Background. Metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) has made a revolution in the mode of pathogen identification. We decided to explore the diagnostic value of blood and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) as mNGS samples in pneumonia. Methods. We retrospectively reviewed 467 mNGS results and assessed the diagnostic performance of paired blood and BALF mNGS in 39 patients with pneumonia. Results. For bacteria and fungi, 16 patients had culture-confirmed pathogen diagnosis, while 13 patients were culture-negative. BALF mNGS was more sensitive than blood mNGS (81.3% vs. 25.0%, p=0.003), and the specificity in BALF and blood mNGS was not statistically significant different (76.9% vs. 84.6%, p=0.317). For 10 patients without culture test, treatments were changed in 2 patients. For viruses, Epstein-Barr virus was positive in blood mNGS in 9 patients. Human adenovirus was detected in both BALF and blood mNGS in 3 patients. Conclusion. Our study suggests that BALF mNGS is more sensitive than blood mNGS in detecting bacteria and fungi, but blood also has advantages to identify the pathogens of pneumonia, especially for some viruses.

Stable self-trapped vortex annuli (VAs) with large values of topological charge S (giant VAs) are not only a subject of fundamental interest, but are also sought for various applications, such as quantum information processing and storage. However, in conventional atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) VAs with S > 1 are unstable. Here, we demonstrate that robust self-trapped fundamental solitons (with S = 0) and bright VAs (with the stability checked up to S = 5), can be created in the free space by means of the local-field effect (the feedback of the BEC on the propagation of electromagnetic waves) in a condensate of two-level atoms coupled by a microwave (MW) field, as well as in a gas of MW-coupled fermions with spin 1/2. The fundamental solitons and VAs remain stable in the presence of an arbitrarily strong repulsive contact interaction (in that case, the solitons are constructed analytically by means of the Thomas-Fermi approximation). Under the action of the attractive contact interaction with strength β, which, by itself, would lead to collapse, the fundamental solitons and VAs exist and are stable, respectively, at β < β max (S) and β < β st (S), with β st (S = 0) = β max (S = 0) and β st (S ≥ 1) < β max (S ≥ 1). Accurate analytical approximations are found for both β st and β max , with β st (S) growing linearly with S. Thus, higher-order VAs are more robust than their lower-order couterparts, on the contrary to what is known in other systems that may support stable self-trapped vortices. Conditions for the experimental realizations of the VAs are discussed.

A memristive synapse based on novel biomaterial nanocomposites is proposed and simulations including the non-ideal factors prove an online learning accuracy of 94.3%.

It was recently found that the electric local-field effect (LFE) can lead to a strong coupling of atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) to off-resonant optical fields. We demonstrate that the magnetic LFE gives rise to a previously unexplored mechanism for coupling a (pseudo-) spinor BEC or fermion gas to microwaves (MWs). We present a theory for the magnetic LFE and find that it gives rise to a short-range attractive interaction between two components of the (pseudo) spinor, and a long-range interaction between them. The latter interaction, resulting from deformation of the magnetic field, is locally repulsive but globally attractive, in sharp contrast with its counterpart for the optical LFE, produced by phase modulation of the electric field. Our analytical results, confirmed by the numerical computations, show that the long-range interaction gives rise to modulational instability of the spatially uniform state, and it creates stable ground states in the form of hybrid matter-wave-microwave solitons (which seem like one-dimensional magnetic monopoles), with a size much smaller than the MW wavelength, even in the presence of arbitrarily strong contact intercomponent repulsion. The setting is somewhat similar to exciton-polaritonic condensates in semiconductor microcavities. The release of matter waves from the soliton may be used for the realization of an atom laser. The analysis also applies to molecular BECs with rotational states coupled by the electric MW field.