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Introduction: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social interactions and repetitive behaviors. This study examines the effects of fenofibrate on a propionic acid (PPA)‐induced rat model of ASD, focusing on behavioral changes, inflammatory markers, and histological findings. Materials and Methods: Thirty male Wistar rats were divided into three groups: a control group, a group receiving PPA and saline, and a group treated with PPA and fenofibrate for 15 days. Behavioral assessments, including the three‐chamber sociability test, open‐field test, and passive avoidance learning, were conducted. Biochemical analyses measured TNF‐α, NGF, IL‐17, IL‐2, and galectin‐3 levels in brain tissues. Histological evaluations focused on Purkinje neuron counts in the cerebellum and neuronal changes in the CA1 and CA3 regions of the hippocampus, along with glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) levels. Results: Fenofibrate treatment significantly improved behavioral outcomes, reducing autism‐like behaviors compared to the PPA/saline group. Biochemically, the PPA/saline group showed elevated levels of malondialdehyde, TNF‐α, IL‐2, IL‐17, and galectin‐3, which were reduced following fenofibrate treatment. Histologically, the PPA/saline group exhibited fewer, dysmorphic Purkinje neurons and increased glial activity in the CA1 region, both of which were ameliorated by fenofibrate treatment. Conclusion: Fenofibrate shows promise in mitigating autism‐like behaviors in a rat model of ASD, likely due to its antioxidative and neuroprotective properties, which contribute to preserving neuronal integrity and reducing inflammation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To achieve efficient and preventive measures against salmon lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis Krøyer, 1838) infestation, a better understanding of behavioral patterns of the planktonic life stages is key. To investigate light responses in L. salmonis copepodites, a non-intrusive experimental system was designed to measure behavioral responses in a 12.5-l volume using machine vision technology and methodology. The experimental system successfully tracked the collective movement patterns of the sea lice population during exposure to different light stimuli emitted from alternating zones in the system. This system could further be used to study behavioral responses to different physical cues of various developmental stages of sea lice or other zooplankton.

[Display omitted] Opioids are powerful analgesics; however, their significant systemic adverse effects and the need for frequent administration restrict their use. Nalbuphine (NA) is a κ-agonist narcotic with limited adverse effects, but needs to be frequently administrated due to its short elimination half-life. Whereas sebacoyl dinalbuphine ester (SDE) is a NA prodrug, which can effectively prolong the analgesic effect, but lacks immediate pain relief. Therefore, in this study, a rapid and sustained local delivery formulation to introduce NA and SDE directly into surgical sites was developed. An amphiphilic nanostructured lipid carrier (NLC) poloxamer 407 (P407) gel (NLC-Gel) was developed to permit concurrent delivery of hydrophobic SDE from the NLC core and hydrophilic NA from P407, offering a dual rapid and prolonged analgesic effect. Benefiting from the thermal-sensitive characteristic of P407, the formulation can be injected in liquid phase and instantly transit into gel at wound site. NLC-Gel properties, including particle size, drug release, rheology, and stability, were assessed. In vivo evaluation using a rat spinal surgery model highlighted the effect of the formulation through pain behavior test and hematology analysis. NLC-Gels demonstrated an analgesic effect comparable with that of commercial intramuscular injected SDE formulation (IM SDE), with only 15 % of the drug dosage. The inclusion of supplemental NA in the exterior gel (PA12-Gel + NA) provided rapid drug onset owing to swift NA dispersion, addressing acute pain within hours along with prolonged analgesic effects. Our findings suggest that this amphiphilic formulation significantly enhanced postoperative pain management in terms of safety and efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media opens up numerous possibilities to study human interaction and collective behavior in an unprecedented scale. It opened a whole new venue for research under the name "social computing". Researchers are interested in profiling individuals (e.g., gender, age group), groups, community, and networking. We are interested in studying the collective behavior of Arabic social media users. Most studies covering Arabic social media has focused on the sentiment analysis of, say tweets. This study, however, looks into who and when users interact with the Arabic social media. Specifically, there are two objectives of this work. First, studying the demographic posting behavior of social media users from two different perspectives: gender and educational level. Second, author profiling. Identifying author's gender of a social media post. We use Saudi Arabia, a very prolific country when it comes to social media in general, as a backdrop for this study. The results in this study are based on mining huge amount of metadata of a popular local social media forum covering the period 2011-14 inclusive. The extracted features (normalized list of k highest scoring words, and likewise for stems) from the posts were used to train classifiers to identify the author's gender. We used two different classifiers, Support Vector Machine (SVM) with linear kernel and 1-NN (1-nearest neighbor), and experimented with different sizes for the list of features. When the number of features (size of the features vector) is small (≤ 50) both classifiers perform equally well in identifying the author's gender, but we risk overfitting the data. The classifiers achieved their best result when using 100 features. The 1-NN classifier delivered a better performance, achieving a balanced accuracy of 93.16% vs 87.33% for the SVM in predicting the author's gender. And for a larger set of features, SVM delivered a better performance and more stable behavior than 1-NN, but still nowhere close to its best performance. We used t test to confirm our assessment that the difference between the performance of both classifiers is statistically significant. Based on that, we recommend using 100 features, and