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Thanks to its preparatory ease, close affinity, and low cost, the aptasensor can serve as a promising substitute for antibody-dependent biosensors. However, the available aptasensors are mostly subject to a single-mode readout and the interference of unbound aptamers in solution and non-target-induced transition events. Herein, we proposed a multimodal aptasensor for multimode detection of ochratoxin A (OTA) with cross-validation using the 3'-6-carboxyfluorescein (FAM)-enhanced exonuclease I (Exo I) tool and magnetic microbead carrier. Specifically, the 3'-FAM-labeled aptamer/biotinylated-cDNA hybrids were immobilized onto streptavidin-magnetic microbeads via streptavidin-biotin interaction. With the presence of OTA, an antiparallel G-quadruplex conformation was formed, protecting the 3'-FAM labels from Exo I digestion, and then anti-FAM-horseradish peroxidase (HRP) was bound via specific antigen-antibody affinity; for the aptamers without the protection of OTA, the distal ssDNA was hydrolyzed from 3' → 5', releasing 3'-FAM labels to the solution. Therefore, the OTA was detected by analyzing the "signal-off" fluorescence of the supernatant and two "signal-on" signals in electrochemistry and colorimetry through the detection of the coating magnetic microbeads in HRP's substrate. The results showed that the 3'-FAM labels increased the activity of Exo I, producing a low background due to a more thorough digestion of unbound aptamers. The proposed multimodal aptasensor successfully detected the OTA in actual samples. This work first provides a novel strategy for the development of aptasensors with Exo I and 3'-FAM labels, broadening the application of aptamer in the multimode detection of small molecules.

As typical new pollutants, perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) have been widely concerned by environmental workers in recent years. This study was carried out to investigate the pollution characteristics of perfluorinated compounds in atmospheric particulate matter (PM

The species of Orinus (Poaceae) are important alpine plants with a variety of phenotypic traits and potential usages in molecular breeding toward drought-tolerant forage crops. However, the genetic basis of evolutionary adaption and diversification in the genus is still unclear. In the present study, we obtained transcriptomes for the two most divergent species, O. thoroldii and O. kokonoricus, using the Illumina platform and de novo assembly. In total, we generated 23,029 and 24,086 unigenes with N50 values of 1188 and 1203 for O. thoroldii and O. kokonoricus respectively, and identified 19,005 pairs of putative orthologs between the two species of Orinus. For these orthologs, estimations of non-synonymous/synonymous substitution rate ratios indicated that 568 pairs may be under strongly positive selection (Ka/Ks 1), and Gene Ontogeny (GO) enrichment analysis revealed that significantly enriched pathways were in DNA repair and resistance to abiotic stress. Meanwhile, the divergence times of species between O. thoroldii and O. kokonoricus occurred 3.2 million years ago (Mya), and the recent evolutionary branch is an allotetraploid species, Cleistogenes songorica. We also detected a Ks peak of ∼0.60 for Orinus. Additionally, we identified 188 pairs of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between the two species of Orinus, which were significantly enrich in stress resistance and lateral root development. Thus, we considered that the species diversification and evolutionary adaption of this genus was initiated by environmental selection, followed by phenotypic differentiation, finally leading to niche separation in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

To evaluate the value of serum Lactate Dehydrogenase (LDH) level in predicting recurrence and the overall survival (OS) of glioma patients.A total number of 216 patients with glioma in our institution were retrospectively recruited to analyze the relationship between preoperative serum LDH level and prognosis.Overall, the median age of patients was 46.0 (31.0-57.0) years old; 53.7% (116 of 216) of the enrolled patients were male. Multivariate analysis revealed that serum LDH level (odds ratio [OR] = 0.97, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.96-0.98, P 0.001) and World Health Organization (WHO) grade (grade II: OR = 19.64, 95%CI = 5.56-69.35, P 0.001; grade III: OR =1 9.50, 95%CI = 7.08-53.73, P 0.001; grade IV: OR = 15.23, 95%CI = 4.94-46.97, P 0.001) were significant and independent of 1-year Progression-free survival (PFS) after adjusting for confounders. The predictive performance of serum LDH level was represented with area under curve (AUC) = 0.741, 95%CI = 0.677-0.798. Multivariate Cox analysis revealed that LDH level (hazard ratio [HR] = 2.56, 95%CI = 1.59-4.15, P 0.001) and WHO grade (grade II: HR = 4.58, 95%CI = 0.56-37.23, P = 0.155; grade III: HR = 16.35, 95%CI = 2.16-123.80, P = 0.007; grade IV: HR = 42.13, 95%CI = 5.83-304.47, P 0.001) remained associated with survival at 2-year follow-up. At 3-year follow-up, lymphocyte count (HR = 0.68, 95%CI = 0.51-0.91, P = 0.008), LDH level (HR = 2.21, 95%CI = 1.40-3.49, P = 0.001), and WHO grade (grade II: HR = 1.44, 95%CI = 0.44-4.68, P = 0.543; grade III: HR = 4.99, 95%CI = 1.68-14.87, P = 0.004; grade IV: HR = 16.96, 95%CI = 6.13-46.93, P 0.001) remained associated with survival in multivariate Cox analysis.Our study demonstrated that preoperative serum LDH level could serve as a reliable indicator for predicting prognosis of glioma patients. Further multicenter studies are still required to verify our findings.

