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Multifunctional group compounds, 2-acyl-3-sulfonamidobut-2-enoates, are efficiently constructed using solid calcium carbide as an alkyne source through the simultaneous formation of two bonds in one step. The salient features of this protocol are the use of an inexpensive, abundant, and easy-to-use alkyne source as a substitute for flammable and explosive gaseous acetylene, low-cost catalyst, mild conditions, wide substrate scope, high stereoselectivity, satisfactory yield, and simple manipulation. This method can also be extended to the gram scale.

Cacumen platycladi(CP) is a frequently used traditional Chinese medicine to treat hair loss. In this study, CP fermented by Lactiplantibacillus plantarumCCFM1348 increased the proliferation of human dermal papilla cells. In an in vivoassay, compared to nonfermented CP, postbiotics (fermented CP) and synbiotics (live bacteria with nonfermented CP) promoted hair growth in mice. The Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway plays crucial roles in the development of hair follicles, including growth cycle restart and maintenance. Both postbiotics and synbiotics upregulated β-catenin, a major factor of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway. Postbiotics and synbiotics also increased the vascular endothelial growth factor expression and decreased the BAX/Bcl2 ratio in the dorsal skin of mice. These results suggest that fermented CP by L. plantarumCCFM1348 may promote hair growth through regulating the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway, promoting the expression of growth factors and reducing apoptosis.

Lipid metabolism disorders commonly occur during menopause. Estrogen deficiency has been shown to lead to excessive energy intake and abnormal lipid metabolism in ovariectomized rats, resulting in obesity. Probiotics exhibit anti-obesity properties, and their underlying mechanism has been widely reported. In this study, we demonstrated the metabolic benefits of Lactobacillus plantarumCCFM1180 in suppressing appetite, controlling body weight, correcting obesity-induced abnormalities, enhancing liver lipid metabolism, and protecting liver function in estrogen-deficient rats. The mechanisms associated with the anti-obesity and anti-dyslipidemia effects of CCFM1180 on estrogen-deficient rats were clarified. The results showed that CCFM1180 dramatically reduced food intake by activating the expression of estrogen receptor alpha (ERα) and increasing the level of leptin in abdominal adipose tissue. These changes, combined with the increased butyrate concentration and recovered bile acid structure, helped enhance lipid metabolism. Additionally, CCFM1180 treatment was found to be safer than exogenous estrogen supplementation. Thus, L. plantarumCCFM1180 could be considered a new therapeutic strategy for preventing and alleviating menopausal lipid abnormalities.

Spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) have been used to construct various nanobiosensors with gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) as nuclei. The SNAs play a critical role in biosensing due to their various physical and chemical properties, programmability, and specificity recognition ability. In this study, CRISPR-responsive self-assembled spherical nucleic acid (CRISPR-rsSNA) detection probes were constructed by conjugating fluorescein-labeled probes to the surface of AuNPs to improve the sensing performance. Also, the mechanism of ssDNA and the role of different fluorescent groups in the self-assembly process of CRISPR-rsSNA were explored. Then, CRISPR-rsSNA and reverse transcription-recombinase polymerase amplification (RT-RPA) were combined to develop an ultrasensitive fluorescence-detection strategy for norovirus. In the presence of the virus, the target RNA sequence of the virus was transformed and amplified by RT-RPA. The resulting dsDNA activated the trans-cleavage activity of CRISPR cas12a, resulting in disintegrating the outer nucleic acid structure of the CRISPR-rsSNA at a diffusible rate, which released reporter molecules. Norovirus was quantitated by fluorescence detection. This strategy facilitated the detection of the norovirus at the attomolar level. An RT-RPA kit for norovirus detected would be developed based on this method. The proposed method would be used for the detection of different viruses just by changing the target RNA and crRNA of the CRISPR cas12a system which provided a foundation for high-throughput detection of various substances.

We propose a novel framework for optimized evaluation to address the challenging problem in aeroengine such as the positioning of the pyrometer featured with multichannel. Using COMSOL Multiphysics in combination with MATLAB, we have implemented the turbine blade radiometric temperature scanning area positioning, pyrometer temperature measurement target resolution analysis, and multichannel pyrometer positioning and evaluation through the careful selection of evaluation indexes. The overall performance of the proposed framework as well as the effectiveness of each function were evaluated through experimental cases. After positioning and installing the pyrometer in this way, it will exert its optimal temperature measurement performance. This approach will guide the development direction of pyrometer positioning research in the future.

