With the development of blockchain and digital currencies, central banks all over the world are accelerating the process of CBDC development. However, it is still controversial on adoption of ...blockchain in CBDC design. In the paper, we analyze both functional and non-functional requirements of CBDC design, and make a literature review on blockchain based CBDC schemes. Analysis findings show that permissioned blockchain is more suitable for CBDC than permissionless blockchain. Besides, there are some challenges in blockchain based CBDC, such as performance, scalability, and cross-chain interoperability. Our analysis is timely and can provide guidelines for blockchain based CBDC design.
Enterovirus 71 (EV71) is one of the most common intestinal virus that causes hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) in infants and young children (mostly ≤5 years of age). Generally, children with ...EV71-infected HFMD have mild symptoms that resolve spontaneously within 7-14 days without complications. However, some EV71-infected HFMD cases lead to severe complications such as aseptic meningitis, encephalitis, acute flaccid paralysis, pulmonary edema, cardiorespiratory complication, circulatory disorders, poliomyelitis-like paralysis, myocarditis, meningoencephalitis, neonatal sepsis, and even death. The mechanism of EV71 pathogenesis has been studied extensively, and the regulation of host immune responses is suspected to aggravate EV71-induced severe complications. Recently, several cytokines or chemokines such as TNF-α, IFN-γ, IL-1β, IL-18, IL-33, IL-37, IL-4, IL-13, IL-6, IL-12, IL-23, IL-27, IL-35, IL-10, IL-22, IL-17F, IL-8, IP-10, MCP-1, G-CSF, and HMGB1 have been reported to be associated with severe EV71 infection by numerous research teams, including our own. This review is aimed at summarizing the pathophysiology of the cytokines and chemokines with severe EV71 infection.
•The impact of high temperature-high humidity (HT-HH) conditions on rice storage were examined.•Volatile aldehydes, ketones, and furans increased when rice was stored under HT-HH conditions.•The ...formation of these volatile compounds negatively impacted the aroma profile of the rice.•Gene expression of lipase increased under HT-HH conditions, leading to faster hydrolysis and oxidation of rice lipids.
Effects of high temperature-high humidity (HT-HH) storage on the flavor profile of rice were investigated. Volatile compounds such as aldehydes, ketones, and furans increased when rice was stored under HT-HH conditions, leading to a pronounced deterioration in rice quality. Correspondingly, the fatty acid content of the rice significantly increased during storage. Lipid oxidation was also accelerated under HT-HH conditions leading to the formation of peroxides. However, catalase activity was reduced under these conditions promoting the accumulation of peroxides. For the first time, insights into the genetic mechanisms responsible for these changes were obtained using RNA-sequencing to establish the flavor metabolic pathways in rice. Under HT-HH conditions, gene expression of lipase increased while that of catalase decreased, leading to faster hydrolysis and oxidation of the rice lipids. As a result, a series of lipid degradation products was formed (such as fatty acids, aldehydes, and ketones) that decreased the rice flavor quality.
The flame retardants aluminum poly-hexamethylenephosphinate (APHP) and 9,10-dihydro-9-oxa-10-phosphaphenanthrene 10-oxide(DOPO) were incorporated into diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A (EP) thermoset, ...and then the synergistic flame-retardant behavior and mechanism of APHP/DOPO were investigated. Comparing with the thermosets with 6%APHP and 6%DOPO alone, 2%APHP/4%DOPO/EP thermosets obtained the higher limited oxygen index, higher UL94 rating, decreased peak of heat release rate and less total heat release from cone calorimeter test. The results reveal a synergistic effect between APHP and DOPO. The synergistic effect of APHP/DOPO in gaseous phase obviously reduced effective heat of combustion, which implies the better flame inhibition effect through quenching free radical chain reaction of combustion. The synergistic charring effect in condensed phase led to the higher char yield, which locked more carbonaceous contents in residue and form more barrier to heat spreading. All the results were caused by the early decomposed DOPO that interacted with the later decomposed APHP to produce more char and decease release of the inflammable gas. Therefore, the burning intensity of APHP/DOPO thermosets obviously was weakened by the synergistic effect of APHP/DOPO.
One of the two branches of the a-linolenic acid metabolism pathway is catalyzed by 12-oxophytodienoic acid reductase I, and the other is involved in jasmonic acid (JA) synthesis. The former is known ...to be active in the response to salinity tolerance in wheat (Triticum aestivum), but the participation of the latter in this response has not been established as yet. Here, the salinity-responsive bread wheat gene TaAOC1, which encodes an allene oxide cyclase involved in the α-linolenic acid metabolism pathway, was constitutively expressed in both bread wheat and Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). In both species, transgenic lines exhibited an enhanced level of tolerance to salinity. The transgenic plants accumulated a higher content of JA and developed shorter roots. Both the shortened roots and the salinity tolerance were abolished in a background lacking a functional AtMYC2, a key component of the JA and abscisic acid signaling pathway, but were still expressed in a background deficient with respect to abscisic acid synthesis. We provide the first evidence, to our knowledge, suggesting that JA is also involved in the plant salinity response and that the a-linolenic acid metabolism pathway has a regulatory role over this response.
•ANP32E is up-regulated in thyroid carcinoma tissues.•ANP32E promotes the proliferation, growth and migration of thyroid carcinoma cells.•ANP32E activates AKT/mTOR/HK2-meditated glycolysis.•Rapamycin ...reduces cell proliferation and migration.
