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Capability of three species of aquatic macrophytes to remediate pentachlorophenol (PCP)-contaminated sediments starting with initial concentration of 2,000 μg kg dw (dry weight) was investigated. Negative effect of PCP on the plant growth, chlorophyll contents and root activities ( p > 0.05) of the three species of aquatic macrophytes during remediation was not observed. PCP removal was significantly enhanced in the phytoremediated sediments in comparison with the control sediments after 90 days treatment ( p < 0.05), and the removal rates of PCP in the sediments planted with P. communis Trin, T. orientalis and S. validus Vahl were 90.35 ± 0.03, 99.23 ± 0.02 and 99.33 ± 0.01%, respectively, while the rate was 29.87 ± 0.05% in the control sediments. Bioaccumulation by three macrophytes was confirmed; the maximum PCP contents in the roots of P. communis Trin , T. orientalis and S. validus Vahl were 419.50 ± 0.71, 1,833.33 ± 7.37 and 2,090.00 ± 2.65 μg kg at the 30th day, respectively. In conclusion, P. communis Trin , T. orientalis and S. validus Vahl may act as promising tools for the PCP phytoremediation in aquatic environment, especially S. validus Vahl. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A biped robot, MARI-3, for jumping is developed, of which the ultimate objective is fast walking and running. Its mechanical structure including the joint configuration and specification, the knee joint, and the speed reduction mechanism are described in detail. A specific control system RON (RObot Network) for MARI-3 that is a serial and distributed network and consists of a microcontroller, host unit, servo units, sensor units and servo amplifiers is presented as well as the sensor system. With the developed biped robot MARI-3, one-leg jumping of 110 ms jumping time and 4.0 cm jumping height was implemented as initiative and verification experiments. Furthermore, by comparison of MARI-3 with other jumping or running robots, MARI-3's potential ability for fast walking, jumping and running becomes clear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the range of 0-500 μg L-1 atrazine, the growth of duckweed Lemna minor showed a negative relationship with atrazine concentration. Although no significant effect was found on the chlorophyll content, the ratio of chlorophyll a/b showed a declining trend with the increase of atrazine level. CAT and SOD activities were induced in the whole tested range of atrazine while POD activity was only induced at atrazine <100 μg L-1, indicating that CAT and SOD may play more important role than POD in the protection of L. minor against atrazine impairment. Bioconcentration factor of atrazine in duckweed L. minor was 0.78, but the biodegradation of atrazine by L. minor was significant which accounted for 16.1% of 10 μg ml-1 in a 7 days experiment. Like in other plants, the GSH conjugation may be the main pathway of biotransformation of atrazine in duckweed L. minor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  In order to improve the positioning precision of the stop posture (position and orientation) of an object and decrease the trial numbers in our proposed releasing manipulation, two iterative learning control (ILC) schemes, learning control based on convergent condition (LCBCC), and learning control based on optimal principle (LCBOP) are designed in experimental-oriented way. These two methods are all based on a linearized system model. The experimental results show that these methods are effective. Having discussed the characteristics of these control methods, we conclude that in the case there is no enough system knowledge, LCBCC is the only choice to be used to learn the system knowledge; after the enough experience has been acquired, LCBOP is better than LCBCC, in the view of both of the convergent rate and the precision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The characteristics of frictional sliding motion in releasing manipulation are discussed in this paper. Releasing manipulation is such a manipulation in which an object obtains its initial translational and rotational velocities by the striking of a manipulator and slides on a surface, and comes to stop at the destination with the desired orientation under the action of friction. First, based on our previous work, the properties of releasing manipulation are described. Second, the conclusion that trajectories of arbitrary shaped objects in sliding motion are nearly rectilinear is presented. Third, a phenomenon of simultaneous stopping of translational and rotational motion for arbitrary shaped objects is clarified. Fourth, motion monotonicity for two extreme cases, i.e. initially translation-dominated motion and initially rotation-dominated motion are discussed; several important original results are obtained. With the above obtained results, two simple approaches of determining the necessary initial velocities for releasing manipulation are naturally developed and their accuracies are confirmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, a novel reduced degree-of-freedom (rDOF) aortic valve model is employed to investigate the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) and hemodynamics associated with aortic stenosis. The dynamics of the valve leaflets are determined by an ordinary differential equation with two parameters and this rDOF model is shown to reproduce key features of more complex valve models. The hemodynamics associated with aortic stenosis is studied for three cases: a healthy case and two stenosed cases. The focus of the study is to correlate the hemodynamic features with the source generation mechanism of systolic murmurs associated with aortic stenosis. In the healthy case, extremely weak flow fluctuations are observed. However, in the stenosed cases, simulations show significant turbulent fluctuations in the ascending aorta, which are responsible for the generation of strong wall pressure fluctuations after the aortic root mostly during the deceleration phase of the systole. The intensity of the murmur generation increases with the severity of the stenosis, and the source locations for the two diseased cases studied here lie around 1.0 inlet duct diameters (Do) downstream of the ascending aorta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Ovarian cancer is a major gynecological cancer that has poor prognosis associated mainly to its late diagnosis. Cisplatin is an FDA approved ovarian cancer therapy and even though the therapy is initially promising, the patients mostly progress to resistance against cisplatin. The underlying mechanisms are complex and not very clearly understood. Using two different paired cell lines representing cisplatin-sensitive and the cisplatin-resistant ovarian cancer cells, the ES2 and the A2780 parental and cisplatin-resistant cells, we show an elevated proto-oncogene c-Myb in resistant cells. We further show down-regulated lncRNA NKILA in resistant cells with its de-repression in resistant cells when c-Myb is silenced. NKILA negatively correlates with cancer cell and invasion but has no effect on cellular proliferation or cell cycle. C-Myb activates NF-κB signaling which is inhibited by NKILA. The cisplatin resistant cells are also marked by upregulated stem cell markers, particularly LIN28A and OCT4, and downregulated LIN28A-targeted let-7 family miRNAs. Whereas LIN28A and downregulated let-7s individually de-repress c-Myb-mediated cisplatin resistance, the ectopic expression of let-7s attenuates LIN28A effects, thus underlying a c-Myb-NKILA-LIN28A-let-7 axis in cisplatin resistance of ovarian cancer cells that needs to be further explored for therapeutic intervention.