Stachyose is a prebiotic that traditionally extracted from plants, such as vegetable. It has been demonstrated to alleviate intestinal inflammation by regulating gut microbiota, but the mechanism has been unclear. This research aims to detect the potential mechanism of stachyose in alleviating the severity of ulcerative colitis (UC). The results indicated that the administration of stachyose could recover the body weight, protect against the colonic tissue damage, reduce the pro-inflammatory cytokines levels, and reverse the histological abnormalities in UC mice. Oral stachyose could restore DSS-induced disturbance in intestinal bacteria. Besides, the metabolome result of serum samples showed that stachyose treatment significantly altered serum metabolites against inflammatory responses in colitis mice. Also, a significant correlation can be found between 23 metabolite biomarkers and 18 differential genera. Our results provided a strong foundation for the future study of the protective role of stachyose in maintaining intestinal homeostasis.

This study develops a methodology to eliminate the reflected radiation in measuring the surface temperature of turbine blades by combining experimental measurements and simulations and calibrating and validating the computational models with experimental measurements. The influences of reflected radiation caused by the front and rear stator vanes, adjacent rotor blades, and background temperature on the temperature measurement error of the target blade are systematically demonstrated through simulation. The temperature measurement errors of the monochromatic method and colorimetric method under the same conditions are compared. Then the corrections on temperature measurement error are carried out under static and moving conditions. Detailed uncertainty analysis is simulated through the Monte Carlo method. Finally, a simplified experiment is carried out, and the results are consistent with the simulation results. This study will open a new avenue for eliminating reflected radiation error and mechanism research for the temperature measurements of the turbine blades.

A new method is proposed for correcting the error of monochromatic method in measuring the surface temperature of turbine blades with the influence of reflection. The measurement error caused by surrounding components was numerically investigated. The effects of background temperature, adjacent rotor blades, front stator vanes, and rear stator vanes on the temperature measurement error are described in detail. Furthermore, the corrected errors of high emissivity and low emissivity are compared and analyzed and the influence of the relative displacement between the turbine blade and the hot-end component on the temperature measurement error is also discussed. Benefiting from the proposed radiation-based error correction method (RECM), we can reduce the monochromatic temperature measurement error to less than 0.3% at high emissivity and less than 0.8% at low emissivity theoretically. Finally, the RECM method is studied experimentally, and the results show that the temperature measurement error can be corrected to better than 0.6%, which is in good agreement with the Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) results.

Background: Callosal Angle (CA) and Evans Index (EI) are considered as imaging biomarkers to diagnose normal-pressure hydrocephalus using traditional MR measurement methods. Objective: The current study aimed to evaluate the differential diagnostic value of CA and EI in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Methods: Five-hundred and two subjects were selected from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database, which included 168 Normal Controls (NC), 233 MCI and 101 AD patients. The structural MR images were interactively applied with multiplanar reconstruction to measure the CA and EI. Results: CA presented no significant difference among NC, MCI and AD groups (H value = 3.848, P value = 0.146), and EI demonstrated higher value in MCI and AD groups than that in NC groups (P = 0.000 and 0.001, respectively). MCI group had significant larger EI (0.29±0.04) than (0.27±0.03) NC group in 70-75 years old sub-groups. ROC showed that the area under the curve was 0.704±0.045 for NC-MCI in 70-75 years old groups. The correlation analysis indicated that EI was significantly negatively related to MMSE scores of MCI patients (r = -0.131, P = 0.046). Conclusion: EI might serve as a screening imaging biomarker for MCI in 70-75 years old patients, and show limited differential value for the diagnosis of AD. CA could present no diagnostic value for MCI and AD in the current study.

