Explore the vast range of titles available.

Circular RNAs, as hopeful diagnosis markers and therapeutic molecules, have been studied, probed and applied into several diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, systemic lupus erythematosus, leukemia, pulmonary tuberculosis, and cancer especially. Recently, mounting evidence has supported that circRNAs play a key role in the tumorigenesis, progress, invasion and metastasis in lung cancer. Its special structure—3′–5′ covalent loop—allow it to execute several special functions in both normal eukaryotic cells and cancer cells. Our review summaries the latest studies on characteristics and biogenesis of circRNAs, and highlight the regulatory functions about miRNA sponge of lung-cancer-related circRNAs. In addition, the interaction of the circRNA-miRNA-mRNA regulatory network will also be elaborated in detail in this review. Therefore, this review can provide a new idea or strategy for further development and application in clinical setting in terms of early-diagnosis and better treatment.

Rice agriculture is the foundation of Asian civilizations south of the Yangtze River. Although rice history is well documented for its lower Yangtze homeland area, the early southward expansion of paddy rice farming is poorly known. Our study investigates this process using a compilation of paleoenvironmental proxies from coastal sediment cores fromsoutheast China to Thailand and Island Southeast Asia.We propose that a shortage of land suitable for paddy fields, caused by marine transgression, constrained rice agriculture during the mid-Holocene. Rapid expansion of coastal plains, particularly in deltaic basins, over the past three millennia has coincided with increases in land suitable for rice cultivation. Our study also helps explain the past population movements of rice farmers.

Proxy-based reconstructions and modeling of Holocene spatiotemporal precipitation patterns for China and Mongolia have hitherto yielded contradictory results indicating that the basic mechanisms behind the East Asian Summer Monsoon and its interaction with the westerly jet stream remain poorly understood. We present quantitative reconstructions of Holocene precipitation derived from 101 fossil pollen records and analyse them with the help of a minimal empirical model. We show that the westerly jet-stream axis shifted gradually southward and became less tilted since the middle Holocene. This was tracked by the summer monsoon rain band resulting in an early-Holocene precipitation maximum over most of western China, a mid-Holocene maximum in north-central and northeastern China, and a late-Holocene maximum in southeastern China. Our results suggest that a correct simulation of the orientation and position of the westerly jet stream is crucial to the reliable prediction of precipitation patterns in China and Mongolia. The basic mechanisms behind the East Asian Summer Monsoon remain poorly understood. Using proxy-based reconstructions and simulations, here the authors show that changes in the orientation and position of the westerly jet stream resulted in regionally asynchronous Holocene precipitation maxima.

Southern China and Southeast Asia witnessed some of their most significant economic and social changes relevant to human land use during the Late Holocene, including the intensification and spread of rice agriculture. Despite rice growth being associated with a number of earth systems impacts, howthese changes transformed tropical vegetation in this region of immense endemic biodiversity remains poorly understood. Here, we compile a pollen dataset incorporating ∼150,000 identifications and 233 pollen taxa to examine past changes in floral biodiversity, together with a compilation of records of forest decline across the region using 14 pollen records spanning lowland to mountain sites. Our results demonstrate that the rise of intensive rice agriculture from approximately 2,000 y ago led not only to extensive deforestation but also to remarkable changes of vegetation composition and a reduction in arboreal diversity. Focusing specifically on the Tertiary relic tree species, the freshwater wetland conifer Glyptostrobus (Glyptostrobus pensilis), we demonstrate how key species that had survived changing environmental conditions across millions of years shrank in the face of paddy rice farming and human disturbance.

Recently, there have been rapid advances in high-resolution remote sensing image retrieval, which plays an important role in remote sensing data management and utilization. For content-based remote sensing image retrieval, low-dimensional, representative and discriminative features are essential to ensure good retrieval accuracy and speed. Dimensionality reduction is one of the important solutions to improve the quality of features in image retrieval, in which LargeVis is an effective algorithm specifically designed for Big Data visualization. Here, an extended LargeVis (E-LargeVis) dimensionality reduction method for high-resolution remote sensing image retrieval is proposed. This can realize the dimensionality reduction of single high-dimensional data by modeling the implicit mapping relationship between LargeVis high-dimensional data and low-dimensional data with support vector regression. An effective high-resolution remote sensing image retrieval method is proposed to obtain stronger representative and discriminative deep features. First, the fully connected layer features are extracted using a channel attention-based ResNet50 as a backbone network. Then, E-LargeVis is used to reduce the dimensionality of the fully connected features to obtain a low-dimensional discriminative representation. Finally, L2 distance is computed for similarity measurement to realize the retrieval of high-resolution remote sensing images. The experimental results on four high-resolution remote sensing image datasets, including UCM, RS19, RSSCN7, and AID, show that for various convolutional neural network architectures, the proposed E-LargeVis can effectively improve retrieval performance, far exceeding other dimensionality reduction methods.

