Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers in Surface Sediment from Songhua River Basin,Northeast of China

Sixty sediment samples were collected from the main Songhua River in three years. Twelve polybrominated diphenyl ether( PBDE) congeners( BDE17,28,47,66,99,100,153,154,138,183,and BDE-209) were detected to state the pollution situation. The results showed that the total concentration of total PBDEs ranges from 0. 424 to 23. 0 ng / g dry weight,with the mean of 3. 02 ng / g,and the total PBDEs concentration is at relative low level compared with those worldwide. The congener profile showed that BDE-209 is the dominant congener that accounts for more than 80. 1% of total PBDEs in sediments,followed by BDE-47 and BDE-99. These profiles are consistent with a high consumption of Deca-BDEs for the brominated flame retardant market in China. The results of spatial and seasonal observations indicated that local sources,temperature variation, and hydrologic conditions are significant factors on PBDEs concentrations. Hazard quotients suggested that PBDEs pose no potential risk to benthic organisms in detected area at present.

Guest Editorial:Special Issue on Intelligent Interpretation of Remote Sensing Images: Theory, Methods and Applications

This special edition of the Journal of Geodesy and Geoinformation Science(JGGS)presents a curated selection of papers that offer novel techniques in the realm of intelligent interpretation of remote sensing images.In recent years,tremendous efforts have been made across a wide spectrum including theory,models,algorithms,applications and datasets,etc.Such advancements have demonstrated their stunning performance in a variety of remote sensing topics spanning from general challenges like remote image classification and object detection,to highly specialized tasks such as autonomous situation awareness and disaster response.Moreover,such achievements have redefined disciplinary boundaries and also reshaped our education.

Neofusicoccum parvum Causing Leaf Spot of Camellia drupifera in China

[Objectives]The study was to identify the causal agent of leaf spots of Camellia drupifera in Hainan Province,China.[Methods]Phylogenetic analyses,spore morphology and pathogenicity tests were adopted to identify the pathogen.[Results]The fungus was identified as Neofusicoccum parvum.The colonies were initially pale to white on PDA,with diffuse yellow pigment around the colonies in the agar after 5 d.After 10 d,the aerial mycelium became gray,and the substrate mycelium became black.Thirty days later,a large number of conidia were generated on OMA.Conidia were hyaline,nonseptate,and fusiform.The mean size of 100 conidia was(13.6-25.4)×(6.2-10.3)μm;the mean length/width ratio was(2.5±0.3)μm.[Conclusions]N.parvum was the causal agent of leaf spots of C.drupifera observed in Hainan Province,China.

BGB-A445,a novel non-ligand-blocking agonistic anti-OX40 antibody,exhibits superior immune activation and antitumor effects in preclinical models

t OX40 is a costimulatory receptor that is expressed primarily on activated CD4+,CD8+,and regulatory T cells.The ligation of OX40 to its sole ligand OX40L potentiates T cell expansion,differentiation,and activation and also promotes dendritic cells to mature to enhance their cytokine production.Therefore,the use of agonistic anti-Ox40 antibodies for cancer immunotherapy has gained great interest.However,most of the agonistic anti-OX40 antibodies in the clinic are OX40L-competitive and show limited efficacy.Here,we discovered that BGB-A445,a non-ligand-competitive agonistic anti-OX40 antibody currently under clinical investigation,induced optimal T cell activation without impairing dendritic cell function.In addition,BGB-A445 dose-dependently and significantly depleted regulatory T cells in vitro and in vivo via antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity.In the MC38 syngeneic model established in humanized OX40 knock-in mice,BGB-A445 demonstrated robust and dose-dependent antitumor efficacy,whereas the ligand-competitive anti-Ox40 antibody showed antitumor efficacy characterized by a hook effect.Furthermore,BGB-A445 demonstrated a strong combination antitumor effect with an anti-PD-1 antibody.Taken together,our findings show that BGB-A445,which does not block OX40-OX40L interaction in contrast to clinical-stage anti-OX40 antibodies,shows superior immune-stimulating effects and antitumor efficacy and thus warrants further clinical investigation.

A Case Report of a Pregnant Woman with CoVID-19 and Tuberculosis

We presented a case of a 32-week pregnant woman with coronavirus disease 2019 and tuberculosis delivering a healthy baby.She was treated with antituberculosis and other symptomatic treatments,and the nucleic acid test;the sputum tuberculosis bacterial smear turned negative;and the symptoms were significantly relieved.

A hierarchical indexing strategy for optimizing Apache Spark with HDFS to efficiently query big geospatial raster data

Earth observations and model simulations are generating big multidimensional array-based raster data.However,it is difficult to efficiently query these big raster data due to the inconsistency among the geospatial raster data model,distributed physical data storage model,and the data pipeline in distributed computing frameworks.To efficiently process big geospatial data,this paper proposes a three-layer hierarchical indexing strategy to optimize Apache Spark with Hadoop Distributed File System(HDFS)from the following aspects:(1)improve I/O efficiency by adopting the chunking data structure;(2)keep the workload balance and high data locality by building the global index(k-d tree);(3)enable Spark and HDFS to natively support geospatial raster data formats(e.g.,HDF4,NetCDF4,GeoTiff)by building the local index(hash table);(4)index the in-memory data to further improve geospatial data queries;(5)develop a data repartition strategy to tune the query parallelism while keeping high data locality.The above strategies are implemented by developing the customized RDDs,and evaluated by comparing the performance with that of Spark SQL and SciSpark.The proposed indexing strategy can be applied to other distributed frameworks or cloud-based computing systems to natively support big geospatial data query with high efficiency.

Effects of a diesel oxidation catalyst on gaseous pollutants and fine particles from an engine operating on diesel and biodiesel

The effects of a diesel oxidation catalytic （DOC） converter on diesel engine emissions were investigated on a diesel bench at various loads for two steady-state speeds using diesel fuel and B20. The DOC was very effective in hydrocarbon （HC） and CO oxidation. Approximately 90%-95% reduction in CO and 36%-70% reduction in HC were realized using the DOC. Special attention was focused on the effects of the DOC on elemental carbon （EC） and organic carbon （OC） fractions in fine particles （PM2.5） emitted from the diesel engine. The carbonaceous compositions of PM2.5 were analyzed by the method of thermal/optical reflectance （TOR）. The results showed that total carbon （TC）, OC and EC emissions for PM2.5 from diesel fuel were generally reduced by the DOC. For diesel fuel, TC emissions decreased 22%-32% after the DOC depending on operating modes. The decrease in TC was attributed to 35%-97% decrease in OC and 3%-65% decrease in EC emissions. At low load, a significant increase in the OC/EC ratio of PMz.5 was observed after the DOC. The effect of the DOC on the carbonaceous compositions in PM2.5 from B20 showed different trends compared to diesel fuel. At low load, a slight increase in EC emissions and a significant decrease in OC/EC ratio of PM2.5 after DOC were observed for B20.

Aquaporin-3 promotes proliferation and inflammation in hepatocellular carcinoma

Carcinogenesis is closely associated with inflammation.Studies have shown that lipopolysaccharides(LPS)can contribute to hepatocellular carcinoma(HC)development by inducing IL-6 and TNF-αproduction from the hepatic progenitor cells.1 Aquaporin 3(AQP3),a water channel protein,has recently been found to play a critical role in cancer-associated inflammation.