Correlation of personality with individual reproductive success in shrub-nesting birds depends on their life history style

Two questions in the research of animal personality—whether there is a correlation between a personality trait and individual reproductive success,and what is the genetic basis underlying a personality trait—remain unresolved.We addressed these two questions in three shrub-nesting birds,the Azure-winged Magpie(Cyanopica cyanus,AM),White-collared Blackbird(Turdus albocinctus,WB),and Brown-cheeked Laughingthrush(Trochalopteron henrici,BL).The personality type of an individual was first identified according to its response to a territorial intruder.Then,we compared the fleeing distance,breeding parameters,and differential expressed genes(DEGs) in the brain transcriptome between bold and shy breeders.In the three species,bold breeders exhibited more aggressiveness towards an intruder of their territory than did shy breeders.The reproductive success of bold breeders was significantly higher than that of shy breeders in AM but not in WB and BL.The three species shared one DEG,crabp1,which was up-regulated in bold relative to in shy individuals.By regulating the expression of corticotropin-releasing hormone,higher crabp1 gene expression can decrease cellular response to retinoic acid.Therefore,bold individuals are insensitive to external stresses and able to exhibit more aggressiveness to intruders than their shier counterparts.Aggressiveness is beneficial to bold individuals in AM but not in WB and BL because the former could evoke neighbors to make the same response of defending against intruders but the latter could not.Although a personality trait may have the same genetic basis across species,its correlation with reproductive success depends largely on the life history style of a species.

The pathogenesis of chronic subdural hematoma in the perspective of neomembrane formation and related mechanisms

Chronic subdural hematoma(CSDH)is a disease characterized by capsuled blood products that progressively occupy the intracranial space,causing intracranial hypertension and compression in the brain.CSDH frequently occurs in all demographics,especially in the elderly,but the pathogenesis of CSDH remains unclear.In this review,we discuss the origin,development,and current treatment strategies of CSDH.For thefirst time,we analyzed the cellular and molecular compositions of hematoma membranes with a focus on neomembrane formation,a complex early-stage interactive event in hematoma pathogenesis.We hypothesize that in patients with CSDH,dural border cells(DBCs)might be induced to synthesize collagen or serum proteins might accumulate at the dura and arachnoid layers at the site of injury,thereby encapsulating the hemorrhage.Membrane formation may trigger inflammatory responses after subdural hemorrhage,promotingfibroblast-involved extracellular matrix(ECM)deposition and aberrant angiogenesis within the outer membrane.Consequently,ECM deposition and angiogenesis mutually influence each other and are modulated by inflammatory processes.By illustrating the complex and interactive mechanism of neomembrane formation,we aim to provide a novel insight into CSDH pathogenesis and propose directions for future research as well as advancements in treatment strategies for this disease.

The Grey-backed Shrike parents adopt brood survival strategy in both the egg and nestling phases

Background:Great diversity exists in the parenting pattern of altricial birds,which has long been considered as an adaptive response to specific environmental conditions but not to their life-history style.Methods:We examined the egg-laying and nestling-raising pattern of the Grey-backed Shrike(Lanius tephronotus)that breeds only once a year on the Tibetan Plateau.We compared the dietary composition to that of its sympatric competitor,the Brown-cheeked Laughing Thrush(Trochalopteron henrici)that breeds twice a year.Results:Female Grey-backed Shrikes produced a fixed clutch size of five,with increasing egg size by their laying sequence.The last offspring in the brood is disadvantageous in the size hierarchy because it hatches later.However,they had the largest fledgling body mass.These findings indicate that Grey-backed Shrikes adopt the brood survival strategy in both the egg and nestling phases.Moreover,males and females exhibit no sexual division in providing parental care as they made an equal contribution to the total amount of food delivered to their brood.This parenting pattern of Grey-backed Shrikes,as well as their dietary items,differ significantly from those of the Brown-cheeked Laughing Thrush.Conclusions:We suggest that the differentiation in life-history style between sympatric competitors,rather than a behavioral response to specific environmental conditions,plays a decisive role in driving avian parenting strategy diversification.

Connecting tradition with modernity: Safety literature review

Road safety has long been considered as one of the most important issues.Numerous studies have been conducted to investigate crashes with significant progress,whereas most of the work concentrates on the lifespan period of roadways and safety influencing factors.This paper undertakes a systematic literature review from the crash procedure to identify the state-of-the-art knowledge,advantages and disadvantages of crash risk,crash prediction,crash prevention and safety of connected and autonomous vehicles(CAVs).As a result of this literature review,substantive issues in general,data source and modeling selection are discussed,and the outcome of this study aims to provide the summary of crash knowledge with potential insight into both traditional and emerging aspects,and guide the future research direction in safety.

