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Although the function of silicon (Si) in plant physiology has long been debated, its beneficial effects on plant resistance against abiotic and biotic stresses, including insect herbivory, have been well documented. In addition, the jasmonate (JA) signaling pathway plays a crucial role in mediating antiherbivore defense responses in plants. However, potential interactions between JA and Si in response to insect attack have not been examined directly. To explore the role JA may play in Si-enhanced resistance, we silenced the expression of allene oxide synthase (OsAOS ; active in JA biosynthesis) and CORONATINE INSENSITIVE1 (OsCOI1 ; active in JA perception) genes in transgenic rice plants via RNAi and examined resulting changes in Si accumulation and defense responses against caterpillar Cnaphalocrocis medinalis (rice leaffolder, LF) infestation. Si pretreatment increased rice resistance against LF larvae in wild-type plants but not in OsAOS and OsCOI1 RNAi lines. Upon LF attack, wild-type plants subjected to Si pretreatment exhibited enhanced defense responses relative to untreated controls, including higher levels of JA accumulation; increased levels of transcripts encoding defense marker genes; and elevated activities of peroxidase, polyphenol oxidase, and trypsin protease inhibitor. Additionally, reduced Si deposition and Si cell expansion were observed in leaves of OsAOS and OsCOI1 RNAi plants in comparison with wild-type plants, and reduced steady-state transcript levels of the Si transporters OsLsi1 , OsLsi2 , and OsLsi6 were observed in Si-pretreated plants after LF attack. These results suggest a strong interaction between Si and JA in defense against insect herbivores involving priming of JA-mediated defense responses by Si and the promotion of Si accumulation by JA.

Lipid metabolism disorders are a prominent characteristic in the pathological development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Danshen zexie decoction (DZD) is a Chinese herbal medicine that is based on zexie decoction and has an effect of regulating lipid mechanism. However, the anti-NAFLD effect and mechanism of DZD remain unclear. In this study, we observed the therapeutic effect of DZD on NAFLD rats and investigated its possible mechanisms. Sixty Sprague Dawley rats were randomly assigned to six groups: control group, model group, Yishanfu (polyene phosphatidylcholine) group, and low, medium and high-dose DZD groups. High-fat diet (HFD) was fed to the rats to establish an NAFLD model, and each treatment group was given corresponding drugs at the same time for eight consecutive weeks. The results revealed that the obvious lipid metabolism disorder and liver injury induced by HFD were alleviated by treatment with DZD, which was verified by decreased serum TC, TG, ALT, AST, liver TC, TG, and FFA, as well as the alleviation of hepatic steatosis. The production of ROS in rats was reduced after treatment with DZD. The SOD activity and GSH content were increased with DZD treatment, while the MDA level was decreased. The administration of DZD could decrease serum IL-1β and IL-18 contents. Moreover, DZD upregulated the expressions of Nrf2, HO-1, GCLC, and GCLM, while it suppressed the expressions of NLRP3, caspase-1, GSDMD, and GSDMD-N. In conclusion, the data showed that DZD can reduce lipid accumulation, alleviate oxidative stress and inflammation, and inhibit pyroptosis in NAFLD rats, which might be ascribed to suppression of the ROS/NLRP3/IL-1β signaling pathway by activation of Nrf2. Overall, these results indicated that DZD is expected to be a therapeutic drug for NAFLD.

Research indicates that utilizing the spectrum in the time–frequency domain plays a crucial role in speech enhancement tasks, as it can better extract audio features and reduce computational consumption. For the speech enhancement methods in the time–frequency domain, the introduction of attention mechanisms and the application of DenseBlock have yielded promising results. In particular, the Unet architecture, which comprises three main components, the encoder, the decoder, and the bottleneck, employs DenseBlock in both the encoder and the decoder to achieve powerful feature fusion capabilities with fewer parameters. In this paper, in order to enhance the advantages of the aforementioned methods for speech enhancement, we propose a Unet-based time–frequency domain denoising model called TFDense-Net. It utilizes our improved DenseBlock for feature extraction in both the encoder and the decoder and employs an attention mechanism in the bottleneck for feature fusion and denoising. The model has demonstrated excellent performance for speech enhancement tasks, achieving significant improvements in the Si-SDR metric compared to other state-of-the-art models. Additionally, to further enhance the denoising performance and increase the receptive field of the model, we introduce a multi-spectrogram discriminator based on multiple STFTs. Since the discriminator loss can observe the correlations between spectra that traditional loss functions cannot detect, we train TFDense-Net as a generator against the multi-spectrogram discriminator, resulting in a significant improvement in the denoising performance, and we name this enhanced model TFDense-GAN. We evaluate our proposed TFDense-Net and TFDense-GAN on two public datasets: the VCTK + DEMAND dataset and the Interspeech Deep Noise Suppression Challenge dataset. Experimental results show that TFDense-GAN outperforms most existing models in terms of STOI, PESQ, and Si-SDR, achieving state-of-the-art results. The comparison samples of TFDense-GAN and other models can be accessed from https://github.com/yhsjoker/TFDense-GAN .

