Evidence regarding the association between dietary choline intake and mortality in individuals with diabetes remains limited. This study aimed to evaluate the relationship between dietary choline intake and all-cause, cardiovascular disease (CVD), and cancer-related mortality among adults with diabetes. A total of 4,712 participants with diabetes were included from the NHANES 2007-2018 cycles. Dietary choline intake was estimated using two 24-hour dietary recalls, and mortality outcomes were ascertained via linkage to National Death Index records through December 31, 2019. Cox proportional hazards models and Kaplan-Meier analyses were employed to assess the associations between choline intake and mortality. Restricted cubic spline models were used to examine potential non-linear relationships, and threshold analyses were conducted to identify inflection points. Over a median follow-up of 6.42 years, 805 deaths were documented, including 267 from CVD and 126 from cancer. A U-shaped association was observed between dietary choline intake and all-cause mortality (p for non-linearity < 0.0001). Compared with the lowest quartile, multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) for all-cause mortality were 0.64 (95% CI: 0.47-0.88) for the second quartile, 0.59 (0.43-0.82) for the third, and 0.69 (0.43-1.09) for the highest quartile. No significant associations were found between choline intake and either CVD or cancer mortality. These findings indicate a U-shaped relationship between dietary choline intake and all-cause mortality in individuals with diabetes, with intakes between 286.77 and 538.86 mg/day associated with the lowest risk—providing potential implications for dietary guidance in diabetes management.

This paper is concerned with the following problem involving almost critical growth

\begin{equation*}\begin{cases}(-\Delta) ^su=|u|^{2_{s}^{*}-2-\varepsilon}u,& \text{in } \varOmega ,\\u=0,& \text{on } \Sigma ,\\\end{cases}\end{equation*}

where $2_{s}^{*}=\frac{2N}{N-2s}$, $s\in(\frac{1}{2},1)$, $N \gt 2s$, Ω is a bounded domain in $\mathbb{R}^N$, ɛ is a small parameter, and the boundary Σ is given in different ways according to the different definitions of the fractional Laplacian operator $(-\Delta)^{s}$. The operator $(-\Delta)^{s}$ is defined in two types: the spectral fractional Laplacian and the restricted fractional Laplacian. For the spectral case, Σ stands for $\partial \Omega$; for the restricted case, Σ is $\mathbb{R}^{N}\setminus \Omega$. Firstly, we provide a positive confirmation of the fractional Brezis–Peletier conjecture, that is, the above almost critical problem has a single bubbling solution concentrating around the non-degenerate critical point of the Robin function. Furthermore, the non-degeneracy andlocal uniqueness of this bubbling solution are established.

Previous studies highlighted the health benefits of coffee and tea, but they only focused on the comparisons between different consumptions. Consequently, the association estimate lacked a clear interpretation, as the substitution of beverages and distribution of doses were not explicitly prescribed. We focused on the ‘relative association’ to ascertain the optimal consumption strategy (including total intake and optimal allocation strategy) for coffee, tea and plain water associated with decreased mortality. Self-reported coffee, tea and plain water intake were used from the UK Biobank. Within a compositional data analysis framework, a multivariate Cox model was used to assess the relative associations after adjusting for a range of potential confounders. The lower mortality risk was observed with at least approximately 7–8 drinks/d of total consumption. When the total intake > 4 drinks/d, substituting plain water with coffee or tea was linked to reduced mortality; nevertheless, the benefit was not seen for ≤ 4 drinks/d. Besides, a balanced consumption of coffee and tea (roughly a ratio of 2:3) associated with the lowest hazard ratios of 0·55 (95 % CI 0·47, 0·64) for all-cause mortality, 0·59 (95 % CI 0·48, 0·72) for cancer mortality, 0·69 (95 % CI 0·49, 0·99) for CVD mortality, 0·28 (95 % CI 0·15, 0·52) for respiratory disease mortality and 0·35 (95 % CI 0·15, 0·82) for digestive disease mortality than other combinations. These results highlight the importance of the rational combination of coffee, tea and plain water, with particular emphasis on ensuring adequate total intake, offering more comprehensive and explicit guidance for individuals.