Pueraria lobataroot has garnered considerable attention for its remarkable hepatoprotective properties. In this study, we employed a pseudo-germ-free (PGF) mice model treated with antibiotics to investigate the effects of gut microbiota on the therapeutic efficacy of the extract of P. lobataroot (PLE) in mice with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) induced by a high-fat diet (HFD). The results demonstrated that mice not exposed to antibiotics exhibited significantly improved liver damage and inflammation, as well as a more diverse gut microbiota after PLE treatment compared to mice treated with antibiotics. It is noteworthy that these beneficial effects of PLE were partially attenuated following the administration of antibiotics. Furthermore, the serum of mice not exposed to antibiotics showed a significant increase in the relative abundance of daidzein. Cell experiments demonstrated that daidzein, a gut microbial metabolite of puerarin, is more effective than puerarin in improving cellular lipid deposition and reducing inflammation. In conclusion, our findings substantiate the pivotal role of the gut microbiota in the processes associated with PLE therapy for NAFLD and the gut microbiota may enhance the efficacy of PLE in treating NAFLD by metabolizing parent compounds, such as puerarin, into secondary metabolites, predominantly daidzein. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the therapeutic potential of botanical extracts in the management of liver diseases, particularly NAFLD.

Background: Calcium-suppressed (CaSupp) technique involving spectral-based images has been used to observe bone marrow edema by removing calcium components from the image. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the knee articular cartilage using the CaSupp technique in dual-layer detector computed tomography (DLCT). Methods: Twenty-eight healthy participants and two patients with osteoarthritis were enrolled, who underwent DLCT and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examination. CaSupp images were reconstructed from spectral-based images using a calcium suppression algorithm and were overlaid with conventional CT images for visual evaluation. The morphology of the knee cartilage was evaluated, and the thickness of the articular cartilage was measured on sagittal proton density-weighted and CaSupp images in the patellofemoral compartment. Results: No abnormal signal or density, cartilage defect, and subjacent bone ulceration were observed in the lateral and medial femorotibial compartments and the patellofemoral compartment on MRI images and CaSupp images for the 48 normal knee joints. CaSupp images could clearly identify cartilage thinning, defect, subjacent bone marrow edema, and edema of the infrapatellar fat pad in the same way as MRI images in the three knee joints with osteoarthritis. A significant difference was found in the mean thickness of the patellar cartilage between MRI images and CaSupp images, while the femoral cartilage presented no significant difference in thickness between MRI images and CaSupp images in all 48 knee joints. Conclusion: The present study demonstrated that CaSupp images could effectively be used to perform the visual and quantitative assessment of knee cartilage.

Microparticles (MPs), a class of cell products with biological activities, have been found to participate in a series of vascular activities. The aim of this article is to investigate the changes in the concentrations of MPs after ischemic stroke by meta-analysis. According to pre-established criteria, a strict screening of articles was performed through the Medline and Embase databases. Subsequently, the included studies were subjected to quality assessment and data extraction. Finally, a meta-analysis was performed on seven major outcomes from 985 noncerebrovascular disease controls and 988 ischemic stroke patients. The pooled concentrations of total MPs (TMPs), endotheliocyte-derived MPs (EMPs), platelet-derived MPs (PMPs), erythrocyte-derived MPs (RMPs), leukocyte-derived MPs (LMPs), and monocyte-derived MPs (MMPs) were significantly increased in the ischemic stroke patients compared to the noncerebrovascular disease controls, with the results as follows: TMPs [standardized mean difference (SMD), 1.12; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.26–1.97; p=0.01], EMPs (SMD, 0.90; 95% CI, 0.67–1.13; p<0.00001), PMPs (SMD, 1.15; 95% CI, 0.69–1.60; p<0.00001), RMPs (SMD, 1.14; 95% CI, 0.57–1.71; p<0.0001), LMPs (SMD, 1.42; 95% CI, 0.74–2.10; p<0.0001), and MMPs (SMD, 1.09; 95% CI, 0.59–1.60; p<0.0001). However, the pooled concentration of lymphocyte-derived MPs (LyMPs) demonstrated no significant difference between the patients and the controls (SMD, 0.22; 95% CI, −0.19 to 0.63; p=0.29). The available data indicated that the circulating MPs, except for LyMPs, play an important role in the development and prognosis of ischemic stroke.

A photonic-assisted broadband and high-resolution microwave frequency measurement scheme is proposed and demonstrated based on undersampling via using three cavity-less optical pulse sources with coprime repetition rates. After undersampling by three ultrashort pulse trains with repetition rates in the order of gigahertz, input microwave signal is down-converted to three intermediate-frequency (IF) signals located in the first Nyquist frequency range. Through measuring the frequencies of the IF signals via fast Fourier transform after digitization by the commercially available analog-to-digital convertors, the input microwave signal frequency can be retrieved based on the frequency identification algorithm. In the proof-of-concept experiment, three ultrashort pulse trains with repetition rates of 2.99, 3.07, and 3.10 GHz are generated by a cavity-less optical pulse source, where the pulse widths are 9.5, 9.6, and 9.8 ps, respectively. Through using these three ultrashort optical pulse trains, a frequency measurement range up to 40 GHz is realized, where the frequency measurement error is less than ±5kHz, and the spurious-free dynamic range is 91.25dBcHz^2/3.