Aqueous solution absorptions are widely used as an effective way for the treatment of noxious gases discharged from various industrial processes. However, this technology may encounter problems in removing gaseous pollutants with low Henry constants, such as styrene from contaminated air. In this study, a novel electrochemical absorption reactor was devised to remove these air pollutants. The reactor consists of five pairs of stacked mesh electrodes. Each pair of mesh electrodes consists of a Ti/RuO

We characterized the tissue repair response after penetrating traumatic brain injury (pTBI) in this study. Seventy specific pathogen-free Kunming mice were randomly divided into the following groups: normal control, 1, 3, 7, 15, 21, and 30 days after pTBI. Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining, immunohistochemistry, and immunofluorescence were performed to examine and monitor brain tissue morphology, and the distribution and expression of lymphatic-specific markers lymphatic vessel endothelial receptor-1 (LYVE-1), hematopoietic precursor cluster of differentiation 34 (CD34) antigen, and Prospero-related homeobox-1 (PROX1) protein. H&E staining revealed that damaged and necrotic tissues observed on day 1 at and around the injury site disappeared on day 7, and there was gradual shrinkage and disappearance of the lesion on day 30, suggesting a clearance mechanism. We explored the possibility of lymphangiogenesis causing this clearance as part of the post-injury response. Notably, expression of lymphangiogenesis markers LYVE-1, CD34, and PROX1 was detected in damaged mouse brain tissue but not in normal tissue. Moreover, new lymphatic cells and colocalization of LYVE-1/CD34 and LYVE-1/PROX1 were also observed. Our findings of the formation of new lymphatic cells following pTBI provide preliminary insights into a post-injury clearance mechanism in the brain. Although we showed that lymphatic cells are implicated in brain tissue repair, further research is required to clarify the origin of these cells.

Objective: This study aimed to explore the potential mechanism of peritumoral brain edema (PTBE) formation in vestibular schwannoma (VS) by detecting intra-tumoral vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) expression.Methods: Between January 2018 and May 2021, 15 patients with PTBE and 25 patients without PTBE were included in the analysis. All patients enrolled in our study underwent surgery in our institution. Expression level of VEGF and microvessel density (MVD) between the two groups were analyzed. Edema index (EI) of each patient with PTBE was calculated.Results: In the PTBE group, the average of EI was 1.53 ± 0.22. VEGF expression levels were significantly enhanced in the PTBE group compared with the non-PTBE group (p < 0.001). The expression level of VEGF in the PTBE group and non-PTBE group was 1.14 ± 0.21 and 0.52 ± 0.09, respectively. Similarly, there were significantly different amounts of MVD in the two groups (p < 0.001). The amount of MVD in the PTBE group and non-PTBE group was 11.33 ± 1.59 and 6.28 ± 1.77, respectively. Correlation analysis showed a highly significant positive correlation between VEGF and MVD (r = 0.883, p < 0.001) and VEGF and EI (r = 0.876, p < 0.001).Conclusion: Our study confirmed the close relationship among VEGF expression, tumor angiogenesis, and formation of PTBE in VS patients. It may be possible to develop new effective therapies to attenuate PTBE in VS for alleviation of symptoms and reduction of postoperative complication.

Background: To evaluate the value of serum Lactate Dehydrogenase (LDH) level in predicting recurrence and the overall survival (OS) of glioma patients.Methods: A total number of 216 patients with glioma in our institution were retrospectively recruited to analyze the relationship between preoperative serum LDH level and prognosis.Results: Overall, the average age of patients was 43.58±17.22 years old; 53.7% (116 of 216) of the enrolled patients were male. Multivariate analysis revealed that serum LDH level (odds ratio [OR]=0.97, 95% confidence interval [CI]=0.96-0.98, PPPPPP=0.155; grade III: HR=16.35, 95%CI=2.16-123.80, P=0.007; grade IV: HR=42.13, 95%CI=5.83-304.47, PP=0.008), LDH level (HR=2.21, 95%CI=1.40-3.49, P=0.001), and WHO grade (grade II: HR=1.44, 95%CI=0.44-4.68, P=0.543; grade III: HR=4.99, 95%CI=1.68-14.87, P=0.004; grade IV: HR=16.96, 95%CI=6.13-46.93, PConclusion: Our study demonstrated that preoperative serum LDH level could serve as a reliable indicator for predicting prognosis of glioma patients. Further multicenter studies are still required to verify our findings.

