Signalling pathways and gene expression profiles in prostate cancer

In general, cancer, encompassing prostate cancer (PCa), is a disease that utilises signalling pathways to progress through the uncontrolled proliferation of cancerous cells. Although the mechanisms of how the cells evade intrinsic or extrinsic signals of death and keep on dividing is not completely understood, there is a plethora of evidence that point to certain signalling molecules that are crucial conveyors of the fine tuning that slightly differs in cancer in comparison to control states. The present chapter provides a detailed description of the key regulators of PCa cell life and unveils their closely communicating proteins that aid in the fine tuning of the cancerous state

Embedding information literacy skills as employability attributes

There is clear evidence that graduates, in general, lack the personal skills, attitudes and behaviors needed for success in the workplace. For university students, gaining employability skills such as information literacy, reflective thinking and writing skills throughout their education is now more important than ever. British Universities have been increasingly investing in various strategies to ensure that their graduates are fully equipped with knowledge and transferable skills and are able to respond to the changing needs of the job market. With the heightened need for our graduates to be employable, the focus has grown from academic literacy to include 'workplace literacy'. However, these two should not be considered separate entities but rather a development from one to the other. At Middlesex University an intra-university team has built a framework to target the development of academic and information literacy as well as graduate employability. The team comprises staff from the School of Engineering and Information Sciences (EIS), the Learner Development Unit (LDU) and Learning Resources (LR). This paper aims to share our experiences at Middlesex University in devising such a collaborative strategy. We will also discuss the results of our work so far, including the changes which have been made and the results of a survey to show the impact on the students’ progress

Embedding information literacy skills as employability attributes

There is clear evidence that graduates, in general, lack the personal skills, attitudes and behaviors needed for success in the workplace. For university students, gaining employability skills such as information literacy, reflective thinking and writing skills throughout their education is now more important than ever. British Universities have been increasingly investing in various strategies to ensure that their graduates are fully equipped with knowledge and transferable skills and are able to respond to the changing needs of the job market. With the heightened need for our graduates to be employable, the focus has grown from academic literacy to include 'workplace literacy'. However, these two should not be considered separate entities but rather a development from one to the other. At Middlesex University an intra-university team has built a framework to target the development of academic and information literacy as well as graduate employability. The team comprises staff from the School of Engineering and Information Sciences (EIS), the Learner Development Unit (LDU) and Learning Resources (LR). This paper aims to share our experiences at Middlesex University in devising such a collaborative strategy. We will also discuss the results of our work so far, including the changes which have been made and the results of a survey to show the impact on the students’ progress

Expert systems for real-time monitoring and fault diagnosis

Methods for building real-time onboard expert systems were investigated, and the use of expert systems technology was demonstrated in improving the performance of current real-time onboard monitoring and fault diagnosis applications. The potential applications of the proposed research include an expert system environment allowing the integration of expert systems into conventional time-critical application solutions, a grammar for describing the discrete event behavior of monitoring and fault diagnosis systems, and their applications to new real-time hardware fault diagnosis and monitoring systems for aircraft

Airfoil shape and thickness effects on transonic airloads and flutter

A transient pulse technique is used to obtain harmonic forces from a time-marching solution of the complete unsteady transonic small perturbation potential equation. The unsteady pressures and forces acting on a model of the NACA 64A010 conventional airfoil and the MBB A-3 supercritical airfoil over a range of Mach numbers are examined in detail. Flutter calculations at constant angle of attack show a similar flutter behavior for both airfoils, except for a boundary shift in Mach number associated with corresponding Mach number shift in the unsteady aerodynamic forces. Differences in the static aeroelastic twist behavior for the two airfoils are significant

Near-Term Options for a Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Flight Demonstrator

