Recent Application of Bio-Alcohol: Bio-Jet Fuel

Recently, the biomass-based energy production has been actively studied as a research and development area for reducing carbon emissions as a solution to global warming caused by the increase of carbon dioxide emissions. Especially, as the energy consumption in the air transportation field increases, the carbon dioxide emissions increase simultaneously. Therefore, the bio-jet fuel production technology is being actively developed to solve this problem. The bio-jet fuel manufacturing process is a process of manufacturing biomass-derived jet fuel that can replace the existing petroleum-based jet fuel. It includes an alcohol-to-jet (ATJ) process using bio-alcohol such as bio-butanol and bio-ethanol, oil-to-jet (OTJ) process using vegetable oil, and an F-T process using syngas obtained from gasification of biomass-based raw materials

Middle-aged women’s experiences of physical activity for managing menopausal symptoms: a phenomenological study

Purpose The purpose of this study was to comprehensively understand and describe the meaning of physical activity for managing menopausal symptoms in middle-aged women. Methods This study targeted middle-aged women with menopausal symptoms who participated in regular exercise at least three times a week for more than 12 weeks. Nine participants were individually interviewed via in-depth face-to-face interviews, and participatory observation was also employed. Colaizzi’s phenomenological qualitative research method was applied for analysis. Results Participants were asked, “What does it means to participate in physical activity at this time of your life?” Fourteen codes, six themes, and three theme clusters were derived for the meaning of physical activity for managing menopausal symptoms in these middle-aged women. The six themes were “reviving the exhausted body and mind,” “being free from the yoke of pain,” “being settled in life,” “finding oneself and becoming altruistic,” “striving while anticipating change,” and “equipping the body and mind.” The three theme clusters were “overcoming my past pain,” “taking the initiative for today’s life,” and “moving towards new change.” Conclusion The narratives revealed that physical activity allowed women to overcome menopausal symptoms, the burden of relationships, and stress, thereby enabling them to make positive changes in their lives and have expectations for the future. Thus, physical activity was a positive force in a healthy menopausal transition for women with menopausal symptoms. The findings of this study can be used to encourage physical activity in peri-menopausal women and to develop physical activity programs for managing menopausal symptoms

Toward Practical Privacy-Preserving Convolutional Neural Networks Exploiting Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Incorporating fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) into the inference process of a convolutional neural network (CNN) draws enormous attention as a viable approach for achieving private inference (PI). FHE allows delegating the entire computation process to the server while ensuring the confidentiality of sensitive client-side data. However, practical FHE implementation of a CNN faces significant hurdles, primarily due to FHE's substantial computational and memory overhead. To address these challenges, we propose a set of optimizations, which includes GPU/ASIC acceleration, an efficient activation function, and an optimized packing scheme. We evaluate our method using the ResNet models on the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets, achieving several orders of magnitude improvement compared to prior work and reducing the latency of the encrypted CNN inference to 1.4 seconds on an NVIDIA A100 GPU. We also show that the latency drops to a mere 0.03 seconds with a custom hardware design.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, appears at DISCC 2023 (2nd Workshop on Data Integrity and Secure Cloud Computing, in conjunction with the 56th International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 2023)

Universal convex covering problems under translation and discrete rotations

We consider the smallest-area universal covering of planar objects of perimeter 2 (or equivalently closed curves of length 2) allowing translation and discrete rotations. In particular, we show that the solution is an equilateral triangle of height 1 when translation and discrete rotation of $\pi$ are allowed. Our proof is purely geometric and elementary. We also give convex coverings of closed curves of length 2 under translation and discrete rotations of multiples of $\pi/2$ and $2\pi/3$. We show a minimality of the covering for discrete rotation of multiples of $\pi/2$, which is an equilateral triangle of height smaller than 1, and conjecture that the covering is the smallest-area convex covering. Finally, we give the smallest-area convex coverings of all unit segments under translation and discrete rotations $2\pi/k$ for all integers $k\ge 3$

Early onset of colorectal cancer in a 13-year-old girl with Lynch syndrome

Lynch syndrome is the most common inherited colon cancer syndrome. Patients with Lynch syndrome develop a range of cancers including colorectal cancer (CRC) and carry a mutation on one of the mismatched repair (MMR) genes. Although CRC usually occurs after the fourth decade in patients with Lynch syndrome harboring a heterozygous MMR gene mutation, it can occur in children with Lynch syndrome who have a compound heterozygous or homozygous MMR gene mutation. We report a case of CRC in a 13-year-old patient with Lynch syndrome and congenital heart disease. This patient had a heterozygous mutation in MLH1 (an MMR gene), but no compound MMR gene defects, and a K-RAS somatic mutation in the cancer cells

Sargassum fulvellum

Ultraviolet (UV) radiation has been reported to induce cutaneous inflammation such as erythema and edema via induction of proinflammatory enzymes and mediators. Sargassum fulvellum is a brown alga of Sargassaceae family which has been demonstrated to exhibit antipyretic, analgesic, antiedema, antioxidant, antitumor, fibrinolytic, and hepatoprotective activities. The purpose of this study is to investigate anti-inflammatory effects of ethylacetate fraction of ethanol extract of Sargassum fulvellum (SFE-EtOAc) in HaCaT keratinocytes and BALB/c mice. In HaCaT cells, SFE-EtOAc effectively inhibited UVB-induced cytotoxicity (60 mJ/cm2) and the expression of proinflammatory proteins such as cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), and inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS). Furthermore, SFE-EtOAc significantly reduced UVB-induced production of proinflammatory mediators including prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) and nitric oxide (NO). In BALB/c mice, topical application of SFE-EtOAc prior to UVB irradiation (200 mJ/cm2) effectively suppressed the UVB-induced protein expression of COX-2, iNOS, and TNF-α and subsequently attenuated generation of PGE2 and NO as well. In another experiment, SFE-EtOAc pretreatment suppressed UVB-induced reactive oxygen species production and exhibited an antioxidant potential by upregulation of antioxidant enzymes such as catalase and Cu/Zn-superoxide dismutase in HaCaT cells. These results suggest that SFE-EtOAc could be an effective anti-inflammatory agent protecting against UVB irradiation-induced skin damages

Dihydrotestosterone-Inducible IL-6 Inhibits Elongation of Human Hair Shafts by Suppressing Matrix Cell Proliferation and Promotes Regression of Hair Follicles in Mice

Autocrine and paracrine factors are produced by balding dermal papilla (DP) cells following dihydrotestosterone (DHT)-driven alterations and are believed to be key factors involved in male pattern baldness. Herein we report that the IL-6 is upregulated in balding DP cells compared with non-balding DP cells. IL-6 was upregulated 3hours after 10–100nM DHT treatment, and ELISA showed that IL-6 was secreted from balding DP cells in response to DHT. IL-6 receptor (IL-6R) and glycoprotein 130 (gp130) were expressed in follicular keratinocytes, including matrix cells. Recombinant human IL-6 (rhIL-6) inhibited hair shaft elongation and suppressed proliferation of matrix cells in cultured human hair follicles. Moreover, rhIL-6 injection into the hypodermis of mice during anagen caused premature onset of catagen. Taken together, our data strongly suggest that DHT-inducible IL-6 inhibits hair growth as a paracrine mediator from the DP