Metawaveguide for Asymmetric Interferometric Light-Light Switching

Light-light switching typically requires strong nonlinearity where intense laser fields route and direct data flows of weak power, leading to a high power consumption that limits its practical use. Here we report an experimental demonstration of a metawaveguide that operates exactly in the opposite way in a linear regime, where an intense laser field is interferometrically manipulated on demand by a weak control beam with a modulation extinction ratio up to approximately 60 dB. This asymmetric control results from operating near an exceptional point of the scattering matrix, which gives rise to intrinsic asymmetric reflections of the metawaveguide through delicate interplay between index and absorption. The designed metawaveguide promises low-power interferometric light-light switching for the next generation of optical devices and networks

Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Bone Marrow Cell-Mediated Interleukin-10 Gene Therapy of Atherosclerosis

A characteristic feature of atherosclerosis is its diffuse involvement of arteries across the entire human body. Bone marrow cells (BMC) can be simultaneously transferred with therapeutic genes and magnetic resonance (MR) contrast agents prior to their transplantation. Via systemic transplantation, these dual-transferred BMCs can circulate through the entire body and thus function as vehicles to carry genes/contrast agents to multiple atherosclerosis. This study was to evaluate the feasibility of using in vivo MR imaging (MRI) to monitor BMC-mediated interleukin-10 (IL-10) gene therapy of atherosclerosis.For in vitro confirmation, donor mouse BMCs were transduced by IL-10/lentivirus, and then labeled with a T2-MR contrast agent (Feridex). For in vivo validation, atherosclerotic apoE(-/-) mice were intravenously transplanted with IL-10/Feridex-BMCs (Group I, n = 5) and Feridex-BMCs (Group II, n = 5), compared to controls without BMC transplantation (Group III, n = 5). The cell migration to aortic atherosclerotic lesions was monitored in vivo using 3.0T MRI with subsequent histology correlation. To evaluate the therapeutic effect of BMC-mediated IL-10 gene therapy, we statistically compared the normalized wall indexes (NWI) of ascending aortas amongst different mouse groups with various treatments.Of in vitro experiments, simultaneous IL-10 transduction and Feridex labeling of BMCs were successfully achieved, with high cell viability and cell labeling efficiency, as well as IL-10 expression efficiency (≥90%). Of in vivo experiments, MRI of animal groups I and II showed signal voids within the aortic walls due to Feridex-created artifacts from the migrated BMCs in the atherosclerotic plaques, which were confirmed by histology. Histological quantification showed that the mean NWI of group I was significantly lower than those of group II and group III (P<0.05).This study has confirmed the possibility of using MRI to track, in vivo, IL-10/Feridex-BMCs recruited to atherosclerotic lesions, where IL-10 genes function to prevent the progression of atherosclerosis

Berberine ameliorates diabetic nephropathy by inhibiting TLR4/NF-κB pathway

Abstract Background Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is the leading cause of end-stage renal failure, contributing to severe morbidity and mortality in diabetic patients. Berberine (BBR) has been well characterized to exert renoprotective effects in DN progression. However, the action mechanism of BBR in DN remains to be fully understood. Methods The DN rat model was generated by intraperitoneal injection of streptozotocin (STZ, 65 mg/kg body weight) while 30 mM high glucose (HG)-treated podocytes were used as an in vitro DN model. The fasting blood glucose level and ratio of kidney weight to body weight were measured after BBR treatment (50, 100, or 200 mg/kg) in STZ-induced DN rats. The renal injury parameters including 24-h urinary protein, blood urea nitrogen and serum creatinine were assessed. qRT-PCR was performed to detect the transcript amounts of inflammatory factors. The concentrations of inflammatory factors were evaluated by ELISA kits. Western blot analysis was conducted to measure the amounts of TLR4/NF-κB-related proteins. The apoptotic rate of podocytes was analyzed by flow cytometry using Annexin V/propidium iodide. Results Berberine reduced renal injury in STZ-induced DN rat model, as evidenced by the decrease in fasting blood glucose, ratio of kidney weight to body weight, 24-h urinary protein, serum creatinine, and blood urine nitrogen. BBR attenuated the systemic and renal cortex inflammatory response and inhibited TLR4/NF-κB pathway in STZ-induced DN rats and HG-induced podocytes. Also, HG-induced apoptosis of podocytes was lowered by BBR administration. Furthermore, blockade of TLR4/NF-κB pathway by resatorvid (TAK-242) or pyrrolidine dithiocarbamate aggravated the inhibitory effect of BBR on HG-induced inflammatory response and apoptosis in podocytes. Conclusions Berberine ameliorated DN through relieving STZ-induced renal injury, inflammatory response, and podocyte HG-induced apoptosis via inactivating TLR4/NF-κB pathway

