LEGAL MEANS OF ENSURING PUBLIC SAFETY AS A BASIS FOR THE PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY

Objective: The article investigates the key areas to improve the effectiveness of legal means for human rights protection in the conditions of spreading ideology that promotes the development of extremist and terrorist activities. Methods: Close attention is paid to the scale of spreading extremism and terrorism ideology at transnational, interstate and national levels. Results: The focus of activity in terrorist organizations is emphasized on destruction or disruption of transport infrastructure, life support facilities, intimidation of population and committing acts of nuclear terrorism. Conclusions: It is necessary to develop a legal policy that promotes the implementation of measures to protect human rights, regardless to the nature of the political and legal system in the state. The universality of measures for the protection of human rights implies their viability in various socially interactive legal systems. The necessity to develop new approaches to justify the formation of ideology of terrorism and extremism is determined. Attention is paid to the necessity to improve legal grounds for understanding terrorism and extremism

Evidence that long-term potentiation occurs within individual hippocampal synapses during learning.

Stabilization of long-term potentiation (LTP) depends on multiple signaling cascades linked to actin polymerization. We used one of these, involving phosphorylation of the regulatory protein cofilin, as a marker to test whether LTP-related changes occur in hippocampal synapses during unsupervised learning. Well handled rats were allowed to explore a compartmentalized environment for 30 min after an injection of vehicle or the NMDA receptor antagonist (+/-)-3-(2-carboxypiperazin-4-yl)propyl-1-phosphonic acid (CPP). Another group of rats consisted of vehicle-injected, home-cage controls. Vehicle-treated rats that explored the environment had 30% more spines with dense phosphorylated (p) cofilin immunoreactivity in hippocampal field CA1 than did rats in the home-cage group. The increase in pCofilin-positive spines and behavioral evidence for memory of the explored environment were both eliminated by CPP. Coimmunostaining for pCofilin and the postsynaptic density protein 95 (PSD-95) showed that synapses on pCofilin-positive spines were substantially larger than those on neighboring (pCofilin-negative) spines. These results establish that uncommon cellular events associated with LTP, including changes in synapse size, occur in individual spines during learning, and provide a technique for mapping potential engrams

MEK/ERK/1/2 sensitive vascular changes coincide with retinal functional deficit, following transient ophthalmic artery occlusion

Retinal ischemia remains a major cause of blindness in the world with few acute treatments available. Recent emphasis on retinal vasculature and the ophthalmic artery's vascular properties after ischemia has shown an increase in vasoconstrictive functionality, as previously observed in cerebral arteries following stroke. Specifically, endothelin-1 (ET-1) receptor-mediated vasoconstriction regulated by the MEK/ERK1/2 pathway. In this study, the ophthalmic artery of rats was occluded for 2 h with the middle cerebral artery occlusion model. MEK/ERK1/2 inhibitor U0126 was administered at 0, 6, and 24 h following reperfusion and the functional properties of the ophthalmic artery were evaluated at 48 h post reperfusion. Additionally, retinal function was evaluated at day 1, 4, and 7 after reperfusion. Occlusion of the ophthalmic artery led to a significant increase of endothelin-1 mediated vasoconstriction which can be attenuated by U0126 treatment, most evident at higher ET-1 concentrations of 10−7 M (Emax151.0 ± 22.0% of 60 mM K+), vs non-treated ischemic arteries Emax 212.1 ± 14.7% of 60 mM K+). Retinal function also deteriorated following ischemia and was improved with treatment with a-wave amplitudes of 725 ± 36 μV in control, 560 ± 21 μV in non-treated, and 668 ± 73 μV in U0126 treated at 2 log cd*s/m2 luminance in the acute stages (1 days post-ischemia). Full spontaneous retinal recovery was observed at day 7 regardless of treatment. In conclusion, this is the first study to show a beneficial in vivo effect of U0126 on vascular contractility following ischemia in the ophthalmic artery. Coupled with the knowledge obtained from cerebral vasculature, these results point towards a novel therapeutic approach following ischemia-related injuries to the eye

Influence of Acoustic Oscillations on Continuous-Flow Water Disinfection

Water disinfection and potential sterilization in continuous flow was achieved in a hybrid reactor with a broadband hydrodynamic emitter combined with ultrasonic vibrations at different frequencies and with excess pressure. Such a combination showed synergistic effects by increasing the acoustic power in the reactor vortex flow. The present combined physical treatment, compared with sonication alone, could increase microorganism inactivation by 15–20%

