Spatial stratified heterogeneity, referring to the within-strata variance less than the between strata-variance, is ubiquitous in ecological phenomena, such as ecological zones and many ecological ...variables. Spatial stratified heterogeneity reflects the essence of nature, implies potential distinct mechanisms by strata, suggests possible determinants of the observed process, allows the representativeness of observations of the earth, and enforces the applicability of statistical inferences. In this paper, we propose a q-statistic method to measure the degree of spatial stratified heterogeneity and to test its significance. The q value is within 0,1 (0 if a spatial stratification of heterogeneity is not significant, and 1 if there is a perfect spatial stratification of heterogeneity). The exact probability density function is derived. The q-statistic is illustrated by two examples, wherein we assess the spatial stratified heterogeneities of a hand map and the distribution of the annual NDVI in China.
Administration of exosomes derived from mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) could improve some neurologic conditions by transferring functional biomolecules to recipient cells. Furthermore, exosomes ...from hypoxic progenitor cells exerted better therapeutic effects in organ injury through specific cargoes. However, there are no related reports about whether exosomes derived from MSCs or hypoxia‐preconditioned MSCs (PC‐MSCs) could prevent memory deficits in Alzheimer disease (AD). In this study, the exosomes derived from MSCs or PC‐MSCs were systemically administered to transgenic APP/PS1 mice. The expression of miR‐21 in MSCs was significantly increased after hypoxic treatment. Injection of exosomes from normoxic MSCs could rescue cognition and memory impairment according to results of the Morris water maze test, reduced plaque deposition, and Aβ levels in the brain; could decrease the activation of astrocytes and microglia; could down‐regulate proinflammatory cytokines (TNF‐α and IL‐1β); and could up‐regulate anti‐inflammatory cytokines (IL‐4 and ‐10) in AD mice, as well as reduce the activation of signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) and NF‐κB. Compared to the group administered exosomes from normoxic MSCs, in the group administered exosomes from PC‐MSCs, learning and memory capabilities were significantly improved; the plaque deposition and Aβ levels were lower, and expression of growth‐associated protein 43, synapsin 1, and IL‐10 was increased; and the levels of glial fibrillary acidic protein, ionized calcium‐binding adaptor molecule 1, TNF‐α, IL‐1β, and activation of STAT3 and NF‐κB were sharply decreased. More importantly, exosomes from PC‐MSCs effectively increased the level of miR‐21 in the brain of AD mice. Additionally, replenishment of miR‐21 restored the cognitive deficits in APP/PS1 mice and prevented pathologic features. Taken together, these findings suggest that exosomes from PC‐MSCs could improve the learning and memory capabilities of APP/PS1 mice, and that the underlying mechanism may lie in the restoration of synaptic dysfunction and regulation of inflammatory responses through regulation of miR‐21.—Cui, G.‐H., Wu, J., Mou, F.‐F., Xie, W.‐H., Wang, F.‐B., Wang, Q.‐L., Fang, J., Xu, Y.‐W., Dong, Y.‐R., Liu, J.‐R., Guo, H.‐D. Exosomes derived from hypoxia‐preconditioned mesenchymal stromal cells ameliorate cognitive decline by rescuing synaptic dysfunction and regulating inflammatory responses in APP/PS1 mice. FASEB J. 32, 654–668 (2018). www.fasebj.org
With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) era, the application of intelligent devices in the network is becoming more and more extensive, and the monitoring technology is gradually developing ...towards the direction of intelligence and digitization. As a hot topic in the field of computer vision, face recognition faces problems such as low level of intelligence and long processing time. Therefore, under the technical support of the IoTs, the research uses internet protocol cameras to collect face information, improves the principal component analysis (PCA), poses a PLV algorithm, and then applies it to the face recognition system for remote monitoring. The outcomes demonstrate that in the Olivetti Research Laboratory face database, the accuracy of PLV is relatively stable, and the highest and lowest are 98 and 94%, respectively. In Yale testing, the accuracy of this algorithm is 12% higher than that of PCA algorithm; In the database of Georgia Institute of Technology (GT), the PLV algorithm requires a time range of 0.2–0.3 seconds and has high operational efficiency. In the selected remote monitoring face database, the accuracy of the method is stable at more than 90%, with the highest being 98%, indicating that it can effectively improve the accuracy of face recognition and provide a reference technical means for further optimization of the remote monitoring system.