An integrated and cooperative architecture for multi-intersection traffic signal control

Traffic signal control(TSC)systems are one essential component in intelligent transport systems.However,relevant studies are usually independent of the urban traffic simulation environment,collaborative TSC algorithms and traffic signal communication.In this paper,we propose(1)an integrated and cooperative Internet-of-Things architecture,namely General City Traffic Computing System(GCTCS),which simultaneously leverages an urban traffic simulation environment,TSC algorithms,and traffic signal communication;and(2)a general multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm,namely General-MARL,considering cooperation and communication between traffic lights for multi-intersection TSC.In experiments,we demonstrate that the integrated and cooperative architecture of GCTCS is much closer to the real-life traffic environment.The General-MARL increases the average movement speed of vehicles in traffic by 23.2%while decreases the network latency by 11.7%.

人工智能在甲状腺癌精准化诊疗中的研究进展

甲状腺癌近年来呈高发趋势,需要精确的信息为患者提供高效的个体化服务。人工智能(artificial intelligence,AI)与医学的深度结合有助于提高医疗决策的智能化和精准化。本文结合目前研究主要探讨AI在甲状腺癌精准化诊疗中的研究进展,阐述了AI的概念和发展,以及精准化在甲状腺癌诊治中的意义;重点探讨AI在甲状腺癌诊断和预后预测方面的应用潜力,详细分析了超声、病理学诊断和基于传统病理参数、基因变异通路模型预后评估的机遇和挑战;对未来甲状腺癌AI研究做出展望。本文为应用AI技术进行关键信息的提取以期指导个体化治疗奠定基础。

The intra-neuroendoscopic technique: a new method for rapid removal of acute severe intraventricular hematoma

The mortality rate of acute severe intraventricular hematoma is extremely high, and the rate of disability in survivors is high. Intraventricular hematoma has always been a difficult problem for clinical treatment. Although minimally invasive endoscopic hematoma evacuation is widely used to treat this disease, the technique still has room for improvement. Equipment for the intra-neuroendoscopic technique（INET） consists of two of our patented inventions： a transparent sheath（Patent No. ZL 200820046232.0） and a hematoma aspirator（Patent No. ZL 201520248717.8）. This study explored the safety and efficacy of INET by comparing it with extraventricular drainage in combination with urokinase thrombolytic therapy. This trial recruited 65 patients with severe intraventricular hemorrhage, including 35（19 men and 16 women, aged 53.2 ± 8.7 years） in the INET group and 30（17 men and 13 women, aged 51.5 ± 7.9 years） in the control group（extraventricular drainage plus urokinase thrombolytic therapy）. Our results showed that compared with the control group, the INET group exhibited lower intraventricular hemorrhage volumes, shorter intensive care-unit monitoring and ventricular drainage-tube placement times, and fewer incidences of intracranial infection, secondary bleeding, and mortality. Thus, the prognosis of survivors had improved remarkably. These findings indicate that INET is a safe and efficient new method for treating severe intraventricular hematoma. This trial was registered with Clinical Trials.gov（NCT02515903）.

慢性乙型肝炎患者HBV-DNA载量与血清microRNA-122、ALT的相关性研究

目的探讨慢性乙型肝炎(CHB)患者HBV-DNA载量与血清microRNA-122(miR-122)、丙氨酸转氨酶(ALT)的相关性,为进一步指导CBH患者的临床诊治提供科学依据。方法回顾性分析2017年1月-2019年3月榆林市中医医院收治的200例CHB患者作为研究对象。采用RT-PCR法检测miR-122和HBV-DNA载量,采用肝功能检测试剂盒检测血清ALT含量,采用双抗体夹心法检测血清乙型肝炎e抗原(HBeAg)、乙型肝炎表面抗原(HBsAg),ELISA竞争法检测血清乙型肝炎e抗体(HBeAb)、乙型肝炎核心抗体(HBcAb)和乙型肝炎表面抗体(HBsAb)。分析慢性乙型肝炎HBV-DNA载量与血清miR-122、ALT含量的关系。结果模式1、2和3的患者HBV-DNA载量较模式4患者高(P<0.05),模式1的患者血清ALT含量较其他模式患者高(P<0.05)。低病毒载量组患者血清ALT阳性率最低(P<0.05)。超高病毒载量组患者miR-122相对表达量较其他载量组患者高(P<0.05)。经Pearson相关性分析,HBVDNA载量与ALT和miR-122均呈正相关(r=1.024和0.946,P<0.05)。结论CHB患者血清HBV-DNA载量与血清miR-122、ALT均呈正相关,三者联合检测可以相互补充,提高诊断的准确性,为临床诊治CHB患者提供更科学的依据。