Reducing soil ammonia volatilization is one of the key ways to reduce soil nitrogen loss and improve nitrogen utilization efficiency in farmlands. Biochar has unique physico-chemical pro-perties, which can change soil physical and chemical properties, affect soil nitrogen cycle, and affect ammonia volatilization in farmland soil. Firstly, we reviewed the ammonia volatilization process and its influencing factors (climatic condition, soil environment, and fertilization management,降低土壤氨挥发量是农田生态系统中减少土壤氮素损失、提高氮肥利用率的关键途径之一。生物炭具有独特的理化性质,施入土壤后可改变土壤理化性状,影响土壤氮素循环,并对农田土壤中氨挥发产生重要的影响。本文首先介绍了稻田和旱田两种土地利用方式下农田氨挥发过程及其影响因素(气候条件、土壤环境、施肥管理等);其次,重点综述了生物炭对农田生态系统氨挥发影响的研究进展,并从物理吸附机制、气液平衡机制、生物化学过程调节机制等方面探讨了生物炭介入下农田土壤氨挥发的响应机制,认为土壤氨挥发减排的响应主要是基于生物炭表面含氧官能团对土壤NH

BACKGROUND Controversies exist in imaging modalities for predicting adenoma consistency. In this study, we proposed a method of predicting consistency by magnetic resonance T2-sequence imaging based on adenoma to cerebellar peduncle signal (TCTI) ratio. MATERIAL AND METHODS Between January 2013 and May 2017, 191 consecutive patients with pituitary adenoma diagnosed at our institution were retrospectively studied. The consistency grade for each lesion was assigned. And the TCTI ratio based on preoperative and postoperative T2-weighted imaging was calculated. RESULTS The median TCTI ratio was 1.55, 1.28, and 1.25 for soft, fibrous, and hard adenomas, respectively. The differences were significant for all groups (p

Activity coefficients at infinite dilution ( γ i ∞ ) and (gas-liquid) partition coefficients ( K L ) for organic compounds (alkanes, alkenes, alkyl benzenes, acetonitrile, acetone, tetrahydrofuran, ethyl acetate, 1,4-dioxane, chloromethanes, and alcohols) in the ionic liquid (IL) 1-octyl-2,3-dimethylimidazolium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide ([OMMIM][NTf2]) have been measured by the gas-liquid chromatographic(GLC) method in the temperature range of (313.15 to 353.15) K. Density, ρ as a function of temperature for [OMMIM][NTf2] at pressure p = 101.3 kPa were measured. The values of the partial molar excess enthalpies at infinite dilution ( H ¯ i E , ∞ ) were derived from the temperature dependence of the γ i ∞ values. The entropies ( T r ef S ¯ i E , ∞ ) and Gibbs energies ( G ¯ i E , ∞ ) of organic solutes in [OMMIM][NTf2] at a reference temperature T r ef = 298.15 K were also calculated from the γ i ∞ values. The Hildebrand’s solubility parameters of the IL [OMMIM][NTf2] were also determined by the regular solution theory (RST) combined with Flory “combinatorial” equation. The linear free energy relationship (LFER) analysis of the results was performed to disclose molecular interactions operating between the IL and the individual solutes. Selectivity ( S i j ∞ ) and capacity ( k j ∞ ) at infinite dilution at 323.15 K have been determined for n-hexane ( i )/benzene ( j ), cyclohexane ( i )/benzene ( j ) and compared to literature values for [NTf2]-based ILs for the same separation problems. For three isomeric xylenes separation problems, S i j ∞ at 323.15 K was also obtained from the γ i ∞ values.

Contextual advertising focuses on placing suitable advertisements on web pages. To attract user’s intention, the advertisements should be highly related to the target web page. The most effective way to do contextual advertising is ontology-based matching algorithms. The main problem of such algorithms is the difficulty in constructing and populating the ontology for matching advertisements. In this paper, we propose an automatic construction method for advertisement ontology. The construction method searches related documents from Web, extracts keywords and weights keywords for concepts. The weighted keywords are treated as instances of concepts and used to generate centroid vectors for concepts. In order to weight keywords in a proper way, we raise a formula WebSSR (Super-Subordinate Relation by Web). WebSSR weights words based on the probabilities that they have Specific Relations with the target concept. We compare our formula with LDA, NGD, WebJaccard, WebOverlap, WebDice and WebPMI, and our formula outperforms all of them. Experiment results also show that our method is more effective than five baseline methods: Bayesian, SVM, SLSA, LDA and Paragraph2Vec.

