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We demonstrate that applying electric field pulses to hepatocytes, in vitro, in the presence of enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP)-expressing adeno-associated virus (AAV8) vectors reduces the viral dosage required for a given transduction level by more than 50-fold, compared to hepatocytes exposed to AAV8-EGFP vectors without electric field pulse exposure. We conducted 48 experimental observations across 8 exposure conditions in standard well plates. The electric pulse exposures involved single 80-ms pulses with 375 V/cm field intensity. Our study suggests that electric pulse exposure results in enhanced EGFP expression in cells, indicative of increased transduction efficiency. The enhanced transduction observed in our study, if translated successfully to an in vivo setting, would be a promising indication of potential reduction in the required dose of AAV vectors. Understanding the effects of electric field pulses on AAV transduction in vitro is an important preliminary step. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This paper aimed to examine the longitudinal validity of self-rated health (SRH) and whether it would be affected by possible changes in evaluation standards (i.e., response shift) over time. Design: Data are from a longitudinal survey of a nationally representative sample in China. Analytical sample was restricted to respondents aged 45 and above (n = 15,893). Individual fixed effects models were used to analyze changes in ratings on health anchoring vignettes and self-rated health over time. Main outcome measures: SRH at two time points with a -two-year span. Results: Both SRH and anchoring vignettes ratings displayed changes over a two-year span for all the studied age groups. Compared with the self-assessed change in health ("How would you rate your health as compared to that of last year?"), changes in SRH reported over time displayed a more stable and optimistic pattern. SRH responded to doctor diagnosed chronic disease and changes in functional limitation, before and after adjusting for evaluation standards. Conclusion: SRH is responsive to the newly diagnosed chronic disease and functional limitation, regardless of whether we consider response shift within the same respondents over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Circulating levels of inflammatory biomarkers may be influenced by chronic psychological stressors such as those experienced by family caregivers. However, previous studies have found mostly small and inconsistent differences between caregivers and control samples on individual measures of systemic inflammation. Latent variables of inflammation were extracted from six biomarkers collected from two blood samples over 9 years apart for 502 participants in a national cohort study. One-half of these participants transitioned into a sustained family caregiving role between the blood samples. Two latent factors, termed "up-regulation" and "inhibitory feedback," were identified, and the transition to family caregiving was associated with a lower increase over time on the inhibitory feedback factor indexed by interleukin (It..)-2 and IL- I O. No caregiving effect was found on the up-regulation factor indexed primarily by IL-6 and C-reactive protein. These findings illustrate the advantages of using latent variable models to study inflammation in response to caregiving stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cover image, by Sen Yao et al., is based on the Article Aberrant coordination geometries discovered in the most abundant metalloproteins, DOI: 10.1002/prot.25257. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The standard of a Reasonable Person is the common basisfor determining the duty of care of a patent infringer. Under the Chinese patent law, the standards for Reasonable Manufacturer and Reasonable Importer are among the highest standards in the world; such high Chinese standards impose an excessive duty of care for Chinese manufacturing enterprises, importers, and distributors, which hinder the development of those enterprises. We should reconstruct the Chinese patent law's Reasonable Person standard based on the characteristics of the patent system and the status quo of China's economic production. A Reasonable Manufacturer should be defined as an ordinary technician with medium-level technology reserves in the relevant field, who has a medium-level abilityfor patent document search and retrieval, who knows the technological composition of his product, and who is able to evaluate and decide on obvious infringement acts. The reconstructed Reasonable Manufacturer standard is based on the attention and ability of ordinary manufacturers at the current stage of socioeconomic development in China, which is similar to the standards adopted in the United States, Japan, and Europe., I. INTRODUCTION II. CONCEPT AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE REASONABLE PERSON A. The Concept of the Reasonable Person B. Characteristics of the Reasonable Person III. EVOLUTION OF THE REASONAB LE PERSON [...]

Greater perceived control is associated with better health and well‐being outcomes, possibly through more adaptive stress processes. Yet little research has examined whether facets of perceived control (personal mastery and perceived constraints) predict psychological and physiological stress reactivity. The present study evaluated the associations of personal mastery and perceived constraints with changes in subjective stress and cortisol in response to acute laboratory stressors, with age and race as potential moderators. In the Midlife in the United States Refresher Study (N = 633 adults aged 25–75), participants completed a baseline perceived control measure and were subsequently recruited to participate in the laboratory stress protocol. The protocol consisted of completing two mental stress tasks (mental arithmetic and Stroop) as well as providing saliva samples and subjective stress ratings. Race moderated the association between perceived constraints and subjective stress reactivity, such that higher constraints predicted greater subjective stress responses in White participants, but no association was observed in Black participants. Higher personal mastery and perceived constraints each predicted greater increases in cortisol in response to the stress tasks (AUCi) among younger but not older adults. These findings suggest that older adults were buffered against the association between facets of control and cortisol stress reactivity. Discussion on potential racial differences in the link between constraints and stress reactivity are elaborated further, as well as considerations for future work to distinguish between facets of control and examine age and racial differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) setting, makes it possible to overcome the problems of the conventional public key infrastructure and the ID-Based public key cryptography, concurrently. A certificateless signcryption (CL-SC) scheme is an important cryptographic primitive which provides the goals of a signature scheme and an encryption scheme both at once, in a certificateless setting. In addition to the basic security requirements of a CL-SC scheme (i.e. the unforgeability and the confidentiality), a new security notion called as the known session specific temporary information security (KSSTIS) has been proposed in the literature, recently. This security notion guarantees the confidentiality of the message even if the temporary information, used for creating the signcryption on the message, reveals. However, as discussed in the literature, there are not any secure CL-SC schemes in the standard model (i.e. without the assumption of random oracles) which guarantees the KSSTIS. In this paper, three recently proposed CL-SC schemes (Caixue, Shan and Ullah et al.'s schemes) are analyzed and it is shown that these schemes not only do not satisfy the KSSTIS, but also they do not even provide the basic security requirements of a CL-SC scheme. Furthermore, an enhanced secure CL-SC scheme is proposed in the standard model which satisfies the KSSTIS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]