Exploiting Geo-Social Correlations to Improve Pairwise Ranking for Point-of-Interest Recommendation

Recently, as location-based social network(LBSN) rapidly grow, point-of-interest(POI) recommendation has become an important way to help people locate interesting places. Nowadays, there have been deep studies conducted on the geographical and social influence in the point-of-interest recommendation model based on the rating prediction. The fact is, however, relying solely on the rating fails to reflect the user's preferences very accurately, because the users are most concerned with the list of ranked point-of-interests(POIs) on the actual output of recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a co-pairwise ranking model called Geo-Social Bayesian Personalized Ranking model(GSBPR), which is based on the pairwise ranking with the exploiting geo-social correlations by incorporating the method of ranking learning into the process of POI recommendation. In this model, we develop a novel BPR pairwise ranking assumption by injecting users' geo-social preference. Based on this assumption, the POI recommendation model is reformulated by a three-level joint pairwise ranking model. And the experimental results based on real datasets show that the proposed method in this paper enjoys better recommendation performance compared to other state-of-the-art POI recommendation models.

Synthesis of Cyclic Core Dendritic Polymer and Its Usage as a Vector for Transferring Foreign DNA into Human Cells

Cyclic core dendritic polymer is a new type of synthetic polymer. We describe the first synthesis of a serial dendrimers with a core of 1,4,7,10-tetraazacyclododecane. The ability of generation 4 of dendrimers to function as an effective gene delivery vectors was also investigated. Results from fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) show that the dendrimer has good affinity to both DNA and human small intestine cancer metastatic (HICMA) cells. the LacZ gene was highly expressed in the cells.

Adult tiger beetles Cicindela gemmata modify their foraging strategy in different hunting contexts

Predator–prey interaction has long been an interesting item in the research of animal behaviors.Given that live prey can damage their predators,predators must trade foraging efficiency for safety while hunting,but the extent of this trade-off is not yet clear.Tiger beetles display diversity in their diets and hunting strategies,and hence,they become an ideal system to address how self-security affects foraging efficiency.We addressed this question in captive adult tiger beetles Cicindela gemmata.By offering several types of arthropod and plant foods,we confirmed that C.gemmata is carnivorous.We found that C.gemmata hunt by either ambushing or chasing their prey,and that they switch between strategies based on differences in the number of prey,the prey status and encounter rate,and the number of predators.Ambushing success increased with the number of prey but decreased with prey encounter rate.Chasing success decreased as prey body size and encounter rate increased.Foraging Cicindela gemmata often gave up an attack when it was nonfatal.This active giving up of hunting may be a consequence of a trade-off between foraging efficiency and self-security.Therefore,it is an adaptive response to the risk of injury when hunting for larger live prey.

A diagnosis model of parental care:How parents optimize their provisioning strategy in brood reduction?

Altricial birds often display biased preferences in providing parental care for their dependent offspring,especially during food shortages.During this process,such inflexible rules may result in provisioning errors.To demonstrate how parents optimize their provisioning strategies,we proposed a“diagnosis model”of parental care to posit that parents will undergo a diagnosis procedure to test whether selecting against some particular offspring based on phenotype is an optimal strategy.We tested this model in an asynchronous hatching bird,the Azure-winged Magpie Cyanopica cyanus,based on 10 years of data about demography and parental provisioning behaviors.Given their higher daily survival rates,core offspring(those hatched on the first day)merits an investment priority compared with their marginal brood mates(those hatched on later days).However,a marginal offspring also merited a priority if it displayed greater weight gain than the expected value at the early post-hatching days.Parents could detect such a marginal offspring via a diagnosis strategy,in which they provisioned the brood at the diagnosis stage by delivering food to every nestling that begged,then biased food toward high-value nestlings at the subsequent decision stage by making a negative response to the begging of low-value nestlings.In this provisioning strategy,the growth performance of a nestling became a more reliable indicator of its investment value than its hatching order or competitive ability.Our findings provide evidence for this“diagnosis model of parental care”wherein parents use a diagnosis method to optimize their provisioning strategy in brood reduction.

