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Abstract Purpose: To investigate the impact of Ramipril (RAM) on the expressions of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) and renal mesangial matrix (RMM) in rats with diabetic nephropathy (DN). Methods: The Sprague Dawley rats were divided into normal control (NC) group (n = 12), DN group (n = 11), and DN+RAM group (n = 12). The ratio of renal weight to body weight (RBT), fasting blood glucose (FBG), HbA1c, 24-h urine protein (TPU), blood urea nitrogen (BUN), creatinine (Cr), renal pathological changes, the levels of IGF-1, fibronectin (FN), type IV collagen (Col-IV), and matrix metalloproteinases (MMP)-2 were compared among the groups. Results: Compared with NC group, the RBT, FBG, HbA1c, TPU, BUN, Cr, and RMM in DN group were significantly increased (P < 0.05), the IGF-1, FN, and Col-IV were significantly upregulated (P < 0.05), while MMP was significantly downregulated (P < 0.05). Compared with DN group, the indexes except for the FBG and HbA1c in DN+RAM group were significantly improved (P < 0.05), among which IGF-1 exhibited significant positive correlation with TPU(r=0.937), FN(r=0.896) and Col-IV(r=0.871), while significant negative correlation with MMP-2 (r=-0.826) (P

Wearable devices used for human body monitoring has broad applications in smart home, sports, security and other fields. Wearable devices provide an extremely convenient way to collect a large amount of human motion data. In this paper, the human body acceleration feature extraction method based on wearable devices is studied. Firstly, Butterworth filter is used to filter the data. Then, in order to ensure the extracted feature value more accurately, it is necessary to remove the abnormal data in the source. This paper combines Kalman filter algorithm with a genetic algorithm and use the genetic algorithm to code the parameters of the Kalman filter algorithm. We use Standard Deviation (SD), Interval of Peaks (IoP) and Difference between Adjacent Peaks and Troughs (DAPT) to analyze seven kinds of acceleration. At last, SisFall data set, which is a globally available data set for study and experiments, is used for experiments to verify the effectiveness of our method. Based on simulation results, we can conclude that our method can distinguish different activity clearly.

The Copper-cysteamine (Cu-Cy) nanoparticle is a novel sensitizer with a potential to increase the effectiveness of radiation therapy for cancer treatment. In this work, the effect of nanoparticle size and the energy of X-rays on the effectiveness of radiation therapy are investigated. The effect of the particle size on their performance is very complicated. The nanoparticles with an average size of 300 nm have the most intense photoluminescence, the nanoparticles with the average size of 100 nm have the most reactive oxygen species production upon X-ray irradiation, while the nanoparticles with the average size of 40 nm have the best outcome in the tumor suppression in mice upon X-ray irradiation. For energy, 90 kVp radiation resulted in smaller tumor sizes than 250 kVp or 350 kVp radiation energies. Overall, knowledge of the effect of nanoparticle size and radiation energy on radiation therapy outcomes could be useful for future applications of Cu-Cy nanoparticles.

Thickness is a very important parameter with which to control the microstructures, along with physical properties in transition-metal nitride thin films. In work presented here, CrN films with different thicknesses (from 26 to 130 nm) were grown by chemical solution deposition. The films are pure phase and polycrystalline. Thickness dependence of microstructures and electrical transport behavior were studied. With the increase of films thickness, grain size and nitrogen content are increased, while resistivity, zero-field sensitivity and magnetoresistance are decreased. In the temperature range of 5−350 K, all samples exhibited semiconductor-like properties with dρ/dT < 0. For the range above and below the Néel temperature, the resistivity can be fitted by the thermal activation model and the two-dimensional weak localization (2D-WL) model, respectively. The ultra-low magnetoresistance at a low temperature under high magnetic fields with a large zero-field sensitivity was observed in the CrN thin films. The zero-field sensitivity can be effectively tuned to 10−2 K−1 at 5 K with a magnetoresistance of less than 1% at 2 K under 14 T by reasonably controlling the thickness.

We studied the strategy preference of using the egocentric or the allocentric representation in individuals who have acquired the ability to use both representations. Fifty-seven children aged 5–7 years and 53 adults retrieved toys hidden in one of four identical containers in a square room. We varied the type of spatial representation available in four conditions: (1) only self-motion information (egocentric representation); (2) only external landmark cues (allocentric representation); (3) both self-motion and landmark cues (dual representation); (4) self-motion and landmark cues in conflict (conflict trial). We found that, compared with the allocentric representation, the egocentric representation approached maturity earlier in development and was exploited better in early years. More importantly, in the conflict trials, while both children and adults relied more on egocentric representation, still a small portion of participants chose allocentric representation, especially in the adult group. These results provided evidence that egocentric representation is generally preferred more in both young children and adults.

