Oxidative stress and cardiomyocyte apoptosis play critical roles in doxorubicin (DOX)-induced cardiotoxicity. Previous studies indicated that fibronectin type III domain-containing 5 (FNDC5) and its ...cleaved form, irisin, could preserve mitochondrial function and attenuate oxidative damage as well as cell apoptosis, however, its role in DOX-induced cardiotoxicity remains unknown. Our present study aimed to investigate the role and underlying mechanism of FNDC5 on oxidative stress and cardiomyocyte apoptosis in DOX-induced cardiotoxicity. Cardiomyocyte-specific FNDC5 overexpression was achieved using an adeno-associated virus system, and then the mice were exposed to a single intraperitoneal injection of DOX (15 mg/kg) to generate DOX-induced cardiotoxicity. Herein, we found that FNDC5 expression was downregulated in DOX-treated murine hearts and cardiomyocytes. Fndc5 deficiency resulted in increased oxidative damage and apoptosis in H9C2 cells under basal conditions, imitating the phenotype of DOX-induced cardiomyopathy in vitro, conversely, FNDC5 overexpression or irisin treatment alleviated DOX-induced oxidative stress and cardiomyocyte apoptosis in vivo and in vitro. Mechanistically, we identified that FNDC5/Irisin activated AKT/mTOR signaling and decreased DOX-induced cardiomyocyte apoptosis, and moreover, we provided direct evidence that the anti-oxidant effect of FNDC5/Irisin was mediated by the AKT/GSK3β/FYN/Nrf2 axis in an mTOR-independent manner. And we also demonstrated that heat shock protein 20 was responsible for the activation of AKT caused by FNDC5/Irisin. In line with the data in acute model, we also found that FNDC5/Irisin exerted beneficial effects in chronic model of DOX-induced cardiotoxicity (5 mg/kg, i.p., once a week for three times, the total cumulative dose is 15 mg/kg) in mice. Based on these findings, we supposed that FNDC5/Irisin was a potential therapeutic agent against DOX-induced cardiotoxicity.
Speech is one of the most sophisticated human motor skills. Speaker identification is the ability of a software component or hardware to acquire a speech signal, recognize the speakers included in ...the signal, and identify the speaker after the audio signals have been received. This study proposes a fluctuating equation inversion method using feature extraction for broadcast hosting. Feature extraction aims to provide useful signal features from natural audio that can be applied to various downstream processes, including recitation, evaluation, and categorization. Initially, data were collected from the CASIA dataset. This study evaluated the experimental outcomes of the proposed approach using mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, gammatone frequency cepstral coefficients, and linear frequency cepstral coefficients. The proposed technique was tested on a publicly accessible dataset, and the findings showed that it performed better in terms of recognition accuracy (98%), precision (97%), recall (96.05%), sensitivity (92.56%), and F1-score (95.09%) than the conventional feature extraction methods. The proposed approach can be utilized to improve audio signal quality and user experience across broadcast-hosting applications.
We tackle the practical problem of hand pose estimation from a single noisy depth image. A dedicated three-step pipeline is proposed: Initial estimation step provides an initial estimation of the ...hand in-plane orientation and 3D location, Candidate generation step produces a set of 3D pose candidate from the Hough voting space with the help of the rotational invariant depth features, Verification step delivers the final 3D hand pose as the solution to an optimization problem. We analyze the depth noises, and suggest tips to minimize their negative impacts on the overall performance. Our approach is able to work with Kinect-type noisy depth images, and reliably produces pose estimations of general motions efficiently (12 frames per second). Extensive experiments are conducted to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate the performance with respect to the state-of-the-art methods that have access to additional RGB images. Our approach is shown to deliver on par or even better results.
We propose a noniterative solution for the Perspective-n-Point ({\rm P}n{\rm P}) problem, which can robustly retrieve the optimum by solving a seventh order polynomial. The central idea consists of ...three steps: 1) to divide the reference points into 3-point subsets in order to achieve a series of fourth order polynomials, 2) to compute the sum of the square of the polynomials so as to form a cost function, and 3) to find the roots of the derivative of the cost function in order to determine the optimum. The advantages of the proposed method are as follows: First, it can stably deal with the planar case, ordinary 3D case, and quasi-singular case, and it is as accurate as the state-of-the-art iterative algorithms with much less computational time. Second, it is the first noniterative {\rm P}n{\rm P} solution that can achieve more accurate results than the iterative algorithms when no redundant reference points can be used (n\le 5). Third, large-size point sets can be handled efficiently because its computational complexity is O(n).