Biochar has emerged as a promising material for limiting the bioavailability of potentially toxic elements in contaminated soils. Despite the benefits associated with the agricultural use of biochar, there is minimal information available on biochar amendment of Cd accumulation in leafy vegetable cultivars. A pot experiment was carried out to evaluate the feasibility of bamboo biochar (BB) and rice straw biochar (RSB) for decreasing cadmium (Cd) availability in artificially contaminated (Cd at 50 mg kg−1) soil, and its accumulation in Brassica chinensis. Biochar was applied at 0 (control), 0.5, 1, 2.5, and 5% (w/w). RSB at 5% significantly reduced the availability of Cd in soil (by 19.3%) compared with BB (by 8.6%). Application of BB and RSB at 1–5% markedly enhanced soil pH by 1.17–5.48 and 2.47–7.46%, respectively. Moreover, soil organic carbon was improved by 40.3–155 and 22.2–111% with 1–5% BB and RSB amendment, respectively. Soil total N was significantly increased by 24.5 and 31.1% with 5% BB and RSB application, respectively. Soil available P was increased by 10.8–24.4 and 14.6–30.7% with 2.5–5% BB or RSB amendment, respectively. Application of 2.5–5% BB and RSB significantly increased soil available K by 76.8–291 and 203–627%, respectively. Biochar at 2.5–5% ratio significantly improved nutrient (P and K) uptake in B. chinensis. Furthermore, biochar was more effective at higher rates, and RSB performed better than BB as a soil nutrient supplement. Cd accumulation in B. chinensis was significantly reduced by 12.0–48.3 and 17.0–35.4% with 0.5–5% BB and 1–5% RSB amendment, respectively. Greater biochar application further decreased bioconcentration factor (BCF) in harvested B. chinensis (all values 2.5%), could be recommended as safe amendments for the immobilization of Cd in contaminated agricultural soils, thereby decreasing its threat to the food chain and human health.

Automatic question generation from text or paragraph is a great challenging task which attracts broad attention in natural language processing. Because of the verbose texts and fragile ranking methods, the quality of top generated questions is poor. In this paper, we present a novel framework Automatic Chinese Question Generation (ACQG) to generate questions from text or paragraph. In ACQG, we use an adopted TextRank to extract key sentences and a template-based method to construct questions from key sentences. Then a multi-feature neural network model is built for ranking to obtain the top questions. The automatic evaluation result reveals that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art systems in terms of perplexity. In human evaluation, questions generated by ACQG rate a higher score.

Activity coefficients at infinite dilution ( γ i ∞ ) and (gas–liquid) partition coefficients ( K L ) for organic compounds (alkanes, alkenes, alkyl benzenes, acetonitrile, acetone, tetrahydrofuran, ethyl acetate, 1,4-dioxane, chloromethanes, and alcohols) and water in the ionic liquid (IL) 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium perchlorate ([BMIM][ClO4]) have been measured by the (gas-liquid) chromatographic method in the temperature range of (303.15–353.15) K. Density, ρ as a function of temperature for [BMIM][ClO4] at pressure p = 101.3 kPa were measured. The values of the partial molar excess enthalpies at infinite dilution ( H ¯ i E , ∞ ) were derived from the temperature dependence of the γ i ∞ values. The entropies ( T ref S ¯ i E , ∞ ) and Gibbs free energies ( G ¯ i E , ∞ ) of organic solutes in [BMIM][ClO4] at a reference temperature T ref = 298.15 K were also calculated from the γ i ∞ values. The Hildebrand’s solubility parameters of the IL [BMIM][ClO4] were also determined by the regular solution theory (RST) combined with Flory ‘‘combinatorial’’ equation. Selectivity ( S ij ∞ ) and capacity ( k j ∞ ) at infinite dilution at 323.15 K have been determined for n-hexane (i)/benzene (j), cyclohexane (i)/benzene (j)). The results were analyzed in comparison to literature values for 1-buthyl-3-methylimidazolium-based ionic liquids (ILs) for the same separation problems. For three isomeric xylenes separation problems, selectivity at 323.15 K were also obtained from the γ i ∞ values.

Automatically generation of an image description is a challenging task which attracts broad attention in artificial intelligence. Inspired by methods of computer vision and natural language processing, different approaches have been proposed to solve the problem. However, captions generated by the existing approaches have been lack of enough contextual information to describe the corresponding images completely. The labeled captions in the training set only basically describe images and lack of enough contextual annotations. In this paper, we propose a Weakly-supervised Image Captioning Approach (WICA) to generate captions containing rich contextual information, without complete annotations for the contextual information in datasets. We utilize encoder-decoder neural networks to extract basic captioning features and leverage object detection networks to identify contextual features. Then, we encode the two levels of features by a phrase-based language model in order to generate captions with rich contextual information. The comprehensive experimental results reveal that proposed model outperforms the existing baselines in terms of on the richness and reasonability of contextual information for image captioning.

