A common belief proposed by Peierls and Landau that two-dimensional material cannot exist freely in a three-dimensional world has been proved false when graphene was first synthesized in 2004. Graphene, which is the base structure of other carbon materials, has drawn much attention of scholars and researchers due to its extraordinary electrical, mechanical and thermal properties. Moreover, meth...

The effect of nitrogen content in rice plants on the tolerance of brown planthopper (BPH), Nilaparvata lugens Stål to high temperature, starvation and insecticide, was studied in the laboratory at International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Philippines. Survival of nymphs and adults, fecundity and egg hatchability were significantly increased by the increase of nitrogen content in host plants...

The processing technology employed in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is significant and distinct. Meanwhile, the processed Coptis chinensis Franch. are significant in clinic based on clinical practice and literature. The current study used ultraperformance liquid chromatography method (UPLC) coupled with quadrupole time of flight mass spectrometry (qTOF/MS) and Marklynx software to analyze ...

This study examines the statistical properties of volatility. Fractal dimension, probability distribution and two-point volatility correlation are used to measure and compare volatility among six di¤erent countries for the 12-year period from Jan. 1 1990 to Dec.31 2001. New York market is found to be the strongest among the six in terms of market e¢ ciency. Moreover, the Tokyo and Singapore mar...

The study compared the biosensing properties of laccase biosensors based on carbon nanofibers (CNFs) and copper/carbon composite nanofibers (Cu/CNFs). The two kinds of nanofibers were prepared by electrospinning and carbonization under the same conditions. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Raman spectroscopy were employed to investigate the morphologies and structu...

In this paper, we propose an efficient text classification method using term projection. Firstly, we use a modified χ statistic to project terms into predefined categories, which is more efficient compared to other clustering methods. Afterwards, we utilize the generated clusters as features to represent the documents. The classification is then performed in a rule-based manner or via SVM. Expe...

Nanotechnology has allowed the construction of various nanostructures for applications, including biomedicine. However, a simple target-specific, economical, and biocompatible drug delivery platform with high maximum tolerated doses is still in demand. Here, we report aptamer-tethered DNA nanotrains (aptNTrs) as carriers for targeted drug transport in cancer therapy. Long aptNTrs were self-asse...

Astroviruses infect humans and many animal species and cause gastroenteritis. To extensively understand the distribution and genetic diversity of astrovirus in small mammals, we tested 968 anal swabs from 39 animal species, most of which were bats and rodents. We detected diverse astroviruses in 10 bat species, including known bat astroviruses and a large number of novel viruses. Meanwhile, nov...

The synthesis of a series of novel N-substituted tetrahydro-β-carboline-imidazolium salt derivatives is presented. The biological properties of the compounds were evaluated in vitro against a panel of human tumor cell lines. The results suggest that the benzimidazole ring and 1-(naphthalen-2-yl)ethan-1-one or 2-naphthylmethyl substituent at the imidazolyl-3-position were vital for modulating cy...

The mechanisms underlying the immune defense by trophoblasts against pathogens remain ill defined. We demonstrated that placental cell death was increased upon in vivo exposure to Listeria monocytogenes. The death of infected cells is an important host innate defense mechanism. Meanwhile, double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) derived from intracellular bacteria or dsDNA viruses is emerging as a potent pa...