Waring-Goldbach Problem: One Square, Four Cubes and Higher Powers

Let ${\mathcal{P}}_r$ denote an almost-prime with at most $r$ prime factors, counted according to multiplicity. In this paper, it is proved that, for $12⩽b⩽35$ and for every sufficiently large odd integer $N$, the equation \begin{equation*} N=x^2+p_1^3+p_2^3+p_3^3+p_4^3+p_5^4+p_6^b \end{equation*} is solvable with $x$ being an almost-prime ${\mathcal{P}}_{r(b)}$ and the other variables primes, where $r(b)$ is defined in the Theorem. This result constitutes an improvement upon that of L"u and Mu.