3,814 research outputs found
Testing the Efficacy and Synergistic Components of Sesamol and Black Rice Extract on Human Colon Cancer Cells
Purpose: Systemic treatment of colorectal cancer involves chemotherapeutic agents which elicit serious and negative side effects from the toxicity of the drug. To address this issue, we are testing dietary supplements for their efficacy against human colon cancer cell lines and also their potential synergistic effects when combined with conventional chemotherapy. Dietary supplements (specifically sesamol and black rice extract) exhibit anticancer, anti-inflammatory, and chemo-preventive properties. Meanwhile, one of the cancer resistance mechanisms is the upregulation of drug elimination mechanisms, leading to multi-drug resistance. We hypothesize that dietary compounds will act as chemo-enhancers, thus enhancing potency of the chemotherapy drug(s) on colon cancer cell lines, even in the presence of induced drug-resistance mechanisms.
Methods: LS180 or HT29 human colonic adenocarcinoma cells were cultured in 96-well plates in standard media lacking or containing active vitamin D (250nM). Doxorubicin, oxaliplatin, irinotecan (chemotherapeutics), sesamol, and black rice extract (dietary supplements) were examined at varying concentrations to determine their antiproliferative potencies. Alamar blue activity was measured by fluorimetry to compare the growth rates in the presence of the treatments.
Results: In the presence of vitamin D, the tested substances showed decreased potency against cell proliferation. Vitamin D treatments accelerated cell proliferation and decreased the potency of doxorubicin (IC50 values: 1.9nM (alone), 3.9nM (vitamin D)). However, a large degree of variability obscured some of the results.
Conclusions: Futures studies will find ways to decrease the variability and determine the extent to which sesamol and black rice extract enhance chemotherapy and overcome drug resistance mechanisms.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/uresposters/1429/thumbnail.jp
Loss-tolerant quantum secure positioning with weak laser sources
Quantum position verification (QPV) is the art of verifying the geographical
location of an untrusted party. Recently, it has been shown that the widely
studied Bennett & Brassard 1984 (BB84) QPV protocol is insecure after the 3 dB
loss point assuming local operations and classical communication (LOCC)
adversaries. Here, we propose a time-reversed entanglement swapping QPV
protocol (based on measurement-device-independent quantum cryptography) that is
highly robust against quantum channel loss. First, assuming ideal qubit
sources, we show that the protocol is secure against LOCC adversaries for any
quantum channel loss, thereby overcoming the 3 dB loss limit. Then, we analyze
the security of the protocol in a more practical setting involving weak laser
sources and linear optics. In this setting, we find that the security only
degrades by an additive constant and the protocol is able to verify positions
up to 47 dB channel loss.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures. Partially based on an earlier work in
arXiv:1510.0489
Youth Smoking, Cigarette Prices, and Anti-Smoking Sentiment
In this paper, we develop a new direct measure of state anti-smoking sentiment and merge it with micro data on youth smoking in 1992 and 2000. The empirical results from the cross-sectional models show two consistent patterns: after controlling for differences in state anti-smoking sentiment, the price of cigarettes has a weak and statistically insignificant influence on smoking participation; and state anti-smoking sentiment appears to be a potentially important influence on youth smoking participation. The cross-sectional results are corroborated by results from discrete time hazard models of smoking initiation that include state fixed effects. However, there is evidence of price-responsiveness in the conditional cigarette demand by youth and young adult smokers.
Renewable energy policy and initiatives in Malaysia
Energy has always been an essential element for the generation of social
and economic growth in a country. It is no longer viewed as a luxury as it
used to be but it has become a necessity in our everyday life. Malaysia, a
country located between 1° and 7° North of the Equator, has an abundance
of renewable energy resources such as solar, wind, hydro and biomass but
most of these renewable energy resources are not fully exploited. Presently,
Malaysia is still very much dependent on fossil fuels as its primary source
of energy. Due to the current upward trend of fuel prices, especially crude
oil prices in the world market, the Malaysian Government is forced to look
into other alternative energy sources with the emphasis on renewable
energy. There are numerous efforts taken by the Malaysian Government in
pursuit of the exploitation of renewable energy. This paper will discuss the
five main initiatives taken by the Malaysian government on renewable
energy, namely Renewable Energy as the 5th Fuel under the 8th and 9th
Malaysian Plan, MS1525 or Energy Efficiency in Commercial Buildings,
the Kyoto Protocol, the Malaysian Building Integrated Photovoltaic
Programme, also known as MBIPV, and Biomass
Using mixup as a regularizer can surprisingly improve accuracy and out-of-distribution robustness
We show that the effectiveness of the well celebrated Mixup can be further improved if instead of using it as the sole learning objective, it is utilized as an additional regularizer to the standard cross-entropy loss. This simple change not only improves accuracy but also significantly improves the quality of the predictive uncertainty estimation of Mixup in most cases under various forms of covariate shifts and out-of-distribution detection experiments. In fact, we observe that Mixup otherwise yields much degraded performance on detecting out-of-distribution samples possibly, as we show empirically, due to its tendency to learn models exhibiting high-entropy throughout; making it difficult to differentiate in-distribution samples from out-of-distribution ones. To show the efficacy of our approach (RegMixup), we provide thorough analyses and experiments on vision datasets (ImageNet & CIFAR-10/100) and compare it with a suite of recent approaches for reliable uncertainty estimation
Graph Inductive Biases in Transformers without Message Passing
Transformers for graph data are increasingly widely studied and successful in
numerous learning tasks. Graph inductive biases are crucial for Graph
Transformers, and previous works incorporate them using message-passing modules
and/or positional encodings. However, Graph Transformers that use
message-passing inherit known issues of message-passing, and differ
significantly from Transformers used in other domains, thus making transfer of
research advances more difficult. On the other hand, Graph Transformers without
message-passing often perform poorly on smaller datasets, where inductive
biases are more crucial. To bridge this gap, we propose the Graph Inductive
bias Transformer (GRIT) -- a new Graph Transformer that incorporates graph
inductive biases without using message passing. GRIT is based on several
architectural changes that are each theoretically and empirically justified,
including: learned relative positional encodings initialized with random walk
probabilities, a flexible attention mechanism that updates node and node-pair
representations, and injection of degree information in each layer. We prove
that GRIT is expressive -- it can express shortest path distances and various
graph propagation matrices. GRIT achieves state-of-the-art empirical
performance across a variety of graph datasets, thus showing the power that
Graph Transformers without message-passing can deliver.Comment: Published as a conference paper at ICML 2023; 17 page
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