Thyroid cancer (THCA) is one of the most common endocrine tumors and keeps rapidly increasing worldwide. Acidic nuclear phosphoprotein 32 family member E (ANP32E) is a H2A.Z histone chaperone that regulates the expression of various genes. It has been shown that ANP32E promotes breast cancer development, whereas its role in THCA remains unknown. In this study, we found that ANP32E was significantly overexpressed in THCA tissues. Down-regulation of ANP32E inhibited the growth, cell cycle progression, DNA synthesis, glycolysis, migration and increased apoptosis in K1 and TPC-1 cells. Opposite results were observed in ANP32E-overexpressing THCA cells. At the molecular level, ANP32E up-regulated MMP9 and MMP13, and activated AKT/mTOR/HK2 signaling in THCA cells. Positive correlation between ANP32E and HK2 was found in THCA tissues. Importantly, silencing of HK2 repressed glycolysis. Inhibition of AKT/mTOR reduced cell proliferation, cell cycle progression and migration in THCA cells. Our findings suggest that ANP32E promotes THCA cell proliferation and migration via potentiating AKT/mTOR/HK2-mediated glycolysis.
Phthalates are extensively used as plasticizers in a variety of daily-life products, resulting in widespread distribution in aquatic environments. However, limited information is available on the ...endocrine disrupting effects of phthalates in aquatic organisms. The aim of the present study was to examine whether exposure to mono-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (MEHP), the hydrolytic metabolite of di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) disrupts thyroid endocrine system in fish. In this study, zebrafish (Danio rerio) embryos were exposed to different concentrations of MEHP (1.6, 8, 40, and 200 μg/L) from 2 h post-fertilization (hpf) to 168 hpf. The whole-body content of thyroid hormone and transcription of genes involved in the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid (HPT) axis were examined. Treatment with MEHP significantly decreased whole-body T4 contents and increased whole-body T3 contents, indicating thyroid endocrine disruption. The upregulation of genes related to thyroid hormone metabolism (Dio2 and UGT1ab) might be responsible for decreased T4 contents. Elevated gene transcription of Dio1 was also observed in this study, which might assist to degrade increased T3 contents. Exposure to MEHP also significantly induced transcription of genes involved in thyroid development (Nkx2.1 and Pax8) and thyroid hormone synthesis (TSHβ, NIS and TG). However, the genes encoding proteins involved in TH transport (transthyretin, TTR) was transcriptionally significantly down-regulated after exposure to MEHP. Overall, these results demonstrate that acute exposure to MEHP alters whole-body contents of thyroid hormones in zebrafish embryos/larvae and changes the transcription of genes involved in the HPT axis, thus exerting thyroid endocrine toxicity.
Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) like signal has been widely used in ground‐based navigation as an augment of global navigation satellite system system. The binary‐coded symbols (BCS) ...spreading modulation has been successfully used in global navigation satellite system systems to pursue the frequency reuses, and it is proved to have better ranging performance if the potential ambiguity risk is avoided. In the paper, the BCS coding is designed for ground‐based transmitter with the comprehensive consideration of potential tracking accuracy, anti‐multipath performance and ambiguous acquisition probability. The binary‐coded symbol codes are obtained by optimising the corresponding performance with the condition of an acceptable false‐lock probability. In this way, a moderate performance tracking performance can be achieved when the designed binary‐coded symbol codes are adopted with the global navigation satellite system‐like signal. The performance of the proposed signal is analysed in theory and assessed by computer simulation, and the unambiguous two‐dimensional processing is given as an alternative for the proposed binary‐coded symbol signals. The result indicates the proposed binary‐coded symbol codes obtain obvious advantages over the traditional binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation and the existing binary‐coded symbol coding schemes when applied with ground‐based occasions.
Current consensus protocols for permissionless blockchain cannot balance security, performance and centralization issues. In the paper, we present a reputation based consensus, FPoR, which combines ...reputation, committee based consensus, PBFT, reward and penalization mechanisms. FPoR can balance scalability, security and decentralization, and promote fairness, increase participation and strengthen security. Experiment results show that FPoR is with high performance and scalability, which can be used for permissionless blockchain. FPoR can also be extended to permissioned blockchain applications.
Global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) provide sufficient position accuracy outdoors but can perform poorly in indoor situations. Therefore, various techniques have been presented to meet the ...indoor requirements, among which the pseudolite system (PLS) is widely studied. A PLS has several error sources including clock error, thermal noise and path-dependent error; among them path-dependent errors, e.g., non-line-of-sight (NLOS, i.e., the direct ray is blocked, only reflected rays received) and multipath (i.e., the direct ray is received together with the reflected rays), are the most intractable to deal with and always cause large range errors. The indoor furniture and flat surfaces of the walls and ceilings make NLOS and multipath quite severe. Detecting NLOS and multipath is a classification problem, which can be well tackled by deep learning approaches. Deep learning algorithms are functions of nonlinear regression using thousands of parameters that distributed in many hidden layers whose values are determined by training phase. We present an NLOS and multipath detecting network (NMDN) that consists of five convolution layers and two fully connected layers; we feed NMDN with the outputs of a receiver’s tracking loop; subsequently, it tells us the detection results. The training and testing data sets are generated by a GNSS software receiver using intermediate frequency signal collected from an indoor PLS. The presented method is compared with two support vector machines, which are the traditional methods for classification, and shows an improvement of up to 45% in overall classification accuracy. The impacts of indoor NLOS and multipath are also analyzed with double difference observables. The results show NLOS causes more serious range error than multipath. The proposed method is suitable for detecting NLOS and multipath when the receiver operating environment is not stable.
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