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We develop the binary-shadow method for exact CNOT counting and apply it to arbitrary wire permutations. The Heisenberg evolution of rotated local Z observables converts every CNOT gate into an elementary transvection over F2, and for a wire permutation, the resulting binary shadow is rigid: it must equal the associated permutation matrix. This reduces the exact CNOT cost of a wire permutation in the CNOT+local model to the transvection length of its permutation matrix. The remaining problem is classical. The relevant mathematical input is the transvection-length theory of permutation matrices, or equivalently, the CNOT-only synthesis of permutation circuits. Combining the binary-shadow reduction with the graph-theoretic link-middle-cut theorem for cycle matrices yields an exact formula: if σ∈Sn has c(σ) disjoint cycles, then CNOT-cost(Wσ)=ℓtr(Pσ)=3n−c(σ). The novelty is therefore not the CNOT-only permutation formula by itself, but the transfer of that exact lower bound to the CNOT+local model: arbitrary one-qubit gates may rotate the local Pauli axes, but they cannot reduce the CNOT count of a wire permutation. In particular, the n-qubit cyclic SWAP gate Sn|x1〉1|x2〉2⋯|xn〉n=|xn〉1|x1〉2⋯|xn−1〉n requires exactly 3(n−1) CNOT gates, even when arbitrary one-qubit gates are allowed at zero cost. Thus, the exact values for n=2,3,4,5,6,… are 3,6,9,12,15,…. We also give explicit optimal factorizations for n=4 and n=5, and show more generally that each additional wire in a cyclic shift costs exactly three more CNOT gates.

Gastric-tube feeding and post-pyloric feeding are the two most common forms of enteral nutrition, each with advantages and disadvantages. To explore the effects and safety of gastric-tube versus post-pyloric feeding in critical patients by comparing pulmonary aspiration- and nutrition-related outcomes, a meta-analysis was conducted. It was performed by systematically searching the following databases: PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane library, BMJ best practice, ProQuest dissertations and theses, CINAHL, web of science, SinoMed, WANFANG, CNKI, and the platform of clinical trial registration. The databases were searched through December 31, 2019, and studies were evaluated by two independent researchers. Review Manager software was used for data analysis. We included 41 studies conducted in ten countries and involving 3248 participants. Meta-analysis showed that post-pyloric feeding had a lower incidence rate of pulmonary aspiration, gastric reflux, and pneumonia (P < 0.001, all), less incidence of gastrointestinal complications including vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, abdominal distension, high gastric residual volume, and constipation (P < 0.05, all), more optimal gastrointestinal nutrition including the percentage of total nutrition provided to the patient, the time to tolerate enteral nutrition, the time required to start feeding and the time required to reach nutritional targets (P < 0.05, all), shorter length of mechanical ventilation, stay in ICU and stay in hospital (P < 0.001, all), compared with gastric-tube feeding. No significant differences were shown in the time of gastrointestinal function recovery, mortality, or hospitalization expenses between the two feeding routes. This review provides evidence that post-pyloric feeding appears to be the safer and more effective choice, as compared to gastric-tube feeding among critical patients.

Obesity is a complex, chronic disease and global public health challenge. Characterized by excessive fat accumulation in the body, obesity sharply increases the risk of several diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, and is linked to lower life expectancy. Although lifestyle intervention (diet and exercise) has remarkable effects on weight management, achieving long-term success at weight loss is extremely challenging, and the prevalence of obesity continues to rise worldwide. Over the past decades, the pathophysiology of obesity has been extensively investigated, and an increasing number of signal transduction pathways have been implicated in obesity, making it possible to fight obesity in a more effective and precise way. In this review, we summarize recent advances in the pathogenesis of obesity from both experimental and clinical studies, focusing on signaling pathways and their roles in the regulation of food intake, glucose homeostasis, adipogenesis, thermogenesis, and chronic inflammation. We also discuss the current anti-obesity drugs, as well as weight loss compounds in clinical trials, that target these signals. The evolving knowledge of signaling transduction may shed light on the future direction of obesity research, as we move into a new era of precision medicine.