In the mobile Internet era, users access interesting information in a continuous manner rather than as one-time results through search engines. The traditional link-based ranking algorithms typically return the relevant “popular”web pages. The current, most important web pages are ranked lower than these pages. Furthermore, most of the results are repeated when the user submits the same query days later. In this paper, we have described a novel service called tracking engine. The tracking engine allows users to enter and save queries, displays time-sensitive information, and notifies users when new, relevant information appears. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution seen in such a service in the mobile Internet era. First, our tracking engine called Tianji crawls the web pages based on time priority and constructs a new index structure, which enables a faster match of web pages to related keywords. Then, we develop a ranking model based on the correlation between time and importance. The experimental results show that the ranking model of Tianji has better performance than existing time-sensitive ranking methods in terms of timeliness and relevance.

Recently, neural sequence-to-sequence models have made impressive progress in abstractive document summarization. Unfortunately, as neural abstractive summarization research is in a primitive stage, the performance of these models is still far from ideal. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Neural Abstractive Summarization with Diverse Decoding (NASDD). This method augments the standard attentional sequence-to-sequence model in two aspects. First, we introduce a diversity-promoting beam search approach in the decoding process, which alleviates the serious diversity issue caused by standard beam search and hence increases the possibility of generating summary sequences that are more informative. Second, we creatively utilize the attention mechanism combined with the key information of the input document as an estimation of the salient information coverage, which aids in finding the optimal summary sequence. We carry out the experimental evaluation with state-of-the-art methods on the CNN/Daily Mail summarization dataset, and the results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.

Rationale Glioblastoma is the most lethal and common malignant brain tumor but rare in patients with neurofibromatosis type 1. The clinical findings and pathological findings with gene signatures in female patients have not been well clarified. Patient concerns A 51-year-old female patient complained of headache and left limb weakness lasting for 20 days. The patient underwent a cesarean section 20 years ago and hysterectomy 1 year ago because of uterine leiomyomas. Multiple cafe-au-lait spots and neurofibromas were found over patient's chest, neck, back, and arms. The myodynamia of left distant and proximate epipodite were grade 0 and grade 1 respectively. The myodynamia of lower left limb was grade 3. Diagnoses Magnetic resonance imaging revealed a malignant lesion which was most likely a glioblastoma in the right temporo-parietal lobe, approximately 5.6 × 5.9 × 6.9 cm in size with a rounded boundary. Interventions A right temporo-parietal craniotomy was performed to resect the space-occupying lesion for gross total removal. Then, the patient received concurrent chemoradiotherapy. Histological examination confirmed a glioblastoma without v-RAF murine sarcoma viral oncogene homolog B1 gene, isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 gene, and telomerase reverse transcriptase gene promoter mutations. Outcomes After surgery, the headache was relieved and the muscular strength of left limbs did improve. After receiving the standard treatment regimen, the patient was alive at 13 months follow-up. Lessons This is the first reported glioblastoma in female neurofibromatosis type 1 patient without v-RAF murine sarcoma viral oncogene homolog B1 gene, isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 gene, and telomerase reverse transcriptase gene promoter mutations. Tumors in adult patients with these signatures were less aggressive with well-circumscribed border and had long-term survivals which strengthened the evidence that these patients may comprise a unique subset in glioblastoma.

Activity coefficients at infinite dilution ( γ i ∞ ) for organic solutes: alkanes, alkenes, and alkyl benzenes in two ionic liquids (ILs) 1,3-dimethylimidazolium dimethylphosphate ([MMIM][DMP]) and 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium dimethylphosphate ([EMIM][DMP]) have been measured by the gas–liquid chromatographic method (GLC). The measurements were carried out in the temperature range of (313.15 to 363.15) K. The values of the partial molar excess enthalpies at infinite dilution ( H ‾ i E , ∞ ) were derived from the temperature dependence of the γ i ∞ values. The entropies ( T ref S ‾ i E , ∞ ) and Gibbs energies ( G ‾ i E , ∞ ) of organic solutes at a reference temperature Tref = 298.15 K were also calculated from the γ i ∞ values. Selectivity ( S ij ∞ ) and capacity ( k j ∞ ) at infinite dilution at T = 323.15 K have been determined for hexane (i)/benzene (j), cyclohexane (i)/benzene (j). The results were analyzed in comparison to literature data for other ILs with the [MMIM] and [EMIM] cations. For three isomeric xylenes separation problems, selectivity at T = 323.15 K were also obtained from the γ i ∞ values.

With the development of information technology, it becomes more and more difficult to retrieve information from the internet for users. Question Answering (QA) is one of the methods to solve this problem. The users type natural language questions and get answers in QA systems. However, most QA systems only return a word or several words to the user, which is not friendly enough. The users are more willing to receive not only answers but also additional introductions or reasons. In this work, we propose a Nature Language Question Answering system which utilizes Seq2Seq model and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to generate answers with more information for users. To our best knowledge, this is the first work generating natural language answers in Question Answering domain. Our experiment results show NLQA can generate readable answers for users.

