Prepregs of carbon fibre-reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites containing carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been successfully produced based on a solventless prepregging process. This work provides one of ...the most comprehensive evaluation to date of the processing and cure parameters affected by the incorporation of CNTs in CFRP prepreg manufacturing. The results confirmed that high-speed shear mixing and functionalisation of CNT are effective in lowering the viscosity of the CNT-epoxy nanocomposites. Based on the findings obtained from the rheological studies, suitable processing parameters are chosen for lab-scale production of CFRP composite prepregs. The effects of surfactant-treated CNTs on cure behaviour of epoxy and CFRP prepreg are evaluated. The catalytic activity of CNTs is negligible for a 0.5
wt% filler content whereas it becomes prominent when the CNT content is increased to 1.0
wt%. The degree of cure is lower for the prepregs containing 0.5–1.0
wt% CNTs than those without or containing a lower CNT content.
Regular expression matching becomes indispensable elements of Internet of Things network security. However, traditional ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) search engine is unable to handle ...patterns with wildcards, as it precisely tracks only one active state with single transition. This paper proposes a promising simultaneous pattern matching methodology for wildcard patterns by two separated engines to represent discrete finite automata. A key preprocessing to encode possible postfix pattern by a unique key ensures that follow-up patterns can accurately traverse all possible matches with limited hardware resources. This approach is practical and scalable for achieving good performance and low space consumption in network security, and it can be applicable to any regular expressions even with multiwildcard patterns. The experimental results demonstrate that this scheme can efficiently and accurately recognize wildcard patterns by simultaneously tracking only two active states. By adopting SRAM TCAM in the proposed architecture, the energy consumption is reduced to around 39%, compared with the energy consumption using a computing system that contains a large memory lookup and comparison overhead.
Ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM)-based search engines generally need a priority encoder (PE) to select the highest priority match entry for resolving the multiple match problem due to the ...don't care (X) features of TCAM. In contemporary network security, TCAM-based search engines are widely used in regular expression matching across multiple packets to protect against attacks, such as by viruses and spam. However, the use of PE results in increased energy consumption for pattern updates and search operations. Instead of using PEs to determine the match, our solution is a three-phase search operation that utilizes the length information of the matched patterns to decide the longest pattern match data. This paper proposes a promising memory technology called priority-decision in memory (PDM), which eliminates the need for PEs and removes restrictions on ordering, implying that patterns can be stored in an arbitrary order without sorting their lengths. Moreover, we present a sequential input-state (SIS) scheme to disable the mass of redundant search operations in state segments on the basis of an analysis distribution of hex signatures in a virus database. Experimental results demonstrate that the PDM-based technology can improve update energy consumption of nonvolatile TCAM (nvTCAM) search engines by 36%-67%, because most of the energy in these search engines is used to reorder. By adopting the SIS-based method to avoid unnecessary search operations in a TCAM array, the search energy reduction is around 64% of nvTCAM search engines.
We investigated the storage lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) before and after the first dose of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine and the association between pre-vaccinated overactive ...bladder (OAB) and the worsening of storage LUTS following COVID-19 vaccination. This cross-sectional study in a third-level hospital in Taiwan used the validated pre- and post-vaccinated Overactive Bladder Symptom Score (OABSS). Diagnosis of OAB was made using pre-vaccinated OABSS. The deterioration of storage LUTS was assessed as the increased score of OABSS following vaccination. Of 889 subjects, up to 13.4% experienced worsened storage LUTS after vaccination. OAB was significantly associated with an increased risk of worsening urinary urgency (p = 0.030), frequency (p = 0.027), and seeking medical assistance due to urinary adverse events (p < 0.001) after vaccination. The OAB group faced significantly greater changes in OABSS-urgency (p = 0.003), OABSS-frequency (p = 0.025), and total OABSS (p = 0.014) after vaccination compared to those observed in the non-OAB group. Multivariate regression revealed that pre-vaccinated OAB (p = 0.003) was a risk for the deterioration of storage LUTS. In conclusion, storage LUTS may deteriorate after vaccination. OAB was significantly associated with higher risk and greater changes in worsening storage LUTS. Storage LUTS should be closely monitored after COVID-19 vaccination, especially in those OAB patients.
