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It is necessary to ensure the quality of students' courses, especially practical courses, which is an important part of higher education, and plays a positive role in promoting and popularizing the improvement of innovation and entrepreneurship in the face of the non suspension of classes and schools under the COVID-19. This paper explores the mode of online and offline combined with ideological and political education mixed teaching reform in the course, in order to explore the educational functions and ideological and political elements of the course from the practical contents and objectives from the practical course of artificial intelligence foundation, explore the implementation methods and teaching concepts of ideological and political education in the course, so that students can better master and understand knowledge comprehensively, improve the results of students' ideological and moral education, and explore the reform mode which satisfy the requirements of talent training. © 2022 IEEE.
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To observe the synergistic effect of garlic essential oil in patients with novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in addition to the routine treatment, we used garlic essential oil in COVID-19 patients with mild to moderate symptoms and compared their results to those of patients who did not receive the essential oil. We conducted a quasi-experimental study with COVID-19 patients from 3 hospitals. In the experimental group, 97 patients received garlic essential oil combined with conventional treatment. In the control group, 100 patients received only the conventional treatment for COVID-19. The effectiveness and safety of the garlic essential oil were assessed. Compared to the control group, the group receiving garlic essential oil showed a shorter duration of symptoms, shorter time to negative nucleic acid testing (NAT) results and shorter time to improvement on the computed tomography (CT). In the same period, the experimental group showed an increase in the rate of the disappearance of symptoms and the improvement rates of NAT and CT. Due to its effectiveness and safety in patients with COVID-19, garlic essential oil is recommended as a preventive measure or a supportive therapy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Introduction: Management of acute respiratory distress including COVID-19 pneumonia involves O2 supplementation, which is lifesaving, but causes severe hyperoxic acute lung injury (HALI). AT2 cells are the most affected cell type in hyperoxia (HO). NADPH oxidase (NOX) is a major source of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in HO. NOX4, the only functionally active NOX present in mitochondria, and primarily produces H2O2 as well as mtROS has been shown to be involved in several human pathologies. Not much is known about NOX4-induced mitochondrial injury in HALI. The current study aims to determine the role of AT2 epithelial cell NOX4 in HALI and the impact of HO on the modulation of mtROS and mitochondrial dynamics in HALI. Methods: Nox4-/-Spc-Cre animals were generated using tamoxifen induction and the knockdown was validated. The Nox4- /-Spc-Cre knockout (KO) and wild type (WT) mice were exposed to room air (NO) or 95% O2 (HO) for 66h to study the structural and functional changes in the lung. Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) was used to study the HO-induced changes in mitochondria. Isolated primary AT2 and/ mouse lung epithelial (MLE) cell line was investigated for mtROS, mt dynamics and apoptosis. Mitochondrial injury was assessed in Nox4 WT and Nox4 silenced cells. Results: C57BL/6J WT animals subjected to HO for 66h showed increased expression of NOX4, determining the role of NOX4 in HALI. The H&E staining demonstrated significant HALI in Nox4 WT animals exposed to HO compared to Nox4 KO as determined by increased infiltration of neutrophils, alveolar wall thickening and presence of proteinaceous debris in the alveolar space. Further, increased BAL cell count and protein levels, increased AT2 cell death and elevation of the proinflammatory cytokine IL- 6 and the chemokine KC was seen in WT animals compared to Nox4 KO. Analysis of lung tissues by TEM showed mitochondrial swelling, cristae damage and mitophagy in AT2 cells due to HO. Changes in mt injury markers were also observed. HO-induced NOX4 increase in primary AT2/ MLE-12 cells resulted in increased mtROS production and apoptosis, which was reduced with Nox4 siRNA silencing. Conclusion: This study suggests that the HO induced NOX4 expression in mouse lung, and deletion of Nox4 gene in AT2 cells reduced mtROS production and apoptosis and protected the lungs from severe hyperoxic lung injury. These results suggest NOX4 as a potential target for the treatment of HALI.
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Travel restrictions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an unprecedented decrease of 73% in global flight mileage in April-May 2020 compared to 2019. Here we examine the CALIPSO satellite observations and find a significant increase in ice crystal number concentrations (Ni) in cirrus clouds in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, which we attribute to an increase in homogeneous freezing when soot from aircraft emissions is reduced. A relatively small positive global average radiative effect of 21 mW m(-2) is estimated if a decrease in aircraft traffic continues, with an average of up to 64 mW m(-2) over the area where aviation is most active. We infer from this analysis that the worldwide adoption of biofuel blending in aircraft fuels that lead to smaller soot emissions could lead to a significant change in the microphysical properties of cirrus clouds but a rather small positive radiative effect.
