Luteolin Suppresses Inflammatory Mediator Expression by Blocking the Akt/NFκB Pathway in Acute Lung Injury Induced by Lipopolysaccharide in Mice

Acute lung injury (ALI), instilled by lipopolysaccharide (LPS), is a severe illness with excessive mortality and has no specific treatment strategy. Luteolin is an anti-inflammatory flavonoid and widely distributed in the plants. Pretreatment with luteolin inhibited LPS-induced histological changes of ALI and lung tissue edema. In addition, LPS-induced inflammatory responses, including increased vascular permeability, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α and interleukin (IL)-6 production, and expression of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) and cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), were also reduced by luteolin in a concentration-dependent manner. Furthermore, luteolin suppressed activation of NFκB and its upstream molecular factor, Akt. These results suggest that the protection mechanism of luteolin is by inhibition of NFκB activation possibly via Akt

The Effect of Dopaminergic Medication on Joint Kinematics during Haptic Movements in Individuals with Parkinson's Disease

This study examined whether altered joint angular motion during haptic exploration could account for a decline in haptic sensitivity in individuals with PD by analyzing joint position data during haptic exploration of a curved contour. Each participant's hand was passively moved by a robotic arm along the edges of a virtual box (5 cm × 15 cm) with a curved left wall. After each trial, participants indicated whether the contour was curved or straight. Visual, auditory, and tactile cues were occluded, and an electrogoniometer recorded shoulder and elbow joint angles during each trial. The PD group in the OFF state had a higher mean detection threshold (4.67 m −1 ) than the control group (3.06 m −1 ). Individuals with PD in the OFF state also had a significantly greater magnitude of shoulder abduction than those in the ON state (p = 0 003) and a smaller magnitude of elbow flexion than those in the ON state or compared to the control group (both p < 0 001). These findings suggest that individuals with PD employ joint configurations that may contribute to haptic insensitivity. Dopamine replacement therapy improved joint configurations during haptic exploration in patients with PD, suggesting a role for dopaminergic dysfunction in PD-related haptic insensitivity

Infall, Fragmentation and Outflow in Sgr B2

Observations of H$_{2}$CO lines and continuum at 1.3 mm towards Sgr B2(N) and Sgr B2(M) cores were carried out with the SMA. We imaged H$_{2}$CO line absorption against the continuum cores and the surrounding line emission clumps. The results show that the majority of the dense gas is falling into the major cores where massive stars have been formed. The filaments and clumps of the continuum and gas are detected outside of Sgr B2(N) and Sgr B2(M) cores. Both the spectra and moment analysis show the presence of outflows from Sgr B2(M) cores. The H$_{2}$CO gas in the red-shifted outflow of Sgr B2(M) appears to be excited by a non-LTE process which might be related to the shocks in the outflow.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Published in J. Physics Conference Serie

Gene regulatory control in the sea urchin aboral ectoderm: Spatial initiation, signaling inputs,and cell fate lockdown

The regulation of oral–aboral ectoderm specification in the sea urchin embryo has been extensively studied in recent years. The oral–aboral polarity is initially imposed downstream of a redox gradient induced by asymmetric maternal distribution of mitochondria. Two TGF-β signaling pathways, Nodal and BMP, are then respectively utilized in the generation of oral and aboral regulatory states. However, a causal understanding of the regulation of aboral ectoderm specification has been lacking. In this work control of aboral ectoderm regulatory state specification was revealed by combining detailed regulatory gene expression studies, perturbation and cis-regulatory analyses. Our analysis illuminates a dynamic system where different factors dominate at different developmental times. We found that the initial activation of aboral genes depends directly on the redox sensitive transcription factor, hypoxia inducible factor 1α (HIF-1α). Two BMP ligands, BMP2/4 and BMP5/8, then significantly enhance aboral regulatory gene transcription. Ultimately, encoded feedback wiring lockdown the aboral ectoderm regulatory state. Our study elucidates the different regulatory mechanisms that sequentially dominate the spatial localization of aboral regulatory states

Towards General-Purpose Text-Instruction-Guided Voice Conversion

This paper introduces a novel voice conversion (VC) model, guided by text instructions such as "articulate slowly with a deep tone" or "speak in a cheerful boyish voice". Unlike traditional methods that rely on reference utterances to determine the attributes of the converted speech, our model adds versatility and specificity to voice conversion. The proposed VC model is a neural codec language model which processes a sequence of discrete codes, resulting in the code sequence of converted speech. It utilizes text instructions as style prompts to modify the prosody and emotional information of the given speech. In contrast to previous approaches, which often rely on employing separate encoders like prosody and content encoders to handle different aspects of the source speech, our model handles various information of speech in an end-to-end manner. Experiments have demonstrated the impressive capabilities of our model in comprehending instructions and delivering reasonable results.Comment: Accepted to ASRU 202

RI/MOM renormalization of the parton quasidistribution functions in lattice regularization

