Investment choice and perceived mating intentions regulated by external resource cues and internal fluctuation in blood glucose levels

We examined resource allocation priorities in the framework of an updated Maslow hierarchy of fundamental human needs. In Experiment 1, the participants in the food abundance priming condition viewing photos of high-calorie food allocated more money to savings than to spending. However, the participants preferred spending to savings under the condition of mating availability priming with romantic photographs. In Experiment 2, before and after drinking either water or a sugary beverage, fasting participants rated photos of a conversation between a man and a woman. Water drinking lowered the rating scores of mating intentions as well as blood glucose (BG) levels. The sugary drink buffered this decline in sexual perceptivity. Overall, the change in BG levels was positively associated with changes in the ratings of mating intentions but was not associated with other likelihood ratings. These results suggest that both external cues of food and mating resources and internal BG fluctuation regulate the cognitive priority of physiological needs vs. mate acquisition and retention.</p

Insulin-degrading enzyme is exported via an unconventional protein secretion pathway

Insulin-degrading enzyme (IDE) is a ubiquitously expressed zinc-metalloprotease that degrades several pathophysiologically significant extracellular substrates, including insulin and the amyloid β-protein (Aβ), and accumulating evidence suggests that IDE dysfunction may be operative in both type 2 diabetes mellitus and Alzheimer disease (AD). Although IDE is well known to be secreted by a variety of cell types, the underlying trafficking pathway(s) remain poorly understood. To address this topic, we investigated the effects of known inhibitors or stimulators of protein secretion on the secretion of IDE from murine hepatocytes and HeLa cells. IDE secretion was found to be unaffected by the classical secretion inhibitors brefeldin A (BFA), monensin, or nocodazole, treatments that readily inhibited the secretion of α1-antitrypsin (AAT) overexpressed in the same cells. Using a novel cell-based Aβ-degradation assay, we show further that IDE secretion was similarly unaffected by multiple stimulators of protein secretion, including glyburide and 3'-O-(4-benzoyl)benzoyl-ATP (Bz-ATP). The calcium ionophore, A23187, increased extracellular IDE activity, but only under conditions that also elicited cytotoxicity. Our results provide the first biochemical evidence that IDE export is not dependent upon the classical secretion pathway, thereby identifying IDE as a novel member of the select class of unconventionally secreted proteins. Further elucidation of the mechanisms underlying IDE secretion, which would be facilitated by the assays described herein, promises to uncover processes that might be defective in disease or manipulated for therapeutic benefit

Detection of Small Targets in Sea Clutter Based on RepVGG and Continuous Wavelet Transform

Constructing a high-performance target detector under the background of sea clutter is always necessary and important. In this work, we propose a RepVGGA0-CWT detector, where RepVGG is a residual network that gains a high detection accuracy. Different from traditional residual networks, RepVGG keeps an acceptable calculation speed. Giving consideration to both accuracy and speed, the RepVGGA0 is selected among all the variants of RepVGG. Also, continuous wavelet transform (CWT) is employed to extract the radar echoes' time-frequency feature effectively. In the tests, other networks (ResNet50, ResNet18 and AlexNet) and feature extraction methods (short-time Fourier transform (STFT), CWT) are combined to build detectors for comparison. The result of different datasets shows that the RepVGGA0-CWT detector performs better than those detectors in terms of low controllable false alarm rate, high training speed, high inference speed and low memory usage. This RepVGGA0-CWT detector is hardware-friendly and can be applied in real-time scenes for its high inference speed in detection