World Rabies Day - a decade of raising awareness

World Rabies Day was set up in 2007 to raise global awareness about rabies, to provide information on how to prevent the disease in at-risk communities and support advocacy for increased efforts in rabies control. It is held annually on September 28th, with events, media outreach and other initiatives carried out by individuals, professionals, organisations and governments from the local to the international level. The Global Alliance for Rabies Control coordinates World Rabies Day, amplifying the campaign's reach through the provision of a central event platform and resources to support events across the world, the promotion of messages through key rabies stakeholders, and the implementation of specific activities to highlight particular issues. Over the last decade, more than 1,700 registered events have been held across the world and shared with others in the global rabies community. Events in canine rabies endemic countries, particularly in Africa and Asia, have increased over time. Beyond the individual events, World Rabies Day has gained the support of governments and international agencies that recognise its value in supporting existing rabies control initiatives and advocating for improvements. As the rabies landscape has changed, World Rabies Day remains a general day of awareness but has also become an integral part of national, regional and global rabies elimination strategies. The global adoption of 2030 as the goal for the elimination of rabies as a public health threat has led to even greater opportunities for World Rabies Day to make a sustainable impact on rabies, by bringing the attention of policy makers and donors to the ongoing situation and elimination efforts in rabies-endemic countries

Pano Duo Recital: Joanna Kim Doyle and Soohyun Yun, Works for Four-Hands on One Piano

KSU School of Music presents Piano Duo Recital, Works for Four-Hands on One Piano, Joanna Kim Doyle and Soohyun Yun.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/musicprograms/1281/thumbnail.jp

Multiscale, Thermomechanical Topology Optimization of Cellular Structures for Porous Injection Molds

During the injection molding cycle, molten material is injected at high pressure inside the mold and cooled down to form a solid part. This creates thermomechanical stresses that are alleviated by the correct design of a cooling system. In conventional molds, the cooling system consists of straight-line cooling channels, which can be manufactured using machining processes; however, they are thermally inefficient and unable to cool the injected part uniformly. The emergence of metal-based additive manufacturing techniques such as direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) allows the fabrication of molds with conformal cooling channels. Conformal cooling molds cool down the part faster and more uniformly; however, they face limitations. First, their fabrication cost is 10 to 20 times higher than the one of a conventional mold. Second, the DMLS process, which is the most popular fabrication method of conformal cooling molds, produces internal thermal stresses that distort the mold. The development of structural optimization methods such as multiscale topology optimization offers the potential to create novel and complex cellular structures that alleviate these current limitations. The objective of this research is to establish a multiscale topology optimization method for the optimal design of non-periodic cellular structures subjected to thermomechanical loads. The result is a hierarchically complex design that is thermally efficient, mechanically stable, and suitable for additive manufacturing. The proposed method seeks to minimize the mold mass at the macroscale, while satisfying the thermomechanical constraints at the mesoscale. The thermomechanical properties of the mesoscale cellular unit cells are estimated using homogenization theory. A gradient-based optimization algorithm is used for which macroscale and mesoscale sensitivity coefficients are derived. The design and evaluation of a porous injection mold is presented to demonstrate the proposed optimization method

Scale-free networks with a large- to hypersmall-world transition

Recently there have been a tremendous interest in models of networks with a power-law distribution of degree -- so called "scale-free networks." It has been observed that such networks, normally, have extremely short path-lengths, scaling logarithmically or slower with system size. As en exotic and unintuitive example we propose a simple stochastic model capable of generating scale-free networks with linearly scaling distances. Furthermore, by tuning a parameter the model undergoes a phase transition to a regime with extremely short average distances, apparently slower than log log N (which we call a hypersmall-world regime). We characterize the degree-degree correlation and clustering properties of this class of networks.Comment: errors fixed, one new figure, to appear in Physica

Abstract 2421: The role of p53 mutational status and SOX9 suppression in chemotherapy response of ovarian cancer

