MW-GAN: Multi-warping GAN for caricature generation with multi-style geometric exaggeration

Given an input face photo, the goal of caricature generation is to produce stylized, exaggerated caricatures that share the same identity as the photo. It requires simultaneous style transfer and shape exaggeration with rich diversity, and meanwhile preserving the identity of the input. To address this challenging problem, we propose a novel framework called Multi-Warping GAN (MW-GAN), including a style network and a geometric network that are designed to conduct style transfer and geometric exaggeration respectively. We bridge the gap between the style/landmark space and their corresponding latent code spaces by a dual way design, so as to generate caricatures with arbitrary styles and geometric exaggeration, which can be specified either through random sampling of latent code or from a given caricature sample. Besides, we apply identity preserving loss to both image space and landmark space, leading to a great improvement in quality of generated caricatures. Experiments show that caricatures generated by MW-GAN have better quality than existing methods

A critical review on BDE-209: Source, distribution, influencing factors, toxicity, and degradation

As the most widely used polybrominated diphenyl ether, BDE-209 is commonly used in polymer-based commercial and household products. Due to its unique physicochemical properties, BDE-209 is ubiquitous in a variety of environmental compartments and can be exposed to organisms in various ways and cause toxic effects. The present review outlines the current state of knowledge on the occurrence of BDE-209 in the environment, influencing factors, toxicity, and degradation. BDE-209 has been detected in various environmental matrices including air, soil, water, and sediment. Additionally, environmental factors such as organic matter, total suspended particulate, hydrodynamic, wind, and temperature affecting BDE-209 are specifically discussed. Toxicity studies suggest BDE-209 may cause systemic toxic effects on living organisms, reproductive toxicity, embryo-fetal toxicity, genetic toxicity, endocrine toxicity, neurotoxicity, immunotoxicity, and developmental toxicity, or even be carcinogenic. BDE-209 has toxic effects on organisms mainly through epigenetic regulation and induction of oxidative stress. Evidence regarding the degradation of BDE-209, including biodegradation, photodegradation, Fenton degradation, zero-valent iron degradation, chemical oxidative degradation, and microwave radiation degradation is summarized. This review may contribute to assessing the environmental risks of BDE-209 to help develop rational management plans

The early-onset febrile reaction following vaccination and associated factors: An exploratory sub-study based on the Ebola vaccine clinical trial

A phase-1 clinical trial aimed to assess the safety and immunogenicity of the type-5 adenovirus vector based Ebola vaccine (Ad5-EBOV) was conducted in China. To provide more evidence for the safety evaluation and dose-selection, an exploratory sub-study using a wireless automatic temperature measuring platform was done based on the phase-1 clinical trial. The main aim of the sub-study was to obtain more information about the occurrence of fever and detect the potential associated factors, second was to assess the feasibility of the temperature measuring platform in vaccine clinical trials. Temperature data of 3 treatment groups all presented a rising tendency during the first 6 hours after vaccination, the incidence of elevated temperature and possible associated factors were analyzed. For the incidence of elevated temperature, no marked dose-response relationship was found in 6 hours with wireless thermometers; the information from mercury thermometers showed that the grade-1 fever proportion peaked at 6 hours and there was no difference between groups, while grade-2 fever proportion peaked at 24 hours and was significantly higher in high-dose group than those in the other 2 groups. Significant differences were found between sex groups (males vs. female, incidence rate ratios (IRR) = 2.93 and 7.62 for any-grade, grade-2 fever respectively, P<0.001); a decline in grade-2 fever incidence was found with the increasing age groups (IRR = 0.78, P = 0.003) and body mass index (BMI, IRR = 0.67, P<0.001) .Our findings show that the dose-dependent manner between fever and the dose of Ad5-EBOV in this study might emerge after 6 hours, and which is slight and transient. Wireless thermometers secured on the skin surface are not suitable for a long time (longer than 6 hours) measurement, new methods for temperature monitoring, like ear temperature measurement, should be tested in the further research