基于时空层级查询的指代视频目标分割

本文针对当前指代视频目标分割方法缺乏目标时空一致性建模和目标时空表征学习不足等问题,进行了深入的研究,提出了基于时空层级查询的指代视频目标分割方法(STHQ).本文将指代视频目标分割看作基于查询的序列预测问题,并提出两级查询机制进行目标的时空一致性建模和时空特征学习.在第1阶段,本文提出了帧级空间信息提取模块,该模块使用语言特征作为查询独立地和视频序列中的每一帧在空间维度进行信息交互,生成包含目标空间信息的实例嵌入;在第2阶段,本文提出时空信息聚合模块,该模块使用视频级的可学习查询嵌入和第1阶段生成的实例嵌入在时空维度进行信息交互,生成具有时空表征信息的视频级实例嵌入;最后,视频级实例嵌入线性变换为条件卷积参数,并和视频序列中的每一帧进行卷积操作,生成目标的掩码预测序列.在该领域的3个基准数据集上的实验结果表明,本文提出的STHQ方法超越了现有的方法,实现了最佳的性能.

Fecal consumption by adults of altricial birds in relation to the temporal change in nestling gut microbiota

Nest sanitation behavior of altricial birds has been selected to reduce the exposure of young to pathogens,parasites,or predators,and thus to maintain the health and safety of nestlings(Guigueno and Sealy 2012).During the process of nest sanitation,caregivers either carry away the fecal sacs of nestlings or directly eat them.Given that adults endure higher risk of being infected by pathogens during fecal consumption(Potti et al.2007),it remains a puzzle about why adults consume the nestling feces when they can transport them.Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the fecal consumption behavior of altricial birds,including the nutrition hypothesis(Gliick 1988),economic hypothesis(Hurd et al.1991),and predation hypothesis(Ibanez-Alamo et al.2013).

Systematic literature review on the applications,impacts,and public perceptions of autonomous vehicles in road transportation system

As the advancement of driverless technology,together with information and communication technology moved at a fast pace,autonomous vehicles have attracted great attention from both industries and academic sectors during the past decades.It is evident that this emerging technology has great potential to improve the pedestrian safety on roads,mitigate traffic congestion,increase fuel efficiency,and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.However,there is limited systematic research into the applications and public perceptions of autonomous vehicles in road transportation.The purpose of this systematic literature review is to synthesise and analyse existing research on the applications,implications,and public perceptions of autonomous vehicles in road transportation system.It is found that autonomous vehicles are the future of road transportation and that the negative perception of humans is rapidly changing towards autonomous vehicles.Moreover,to fully deploy autonomous vehicles in a road transportation system,the existing road transportation infrastructure needs significant improvement.This systematic literature review contributes to the comprehensive knowledge of autonomous vehicles and will assist transportation researchers and urban planners to understand the fundamental and conceptual framework of autonomous vehicle technologies in road transportation systems.

Responses of a resident group to an outsider in the blue-breasted quail: A paradigm for studying social resettlement of dispersers

Dispersal is an individual life-history trait that can influence the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of both the source and recipient populations.Current studies of animal dispersal have paid little attention to how the responses of residents in a recipient population affect the social resettlement of dispersers into a new habitat.We addressed this question in the blue-breasted quail Synoicus chinensis by designing an outsider introduction experiment to simulate a scenario of interaction between residents and dispersers.In the experiment,we introduced an unfamiliar quail into a group of 3 differently ranked residents and then examined their behavioral responses to the arrival of the outsider.We found that all residents made negative responses by pecking at the outsider to maintain their pecking order,in which high-ranked residents displayed significantly greater intensity than those of lower ranks.This result highlighted that adverse behavioral responses of residents would prevent outsiders from obtaining hierarchical dominance in the recipient group.Moreover,the residents’sex ratio,their relative ages to the outsiders,and whether outsiders counter-pecked at the residents all influenced the probability of outsiders prevailing against the residents.Those outsiders that displayed counter-peck courage were more likely to gain higher dominance and hence resettle into the recipient group successfully.Our findings suggest that resident groups may impose a selection among dispersers via adverse behavioral responses.Therefore,social factors that can influence the resettlement step of dispersers in a new habitat should be accounted for in future studies of animal dispersal.

