Food nutrition estimation aims to predict calories, portion size, and nutrient composition from dietary observations, supporting health monitoring and personalized nutrition management. Accurate estimation remains difficult because food appearance often provides limited information about physical scale, hidden ingredients, cooking processes, and nutrient density. Multimodal sensing and learning provide new opportunities to reduce these ambiguities by integrating visual, geometric, semantic, and sensor-based information. This paper surveys multimodal information fusion for food nutrition estimation. Different from existing surveys that mainly organize food analysis studies by tasks, input modalities, or model architectures, this survey adopts a modality-aware and problem-oriented taxonomy. It explains how different modalities support key estimation problems, including portion and scale estimation, hidden-composition inference, nutrient aggregation, and physicochemical analysis. Existing methods are classified into four categories: visual-geometric multimodal learning, semantic and knowledge-augmented estimation, compositional multimodal reasoning, and other multimodal sensing. Representative methods, datasets, evaluation metrics, applications, and Nutrition5k results are reviewed and compared. Current limitations and future research directions are then discussed from the perspectives of accuracy, interpretability, robustness, and deployment. This survey provides a structured reference for developing reliable multimodal nutrition estimation systems.
With the continuous advancement of digitalization, rural e-commerce has emerged as a burgeoning phenomenon. This study explores the impact of rural e-commerce on land-augmenting technological progress—a specific form of biased technological progress focused on enhancing land productivity while controlling for other inputs—using China’s county-level data from 2010 to 2021. Taking the establishment of "Taobao Villages" as a proxy for rural e-commerce development, we employ a combination of empirical methods, including difference-in-differences, random forest, threshold regression, and mediating effect models, to analyze the relationship, its heterogeneity, and underlying mechanisms. The findings reveal that rural e-commerce significantly enhances land-augmenting technological progress. Notably, such technological progress led to a reduction equivalent to 0.35% of commonly cultivated arable land in 2021, highlighting its tangible contribution to land-use efficiency in the face of mounting environmental and demographic pressures. This positive impact is further amplified by improvements in knowledge production efficiency. The mechanisms driving these effects include promoting urbanization, labor mobility, and creating local non-agricultural employment opportunities. Moreover, the study underscores the vital role of land-augmenting technological progress in fostering sustainable local agricultural development, which includes increasing per capita agricultural production value and productivity, as well as narrowing the urban-rural income gap.
Sea cucumber male gonads are valuable by-products of sea cucumber processing. However, it remains unknown whether sea cucumber male gonads are capable of resisting testicular damage and spermatogenesis disorder. Animal experiments showed that sea cucumber male gonad peptide (SCSP) supplementation can promote the quality of sperm and the integrity of the blood-testis barrier (BTB) and maintain the normal morphological structure of both the testicles and epididymides. In addition, SCSP reduced testicular oxidative stress and decreased serum TNF-alpha and IL-6 levels by 42.27% and 22.60%, respectively. Immunohistochemical staining showed that SCSP facilitated the expression of Bcl-2, ZO-1, and occludin in testes. Correspondingly, SCSP significantly promoted the expression of Bcl-xl, tubulin, beta-catenin, and connexin 43 and decreased the expression of Bax, Bad, Caspase-3, and p-p38 MAPK. The findings of this study suggested that SCSP alleviated testicular damage and spermatogenesis disorder not only by inhibiting inflammation and cell apoptosis but also by promoting the recovery of the BTB structure by restraining the p38 MAPK signaling pathway. The findings provide potential value for exploiting future food in SCSP applications. (c) 2027 The authors. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is an open standard for representing geometric and semantic information in building information modeling (BIM), which is widely used to support the development of digital twins (DTs). However, IFC has limited capabilities for handling heterogeneous operational data, hindering the integration of DTs into workflows such as structural health monitoring (SHM). This paper presents a database-driven IFC framework that stores IFC models and semantic data in a structured database. The IFC representation is extended to incorporate SHM and inspection information, enabling traceable associations between monitoring records and their corresponding IFC components, with data access provided through a RESTful API. The framework is validated using an office building and a simply supported bridge. Benchmarks demonstrate the relational approach’s efficiency in global counts, property retrieval, and sensor-oriented queries. The framework has the potential to provide a unified, extensible data foundation for lifecycle-oriented digital twins of existing structures.
To improve the high-value utilization of bamboo shoot shells (BSS), a two-step strategy combining sodium chlorite pretreatment and hydrolysis with a thermostable xylanase from Thermomyces lanuginosus Q231 was developed to produce xylooligosaccharides (XOS). The xylanase exhibited an optimum pH of 6.0 and an optimum temperature of 70 degrees C, while maintaining good catalytic performance at 50-65 degrees C. The effects of sodium chlorite concentration (1%-8%, w/v) on the chemical composition, structural characteristics, and enzymatic hydrolysis performance of BSS were investigated. The results showed that sodium chlorite selectively removed lignin in a concentration-dependent manner, thereby increasing hemicellulose exposure and xylanase accessibility while largely preserving the cellulose crystalline structure. The optimal pretreatment concentration was 6% (w/v), at which the XOS yield reached 22.30%. HPLC analysis showed that xylotetraose (X4) and xylopentaose (X5) were the major components, and the xylose/XOS ratio remained at a low level of 0.06 after 2 h of enzymatic hydrolysis, indicating high product selectivity. Under the optimized conditions, 50.50 g of XOS was obtained from 1 kg of pretreated BSS. These results suggest that the proposed process has strong potential for the valorization of BSS and offer valuable insights for further research on enzymatic XOS production from lignocellulosic residues.