The Appropriations Bill passed by the US Congress in February 2019 instructed NASA to direct not less than $100,000,000 for the development of nuclear thermal propulsion, of which not less than$70,000,000 shall be for the design of a flight demonstration by 2024 for which a multi-year plan is required by both the House and the Senate within 180 days of enactment of this agreement." As part of NASAs response to this direction, the Advanced Concepts Office (ACO) at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) was tasked with leading a study to develop a nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) flight demonstration (FD) concept and evaluate its feasibility with respect to the near-term schedule goal. During formulation for the NTP FD study, two perspectives emerged with regards to FD concept design. The first seeks to strictly observe the immediate near-term schedule goal, embracing a completely off-the-shelf, high-TRL approach to subsystem design and component selection. The downside to this approach is that the propulsion performance to be expected from such a design is significantly lower than what NTP promises for operational systems, and the value of the flight demo is potentially reduced due to a lack of traceability. The second approach advocates for an FD concept that shows increased traceability to the projected designs of operational systems, providing risk reduction for future NTP-enabled missions. This option comes at the cost of schedule and development risks, as it requires some new investments in nuclear reactor fuels and design. In order to understand the implications and differences between these two approaches, the ACO team elected to perform a concept design of each type, labeling the immediate near-term concept Flight Demo 1 (FD1), and the higher traceability concept Flight Demo 2 (FD2). This paper will present a summary of the mission profiles and system designs for both FD1 and FD2, identifying key drivers and challenges for each design

Working with OpenCL to Speed Up a Genetic Programming Financial Forecasting Algorithm: Initial Results

The genetic programming tool EDDIE has been shown to be a successful financial forecasting tool, however it has suffered from an increase in execution time as new features have been added. Speed is an important aspect in financial problems, especially in the field of algorithmic trading, where a delay in taking a decision could cost millions. To offset this performance loss, EDDIE has been modified to take advantage of multi-core CPUs and dedicated GPUs. This has been achieved by modifying the candidate solution evaluation to use an OpenCL kernel, allowing the parallel evaluation of solutions. Our computational results have shown improvements in the running time of EDDIE when the evaluation was delegated to the OpenCL kernel running on a multi-core CPU, with speed ups up to 21 times faster than the original EDDIE algorithm. While most previous works in the literature reported significantly improvements in performance when running an OpenCL kernel on a GPU device, we did not observe this in our results. Further investigation revealed that memory copying overheads and branching code in the kernel are potentially causes of the (under-)performance of the OpenCL kernel when running on the GPU device

Gene amplifications associated with the development of hormone- resistant prostate cancer

Purpose: Hormone resistance remains a significant clinical problem in prostate cancer with few therapeutic options. Research into mechanisms of hormone resistance is essential. Experimental Design: We analyzed 38 paired (prehormone/posthormone resistance) prostate cancer samples using the Vysis GenoSensor. Archival microdissected tumor DNA was extracted, amplified, labeled, and hybridized to Amplione I DNA microarrays containing 57 oncogenes. Results: Genetic instability increased during progression from hormone-sensitive to hormone-resistant cancer (P = 0.008). Amplification frequencies of 15 genes (TERC, MYBL3, HRAS, PI3KCA, JUNB, LAMC2, RAF1, MYC, GARP, SAS, FGFR1, PGY1, MYCL1, MYB, FGR) increased by greater than 10% during hormone escape. Receptor tyrosine kinases were amplified in 73% of cases; this was unrelated to development of hormone resistance. However, downstream receptor tyrosine kinase signaling pathways showed increased amplification rates in resistant tumors for the mitogen-activated protein kinase (FGR/Src-2, HRAS, and RAF1; P = 0.005) and phosphatidylinositol 3'-kinase pathways (FGR/ Src-2, PI3K, and Akt; P = 0.046). Transcription factors regulated by these pathways were also more frequently amplified after escape (MYC family: 21% before versus 63% after, P = 0.027; MYB family: 26 % before versus 53 % after, P = 0.18). Conclusions: Development of clinical hormone escape is linked to phosphatidylinositol 3'-kinase and mitogen-activated protein kinase pathways. These pathways may function independently of the androgen receptor or via androgen receptor activation by phosphorylation, providing novel therapeutic targets

Conversation therapy for agrammatism: exploring the therapeutic process of engagement and learning by a person with aphasia.

A recent systematic review of conversation training for communication partners of people with aphasia has shown that it is effective, and improves participation in conversation for people with chronic aphasia. Other research suggests that people with aphasia are better able to learn communication strategies in an environment which closely mirrors that of expected use, and that cognitive flexibility may be a better predictor of response to therapy than severity of language impairment. This study reports results for a single case, one of a case series evaluation of a programme of conversation training for agrammatism that directly involves a person with aphasia (PWA) as well as their communication partner. It explores how a PWA is able to engage with and learn from the therapy, and whether this leads to qualitative change in post-therapy conversation behaviours