We analyze the lattice spacing dependence for the pion unpolarized matrix element of a quark bilinear operator with a Wilson link (parton quasidistribution functions operator, quasi-PDFs) in the rest frame, using 13 lattice spacings ranging from 0.032 to 0.121 fm. We compare results for three different fermion actions with or without good chiral symmetry on dynamical gauge ensembles from three collaborations. This investigation is motivated by the fact that the gauge link generates a 1/a divergence, the cancellation of which in many ratios can be numerically tricky. Indeed, our results show that this cancellation deteriorates with decreasing lattice spacing, and that the RI/MOM method leaves a linearly divergent residue for quasi-PDFs. We also show that in the Landau gauge the interaction between the Wilson link and the external state results in a linear divergence which depends on the discretized fermion action

Effects of Vanadium doping on BaFe2As2

We report an investigation of the structural, magnetic and electronic properties of Ba(Fe(1-x)V(x))2As2 using x-ray, transport, magnetic susceptibility and neutron scattering measurements. The vanadium substitutions in Fe sites are possible up to 40\%. Hall effect measurements indicate strong hole-doping effect through V doping, while no superconductivity is observed in all samples down to 2K. The antiferromagnetic and structural transition temperature of BaFe2As2 is gradually suppressed to finite temperature then vanishes at x=0.245 with the emergence of spin glass behavior, suggesting an avoided quantum critical point (QCP). Our results demonstrate that the avoided QCP and spin glass state which were previously reported in the superconducting phase of Co/Ni-doped BaFe2As2 can also be realized in non-superconducting Ba(Fe(1-x)V(x))2As2.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure

Multi-Label Image Classification via Knowledge Distillation from Weakly-Supervised Detection

Multi-label image classification is a fundamental but challenging task towards general visual understanding. Existing methods found the region-level cues (e.g., features from RoIs) can facilitate multi-label classification. Nevertheless, such methods usually require laborious object-level annotations (i.e., object labels and bounding boxes) for effective learning of the object-level visual features. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient deep framework to boost multi-label classification by distilling knowledge from weakly-supervised detection task without bounding box annotations. Specifically, given the image-level annotations, (1) we first develop a weakly-supervised detection (WSD) model, and then (2) construct an end-to-end multi-label image classification framework augmented by a knowledge distillation module that guides the classification model by the WSD model according to the class-level predictions for the whole image and the object-level visual features for object RoIs. The WSD model is the teacher model and the classification model is the student model. After this cross-task knowledge distillation, the performance of the classification model is significantly improved and the efficiency is maintained since the WSD model can be safely discarded in the test phase. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets (MS-COCO and NUS-WIDE) show that our framework achieves superior performances over the state-of-the-art methods on both performance and efficiency.Comment: accepted by ACM Multimedia 2018, 9 pages, 4 figures, 5 table

Taiwan Oscillation Network

The Taiwan Oscillation Network (TON) is a ground-based network to measure solar intensity oscillations to study the internal structure of the Sun. K-line full-disk images of 1000 pixels diameter are taken at a rate of one image per minute. Such data would provide information onp-modes withl as high as 1000. The TON will consist of six identical telescope systems at proper longitudes around the world. Three telescope systems have been installed at Teide Observatory (Tenerife), Huairou Solar Observing Station (near Beijing), and Big Bear Solar Observatory (California). The telescopes at these three sites have been taking data simultaneously since October of 1994. Anl – v diagram derived from 512 images is included to show the quality of the data

Infall and Outflow of Molecular Gas in Sgr B2

Observations of two $H_2CO (3_{03}-2_{02} and 3_{21}-2_{20})$ lines and continuum emission at 1.3 mm toward Sgr B2(N) and Sgr B2(M) have been carried out with the SMA. The mosaic maps of Sgr B2(N) and Sgr B2(M) in both continuum and lines show a complex distribution of dust and molecular gas in both clumps and filaments surrounding the compact star formation cores. We have observed a decelerating outflow originated from the Sgr B2(M) core, showing that both the redshifted and blueshifted outflow components have a common terminal velocity. This terminal velocity is $58 ± 2 km s^{−1}$. It provides an excellent method for determination of the systematic velocity of the molecular cloud. The SMA observations have also shown that a large fraction of absorption against the two continuum cores is redshifted with respect to the systematic velocities of Sgr B2(N) and Sgr B2(M), respectively, suggesting that the majority of the dense molecular gas is flowing into the two major cores where massive stars have been formed. We have solved the radiative transfer in a multilevel system with LVG approximation. The observed $H_2CO$ line intensities and their ratios can be adequately fitted with this model for the most of the gas components. However, the line intensities between the higher energy level transition $H_2CO(3_{21}-2_{20})$ and the lower energy level transition $H_2CO(3_{03}-2_{02})$ is reversed in the redshifted outflow region of Sgr B2(M), suggesting the presence of inversion in population between the ground levels in the two K ladders $(K_{−1} = 0 and 2)$. The possibility of weak maser processes for the $H_2CO$ emission in Sgr B2(M) is discussed.Astronom