Ovarian cancers are highly heterogeneous where platinum based chemotherapy which induces DNA crosslinking resulting in apoptosis of the cell is the preferred treatment. However, many patients are intrinsically resistant or quickly develop resistance. The Sox factors are a large family of transcription factors that play important roles in tumor development and progression in a variety of human malignancies and diverse developmental processes, but their impact in clinical tumorigenesis is still unclear. An analysis of genomic changes in ovarian cancer has provided the most comprehensive and integrated view of cancer genes for any cancer type to date. Ovarian serous adenocarcinoma tumors from 500 patients were examined by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Research Network and analyses are reported in a recent issue of Nature. This evidence suggests that epigenetic deregulation, such as methylation, may be a key factor in the onset and maintenance of chemoresistance. Previous microarray analysis results in our lab correctly identified a subset of about 300 genes that when methylated altered the chemoresistance of the ovarian epithelium cells in culture. Of the genes identified in the analysis we further set out to characterize oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes that interact with the guardian of the genome, TP53, to determine if we could elucidate the mechanism by which it increased resistance. Using several in-vitro assays, we determined that the loss of p53 in conjunction with SOX9 decreased the level of apoptosis in response to carboplatin. Furthermore, in cells with mutated p53/SOX9 show an increase in tumorigenesis. Regulation of several pathways with p53 mutations in ovarian cancer might represent a therapy response prediction and could be a future therapeutic target for ovarian cancer. In addition, the crosstalk between p53/SOX9 and epigenetic regulators may present a valid treatment option for increasing carboplatin sensitivity in resistant patients

Geometry-induced asymmetric diffusion

Past work has shown that ions can pass through a membrane more readily in one direction than the other. We demonstrate here in a model and an experiment that for a mixture of small and large particles such asymmetric diffusion can arise solely from an asymmetry in the geometry of the pores of the membrane. Our deterministic simulation considers a two-dimensional gas of elastic disks of two sizes diffusing through a membrane, and our laboratory experiment examines the diffusion of glass beads of two sizes through a metal membrane. In both experiment and simulation, the membrane is permeable only to the smaller particles, and the asymmetric pores lead to an asymmetry in the diffusion rates of these particles. The presence of even a small percentage of large particles can clog a membrane, preventing passage of the small particles in one direction while permitting free flow of the small particles in the other direction. The purely geometric kinetic constraints may play a role in common biological contexts such as membrane ion channels.Comment: published with minuscule change

High-order volterra model predictive control and its application to a nonlinear polymerisation process

Model Predictive Control (MPC) has recently found wide acceptance in the process industry, but the existing design and implementation methods are restricted to linear process models. A chemical process involves, however, severe nonlinearity which cannot be ignored in practice. This paper aims to solve this nonlinear control problem by extending MPC to nonlinear models. It develops an analytical framework for nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC), and also offers a third-order Volterra series based nonparametric nonlinear modelling technique for NMPC design which relieves practising engineers from the need for first deriving a physical-principles based model. An on-line realisation technique for implementing the NMPC is also developed. The NMPC is then applied to a Mitsubishi Chemicals polymerisation reaction process. The results show that this nonlinear MPC technique is feasible and very effective. It considerably outperforms linear and low-order Volterra model based methods. The advantages of the approach developed lie not only in control performance superior to existing NMPC methods, but also in relieving practising engineers from the need for deriving an analytical model and then converting it to a Volterra model through which the model can only be obtained up to the second order

Abstract 4525: Hypoxia signaling pathway plays a role in ovarian cancer chemoresistance

Hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1) is a basic helix-loop-helix transcription factor that when induced regulates the expression of many genes involved in cytoprotective stimuli, which attenuates apoptosis and improves survival. Increased expression of HIF-1α gene (HIF1A) has been found in several carcinomas, including ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancers are generally refractory to platinum-based chemotherapy. Despite the large number of studies, molecular events that govern the emergence of aggressive therapy-resistant cells after chemotherapy are poorly defined. Genomic instabilities, such as copy number variation(CNV), may play an important role in chemoresistance and have been implicated in many complex diseases, like cancer.. We analyzed CNV data that is publically available through the Cancer Genome Atlas and others. Of particular interest was the transcription factor HIF1A which plays an integral role in oxidative stress response such as those induced by chemotherapy reagents. The present study provides evidence for the rare escape of tumor cells from drug-induced cell death by entering a non-cycling senescent state. We report the adaptive response of human ovarian surface epithelium cells to CoCl2, a chemical hypoxia-mimicking agent resulting in a senescent-like state of chemoresistant cells. The effect of the treatment was evaluated on CNV of HIF-1α gene expression, cell proliferation, survival, and tumor invasiveness. We show here that CNV duplication events of HIF1α results in an oxidative stress response in cells leading to chemoresistance through the induction of cellular senescence. Understanding the molecular events associated with chemoresistance will ultimately lead to better patient treatment and outcomes