A cup of tea can be made in one of the two ways: the milk or the tea infusion was first added to the cup. The Lady Tasting Tea experiment consists in mixing eight cups of tea, four in one way and ...four in the other, and presenting them to the Lady for judgment in a random order. This short article presents a Bayesian Network (BN) for modelling the Lady Tasting Tea experiment that provides a comprehensive perspective in inferential analysis of all the data samples possibly generated from the experiment. More specifically, with respect to a prior distribution of three possible levels (pure guessing, 75% sure, and 100% sure) of the Lady’s ability in correctly deciding how a served cup of tea has been made, the proposed BN model enables us to calculate the posterior probabilities of any judgment outcomes possibly made by the Lady.
Accumulating evidence suggests that spinal cord astrocytes play an important role in neuropathic pain sensitization by releasing astrocytic mediators (e.g. cytokines, chemokines and growth factors). ...However, it remains unclear how astrocytes control the release of astrocytic mediators and sustain late-phase neuropathic pain. Astrocytic connexin-43 (now known as GJ1) has been implicated in gap junction and hemichannel communication of cytosolic contents through the glial syncytia and to the extracellular space, respectively. Connexin-43 also plays an essential role in facilitating the development of neuropathic pain, yet the mechanism for this contribution remains unknown. In this study, we investigated whether nerve injury could upregulate connexin-43 to sustain late-phase neuropathic pain by releasing chemokine from spinal astrocytes. Chronic constriction injury elicited a persistent upregulation of connexin-43 in spinal astrocytes for >3 weeks. Spinal (intrathecal) injection of carbenoxolone (a non-selective hemichannel blocker) and selective connexin-43 blockers (connexin-43 mimetic peptides (43)Gap26 and (37,43)Gap27), as well as astroglial toxin but not microglial inhibitors, given 3 weeks after nerve injury, effectively reduced mechanical allodynia, a cardinal feature of late-phase neuropathic pain. In cultured astrocytes, TNF-α elicited marked release of the chemokine CXCL1, and the release was blocked by carbenoxolone, Gap26/Gap27, and connexin-43 small interfering RNA. TNF-α also increased connexin-43 expression and hemichannel activity, but not gap junction communication in astrocyte cultures prepared from cortices and spinal cords. Spinal injection of TNF-α-activated astrocytes was sufficient to induce persistent mechanical allodynia, and this allodynia was suppressed by CXCL1 neutralization, CXCL1 receptor (CXCR2) antagonist, and pretreatment of astrocytes with connexin-43 small interfering RNA. Furthermore, nerve injury persistently increased excitatory synaptic transmission (spontaneous excitatory postsynaptic currents) in spinal lamina IIo nociceptive synapses in the late phase, and this increase was suppressed by carbenoxolone and Gap27, and recapitulated by CXCL1. Together, our findings demonstrate a novel mechanism of astrocytic connexin-43 to enhance spinal cord synaptic transmission and maintain neuropathic pain in the late-phase via releasing chemokines.
Background
The impacts of chronic airway diseases on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) are far from understood.
Objective
To explore the influence of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary ...disease (COPD) comorbidity on disease expression and outcomes, and the potential underlying mechanisms in COVID‐19 patients.
Methods
A total of 961 hospitalized COVID‐19 patients with a definite clinical outcome (death or discharge) were retrospectively enrolled. Demographic and clinical information were extracted from the medical records. Lung tissue sections from patients suffering from lung cancer were used for immunohistochemistry study of angiotensin‐converting enzyme II (ACE2) expression. BEAS‐2B cell line was stimulated with various cytokines.
Results
In this cohort, 21 subjects (2.2%) had COPD and 22 (2.3%) had asthma. After adjusting for confounding factors, COPD patients had higher risk of developing severe illness (OR: 23.433; 95% CI 1.525‐360.135; P < .01) and acute respiratory distress syndrome (OR: 19.762; 95% CI 1.461‐267.369; P = .025) than asthmatics. COPD patients, particularly those with severe COVID‐19, had lower counts of CD4+ T and CD8+ T cells and B cells and higher levels of TNF‐α, IL‐2 receptor, IL‐10, IL‐8, and IL‐6 than asthmatics. COPD patients had increased, whereas asthmatics had decreased ACE2 protein expression in lower airways, compared with that in control subjects without asthma and COPD. IL‐4 and IL‐13 downregulated, but TNF‐α, IL‐12, and IL‐17A upregulated ACE2 expression in BEAS‐2B cells.