Deep-Learning-Based Classification of Rat OCT Images After Intravitreal Injection of ET-1 for Glaucoma Understanding

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a useful technique to monitor retinal damage. We present an automatic method to accurately classify rodent OCT images in healthy and pathological (before and after 14 days of intravitreal injection of Endothelin-1, respectively) making use of the DenseNet-201 architecture fine-tuned and a customized top-model. We validated the performance of the method on 1912 OCT images yielding promising results ( AUC=0.99±0.01 in a P=15 leave-P-out cross-validation). Besides, we also compared the results of the fine-tuned network with those achieved training the network from scratch, obtaining some interesting insights. The presented method poses a step forward in understanding pathological rodent OCT retinal images, as at the moment there is no known discriminating characteristic which allows classifying this type of images accurately. The result of this work is a very accurate and robust automatic method to distinguish between healthy and a rodent model of glaucoma, which is the backbone of future works dealing with human OCT images.Animal experiment permission was granted by the Danish Animal Experimentation Council (license number: 2017-15-0201-01213). We gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of the Titan Xp GPU used for this research. This work was supported by the Project GALAHAD [H2020-ICT-2016-2017, 732613]Fuentes-Hurtado, FJ.; Morales, S.; Mossi García, JM.; Naranjo Ornedo, V.; Fedulov, V.; Woldbye, D.; Klemp, K.... (2018). Deep-Learning-based Classification of Rat OCT images After Intravitreal Injection of ET-1 for Glaucoma Understanding. En Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning – IDEAL 2018. Springer. 27-34. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03493-1_4S2734Karri, S., Chakraborty, D., Chatterjee, J.: Transfer learning based classification of optical coherence tomography images with diabetic macular edema and dry age-related macular degeneration. Biomed. Opt. Express 8(2), 579–592 (2017)Pekala, M., Joshi, N., Freund, D.E., Bressler, N.M., et al.: Deep learning based retinal OCT segmentation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.09749 (2018)Srinivasan, P.P., Kim, L.A., Mettu, P.S., et al.: Fully automated detection of diabetic macular edema and dry age-related macular degeneration from optical coherence tomography images. Biomed. Opt. Express 5(10), 3568–3577 (2014)Lee, C.S., Baughman, D.M., Lee, A.Y.: Deep learning is effective for the classification of OCT images of normal versus age-related macular degeneration. arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.04891 (2016)Muhammad, H., Fuchs, T.J., De Cuir, N., De Moraes, C.G., et al.: Hybrid deep learning on single wide-field optical coherence tomography scans accurately classifies glaucoma suspects. J. Glaucoma 26(12), 1086–1094 (2017)Virgili, G., Michelessi, M., Cook, J., Boachie, C., et al.: Diagnostic accuracy of optical coherence tomography for diagnosing glaucoma: secondary analyses of the gate study. Br. J. Ophthalmol. 102(5), 604–610 (2017). bjophthalmol-2017Hood, D.C.: Improving our understanding, and detection, of glaucomatous damage: an approach based upon OCT. Prog. Retin. eye res. 57, 46–75 (2017)Nagata, A., Omachi, K., Higashide, T., et al.: OCT evaluation of neuroprotective effects of tafluprost on retinal injury after intravitreal injection of endothelin-1 in the rat eye. Invest. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci. 55(2), 1040–1047 (2014)Huang, G., Liu, Z., Weinberger, K.Q., van der Maaten, L.: Densely connected convolutional networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, vol. 1, p. 3 (2017)Kingma, D.P., Ba, J.: Adam: a method for stochastic optimization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6980 (2014

Fast Degradation of Tetracycline and Ciprofloxacin in Municipal Water under Hydrodynamic Cavitation/Plasma with CeO2 Nanocatalyst

Although water contamination with drug residues is a threat to public health, there are currently barely any effective methods of purifying water from pharmaceutical substances. In this study, continuous-flow sonoplasma treatment was used for the complete degradation of tetracycline and ciprofloxacin in polluted municipal water. The addition of CeO2 nanoparticles as catalysts significantly increased the degradation rate of the antibiotics, and a degradation degree of 70% was achieved. The presence of reactive oxygen species in the CeO2-nanoparticle-containing sonoplasma-treated system was experimentally proven for the first time using the chemiluminescence technique