The second most common male cancer is prostate cancer (PCa), which has a high tendency for bone metastasis. Long non-coding RNAs, including TMPO-AS1, play a crucial role in PCa progression. However, ...TMPO-AS1's function in PCa bone metastasis (BM) and its underlying molecular mechanisms are unclear. Herein, we found that the long transcript of TMPO-AS1 (TMPO-AS1
) was upregulated in PCa tissues with bone metastasis, and overexpression of TMPO-AS1
correlated with advanced clinicopathological features and reduced BM-free survival in patients with PCa. Upregulated TMPO-AS1
promoted, whereas downregulated TMPO-AS1
inhibited, the PCa cell bone metastatic capacity in vitro and in vivo. Mechanistically, TMPO-AS1
was demonstrated to act as a scaffold, that strengthened the interaction of casein kinase 2 alpha 1 (CSNK2A1) and DEAD-box helicase 3 X-linked (DDX3X), and activated the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway, thus promoting BM of PCa. Moreover, upregulation of TMPO-AS1
in PCa resulted from transcription elongation modulated by general transcription factor IIF subunit 2 (GTF2F2). Collectively, our study provides critical insights into the role of TMPO-AS1
in PCa BM via Wnt/β-catenin signaling, identifying TMPO-AS1
as a candidate marker of PCa bone metastasis prognosis and therapeutic target.
Network intrusion detection is an indispensable defense in the critical era fulling of cyberattacks. However, it faces a severe class imbalanced issue, and most of the researches are conducted on ...simulated data. Therefore, this work introduces a hierarchical ensemble architecture with machine learning approaches. It is trained on the latest and real-world dataset to solve the above problems. The experiments show that we outperform state-of-the-art methods on real network traffic data.
Background
Bone metastasis is the leading cause of tumor‐related death in prostate cancer (PCa) patients. Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been well documented to be involved in the progression of ...multiple cancers. Nevertheless, the role of lncRNAs in PCa bone metastasis remains largely unclear.
Methods
The expression of prostate cancer‐associated transcripts was analyzed in published datasets and further verified in clinical samples and cell lines by RT‐qPCR and in situ hybridization assays. Colony formation assay, MTT assay, cell cycle analysis, EdU assay, Transwell migration and invasion assays, wound healing assay, and in vivo experiments were carried out to investigate the function of prostate cancer‐associated transcript 6 (PCAT6) in bone metastasis and tumor growth of PCa. Bioinformatic analysis, RNA pull‐down, and RIP assays were conducted to identify the proteins binding to PCAT6 and the potential targets of PCAT6. The therapeutic potential of targeting PCAT6 by antisense oligonucleotides (ASO) was further explored in vivo.
Results
PCAT6 was upregulated in PCa tissues with bone metastasis and increased PCAT6 expression predicted poor prognosis in PCa patients. Functional experiments found that PCAT6 knockdown significantly inhibited PCa cell invasion, migration, and proliferation in vitro, as well as bone metastasis and tumor growth in vivo. Mechanistically, METTL3‐mediated m6A modification contributed to PCAT6 upregulation in an IGF2BP2‐dependent manner. Furthermore, PCAT6 upregulated IGF1R expression by enhancing IGF1R mRNA stability through the PCAT6/IGF2BP2/IGF1R RNA‐protein three‐dimensional complex. Importantly, PCAT6 inhibition by ASO in vivo showed therapeutic potential against bone metastasis in PCa. Finally, the clinical correlation of METTL3, IGF2BP2, IGF1R, and PCAT6 was further demonstrated in PCa tissues and cells.
Conclusions
Our study uncovers a novel molecular mechanism by which the m6A‐induced PCAT6/IGF2BP2/IGF1R axis promotes PCa bone metastasis and tumor growth, suggesting that PCAT6 may serve as a promising prognostic marker and therapeutic target against bone‐metastatic PCa.
