Infrared drying characteristics and quality variations (color change, hardness, contents of polyphenol and flavonoid) of lily bulbs under blanching pretreatment are investigated. Influences of parameters such as pretreatment temperature and time and infrared drying temperature are discussed. Effective moisture diffusivity coefficient, activation energy, and energy consumption were calculated. Resu

Background: Subregions in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) are affected early by Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology and subject to grey matter atrophy. Measuring the earliest AD-related atrophy in the hippocampus is challenging as region-of-interest (ROI) analyses of hippocampal subregional volumes collapse across voxels within anatomical subregions. PET imaging studies, however, report accumulation

How do Chinese queer artists respond to the hegemony of Han-centric, patriarchal, and heterosexual norms, and how do they imagine home through a queer and activist lens? This study explores the visual representation of the queer community by veteran artist/activist couple Shitou and Mingming through an analysis of the photographs and documentaries shot by the artists and their friends since the 19

Background: While neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) are common in early Alzheimer’s disease (AD), they are currently underdiagnosed and undertreated in the memory clinic. Therefore, we evaluated the effectiveness of the Describe, Investigate, Create, Evaluate (DICE™) approach to structure and standardize the care for NPS in AD in the memory clinic. Method: A total of 60 community-dwelling patients w

Background: Brain amyloid-β (Aβ) is the pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD). In logistic disease models, Aβ accumulation is a sigmoid function of time-since-disease-onset (TSDO) (figure 1). Previous positron emission tomography (PET)-based models vary accumulation onset(t50) and duration(r) globally; capacity(K) and baseline(NS) regionally (Whittington2018). We confirm existing appro

Some microorganisms, like the aerobic soil bacteria, Oligotropha carboxidovorans, have the capability to oxidize the highly toxic atmospheric gas carbon monoxide (CO) into CO2 through CO dehydrogenase enzymes, whose active site contains a bimetallic MoCu center. Over the last decades, a number of experimental and theoretical investigations were devoted to understanding the mechanism of CO oxidatio

SummaryWe describe the collection of cohorts together with the analysis plan for an update of the fracture risk prediction tool FRAX with respect to current and novel risk factors. The resource comprises 2,138,428 participants with a follow-up of approximately 20 million person-years and 116,117 documented incident major osteoporotic fractures.IntroductionThe availability of the fracture risk asse

How do Chinese activists and intellectuals continue to make a social impact under heightened repression? In particular, how do female activists and intellectuals cope with political repression in addition to the structural gender bias already present in Chinese society? This chapter examines the life and activism of feminist scholar and independent filmmaker Ai Xiaoming. Despite being banned from

Benchmarking has been a useful tool for unbiased comparison of control strategies in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in terms of effluent quality, operational cost and risk of suffering microbiology-related total suspended solids (TSS) separation problems. This chapter presents the status of extending the original Benchmark Simulation Model No 2 (BSM2) towards including greenhouse gas (GHG) em

Background: Amyloid-beta (Aβ) is hypothesized to facilitate the spread of tau pathology beyond the medial temporal lobe (MTL). However, there is evidence that age-related Aβ-independent tau pathology is present outside the MTL (Kaufman et al., Acta Neuropathol, 2018). We examine tau deposition determined by positron emission tomography (PET) in regions typically involved earlier/later in AD and do

《在幽昏中顯影：港中對話中國獨立紀錄片2014-2020》一書以導演、學者、觀眾對話的形式，討論了中國獨立紀錄片研究會（香港）2014至2020年期間展映、製片、發行的獨立電影。我們從中選擇了記錄較為完整的“叛逆中國”、“飛越瘋人院”、“情慾中國”三個展映單元的獨立紀錄片討論，以及針對夾邊溝右派農場倖存者記憶、維吾爾和新疆議題、三自教會、地下知識分子、前政府高官、工人抗爭等18部影片的映後交流文本或者導演訪談文本，形成本書“性、性別與女性主體”、“權利與政治”、“歷史與記憶”、“放逐與流亡”四個部分的主要內容。本書還收入研究會參與製片的《喊叫與耳語》首映對談，曾金燕對艾未未在跨國視野（流亡處境）下關於藝術（如《人流》）、社會行動和審查的兩次訪談，曾金燕對應亮半自傳劇情片《自由行》的訪談、曾金燕對艾曉明關於性別、紀錄片和社會行動的訪談、曾金燕與王月眉關於在香港八年“邊緣”經驗的筆談。額外收入

Objectives Physical inactivity and sedentary behaviour are associated with higher breast cancer risk in observational studies, but ascribing causality is difficult. Mendelian randomisation (MR) assesses causality by simulating randomised trial groups using genotype. We assessed whether lifelong physical activity or sedentary time, assessed using genotype, may be causally associated with breast can

Background: Different tau biomarkers become abnormal at different stages of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), with CSF p-tau typically being elevated at subthreshold levels of tau-PET binding. To capitalize on the temporal order of tau biomarker-abnormality and capture the earliest changes of tau accumulation, we selected a group of amyloid-β-positive (A+) individuals with elevated CSF p-tau levels but ne

Extensive anti-government protests were held in Poland in October 2020 related to accumulated social tensions due to COVID-19 pandemic among others. We attempt a question of how understanding communication patterns among protesters could possibly support epidemiological harm reduction campaigns. To do so, we analysed tweets in Polish language with hashtags: #Strajkkobiet representing pro-choice mo

In this paper, we present a global solution to a nonlinear H-infinity optimal control problem for control-affine systems with an associated potential function. We also give a closed-form expression for an optimal controller and demonstrate its potential for sparsity. This paper thus advances a recent result which considers the same problem restricted to systems with symmetric state matrix and nonl

Background: Markers of downstream events are a key component of clinical trials of disease-modifying therapies for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Morphometric metrics like cortical thickness are established measures of atrophy but are not sensitive enough to detect Aβ-related changes that occur before overt atrophy become visible. We aimed to investigate to what extent diffusion MRI can provide sensiti

Constructing simulation models can be a complex and time-consuming task, in particular if the models are constructed from scratch or if a general-purpose simulation modeling tool is used. In this paper, we propose a model construction framework, which aims to simplify the process of constructing discrete event simulation models for emergency medical service (EMS) policy analysis. The main building