The increase in demand for the fast charging of electric vehicles (EVs) has promoted research and the application of high-power direct current (DC) fast charging stations, and research on the stability control of charging stations with a parallel structure of multi-controllable rectifier modules is of great significance. Taking into account the dynamic and steady-state performance, the parameters of the dual-loop controller based on virtual impedance control are designed to realize the power sharing of multi-controllable rectifier modules. The constant power load model of EV charging at a constant current is established, and the load capacity of the cascaded system of converters is studied by using the impedance analysis method. The experimental and simulation results verify the effectiveness and correctness of the power sharing control strategy and the cascaded system stability analysis.

Rhizobia inoculation is widely used in legumes to improve the yield and quality of forage. However, the symbiotic interactions of different legumes are specific. The search for efficient strains plays an important role in legume forage and in practical production. In this study, Desmodium intortum was first inoculated with rhizobia from different regions, and then the production traits, nutritional quality, and fermentation of D. intortum in the rumen were evaluated according to the rhizobia strains. The results showed that, compared with the control, inoculation with different rhizobia strains significantly increased the number of nodules, shoot fresh weight, crude protein content, plant protein yield, and ether extract content of D. intortum, and inoculation with the R3 strain (Bradyrhizobium elkanii) increased these values by 61.0%, 29.6%, 16.1%, 62.9%, and 30.4%, respectively. In the basal diet of Pennisetum purpureum Rich. × P. americana King grass cv. Reyan No.4, D. intortum inoculated with different rhizobia was added (75:25), and the combination of the inoculated R3 and R5 strains increased the rumen’s ammonia-nitrogen (NH3-N) levels and in vitro dry matter digestibility (IVDMD): R3 increased the contents of NH3-N and IVDMD by 50.1% and 12.3%, respectively, while R5 increased them by 50.9% and 15.4%, respectively. Based on a comprehensive evaluation through principal component analysis, R3 was ranked first overall. These results support the development of competitive inoculants from indigenous strains as a strategy to improve the nutritional value of D. intortum and ruminal fermentation.