1. PCAT6 is upregulated in bone metastasis‐positive prostate cancer and PCAT6 upregulation correlates with poor prognosis in patients with prostate cancer.
2. PCAT6 promotes prostate cancer bone metastasis by stabilizing IGF1R mRNA through interacting with IGF2BP2.
3. METTL3‐mediated m6A modification leads to the upregulation of PCAT6 in an IGF2BP2‐dependent manner.
•HPC incorporating coarse aggregate are prepared.•Effects of coarse aggregate and steel fibre contents on mechanical properties are explored.•The synergistic effect between coarse aggregate and steel ...fiber is discussed.
This study investigated the effects of the coarse aggregate and steel fibre contents on the mechanical properties of high performance concrete (HPC) at an ambient curing temperature. HPC bulk materials were formed using four replacement levels by volume of mortar (0%, 16%, 28% and 38%) and four steel fibre volume dosages (0%, 1%, 2% and 3%). The mechanical properties (e.g., compressive strength, splitting tensile strength and flexural behaviour) and the synergistic effect between coarse aggregate and steel fibre were studied. The results indicated that compressive and splitting tensile strength increased as the coarse aggregate replacement level increased from 0% to 28%, but decreased with a further increase in coarse aggregate content up to 38%. The inclusion of coarse aggregate also weakened the flexural behaviour of HPC, especially in terms of the peak flexural load, peak deflection, toughness and post-peak ductility. Furthermore, the steel fibre volume dosage had a limited effect on compressive strength but significantly enhanced the splitting tensile strength and flexural behaviour. Finally, this study discusses the mechanism of synergy between coarse aggregate and steel fibre based on scanning electron microscopic observations of the HPC microstructure. These research outcomes pave a way toward prospective engineering applications of HPC.
To alleviate high energy dissipation of unnecessary snooping accesses, snoop filters have been designed to reduce snoop lookups. These filters have the problem of decreasing filtering efficiency, and ...thus usually rely on partial or whole filter reset by detecting block evictions. Unfortunately, the reset conditions occur infrequently or unevenly (called
passive filter deletion
). This work proposes the concept of revitalized snoop filter (RSF) design, which can actively renew the destination filter by employing a generation wrapping-around scheme for various reference behaviors. We further utilize a sampling mechanism for RSF to timely trigger precise filter revitalizations, so that unnecessary RSF flushing can be minimized. The proposed RSF can be integrated to various existent inclusive snoop filters with only a minor change to their designs. We evaluate our proposed design and demonstrate that RSF eliminates 58.6% of snoop energy compared to JETTY on average while inducing only 6.5% of revitalization energy overhead. In addition, RSF eliminates 45.5% of snoop energy compared to stream registers on average and only induces 2.5% of revitalization energy overhead. Overall, these RSFs reduce the total L2 cache energy consumption by 52.1% (58.6% -- 6.5%) as compared to JETTY and by 43% (45.5% -- 2.5%) as compared to stream registers. Furthermore, RSF improves the overall performance by 1% to 1.4% on average compared to JETTY and stream registers for various benchmark suites.
TCAM-based search engines are widely used in regular expression matching across multiple packets. However, the use of priority encoder results in increased energy consumption of pattern updates and ...search operations. This work, proposes a promising memory technology, called Priority-Decision in Memory (PDM), which eliminates the need for priority encoders and removes restrictions on ordering, meaning that patterns can be stored in an arbitrary order without sorting their lengths. Moreover, we present a Sequential Input-State Search (SIS) scheme to disable the mass of redundant search operations in state segments, based on the analysis distribution of hex signatures in a virus database. Experimental results demonstrate that PDM-based technology can improve update energy consumption of nvTCAM search engines by 36%~67% because most of the energy in the latter is used to reorder. By adopting the SIS-based method to avoid unnecessarily search operations in a TCAM array, the search energy reduction is around 64% of nvTCAM search engines.