Clinical Study on Application of Xinrun Tongluo Method Based on the Theory of Collateral Diseases in Treating Androgenic Baldness of Blood Heat Wind Dryness Syndrome

[Objectives]To explore the intervention effect of the representative formula of Xinrun Tongluo method,Liangxue Xiaofeng Powder,on the incidence of androgenic alopecia in the syndrome of blood heat and wind dryness.[Methods]A total of 72 patients with androgenic alopecia in Suzhou TCM Hospital Affiliated to Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine from October,2022 to June,2023 were randomly divided into a control group(36 cases,treated with Western medicine)and a treatment group(36 cases,treated with Chinese herbal formula+Western medicine).The short-term and long-term efficacy of the two groups of patients was compared.[Results]The hair microscopic signs and short-term and long-term efficacy of the treatment group were significantly better than those of the control group before and after treatment,with a statistically significant difference(P<0.05).[Conclusions]The representative formula of Xinrun Tongluo method is Liangxue Xiaofeng Powder,which has better clinical efficacy as an auxiliary Western medicine in the treatment of androgenic alopecia patients with blood heat and wind dryness syndrome,and is worthy of further promotion and application in clinical practice.

Effects of vacancy defect on the tensile behavior of graphene

Graphene is the strongest material but its performance is significantly weakened by vacancy defects. We use molecular dynamics simulations to inves- tigate the tensile behavior of a graphene which contains a single vacancy defect. Our results suggest that because of the single vacancy, the fracture strength of graphene losses about 17.7%. The stress concentration around the vacancy defect leads to the destruction of nearby six-member rings structure, which forms the initial crack. The propagation direction of this crack in defective graphene is at an angle of 60° to the tensile direction initially, but then becomes perpendicular to the tensile direction.

An elastic model for bioinspired design of carbon nanotube bundles

Collagen fibers provide a good example of making strong micro-or mesoscale fibers from nanoscale tropocollagen molecules through a staggered and crosslinked organization in a bottom-up manner.Mimicking the architectural features of collagen fibers has been shown to be a promising approach to develop carbon nanotube（CNT）fibers of high performance.In the present work,an elastic model is developed to describe the load transfer and failure propagation within the bioinspired CNT bundles,and to establish the relations of the mechanical properties of the bundles with a number of geometrical and physical parameters such as the CNT aspect ratio and longitudinal gap,interface cross-link density,and the functionalizationinduced degradation in CNTs,etc.With the model,the stress distributions along the CNT-CNT interface as well as in every individual CNT are well captured,and the failure propagation along the interface and its effects on the mechanical properties of the CNT bundles are predicted.The work may provide useful guidelines for the design of novel CNT fibers in practice.

Measuring National-level Research Production under Fractional Counting:China versus the U.S.

This paper aims to examine the heterogeneity of research production between China and the United States by disaggregating the national research production into its constituent components.Different from previous studies,we introduce the share counting method to determine the number of publications attributed to each country.We analyse bibliographic metadata from over 36 million SCI/SSCI-indexed journal publications published in the period from 2000 to 2021.The research production of China and the United States is decomposed according to the document types,disciplines,and high-impact journals.In the quantitative analysis,the first finding is that China emerged as the world’s largest contributor to SCIindexed publications in 2019 under fractional counting,two years earlier than under whole counting.Surpassing the U.S.in publication count does not indicate a completely surpassing position for China in its scientific production strength,however.When it is divided by document types,China has published a smaller proportion of review-type journal publications than the U.S.;when filtered by disciplines,in the period from 2016 to 2021,China’s research production leads in only 100 of 178 natural science fields and 2of 58 social science fields.The second finding is,when only the number of papers on high-impact journals is considered,China also surpassed the U.S.in 2019;meanwhile,the proportion of high-impact journal papers of China is still lower than that of the U.S.These results reveal that there are different knowledge production patterns in China and the United States.This study contributes to a better understanding of the disparities in research productivity between the top two nations,and suggests several policy implications for China.

A simulation based on the cosserat continuum model of the vortex structure in granular materials

Displacement fluctuation is the difference between the real displacement and the affine displacement in deforming granular materials. The discrete element method （DEM） is widely used along with experimental approaches to investigate whether the displacement fluctuation represents the vortex structure. Current research suggests that the vortex structure is caused by the cooperative motion of particle groups on meso-scales, which results in strain localization in granular materials. In this brief article, we investigate the vortex structure using the finite element method （FEM） based on the Cosserat cor[tinuum model. The numerical example focuses on the relationship between the vortex structure and the shear bands under two conditions： （a） uniform granular materials; （b） granular materials with inclusions. When compared with distributions of the effective strain and the vortex structure, we find that the vortex structure coexists with the strain localization and originates from the stiffness cooperation of different locations in granular materials at the macro level.