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The increased number of accidents involving UAVs striking people has caused great societal concern. Therefore, it is necessary to study the threat potential and severity of ground collision accidents of UAVs. This study analyzed the head and neck injury risk resulting from the impact of medium-mass UAVs. First, the finite element (FE) model of the M200-Hybrid III 50th dummy was established, in which the M200 itself had been validated against drop tests, and then the M200-Hybrid III 50th model was validated based on the experimental data of the M200 impacting on the dummy head. High consistency between the simulations and the experiments was observed. Second, simulations were conducted to analyze the head and neck injury severity at different impact speeds, angles, and locations of the M200. As the impact speed increases, HIC15 increases exponentially and N ij increases linearly. It is found that the critical speed range causing injury for both vertical and horizontal impacts is 7–9 m/s. As the impact angle increases, HIC15 varies in the form of the sum of an inverse proportional function and a linear function, and N ij increases in the form of the sum of power and quadratic function. In addition, the battery-first and the top of mainframe impacts lead to the highest probability of head and neck injury among different impact locations, while the landing gear-first is the lowest. Finally, a biomechanical model (THUMS) was incorporated to develop the M200-THUMS model to study the tissue-level injury of the head and neck under different impact conditions. The simulation results show that neck is prone to ligament injury under vertical impact, while the skull is more likely to be fractured under horizontal impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because the data in practical applications usually satisfy the assumption of mixing subspaces and contain multiple features, multi-view subspace clustering has attracted extensive attention in recent years. In previous work, multi-view information can be utilized comprehensively by considering consistency. However, they often treat the information from different views equally. Because it is difficult to ensure that the information of all views is well mined, difficult view will reduce the performance. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view subspace clustering method named consistent auto-weighted multi-view subspace clustering (CAMVSC) to overcome the above limitation by weighting automatically the representation matrices of each view. In our model, the density and sparsity are both considered to ensure the learning effect of each view. Although simultaneously using the self-representation and the auto-weighting strategy will bring difficulties to solve the model, we successfully design a special updating scheme to obtain the numerical algorithm, and prove its convergence theoretically. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serum uric acid (SUA) may play an important role in the occurrence of colorectal cancer (CRC). This study aims to explore the association of SUA with the risk of CRC incidence by drawing data from the Kailuan Study. We prospectively examined the association between SUA and risk of CRC incidence among 93,356 Chinese. Eligible participants were divided into three groups based on their tertiles of SUA. Cox proportional hazards regression was used to calculate the hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) of CRC. During a median follow-up of 13.02 years, 583 new-onset CRC cases were identified. After adjustments were made for confounders, participants in the highest tertiles of SUA exhibited a 1.55-fold increased risk of CRC compared with patients with the lowest SUA levels (HRT3 vs. T1 = 1.55, 95% CI: 1.09–2.30). The associations of SUA with the risk of CRC were slightly reduced but remained substantial in the competing risk analyses when treating CRC unrelated death as the competing risk event. This study found a positive association of SUA with CRC incidence. Specific prevention efforts could be focused on the population with higher levels of SUA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Inflammation and metabolic syndrome (MetS) may act synergistically and possibly accelerate the initiation and progression of colorectal cancer (CRC). We prospectively examined the joint effect of MetS and inflammation on the risk of CRC. Methods: We studied 92,770 individuals from the Kailuan study. MetS was defined based on the presence of three or more of the following components. (1) high glucose: FPG > 5.6 mmol/L; (2) high blood pressure: SBP ≥ 130 mmHg or DBP ≥ 85 mmHg; (3) high triglycerides: triglycerides > 1.69 mmol/L; (4) low HDL-C: HDL-C < 1.04 mmol/L in men or 1.29 mmol/L in women; and (5) visceral adiposity: waist circumference ≥ 85 cm in men or 80 cm in women. Inflammation was defined as hs-CRP ≥ 3 mg/L. We divided participants into four groups for the primary exposure according to the presence/absence of inflammation and presence/absence of MetS. Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to evaluate the association of MetS and/or inflammation with the risk of CRC. Results: Compared with metabolically healthy noninflammatory individuals, inflammatory participants without MetS and inflammatory participants with MetS were associated with a 1.3-fold and 4.18-fold increased risk of CRC with corresponding HRs (95% CI) of 1.34 (1.09, 1.64) and 4.18 (3.11, 5.62), respectively. The combination of MetS and inflammation was associated with the highest risk of CRC in all subgroups, especially among participants who were female, in younger age, and obese. Sensitivity analyses further validated our primary findings. Conclusions: We found the combination of MetS and inflammation could significantly increase the risk of CRC. Including CRP in the diagnosis of MetS may help to identify additional high-risk participants who should be targeted for early diagnosis and prevention of CRC. Trial registration Kailuan study, ChiCTR–TNRC–11001489. Registered 24 August, 2011-Retrospectively registered, http:// www.chictr.org.cn/showprojen.aspx?proj=8050 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is associated with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS), studies on the direct relationship between NAFLD and snoring, an early symptom of OSAS, are limited. We evaluated whether snorers had higher risk of developing NAFLD. The study was performed using data of the Tongmei study (cross-sectional survey, 2,153 adults) and Kailuan study (ongoing prospective cohort, 19,587 adults). In both studies, NAFLD was diagnosed using ultrasound; snoring frequency was determined at baseline and classified as none, occasional (1 or 2 times/week), or habitual (≥3 times/week). Odds ratios (ORs) and hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals were estimated using logistic and Cox models, respectively. During 10 years' follow-up in Kailuan, 4,576 individuals with new-onset NAFLD were identified at least twice. After adjusting confounders including physical activity, perceived salt intake, body mass index (BMI), and metabolic syndrome (MetS), multivariate-adjusted ORs and HRs for NAFLD comparing habitual snorers to non-snorers were 1.72 (1.25–2.37) and 1.29 (1.16–1.43), respectively. These associations were greater among lean participants (BMI < 24) and similar across other subgroups (sex, age, MetS, hypertension). Snoring was independently and positively associated with higher prevalence and incidence of NAFLD, indicating that habitual snoring is a useful predictor of NAFLD, particularly in lean individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In neurodegenerative diseases, pathogenic proteins tend to misfold and form aggregates that are difficult to remove and able to induce excessive endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress, leading to neuronal injury and apoptosis. Homocysteine-induced endoplasmic reticulum protein (Herp), an E3 ubiquitin ligase, is an important early marker of ER stress and is involved in the ubiquitination and degradation of many neurodegenerative proteins. However, in Huntington’s disease (HD), a typical polyglutamine disease, whether Herp is also involved in the metabolism and degradation of the pathogenic protein, mutant huntingtin, has not been reported. Therefore, we studied the relationship between Herp and N-terminal fragments of huntingtin (HttN-20Q and HttN-160Q). We found that Herp was able to bind to the overexpressed Htt N-terminal, and this interaction was enhanced by expansion of the polyQ fragment. Confocal microscopy demonstrated that Herp was co-localized with the HttN-160Q aggregates in the cytoplasm and tightly surrounded the aggregates. Overexpression of Herp significantly decreased the amount of soluble and insoluble HttN-160Q, promoted its ubiquitination, and inhibited its cytotoxicity. In contrast, knockdown of Herp resulted in more HttN-160Q protein, less ubiquitination, and stronger cytotoxicity. Inhibition of the autophagy-lysosomal pathway (ALP) had no effect on the function of Herp. However, blocking the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway (UPP) inhibited the reduction in soluble HttN-160Q caused by Herp. Interestingly, blocking the UPP did not weaken the ability of Herp to reduce HttN-160Q aggregates. Deletions of the N-terminal of Herp weakened its ability to inhibit HttN-160Q aggregation but did not result in a significant increase in its soluble form. However, loss of the C-terminal led to a significant increase in soluble HttN-160Q, but Herp still maintained the ability to inhibit aggregate formation. We further found that the expression level of Herp was significantly increased in HD animal and cell models. Our findings suggest that Herp is a newly identified huntingtin-interacting protein that is able to reduce the cytotoxicity of mutant huntingtin by inhibiting its aggregation and promoting its degradation. The N-terminal of Herp serves as the molecular chaperone to inhibit protein aggregation, while its C-terminal functions as an E3 ubiquitin ligase to promote the degradation of misfolded proteins through the UPP. Increased expression of Herp in HD models may be a pro-survival mechanism under stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]