Background The impairment of intrinsic capacity (IC) among older adults is a significant global health challenge, impacting their well-being and quality of life. Despite global efforts to promote healthy aging, research on the prevalence of IC impairment in the Chinese population remains limited. This study aims to examine the prevalence of IC impairment among Chinese older adults and to explore the associations between sociodemographic, health status, and lifestyle factors with IC impairment. Methods This study utilized data from the China Health and Aging Tracking Survey (CHARLS) 2020. IC was assessed across five domains in line with WHO guidelines: cognition, locomotion, vitality, sensory, and psychological. Associations between IC impairment and sociodemographic, health status, and lifestyle factors were analyzed using chi-square tests. Binary logistic regression was employed to identify factors associated with IC impairment. Results Among 6,941 respondents aged 60 years and above, 83.8% reported IC impairment. Cognitive impairment was predominant (71.8%), followed by psychological (40.4%), locomotion (19.8%), vitality (17.2%), and sensory impairments (8.9%). Binary logistic regression revealed that older age (OR = 2.875, 95% CI: 1.662–4.974), unmarried/divorced/widowed status (OR = 1.494, 95% CI: 1.210–1.846), rural residence (OR = 1.827, 95% CI: 1.551–2.153), presence of multiple chronic diseases (OR = 1.412, 95% CI: 1.120–1.779) and regular physical pain (OR = 1.776, 95% CI: 1.364–2.312) were associated with increased odds of IC impairment. Conversely, higher education (OR = 0.485, 95% CI: 0.306–0.771), pension insurance (OR = 0.717, 95% CI: 0.565–0.910), good self-rated health (OR = 0.448, 95% CI: 0.348–0.577), positive life expectancy (OR = 0.588, 95% CI: 0.486–0.710), social participation (OR = 0.711, 95% CI: 0.618–0.818), adequate sleep (OR = 0.835, 95% CI: 0.722–0.967), and internet access (OR = 0.580, 95% CI: 0.495–0.680)were linked to lower odds of IC impairment. Conclusions The study reveals a considerable prevalence of IC impairment among older adults in China, with cognitive impairment being particularly prominent. Our study identifies key factors associated with IC impairment, including sociodemographic, health status, and lifestyle factors. These findings emphasize the need for targeted public health strategies that address these modifiable factors to strengthen IC and improve the quality of aging.

Background In China, internal migrants are a vulnerable population due to the challenges of the health and social system. With the increase of population aging, older migrants have an increasing risk of developing chronic conditions. To date, limited research is available to document the life and health status of older migrants with hypertension, especially those who live alone. This study aims to report and compare the life and health status of older migrants with hypertension among those who live alone or do not. Methods Data were collected from the 2018 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS). We included 40 older migrants with hypertension who lived alone and 214 who did not. The T-test, Chi-square test, Fisher exact test and Goodman and Kruskal’s Gamma were employed to test the differences between these groups. Additionally, multivariable linear and logistic regression analyses were used to confirm such differences. Results Of the 254 participants, 51.6% were male and the average age was 70.8. Furthermore, 81.1% had received secondary school education or below. Among older migrants with hypertension, 38.9% had received basic public health services such as regular blood pressure measurements from community health workers. Compared to hypertensive older migrants who did not live alone, those who lived alone had a higher CES-D score, a greater proportion of participants with depression, and a lower willingness to reduce alcohol consumption (11.91 vs. 8.53, p  = 0.008; 18.8% vs. 6.3%, p  = 0.018; 14.3% vs. 33.7%, p  = 0.022). The multivariable analysis indicated that hypertensive older migrants who lived alone had higher risk scores for depression (adjusted β = 3.145, 95%CI = 0.092–6.198, p  = 0.044). Conclusions Our study indicates the lack of effective implementation of basic public health services for older migrants with hypertension. In particular, hypertensive older migrants who live alone has less favourable psychological status and lifestyle.

Microorganisms are important members of seagrass bed ecosystems and play a crucial role in maintaining the health of seagrasses and the ecological functions of the ecosystem. In this study, we systematically quantified the assembly processes of microbial communities in fragmented seagrass beds and examined their correlation with environmental factors. Concurrently, we explored the relative contributions of species replacement and richness differences to the taxonomic and functional β-diversity of microbial communities, investigated the potential interrelation between these components, and assessed the explanatory power of environmental factors. The results suggest that stochastic processes dominate community assembly. Taxonomic β-diversity differences are governed by species replacement, while for functional β-diversity, the contribution of richness differences slightly outweighs that of replacement processes. A weak but significant correlation ( p < 0.05) exists between the two components of β-diversity in taxonomy and functionality, with almost no observed significant correlation with environmental factors. This implies significant differences in taxonomy, but functional convergence and redundancy within microbial communities. Environmental factors are insufficient to explain the β-diversity differences. In conclusion, the assembly of microbial communities in fragmented seagrass beds is governed by stochastic processes. The patterns of taxonomic and functional β-diversity provide new insights and evidence for a better understanding of these stochastic assembly rules. This has important implications for the conservation and management of fragmented seagrass beds.