Conclusion
Patients with asthma and COPD likely have different risk of severe COVID‐19, which may be associated with different ACE2 expression.
After adjusting for confounding factors, COVID‐19 patients with COPD have higher risks of developing severe illness and acute respiratory distress syndrome than COVID‐19 patients with asthma. COPD patients have increased, whereas asthmatics have decreased ACE2 protein expression in lower airways, compared with that in control subjects without asthma and COPD. IL‐17A, TNF‐α, and IL‐12 promote, while IL‐4 and IL‐13 suppress ACE2 expression in airway BEAS‐2B cells. Abbreviations: ACE2, angiotensin‐converting enzyme II; ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome; BEAS‐2B, adenovirus‐12 SV40 hybrid virus transformed bronchial epithelial cells; COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; COVID‐19, coronavirus disease 2019.
Internet of Things (IoT) anomaly detection is significant due to its fundamental roles of securing modern critical infrastructures, such as falsified data injection detection and transmission line ...faults diagnostic in smart grids. Researchers have proposed various detection methods fostered by machine learning (ML) techniques. Federated learning (FL), as a promising distributed ML paradigm, has been employed recently to improve detection performance due to its advantages of privacy-preserving and lower latency. However, existing FL-based methods still suffer from efficiency, robustness, and security challenges. To address these problems, in this article, we initially introduce a blockchain-empowered decentralized and asynchronous FL framework for anomaly detection in IoT systems, which ensures data integrity and prevents single-point failure while improving the efficiency. Further, we design an improved differentially private FL based on generative adversarial nets, aiming to optimize data utility throughout the training process. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first system to employ a decentralized FL approach with privacy-preserving for IoT anomaly detection. Simulation results on the real-world dataset demonstrate the superior performance from aspects of robustness, accuracy, and fast convergence while maintaining high level of privacy and security protection.
Smart cities are expected to improve the quality of daily life, promote sustainable development, and improve the functionality of urban systems. Now that many smart systems have been implemented, ...security and privacy issues have become a major challenge that requires effective countermeasures. However, traditional cybersecurity protection strategies cannot be applied directly to these intelligent applications because of the heterogeneity, scalability, and dynamic characteristics of smart cities. Furthermore, it is necessary to be aware of security and privacy threats when designing and implementing new mechanisms or systems. Motivated by these factors, we survey the current situations of smart cities with respect to security and privacy to provide an overview of both the academic and industrial fields and to pave the way for further exploration. Specifically, this survey begins with an overview of smart cities to provide an integrated context for readers. Then, we discuss the privacy and security issues in current smart applications along with the corresponding requirements for building a stable and secure smart city. In the next step, we summarize the existing protection technologies. Finally, we present open research challenges and identify some future research directions.
We present pion and kaon parton distribution functions from a global QCD analysis of the experimental data within the framework of dynamical parton model. We use the DGLAP equations with ...parton–parton recombination corrections and the valence input of uniform distribution which maximizes the information entropy. At our input scale
Q
0
2
, there are no sea quark and gluon distributions. All the sea quarks and gluons of the pion and the kaon are completely generated from the parton splitting processes. The mass-dependent parton splitting kernel is applied for the strange quark distribution in the kaon. The obtained valence quark and sea quark distributions at high
Q
2
(
Q
2
>
5
GeV
2
) are compatible with the existed experimental measurements. Furthermore, the asymptotic behaviours of parton distribution functions at small and large
x
have been studied for both the pion and the kaon. Lastly, the first three moments of parton distributions at high
Q
2
scale are calculated, which are consistent with other theoretical predictions.
