Exploring the impact of hydrogen sulfide on hematologic malignancies: A review.

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is one of the three most crucial gaseous messengers in the body. The discovery of H2S donors, coupled with its endogenous synthesis capability, has sparked hope for the treatment of hematologic malignancies. In the last decade, the investigation into the impact of H2S has expanded, particularly within the fields of cardiovascular function, inflammation, infection, and neuromodulation. Hematologic malignancies refer to a diverse group of cancers originating from abnormal proliferation and differentiation of blood-forming cells, including leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma. In this review, we delve deeply into the complex interrelation between H2S and hematologic malignancies. In addition, we comprehensively elucidate the intricate molecular mechanisms by which both H2S and its donors intricately modulate the progression of tumor growth. Furthermore, we systematically examine their impact on pivotal aspects, encompassing the proliferation, invasion, and migration capacities of hematologic malignancies. Therefore, this review may contribute novel insights to our understanding of the prospective therapeutic significance of H2S and its donors within the realm of hematologic malignancies.

Analysis of factors of willingness to adopt intelligent construction technology in highway construction enterprises.

This study aims to investigate the factors that influence the willingness of highway construction enterprises in China to adopt intelligent construction technology. Based on the existing literature, a TOSE framework was proposed, and four dimensions and 15 hypothesized influencing factors were identified through expert interviews. By using a combination of PLS-SEM and ANN, 513 survey data were analyzed to determine the linear and non-linear relationships of the influencing factors on the willingness to adopt. The results showed that all 14 hypothesized factors had varying degrees of positive or negative effects on the willingness to adopt, except for organizational culture, which was found to have no significant impact. Specifically, technology cost was found to be the most influential negative factor, while market demand and organizational structure were the most influential positive factors. The findings of this study have important reference value for decision makers and participants in highway construction enterprises, as well as other construction companies when considering the adoption of smart construction technologies. The originality of this research lies in the novel application of the TOSE framework to investigate smart construction technology adoption, and the combined use of PLS-SEM and ANN to examine both linear and nonlinear relationships between variables for the first time.

Informal Safety Communication of Construction Workers: Conceptualization and Scale Development and Validation.

Existing studies have highlighted the importance of informal safety communication among workers at construction sites. However, there is still a lack of empirically tested theoretical models with valid and reliable scales for describing and measuring construction workers' informal safety communication (CWISC). Accordingly, this study aimed to fill this need by developing an instrument to assess the communication performance of construction workers. Four stages of scale development were described: construct formation, item generation, factor extraction through the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) (n = 219), and scale assessment through the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (n = 156). Using questionnaire data drawn from construction workers in China, the CWISC was verified to be a three-dimensional construct including citizenship safety communication (CSC), self-needed safety communication (SSC), and participatory safety communication (PSC). The corresponding CWISC scale with 12 items was shown to have acceptable internal consistency reliability, as well as content, convergent, and discriminant validity. The CWISC scale could serve as an instrument to assess and identify the weaknesses in informal safety communication performance of construction workers. In turn, this information could help supervisors implement appropriate management practices to those workers to enhance workplace informal safety communication. Related studies taking a multidimensional CWISC into account were expected to be carried out.

The structure and emerging trends of construction safety management research: a bibliometric review.

Recently, construction safety management (CSM) practices and systems have become important topics for stakeholders to take care of human resources. However, few studies have attempted to map the global research on CSM. A comprehensive bibliometric review was conducted in this study based on multiple methods. In total, 1172 CSM-related papers from the Web of Science Core Collection database were examined. The analyses focused on publication year, country-institute, publication source, author and research topics. The results indicated that the USA, China, Australia and the UK took leading positions in CSM research. Two branches of journals were identified, namely the branch of engineering science and that of safety science and social science. Additionally, seven themes together with 28 specific topics were detected to allow researchers to track the main structure and temporal evolution of CSM research. Finally, the main research trends and potential research directions were discussed to guide the future research.

Developing A Case-Based Reasoning Model for Safety Accident Pre-Control and Decision Making in the Construction Industry.

Case-based reasoning (CBR) has been extensively employed in various construction management areas, involving construction cost prediction, duration estimation, risk management, tendering, bidding and procurement. However, there has been a dearth of research integrating CBR with construction safety management for preventing safety accidents. This paper proposes a CBR model which focuses on case retrieval and reuse to provide safety solutions for new problems. It begins with the identification of case problem attribute and solution attribute, the state of hazard is used to describe the problem attribute based on principles of people's unsafe behavior and objective's unsafe state. Frame-based knowledge representation method is adopted to establish the case database from dimensions of slot, facet and facet's value. Besides, cloud graph method is introduced to determine the attribute weight through analyzing the numerical characteristics of expectation value, entropy value and hyper entropy value. Next, thesaurus method is employed to calculate the similarity between cases including word level similarity and sentence level similarity. Principles and procedures have been provided on case revise and case retain. Finally, a real-world case is conducted to illustrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed model. Considering the high potential for pre-control and decision-making of construction safety accident, the proposed model is expected to contribute safety managers to take decisions on prevention measures more efficiently.

An Evaluation Model for Urban Comprehensive Carrying Capacity: An Empirical Case from Harbin City.

