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Consistent use of large amounts of fertilizers, pesticides, and mulch can cause the accumulation of harmful substances in cotton plants. Among these harmful substances, cadmium (Cd), an undegradable element, stands out as being particularly highly toxic to plants. The objective of this study was to evaluate the ability of biochar (3%) and biofertilizer (1.5%) to decrease Cd uptake, increase cotton dry weight, and modulate the activities of photosynthetic and peroxidase (POD), superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase enzyme (CAT) in cotton ( Gossypium hirsutum L.) grown in Cd-contaminated soil (0, 1, 2, or 4 mg Cd kg −1 soil) in pots. These studies showed that, as expected, exogenous Cd adversely affects cotton chlorophyll and photosynthesis. However, biochar and biofertilizer increased cotton dry weight by an average of 16.82% and 32.62%, respectively. Meanwhile, biochar and biofertilizer decreased the accumulation of Cd in cotton organs, and there was a significant reduction in the amount of Cd in bolls ( P  <  0.05 ). Biochar and biofertilizer have a positive impact on cotton chlorophyll content, net photosynthesis, stomatal conductance, transpiration rate, and intercellular CO 2 concentration. Thus, the addition of biochar and biofertilizer promote cotton growth. However, biochar and biofertilizer increased the SOD activity of leaves (47.70% and 77.21%), CAT activity of leaves (35.40% and 72.82%), SOD activity of roots (33.62% and 39.37%), and CAT activity of roots (36.91% and 60.29%), respectively, and the addition of biochar and biofertilizer decreased the content of MDA and electrolyte leakage rate. Redundancy analyses showed that biochar and biofertilizer also improved SOD and POD activities by reducing the heavy metal-induced oxidative stress in cotton and reducing Cd uptake in cotton organs. Therefore, biochar and biofertilizer have a positive effect on the growth of cotton.

Joint detection and embedding (JDE) methods usually fuse the target motion information and appearance information as the data association matrix, which could fail when the target is briefly lost or blocked in multi-object tracking (MOT). In this paper, we aim to solve this problem by proposing a novel association matrix, the Embedding and GioU (EG) matrix, which combines the embedding cosine distance and GioU distance of objects. To improve the performance of data association, we develop a simple, effective, bottom-up fusion tracker for re-identity features, named SimpleTrack, and propose a new tracking strategy which can mitigate the loss of detection targets. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments are carried out using five different state-of-the-art JDE-based methods. The results show that by simply replacing the original association matrix with our EG matrix, we can achieve significant improvements in IDF1, HOTA and IDsw metrics, and increase the tracking speed of these methods by around 20%. In addition, our SimpleTrack has the best data association capability among the JDE-based methods, e.g., 61.6 HOTA and 76.3 IDF1, on the test set of MOT17 with 23 FPS running speed on a single GTX2080Ti GPU.

The prevalence of dementia has become an increasingly important public health priority. This study investigated the association between midday napping and long-term trajectories of cognitive function in middle-aged and older Chinese adults. Among 4648 participants aged 45+ years extracted from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). The components of the Telephone Interview of Cognitive Status battery (TICS-10) was used to assess cognitive function. Group-based trajectory modelling (GBTM) was used to identify long-term trajectories of cognitive function. Multinomial logistic regression model was used to estimate risk ratios (RRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Three distinct long-term trajectories of cognitive function reflected patterns of rapid decline, slow decline, and stable. The RR (95% CI) for rapid decline was 1.45 (1.05-2.01) for 0 minutes, 1.49 (1.05-2.12) for 31-90 minutes, and 2.19 (1.41-3.42) for >90 minutes compared with midday napping 1-30 minutes. The RR (95% CI) for slow decline was 1.22 (1.02-1.47) for 0 minutes, 1.27 (1.04-1.55) for 31-90 minutes, and 1.80 (1.38-2.35) for >90 minutes compared with midday napping 1-30 minutes. In addition, the increased risk of cognitive decline that transferred from >90 to 31-90 minutes, switched from 31-90 to >90 minutes, and persisted in >90 minutes compared with midday napping 1-30 minutes, especially rapid decline. There was a longitudinal association between no and long (>30 minutes) midday napping and long-term trajectories of cognitive decline, especially rapid decline. The study is a 4-year observational in nature and provides limited evidence for establishing causal relationships.

