Drug Delivery Applications of Coaxial Electrospun Nanofibres in Cancer Therapy

Cancer is one of the most serious health problems and the second leading cause of death worldwide, and with an ageing and growing population, problems related to cancer will continue. In the battle against cancer, many therapies and anticancer drugs have been developed. Chemotherapy and relevant drugs are widely used in clinical practice; however, their applications are always accompanied by severe side effects. In recent years, the drug delivery system has been improved by nanotechnology to reduce the adverse effects of the delivered drugs. Among the different candidates, core–sheath nanofibres prepared by coaxial electrospinning are outstanding due to their unique properties, including their large surface area, high encapsulation efficiency, good mechanical property, multidrug loading capacity, and ability to govern drug release kinetics. Therefore, encapsulating drugs in coaxial electrospun nanofibres is a desirable method for controlled and sustained drug release. This review summarises the drug delivery applications of coaxial electrospun nanofibres with different structures and drugs for various cancer treatments

Investigating the effect of carbon tax and carbon quota policy to achieve low carbon logistics operations

Developing a low-carbon economy and reducing carbon dioxide emission have become a consensus for both academics and practitioners. However, the existing literature did not pay enough attention in interrogating the impacts of Carbon Tax (CT) and Carbon Quota (CQ) policy on distribution costs and carbon dioxide emission in the field of vehicle routing problem. Moreover, the investigated subsidies factor is also incomplete. This research stands on the position of the company to study the impact of CT and CQ policy on aforementioned two aspects. A mathematical model is developed to achieve the best low carbon vehicle routing under the optimal policy. The optimization goal of this research is to minimize the total cost that includes vehicle-using, transportation, CT, CQ, and raw material subsidy costs. An improved optimization algorithm, namely Genetic Algorithm-Tabu Search (GA-TS), is proposed to solve a given business case. In the simulation experiments, GA-TS and a traditional GA are compared and the results show the advantage of GA-TS on reducing the total cost and carbon dioxide emission. Furthermore, the experiments also explore the total cost and carbon dioxide emission under three scenarios (Benchmark, CT and CQ), incorporating four policies: CT, Carbon Tax Subsidy (CTS), CQ, and Carbon Quota Subsidy (CQS). It is concluded that CQS is the ideal policy to minimize distribution cost and carbon dioxide emission. In addition, the impact of vehicles’ capacities on the total cost and carbon dioxide emission is also analyzed in this research. This research also aimed at assisting practitioners in better formulating delivery routes, as well as policy makers in developing carbon policies. Finally, the limitations and the future research directions of this research are also discussed

Effect of different rice transplanting patterns on microbial community in water, sediment, and Procambarus clarkii intestine in rice-crayfish system

Although the microbial ecology of integrated rice-crayfish farming systems is receiving increasing attention with the expanding application area in China, the effects of rice transplanting patterns on the microbial community of water, sediment and Procambarus clarkii intestine in rice-crayfish system has yet to be determined. This study explored the microbial community present in water, sediment and intestine samples from three transplant patterns (rice crayfish with wide-narrow row transplanting, rice-crayfish with normal transplanting and pond-crayfish, abbreviated as RC-W, RC, and PC, respectively) using high-throughput sequencing. The results showed that the dominant microbial taxa from sediment, surrounding water, and intestine at phylum level were Proteobacteria, Chloroflexi, Cyanobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes. The patterns of rice transplanting had significant effects on microbial biodiversity and species composition in surrounding water. The OTUs community richness of water under RC group was significantly higher than that of PC group and RC-W group. The OTU relative abundance of top 10 operational taxonomic units had significantly different (p < 0.05) in the water samples from the three groups. The intestinal OTU community richness of Procambarus clarkii in the three groups was positively correlated with the community richness of water. The proximity between intestinal and water samples in PCA diagram indicated that their species composition was more similar. The results also showed that rice transplanting patterns can affect intestinal microbial biodiversity of Procambarus clarkii and the intestinal microbial biodiversity correlated with water bodies. Although the intestinal microbial diversity of crayfish in RC-W group was lower than that in RC group, the relative abundance of potential pathogenic bacteria, such as Vibrio, Aeromonas, in intestine of the crayfish in the RC-W group was significantly decreased under rice wide-narrow row transplanting model. Redundancy analysis revealed that environmental parameters, such as pH, DO, nitrate, which regulate the composition of microbial community structures. This study provides an understanding for microbial response to different rice transplanting pattern in rice-crayfish farming system