Pancreatic cancer has remained a major cause of cancer-related deaths. A hallmark of pancreatic cancer is extensive stromal reactions, resulting in a unique tumor microenvironment, especially the involvement of macrophages. These tumor-educated cells limit the efficacy of chemotherapy. Therefore, it is necessary to identify an effective treatment strategy. In this study, we aimed to explore the anti-tumor and immunomodulatory effects of osthole on pancreatic cancer. We found that osthole suppressed Panc 02 cell migration and proliferation and induced apoptosis as shown in vitro. Osthole also attenuated the development of pancreatic cancer in mice by inhibiting tumor-infiltrating M2 macrophages in our study. Additionally, osthole inhibited the polarization of primary bone marrow cells into M2 macrophages and inhibited the expression of MRC1, CCL22and TGF-βin the M2 polarization process in vitro. Detection of the related signaling pathways revealed that osthole exerted immunomodulatory effects on M2 macrophages by down-regulating p-STAT6 and the p-ERK1/2-C/EBP β axis. These results indicated that osthole has effective anti-tumor and immunomodulatory effects on pancreatic cancer.

ABSTRACTThirty-seven years since reform and opening up, China has sustained rapid economic growth and urbanization. However, there was inadequate protection of natural, historical, and cultural heritage, especially in the past 17 years, which led to the outcome that urban and rural construction lacked features. To rebuild our urban features during urbanization, and avoid destroying them, we should probe into the reason of lacking features and how to protect them. Therefore, taking Jinan City as an example, this paper explored the crisis and its causes of urban characteristics during the period of rapid urbanization based on discussing roles of spring features, including economic effects, social effects, ecological effects and so on. What is more, this paper listed and analyzed those protection measures taken by Jinan. The results showed that spring groups spewed again and kept for 8 years through those measures, which meant that urban characteristics restored. Thus, Jinan City provides successful and significant reference for other cities in restoring urban features during urbanization construction. Also, the author deemed that cities could recollect their urban features as long as they take reasonable measures.

Video retargeting is dedicated to resizing the resolution of videos in a content aware manner, and it involves three critical challenges, namely, visual saliency preservation, deformation prevention, and temporal consistency persistence. Existing retargeting algorithms include seam carving based approaches, warping based approaches, and cropping based approaches, which mainly concentrate on saliency preservation and fail to prevent the deformation of salient shapes. This paper proposes a deformable shape preserving video retargeting scheme where salient curves extracted from frames are protected from deformation by minimizing the matching cost of curves in the original frames and the retargeted frames. Correspondingly, a curve matching algorithm is developed to generate the deformation cost which is invariant to translation, rotation and scaling with the Bookstein coordinate transform. In turn, the deformation cost of salient curves will be incorporated into the energy map of seam carving. Furthermore, the proposed scheme defines a temporal energy term to penalize the change of the relative position of curves in consecutive retargeted frames with respect to the original frames. Extensive experiments are validated by the visual comparison, user evaluation, deformation analysis and temporal consistency evaluation, which prove that the proposed scheme outperforms state-of-the-art video retargeting methods.

