HMGA1 variant IVS5-13insC is associated with insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes: an updated meta-analysis

Background: High-mobility group A1 (HMGA1) polymorphism has been suspected as a gene variant associated with type 2 diabetes (T2D). However, conflicting outcomes have been reported. Objective: This meta-analysis aimed to predict the association between the HMGA1 variant IVS5-13insC and T2D. Methods: Statistical analyses were performed using Stata/SE 12.0 software. Results: A total of 11 case-control studies in 6 articles were included. Results suggested that the HMGA1 variant IVS5-13insC was associated with an increased risk of insulin resistance (OR = 0.61, 95% CI 0.56 to 0.66, P < 0.0001), T2D (OR = 0.67, 95% CI 0.61 to 0.73, P < 0.0001), particularly for Caucasians with increased risks of T2D (OR = 0.56, 95% CI 0.49 to 0.65, P < 0.0001) compared with wild-type subjects. Conclusion: This meta-analysis indicated that the HMGA1 variant IVS5-13insC can be a risk factor of T2D development, particularly among Caucasians. Significant risks were also found (Asian: OR = 0.74, 95% CI: 0.63 to 0.86, P < 0.0001, Hispanic-American: OR = 0.81, 95% CI: 0.65 to 1.01, P < 0.0001) in non-Caucasian population. However, ethnical studies should be conducted to reveal whether the HMGA1 variant IVS5-13insC is associated with an increased risk of T2D.Keywords: HMGA1, type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, variant, meta-analysis

The Value of Backers’ Word-of-Mouth in Screening Crowdfunding Projects: An Empirical Investigation

Reward-based crowdfunding is an emerging financing channel for entrepreneurs to raise money for their innovative projects. How to screen the crowdfunding projects is critical for crowdfunding platform, project founder, and potential backers. This study aims to investigate whether backers’ word-of-mouth (WOM) is a valuable input to generate collective intelligence for project screening. Specially, we answer three questions. First, is backers’ WOM an effective signal for implementation performance of crowdfunding projects? Second, how do the WOM help screen projects during the fund-raising process? Third, which kind of comments (positive or negative) is more effective in screening crowdfunding projects? Research hypotheses were developed based on theories of collective intelligence and WOM communication. Using a cross section dataset and a panel dataset, we get the following findings. First, backers’ negative WOM can effectively predict project implementation performance, however positive WOM does not have that prediction power. The prediction power of positive and negative WOM differs significantly. One possible reason is that negative WOM does contain more information of project quality. Second, project with more accumulative negative WOM tend to attract fewer subsequent backers. However, accumulative positive WOM is not helpful for attracting more potential backers. We conclude that negative WOM is useful for project screening project, because it is a signal of project quality, and meanwhile it could prevent backers make subsequent investments

Low-Cost Efficient Magnetic Adsorbent for Phosphorus Removal from Water

Adsorption using magnetic adsorbents makes the phosphorus removal from water simple and efficient. However, most of the reported magnetic adsorbents use chemically synthesized nanoparticles as magnetic cores, which are expensive and environmentally unfriendly. Replacing the nanomagnetic cores by cheap and green magnetic materials is essential for the wide application of this technique. In this paper, coal-fly-ash magnetic spheres (MSs) were processed to produce a cheap and eco-friendly magnetic core. A magnetic adsorbent, ZrO2 coated ball-milled MS (BMS@ZrO2), was prepared through a simple chemical precipitation method. Careful structural investigations indicate that a multipore structural amorphous ZrO2 layer has grown on the MS core. The specific surface area of BMS@ZrO2 is 48 times larger than that of the MS core. The highest phosphorus adsorption is tested as 16.47 mg g-1 at pH = 2. The BMS@ZrO2 adsorbent has a saturation magnetization as high as 33.56 emu g-1, enabling efficient magnetic separation. Zeta potential measurements and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy analysis reveal that the phosphorus adsorption of BMS@ZrO2 is triggered by the electrostatic attraction and the ligand exchange mechanism. The BMS@ZrO2 adsorbent could be reused several times after proper chemical treatment

Tremadocian (Ordovician) reclined graptolites from Baishan, North China

The Erdaopuzi section in the Baishan area of Jilin Province, northeast China, contains abundant late Tremadoc graptolites. However, there are some taxonomic controversies regarding the characters of the hand specimens that are difficult to identify. In this paper, we present our restudy of isolated graptolites from acid residue and discuss the taxonomic problems of the subgenus Clonograptus (Neoclonograptus) Zhao and Zhang. Four genera and six species were identified, including Adelograptus tenellus (Linnarsson), Ancoragraptus gracilis (Zhao and Zhang), Dictyonema sp., Psigraptus jacksoni Rickards and Stait, Psigraptus lenzi Jackson, Psigraptus arcticus Jackson. According to the significant evolution of morphological characters, two graptolite zones (from bottom to top) can be identified in ascending order in the study area, i.e. Adelograptus Zone and the Psigraptus Zone

Multi-key Analysis of Tweakable Even-Mansour with Applications to Minalpher and OPP

The tweakable Even-Mansour construction generalizes the conventional Even-Mansour scheme through replacing round keys by strings derived from a master key and a tweak. Besides providing plenty of inherent variability, such a design builds a tweakable block cipher from some lower level primitive. In the present paper, we evaluate the multi-key security of TEM-1, one of the most commonly used one-round tweakable Even-Mansour schemes (formally introduced at CRYPTO 2015), which is constructed from a single n-bit permutation P and a function f(k, t) linear in k from some tweak space to {0, 1} n. Based on giant component theorem in random graph theory, we propose a collision-based multi-key attack on TEM-1 in the known-plaintext setting. Furthermore, inspired by the methodology of Fouque et al. presented at ASIACRYPT 2014, we devise a novel way of detecting collisions and eventually obtain a memory-efficient multi-key attack in the adaptive chosen-plaintext setting. As important applications, we utilize our techniques to analyze the authenticated encryption algorithms Minalpher (a second-round candidate of CAESAR) and OPP (proposed at EUROCRYPT 2016) in the multi-key setting. We describe knownplaintext attacks on Minalpher and OPP without nonce misuse, which enable us to recover almost all O(2n/3) independent masks by making O(2n/3) queries per key and costing O(22n/3) memory overall. After defining appropriate iterated functions and accordingly changing the mode of creating chains, we improve the basic blockwiseadaptive chosen-plaintext attack to make it also applicable for the nonce-respecting setting. While our attacks do not contradict the security proofs of Minalpher and OPP in the classical setting, nor pose an immediate threat to their uses, our results demonstrate their security margins in the multi-user setting should be carefully considered. We emphasize this is the very first third-party analysis on Minalpher and OPP