The effects of pollution on CO2 exchange in a Boreal Forest

Boreal forests are the largest biological community on earth, with an area of about 14.7×10^6 km2. Canada has about 270 Mha of boreal forests. The purpose of this project is to study CO2 exchange at the York Athabasca Jack Pine (YAJP) site near the oil sands facilities by analyzing temperature, H2O, CO2 concentration, and CO2 flux. The results show both temperature and water vapour affected the CO2 concentration and flux. When the wind direction was from the direction of upgrading facilities, a higher concentration of pollutants was measured at YAJP site. The CO2 concentration during pollution episodes was 17.3 (1.6) mmol/m3 and the flux was -5.5 (1.4) μmol/m2/s. These values are compared to 16.8 (0.6) mmol/m3 and -3.4 (0.2) μmol/m2/s when winds were not from this range (numbers in brackets are standard deviations). These results suggest that pollution at Alberta's oil sands facilities affects the CO2 exchange in boreal forests

Molecular prognostic markers for adult acute myeloid leukemia with normal cytogenetics

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a heterogenous disorder that results from a block in the differentiation of hematopoietic progenitor cells along with uncontrolled proliferation. In approximately 60% of cases, specific recurrent chromosomal aberrations can be identified by modern cytogenetic techniques. This cytogenetic information is the single most important tool to classify patients at their initial diagnosis into three prognostic categories: favorable, intermediate, and poor risk. Currently, favorable risk AML patients are usually treated with contemporary chemotherapy while poor risk AML patients receive allogeneic stem cell transplantation if suitable stem cell donors exist. The largest subgroup of AML patients (~40%) have no identifiable cytogenetic abnormalities and are classified as intermediate risk. The optimal therapeutic strategies for these patients are still largely unclear. Recently, it is becoming increasingly evident that it is possible to identify a subgroup of poorer risk patients among those with normal cytogenic AML (NC-AML). Molecular risk stratification for NC-AML patients may be possible due to mutations of NPM1, FLT3, MLL, and CEBPα as well as alterations in expression levels of BAALC, MN1, ERG, and AF1q. Further prospective studies are needed to confirm if poorer risk NC-AML patients have improved clinical outcomes after more aggressive therapy

Overexpressed transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) in lung adenocarcinoma harbours a new opportunity for therapeutic targeting

The specific biological function of transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) in pathogenesis of lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) remains unclear. In this study, TRPV1 expression in tumor tissues, primary cells and cell lines of LUAD, as well as the mechanism mediating its hyperexpression were systematically studied. Multiple models and techniques were adopted to elucidate the relationship between TRPV1 hyperexpression and tumor recurrence and metastasis. Results showed that TRPV1 expression was increased in tumor tissues and primary tumor cells of LUAD patients. The increased expression was associated with worse overall survival outcome and raised HIF1α levels. TRPV1 expression in A549 and NCI-H292 cells was increased after pretreatment with cigarette smoke extract or spermine NONOate. Moreover, A549 cells with TRPV1 overexpression has enhanced tumor growth rates in subcutaneous grafted tumor models, and increased intrapulmonary metastasis after tail vein infusion in nude BALB/c nude mice. Mechanistically, TRPV1 overexpression in A549 cells promoted HIF1α expression and nuclear translocation by promoting CREB phosphorylation and activation of NOS1-NO pathway, ultimately leading to accelerated cell proliferation and stronger invasiveness. In addition, based on photothermal effects, CuS-TRPV1 mAb effectively targeted and induced apoptosis of TRPV1-A549 cells both in vivo and in vitro, thereby mitigating tumor growth and metastasis induced by xenotransplantation of TRPV1-A549 cells. In conclusion, TRPV1 hyperexpression in LUAD is a risk factor for tumor progression and is involved in proliferation and migration of tumor cells through activation of HIF1α. Our study also attempted a new strategy inhibiting the recurrence and metastasis of LUAD: by CuS-TRPV1 mAb precisely kill TRPV1 hyperexpression cells through photothermal effects

The effects of pollution on CO2 exchange in a Boreal Forest

Boreal forests are the largest biological community on earth, with an area of about 14.710^6 km2. Canada has about 270 Mha of boreal forests. The purpose of this project is to study CO2 exchange at the York Athabasca Jack Pine (YAJP) site near the oil sands facilities by analyzing temperature, H2O, CO2 concentration, and CO2 flux. The results show both temperature and water vapour affected the CO2 concentration and flux. When the wind direction was from the direction of upgrading facilities, a higher concentration of pollutants was measured at YAJP site. The CO2 concentration during pollution episodes was 17.3 (1.6) mmol/m3 and the flux was -5.5 (1.4) mol/m2/s. These values are compared to 16.8 (0.6) mmol/m3 and -3.4 (0.2) mol/m2/s when winds were not from this range (numbers in brackets are standard deviations). These results suggest that pollution at Alberta's oil sands facilities affects the CO2 exchange in boreal forests