GraFT: Gradual Fusion Transformer for Multimodal Re-Identification

Object Re-Identification (ReID) is pivotal in computer vision, witnessing an escalating demand for adept multimodal representation learning. Current models, although promising, reveal scalability limitations with increasing modalities as they rely heavily on late fusion, which postpones the integration of specific modality insights. Addressing this, we introduce the \textbf{Gradual Fusion Transformer (GraFT)} for multimodal ReID. At its core, GraFT employs learnable fusion tokens that guide self-attention across encoders, adeptly capturing both modality-specific and object-specific features. Further bolstering its efficacy, we introduce a novel training paradigm combined with an augmented triplet loss, optimizing the ReID feature embedding space. We demonstrate these enhancements through extensive ablation studies and show that GraFT consistently surpasses established multimodal ReID benchmarks. Additionally, aiming for deployment versatility, we've integrated neural network pruning into GraFT, offering a balance between model size and performance.Comment: 3 Borderline Reviews at WACV, 8 pages, 5 figures, 8 table

Combination and compression of multiple pulses with same or different wavelengths

Funding Information: This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61675008 and in part by Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Commission under Grant GJHZ20180411185015272. K. Nakkeeran wishes to thank The Royal Society Kan Tong Po International Fellowship 2018 for the financial support to visit The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.Peer reviewedPostprin

Simultaneous Combination and Nearly Self-similar Pulse Compression of Five Pulses at Different Wavelengths

Acknowledgment This work was supported by Shenzhen Technology and Innovation Council (Project GJHZ20180411185015272), Youth Science and Technology Innovation Talent of Guangdong Province (Project 2019TQ05X227) and research startup fund. K. Nakkeeran likes to acknowledge the Binks Trust Fund for this collaborative research project work.Peer reviewedPostprin

Preschoolers' outdoor pretend play and social competence: do individual and home factors play a role?

As one of the most advanced play forms in childhood, pretend play has demonstrated positive associations with child development in several domains. However, little research has been done to look at the association between pretend play and social skills. By observing children's outdoor pretend play, the main purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between different types of pretend play and children's social skills, and also to examine the effects of several individual and home factors on this potential relationship. Results showed that overall pretend play was positively associated with assertiveness. Abstract pretend play was positively associated with assertiveness and cooperation. Social pretend play was positively associated with assertiveness, cooperation, and self-control. Social pretend play predicted all three social skills above and beyond other types of pretend play. No significant interaction was found for individual factors and pretend play. Parents' beliefs were significantly associated with children's social pretend play

sTarPicker: A Method for Efficient Prediction of Bacterial sRNA Targets Based on a Two-Step Model for Hybridization

Bacterial sRNAs are a class of small regulatory RNAs involved in regulation of expression of a variety of genes. Most sRNAs act in trans via base-pairing with target mRNAs, leading to repression or activation of translation or mRNA degradation. To date, more than 1,000 sRNAs have been identified. However, direct targets have been identified for only approximately 50 of these sRNAs. Computational predictions can provide candidates for target validation, thereby increasing the speed of sRNA target identification. Although several methods have been developed, target prediction for bacterial sRNAs remains challenging.Here, we propose a novel method for sRNA target prediction, termed sTarPicker, which was based on a two-step model for hybridization between an sRNA and an mRNA target. This method first selects stable duplexes after screening all possible duplexes between the sRNA and the potential mRNA target. Next, hybridization between the sRNA and the target is extended to span the entire binding site. Finally, quantitative predictions are produced with an ensemble classifier generated using machine-learning methods. In calculations to determine the hybridization energies of seed regions and binding regions, both thermodynamic stability and site accessibility of the sRNAs and targets were considered. Comparisons with the existing methods showed that sTarPicker performed best in both performance of target prediction and accuracy of the predicted binding sites.sTarPicker can predict bacterial sRNA targets with higher efficiency and determine the exact locations of the interactions with a higher accuracy than competing programs. sTarPicker is available at http://ccb.bmi.ac.cn/starpicker/

What do we know about the implementation of the quality rating and improvement system?: a cross-cultural comparison in three countries

Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRISs) provide an infrastructure that maintains as well as supports the enhancement of early childhood education (ECE) programs quality. It is being established worldwide. However, little is known about the implementation process and how this relates to implementation success. The purpose of this study was to have a better understanding of QRIS implementation through investigating QRIS in three regions within three countries (U.S., China, Singapore) based on implementation science framework (Fixsen, Naoom, Blase, Friedman, & Wallace, 2005), and cultural background of each country. A case study approach was used to examine the components of QRIS, implementation process, effect, and stage of each region’s QRIS. Results showed that the components of QRIS in each region looked different, with U.S. (North Carolina) having the most comprehensive components, and China (Beijing) and Singapore having fewer, although each still had critical components within their systems. The three countries also possess different values, strategies, and resources to support the implementation of QRIS. Based on each region’s implementation process, QRIS in North Carolina is in its full implementation stage with several major and minor adjustments going on; Beijing’s QRIS is at a mixed stage with variations in the development of different drivers; Singapore’s QRIS is clearly at an initial implementation stage. Implications for each region’s QRIS are discussed under their unique cultural, political, and historical backgrounds within each country. Further implications for implementation science framework as well as how it might be adjusted for each region’s QRIS implementation is discussed at the end