The bone marrow microenvironment has a key role in regulating haematopoiesis, but its molecular complexity and response to stress are incompletely understood. Here we map the transcriptional landscape of mouse bone marrow vascular, perivascular and osteoblast cell populations at single-cell resolution, both at homeostasis and under conditions of stress-induced haematopoiesis. This analysis revealed previously unappreciated levels of cellular heterogeneity within the bone marrow niche and resolved cellular sources of pro-haematopoietic growth factors, chemokines and membrane-bound ligands. Our studies demonstrate a considerable transcriptional remodelling of niche elements under stress conditions, including an adipocytic skewing of perivascular cells. Among the stress-induced changes, we observed that vascular Notch delta-like ligands (encoded by Dll1 and Dll4 ) were downregulated. In the absence of vascular Dll4 , haematopoietic stem cells prematurely induced a myeloid transcriptional program. These findings refine our understanding of the cellular architecture of the bone marrow niche, reveal a dynamic and heterogeneous molecular landscape that is highly sensitive to stress and illustrate the utility of single-cell transcriptomic data in evaluating the regulation of haematopoiesis by discrete niche populations. The transcriptional landscape of cell populations of the mouse bone marrow microenvironment, mapped at single-cell resolution, reveals cellular heterogeneity in this niche as well as substantial transcriptional remodelling under stress conditions.

In underwater environments, the presence of multipath effects can cause measurement outliers in acoustic sensors, leading to reduced estimation accuracy for integrated navigation. To address this issue, this paper proposes a sliding window variational Kalman filter based on Student’s t-distribution (SWVKF-ST) to improve state estimation accuracy. First, this method makes use of Student’s t-distribution to model heavy-tailed noise and adopts the inverse Wishart distribution as the prior for noise covariance, thereby enhancing robustness against heavy-tailed distributions. On this basis, the state variables and measurements within the sliding window are jointly estimated using the variational Bayesian framework, which helps mitigate the impact of unknown noise characteristics on state estimation. In addition, this method constructs multiple fading factors to prevent the degradation of estimation accuracy caused by excessive adjustment of the predicted error covariance matrix. Finally, the simulations and actual experiment validate that the SWVKF-ST outperforms the compared filters, achieving higher filtering precision and stronger robustness to outliers. The method effectively reduces the uncertainty in the measurement noise covariance matrix and demonstrates excellent adaptability in complex underwater environments.

The rhizosphere represents a highly active plant-soil interface, where microorganisms play critical roles in the growth and development of alfalfa and in regulating local ecosystem processes. However, the mechanisms by which alfalfa rhizosphere microorganisms respond to spatiotemporal variation in saline-alkali environments remain poorly understood. Here, we collected alfalfa plants from one- to eight-year-old stands across three pastoral regions differing in soil type and characterized their rhizosphere soils. Using soil physicochemical analyzes, soil enzymology, and metagenomics, we examined how rhizosphere microbial communities respond to temporal and spatial variation in saline-alkali soils. Our findings indicate that alfalfa rhizosphere microecology may maintain rhizosphere health by modulating soil physicochemical properties, reducing peroxidase activity, enhancing reductase activity, and increasing the abundance of beneficial microorganisms. These results underscore the potential value of introducing exogenous beneficial bacteria to shape indigenous rhizosphere microecology.

