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Microplastic pollution, as a global environmental problem, still shows huge challenges in frontier scientific issues. Currently, the research is increasing on the uptake of microplastics by plants, as well as response of plants to microplastics. However, research on environmental factors affecting the uptake of microplastics by plants is still limited. Based on the hydroponic experiment in laboratory, the quantitative uptake of polystyrene (PS) microplastics (0.2 μm) by wheat seedling (Triticum aestivum) was investigated under different temperature and humidity conditions (high transpiration environment: 30℃, 55% RH; low transpiration environment: 10℃, 85% RH). Furthermore, the changes in wheat growth and the physiological state were also analyzed, including indicators of morphology, photosynthesis and biochemistry. The results show that the accumulation amount of microplastics in wheat increased significantly with the increase of exposure concentration. Besides, the uptake amount of microplastics by wheat roots was 1.5 times higher in high transpiration environment than those in low transpiration environment. Under high transpiration environment, PS microplastics inhibited growth of wheat root and the activity of peroxidase in wheat shoot. Under the condition of high concentration with 200 mg· L-1 of PS microplastics, it showed a significant decrease in the content of chlorophyll b but significant increase in the content of malondialdehyde in wheat roots and activity of superoxide dismutase in wheat shoots. Under low transpiration environment, a high concentration (200 mg· L-1) of PS microplastics caused the content of malondialdehyde …

Chronic lung diseases, such as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), are major leading causes of death worldwide and are generally associated with poor prognoses. The heterogeneous distribution of collagen, mainly type I collagen associated with excessive collagen deposition, plays a pivotal role in the progressive remodeling of the lung parenchyma to chronic exertional dyspnea for both IPF and COPD. To address the pressing need for noninvasive early diagnosis and drug treatment monitoring of pulmonary fibrosis, we report the development of human collagen-targeted protein MRI contrast agent (hProCA32.collagen) to specifically bind to collagen I overexpressed in multiple lung diseases. When compared to clinically approved Gd3+ contrast agents, hProCA32.collagen exhibits significantly better r1 and r2 relaxivity values, strong metal binding affinity and …

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused substantial damage to global health. Even though three years have passed, the world continues to struggle with the virus. Concerns are growing about the impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of infected individuals, who are more likely to experience depression, which can have long-lasting consequences for both the affected individuals and the world. Detection and intervention at an early stage can reduce the risk of depression in COVID-19 patients. In this paper, we investigated the relationship between COVID-19 infection and depression through social media analysis. Firstly, we managed a dataset of COVID-19 patients that contains information about their social media activity both before and after infection. Secondly, We conducted an extensive analysis of this dataset to investigate the characteristic of COVID-19 patients with a higher risk of depression. Thirdly, we …

Evaluating design ideas is necessary to predict their success and assess their impact early on in the process. Existing methods rely either on metrics computed by systems that are effective but subject to errors and bias, or experts’ ratings, which are accurate but expensive and long to collect. Crowdsourcing offers a compelling way to evaluate a large number of design ideas in a short amount of time while being cost-effective. Workers’ evaluation is, however, less reliable and might substantially differ from experts’ evaluation.

In this work, we investigate workers’ rating behavior and compare it with experts. First, we instrument a crowdsourcing study where we asked workers to evaluate design ideas from three innovation challenges. We show that workers share similar insights with experts but tend to rate more generously and weigh certain criteria more importantly. Next, we develop a hybrid human-AI approach that …