In recommender systems (RS), many models are designed to predict ratings of items for the target user. To improve the performance for rating prediction, some studies have introduced tags into recommender systems. Tags benefit RS considerably, however, they are also redundant and ambiguous. In this paper, we propose a hybrid deep learning model TRSDL (tag-aware recommender system based on deep learning) to improve the performance of tag-aware recommender systems (TRS). First, TRSDL uses pre-trained word embeddings to represent user-defined tags, and constructs item and user profiles based on the items’ tags set and users’ tagging behaviors. Then, it utilizes deep neural networks (DNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to extract the latent features of items and users, respectively. Finally, it predicts ratings from these latent features. The model not only addresses tag limitations and takes advantage of semantic tag information but also learns more advanced implicit features via deep structures. We evaluated our proposed approach and several baselines on MovieLens-20 m, and the experimental results demonstrate that TRSDL significantly outperforms all the baselines (including the state-of-the-art models BiasedMF and I-AutoRec). In addition, we also explore the impacts of network depth and type on model performance.

In this paper, we estimate the integrated volatility of Ito semimartingale when sampling times are endogenous. The estimator is proved to be consistent, and is robust to jumps, regardless of whether they are finite and infinite activity jumps. We also establish a central limit theorem for the estimator in a general endogenous time setting when the jumps have finite variation. Simulation is also included to illustrate the performance of the proposed procedure.

Activity coefficients at infinite dilution ( γ i ∞ ) and (gas + liquid) partition coefficients (KL) for organic solutes: alkanes, alkenes, alkyl benzenes, acetonitrile, acetone, tetrahydrofuran, ethyl acetate, and chloromethanes in the ionic liquid (IL) 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium methyl sulfate ([BMIM][CH3SO4]) have been measured by the (gas + liquid) chromatographic method in the temperature range of (313.15 to 363.15) K. The values of the partial molar excess enthalpies at infinite dilution ( H ‾ i E, ∞ ) were derived from the temperature dependence of the γ i ∞ values. The entropies ( T ref S ‾ i E, ∞ ) and Gibbs free energies ( G ‾ i E, ∞ ) of organic solutes in [BMIM][CH3SO4] at a reference temperature Tref = 298.15 K were also calculated from the γ i ∞ values. The solubility parameters of the IL [BMIM][CH3SO4] were also determined by the regular solution theory (RST). The linear free energy relationship (LFER) analysis of the results was performed to disclose molecular interactions operating between the IL and the individual solutes.

Photocatalytic oxidation processes have interest for water treatment since these processes can remove recalcitrant organic compounds and operate at mild conditions of temperature and pressure. However, performance under saline conditions present in many water resources is not well known. This study aims to explore the basic effects of photocatalysis on the removal of organic matter in the presence of salt. A laboratory-scale photocatalytic reactor system, employing ultraviolet (UV)/titanium dioxide (TiO2) photocatalysis was evaluated for its ability to remove the humic acid (HA) from saline water. The particle size and zeta potential of TiO2 under different conditions including solution pH and sodium chloride (NaCl) concentrations were characterized. The overall degradation of organics over the NaCl concentration range of 500–2,000 mg/L was found to be 80% of the non-saline equivalent after 180 min of the treatment. The results demonstrated that the adsorption of HA onto the TiO2 particles was dependent on both the pH and salinity due to electrostatic interaction and highly unstable agglomerated dispersion. This result supports UV/TiO2 as a viable means to remove organic compounds, but the presence of salt in waters to be treated will influence the performance of the photocatalytic oxidation process.

The present study characterizes the effects of Aβ31-35, a short active fragment of amyloid β-peptide (Aβ), upon the BK channel-mediated K⁺ current and intracellular free Ca²⁺ concentration ([Ca²⁺]i) of freshly dissociated pyramidal cells from rat CA1 hippocampus by using whole-cell patch-clamp recording and single cell Ca²⁺ imaging techniques. The results show that: (1) in the presence of voltage- and ATP-gated K⁺ channel blockers application of 5.0 μM Aβ31-35 significantly diminished transient outward K⁺ current amplitudes at clamped voltages between 0 and 45mV; (2) under the same conditions [Ca²⁺]i was minimally affected by 5.0 μM but significantly increased by 12.5 μM and 25 μM Aβ31-35; and (3) when 25 μM of a larger fragment of the amyloid β-peptide, Aβ25-35, was applied, the results were similar to those obtained with the same concentration of Aβ31-35. These results indicate that Aβ31-35 is likely to be the shortest active fragment of the full Aβ sequence, and can be as effectively as the full-length Aβ peptide in suppressing BK-channel mediated K⁺ currents and significantly elevating [Ca²⁺]i in hippocampal CA1 neurons.