The evolution of settling fine particle clouds in transition or rarefied flow regimes is a fundamental yet insufficiently understood problem in fluid mechanics. Here, we address this challenge numerically using a kinematic model, and approximate the hydrodynamic interaction between particles by superposing velocity disturbances from rarefied gas flows past individual particles. The effect of electrostatic interactions among charged particles is also studied. As an application, we simulate the sedimentation of small dust clouds under Martian conditions, focusing on the 10$\,\unicode{x03BC}$m diameter fraction of ‘settled dust’. Our results show that under Martian conditions, dust clouds develop elongated tails during sedimentation, with up to 25 % of particles leaking from the bulk over a 10 minute period. Unlike Earth-based scenarios, the clouds do not break apart owing to the weaker hydrodynamic interactions in Mars’ thin atmosphere. By examining the interplay between hydrodynamic and electrostatic interactions, which influence particle leakage in opposite ways, we demonstrate that larger dust clouds are also likely to evolve with sustained tail formation. Fully suppressing particle leakage would require particle charges well above $10^4e$, levels unlikely to occur under typical Martian conditions. New analytical expressions are derived for the cloud settling velocity and tail evolution, providing theoretical insights and a foundation for future studies on particle dynamics in transition/rarefied environments.

The incorporation of trace metals into land snail shells may record the ambient environmental conditions, yet this potential remains largely unexplored. In this study, we analyzed modern snail shells (Cathaica sp.) collected from 16 sites across the Chinese Loess Plateau to investigate their trace metal compositions. Our results show that both the Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca ratios exhibit minimal intra-shell variability and small inter-shell variability at individual sites. A significant positive correlation is observed between the shell Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca ratios across the plateau, with higher values being recorded in the northwestern sites where less monsoonal rainfall is received. We propose that shell Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca ratios, which record the composition of soil solution, may be controlled by the Rayleigh distillation in response to prior calcite precipitation. Higher rainfall amounts may lead to a lower degree of Rayleigh distillation and thus lower shell Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca ratios. This is supported by the distinct negative correlation between summer precipitation and shell Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca ratios, enabling us to reconstruct summer precipitation amounts using the Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca ratios of Cathaica sp. shells. The potential application of these novel proxies may also be promising for other terrestrial mollusks living in the loess deposits globally.

Human milk oligosaccharides offer unique benefits for infant growth and development. Buffalo milk, characterized by a mild flavor and high nutritional value, has attracted considerable interest. To characterize the oligosaccharide profile and composition of buffalo milk, we conducted qualitative and quantitative analysis of milk oligosaccharides at the early- and late-lactation stages of crossbred (Nili-Ravi × Murrah × local) buffaloes from Guangxi, China. The results revealed a total of 97 oligosaccharides including 17 novel oligosaccharides, with concentrations of 416.6 ± 25.86 and 368.3 ± 10.29 mg/L in milk from early- and late-lactation stages, respectively. The most abundant oligosaccharides were 3’-sialyllactose (3’-SL), difucosyllactose (DFL), 6’-sialyllactose (6’-SL), and a newly discovered compound, 2142. The oligosaccharides in crossbred (Nili-Ravi × Murrah × local) buffaloes demonstrated greater diversity than those found in the milk of other dairy animals, highlighting its potential as a high-quality nutritional resource for adults and infants.

The high comorbidity of major depressive disorder (MDD), anxiety disorders (ANX), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) complicates the study of their structural neural correlates, particularly in white matter (WM) alterations. Using fractional anisotropy (FA), this meta-analysis aimed to identify both unique and shared WM characteristics for these disorders by comparing them with healthy controls (HC). The aggregated sample size across studies includes 3,661 individuals diagnosed with MDD, ANX, or PTSD and 3,140 HC participants. The whole-brain analysis revealed significant FA reductions in the corpus callosum (CC) across MDD, ANX, and PTSD, suggesting a common neurostructural alteration underlying these disorders. Further pairwise comparisons highlighted disorder-specific differences: MDD patients showed reduced FA in the middle cerebellar peduncles and bilateral superior longitudinal fasciculus II relative to ANX patients and decreased FA in the CC extending to the left anterior thalamic projections (ATPs) when compared with PTSD. In contrast, PTSD patients exhibited reduced FA in the right ATPs compared to HC. No significant FA differences were observed between ANX and PTSD or between ANX and HC. These findings provide evidence for both shared and unique WM alterations in MDD, ANX, and PTSD, reflecting the neural underpinnings of the clinical characteristics that distinguish these disorders.