Dietary exposure of cadmium (Cd) has not been studied in Southwest China. The objective of the study was to determine the pollution characteristics and contamination levels in various agriculture products in Southwest China and to conduct a comparison of dietary exposure assessment of Cd in polluted and non-polluted areas. Results showed that the mean Cd contents in rice were 0.53 and 0.52 mg/kg in the high-polluted and low-polluted areas, respectively, with the average value was 0.03 mg/kg in the control area. The mean dietary Cd exposure from rice and vegetables of the selected non-occupational residents in Southwest China was 113.10 μg/kg bodyweight (bw)/month, 88.80 μg/kg bw/month, and 16.50 μg/kg bw/month in the high-polluted, low-polluted, and control areas, respectively, which correspond to 4.5 times, 3.6 times, and 0.66 times of the provisional tolerable monthly intake (25 μg/kg bw/month) established by the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives. The findings indicated that the risk for Cd exposure of residents was high due to home-grown food (most especially rice) being near polluted areas and is of great concern.

Introducing fire-retardant additives or building blocks into resins is a widely adopted method used for improving the fire retardancy of epoxy composites. However, the increase in viscosity and the presence of insoluble additives accompanied by resin modification remain challenges for resin transfer molding (RTM) processing. We developed a robust approach for fabricating self-extinguishing RTM composites using unmodified and flammable resins. To avoid the effects on resin fluidity and processing, we loaded the flame retardant into tackifiers instead of resins. We found that the halogen-free flame retardant, a microencapsulated red phosphorus (MRP) additive, was enriched on fabric surfaces, which endowed the composites with excellent fire retardancy. The composites showed a 79.2% increase in the limiting oxygen index, a 29.2% reduction in heat release during combustion, and could self-extinguish within two seconds after ignition. Almost no effect on the mechanical properties was observed. This approach is simple, inexpensive, and basically applicable to all resins for fabricating RTM composites. This approach adapts insoluble flame retardants to RTM processing. We envision that this approach could be extended to load other functions (radar absorbing, conductivity, etc.) into RTM composites, broadening the application of RTM processing in the field of advanced functional materials.

Complete synthetic minimal media for Zygosaccharomyces rouxii growth were designed for high temperature (40 ℃, HTS) and high salt stress (18% NaCl, HSS) in this study, and the difference in the nutritional requirements of Z. rouxii cells under long-term adverse environmental conditions was analyzed. The differences in the metabolism and gene expression of organic acids, amino acids and sugars during the period from the growth adaptation stage to the early logarithmic stage were highlighted between HSS and HTS conditions. The results showed that Z. rouxii cells exposed to HSS needed more exogenous amino acids, vitamin and amino acid supplementation alleviated HTS-induced damage in yeast cells. The adversity transcription gene MSN4 and the hypertonic regulatory protein gene HOG1 responded to high salt, while the heat shock regulatory protein gene HSF1 and the superoxide dismutase gene SOD1 responded to high temperature. In summary, different strategies for organic acid, amino acid and sugar metabolism were adopted by Z. rouxii in response to HSS and HTS. This study deepens the understanding of the mechanism of temperature tolerance in salt-tolerant Z. rouxii, which will contribute to the development of new brewing yeast cells with tolerance to both high salt and temperature.

The increasing number of 3D objects in various applications has increased the requirement for effective and efficient 3D object retrieval methods, which attracted extensive research efforts in recent years. Existing works mainly focus on how to extract features and conduct object matching. With the increasing applications, 3D objects come from different areas. In such circumstances, how to conduct object retrieval becomes more important. To address this issue, we propose a multi-view object retrieval method using multi-scale topic models in this paper. In our method, multiple views are first extracted from each object, and then the dense visual features are extracted to represent each view. To represent the 3D object, multi-scale topic models are employed to extract the hidden relationship among these features with respect to varied topic numbers in the topic model. In this way, each object can be represented by a set of bag of topics. To compare the objects, we first conduct topic clustering for the basic topics from two data sets, and then generate the common topic dictionary for new representation. Then, the two objects can be aligned to the same common feature space for comparison. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, experiments are conducted on two data sets. The 3D object retrieval experimental results and comparison with existing methods demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.