Determination of higenamine in common natural spices by ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry.

Higenamine (HG) is a β receptor agonist and was explicitly added to the Prohibited List of the World Anti-Doping Agency in 2017. This compound is prohibited in both in- and out-of-competition athletes and falls under the category of nonthreshold substances. Because of HG presence in numerous plants, as evidenced by a growing body of research data, an exception was made for HG in the TD2017MRPL document, in which adverse analytical findings (AAFs) were not reported if the urinary HG concentration was less than 10 ng/mL.

Co-fermentation of titanium-flocculated-sludge with food waste towards simultaneous water purification and resource recovery.

Recovery of resources from domestic sewage and food waste has always been an international-thorny problem. Titanium-based flocculation can achieve high-efficient destabilization, quick concentration and separation of organic matter from sewage to sludge. This study proposed co-fermentation of the titanium-flocculated sludge (Ti-loaded sludge) and food waste towards resource recovery by converting organic matter to value-added volatile fatty acids (VFAs) and inorganic matter to struvite and TiO nanoparticles.

Aspiration dynamics generate robust predictions in heterogeneous populations.

Update rules, which describe how individuals adjust their behavior over time, affect the outcome of social interactions. Theoretical studies have shown that evolutionary outcomes are sensitive to model details when update rules are imitation-based but are robust when update rules are self-evaluation based. However, studies of self-evaluation based rules have focused on homogeneous population structures where each individual has the same number of neighbors.

Impacts of preferences on the emergence of cooperation.

Behavior decision making, where individuals can efficiently express their preferences for all options, has a great impact on cooperation. Hereby, we institute a minimal model in well-mixed populations where whether and how to sanction defectors are decided by cooperators via different decision-making mechanisms. The results illustrate that whether cooperation can outbreak depends on the cooperators' preferences for sanction and complying with the electoral outcome.

Evolution of cooperation under punishment.

Punishment has been considered as an effective mechanism for promoting and sustaining cooperation. In most existing models, punishment always comes as a third strategy alongside cooperation and defection, and it is commonly assumed to be executed based on individual decision rules rather than collective decision rules. Differently from previous works, we employ a democratic procedure by which cooperators cast votes independently and simultaneously for whether to impose punishment on defectors, and we establish a relationship between the cooperators' willingness to punish defectors (WTPD) and whether the punishment is inflicted on defectors.

Insurance optimizes complex interactive and cooperative behaviors in public goods games.

Global cooperation is urgently needed to prevent risks of world-wide extreme events and disasters for sustainable development. In human societies, however, there exists bias toward interacting with partners with similar characteristics, but not contributing globally. We study how complex interactive behaviors evolve under risks through proposing a threshold public goods game model.

Evolving synergetic interactions.

Cooperators forgo their own interests to benefit others. This reduces their fitness and thus cooperators are not likely to spread based on natural selection. Nonetheless, cooperation is widespread on every level of biological organization ranging from bacterial communities to human society.

Evolutionary dynamics of general group interactions in structured populations.

The evolution of populations is influenced by many factors, and the simple classical models have been developed in a number of important ways. Both population structure and multiplayer interactions have been shown to significantly affect the evolution of important properties, such as the level of cooperation or of aggressive behavior. Here we combine these two key factors and develop the evolutionary dynamics of general group interactions in structured populations represented by regular graphs.

Aspiration dynamics in structured population acts as if in a well-mixed one.

Understanding the evolution of human interactive behaviors is important. Recent experimental results suggest that human cooperation in spatial structured population is not enhanced as predicted in previous works, when payoff-dependent imitation updating rules are used. This constraint opens up an avenue to shed light on how humans update their strategies in real life.

Aspiration dynamics of multi-player games in finite populations.

On studying strategy update rules in the framework of evolutionary game theory, one can differentiate between imitation processes and aspiration-driven dynamics. In the former case, individuals imitate the strategy of a more successful peer. In the latter case, individuals adjust their strategies based on a comparison of their pay-offs from the evolutionary game to a value they aspire, called the level of aspiration.

Evolution of global cooperation driven by risks.

Globalization facilitates our communication with each other, while it magnifies problems such as overharvesting of natural resources and human-induced climate change. Thus people all over the world are involved in a global social dilemma which calls for worldwide cooperation to reduce the risks of these extreme events and disasters. A collective target (threshold) is required to prevent such events.