Turning a CLIP Model into a Scene Text Spotter.

We exploit the potential of the large-scale Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model to enhance scene text detection and spotting tasks, transforming it into a robust backbone, FastTCM-CR50. This backbone utilizes visual prompt learning and cross-attention in CLIP to extract image and text-based prior knowledge. Using predefined and learnable prompts, FastTCM-CR50 introduces an instance-language matching process to enhance the synergy between image and text embeddings, thereby refining text regions. Our Bimodal Similarity Matching (BSM) module facilitates dynamic language prompt generation, enabling offline computations and improving performance. FastTCM-CR50 offers several advantages: 1) It can enhance existing text detectors and spotters, improving performance by an average of 1.6% and 1.5%, respectively. 2) It outperforms the previous TCM-CR50 backbone, yielding an average improvement of 0.2% and 0.55% in text detection and spotting tasks, along with a 47.1% increase in inference speed. 3) It showcases robust few-shot training capabilities. Utilizing only 10% of the supervised data, FastTCM-CR50 improves performance by an average of 26.5% and 4.7% for text detection and spotting tasks, respectively. 4) It consistently enhances performance on out-of-distribution text detection and spotting datasets, particularly the NightTime-ArT subset from ICDAR2019-ArT and the DOTA dataset for oriented object detection. The code is available at https://github.com/wenwenyu/TCM.

Synthetic Cell Lines for Inducible Packaging of Influenza A Virus.

Influenza A virus (IAV) is a negative-sense RNA virus that causes seasonal infections and periodic pandemics, inflicting huge economic and human costs on society. The current production of influenza virus for vaccines is initiated by generating a seed virus through the transfection of multiple plasmids in HEK293 cells followed by the infection of seed viruses into embryonated chicken eggs or cultured mammalian cells. We took a system design and synthetic biology approach to engineer cell lines that can be induced to produce all viral components except hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA), which are the antigens that specify the variants of IAV. Upon the transfection of HA and NA, the cell line can produce infectious IAV particles. RNA-Seq transcriptome analysis revealed inefficient synthesis of viral RNA and upregulated expression of genes involved in host response to viral infection as potential limiting factors and offered possible targets for enhancing the productivity of the synthetic cell line. Overall, we showed for the first time that it was possible to create packaging cell lines for the production of a cytopathic negative-sense RNA virus. The approach allows for the exploitation of altered kinetics of the synthesis of viral components and offers a new method for manufacturing viral vaccines.

Effects of Mercury Contamination on Microbial Diversity of Different Kinds of Soil.

Soil microorganisms promote the recovery of contaminated soil by influencing the cyclic transformation of various substances. In this study, we investigated the impact of mercury pollution on the structure, composition, and main populations of soil microbial communities using a high-throughput sequencing method and observed that mercury pollution significantly influenced the diversity, structure, and distribution pattern of microbial communities. Furthermore, during mercury pollution, the Shannon and Chao indices decreased for the bacterial communities and increased for the fungal communities. Mercury pollution mainly reduced the relative abundances of Proteobacteria (16.2−30.6%), Actinomycetes (24.7−40.8%), and other dominant bacterial phyla. The relative abundance of Ascomycota decreased by 17.4% and 16.7% in alkaline and neutral soils, respectively, whereas the relative abundance of unclassified_k_Fungi increased by 26.1% and 28.6%, respectively. In acidic soil, Ascomycota increased by 106.3% and unclassified_k_Fungi decreased by 71.2%. The results of redundancy and correlation analyses suggested that soil microbial diversity was significantly correlated with soil properties such as pH, cation exchange capacity, soil organic carbon, and total nitrogen (p < 0.05) under different treatments. Our findings highlight the impact of Hg pollution on soil microbial communities, thereby providing a theoretical foundation for the bioremediation of soil Hg pollution.

The vertical migration of antibiotic-resistant genes and pathogens in soil and vegetables after the application of different fertilizers.