NK-/T-cell lymphomas Wang, Hua; Fu, Bi-Bo; Gale, Robert Peter ...
Leukemia,
09/2021, Volume:
35, Issue:
9
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Natural killer/T-cell lymphoma (NKTL) is a sub-type of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-related non-Hodgkin lymphomas common in Asia and Latin America but rare elsewhere. Its pathogenesis is complex and ...incompletely understood. Lymphoma cells are transformed from NK- or T-cells, sometimes both. EBV-infection and subsequent genetic alterations in infected cells are central to NKTL development. Hemophagocytic syndrome is a common complication. Accurate staging is important to predict outcomes but there is controversy which system is best. More than two-thirds of NKTL lympohmas are localized at diagnosis, are frequently treated with radiation therapy only and have 5-year survival of about 70 percent. Persons with advanced NKTLs receive radiation therapy synchronously or metachronously with diverse multi-drug chemotherapy typically including L-asparginase with 5-year survival of about 40 percent. Some persons with widespread NKTL receive chemotherapy only. There are few data on safety and efficacy of high-dose therapy and a haematopoietic cell autotransplant. Immune therapies, histone deacetylase (HDAC)-inhibitors and other drugs are in early clinical trials. There are few randomized controlled clinical trials in NKTLs and no therapy strategy is clearly best; more effective therapy(ies) are needed. Some consensus recommendations are not convincingly evidence-based. Mechanisms of multi-drug resistance are considered. We discuss these issues including recent advances in our understanding of and therapy of NKTLs.
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the main cause of death among patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), particularly in low- and middle-income countries. To effectively prevent the ...development of CVDs in T2DM, considerable effort has been made to explore novel preventive approaches, individualized glycemic control and cardiovascular risk management (strict blood pressure and lipid control), together with recently developed glucose-lowering agents and lipid-lowering drugs. This review mainly addresses the important issues affecting the choice of antidiabetic agents and lipid, blood pressure and antiplatelet treatments considering the cardiovascular status of the patient. Finally, we also discuss the changes in therapy principles underlying CVDs in T2DM.
The associations between genes and diseases are of critical significance in aspects of prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Although gene-disease relationships have been investigated extensively, ...much of the underpinnings of these associations are yet to be elucidated.
A novel method integrates MeSH database, term weight (TW), and co-occurrence methods to predict gene-disease associations based on the cosine similarity between gene vectors and disease vectors. Vectors are transformed from the texts of documents in the PubMed database according to the appearance and location of the gene or disease terms. The disease related text data has been optimized during the process of constructing vectors.
The overall distribution of cosine similarity value was investigated. By using the gene-disease association data in OMIM database as golden standard, the performance of cosine similarity in predicting gene-disease linkage was evaluated. The effects of applying weight matrix, penalty weights for keywords (PWK), and normalization were also investigated. Finally, we demonstrated that our method outperforms heterogeneous network edge prediction (HNEP) in aspects of precision rate and recall rate.
Our method proposed in this paper is easy to be conducted and the results can be integrated with other models to improve the overall performance of gene-disease association predictions.
In this paper, the current state of the art of solar sail technology is reviewed. Solar sail research is quite broad and multi-disciplinary; this paper focuses mainly on areas such as solar sail ...dynamics, attitude control, design and deployment, and mission and trajectory analysis. Special attention is given to solar radiation pressure force modeling and attitude dynamics. Some basics of solar sailing which would be very useful for a new investigator in the area are also presented. Technological difficulties and current challenges in solar sail system design are identified, and possible ideas for future research in the field are also discussed.
