信息工程最新文献

As the global population continues to grow, the enormous stress on our environment and resources is becoming impossible to ignore. A focus on producing and consuming as cheaply as possible has created an economy in which objects are briefly used and then discarded as waste, featuring a linear lifecycle that creates an enormous amount of waste. The alternative to the linear economy “take-make-waste” is called the “circular economy”. Under this paradigm, materials are recycled to build new products or components that are designed and built to promote their reuse and refurbishment. This assures the continuous (re-)exploitation of existing resources, reducing the extraction of new raw materials. However, customers often reject these reused or refurbished products under the suspicion that they do not meet the same usability, safety, or performance levels of new products. In this sense, trustworthy records of historical details of refurbished products could increase consumers’ confidence in products and components of the “circular economy”, prioritizing trustworthiness, reliability, and transparency. This work presents a new certification tool based on blockchain technology to guarantee trusted, accurate, transparent, and traceable lifecycle information of products and their components and to generate trustworthy certificates to probe refurbished product historical details. This tool aims to enhance refurbished product visibility by creating the basis for making the circular economy a reality in any domain.

The emergence of advanced biotechnologies has intensified in recent years. The rapid development of these biotechnologies has had a wide and profound impact globally, with the majority on the frontier of biosecurity technologies. The global biosecurity situation is currently highly challenging, with the characteristics of internationalization, extremely serious harm, and complex development. The misuse and abuse of biotechnologies are common, which thereby endanger biosecurity. The international community and governments have attached great importance to cutting-edge biotechnologies and are implementing laws and regulations to control and prevent biosecurity-related influences. By tracking the frontier progress of the new technologies generated from gene editing, gene drives, synthetic biology, and related cross-disciplines as applied in the biosecurity field, we analyzed the development trends in biotechnologies and their potential influence. On the one hand, this paper proposes that there is an urgent need for global cooperation to formulate management, control strategies, and measures for cutting-edge technologies in biosecurity to jointly promote their sound development. On the other hand, the international community should jointly shoulder the responsibility for safeguarding biosecurity and restrict the biotechnologies to rational applications within legal and ethical frameworks. This paper aims to provide a reference for the prevention of misuse and abuse of biotechnologies and support global cooperation in biosecurity governance.

Bedaquiline resistance is increasingly observed in the treatment of rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis (TB), yet standardized regimens for managing bedaquiline-resistant TB are lacking. Studies indicate a high proportion of bedaquiline-resistant cases have previously been treated for TB, and often involve strains resistant to quinolones. Regular monitoring of the culture status in patients receiving bedaquiline resistance treatment is advised. Methods such as experimental evolution, protein modeling, genome sequencing, and phenotypic analysis have been instrumental in identifying the mechanisms of bedaquiline resistance. Specifically, variants in the Rv0678 transcriptional repressor of the MmpS5-MmpL5 efflux system are linked to this type of resistance. Bayesian probability estimates show promise in determining the genotypic–phenotypic association for bedaquiline resistance, suggesting potential utility in clinical practice. Future research should explore the practical application of Bayesian probabilities in managing bedaquiline resistance. Sequencing-based technologies are anticipated to play a vital role in the early detection and management of drug-resistant TB strains.