Neurilemmoma, also known as schwannoma or neurinoma, is a tumor that originates from neural sheath Schwann cells. Giant neurilemmomas derived from the retroperitoneum have rarely been reported. We herein describe a woman with a giant retroperitoneal neurilemmoma that was initially incorrectly diagnosed as an inflammatory abdominal mass. The tumor extended from the patient’s hypogastrium to her pelvic cavity and measured 20 × 15 × 10 cm. The tumor was excised via laparotomy and diagnosed as a retroperitoneal neurilemmoma through histological and immunohistochemical examination. Although rare, particularly in the giant form, neurilemmoma should be considered as an important differential diagnosis in patients with a retroperitoneal tumor or inflammatory abdominal mass. Complete excision should be considered for the potential cure of giant retroperitoneal neurilemmomas.

In recent years, increasing associations between microRNAs (miRNAs) and human diseases have been identified. Based on accumulating biological data, many computational models for potential miRNA-disease associations inference have been developed, which saves time and expenditure on experimental studies, making great contributions to researching molecular mechanism of human diseases and developing new drugs for disease treatment. In this paper, we proposed a novel computational method named Ensemble of Decision Tree based MiRNA-Disease Association prediction (EDTMDA), which innovatively built a computational framework integrating ensemble learning and dimensionality reduction. For each miRNA-disease pair, the feature vector was extracted by calculating the statistical measures, graph theoretical measures, and matrix factorization results for the miRNA and disease, respectively. Then multiple base learnings were built to yield many decision trees (DTs) based on random selection of negative samples and miRNA/disease features. Particularly, Principal Components Analysis was applied to each base learning to reduce feature dimensionality and hence remove the noise or redundancy. Average strategy was adopted for these DTs to get final association scores between miRNAs and diseases. In model performance evaluation, EDTMDA showed AUC of 0.9309 in global leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV) and AUC of 0.8524 in local LOOCV. Additionally, AUC of 0.9192+/-0.0009 in 5-fold cross validation proved the model's reliability and stability. Furthermore, three types of case studies for four human diseases were implemented. As a result, 94% (Esophageal Neoplasms), 86% (Kidney Neoplasms), 96% (Breast Neoplasms) and 88% (Carcinoma Hepatocellular) of top 50 predicted miRNAs were confirmed by experimental evidences in literature.

Introduction: The sural neuro-fasciocutaneous flap is widely used for reconstructing skin defects in the lower calf. Variations of the sural nerve in the calf are infrequent, which may require a variation in the traditional surgical procedure., Case Presentation: A 76-year-old male patient had soft tissue defect of the right lateral ankle and lower leg caused by an accident 18 years ago. He had exposed bones and had osteomyelitis. He underwent two primary operations, and finally, we used a sural neuro-fasciocutaneous flap to effectively cover the defect. We observed that the course of the sural nerve was atypical during the surgery, and we adjusted the flap axis laterally to bring the lateral sural cutaneous nerve inside the flap to improve the success rate of the surgery. The flap entirely survived, and there was no sensory impairment in the calf. The patient was discharged from the hospital after 10 days., Clinical Discussion: Some type of variant of the sural nerve makes the flap harvest without the neurovascular component of the sural nerve and the cutaneous chain, which might decrease flap survival. Moving the flap axis laterally and bringing in the lateral sural nerve or peroneal communicating nerve offers an adequate blood supply to the vascular territory and the flap region., Conclusion: In patients with sural nerve variants, the procedure does not have to follow the traditional theory of the sural neuro-fasciocutaneous flap. Preoperative and intraoperative protection of the sural nerve variant should also be considered., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)