The Yellow River is an important water source for north China, which is the fifth largest river all over the world. Here the upstream, midstream and downstream of the Yellow River were selected as ...case study for well understanding the sustainability of water quality and quantity. The results showed the runoff of Yellow River has decreased since the 1950s due to human activities. Moreover, the water quality of the Yellow River is deteriorating with the rapid development of industry and urbanization. Especially heavy metals pollution, the concentrations of arsenic, cadmium, lead and total nitrogen increased gradually from upstream to downstream, while the concentrations of chromium, mercury, zinc and total phosphorous were highest in the midstream. The concentrations of nitrogen (e.g. ammonium and nitrate), volatile phenol and total amount of Escherichia coli displayed decreasing trends from upstream to downstream. In addition, the concentrations of heavy metals showed the highest value in the corresponding farmland of midstream except for Pb, which displayed the significant positive correlation with yellow river water, moreover As and Cr also showed the carcinogenic risk in irrigated farmland. Further analysis found the agriculture, industry and urban residential areas accounted for influence of 40%, 26%, and 16% on water amount reduce, respectively. Industrial wastewater, domestic wastewater, phosphorus and nitrigen accounted for 66%, 21%, 8% and 5% of the influence on water quality, respectively. The results suggested that the sustainability of the water resource of the Yellow River is at risk in terms of quality and quantity. There is an urgent need to readjust the water allocation plan (namely 87 plan), establishing a water rights trading system, implement the precision irrigation on agricultural practices and adjust the industrial structure of the Yellow River Basin.
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•Runoff of the Yellow River has decreased since the 1950s due to human activities(HA).•Water quality of the Yellow River is deteriorating with the rapid development.•As, Pb and Cr showed the health risk for human in the water of the Yellow River.•As and Cr also showed the carcinogenic risk in corresponding irrigated farmland.•Water resource sustainability is at risk in the Yellow River due to human activities.
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•A full-scale project was operated for sludge fermentation to produce VFAs.•Sludge reduce, carbon recovery and nutrient removal were simultaneously improved.•A very high solid content ...of 7% was adopted in sludge fermentation.•VFAs from sludge meets requirement for upgrading nutrient removal of wastewater.•This project presents greater economic advantage than biogas production process.
A full-scale project of thermal-alkaline pretreatment and alkaline fermentation of sewage sludge was built to produce volatile fatty acids (VFAs) which was then used as external carbon source for improving biological nitrogen and phosphorus removals (BNPR) in wastewater plant. Results showed this project had efficient and stable performances in VFA production, sludge reduce and BNPR. Hydrolysis rate in pretreatment, VFAs yield in fermentation and total VS reduction reached 68.7%, 261.32 mg COD/g VSS and 54.19%, respectively. Moreover, fermentation liquid with VFA presented similar efficiency as acetic acid in enhancing BNPR, obtaining removal efficiencies of nitrogen and phosphorus up to 72.39% and 89.65%, respectively. Finally, the project also presented greater economic advantage than traditional processes, and the net profits for VFAs and biogas productions are 9.12 and 3.71 USD/m3 sludge, respectively. Long-term operation indicated that anaerobic alkaline fermentation for VFAs production is technically and economically feasible for sludge carbon recovery.
Understanding the stress-dependent elastic moduli of fractured rocks is essential for monitoring geopressure and tectonic stress. The elastic nonlinearity with finite strains can be described by the ...theory of acoustoelasticity through the third-order elastic constants (3oECs) that are strictly valid for an isotropic homogeneous medium. The extension to fractured rocks becomes particularly interesting because of the sensitivity of fractures to prestress, but remains largely unaddressed. We address this issue through theoretical modeling with confirmed validity by considering a group of homogeneously distributed fractures (ellipses) embedded into a homogeneous background medium subject to a uniform confining pressure. We incorporate both the David-Zimmerman (DZ) and Mori-Tanaka (MT) models into the theory of acoustoelasticity. The DZ model accounts for the closure influence of cracks with different aspect ratios, whereas the MT model is used to estimate the combining effect of the background acoustoelasticity and the elastic nonlinearity due to the closure of cracks. We validate the acoustoelastic DZ-MT model of fractured rocks by experiment data with Fontainebleau and Vosges sandstones. We show that the effective elastic moduli of fractured rocks mainly depend on the background acoustoelasticity and nonlinear elastic deformations induced by closing cracks. The inclusions inside fractures have too low 3oECs that the associated acoustoelastic effect could be neglected for both interconnected and isolated cracks. The effective elastic moduli of rocks change significantly during the closing period of cracks with increasing pressure under low pressure. The influence of cracks can be reduced only when cracks are closed completely, where, unlike the theoretical prediction by the DZ model, the effective elastic moduli of rocks still increase along with increasing pressure because of the acoustoelastic effect of the background.
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