The breeding and large-scale adoption of hybrid seeds is an important achievement in agriculture. Rice hybrid seed production uses cytoplasmic male sterile lines or photoperiod/thermo-sensitive genic ...male sterile lines (PTGMS) as female parent. Cytoplasmic male sterile lines are propagated via cross-pollination by corresponding maintainer lines, whereas PTGMS lines are propagated via self-pollination under environmental conditions restoring male fertility. Despite huge successes, both systems have their intrinsic drawbacks. Here, we constructed a rice male sterility system using a nuclear gene named Oryza sativa No Pollen 1 (OsNP1). OsNP1 encodes a putative glucose–methanol–choline oxidoreductase regulating tapetum degeneration and pollen exine formation; it is specifically expressed in the tapetum and miscrospores. The osnp1 mutant plant displays normal vegetative growth but complete male sterility insensitive to environmental conditions. OsNP1 was coupled with an α-amylase gene to devitalize transgenic pollen and the red fluorescence protein (DsRed) gene to mark transgenic seed and transformed into the osnp1 mutant. Self-pollination of the transgenic plant carrying a single hemizygous transgene produced nontransgenic male sterile and transgenic fertile seeds in 1:1 ratio that can be sorted out based on the red fluorescence coded by DsRed. Cross-pollination of the fertile transgenic plants to the nontransgenic male sterile plants propagated the male sterile seeds of high purity. The male sterile line was crossed with ∼1,200 individual rice germplasms available. Approximately 85% of the F1s outperformed their parents in per plant yield, and 10% out-yielded the best local cultivars, indicating that the technology is promising in hybrid rice breeding and production.
In this work, an improved moth-flame optimization algorithm is proposed to alleviate the problems of premature convergence and convergence to local minima. From the perspective of diversity, an ...inertia weight of diversity feedback control is introduced in the moth-flame optimization to balance the algorithm’s exploitation and global search abilities. Furthermore, a small probability mutation after the position update stage is added to improve the optimization performance. The performance of the proposed algorithm is extensively evaluated on a suite of CEC’2014 series benchmark functions and four constrained engineering optimization problems. The results of the proposed algorithm are compared with the ones of other improved algorithms presented in literatures. It is observed that the proposed method has a superior performance to improve the convergence ability of the algorithm. In addition, the proposed algorithm assists in escaping the local minima.
We present the polarized parton distribution functions from a QCD analysis of the worldwide polarized deep inelastic scattering data, based on the dynamical parton distribution model. All the sea ...quarks and gluons are dynamically generated from QCD radiations, with the nonperturbative input comprising only the polarized valence quark distributions. This approach leads to a simple parametrization, which has only seven free parameters. In the analysis, we apply the DGLAP equations with parton-parton recombination corrections. For the first step, the DGLAP equations, parton-parton recombination corrections, and experimental observable g1 are all evaluated at the leading order. The parameterized nonperturbative input at an extremely low Q02 reproduces well the spin-dependent structure functions measured at high Q2. Comparisons with experimental observations and some other polarized parton distribution functions are also shown. Our results are in good agreement with the experimental data and consistent with some other parameterized models. Furthermore, our analysis presents the positive polarized gluon distribution and it suggests that the gluon distribution plays an important role to the proton spin content. The polarized antiquark distributions are non-zero at high Q2 but quite small compared to polarized valence quark distributions, based on this dynamical parton model analysis. This analysis gives smaller statistical uncertainties for the polarized sea quark and gluon distributions, thanks to the fewer free parameters used for the parametrization of the initial polarized PDFs.
Motivated by recent observations in the WASA-at-COSY detector, we investigate the η3He nucleus using the ηNNN few body method. We construct an effective s-wave energy dependent ηN potential that ...reproduces the ηN subthreshold scattering amplitude as per the 2005 Green-Wycech model, yielding the η separation energy and decay width of 0.19 MeV and 1.71 MeV, respectively. Additionally, we construct various sets of effective s-wave energy independent ηN potentials, where the corresponding complex scattering lengths (aηN) are fallen within the range provided in most theoretical models. Our investigation aims to explore the potential existence of a bound η3He nucleus under these scattering lengths, and to calculate the resulting binding energies and decay widths. Our findings indicate that the η3He nucleus is bound by 1.65 MeV with a decay width of about 5 MeV when aηN is (1.0+0.3i) fm, and by 1.46 MeV with a decay width of about 10 MeV when aηN is (1.0+0.5i) fm.
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