Elevated tropospheric ozone concentrations induce adverse effects in plants. We reviewed how ozone affects (i) the composition and diversity of plant communities by affecting key physiological traits; (ii) foliar chemistry and the emission of volatiles, thereby affecting plant-plant competition, plant-insect interactions, and the composition of insect communities; and (iii) plant-soil-microbe interactions and the composition of soil communities by disrupting plant litterfall and altering root exudation, soil enzymatic activities, decomposition, and nutrient cycling. The community composition of soil microbes is consequently changed, and alpha diversity is often reduced. The effects depend on the environment and vary across space and time. We suggest that Atlantic islands in the Northern Hemisphere, the Mediterranean Basin, equatorial Africa, Ethiopia, the Indian coastline, the Himalayan region, southern Asia, and Japan have high endemic richness at high ozone risk by 2100.

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Elevated concentrations of ground‐level ozone (O3) and atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition occur concurrently. The negative effects of elevated O3 on plants have been widely studied and are well understood nowadays. However, how the effects of elevated O3 on plants may be driven by N deposition remains an unsolved puzzle. We conducted a meta‐analysis and showed that the negative effects of elevated O3 on photosynthesis, stomatal conductance, growth and biomass production of semi‐natural and natural vegetation may remain unchanged by N deposition in the coming future under realistic increases in O3 concentrations (+20 to 40 ppb) and N deposition (up to 60 kg ha−1 year−1). The negative effect of elevated O3 on chlorophyll content is offset by soil N addition; however, the negative effect on biomasses is not offset by soil N addition. Across functional groups and O3 levels, N addition exacerbated O3 effects on root when N increased from 0–10 kg N ha−1 year−1 to 11–30 kg N ha−1 year−1. However, an analysis as per the plant functional group revealed that such a N‐dependent O3 effect was significant only in perennial non‐woody plants, and was non‐significant when only realistic increases in O3 concentrations were considered. Likewise, N addition appeared to exacerbate O3‐negative effects on photosynthesis of trees when N increased from 0–30 kg N ha−1 year−1 to >60 kg N ha−1 year−1; however, this effect was significant only when realistic increases in O3 concentrations were considered. The results suggest potential error in the current estimates of the overall O3 impacts on plants due to no consideration of soil N availability, and encourage further studies on the interaction of O3 and N availability that will permit more robust analyses in the future. Elevated O3 will likely remain a persistent agricultural and ecological issue independently of N deposition. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

The human hand plays a role in a variety of daily activities. This intricate instrument is vulnerable to trauma or neuromuscular disorders. Wearable robotic exoskeletons are an advanced technology with the potential to remarkably promote the recovery of hand function. However, the still face persistent challenges in mechanical and functional integration, with real-time control of the multiactuators in accordance with the motion intentions of the user being a particular sticking point. In this study, we demonstrated a newly-designed wearable robotic hand exoskeleton with multijoints, more degrees of freedom (DOFs), and a larger range of motion (ROM). The exoskeleton hand comprises six linear actuators (two for the thumb and the other four for the fingers) and can realize both independent movements of each digit and coordinative movement involving multiple fingers for grasp and pinch. The kinematic parameters of the hand exoskeleton were analyzed by a motion capture system. The exoskeleton showed higher ROM of the proximal interphalangeal and distal interphalangeal joints compared with the other exoskeletons. Five classifiers including support vector machine (SVM), K-near neighbor (KNN), decision tree (DT), multilayer perceptron (MLP), and multichannel convolutional neural networks (multichannel CNN) were compared for the offline classification. The SVM and KNN had a higher accuracy than the others, reaching up to 99%. For the online classification, three out of the five subjects showed an accuracy of about 80%, and one subject showed an accuracy over 90%. These results suggest that the new wearable exoskeleton could facilitate hand rehabilitation for a larger ROM and higher dexterity and could be controlled according to the motion intention of the subjects.