The prevalence of bacterial resistance caused by the application of animal manure has become an important environmental issue. Herein, the vertical migration of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and pathogens in soil and vegetables after the application of different fertilizers was explored. The results showed that the application of composted manure considerably enhanced the abundance of most ARGs and pathogens, especially in surface soil and pakchoi roots. Moreover, the soil ARGs increased partially from log 1.93 to log 4.65 after the application of composted manure, and six pathogens were simultaneously detected. It was observed that the increase in soil depth decreased most ARGs and pathogens by log 1.04-2.24 and 53.98 %~85.54 %, respectively. This indicated that ARGs and pathogens still existed in the deep soil (80-100 cm). Moreover, total organic carbon had a significant influence on the pathogen distribution, whereas bacterial communities primarily drove the vertical migration of ARGs rather than environmental factors. Although most of the ARG-host associations observed in the surface soil were disappeared in deep soil as revealed by network analysis, some co-occurrence pattern still occurred in deep soil, suggesting that some ARGs might be carried to deep soil by their host bacteria. These results were novel in describing the vertical migration of ARGs in the environment after the application of different fertilizers, providing ideas for curbing their migration to crops.

Reduction of antibiotic resistance genes under different conditions during composting process of aerobic combined with anaerobic.

Single aerobic or anaerobic composting is reportedly as inefficient for removing antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) from animal manure. This study investigates the effects of ARG removal during aerobic combined with anaerobic composting (ACA) under different conditions. The results showed that a turning frequency of once a day, the proportion of swine manure and corn straw (3:1) and an anaerobic time of 6 days were the best operating conditions for ARG reduction (>95%, especially ermF: 99.78%) during ACA. Moreover, redundancy analysis demonstrated that the bacterial community (especially Truepera, Petrimonas and Ureibacillus) had a stronger effect on ARG removal than environmental factors did (especially temperature, total phosphorus, ammonia nitrogen and pH). Network analysis indicated the important effect of these potential host bacteria on the spread of ARGs through significant co-occurrence between individual ARGs and specific bacteria. These findings offer an effective technology to reduce and block ARGs spread from animal manure.

Effects of Partial Blackwater Substitution on Soil Potential NI-Trogen Leaching in a Summer Maize Field on the North China Plain.

In China, promoting harmless blackwater treatment and resource utilization in rural areas is a priority of the "toilet revolution". Exploring the effects of blackwater application in arid areas on soil nitrogen losses can provide a basis for more effective water and fertilizer management. This study analyzed nitrogen leaching and maize yield under blackwater application in the summer maize season of 2020. A total of 5 treatments were used: no fertilizer, single chemical fertilizer application (CF), single blackwater application (HH), and combined chemical fertilizer and blackwater application ratios of 1:1 (CH1) and 2:1 (CH2). The total nitrogen leached from the fertilization treatments was 53.14-60.95 kg·ha-1 and the leached nitrate nitrogen was 34.10-40.62 kg·ha-1. Nitrate nitrogen accounted for 50-62% of the total leached nitrogen. Compared with blackwater treatments, nitrate nitrogen moved into deeper soil layers (80-100 cm depth) during the CF treatment. Compared with CF, HH significantly reduced the maize yield by 24.39%. The nitrogen surplus of HH was higher than that of other fertilizer treatments. Considering nitrogen leaching, maize yield, and economic benefits, the CH2 treatment presented the optimal results. These findings address knowledge gaps and assist in guiding policy-makers to effectively promote China's "toilet revolution".

The collaboration and reporting quality of social welfare systematic reviews in the Campbell Collaboration online library.

BACKGROUND: To analyze the collaboration and reporting quality of the systematic reviews of social welfare in the Campbell collaboration online library. METHODS: The Campbell collaboration online library was searched for systematic reviews of social welfare and the basic information extracted in order to assess the reporting quality of systematic reviews using a MOOSE checklist. BICOMS-2 and UCINET software were used to produce the social network, and Comprehensive Meta Analysis (Version 2) and STATA 13.0 were used to analyze the related data. RESULTS: Fifty-seven systematic reviews of social welfare were included. Twenty-eight items of the included social welfare systematic reviews were rated as complete (≥70%). There were significant differences between ≤2013 and ≥ 2014 in five items. These differences were as follows: research published by one organization or more than one organization in one item, more than three authors or less than four authors in two items, and one country or more than one country in six items. It's completed about researches with more than one organization, three authors or more than one country. Some items were found to have a low reporting rate of studies published before 2014, by one organization, with less than four authors or one country, respectively. The social network of authors and organizations showed good collaboration. CONCLUSIONS: Some items could be further improved with regard to the rate of reporting systematic reviews of social welfare in the Campbell collaboration online library. This could improve the overall quality of social welfare systematic reviews.