Urbanization has brought notable benefits for cities, but has also resulted in severe and diverse challenges in China. Previous studies have contributed to the definitions and evaluation of urbanization. However, there remain a great deal of ambiguities regarding urban comprehensive carrying capacity, and its measurable indicators still need further exploration given the urban development. This study aims to explore a model for evaluating urban comprehensive carrying capacity and thus to promote urban development. A total of 48 indicators which fell into 8 subsystems were identified to evaluate the urban comprehensive carrying capacity through literature reviews and interviews. The indicator set was developed for evaluation indicator selecting. Meanwhile, the dynamic system was explored, and an evaluation model based on the entire array polygon method was designed to evaluate urban comprehensive carrying capacity. Finally, a case study was conducted to provide suggestions for the decision-maker to implement the evaluation model. The results of this study show that the evaluation indicator system was dynamic due to urban development. Meanwhile, the model of the entire array polygon method was able to effectively evaluate urban comprehensive carrying capacity through the case study. Furthermore, this study found that there is an imbalance among subsystems in urban development according to the standard deviation. The findings are useful for setting up a benchmark framework for urban sustainability and providing an evaluation and monitoring model for decision maker to improve the urban carrying capacity.

Using leading and lagging indicators to select safe contractors at the prequalification stage of construction projects.

The contractor-selection decision at the prequalification stage is critical to the project success. An insufficient prediction of contractors' safety capacities using only lagging indicators may hinder the continuous improvement of safety performance in the construction industry. This research enhanced construction management and practices by proposing a comprehensive safe contractor selection model which integrated both leading and lagging indicators. First, a set of leading and lagging safety indicators were identified based on literature review and expert opinions. Then, the grey correlation analysis (GCA) was utilized to assign weights to individual indicators. We found that management commitment, safety training and education, safety risk management, and safety rules and procedures were four most influential factors to the safety performance of contractors. In addition, the fuzzy technique of ordering preference by similarity to ideal solution (Fuzzy TOPSIS) was used to condense individual indicators and create a composite safety performance indicator (c-SPI). Finally, the feasibility of the decision support tool for safe contractor selection was verified using a real-case railway construction project.

The Impact of Coworkers' Safety Violations on an Individual Worker: A Social Contagion Effect within the Construction Crew.

This research developed and tested a model of the social contagion effect of coworkers’ safety violations on individual workers within construction crews. Both situational and routine safety violations were considered in this model. Empirical data were collected from 345 construction workers in China using a detailed questionnaire. The results showed that both types of safety violations made by coworkers were significantly related to individuals’ perceived social support and production pressure. Individuals’ attitudinal ambivalence toward safety compliance mediated the relationships between perceived social support and production pressure and both types of individuals’ safety violations. However, safety motivation only mediated the effects of perceived social support and production pressure on individuals’ situational safety violations. Further, this research supported the differences between situational and routine safety violations. Specifically, we found that individuals were more likely to imitate coworkers’ routine safety violations than their situational safety violations. Coworkers’ situational safety violations had an indirect effect on individuals’ situational safety violations mainly through perceived social support and safety motivation. By contrast, coworkers’ routine safety violations had an indirect effect on individuals’ routine safety violations mainly through perceived production pressure and attitudinal ambivalence. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications, research limitations, and future directions were discussed.

Luminescent Poly(vinyl alcohol)/Carbon Quantum Dots Composites with Tunable Water-Induced Shape Memory Behavior in Different pH and Temperature Environments.

Luminescent water-induced shape memory polymer (SMP) composites with tunable shape recovery rate are developed by blending poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) and carbon quantum dots (CQDs). The oxygen and active hydrogen-rich CQDs can serve as extra physical cross-linking points in PVA via strong hydrogen bonding interaction, which largely improves the shape memory performances of PVA. At room temperature, water can successfully actuate the shape recovery of deformed PVA/CQDs composite. It is demonstrated that this water-induced shape recovery is mainly attributed to the plasticizing effect of water and its competitive hydrogen bonding. Furthermore, a quantitative bending test suggests that the shape recovery time of this water-induced SMP is tunable by altering the environmental pH value and temperature, and a relatively large shape recovery time window (from 20 to 200 s) can be achieved. In addition, the introduction of CQDs endows the PVA/CQDs SMP composites with excellent luminescent property, which makes the shape change of SMP visible under UV light. It should be noted that the mild stimulus condition and tunable shape recovery performances make the luminescent visible PVA/CQDs SMP feasible for diverse biological applications in smart medical devices, stimuli-responsive drug-release, and intelligent sensors in vivo and in vitro.

One pot preparation of silver nanoparticles decorated TiO2 mesoporous microspheres with enhanced antibacterial activity.

We report a simple "one-pot" solvothermal preparation of silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) decorated mesoporous titania (TiO2) microspheres as an effective antibacterial agent. TBOT as Ti source was hydrolyzed and crystallized in media composed of acetic acid and ethanol, in which esterification catalyzed by TBOT occurred for in-situ "controlled water release". AgNO3 as Ag source was reduced by ethanol to form Ag NPs embedded in the TiO2 microspheres. The effect of AgNO3 and HAc on the morphology of Ag/TiO2 was investigated. The Ag/TiO2 with various Ag content showed excellent antibacterial activities with extremely low minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus when compared with colloidal Ag NPs.

Multifunctional multisegmented Co/CoPt3 heterostructure nanowires.

Multisegmented (MS) Co/CoPt3 nanowires (NWs) have been successfully fabricated by a template-assisted pulsed electrodeposition process and the length of each Co and CoPt3 segment is controlled by the pulse durations. The MS NWs show both the characteristic surface plasmon absorption and catalytic properties of CoPt3 and the strong ferromagnetic properties of Co that are affected by the interactions between Co and CoPt3. Furthermore, the ferromagnetic, optical, and catalytic properties can be well modulated by mainly changing the length of the Co and CoPt3 segments, respectively. Such multifunction of MS nanowires can be exploited for recyclable catalysts and bioassays based on their magnetic-catalytic and magnetic-optical properties, respectively.