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Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease. Crocetin, derived from saffron, exerts multiple pharmacological properties, such as anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antifatigue, and anticancer effects. However, the effect of crocetin on PD remains unclear. In this study, we designed experiments to investigate the effect of crocetin against MPTP-induced PD models and the underlying mechanisms. Our results showed that crocetin treatment attenuates MPTP-induced motor deficits and protects dopaminergic neurons. Both in vivo and in vitro experiments demonstrated that crocetin treatment decreased the expression of inflammatory associated genes and inflammatory cytokines. Furthermore, crocetin treatment protected mitochondrial functions against MPP+ induced damage by regulating the mPTP (mitochondrial permeability transition pore) viability in the interaction of ANT (adenine nucleotide translocase) and Cyp D (Cyclophilin D) dependent manner. Therefore, our results demonstrate that crocetin has therapeutic potential in Parkinson's disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An evolutionary approach of parking space guidance based upon a novel Chaotic Particle Swarm Optimization (CPSO) algorithm is proposed. In the newly proposed CPSO algorithm, the chaotic dynamics is combined into the position updating rules of Particle Swarm Optimization to improve the diversity of solutions and to avoid being trapped in the local optima. This novel approach, that combines the strengths of Particle Swarm Optimization and chaotic dynamics, is then applied into the route optimization (RO) problem of parking lots, which is an important issue in the management systems of large-scale parking lots. It is used to find out the optimized paths between any source and destination nodes in the route network. Route optimization problems based on real parking lots are introduced for analyzing and the effectiveness and practicability of this novel optimization algorithm for parking space guidance have been verified through the application results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile roaming authentication scheme achieves the mutual authentication and session key establishment between the mobile user and the foreign agent. In 2013, Xie et al. pointed out that Chen et al.'s scheme is vulnerable to offline password attack, and does not achieve fair session key generation, user untraceability, user friendliness, and perfect forward secrecy, and then they proposed an improved scheme. In this paper, we propose an improvement of Xie et al.'s scheme, since the foreign agent may confuse the mobile users when multiple mobile users simultaneously access the foreign agent in Xie et al.'s scheme. Further, we prove the formal security of the proposed scheme, and present the performance comparison between our scheme and some related schemes. The proposed scheme is more efficient and secure than other related schemes and is suitable for using in the global mobility network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]