Macroscopic modeling of social crowds

Social behavior in crowds, such as herding or increased interpersonal spacing, is driven by the psychological states of pedestrians. Current macroscopic crowd models assume that these are static, limiting the ability of models to capture the complex interplay be-tween evolving psychology and collective crowd dynamics that defines a “social crowd”. This paper introduces a novel approach by explicitly incorporating an “activity” vari-able into the modeling framework, which represents the evolving psychological states of pedestrians and is linked to crowd dynamics. To demonstrate the role of activity, we model pedestrian egress when this variable captures stress and awareness of contagion. In addition, to highlight the importance of dynamic changes in activity, we examine a scenario in which an unexpected incident necessitates alternative exits. These case studies demonstrate that activity plays a pivotal role in shaping crowd behavior. The proposed modeling approach thus opens avenues for more realistic macroscopic crowd descriptions with practical implications for crowd management

Meta-analysis of preclinical studies of mesenchymal stromal cells to treat rheumatoid arthritis.

BackgroundThis study aims to evaluate the quality of preclinical data, determine the effect sizes, and identify experimental measures that inform efficacy using mesenchymal stromal (or stem) cells (MSC) therapy in animal models of rheumatoid arthritis (RA).MethodsLiterature searches were performed on MSC preclinical studies to treat RA. MSC treatment effect sizes were determined by the most commonly used outcome measures, including paw thickness, clinical score, and histological score.FindingsA total of 48 studies and 94 treatment arms were included, among which 42 studies and 79 treatment arms reported that MSC improved outcomes. The effect sizes of RA treatments using MSC, when compared to the controls, were: paw thickness was ameliorated by 53.6% (95% confidence interval (CI): 26.7% -80.4%), histological score was decreased by 44.9% (95% CI: 33.3% -56.6%), and clinical score was decreased by 29.9% (95% CI: 16.7% -43.0%). Specifically, our results indicated that human umbilical cord derived MSC led to large improvements of the clinical score (-42.1%) and histological score (-51.4%).InterpretationTo the best of our knowledge, this meta-analysis is to quantitatively answer whether MSC represent a robust RA treatment in animal models. It suggests that in preclinical studies, MSC have consistently exhibited therapeutic benefits. The findings demonstrate a need for considering variations in different animal models and treatment protocols in future studies using MSC to treat RA in humans to maximise the therapeutic gains in the era of precision medicine.FundsNIH [1DP2CA195763], Baylx Inc.: BI-206512, NINDS/NIH Training Grant [Award# NS082174]

Exposure to various abscission-promoting treatments suggests substantial ERF subfamily transcription factors involvement in the regulation of cassava leaf abscission

AP2/ERF genes that exhibited the same expression patterns during ethylene and water-deficit stress treatments. (XLS 19 kb

Calibration-based Dual Prototypical Contrastive Learning Approach for Domain Generalization Semantic Segmentation

Prototypical contrastive learning (PCL) has been widely used to learn class-wise domain-invariant features recently. These methods are based on the assumption that the prototypes, which are represented as the central value of the same class in a certain domain, are domain-invariant. Since the prototypes of different domains have discrepancies as well, the class-wise domain-invariant features learned from the source domain by PCL need to be aligned with the prototypes of other domains simultaneously. However, the prototypes of the same class in different domains may be different while the prototypes of different classes may be similar, which may affect the learning of class-wise domain-invariant features. Based on these observations, a calibration-based dual prototypical contrastive learning (CDPCL) approach is proposed to reduce the domain discrepancy between the learned class-wise features and the prototypes of different domains for domain generalization semantic segmentation. It contains an uncertainty-guided PCL (UPCL) and a hard-weighted PCL (HPCL). Since the domain discrepancies of the prototypes of different classes may be different, we propose an uncertainty probability matrix to represent the domain discrepancies of the prototypes of all the classes. The UPCL estimates the uncertainty probability matrix to calibrate the weights of the prototypes during the PCL. Moreover, considering that the prototypes of different classes may be similar in some circumstances, which means these prototypes are hard-aligned, the HPCL is proposed to generate a hard-weighted matrix to calibrate the weights of the hard-aligned prototypes during the PCL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance over current approaches on domain generalization semantic segmentation tasks.Comment: Accepted by ACM MM'2

Metformin promotes the survival of transplanted cardiosphere-derived cells thereby enhancing their therapeutic effect against myocardial infarction

The CDC differentiation at 4 weeks after transplantation analyzed by immunostaining. A–C: Sections of hearts were immunostained with antibodies to (A) the cardiomyocyte marker tropomyosin, (B) the endothelial cell marker von-Willebrand Factor (vWF), and (C) the smooth muscle cell marker α-smooth muscle actin (α-SMA). Antibody to GFP was used for identifying surviving CDC-derived cells and DAPI was used for identifying nuclei. Scale bars = 20 μm. DAPI 4′,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole. (PDF 178 kb

De Novo

The advent of cellular reprogramming technology has revolutionized biomedical research. De novo human cardiac myocytes can now be obtained from direct reprogramming of somatic cells (such as fibroblasts), from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs, which are reprogrammed from somatic cells), and from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). Such de novo human cardiac myocytes hold great promise for in vitro disease modeling and drug screening and in vivo cell therapy of heart disease. Here, we review the technique advancements for generating de novo human cardiac myocytes. We also discuss several challenges for the use of such cells in research and regenerative medicine, such as the immature phenotype and heterogeneity of de novo cardiac myocytes obtained with existing protocols. We focus on the recent advancements in addressing such challenges

A review of principles and options for the re-use of machining chips by solid, semi-solid or melt-based processing

Machining chips are a potentially versatile material feedstock to be used in a range of solid-state and melt based manufacturing processes. The poor current understanding of the behaviour of chips in such processes limits the likelihood of practical adoption of such materials on an industrial scale. The re-use (as opposed to recycling or landfilling) of machining waste offers both economic and environmental savings. Iron and steel production causes up to 9 %, and aluminium up to 1.5 % of global process and energy CO 2 emissions. It is proposed that between 0.24 % and 0.5 % (117 Mt CO 2) of global CO 2 emissions could be saved by reusing steel machining chips and between 0.13 % and 0.22 % (51 Mt CO 2) via re-use of aluminium chips, through mitigation of recycling associated emissions or emissions from generation of new steel. Re-use of large manufacturing scrap, i.e. the majority of such scrap, increases these values to savings of 1 % and 0.86 % of global CO 2 emissions for steel and aluminium respectively in the best scenario. This work gives a perspective on the potential for chips to retain value and be re-used in manufacturing process streams. The paper guides the reader from the generation and control of machining chips, to the principles of material consolidation. The principles of material densification by both solid state and laser deposition based methods are described, and current and potential manufacturing processes which can use chips as a feedstock are critically reviewed in terms of their practicalities and final properties. A perspective on potential CO 2 savings is described, providing the underpinning motivation behind this work. It is shown there is significant potential for versatile manufacturing using machining chips by both solid-state and laser-based processing of chips into finished products. An argument is also presented for a new approach to processing large-scrap, e.g. from the automotive manufacturing industry, as well as end-of-life automotive scrap, into smaller chips ready for re-use.</p