“Standard Text” Relational Classification Model Based on Concatenated Word Vector Attention and Feature Concatenation

The task of relation classification is an important pre-task in natural language processing tasks. Relation classification can provide a high-quality corpus for tasks such as machine translation, human–computer dialogue, and structured text generation. In the process of the digitalization of standards, identifying the entity relationship in the standard text is an important prerequisite for the formation of subsequent standard knowledge. Only by accurately labeling the relationship between entities can there be higher efficiency and accuracy in the subsequent formation of knowledge bases and knowledge maps. This study proposes a standard text relational classification model based on cascaded word vector attention and feature splicing. The model was compared and ablated on our labeled standard text Chinese dataset. At the same time, in order to prove the performance of the model, the above experiments were carried out on two general English datasets, SemEval-2010 Task 8 and KBP37. On standard text datasets and general datasets, the model proposed in this study achieved excellent results

FA-RCNet: A Fused Feature Attention Network for Relationship Classification

Relation extraction is an important task in natural language processing. It plays an integral role in intelligent question-and-answer systems, semantic search, and knowledge graph work. For this task, previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and long short-term memory networks (LSTMs) in relational classification tasks. Recently, due to the superior performance of the pre-trained model BERT, BERT has become a feature extraction module for many relational classification models, and good results have been achieved in work related to BERT. However, most of such work uses the deepest levels of features. The important role of shallow-level information in the relational classification task is ignored. Based on the above problems, a relationship classification network FA-RCNet (fusion-attention relationship classification network) with feature fusion and attention mechanism is proposed in this paper. FA-RCNet fuses shallow-level features with deep-level features, and augments entity features and global features by the attention module so that the feature vector can perform the relational classification task more perfectly. In addition, the model in this paper achieves advanced results on both the SemEval-2010 Task 8 dataset and the KBP37 dataset compared to previously published models

Evaluation of Glass Coatings with Various Silica Content Corrosion in a 0.5 M HCl Water Solution

Two enamel coatings with a high and a low silica content were prepared on 35CrMo steels via vacuum firing. Their corrosion behavior in a 0.5 M HCl solution including corrosion kinetics, microstructures and electrochemistry performance were studied in comparison with uncoated steels. The results show that catastrophic corrosion occurred for uncoated steels while enamel coatings significantly decreased the corrosion rate. Enamel coatings with a high silica content exhibited the best corrosion resistance against hydrochloric acid due to their highly connected silicate network, which inhibited the leaching process of alkali metals in the acid solution. The corrosion inhibition efficiency for enamel containing a high silica content reached a maximum of 94.3%

Leptin concentration and risk of coronary heart disease and stroke: A systematic review and meta-analysis

<div><p>Background and purpose</p><p>Although high leptin concentration has been shown to be correlated with established vascular risk factors, epidemiologic studies have reported inconclusive results on the association between leptin and cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Therefore, a meta-analysis was performed to evaluate this issue.</p><p>Methods</p><p>We searched Pubmed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library from their inception to Jan 2016 for both case-control and cohort studies that assessed leptin concentration and CVD risk. Reports with odds ratio (OR), risk ratio (RR) and corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CI) were considered. The data were extracted by two investigators independently.</p><p>Results</p><p>A total of 13 epidemiologic studies totaling 4257 CVD patients and 26710 controls were included. A significant inverse association was shown between leptin and coronary heart disease (CHD), with an overall OR of 1.16 (95% CI: 1.02–1.32), but not for stroke (OR = 1.21, 95% CI 0.98–1.48) under sociodemographic adjustment. Further adjustment for additional cardiovascular risk factors resulted in ORs of 1.16 (95% CI 0.97–1.40) for CHD and 1.10 (95% CI 0.89–1.35) for stroke. The findings remained when analyses were restricted to high-quality studies and indicated OR estimates of 1.07 (95% CI 0.96–1.19) for CHD and 0.98 (95% CI 0.76–1.25) for stroke. In a subgroup meta-analysis, a high leptin level was not independently associated with CHD in both females (OR = 1.03, 95% CI 0.86–1.23) and males (OR = 1.09, 95% CI 0.95–1.26) or with stroke in both females (OR = 1.13, 95% CI 0.87–1.47) and males (OR = 0.80, 95% CI 0.59–1.09). There was no significant publication bias as suggested by Egger test outcomes.</p><p>Conclusions</p><p>Our findings indicate that high leptin levels may not be associated with risks of CHD and stroke. Further large, well-designed prospective cohort studies are needed to fully evaluate the role of leptin on the risk of CVD.</p></div