Neuroinflammation is crucial in the onset and progression of dopaminergic neuron loss in Parkinson’s disease (PD). We aimed to determine whether 3-N-Butylphthalide (NBP) can protect against PD by inhibiting the cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS)-stimulator of interferon genes (STING) pathway and the inflammatory response of microglia. MitoSOX/MitoTracker/Hoechst staining was used to detect the levels of mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (ROS) in BV2 cells. Quantitative Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction was used to measure the levels of free cytoplasmic mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in BV2 cells and mouse brain tissues. Behavioral impairments were assessed using rotarod, T-maze, and balance beam tests. Dopaminergic neurons and microglia were observed using immunohistochemical staining. Expression levels of cGAS, STING, nuclear factor kappa-B (NfκB), phospho- NfκB (p-NfκB), inhibitor of NfκBα (IκBα), and phospho-IκBα (p-IκBα) proteins in the substantia nigra and striatum were detected using Western Blot. NBP decreased mitochondrial ROS levels in rotenone-treated BV2 cells. NBP alleviated behavioral impairments and protected against rotenone-induced microgliosis and damage to dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra and striatum of rotenone-induced PD mice. NBP decreased rotenone-induced mtDNA leakage and mitigated neuroinflammation by inhibiting cGAS-STING pathway activation. NBP exhibited a protective effect in rotenone-induced PD models by significantly inhibiting the cGAS-STING pathway. Moreover, NBP can alleviate neuroinflammation, and is a potential therapeutic drug for alleviating clinical symptoms and delaying the progression of PD. This study provided insights for the potential role of NBP in PD therapy, potentially mitigating neurodegeneration, and consequently improving the quality of life and lifespan of patients with PD. The limitations are that we have not confirmed the exact mechanism by which NBP decreases mtDNA leakage, and this study was unable to observe the actual clinical therapeutic effect, so further cohort studies are required for validation.

Reliable and efficient detection of persimmons provides the foundation for precise maturity evaluation. Persimmon ripeness detection remains challenging due to small target sizes, frequent occlusion by foliage, and motion- or focus-induced blur that degrades edge information. This study proposes YOLOv11-4ConvNeXtV2, an enhanced detection framework that integrates a ConvNeXtV2 backbone with Fully Convolutional Masked Auto-Encoder (FCMAE) pretraining, Global Response Normalization (GRN), and Single-Head Self-Attention (SHSA) mechanisms. We present a comprehensive persimmon dataset featuring sub-block segmentation that preserves local structural integrity while expanding dataset diversity. The model was trained on 4921 annotated images (original 703 + 6 × 703 augmented) collected under diverse orchard conditions and optimized for 300 epochs using the Adam optimizer with early stopping. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that YOLOv11-4ConvNeXtV2 achieves 95.9% precision and 83.7% recall, with mAP@0.5 of 88.4% and mAP@0.5:0.95 of 74.8%, outperforming state-of-the-art YOLO variants (YOLOv5n, YOLOv8n, YOLOv9t, YOLOv10n, YOLOv11n, YOLOv12n) by 3.8–6.3 percentage points in mAP@0.5:0.95. The model demonstrates superior robustness to blur, occlusion, and varying illumination conditions, making it suitable for deployment in challenging maturity detection environments.

There has been abundant research on the variety of programmed cell death pathways. Apoptosis, pyroptosis, and necroptosis under the action of the caspase family are essential for the innate immune response. Caspases are classified into inflammatory caspase-1/4/5/11, apoptotic caspase-3/6/7, and caspase-2/8/9/10. Although necroptosis is not caspase-dependent to transmit cell death signals, it can cross-link with pyroptosis and apoptosis signals under the regulation of caspase-8. An increasing number of studies have reiterated the involvement of the caspase family in acute lung injuries caused by bacterial and viral infections, blood transfusion, and ventilation, which is influenced by noxious stimuli that activate or inhibit caspase engagement pathways, leading to subsequent lung injury. This article reviews the role of caspases implicated in diverse programmed cell death mechanisms in acute lung injury and the status of research on relevant inhibitors against essential target proteins of the described cell death mechanisms. The findings of this review may help in delineating novel therapeutic targets for acute lung injury.

The all-metal conical screw pump can achieve efficient lifting of fluids with different viscosities by adjusting the stator-rotor clearance fit. To investigate the operational characteristics of the all-metal conical screw pump under various fluid viscosities, this study builds upon outdoor experiments and employs numerical simulation for further analysis. The effects of stator-rotor clearance fit and rotor speed on pump displacement, energy efficiency, torque, and volumetric efficiency under different fluid viscosities are obtained. Reasonable operating parameters are recommended for heavy-oil reservoirs under different lifting conditions. The results indicate that the all-metal conical screw pump overcomes the limitations of traditional elastomer pumps and equal-diameter metal pumps, enabling efficient lifting across a wide viscosity range. Fluids of different viscosities correspond to different operating conditions: for high-viscosity fluids, the pump’s energy efficiency increases first and then decreases with larger clearances, while it decreases with increasing rotor speed. Under thermal recovery of heavy oil, the pump should operate with small clearance and high speed, whereas under cold production, large clearance and low speed are preferable.

