No abstract

No abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to tremendous impacts on human lives and society, which are not only because of negative effects on people's mental health due to isolation policies and physical distance for mitigating the spread of SARS-CoV-2, but also because the incident post-acute sequelae of the coronavirus will cause mental disorders. A green environment is a health resource, which cannot only benefit human physical and mental health, but also increases biodiversity, contributes to flood mitigation, and cools urban areas. A home garden, as a kind of small green space, can provide ecosystem services with eco-healing functions in reducing mental stress during the isolation period of the COVID-19 pandemic through the garden itself and physical activities in it. Such an eco-healing approach within a mini-therapeutic landscape can also benefit biodiversity by enhancing plant diversity in residence and increasing biodiversity at a large scale. In this article, we propose a conceptual framework describing a home garden as “ecological medicine” with healing functions to improve mental health, as well as indirectly enhancing urban biodiversity. A home garden, as a mini-type of green landscape with biodiversity content, allows people to get close with nature so that it can promote comfortable and natural feelings during the pandemic. Furthermore, such an eco-healing home garden approach benefiting urban biodiversity can meet the challenges in maintaining environmental and mental health in post COVID-19 pandemic recovery, as well as preparing unknown next-surge risks with potential isolation regulations.

No abstract

Modern SAT solvers are based on a paradigm named conflict driven clause learning (CDCL), while local search is an important alternative. Although there have been attempts combining these two methods, this work proposes deeper cooperation techniques. First, we relax the CDCL framework by extending promising branches to complete assignments and calling a local search solver to search for a model nearby. More importantly, the local search assignments and the conflict frequency of variables in local search are exploited in the phase selection and branching heuristics of CDCL. We use our techniques to improve three typical CDCL solvers (glucose, MapleLCMDistChronoBT and Kissat). Experiments on benchmarks from the Main tracks of SAT Competitions 2017-2020 and a real world benchmark of spectrum allocation show that the techniques bring significant improvements, particularly on satisfiable instances. A resulting solver won the Main Track SAT category in SAT Competition 2020 and also performs very well on the spectrum allocation benchmark. As far as we know, this is the first work that meets the standard of the challenge ``Demonstrate the successful combination of stochastic search and systematic search techniques, by the creation of a new algorithm that outperforms the best previous examples of both approaches.'' (AAAI 1997) on standard application benchmarks.

No abstract

Zhengganxifeng decoction (ZGXFD) is a traditional Chinese medicinal formula, from "Medical Zhong parameter West recorded" by Xichun Zhang, which has been applied to the treatment of clinical essential hypertension. Besides its effect in blood pressure reduction, ZGXFD is also known to be a radical therapy with little or no side effects. Compared with western medicines, Chinese medicinal formulas have the advantage of simultaneously attacking multiple targets. However, such a property brings trouble to the pharmacological studies of Chinese medicines. This study investigated the composition of gut microbiota in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) treated with ZGXFD. ZGXFD was shown to cause similar effects in the treatment group as benazepril: both were able to reduce in SHR the microbial diversity, Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes (F/B) ratio and coccus to bacillus (C/B) ratio. Meanwhile, ZGXFD can maintain the integrity of intestinal mechanistic barrier and elevate the percentage of bacteria producing short chain fatty acids (SCFA). By investigating renin-angiotensin system (RAS) system, we found that ZGXFD can decrease the expression of angiotensin-converting-enzyme (ACE) in lungs, which in turn causes a increase in AngI produces angiotensin1-7 (Ang1-7) and decrease in AngII. ZGXFD regulate blood pressure in SHR via RAS.

Cisplatin is a critical component of first-line chemotherapy for several cancers, but causes peripheral sensory neuropathy, hearing loss, and tinnitus. We aimed to identify comorbidities for cisplatin-induced neurotoxicities among large numbers of similarly treated patients without the confounding effect of cranial radiotherapy.Methods: Utilizing linear and logistic regression analyses on 1680 wellcharacterized cisplatin-treated testicular cancer survivors, we analyzed associations of hearing loss, tinnitus, and peripheral neuropathy with nongenetic comorbidities. Genome-wide association studies and gene-based analyses were performed on each phenotype.