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Unexpectedly frequent severe haze episodes were observed in Beijing during February-March in 2021 after two phases of clean air action plan (2013-2020), yet the causes remained unclear. Here, we conducted real-time fine particle (PM2.5) composition measurements during January-March in 2021 using a time-of-flight aerosol chemical speciation monitor and an aethalometer and compared with those during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) period in 2020. Our results showed ubiquitously elevated concentrations of chloride, black carbon (BC), and primary organic aerosol (POA) in 2021, suggesting increased primary emissions during the post-COVID-19 period. By using the machine learning-based random forest (RF) algorithm, we found largely different responses of aerosol changes to meteorology in different months. After decoupling the effects of meteorology, the PM2.5 changes from 2020 to 2021 were reduced from -35.6% to -29.0% in January, -24.1% to -4.5% in February, and +92.6% to +34.2% in March, respectively. Our results demonstrate the dominant roles of stagnant meteorology and secondary production in the formation of severe haze episodes in March 2021. In particular, we found that the compositions of observed and deweathered PM2.5 were fairly similar between 2020 and 2021, and the ratios of secondary OA to secondary inorganic aerosols were close. Our study indicates that decoupling the influence of meteorological conditions is of great importance for better evaluation of mitigating strategies of air pollution due to the large impact of meteorology on the changes in PM2.5 species particularly in a short period.
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The significant reduction in human activities during COVID-19 lockdown is anticipated to substantially influence urban climates, especially urban heat islands (UHIs). However, the UHI variations during lockdown periods remain to be quantified. Based on the MODIS daily land surface temperature and the in-situ surface air temperature observations, we reveal a substantial decline in both surface and canopy UHIs over 300-plus megacities in China during lockdown periods compared with reference periods. The surface UHI intensity (UHII) is reduced by 0.25 (one S.D. = 0.22) K in the daytime and by 0.23 (0.20) K at night during lockdown periods. The reductions in canopy UHII reach 0.42 (one S.D. = 0.26) K in the daytime and 0.39 (0.29) K at night. These reductions are mainly due to the near-unprecedented drop in human activities induced by strict lockdown measures. Our results provide an improved understanding of the urban climate variations during the global pandemic.
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Although, recently convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based prognostic models have been developed for COVID-19 severity prediction, most of these studies have analyzed characteristics of lung infiltrates (ground-glass opacities and consolidations) on chest radiographs or CT. However, none of the studies have explored the possible lung deformations due to the disease. Our hypothesis is that more severe disease results in more pronounced deformation. The key contributions of this work are three-fold: (1) A new lung deformation based biomarker analyzing regions of differential distensions between COVID-19 patients with mild and severe disease. (2) Integrating 3D-CNN characterization of lung deformation regions and lung infiltrates on lung CT into a novel framework (LuMiRa) for prognosticating COVID-19 severity. (3) Validating LuMiRa on one of the largest multi-institutional cohort till date (N = 948 patients). We found that majority of the shape deformations were observed in the mediastinal surface of both the lungs and in left interior lobe. On a testing cohort based on two institutions, Av (N = 419) and Bv (N = 113), LuMiRa yielded an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.89 and 0.77 respectively showing significant improvement over a 3D-CNN trained over just lung infiltrates (AUC = 0.85 (p < 0.001), AUC = 0.75 (p = 0.01)). Additionally, LuMiRa performed significantly better than machine learning models trained on clinical and radiomic features (0.82, 0.78 and 0.72, 0.72 on Av and Bv respectively). © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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The COVID-19 outbreak has raised awareness of the importance of increased motivation and resilience in nurses. To explore the level of nurse Job involvement in Z hospital in Zhuhai city of China, and the influence of Organizational justice and Organizational identity, a total of 125 nurses in Z hospital in Zhuhai city, Guangdong province, were selected by convenient sampling method and investigated with general information questionnaire, Organizational justice, Organizational identity,and Job involvement Scale. There were 114 valid questionnaires returned;The scores of nurse's Organizational justice, Distributive justice, Procedural justice and Interactive justice, Organizational identity,and Job involvement were 3.532±0.581, 3.397±0.691, 3.487±0.729, 3.840±0.641 and 3.912±0.615 respectively. The score of organization justice positively correlated with the scores of Organizational identity (r=0.627, P<0.001), and positively correlated with the score of Job involvement (r=0.627,P<0.001). The scores of Organizational identity were positively correlated with the score of Job involvement (r=0.724,P<0.001). The results of regression analysis showed that Organizational justice, Organizational identity can positively affect nurses' Job involvement, and explained 59.9% of the cumulative variance. At the same time,Organization identity played a partial mediating role between Organizational justice, as well as its three sub-dimensions and Job involvement. The scores of Organizational justice and Job involvement in selected nurses in Zhuhai are only a little higher than the average levels, which needs to be improved. The perceived Interactive justice is high while the Distributive justice is low. Nurses' Job involvement and Organizational identity can be promoted directly by increasing Distributive justice, followed by Interactive justice and Procedural justice. © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2021.