we get our best result using 1-NN with a balanced accuracy of 93.16%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: At present, the treatment options available to delay the onset or slow down the progression of Alzheimer′s disease (AD) are not effective. Recent studies have suggested that diet and lifestyle factors may represent protective strategies to minimize the risk of developing AD. Date palm fruits are a good source of dietary fiber and are rich in total phenolics and natural antioxidants, such as anthocyanins, ferulic acid, protocatechuic acid and caffeic acid. These polyphenolic compounds have been shown to be neuroprotective in different model systems. Objective: We investigated whether dietary supplementation with 2% and 4% date palm fruits (grown in Oman) could reduce cognitive and behavioral deficits in a transgenic mouse model for AD (amyloid precursor protein [APPsw]/Tg2576). Materials and Methods: The experimental groups of APP-transgenic mice from the age of 4 months were fed custom-mix diets (pellets) containing 2% and 4% date fruits. We assessed spatial memory and learning ability, psychomotor coordination, and anxiety-related behavior in all the animals at the age of 4 months and after 14 months of treatment using the Morris water maze test, rota-rod test, elevated plus maze test, and open-field test. We have also analyzed the levels of amyloid beta (Aβ) protein (1-40 and 1-42) in plasma of control and experimental animals. Results: Standard diet-fed Tg mice showed significant memory deficits, increased anxiety-related behavior, and severe impairment in spatial learning ability, position discrimination learning ability and motor coordination when compared to wild-type on the same diet and Tg mice fed 2% and 4% date supplementation at the age of 18 months. The levels of both Aβ proteins were significantly lowered in date fruits supplemented groups than the Tg mice without the diet supplement. The neuroprotective effect offered by 4% date fruits diet to AD mice is higher than 2% date fruits diet. Conclusions: Our results suggest that date fruits dietary supplementation may have beneficial effects in lowering the risk, delaying the onset or slowing down the progression of AD.

Objective: To investigate how emotion valence affects the movement speed. Method: Emotion-induction and prompt-target task paradigms were combined in the study. Subjects were asked to view emotional pictures first, then continuously performed a movement task six times at the prompt of the target stimulus. Result: I) In Experiment I, negative and positive conditions tend to increase the movement speed compared to neutral conditions, but did not reach the significant differences level; 2) In Experiment 2, the movement speed under negative conditions was significantly slower than that of neutral conditions. Conclusion ; I) Compared with positive emotions, negative emotions have a greater impact on the movement speed;2) Negative emotions will significantly slow down the movement speed, and the more negative emotions, the longer the duration of the impact on the movement speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are the latest e-learning initiative to attain widespread popularity in the world. Thus, it is highly required to have a throughout analysis of learning in MOOCs, from theoretical to practical. Our primary goal is to take a detailed and comprehensive investigation into the learning behaviors in MOOCs, as well as to identify issues that have not yet to be adequately resolved. We employed commonly used educational data mining methodologies to analyze and interpret the behaviors in a computer science course based on the questionnaire survey data and daily activity data. We find most of the students could be divided into several groups that are coincident with their learning styles. Moreover, we can easily predict students' learning styles based on their learning behaviors. This finding means the learning style could be a factor to indicate students' learning behaviors, or even measure whether a student is appropriate to learn via MOOCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to high-intensity agricultural production activities and the excessive use of chemical substances such as fertilizers and pesticides, agricultural nonpoint source pollution has surpassed industrial and urban residential pollution to become the number one contributor to nonpoint source pollution in China. Promoting farmers' participation in agricultural nonpoint source pollution management is a key link to achieve the goal of sustainable agricultural development. Based on an expanded theory of planned behavior, we identified the key influencing factors of farmers' participation in agricultural nonpoint source pollution management. According to microsurvey data from 600 farmers in Huai'an, China, we used a structural equation model to analyze in depth the influence of farmers' internal cognition and their perceptions of the external environment to explore the formation mechanism of their participation in agricultural nonpoint source pollution management behavior. The study shows that, first, government regulations promote the green development of the agricultural market environment and social organizations and that farmers' perceptions of the external environment strengthen the influence of their internal cognition but are not fully significant. Second, farmers' internal cognition can enhance their willingness to participate, and the influence of attitudes is the strongest. Finally, there is a positive relationship between the level of response of farmers' participation in pollution control behavior and their perceived behavioral control and willingness to control. Based on the above analysis, we propose policy recommendations in terms of government regulation, market regulation, organization construction, and multisubject collaboration to mobilize the enthusiasm of various subjects and to improve the efficiency of agricultural nonpoint source pollution management. • Application of polycentric governance theory in nonpoint source pollution control. • Government regulations promote the green development of the agricultural environment. • Among farmers' cognition, attitude has the strongest influence on intention. • Farmers' perceptions of the external environment will influence their cognition. • Farmers' perceived behavior control and intention promote their governance behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chemoresistance