Region-adaptive Concept Aggregation for Few-shot Visual Recognition

Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to learn novel concepts from very limited examples. However, most FSL methods suffer from the issue of lacking robustness in concept learning. Specifically, existing FSL methods usually ignore the diversity of region contents that may contain concept-irrelevant information such as the background, which would introduce bias/noise and degrade the performance of conceptual representation learning. To address the above-mentioned issue, we propose a novel metric-based FSL method termed region-adaptive concept aggregation network or RCA-Net. Specifically, we devise a region-adaptive concept aggregator (RCA) to model the relationships of different regions and capture the conceptual information in different regions, which are then integrated in a weighted average manner to obtain the conceptual representation. Consequently, robust concept learning can be achieved by focusing more on the concept-relevant information and less on the conceptual-irrelevant information. We perform extensive experiments on three popular visual recognition benchmarks to demonstrate the superiority of RCA-Net for robust few-shot learning. In particular, on the Caltech-UCSD Birds-200-2011 (CUB200) dataset, the proposed RCA-Net significantly improves 1-shot accuracy from 74.76% to 78.03% and 5-shot accuracy from 86.84% to 89.83% compared with the most competitive counterpart.

Bph30confers resistance to brown planthopperby fortifying sclerenchyma in rice leaf sheaths

Phloem-feeding insects cause massive losses in agriculture and horticulture.Host plant resistance to phloem-feeding insects is often mediated by changes in phloem composition,which deter insect settling and feeding and decrease viability.Here,we report that rice plant resistance to the phloem-feeding brown planthopper(BPH)is associated with fortification of the sclerenchyma tissue,which is located just beneath the epidermis and a cell layer or two away from the vascular bundle in the rice leaf sheath.We found that BPHs prefer to feed on the smooth and soft region on the surface of rice leaf sheaths called the long-cell block.We identified Bph30 as a rice BPH resistance gene that prevents BPH stylets from reaching the phloem due to the fortified sclerenchyma.Bph30 is strongly expressed in sclerenchyma cells and enhances cellulose and hemicellulose synthesis,making the cell walls stiffer and sclerenchyma thicker.The structurally fortified sclerenchyma is a formidable barrier preventing BPH stylets from penetrating the leaf sheath tissues and arriving at the phloem to feed.Bph30 belongs to a novel gene family,encoding a protein with two leucine-rich domains.Another member of the family,Bph40,also conferred resistance to BPH.Collectively,the fortified sclerenchyma-mediated resistance mechanism revealed in this study expands our understanding of plant-insect interactions and opens a new path for controlling planthoppers in rice.

Balancing selection and wild gene pool contribute to resistance in global rice germplasm against planthopper

Interactions and co-evolution between plants and herbivorous insects are critically important in agriculture.Brown planthopper(BPH)is the most severe insect of rice,and the biotypes adapt to feed on different rice genotypes.Here,we present genomics analyses on 1,520 global rice germplasms for resistance to three BPH biotypes.Genome-wide association studies identified 3,502 single nucleotide polymorphisms(SNPs)and 59 loci associated with BPH resistance in rice.We cloned a previously unidentified gene Bph37 that confers resistance to BPH.The associated loci showed high nucleotide diversity.Genome-wide scans for trans-species polymorphisms revealed ancient balancing selection at the loci.The secondarily evolved insect biotypes II and III exhibited significantly higher virulence and overcame more rice varieties than the primary biotype I.In response,more SNPs and loci evolved in rice for resistance to biotypes II and III.Notably,three exceptional large regions with high SNP density and resistance-associated loci on chromosomes 4 and 6 appear distinct between the resistant and susceptible rice varieties.Surprisingly,these regions in resistant rice might have been retained from wild species Oryza nivara.Our findings expand the understanding of long-term interactions between rice and BPH and provide resistance genes and germplasm resources for breeding durable BPH-resistant rice varieties.

Real-time visual tracking using complementary kernel support correlation filters

Despite demonstrated success of SVM based trackers,their performance remains a boosting room if carefully considering the following factors:first,the tradeoff between sampling and budgeting samples affects tracking accuracy and efficiency much;second,how to effectively fuse different types of features to learn a robust target representation plays a key role in tracking accuracy.In this paper,we propose a novel SVM based tracking method that handles the first factor with the help of the circulant structures of the samples and the second one by a multi-kernel learning mechanism.Specifically,we formulate an SVM classification model for visual tracking that incorporates two types of kernels whose matrices are circulant,fully taking advantage of the complementary traits of the color and HOG features to learn a robust target representation.Moreover,it is fortunate that the SVM model has a closed-form solution in terms of both the classifier weights and the kernel weights,and both can be efficiently computed via fast Fourier transforms(FFTs).Extensive evaluations on OTB100 and VOT2016 visual tracking benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a favorable performance against various state-of-the-art trackers with a speed of 50 fps on a single CPU.