In the complex underwater environment, it is hard to obtain accurate system noise prior information. If uncertainty system noise model is used in state determination, the precision will decrease. To address the problem, this paper proposes a novel inverse-Wishart (IW) based variational Bayesian adaptive cubature Kalman filter (IW-VACKF), and the inverse-Wishart distribution is employed as the conjugate prior distribution of system noise covariance matrices. To improve the modeling accuracy, a mixing probability vector is introduced based on the inverse-Wishart distribution to better characterize the uncertainty and dynamic of state noise in underwater environments. Then, the state transition and the measurement process are derived as hierarchical Gaussian models. Subsequently, the posterior information of the system is jointly calculated by employing the variational Bayesian method. Simulations and real trials illustrate that the proposed IW-VACKF can improve the state estimation precision efficiently in the complex underwater environment.

Mechanical strength is essential for the upright growth habit, which is one of the most important characteristics of terrestrial plants. Lignin, a phenylpropanoid-derived polymer mainly present in secondary cell walls plays critical role in providing mechanical support. Here, we report that the prostrate-stem cultivar of the legume forage Medicago ruthenica cultivar ‘Mengnong No. 1’ shows compromised mechanical strength compared with the erect-stem cultivar ‘Zhilixing’. The erect-stem cultivar, ‘Zhilixing’ has significantly higher lignin content, leading to higher mechanical strength than the prostrate-stem cultivar. The low abundance of miRNA397a in the Zhiixing cultivar causes reduced cleavage of MrLAC17 transcript, which results in enhanced expression level of MrLAC17 compared to that in the prostrate-stem cultivar Mengnong No. 1. Complementation of the Arabidopsis lac4 lac17 double mutants with MrLAC17 restored the lignin content to wild-type levels, confirming that MrLAC17 perform an exchangeable role with Arabidopsis laccases. LAC17- mediated lignin polymerization is therefore increased in the ‘Zhilixing’, causing the erect stem phenotype. Our data reveal the importance of the miR397a in the lignin biosynthesis and suggest a strategy for molecular breeding targeting plant architecture in legume forage.

Urban agglomerations have become a new geographical unit in China, breaking the administrative fortresses between cities, which means that the population and economic activities between cities will become more intensive in the future. Constructing and optimizing the ecological security pattern of urban agglomerations is important for promoting harmonious social-economic development and ecological protection. Using the Harbin-Changchun urban agglomeration as a case study, we have identified ecological sources based on the evaluation of ecosystem functions. Based on the resistance surface modified by nighttime light (NTL) data, the potential ecological corridors were identified using the least-cost path method, and key ecological corridors were extracted using the gravity model. By combining 15 ecological sources, 119 corridors, 3 buffer zones, and 77 ecological nodes, the ecological security pattern (ESP) was constructed. The main land-use types composed of ecological sources and corridors are forest land, cultivated land, grassland, and water areas. Some ecological sources are occupied by construction, while unused land has the potential for ecological development. The ecological corridors in the central region are distributed circularly and extend to southeast side in the form of tree branches with the Songhua River as the central axis. Finally, this study proposes an optimizing pattern with “four belts, four zones, one axis, nine corridors, ten clusters and multi-centers” to provide decision makers with spatial strategies with respect to the conflicts between urban development and ecological protection during rapid urbanization.

Arrange the integers 1,2,…,n on a circle and, for a fixed k≥1, let si be the sum of the k consecutive entries starting at position i (indices taken modulo n). For a circular permutation π, define the range R(π)=maxisi−minisi, and let w(n,k) be the minimum value of R(π) over all circular permutations of 1,…,n. We obtain three structural results. First, we prove the complement symmetry w(n,k)=w(n,n−k). Second, we determine the first nontrivial arithmetic progression case n=2k+1 exactly: w(2k+1,k)=2k2. Third, we determine the structured regime n=k2+1 exactly: w(k2+1,k)=k. The proofs combine averaging lower bounds on the progression n≡1(modk) with explicit constructions: a parity-sensitive two-block arrangement for n=2k+1 and a k×k array construction for n=k2+1.