Deep learning shows its superiority in many domains such as computing vision, nature language processing, and speech recognition. In music recommendation, most deep learning-based methods focus on learning users&rsquo, temporal preferences using their listening histories. The cold start problem is not addressed, however, and the music characteristics are not fully exploited by these methods. In addition, the music characteristics and the users&rsquo, temporal preferences are not combined naturally, which cause the relatively low performance of music recommendation. To address these issues, we proposed a Deep Temporal Neural Music Recommendation model (DTNMR) based on music characteristics and the users&rsquo, temporal preferences. We encoded the music metadata into one-hot vectors and utilized the Deep Neural Network to project the music vectors to low-dimensional space and obtain the music characteristics. In addition, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks are utilized to learn about users&rsquo, long-term and short-term preferences from their listening histories. DTNMR alleviates the cold start problem in the item side using the music medadata and discovers new users&rsquo, preferences immediately after they listen to music. The experimental results show DTNMR outperforms seven baseline methods in terms of recall, precision, f-measure, MAP, user coverage and AUC.

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is associated with high mortality and occurs via endothelial injury. Endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) restore the integrity of the endothelium and protect it from atherosclerosis. In this study, we compared the expression of microRNAs (miRNAs) in EPCs in atherosclerosis patients and normal controls. We found that miR-221 expression was significantly up-regulated in patients compared with controls. We predicted and identified p21/Cdc42/Rac1-activated kinase 1 (PAK1) as a novel target of miR-221 in EPCs. We also demonstrated that miR-221 targeted a putative binding site in the 3'UTR of PAK1, and absence of this site was inversely associated with miR-221 expression in EPCs. We confirmed this relationship using a luciferase reporter assay. Furthermore, overexpression of miR-221 in EPCs significantly decreased EPC proliferation, in accordance with the inhibitory effects induced by decreased PAK1. Overall, these findings demonstrate that miR-221 affects the MEK/ERK pathway by targeting PAK1 to inhibit the proliferation of EPCs.

In the web advertising domain, contextual advertising and sponsored search are two of the main advertising channels used to display related advertisements on web pages. A major challenge for contextual advertising is to match advertisements and web pages based on their semantics. When a web page and its semantically related advertisements contain many different words, the performance of the traditional methods can be very poor. In particular, there are few studies presented for Chinese contextual advertising that are based on semantics. To address these issues, we propose an ontology-based approach to Chinese semantic advertising. We utilize an ontology called the Taobao Ontology and populate it by automatically adding related phrases as instances. The ontology is used to match web pages and advertisements on a conceptual level. Based on the Taobao Ontology, the proposed method exploits seven distance functions to measure the similarities between concepts and web pages or advertisements. Then, the similarities between web pages and advertisements are calculated by considering the ontology-based similarities as well as term-based similarities. The empirical experiments indicate that our method is able to match Chinese web pages and advertisements with a relatively high accuracy. Among the seven distance functions, Cosine distance and Tanimoto distance show the best performance in terms of precision, recall, and F-measure. In addition, our method outperforms two contextual advertising methods, i.e., the impedance coupling method and the SVM-based method.

With the development of large-scale knowledge bases (KBs), knowledge-based question answering (KBQA) has become an important research topic in recent years. The key task in KBQA is relation detection, which is the process of finding a compatible answer type for a natural language question and generating its corresponding structured query over a KB. However, existing systems often rely on shallow probabilistic methods, which are less expressive than deep semantic representation methods. In addition, since KBs are still far from complete, it is necessary to develop a new strategy that leverages unstructured resources outside of KBs. In this work, we propose a novel Question Answering method with Relation Detection and Textual Evidence (QARDTE). First, to address the semantic gap problem in relation detection, we use bidirectional long-short term memory networks with different levels of abstraction to better capture sentence structures. Our model achieves improved results with robustness against a wide diversity of expressions and questions with multiple relations. Moreover, to help compensate for the incompleteness of KBs, we utilize external unstructured text to extract additional supporting evidence and combine this evidence with relation information during the answer re-ranking process. In experiments on two well-known benchmarks, our system achieves F1 values of 0.558 (+2.8%) and 0.663 (+5.7%), which are state-of-the-art results that show significant improvement over existing KBQA systems.

With the development of online advertisements, clickbait spread wider and wider. Clickbait dissatisfies users because the article content does not match their expectation. Thus, clickbait detection has attracted more and more attention recently. Traditional clickbait-detection methods rely on heavy feature engineering and fail to distinguish clickbait from normal headlines precisely because of the limited information in headlines. A convolutional neural network is useful for clickbait detection, since it utilizes pretrained Word2Vec to understand the headlines semantically, and employs different kernels to find various characteristics of the headlines. However, different types of articles tend to use different ways to draw users’ attention, and a pretrained Word2Vec model cannot distinguish these different ways. To address this issue, we propose a clickbait convolutional neural network (CBCNN) to consider not only the overall characteristics but also specific characteristics from different article types. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms traditional clickbait-detection algorithms and the TextCNN model in terms of precision, recall and accuracy.

