Effect of Wu-Wei-Gui-Shao decoction on complete Freund's adjuvant-induced arthritis rats

Purpose: To investigate the anti-rheumatic potential of Wu-Wei-Gui-Shao decoction (WGD) and its possible mechanism of action. Methods: Adjuvant arthritis (AA) rats were established using complete Freund's adjuvant. The rats were then given different doses of WGD (100, 200, and 400 mg/kg, for 28 days). The anti-arthritic effects of WGD were evaluated. Furthermore, the in vitro anti-arthritic effects of WGD and its related mechanisms were also determined in MH7A cells. Results: WGD (100 - 400 mg/kg) exhibited significant anti-rheumatic properties after 28 days of treatment, inhibiting paw edema in AA rats, reducing arthritis score and thymus and spleen index, and inhibiting the tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α and the interleukin (IL)-6. In addition, the results of in vitro cell experiments also confirmed that WGD reduced the release of cytokines, as well as mRNA levels of matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) -2, -3, and -9. Conclusion: These findings suggest that WGD can be further developed as a traditional Chinese medicine to treat rheumatic arthritis. Keywords: Wu-Wei-Gui-Shao decoction, Complete Freund's adjuvant, Arthritis, Molecular mechanism, Traditional Chinese Medicin

Influence of Environment on Ageing Behaviour of the Polyurethane Film

In this work, UV-Vis spectra, FT-IR spectra, colour difference, yellowness index, and SEM micrographs were used to study the accelerated ageing behaviour of polyurethane films that exposed to UV radiation, O3 atmosphere, and UV/O3 integrated environment. During 200 hours of exposure in three different environment, the UV absorbance, the colour difference, the yellowness, and the absorption of –NH/–OH and –C=O bands in FT-IR spectra of the films increase gradually with increasing exposure time, respectively, and the films exposed to the three environments have different colour difference, yellowness index, UV-Vis spectra, and FT-IR spectra. The films are vulnerable to degradation and yellowing in the following environment order: O3 < UV < UV/O3. After exposure to UV radiation or O3 atmosphere, some degradation products and blisters are formed on the film surface. After exposure to UV/O3 integrated environment, there are strip blisters and micro-cracks on the film surface, and exists an obvious synergism between UV radiation and O3 atmosphere in accelerating the ageing of the polyurethane films

Diff-ID: An Explainable Identity Difference Quantification Framework for DeepFake Detection

Despite the fact that DeepFake forgery detection algorithms have achieved impressive performance on known manipulations, they often face disastrous performance degradation when generalized to an unseen manipulation. Some recent works show improvement in generalization but rely on features fragile to image distortions such as compression. To this end, we propose Diff-ID, a concise and effective approach that explains and measures the identity loss induced by facial manipulations. When testing on an image of a specific person, Diff-ID utilizes an authentic image of that person as a reference and aligns them to the same identity-insensitive attribute feature space by applying a face-swapping generator. We then visualize the identity loss between the test and the reference image from the image differences of the aligned pairs, and design a custom metric to quantify the identity loss. The metric is then proved to be effective in distinguishing the forgery images from the real ones. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves high detection performance on DeepFake images and state-of-the-art generalization ability to unknown forgery methods, while also being robust to image distortions

Nucleation and Condensation of Magnesium Vapor in Argon Carrier

The nucleation and condensation of Magnesium (Mg) vapor carried by argon gas (Ar) were examined. The condensation of Mg vapor at a heat source temperature of 1273&ndash;1473 K and Ar flow rate of 0.1&ndash;0.4 m3/h was analyzed. The result indicated that the condensation temperature is affected by the heat source temperature and Ar flow rate, and the condensation temperature of Mg vapor was 1013.3 K at a heat source temperature of 1473 K and Ar flow rate of 0.2 m3/h. The effects of Mg vapor partial pressure and temperature of the condensation zone on the nucleation and condensation of Mg vapor carried by Ar were calculated and analyzed in terms of atomic collisions and critical nucleation radius. Increased vapor oversaturation and decreased condensation temperature were favorable for liquid nucleation growth. The Mg condensation products in Ar flow rate of 0.2 m3/h at a heat source temperature of 1473 K were analyzed by XRD, SEM, and EDS, which indicated that the condensed product was of high purity and not easily oxidized in Ar flow. In this paper, the quality of Mg vapor condensation was controlled, which provided the theoretical and experimental basis for a continuous Mg production process