In recent years, the amount of remote sensing imagery data has increased exponentially. The ability to quickly and effectively find the required images from massive remote sensing archives is the key to the organization, management, and sharing of remote sensing image information. This paper proposes a high-resolution remote sensing image retrieval method with Gabor-CA-ResNet and a split-based deep feature transform network. The main contributions include two points. (1) For the complex texture, diverse scales, and special viewing angles of remote sensing images, A Gabor-CA-ResNet network taking ResNet as the backbone network is proposed by using Gabor to represent the spatial-frequency structure of images, channel attention (CA) mechanism to obtain stronger representative and discriminative deep features. (2) A split-based deep feature transform network is designed to divide the features extracted by the Gabor-CA-ResNet network into several segments and transform them separately for reducing the dimensionality and the storage space of deep features significantly. The experimental results on UCM, WHU-RS, RSSCN7, and AID datasets show that, compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our method can obtain competitive performance, especially for remote sensing images with rare targets and complex textures.

Soil rock mixture (SRM) is a common geo-material, which usually needs to be treated by grouting reinforcement. The grouting effect is tied to the grouting method, grout property, and geological condition, which are difficult to be quantitatively analyzed. The main obstacle in developing a rigorous theory for evaluating the grouting effect is the heterogeneity of SRM. This paper aims at developing a preliminary theoretical model and an empirical formula for predicting the overall strength of grouted SRM based on the actual morphological structure of grout-rock skeleton and its heterogeneity. A discrete element model was established for analysis of grout vein structures and validation of the theoretical approach. Two morphological parameters called “grout vein uniformity” and “block-skeleton conversion ratio” were proposed to quantify the influence of spatial distribution of grout vein and rock blocks in grouted SRM. Finally, an empirical formula was established for estimating the uniaxial compressive strength of grouted SRM, with a complete description of rock conversion ratio as a function of grout proportion and rock proportion. The ability of the approach to capture the influence of the grouting effect was verified by comparing the predicted values with the numerical values and the laboratory test results of this study. The improvement of the mechanical property of the stratum can be quickly assessed according to the obtained correlations as a general rule. Specifically, the normalized UCS increases in a linear fashion over grout proportion at a rock-soil ratio between 0.6 and 0.8. However, the theoretical model may overestimate the strength when the rock-soil ratio is higher than 0.9. It is open to improvement by further studies for the systemization of a more rigorous and robust approach in estimating and accommodating the uncertainties when applied in grouting operation guidance in the real world.

The lack of a precisely-dated, unequivocal climate proxy from northern China, where precipitation variability is traditionally considered as an East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) indicator, impedes our understanding of the behaviour and dynamics of the EASM. Here we present a well-dated, pollen-based, ~20-yr-resolution quantitative precipitation reconstruction (derived using a transfer function) from an alpine lake in North China, which provides for the first time a direct record of EASM evolution since 14.7 ka (ka = thousands of years before present, where the “present” is defined as the year AD 1950). Our record reveals a gradually intensifying monsoon from 14.7–7.0 ka, a maximum monsoon (30% higher precipitation than present) from ~7.8–5.3 ka and a rapid decline since ~3.3 ka. These insolation-driven EASM trends were punctuated by two millennial-scale weakening events which occurred synchronously to the cold Younger Dryas and at ~9.5–8.5 ka and by two centennial-scale intervals of enhanced (weakened) monsoon during the Medieval Warm Period (Little Ice Age). Our precipitation reconstruction, consistent with temperature changes but quite different from the prevailing view of EASM evolution, points to strong internal feedback processes driving the EASM and may aid our understanding of future monsoon behaviour under ongoing anthropogenic climate change.

Wearables developed for human body signal detection receive increasing attention in the current decade. Compared to implantable sensors, wearables are more focused on body motion detection, which can support human–machine interaction (HMI) and biomedical applications. In wearables, electromyography (EMG)-, force myography (FMG)-, and electrical impedance tomography (EIT)-based body information monitoring technologies are broadly presented. In the literature, all of them have been adopted for many similar application scenarios, which easily confuses researchers when they start to explore the area. Hence, in this article, we review the three technologies in detail, from basics including working principles, device architectures, interpretation algorithms, application examples, merits and drawbacks, to state-of-the-art works, challenges remaining to be solved and the outlook of the field. We believe the content in this paper could help readers create a whole image of designing and applying the three technologies in relevant scenarios.

Terrestrial ecosystems will be transformed by current anthropogenic change, but the extent of this change remains a challenge to predict. Nolan et al. looked at documented vegetational and climatic changes at almost 600 sites worldwide since the last glacial maximum 21,000 years ago. From this, they determined vegetation responses to temperature changes of 4° to 7°C. They went on to estimate the extent of ecosystem changes under current similar (albeit more rapid) scenarios of warming. Without substantial mitigation efforts, terrestrial ecosystems are at risk of major transformation in composition and structure. Science , this issue p. 920 Global vegetation change since the Last Glacial Maximum is used as an indicator of transformation under warming scenarios. Impacts of global climate change on terrestrial ecosystems are imperfectly constrained by ecosystem models and direct observations. Pervasive ecosystem transformations occurred in response to warming and associated climatic changes during the last glacial-to-interglacial transition, which was comparable in magnitude to warming projected for the next century under high-emission scenarios. We reviewed 594 published paleoecological records to examine compositional and structural changes in terrestrial vegetation since the last glacial period and to project the magnitudes of ecosystem transformations under alternative future emission scenarios. Our results indicate that terrestrial ecosystems are highly sensitive to temperature change and suggest that, without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, terrestrial ecosystems worldwide are at risk of major transformation, with accompanying disruption of ecosystem services and impacts on biodiversity.