RFWD3 acts as a tumor promotor in the development and progression of bladder cancer

Background. Bladder cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed malignancies of the urinary system with relatively poor prognosis and insufficient treatment strategies. RFWD3 is an E3 ligase whose function is rarely investigated in malignant tumors. Methods. A tissue microarray was used for evaluating RFWD3 expression in clinical samples and its correlation with tumor characteristics and patients’ prognosis. RFWD3 knockdown and overexpression cell models were constructed for conducting loss-of-function and gain-of-function assays. qPCR and western blotting were used for detecting mRNA and protein levels of RFWD3, respectively. MTT assay, colony formation assay, flow cytometry, wound-healing assay and transwell assay were carried out to demonstrate the change of cell phenotypes upon RFWD3 knockdown. Results. RFWD3 expression was relatively higher in bladder cancer tissues than in normal tissues, which is correlated with higher N stage and poorer prognosis of patients. Knockdown of RFWD3 in bladder cancer cells significantly inhibited cell proliferation, colony formation, promote cell apoptosis and restrained cell migration. Overexpression of RFWD3 induced the opposite effects. Conclusions. It was illustrated that RFWD3 possesses excellent tumor-promoting ability in bladder cancer. Accordingly, RFWD3 may be a promising therapeutic target in the targeted therapy of bladder cancer, which is worth further research

Service requirement for terminal delivery: an empirical study from the perspective of online shoppers

To investigate customer’s service requirement for parcel delivery, combining with theoretical analysis and empirical test, a measuring model of customer service requirement was proposed for terminal delivery. Based on literature reviews, five potential dimensions with 27 items were initially discussed. Through exploratory factor analysis on samples collected from Taobao networks, four dimensions with 18 measurement items were finally confirmed including service attitude, service reliability, service standardization and service flexibility. By further confirmatory factor analysis, the fitness of this measuring model was proved to be acceptable. The research revealed that online shoppers paid attention to not only service result but also service process, so related suggestions were also proposed for express firms to promote their service management.Peer Reviewe

Region-controlled Style Transfer

Image style transfer is a challenging task in computational vision. Existing algorithms transfer the color and texture of style images by controlling the neural network's feature layers. However, they fail to control the strength of textures in different regions of the content image. To address this issue, we propose a training method that uses a loss function to constrain the style intensity in different regions. This method guides the transfer strength of style features in different regions based on the gradient relationship between style and content images. Additionally, we introduce a novel feature fusion method that linearly transforms content features to resemble style features while preserving their semantic relationships. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed approach

Greedy-Mine: A Profitable Mining Attack Strategy in Bitcoin-NG

Bitcoin-NG is an extensible blockchain protocol based on the same trust model as Bitcoin. It divides each epoch into one Key-Block and multiple Micro-Blocks, effectively improving transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG adopts a special incentive mechanism (i.e., the transaction fees in each epoch are split to the current and next leader) to maintain its security. However, there are some limitations to the existing incentive analysis of Bitcoin-NG in recent works. First, the incentive division method of Bitcoin-NG only includes some specific mining attack strategies of adversary, while ignoring more stubborn attack strategies. Second, once adversaries find a whale transaction, they will deviate from honest mining strategy to obtain extra reward. In this paper, we are committed to solving these two limitations. First, we propose a novel mining strategy named Greedy-Mine attack. Then, we formulate a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model to analyze the competition of honest miners and adversaries. Furthermore, we analysis the extra reward of adversaries and summarize the mining power proportion range required for malicious adversaries to launch Greedy-Mine to obtain extra returns. Finally, we make a backward-compatibility progressive modification to Bitcoin-NG protocol that would raise the threshold of propagation factor from 0 to 1. Meanwhile, we get the winning condition of adversaries when adopting Greedy-Mine, compared with honest mining. Simulation and experimental results indicate that Bitcoin-NG is not incentive compatible, which is vulnerable to Greedy-Mine attack.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figur

Optimization of cyclosporin A production by Beauveria nivea in continuous fed-batch fermentation

To develop the effective control method for fed-batch culture of cyclosporin A production, we chose fructose, L-valine and (NH4)2HPO4 as feeding nutrients and compared their productivities in relation to different concentrations. The feeding rate of three kinds of feeding materials was controlled to maintain the suitable residual concentration. The fed-batch fermentation results indicated that the optimal concentrations of fructose, L-valine and (NH4)2HPO4 were about 20 g/L, 0.5 g/L and 0.6 g/L for cyclosporin A production, respectively. The cultivation of Beauveria nivea could produce cyclosporin A up to 6.2 g/L for 240 hrs through a continuous feeding-rate-controlled-batch process under the optimal feeding conditions

Predicting tipping points in mutualistic networks through dimension reduction

This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1714958115/-/DCSupplemental.Peer reviewedPublisher PD