Future of the human climate niche Kohler, Timothy A.; Lenton, Timothy M.; Svenning, Jens-Christian ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
05/2020, Letnik:
117, Številka:
21
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
All species have an environmental niche, and despite technological advances, humans are unlikely to be an exception. Here, we demonstrate that for millennia, human populations have resided in the ...same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe, characterized by a major mode around ∼11 °C to 15 °C mean annual temperature (MAT). Supporting the fundamental nature of this temperature niche, current production of crops and livestock is largely limited to the same conditions, and the same optimum has been found for agricultural and nonagricultural economic output of countries through analyses of year-to-year variation. We show that in a business-as-usual climate change scenario, the geographical position of this temperature niche is projected to shift more over the coming 50 y than it has moved since 6000 BP. Populations will not simply track the shifting climate, as adaptation in situ may address some of the challenges, and many other factors affect decisions to migrate. Nevertheless, in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT >29 °C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara. As the potentially most affected regions are among the poorest in the world, where adaptive capacity is low, enhancing human development in those areas should be a priority alongside climate mitigation.
In this paper we deal with the camera pose estimation problem from a set of 2D/3D line correspondences, which is also known as PnL (Perspective-n-Line) problem. We carry out our study by comparing ...PnL with the well-studied PnP (Perspective-n-Point) problem, and our contributions are three-fold: (1) We provide a complete 3D configuration analysis for P3L, which includes the wellknown P3P problem as well as several existing analyses as special cases. (2) By exploring the similarity between PnL and PnP, we propose a new subset-based PnL approach as well as a series of linear-formulation-based PnL approaches inspired by their PnP counterparts. (3) The proposed linear-formulation-based methods can be easily extended to deal with the line and point features simultaneously.
Charge generation and separation are regarded as the major constraints limiting the photocatalytic activity of polymeric photocatalysts. Herein, two new linear polyarylether‐based polymers (PAE–CPs) ...with distinct linking patterns between their donor and acceptor motifs were tailor‐made to investigate the influence of different linking patterns on the charge generation and separation process. Theoretical and experimental results revealed that compared to the traditional single‐stranded linker, the double‐stranded linking pattern strengthens donor–acceptor interactions in PAE–CPs and generates a coplanar structure, facilitating charge generation and separation, and enabling red‐shifted light absorption. With these prominent advantages, the PAE–CP interlinked with a double‐stranded linker exhibits markedly enhanced photocatalytic activity compared to that of its single‐strand‐linked analogue. Such findings can facilitate the rational design and modification of organic semiconductors for charge‐induced reactions.
Two polyarylether‐based polymers with single/double linking patterns were investigated to establish the effect of the linking patterns on the charge generation and separation process in D–A conjugated polymer photocatalysts, thus achieving remarkable photocatalytic HER and HPER performances.
Due to the obvious advantages of utilizing naturally abundant and low cost sodium resources, sodium ion batteries (SIBs) show great potential for large‐scale energy storage applications. And the high ...theoretical capacities of transition metal sulfides (TMSs) make them appealing anode materials for SIBs; however, structural collapse caused by the severe volume change during de/sodiation processes results in poor capacity retention and rate capabilities. Compared to the development of new materials and the improvement of their electrochemical performance, the studies on their reaction mechanisms are still rare, especially the operando characterizations. Herein, the synthesis, anode application, and the operando observation of the de/sodiation mechanism of a nitrogen‐doped porous carbon coated nickel cobalt bimetallic sulfide hollow nanocube ((Ni0.5Co0.5)9S8@NC) composite are reported. Such a material is synthesized via facile sulfidation of phenol formaldehyde coated Ni3Co(CN)62 metal–organic framework precursors with Na2S followed by calcination. The nanocomposite displays a remarkable specific capacity of 752 mAh g−1 at 100 mA g−1 after 100 cycles and outstanding rate capability due to the synergistic effect of several appealing features. Particularly, the pseudocapacitive effect appears to substantially contribute to the sodium storage capability. Operando X‐ray diffraction reveals the conversion reaction mechanism of (Ni0.5Co0.5)9S8@NC, forming Ni, Co, Na2S, and Na2S5.
The synthesized (Ni0.5Co0.5)9S8@NC hollow nanocube composite displays a remarkable specific capacity of 752 mAh g−1 at 100 mA g−1 after 100 cycles and outstanding rate capability with 87% capacity retention after a 20‐fold increase of the specific current. The superior rate capability derives from the pseudocapacitive contribution of the material. Operando X‐ray diffraction reveals the conversion reaction mechanism of (Ni0.5Co0.5)9S8@NC, forming Ni, Co, Na2S, and Na2S5.
In this paper, we propose a pairwise spatial transformer network (PSTN) for cross-view gait recognition, which reduces unwanted feature mis-alignment due to view differences before a recognition step ...for better performance. The proposed PSTN is a unified CNN architecture that consists of a pairwise spatial transformer (PST) and subsequent recognition network (RN). More specifically, given a matching pair of gait features from different source and target views, the PST estimates a non-rigid deformation field to register the features in the matching pair into their intermediate view, which mitigates distortion by registration compared with the case of direct deformation from the source view to target view. The registered matching pair is then fed into the RN to output a dissimilarity score. Although registration may reduce not only intra-subject variations but also inter-subject variations, we can still achieve a good trade-off between them using a loss function designed to optimize recognition accuracy. Experiments on three publicly available gait datasets demonstrate that the proposed method yields superior performance for both verification and identification scenarios by combining any gait recognition network benchmarks with the PST.
PDF