Compared with the gold standard, polysomnography (PSG), and silver standard, actigraphy, contactless consumer sleep-tracking devices (CCSTDs) are more advantageous for implementing large-sample and long-period experiments in the field and out of the laboratory due to their low price, convenience, and unobtrusiveness. This review aimed to examine the effectiveness of CCSTDs application in human experiments. A systematic review and meta-analysis (PRISMA) of their performance in monitoring sleep parameters were conducted (PROSPERO: CRD42022342378). PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane CENTRALE, and Web of Science were searched, and 26 articles were qualified for systematic review, of which 22 provided quantitative data for meta-analysis. The findings show that CCSTDs had a better accuracy in the experimental group of healthy participants who wore mattress-based devices with piezoelectric sensors. CCSTDs’ performance in distinguishing waking from sleeping epochs is as good as that of actigraphy. Moreover, CCSTDs provide data on sleep stages that are not available when actigraphy is used. Therefore, CCSTDs could be an effective alternative tool to PSG and actigraphy in human experiments.

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) comprises histologic subtypes with distinct prognosis and treatment implications. This single-cohort study evaluated slide-level weakly supervised subtype classification for clear cell RCC (ccRCC), papillary RCC (pRCC), and chromophobe RCC (chRCC) using 928 diagnostic H&E whole-slide images (WSIs) from 928 patients in TCGA-RCC. We propose Swin-CLAM, a controlled modification of CLAM in which the conventional CNN patch encoder is replaced by an ImageNet-pretrained Swin-Tiny Transformer, while the CLAM-SB bag-level aggregation module is kept unchanged. WSIs were segmented, tiled into non-overlapping 256×256 patches at an effective 20× magnification, encoded offline, and classified using slide-level labels only. In five-fold patient-level cross-validation on TCGA-RCC, Swin-CLAM achieved a macro-averaged AUC of 0.976±0.008, an accuracy of 94.8±1.0%, and a macro-F1 of 0.940±0.012, with the largest gain observed for chRCC. Attention heatmaps and t-SNE plots were used as qualitative, exploratory analyses rather than formal evidence of interpretability. These results suggest that stronger patch-level representation can improve CLAM-based RCC subtype classification under a fixed MIL aggregator. However, the study does not establish clinical readiness, and external validation, calibration, domain-shift analysis, and expert region-level assessment are needed before practical deployment.

Carbon dots (CDs) have attracted significant interest as one of the most emerging photoluminescence (PL) nanomaterials. However, the realization of CDs with dominant near‐infrared (NIR) absorption/emission peaks in aqueous solution remains a great challenge. Herein, CDs with both main NIR absorption bands at 720 nm and NIR emission bands at 745 nm in an aqueous solution are fabricated for the first time by fusing large conjugated perylene derivatives under solvothermal treatment. With post‐surface engineering, the polyethyleneimine modified CDs (PEI‐CDs) exhibit enhanced PL quantum yields (PLQY) up to 8.3% and 18.8% in bovine serum albumin aqueous and DMF solutions, which is the highest PLQY of CDs in NIR region under NIR excitation. Density functional theory calculations support the strategy of fusing large conjugated perylene derivatives to achieve NIR emissions from CDs. Compared to the commercial NIR dye Indocyanine green, PEI‐CDs exhibit excellent photostability and much lower cost. Furthermore, the obtained PEI‐CDs illustrate the advantages of remarkable two‐photon NIR angiography and in vivo NIR fluorescence bioimaging. This work demonstrates a promising strategy of fusing large conjugated molecules for preparing CDs with strong NIR absorption/emission to promote their bioimaging applications. Carbon dots with both main near‐infrared (NIR) absorption and emission bands in aqueous solution are fabricated through solvothermal fusion of large conjugated perylene derivatives. After post‐surface modification with polyethyleneimine, high photoluminescence quantum yields in NIR region up to 8.3% and 18.8% are obtained in their bovine serum albumin aqueous and DMF solutions, respectively.