Search

Sepsis remains one of the leading causes of death globally, in spite of advanced developments in intensive care and better understandings of pathophysiology related to sepsis. There is no special treatment or drug available for sepsis, currently. Under normal circumstances, neutrophil is a major player in acute infection control. However, during sepsis, the migration abilities and antimicrobial functions of neutrophils are impaired, resulting in a dysregulated immune response. Recent studies have indeed demonstrated that blocking or reversing neutrophil migration and impaired antibacterial function can improve the outcomes in septic animal models. This article systemically synthesized information regarding related factors and signaling involved in the functions of neutrophils in sepsis. This review also discussed the possibility that neutrophils be used as a marker for specific diagnosis and/or prediction of the outcomes of sepsis.

Electrochemical carbon dioxide (CO

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are crafted by imposing mild perturbation on clean ones. An intriguing property of adversarial examples is that they are efficient among different DNNs. Thus transfer-based attacks against DNNs become an increasing concern. In this scenario, attackers devise adversarial instances based on the local model without feedback information from the target one. Unfortunately, most existing transfer-based attack methods only employ a single local model to generate adversarial examples. It results in poor transferability because of overfitting to the local model. Although several ensemble attacks have been proposed, the transferability of adversarial examples merely have a slight increase. Meanwhile, these methods need high memory cost during the training process. To this end, we propose a novel attack strategy called stochastic serial attack (SSA). It adopts a serial strategy to attack local models, which reduces memory consumption compared to parallel attacks. Moreover, since local models are stochastically selected from a large model set, SSA can ensure that the adversarial examples do not overfit specific weaknesses of local source models. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset and NeurIPS 2017 adversarial competition dataset show the effectiveness of SSA in improving the transferability of adversarial examples and reducing the memory consumption of the training process.

Breast neuroendocrine neoplasms (NENs) constitute a rare histologic subtype that includes both neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) and neuroendocrine carcinomas (NECs). In this study, we aimed to gain insight into the clinical and molecular characteristics of NENs of the breast. NEN and paired distant normal fresh tissues and clinicopathological data were obtained from 17 patients with NENs, and clinicopathological data were collected from 755 patients with invasive breast carcinomas of no special type (IBCs-NST). We compared the clinicopathological characteristics of NENs and IBCs-NST and performed whole-exome sequencing (WES) of both NEN and paired normal tissues. Compared with the IBC-NST patients, the NEN patients had a higher mean age, lower clinical stage, and lower pathological nodal (pN) stage (P

Given a graph H and an integer k ≥ 1 , the Gallai–Ramsey number G R k ( H ) is defined to be the minimum integer n such that every k -edge coloring of the complete graph K n contains either a rainbow (all different colored) triangle or a monochromatic copy of H . In this paper, we study Gallai–Ramsey numbers for graphs with chromatic number three such as K m for m ≥ 2 , where K m is a kipas with m + 1 vertices obtained from the join of K 1 and P m , and a class of graphs with five vertices, denoted by ℋ . We first study the general lower bound of such graphs and propose a conjecture for the exact value of G R k ( K m ) . Then we give a unified proof to determine the Gallai–Ramsey numbers for many graphs in ℋ and obtain the exact value of G R k ( K 4 ) for k ≥ 1 . Our outcomes not only indicate that the conjecture on G R k ( K m ) is true for m ≤ 4 , but also imply several results on G R k ( H ) for some H ∈ ℋ which are proved individually in different papers.