Background After the COVID-19 outbreak, many Chinese high school students have increased their dependence on electronic devices for studying and life, which may affect the incidence of neck and shoulder pain (NSP) in Chinese adolescents. Methods To evaluate the prevalence of NSP in high school students and its associated risk factors during COVID-19, a survey was conducted among 5,046 high school students in Shanghai, Qinghai, Henan and Macao during the second semester and summer vacation of the 2019–2020 academic year. The questionnaire included questions regarding demographic characteristics, the prevalence of NSP and lifestyle factors such as sedentary behavior, poor posture and electronic device usage. Univariable and multivariable logistic regression was used to analyze the possible influencing factors for neck and shoulder pain. Results A total of 4793 valid questionnaires (95.0%) were collected. The results indicated that the prevalence of NSP was 23.7% among high school students. Binary logistic regression analysis revealed that female gender (P < 0.05, OR = 1.82), grade (P < 0.05, range OR 1.40–1.51) and subject selection (P < 0.05, range OR 0.49–0.68) were risk factors for NSP in high school students. Sedentary behavior (P < 0.05, range OR 1.74–2.36), poor posture (P < 0.05, range OR 1.19–2.56), backpack weight (P < 0.05, range OR 1.17–1.88), exercise style and frequency (P < 0.05, range OR 1.18–1.31; P < 0.05, range OR 0.76–0.79, respectively), and the time spent using electronic devices (P < 0.05, range OR 1.23–1.38)had a significant correlation with NSP in high school students. Conclusions NSP is currently very common among high school students during the outbreak of COVID-19. Sedentary behavior, poor posture and other factors have a great impact on the occurrence of NSP in high school students. Education regarding healthy lifestyle choices should be advocated for to decrease NSP among high school students, such as more physical activity, changing poor postures and reducing the amount of time spent using electronic devices.

ObjectiveChina has continued to improve tuberculosis (TB) control in the past decade; however, the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 hindered this progress. As a province with a large population and frequent international exchanges, Guangdong has been seriously affected by COVID-19. This study aimed to understand the effect of COVID-19 on TB detection in Guangdong based on the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model.DesignTime-series study.SettingGuangdong, China.Outcome measuresWe used the ARIMA model to quantify the effect of COVID-19 by comparing reported cases during the COVID-19 pandemic with predicted cases under a counterfactual scenario of no COVID-19 pandemic. After model evaluation, we chose ARIMA (0,1,2)(0,1,1)12 as the prediction model. We also highlighted that there were three emergency response periods in which the responses and public responses to COVID-19 varied.ResultsDuring the pandemic period, the average annual TB notification rate was 57.95/100 000, which decreased by 27.97% compared with the pre-pandemic period. Although it decreased by 6.17% on average annually in the pre-pandemic period, it decreased by 14.92% in 2020 as compared with 2019, but only decreased by 0.34% in 2021 as compared with 2020. The results of the ARIMA model showed that the number of reported cases in 2020 decreased by 6.62% compared with that of the predicted cases, but this decreased by 0.42% only in 2021. The most seriously affected period was the second-level emergency response period in 2020, when the relative difference between reported and predicted cases reached the peak (−16.43%). The least affected period was the third-level emergency response period of 2021, the reported cases recovered and exceeded the predicted cases, with a gap of 0.77%.ConclusionsTB detection in Guangdong had generally declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, which might be related to the movement restrictions, diverted resources and patients’ concerns. This decline would lead to the delay or even interruption of diagnosis and treatment, which would cause the regression of TB control. To improve TB detection, it is important for stakeholders to take consorted effort during public health emergencies.

The Luding-Shimian Highway is located in the west of Sichuan, China. The geological movement is active in this area, and the dikes are widely distributed. During tunnel excavation, dike intrusion frequently leads to significant deformation and falling blocks of the surrounding rock. After the construction of the secondary lining, severe cracking was observed in the dike-intruded area of the Chuni Tunnel. XRD analysis, thin-section identification, and uniaxial compression testing revealed alterations in the intrusive dike area, including the formation of clay minerals and reduced uniaxial compressive strength. The parameters of FEM were determined by Hoek–Brown criterion. The force of the structure was asymmetrical due to the differing properties of the bedrock and intrusive dike. The position of dike intrusion can help identify the vulnerable areas of the tunnel lining. When the dike approaches the tunnel face, steep lateral deformation changes may lead to circumferential cracking at the side wall. If the dike intrudes from the arch waist position, excessive deformation increases the likelihood of longitudinal cracking at the arch waist and side wall. At the same time, the inverted arch also has the risk of uplift. When the dike intrudes from the vault position, damage to both the vault and the inverted arch becomes more probable. To address these challenges, the proposed measures included increasing the thickness of the secondary lining, reinforcing the surrounding rock through grouting, closing the inverted arch. The measures enhances tunnel stability and safety, addressing a critical research gap in dike-intrusive strata and providing theoretical and practical support for similar conditions.