Background: The study aimed to explore cortical morphology in benign childhood epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (BECTS) and the relationship between cortical characteristics and age of onset and intelligence quotient (IQ). Methods: Cortical morphometry with surface-based morphometry (SBM) was used to compare changes in cortical thickness, gyrification, sulcal depth, and fractal dimension of the cerebral cortex between 25 BECTS patients and 20 healthy controls (HCs) with two-sample t-tests [P<0.05, family-wise error (FWE) corrected].Relationships between abnormal cortical morphological changes and age of onset and IQ, which included verbal intelligence quotient (VIQ), performance intelligence quotient (PIQ), and full-scale intelligence quotient (FIQ) were investigated with Spearman correlation analysis (P<0.05, uncorrected). Results:The BECTS patients showed extensive cortical thinning predominantly in bilateral frontal, temporal regions, and limbic system. Cortical gyrification increased in the left hemisphere and partial right hemisphere, and the decreased cortical gyrification was only in the left hemisphere. The increased sulcal depth was the left fusiform gyrus. There are no statistically significant differences in the fractal dimension.Correlation analysis revealed the negative correlation between age of onset and cortical thickness in the right precentral gyrus. It also revealed the negative correlation between the age of onset and cortical gyrification in the left inferior parietal gyrus. Also, there was negative correlation between VIQ and cortical gyrification in the left supramarginal gyrus of BECTS patients.Conclusions: This study reveals aberrant cortical thickness, cortical gyrification, and sulcal depth of BECTS in areas related to cognitive functions including language, attention and memory, and the correlation between some brain regions and VIQ and age of onset, providing a potential marker of early neurodevelopmental disturbance and cognitive dysfunction in BECTS.

Image segmentation is a basic technology in the field of image processing and computer vision. Medical image segmentation is an important application field of image segmentation and plays an increasingly important role in clinical diagnosis and treatment. Deep learning has made great progress in medical image segmentation. In this paper, we proposed Residual-Attention UNet++, which is an extension of the UNet++ model with a residual unit and attention mechanism. Firstly, the residual unit improves the degradation problem. Secondly, the attention mechanism can increase the weight of the target area and suppress the background area irrelevant to the segmentation task. Three medical image datasets such as skin cancer, cell nuclei, and coronary artery in angiography were used to validate the proposed model. The results showed that the Residual-Attention UNet++ achieved superior evaluation scores with an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 82.32%, and a dice coefficient of 88.59% with the skin cancer dataset, a dice coefficient of 85.91%, and an IoU of 87.74% with the cell nuclei dataset and a dice coefficient of 72.48%, and an IoU of 66.57% with the angiography dataset.

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Evergreen tree species that maintain positive carbon balance during the late growing season may subsidize extra carbon in a mixed forest. To test this concept of ‘carbon subsidy’, leaf gas exchange characteristics and related leaf traits were measured for three gymnosperm evergreen species (Chamaecyparis thyoides, Tsuga canadensis and Pinus strobus) native to the oak-hickory deciduous forest in northeast USA from March (early Spring) to October (late Autumn) in a single year. All three species were photosynthetically active in Autumn. During the Summer–Autumn transition, photosynthetic capacity (Amax) of T. canadensis and P. strobus increased (T-test, P < 0.001) and was maintained in C. thyoides (T-test, P = 0.49), while dark respiration at 20 °C (Rn) and its thermal sensitivity were generally unchanged for all species (one-way ANOVA, P > 0.05). In Autumn, reductions in mitochondrial respiration rate in the daylight (RL) and the ratio of RL to Rn (RL/Rn) were observed in P. strobus (46.3% and 44.0% compared to Summer, respectively). Collectively, these physiological adjustments resulted in higher ratios of photosynthesis to respiration (A/Rnand A/RL) in Autumn for all species. Across season, photosynthetic biochemistry and respiratory variables were not correlated with prevailing growth temperature. Physiological adjustments allowed all three gymnosperm species to maintain positive carbon balance into late Autumn, suggesting that gymnosperm evergreens may benefit from Autumn warming trends relative to deciduous trees that have already lost their leaves.