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The empirical expressions for predicting the small-strain shear modulus (G0) of granular soils in current engineering practice are established mainly on experimental data under isotropic stress conditions. In most geotechnical applications, however, soils are subjected to anisotropic stress conditions. The impact of stress anisotropy on G0 is a critical concern but is not yet fully understood. In this paper, we present a specifically designed experimental study to address the question. Various principal stress ratios were applied to isotropically consolidated sand specimens in a triaxial apparatus, and the elastic shear waves were generated by the bender elements installed in the apparatus such that the variations of G0 from isotropic stress states to anisotropic stress states were determined. Three quartz sands with different particle shapes were tested under a range of states in terms of void ratio, axial stress, and radial stress. The study shows that the impact of stress anisotropy is much more complicated than commonly thought. It depends on the magnitude of the stress ratio and the loading mode. A simple model that accounts for two primary mechanisms associated with the impact of stress anisotropy is proposed, and its performance is evaluated using various sources of data in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. Accurate and effective biomarkers for the prognosis of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) are poorly identified. A network-based gene signature may serve as a valuable biomarker to improve the accuracy of risk discrimination in patients. Methods. The expression levels of cancer hallmarks were determined by Cox regression analysis. Various bioinformatic methods, such as GSEA, WGCNA, and LASSO, and statistical approaches were applied to generate an MTORC1 signaling-related gene signature (MSRS). Moreover, a decision tree and nomogram were constructed to aid in the quantification of risk levels for each HCC patient. Results. Active MTORC1 signaling was found to be the most vital predictor of overall survival in HCC patients in the training cohort. MSRS was established and proved to hold the capacity to stratify HCC patients with poor outcomes in two validated datasets. Analysis of the patient MSRS levels and patient survival data suggested that the MSRS can be a valuable risk factor in two validated datasets and the integrated cohort. Finally, we constructed a decision tree which allowed to distinguish subclasses of patients at high risk and a nomogram which could accurately predict the survival of individuals. Conclusions. The present study may contribute to the improvement of current prognostic systems for patients with HCC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Reduced heart rate (HR) increase (HRI), recovery (HRR), and higher resting HR are associated with cardiovascular (CV) disease, but causal inferences have not been deduced. We investigated causal effects of HRI, HRR, and resting HR on CV risk, all-cause mortality (ACM), atrial fibrillation (AF), coronary artery disease (CAD), and ischemic stroke (IS) using Mendelian Randomization. Methods: 11 variants for HRI, 11 for HRR, and two sets of 46 and 414 variants for resting HR were obtained from four genome-wide association studies (GWASs) on UK Biobank. We performed a lookup on GWASs for CV risk and ACM in UK Biobank (N = 375,367, 5.4% cases and N = 393,165, 4.4% cases, respectively). For CAD, AF, and IS, we used publicly available summary statistics. We used a random-effects inverse-variance weighted (IVW) method and sensitivity analyses to estimate causality. Results: IVW showed a nominally significant effect of HRI on CV events (odds ratio [OR] = 1.0012, P = 4.11 × 10–2) and on CAD and AF. Regarding HRR, IVW was not significant for any outcome. The IVW method indicated statistically significant associations of resting HR with AF (OR = 0.9825, P = 9.8 × 10–6), supported by all sensitivity analyses, and a nominally significant association with IS (OR = 0.9926, P = 9.82 × 10–3). Conclusion: Our findings suggest no strong evidence of an association between HRI and HRR and any outcome and confirm prior work reporting a highly significant effect of resting HR on AF. Future research is required to explore HRI and HRR associations further using more powerful predictors, when available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

YES‐associated protein 1 (YAP1) plays a key role as a transcriptional coactivator in the Hippo tumor suppressor pathway. YAP1 is overexpressed in a variety of cancers and is considered to be encoded by a proto‐oncogene. However, the role of YAP1 remains debatable, because both gain and loss of YAP1 expression have both been reported in breast cancer (BC). Here, we found that elevated expression of YAP1 mRNA in BC was negatively correlated with relapse‐free, distant metastases‐free and overall survival rates. We then knocked down or overexpressed YAP1 in human BC cells, and examined cell proliferation, apoptosis, and tumorigenic ability in vivo. We identified that YAP1 promotes cell growth and inhibits cell apoptosis of BC through the phosphatase and tensin homolog deleted on chromosome 10–AKT signaling pathway, and thus suggest that YAP1 might serve as a new target for inhibiting BC progression. YES‐associated protein 1 (YAP1) is overexpressed in human breast cancer (BC) and is negatively correlated with the prognosis of BC patients. We report here that YAP1 can promote cancer cell growth and inhibit cell apoptosis by regulating PTEN–AKT signaling in vitro. These results suggest that YAP1 plays an important role in BC progression and might serve as a new target for BC therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]