The ultra-low permeability of shale reservoirs limits shale gas production. Liquid nitrogen (LN2) fracturing is a promising reservoir stimulation technology that has attracted considerable attention in the unconventional natural gas industry. However, the evolution of pore and fracture structures in shale subjected to cyclic LN2treatment and its effect on permeability enhancement have not been fully elucidated, especially with the presence of pore or fracture water. In this study, the physical response of Longmaxi Formation shale to cyclic LN2treatment was carefully investigated. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and computed tomography (CT) were used to investigate the alteration of the pore and fracture structures in water-saturated and dry shale samples at different scales before and after cyclic LN2treatment. Based on digital image processing and the fractal theory of pore structure, the variation in pore and fracture structures in shale matrices at the microscale was quantitatively analyzed. The experimental results indicate that cyclic LN2treatment can effectively enhance pore volume and induce microfracture initiation and propagation. These phenomena were more significant in the water-saturated shale samples. Different correlations between the areal porosity of matrices and overall porosity/permeability in dry and water-saturated samples indicate that thermal stress and frost-heave force have different effects on shale pore and fracture structures. Owing to the different generation mechanisms, thermal stress was mostly applied to shale matrices, whereas frost-heavy force only existed near water-rich minerals, which were mainly clay in shale natural fractures. These two driving forces also had different responses to cyclic LN2treatment. Because the new generated pores and microfractures have increased the distance among mineral particles, thermal stress gradually decreased with increasing LN2treatment cycles. However, frost-heavy force could still induce macro-fractures along the bedding face of shale samples after several LN2treatment cycles, owing to water migration during water-ice phase change.

Performing mobile knearest neighbor (MkNN) queries whilst also being mobile is a challenging problem. All the mobile objects issuing queries and/or being queried aremobile. The performance of this kind of query relies heavily on the maintenance of the current locations of the objects. The index used for mobile objects must support efficient update operations and efficient query handling. This study aims to improve the performance of the MkNN queries while reducing update costs. Our approach is based on an observation that the frequency of one region changing between being occupied or not by mobile objects is much lower than the frequency of the position changes reported by the mobile objects. We first propose an virtual grid quadtree with Voronoi diagram(VGQ-Vor), which is a two-layer index structure that indexes regions occupied by mobile objects in a quadtree and builds a Voronoi diagram of the regions. Then we propose a moving knearest neighbor (kNN) query algorithm on the VGQ-Vor and prove the correctness of the algorithm. The experimental results show that the VGQ-Vor outperforms the existing techniques (Bx-tree, Bdual-tree) by one to three orders of magnitude in most cases.

Nowadays, human activity recognition is becoming a more and more significant topic, and there is also a wide range of applications for it in real world scenarios. Sensor data is an important data source in engineering and application. At present, some studies have been carried out in the field of human activity recognition based on sensor data in a macroscopic perspective. However, many studies in this perspective face some limitations. One pivotal limitation is uncontrollable data segment length of different kinds of activities. Suitable feature and data form are also influencing factors. This paper carries out the study creatively on a microscopic perspective with an emphasis on the logic and relevance between data segments, attempting to apply the idea of natural language processing and the method of data symbolization to the study of human activity recognition and try to solve the problem above. In this paper, several activity-element definitions and three algorithms are proposed, including the algorithm of dictionary building, the algorithm of corpus building, and activity recognition algorithm improved from a natural language analysis method, TF-IDF. Numerous experiments on different aspects of this model are taken. The experiments are carried out on six complex and representative single-level sensor datasets, namely UCI Sports and Daily dataset, Skoda dataset, WISDM Phoneacc dataset, WISDM Watchacc dataset, Healthy Older People dataset and HAPT dataset, which prove that this model can be applied to different datasets and achieve a satisfactory recognition result.

• Building balance between performance and privacy for CPIR-based query by scanning data subspace. • A hierarchical secure encrypted index for the subspace information is proposed. • A secure method for retrieving data subspace information is provided for users. • Data users can choose privacy degree according to their own needs. Location-based service has become one of the essential parts of our daily lives, which raises a problem: how to preserve location privacy. Computational Private Information Retrieval (CPIR) protocol, which does not need a trusted third party, allows users to retrieve data from a service provider without revealing users' query information. However, the CPIR protocol scans the entire data space, which causes high costs and limits the scale of CPIR-based applications. To address this problem, we propose a performance tunable Computational Private Information Retrieval (PTCPIR) model. We divide data space into subspaces and scan a subset of subspaces to achieve better performance while sacrificing some privacy. By tuning the percentage of scanned subspaces, we can achieve a tradeoff between performance and privacy. We design a hierarchical encrypted secure index to support data users to retrieve subspace information safely and efficiently, which facilitates privacy-preserving subspace information retrieval. Furthermore, we propose a novel subspace information retrieval method where the confused query keyword sequence makes servers unable to count query probability. Hence access pattern privacy is protected. Experiments on Sequoia and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our PTCPIR model provides a tunable tradeoff between performance and privacy with high efficiency and good scalability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]