Traditional chemotherapy exhibits a certain therapeutic effect toward malignant cancer, but easily induce tumor multidrug resistance (MDR), thereby resulting in the progress of tumor recurrence or metastasis. In this work, we deigned ternary hybrid nanodrugs (PEI/DOX@CXB-NPs) to simultaneously combat against tumor MDR and metastasis. In vitro results demonstrate this hybrid nanodrugs could efficiently increase cellular uptake at pH 6.8 by the charge reversal, break lysosomal sequestration by the proton sponge effect and trigger drugs release by intracellular GSH, eventually leading to higher drugs accumulation and cell-killing in drug-sensitive/resistant cells. In vivo evaluation revealed that this nanodrugs could significantly inhibit MDR tumor growth and simultaneously prevent A549 tumor liver/lung metastasis owing to the specifically drugs accumulation. Mechanism studies further verified that hybrid nanodrugs were capable of down-regulating the expression of MDR or metastasis-associated proteins, lead to the enhanced anti-MDR and anti-metastasis effect. As a result, the multiple combination strategy provided an option for effective cancer treatment, which could be potentially extended to other therapeutic agents or further use in clinical test., Graphical abstract Ternary hybrid nanodrugs were fabricated and exhibited the stepwise response to pH/GSH stimuli, thereby improving in vivo targeting delivery and high-effectively treating MDR and metastatic tumor.Image 1

Accelerating mass exchange between matrix and fractures is the essence of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) in tight formations after natural depletion. Low salinity water (LSW) injection has been commercially-proven in conventional reservoirs EOR, with scale projects in progress worldwide. There is, however, a lack of understanding of the EOR effect in tight formations. Therefore, in this work, we introduced LSW-EOR to a target tight formation using huff-puff mode. Spontaneous imbibition (SI) tests were firstly performed on homogenous Berea sandstone cores with decreasing salinity brine to observe the production response. The results indicated that the oil recovery of the tight rock was boosted by tuning brine salinity. Of all the used brines with salinity ranging from 0.021% to 2.1% TDS (total dissolved salinity), the 0.21% TDS brine showed a rapid increase in oil production over imbibing time, which finally led to an incremental oil recovery of 4.5% OOIP (original oil in place). Core-scale modeling was conducted by history-matching the oil recovery dynamics of the SI results through modifying capillary pressure and relative permeability. A full-scale reservoir model was constructed using micro-seismic data to model fracture geometry combing fracturing results and scaling parameters obtained from core scale history-matching. It is proven that LSW huff-n-puff stimulated the oil production after natural depletion and improved MEE (mass exchange efficiency) of the target formation, but the EOR benefit was not comparable to CO2 and surfactant-assisted water huff-puff methods.

Summary FAPbI3 (FA+ = formamidinium) perovskite, one of the most efficient basic components in nowadays perovskite solar cells (PCSs), undergoes spontaneous phase transition while molecular-level investigations are still lacking. Here, we report a structural study on the phase transition process of the FA-based perovskites based on isolation and identification of a series of single crystal intermediates. A key intermediate of 8H phase with unique structure is discovered, which helps elucidate the complete phase evolution and stabilization mechanism of FA-based perovskites. Our new insight based on the Pauling’s rules not only deepens the understanding of the phase stabilization roles of cations and anions in maximizing the concentrations of corner-sharing halogens and cubic cages but also forms suggestion for fabrication of high-performance and long-term stable PCSs by controlling the factors such as composition, precursor solution, stoichiometry, and additives.

Purpose Heart-lung transplantation (HLTx) is a life-saving treatment option for patients with advanced cardiopulmonary failure. However, posterior mediastinal bleeding and phrenic nerve damage are still intraoperative challenges for the traditional surgical method. This study reports an innovative non-in situ HLTx performed in our center, preventing posterior mediastinal bleeding and phrenic nerve damage effectively. Description Between September 2015 and September 2020, 12 patients without previous heart surgery underwent a traditional HLTx and were deemed a control group, and 3 patients underwent an innovative non-in situ HLTx. The operative time, cold ischemic time, intraoperative bleeding, intraoperative transfusion, and the intensive care unit and hospital lengths of stay were assessed between traditional HLTx and non-in situ HLTx. Evaluation The innovative non-in situ HLTx was successfully performed in the 3 patients. We found that the intensive care unit and hospital lengths of stay, total surgical time, cold ischemic time, intraoperative bleeding, and intraoperative transfusion were decreased in the 3 patients compared with the traditional surgical method. Conclusion Non-in situ HLTx may decrease posterior mediastinal bleeding and phrenic nerve damage effectively.