Attentive Part-Based Alignment Network for Vehicle Re-Identification

Vehicle Re-identification (Re-ID) has become a research hotspot along with the rapid development of video surveillance. Attention mechanisms are utilized in vehicle Re-ID networks but often miss the attention alignment across views. In this paper, we propose a novel Attentive Part-based Alignment Network (APANet) to learn robust, diverse, and discriminative features for vehicle Re-ID. To be specific, in order to enhance the discrimination of part features, two part-level alignment mechanisms are proposed in APANet, consisting of Part-level Orthogonality Loss (POL) and Part-level Attention Alignment Loss (PAAL). Furthermore, POL aims to maximize the diversity of part features via an orthogonal penalty among parts whilst PAAL learns view-invariant features by means of realizing attention alignment in a part-level fashion. Moreover, we propose a Multi-receptive-field Attention (MA) module to adopt an efficient and cost-effective pyramid structure. The pyramid structure is capable of employing more fine-grained and heterogeneous-scale spatial attention information through multi-receptive-field streams. In addition, the improved TriHard loss and Inter-group Feature Centroid Loss (IFCL) function are utilized to optimize both the inter-group and intra-group distance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model over multiple existing state-of-the-art approaches on two popular vehicle Re-ID benchmarks

Ask Diana: A Keyword-Based Chatbot System for Water-Related Disaster Management

This research developed a keyword-based chatbot system, Ask Diana, for water-related disaster management. Disaster management has been considered difficult and tedious due to the complex characteristics of disaster-related data. To deal with this problem, this research developed a chatbot system with a water-related disaster database, a user intent mechanism, and an intuitive mobile-device-based user interface. With such a system, users are able to access important data or information they need for decision making by directly asking the proposed chatbot or operating the image-based menus. The system was validated through a usability test and a six-month field test. The results demonstrated that Ask Diana can help related personnel access disaster data intuitively and develop corresponding response strategies efficiently

Bank intervention and firms’ earnings management: evidence from debt covenant violations

Earnings management has long been one of the main concerns in accounting and management literature, and the extent to which corporate governance mechanisms can discipline management behaviour and prevent earnings management has attracted increasing interest among policy makers and academic researchers. Differing from previous corporate governance literature that focuses mainly on the board and auditors, we explore the role of creditors in corporate governance. In particular, we examine the effect of bank intervention on earnings management via the lens of debt covenant violations, where control rights are transferred to creditors (banks). Using a Difference-in-Difference approach, we find that firms reduce both their accruals-based and real earnings management following debt covenant violations. The negative effect on earnings management is more prominent when banks possess greater bargaining and monitoring power and when firms are more financially constrained. By identifying a specific channel through which debt providers influence corporate financial reporting, our findings suggest that creditors can play an important role in governing organisations and disciplining management behaviour.</p

Progress in Single-cell RNA Sequencing of Lung Adenocarcinoma

Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is the most common subtype of lung cancer and one of the main causes of cancer-related deaths. In the past decade, with the widespread use of computed tomography (CT) in routine screening for lung cancer, the incidence of LUAD presenting as small pulmonary nodules radiologically, has increased remarkably. The mechanisms of the occurrence and progression of LUADs are complex, and the prognoses of patients with LUAD vary significantly. Although significant progress has been made in targeted therapy and immunotherapy for LUADs in recent years, the drug resistance of tumor cells has not been effectively overcome, which limits the benefits of patients. With the accomplishment of the Human Genome Project, sequencing-based genomic and transcriptomics have come into the field of clinical and scientific researches. Single-cell sequencing, as a new type of sequencing method that has captured increasing attention recently, can perform specific analysis of cell populations at single-cell level, which can reveal the unique changes of each cell type. Single-cell sequencing can also provide accurate assessment on heterogeneous stromal cells and cancer cells, which is helpful to reveal the complexity of molecular compositions and differences between non- and malignant tissues. To sum up, it is an urgent need for clinicians and basic scientists to deeply understand the pathogenesis and development of LUAD, the heterogeneity of tumor microenvironment (TME) and the mechanism of drug resistance formation through single-cell sequencing, so as to discover new therapeutic targets. In this paper, we reviewed and summarized the application and progress in single-cell sequencing of LUADs

Synthesis of bifunctional NiFe layered double hydroxides (LDH)/Mo-doped g-C3N4 electrocatalyst for efficient methanol oxidation and seawater splitting

To boost the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and methanol oxidation reaction (MOR) of pristine NiFe-layered double hydroxides (LDH), the NiFe-LDH/Mo-doped graphitic carbon nitride (NiFe-LDH/MoCN) heterojunction was synthesized herein through hydrothermal method. The establishment of built-in electric field in NiFe-LDH/MoCN heterojunction enhanced the electrochemical oxidation activities towards both seawater splitting and methanol oxidation, via the improving electrocatalyst surface wettability and conductivity. Almost 10-fold enhancement of turnover frequency (TOF) and electrochemical active surface area (ECSA) than pure NiFe-LDH implied more active sites to participate in catalytic reactions via Mo doping and the formation of heterostructure. Moreover, the local charge redistribution demonstrated in the NiFe-LDH/MoCN interface region may favor the adsorption of methanol and OH− in the seawater. The present work may expound the strong coupling interaction and the establishment of built-in electric field in the interface between NiFe-LDH and semiconductor to enhance both methanol oxidation and seawater oxidation for NiFe-LDH