In response to the prevailing trend of an aging society and the increasing requirements of rehabilitation, this paper presents an approach involving brain-machine interaction (BMI) for a single-degree-of-freedom (1-DOF) sit-to-stand transfer robot. Based on a 1-DOF rehabilitation robot, three experiment paradigms involving motor imagery (MI), action observation of motor imagery (AO-MI) and motor execution are designed using both electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG). To enhance motion intention recognition accuracy, a Gumbel-ResNet-KANs decoding model is established. The Gumbel-ResNet-KANs model integrates the Gumbel-Softmax method with the ResNet-KANs network module and demonstrates strong decoding capability, as demonstrated by comparative tests in this paper. To validate the effect of robotic assistance, EEG and EMG coherence are analyzed to assess the impact of robotic assistance on rehabilitation from a neuromuscular perspective in both assisted and unassisted conditions. We assessed the effect of robotics on rehabilitation from an emotional perspective by analyzing the difference between the differential entropy of the right and left brain. The proposed study also reveals that the movement-related cortical potentials in AO-MI are beneficial for promoting the performance of BMI in sit-to-stand training, which provides a possible approach for the development of new types of robots for lower limb rehabilitation.

This paper introduces a novel ray-tracing methodology for various gradient-index materials, particularly plasmas. The proposed approach utilizes adaptive-step Runge–Kutta integration to compute ray trajectories while incorporating an innovative rasterization step for ray energy deposition. By removing the requirement for rays to terminate at cell interfaces – a limitation inherent in earlier cell-confined approaches – the numerical formulation of ray motion becomes independent of specific domain geometries. This facilitates a unified and concise tracing method compatible with all commonly used curvilinear coordinate systems in laser–plasma simulations, which were previously unsupported or prohibitively complex under cell-confined frameworks. Numerical experiments demonstrate the algorithm’s stability and versatility in capturing diverse ray physics across reduced-dimensional planar, cylindrical and spherical coordinate systems. We anticipate that the rasterization-based approach will pave the way for the development of a generalized ray-tracing toolkit applicable to a broad range of fluid simulations and synthetic optical diagnostics.

River terraces serve as excellent indicators of the landform evolution of the Guizhou Plateau. This paper presents the results of terrace investigation and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating focused on five sections along the Liujiang River of the southeastern Guizhou Plateau. The OSL ages of the terraces range from 0.21 ± 0.02 to 16.0 ± 1.4 ka for the first terraces (T1) and from 3.5 ± 0.3 to 26.5 ± 3.3 ka for the second terraces (T2), which are much younger than those of other basins on the Guizhou Plateau. These ages, considered in tandem with the results of previous investigations, enhance our understanding of the fluvial landform evolution of the Guizhou Plateau since the Late Pleistocene. On the Guizhou Plateau platform, terraces are considered to be the response of river evolution to tectonic uplift, indicating a relatively slow geomorphic process. In the slope zone, climate change has had a significant impact on the fluvial landform processes, driving the formation of the younger terraces along the Liujiang River. In the platform–slope transition zone, the evolution of terraces was driven by both tectonic uplift and climate change, where the landform processes were dominated by strong headward erosion.

The betatron radiation source features a micrometer-scale source size, a femtosecond-scale pulse duration, milliradian-level divergence angles and a broad spectrum exceeding tens of keV. It is conducive to the high-contrast imaging of minute structures and for investigating interdisciplinary ultrafast processes. In this study, we present a betatron X-ray source derived from a high-charge, high-energy electron beam through a laser wakefield accelerator driven by the 1 PW/0.1 Hz laser system at the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (SULF). The critical energy of the betatron X-ray source is 22 ± 5 keV. The maximum X-ray flux reaches up to 4 × 109 photons for each shot in the spectral range of 5–30 keV. Correspondingly, the experiment demonstrates a peak brightness of 1.0 × 1023 photons·s−1·mm−2·mrad−2·0.1%BW−1, comparable to those demonstrated by third-generation synchrotron light sources. In addition, the imaging capability of the betatron X-ray source is validated. This study lays the foundation for future imaging applications.

A compact microstrip eight-channel diplexer based on quad-mode stepped impedance resonator (QMSIR) is proposed in this paper. The proposed diplexer is composed by two second-order quad-band bandpass filters (BPFs) and common-port distributed coupling matching circuit. Each quad-band BPF is formed by two coupled-QMSIRs controlling the passband characteristics. By introducing multiple coupling paths between input and output ports, the isolation between the eight channels is performed. For demonstration, an eight-channel diplexer based on QMSIR is designed and fabricated with microstrip technology. The use of the QMSIR can lead to significant size reduction for the multiplexer, this is because the required resonator number is reduced. As a result, the diplexer occupies a compact size of 0.083λ2, which is smaller than most of the eight-channel diplexers that have been proposed. And the 3 dB fractional bandwidth is 97% (2.5–7.2 GHz). Measurement results correlate well with the simulated predictions, showing that a good isolation of better than 20 dB and upper stopband of better than 10 dB.