predominantly in layer-5 PCs projecting to subcortical regions, with very few in those projecting to contralateral prefrontal cortex and layer 2/3 PCs. Moreover, PC autapses persist during development into adulthood. Surprisingly, they produce giant postsynaptic responses (∼5 fold greater than recurrent PC-PC synapses) that are exclusively mediated by AMPA receptors. Upon activation, autapses enhance burst firing, neuronal responsiveness and coincidence detection of synaptic inputs. These findings indicate that PC autapses are functional and represent an important circuit element in the neocortex. While autapses are synapses made by a neuron onto itself, its functional significance in pyramidal cells are not clear. Here, the authors show that in the mammalian neocortex, autapses of pyramidal cells can enhance burst firing and coincidence detection from other inputs.

The popularity of the online social media in China promotes a dynamic digital drive for both global and glocalised communications, facilitating the emergence of more connected intercultural language practices unimaginable in the past. Social media also creates a vast community where pervasive translanguaging practices take place daily. Translanguaging hybrids coined by Chinese university students on WeChat are exactly a case in point. WeChat is a free platform launched in 2011 by Tencent. Well established in China and the world over, Tencent provides multimodal instant messaging services. Open to world cultures, these students show ingenuity in translanguaging linguistic play in their daily text messages; meanwhile, their creative coinage of translanguaging hybrids influences the entire WeChat community. Written language in the WeChat community, often amounting to a new form of speech, deserves serious scholarly inquiry.

Nurses play a pivotal role in the delivery of medical services. Professional commitment is crucial for nursing professionals’ long-term, healthy, and sustainable development. However, nursing students’ professional commitment levels are currently unsatisfactory in China, especially given that the COVID-19 pandemic has posed unprecedented challenges to the profession. Therefore, studies investigating the professional commitment levels of nursing students and the underlying influencing factors are urgently required. This study explored how nursing students’ risk perceptions, negative emotions, and psychological capital affected their professional commitment during the COVID-19 pandemic. A cross-sectional study was conducted among nursing students using risk perception, professional commitment, negative emotions, and psychological capital scales. An analysis of 1142 Chinese nursing students suggested that nursing students’ risk perception positively impacted professional commitment and that negative emotions mediated this association. Importantly, psychological capital moderates the mediating effect of negative emotions and can buffer the negative emotions caused by risk perception. This study demonstrated that effective intervention strategies should be implemented in multiple dimensions such as education, individual, public and society to improve the professional commitment of nursing students.

The development of optoelectronics mimicking the functions of the biological nervous system is important to artificial intelligence. This work demonstrates an optoelectronic, artificial, afferent-nerve strategy based on memory-electroluminescence spikes, which can realize multiple action-potentials combination through a single optical channel. The memory-electroluminescence spikes have diverse morphologies due to their history-dependent characteristics and can be used to encode distributed sensor signals. As the key to successful functioning of the optoelectronic, artificial afferent nerve, a driving mode for light-emitting diodes, namely, the non-carrier injection mode, is proposed, allowing it to drive nanoscale light-emitting diodes to generate a memory-electroluminescence spikes that has multiple sub-peaks. Moreover, multiplexing of the spikes can be obtained by using optical signals with different wavelengths, allowing for a large signal bandwidth, and the multiple action-potentials transmission process in afferent nerves can be demonstrated. Finally, sensor-position recognition with the bio-inspired afferent nerve is developed and shown to have a high recognition accuracy of 98.88%. This work demonstrates a strategy for mimicking biological afferent nerves and offers insights into the construction of artificial perception systems. In this work, a nanoscale light-emitting diode with memory-electroluminescence is demonstrated, which is used for mimicking the generation of multiple action-potentials and their combinations in bio-inspired afferent nerves.

The minimum-energy formation strategy for interconnected networks with distributed formation protocols is persented, where the impacts of the total energy restriction and the interaction silence are analyzed, respectively. The critical feature of this article is that the distributed formation and the minimum-energy restriction are realized simultaneously, and the total energy restriction is minimum in the sense of the linear matrix inequality. However, the guaranteed-cost formation strategy and the limited-budget formation strategy cannot guarantee that the energy restriction is minimum. Firstly, sufficient conditions for minimum-energy-restriction formation without the interaction silence are proposed, which can be solved by a specific optimization approach in terms of the linear matrix inequality, and the formation whole motion trajectory is determined, which is closely related to the average of the initial states of all agents and formation control vectors. Then, minimum-energy-restriction formation criteria for interconnected systems with the interaction silence are proposed by introducing two inhibition parameters and the interaction silence rate. Finally, two simulation examples are performed to illustrate the effectiveness of theoretical analyses.