Recent empirical studies have shown that modern computer network traffic is much more appropriately modelled by long-range dependent self-similar processes than traditional short-range dependent processes such as Poisson. Thus, if its selfsimilar nature is not considered in the synthesis of experimental network data, incorrect performance assessments for network systems may result. This raises the need of a self-similar trace synthesizing algorithm with long-range dependence. In this paper, we propose and examine the feasibility of a filter-based method for the synthesis of self-similar network traces. The proposed approach can alleviate the problems encountered by conventional synthesizers, such as random midpoint displacement and Paxson’s spectrum fitting , which cannot generate self-similar traces on the fly and may give negative numbers. Additionally, the extended range of self-similarity of the filtered approach can be easily managed by the filter truncation window; therefore, a trace that faithfully matches the measured behavior of true network traffic, where the self-similar nature only lasts beyond a certain range but disappears as the considered aggregated window is much further extended, can be generated.

Photocatalytic oxidation processes have interest for water treatment since these processes can remove recalcitrant organic compounds and operate at mild conditions of temperature and pressure. However, performance under saline conditions present in many water resources is not well known. This study aims to explore the basic effects of photocatalysis on the removal of organic matter in the presence of salt. A laboratory-scale photocatalytic reactor system, employing ultraviolet (UV)/titanium dioxide (TiO₂) photocatalysis was evaluated for its ability to remove the humic acid (HA) from saline water. The particle size and zeta potential of TiO₂ under different conditions including solution pH and sodium chloride (NaCl) concentrations were characterized. The overall degradation of organics over the NaCl concentration range of 500-2,000 mg/L was found to be 80% of the non-saline equivalent after 180 min of the treatment. The results demonstrated that the adsorption of HA onto the TiO₂ particles was dependent on both the pH and salinity due to electrostatic interaction and highly unstable agglomerated dispersion. This result supports UV/TiO₂ as a viable means to remove organic compounds, but the presence of salt in waters to be treated will influence the performance of the photocatalytic oxidation process.

Hippocampal neuronal network oscillation is closely related to the memory, anxiety and behavioral inhibition of mammalian. The cognitive decline and behavioral disinhibition in the patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) may be relevant to amyloid β protein (Aβ)-induced impairment in hippocampal neuronal cooperative activity. However, it is not well known whether intrahippocampal injection of Aβ could induce behavioral disinhibition and neuronal network disorder, as well as cognition decline in animals. In the present study, we observed the effects of intracerebral injection of Aβ(1-42) on the spatial memory and behavioral inhibition of rats by using Morris water maze and elevated plus-maze tests. Further, we analyzed hippocampal theta rhythm by recording hippocampal local field potential. The results showed that: (1) bilateral hippocampal injection of Aβ(1-42) reduced the anxious behavior of rats, with a significant behavioral disinhibition in the elevated plus-maze test, representing as an increase in the mean entering times and mean residence time in the open arm; (2) Aβ(1-42) injection resulted in a significant impairment of spatial memory in rats, with significantly increased mean escape latencies in hidden platform test; (3) Aβ(1-42) disrupted the induction of theta rhythm induced by tail pinch, with a significant reduction in the peak power, not the peak power frequency of the theta rhythm. These experimental results indicate that intrahippocampal injection of Aβ(1-42) can induce behavioral disinhibition and theta rhythm suppression, as well as spatial memory impairment in rats, which suggests that the cognition deficits and behavior impairments in AD are probably associated with the Aβ-induced disruption of hippocampal theta rhythm and consequent down-regulation of synaptic plasticity.

Previous studies have suggested anti-tumor effects of asiatic acid in some human cancer cell lines. This agent is reported to increase the levels of p21 WAF1/CIP1 in human breast cancer cell lines. However, the molecular mechanisms have not been established. Here we report that asiatic acid up-regulates p21 WAF1/CIP1 protein expression but not the level of p21 WAF1/CIP1 mRNA in HepG2 human hepatoma cells. Furthermore, we found that the asiatic acid induced increase of p21 WAF1/CIP1 protein was associated with decreased phosphorylation (ser-146) of p21 WAF1/CIP1 . Knockdown of NDR1/2 kinase, which directly phosphorylates p21 WAF1/CIP1 protein at ser-146 and enhances its proteasomal degradation, increased the levels of p21 WAF1/CIP1 protein and eliminated the regulation of p21 WAF1/ CIP1 stability by asiatic acid. At the same time, the expression of NDR1/2 kinase decreased during treatment with asiatic acid in HepG2 cells. Moreover, asiatic acid inhibited the proliferation of HepG2 cells, this being attenuated by knockdown of p21 WAF1/CIP1 . In conclusion, we propose that asiatic acid inhibits the expression NDR1/2 kinase and promotes the stability of p21 WAF1/CIP1 protein through attenuating NDR1/2 dependent phosphorylation of p21 WAF1/CIP1 in HepG2 cells.