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Rice Oryza sativa L. development-and also its response to climatic change-is mainly determined by temperature and photoperiod. An experiment was conducted to study the influence of meteorological factors on growth and development of hybrid rice in South China, in which seeds were sown at different sites at different dates in the spring. The 29 experimental sites were spread over a large area, with latitudes from 21°39' to 34°16' N and altitudes from 1 to 1862 m above sea level. It was found that the length of the growth period at low latitudes (21 to 25°N) was mainly determined by temperature and showed a single-peaked curve with an optimum temperature at about 25.7°C. The temperature response of development is almost linear at high latitudes (25 to 35°N), but the dependence is not as close and significant as that at low latitude, due to longer daylength and its higher variation. A phenological-simulation model with a biological basis was used to simulate the developmental stages of rice in South China. It described both thermal sensitivity and photoperiodism using nonlinear equations. The model was validated by data of sowing-date experiments carried out at different geographical sites, and then was applied to evaluate changes in the length of the rice-growth period in response to climate warming during the period from 1951 to 2006. Because there was significant warming, and the length of the growth period was sensitive to this change over the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, the length of the growth period was narrowed by 6 to 14 d (comparing 1990 to 2006 with 1951 to 1989), whereas it was shortened by 1 to 2 d in most low plain areas in South China. The probability of serious temperature related crop failure will increase if planting of a latematurity variety is adopted in high altitude areas.

Neuroinflammation has always been of concern in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). As a major inflammatory mediator, prostaglandin E(2) (PGE(2)) plays an important role in the inflammatory process of AD. Up to now, there is still controversy on the neuroprotective or neurotoxic role of PGE(2). However, the role of PGE(2) in neurodegeneration may be far more complex, due to the 4 EP receptor subtypes. This article aims to summarize the relationship between PGE(2) receptor EP subtypes and AD. It is believed that a better understanding of the PGE(2) receptor EP subtypes may help to clarify the relation between inflammation and AD, and to develop novel therapeutic strategies targeting specific EP receptor for AD treatment.

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In this study, the authors evaluated the relationship between polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon-deoxyribonucleic acid (PAH-DNA) adduct levels in workers' peripheral white blood cells (WBCs) and their occupational exposures to coke oven emissions (measured by air and urinary 1-hydroxypyrene [1-OHP]). Personal exposures to smoking, charbroiled food, changing clothes in the workplace, and respirator use were determined by questionnaire. Eighty-nine coke oven workers were divided into 3 exposure groups on the basis of job description: topside workers, cokeside workers, and plant office staff. Referent subjects comprised 63 individuals from the same company who worked at a site remote from the coking plant. The geometric mean (GM) PAH-DNA adduct levels determined from the WBCs of the exposed groups were 6.86, 1.56, and 0.90 adducts/10(8) nucleotides, respectively (referents = 0.38 adducts/10(8) nucleotides). GM personal benzene soluble fraction (BSF) exposures for the exposed groups were 483.2 microg/m3, 70.1 microg/m3, and 43.2 microg/m3, respectively (referents = 10.7 microg/m3). There was a significant correlation (p < 0.05) between individual BSF and PAH-DNA adduct levels for the exposed groups. The authors also found a significant correlation (p < 0.05) between urinary 1-OHP levels from the day 2 samples of the exposed groups and their PAH-DNA adduct levels. The logistic-regression model revealed that PAH-DNA adduct levels were significantly different between job categories. The results of this study indicate that BSF exposure is the primary contributor to PAH-DNA adduct levels determined from WBCs.

Symbolic music generation aims to generate music scores automatically. A recent trend is to use Transformer or its variants in music generation, which is, however, suboptimal, because the full attention cannot efficiently model the typically long music sequences (e.g., over 10,000 tokens), and the existing models have shortcomings in generating musical repetition structures. In this paper, we propose Museformer, a Transformer with a novel fine-and coarse-grained attention for music generation. Specifically, with the fine-grained attention, a token of a specific bar directly attends to all the tokens of the bars that are most relevant to music structures (e.g., the previous 1st, 2nd, 4th and 8th bars, selected via similarity statistics); with the coarse-grained attention, a token only attends to the summarization of the other bars rather than each token of them so as to reduce the computational cost. The advantages are two-fold. First, it can capture both music structure-related correlations via the fine-grained attention, and other contextual information via the coarse-grained attention. Second, it is efficient and can model over 3× longer music sequences compared to its full-attention counterpart. Both objective and subjective experimental results demonstrate its ability to generate long music sequences with high quality and better structures.

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