Capital Normal University

About: Capital Normal University is a education organization based out in Beijing, China. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Terahertz radiation & Quantum entanglement. The organization has 11441 authors who have published 11988 publications receiving 159071 citations. The organization is also known as: Shǒudū Shīfàn Dàxué.

Characterization of land subsidence induced by groundwater withdrawals in the plain of Beijing city, China

Abstract: The plain of Beijing city in China suffers severe land subsidence owing to groundwater overdraft. The maximum subsidence rate could reach 6 cm/year through the 2000s. An integrated subsidence-monitoring program was designed, including levelling survey, borehole extensometers and multilayer monitoring of groundwater level, with the aim to understand both hydrological and mechanical processes and to characterize the land subsidence. From multilayer compaction monitoring, the major compression layers were identified. The major strata contributing to compression deformation are the second (64.5–82.3 m) and third (102–117 m) aquitards, which contributed around 39 % of the total subsidence. Meanwhile, irrecoverable deformations were also observed in the second (82.3–102 m) and third (117–148 m) confined aquifers; they exhibit elasto-plastic mechanical behavior, which is attributed to the thin beds of silt or silty clay. Stress–strain analysis and oedometer tests were conducted to study the aquifer-system response to pumping and to estimate the specific storage of the major hydrogeologic units. The results reveal the creep behavior and elasto-plastic, visco-elasto-plastic mechanical behavior of the aquitards at different depths. The compressibility of the aquitards in the inelastic range is about one order of magnitude larger than for the elastic range.

Electroconvulsive therapy selectively enhanced feedforward connectivity from fusiform face area to amygdala in major depressive disorder.

Abstract: Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) has been widely used to treat the major depressive disorder (MDD), especially for treatment-resistant depression. However, the neuroanatomical basis of ECT remains an open problem. In our study, we combined the voxel-based morphology (VBM), resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) and granger causality analysis (GCA) to identify the longitudinal changes of structure and function in 23 MDD patients before and after ECT. In addition, multivariate pattern analysis using linear support vector machine (SVM) was applied to classify 23 depressed patients from 25 gender, age and education matched healthy controls. VBM analysis revealed the increased gray matter volume of left superficial amygdala after ECT. The following RSFC and GCA analyses further identified the enhanced functional connectivity between left amygdala and left fusiform face area (FFA) and effective connectivity from FFA to amygdala after ECT, respectively. Moreover, SVM-based classification achieved an accuracy of 83.33%, a sensitivity of 82.61% and a specificity of 84% by leave-one-out cross-validation. Our findings indicated that ECT may facilitate the neurogenesis of amygdala and selectively enhance the feedforward cortical-subcortical connectivity from FFA to amygdala. This study may shed new light on the pathological mechanism of MDD and may provide the neuroanatomical basis for ECT.