and invasion properties are severe limitations to efficient glioma therapy. Therefore, development of glioma in vivo models that more accurately resemble the situation observed in patients emerges. Previously, we established RC6 rat glioma cell line resistant to DNA damaging agents including antiglioma approved therapies such as 3-bis(2-chloroethyl)-1-nitrosourea (BCNU) and temozolomide (TMZ). Herein, we evaluated the invasiveness of RC6 cells in vitro and in a new orthotopic animal model. For comparison, we used C6 cells from which RC6 cells originated. Differences in cell growth properties were assessed by real-time cell analyzer. Cells' invasive potential in vitro was studied in fluorescently labeled gelatin and by formation of multicellular spheroids in hydrogel. For animal studies, fluorescently labeled cells were inoculated into adult male Wistar rat brains. Consecutive coronal and sagittal brain sections were analyzed 10 and 25 days post-inoculation, while rats' behavior was recorded during three days in the open field test starting from 25th day post-inoculation. We demonstrated that development of chemoresistance induced invasive phenotype of RC6 cells with significant behavioral impediments implying usefulness of orthotopic RC6 glioma allograft in preclinical studies for the examination of new approaches to counteract both chemoresistance and invasion of glioma cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The effects of long-term and mild confinement on the metabolic and physiological parameters of mice were investigated. • Weight gain suppression was observed in the confinement stress group. • The stress group also exhibited a lower amount of spontaneous activity and lower subcutaneous temperature. • The stressed mice had deficits in gross motor function but normal motor learning ability. • The effect of confinement stress on spontaneous activity was temporary and reversible. Long-term and mild confinement or isolation in an enclosed environment can occur in situations such as disasters, specific political, economic or social events, nuclear shelters, seabed exploration, polar expeditions, and space travel. To investigate the effects of stress caused by long-term confinement in an enclosed environment in mammals, we divided 8-week-old C57BL/6J mice into four groups that were housed in a closed environment with a narrow metabolic cage (stress group), normal metabolic cage (control group), conventional cage (conventional group) or conventional cage with wire mesh floor (wire mesh group). The phenotypes of the mice were examined for four weeks, followed by behavioral tests. Weight gain suppression was observed in the stress group. Continuous analysis of these mice every two minutes for four weeks using an implanted measuring device showed a significantly decreased amount of spontaneous activity and subcutaneous temperature in the stress group. After housing in each environment for four weeks, the behavioral tests of mice in the stress group also revealed a shorter latency to fall off in the rotarod test and shorter stride length and interstep distance in the footprint test. Interestingly, the lower spontaneous activity of mice in the stress group was rescued by housing in conventional cages. These results suggest a temporary effect of long-term confinement in an enclosed environment as a chronic and mild stress on homeostasis in mammals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Household distributed energy resources (DER) have gained in popularity with the growing interest in environmental protection and with the technological development of internal combustion (IC) engines, gas turbines, microturbines, photovoltaics, fuel cells and wind power. It is understood that DER are able to reduce emissions by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. Meanwhile, there is no consensus regarding whether the installation of household DER increase or inhibit the use of electricity for original consumers. It is widely accepted that the installation of household DER should stimulate electricity consumption through more self-allocation. However, such conclusions are normally drawn based on linear regression models while ignoring certain important variables. After analyzing data from 409 households from 2016 to 2017 using an interactive regression model with human behavior indicators, contrary to the wildly accepted view that new technologies can have a rebound effect (RE), it is found that house DER not only facilitate environment protection in terms of limiting emissions but also inhibit electricity usage through a negative rebound effect. • Certain DER prosumers have a negative marginal rebound effect. • Prosumers with different characteristics are influenced differently by DER. • Rebound effects of DER are acceptable for promotion at lager scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The present work was designed to explore the efficacy of neuroactive drug (risperidone) loaded chitosan lipid nanoparticle (RIS-CH-LNPs) to enhance the bioactivity in schizophrenia via the nasal route., Methods: The three-factor and three-level formulation by design approach was used for optimization and their effects were observed on (Y1) size in nm, (Y2) % drug loading, and (Y3) % drug release. The optimized formulation RIS-CH-LNPopt was further evaluated for its surface morphology, ex-vivo permeation study, in-vivo behavior study, and stability study. The developed RIS-CH-LNPs showed nanometric size range with high drug loading and prolonged drug release., Results: The optimized formulation (RIS-CH-LNPopt) has shown the particle size (132.7 nm), drug loading (7.6 %), drug release (80.7 %) and further ex-vivo permeation study showed 2.32 fold enhancement over RIS-SUS(suspension). In-vivo behavior studies showed that RIS-CH-LNPopt is able to show significant greater bioefficacy as compared to RIS-SUS [intranasal (i.n), intravenous (i.v)]. The pharmacokinetic and brain/plasma ratio of developed chitosan nanoparticle was higher at all time-points as compared to RIS-SUS either given by intranasal or intravenous route that proves the direct nose to brain transport pathway of the drug via nasal administration. The developed chitosan nanoparticle increases nose to brain drug delivery as compared to the dispersion of equivalent dose., Conclusion: The findings of this study substantiate the existence of a direct nose-to-brain delivery route for RIS-CH-LNPs., (Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.net.)