The role of aldehyde dehygrogenase 2 in liver injury caused by vinyl chloride and high-fat diet.

Background. Vinyl chloride (VC) is an abundant environmental contaminant that causes steatohepatitis at high exposure levels. We have shown previously that low concentrations of VC exacerbate high fat diet (HFD)-induced liver injury in mice. The mechanisms involved in the progression of liver injury caused by VC and HFD include oxidative stress, inflammation, metabolic and mitochondrial dysfunction. Mitochondrial aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2) serves as a key line of defense against most reactive aldehydes, including lipid aldehydes (e.g., 4-HNE) and chloroacetaldehyde (VC metabolite). We hypothesize that this defense may play a key role in the interaction between HFD and VC in fatty liver disease. Methods. Mice were exposed to VC via inhalation at concentrations below the current OSHA limit (\u3c1 \u3eppm), or room air for 6 hours per day, 5 days per week for 12 weeks. Mice were fed HFD or a low-fat control diet. Some mice were administered ALDH2 agonist Alda-1 (i.p. 20 mg/kg, 3 times/week) for 3 weeks prior to sacrifice. Metabolic phenotyping, biochemical and histological assessment of liver injury, indices for oxidative stress, inflammation and mitochondrial function were examined. Results. ALDH2 is a direct target of VC metabolite toxicity. Moreover, we demonstrated that ALDH2 activation by Alda-1 pre-treatment decreased lipid accumulation, oxidative stress, and prevented liver injury induced by acute exposure to VC metabolites. Chapter IV describes a chronic model of low-dose VC exposure with HFD. The interaction of VC and HFD decreased ALDH2 expression and activity in mitochondria. Liver injury was characterized by enhanced steatosis, inflammation and oxidative stress. This interaction correlated with mitochondrial dysfunction and metabolic stress. Administration of ALDH2 agonist Alda-1 prevented the decrease in ALDH2 activity and conferred profound protection against these changes caused by HFD+VC. Conclusion: Taken together, these results support the hypothesis that ALDH2 appears to be a direct target of VC exposure, which likely contributes to the enhancement of liver injury under these conditions. Importantly, ALDH2 plays a critical role in liver injury caused low-level VC exposure and HFD and may therefore be a potential target for future therapies

Dynamic Behaviors of a Discrete Periodic Predator-Prey-Mutualist System

A nonautonomous discrete predator-prey-mutualist system is proposed and studied in this paper. Sufficient conditions which ensure the permanence and existence of a unique globally stable periodic solution are obtained. We also investigate the extinction property of the predator species; our results indicate that if the cooperative effect between the prey and mutualist species is large enough, then the predator species will be driven to extinction due to the lack of enough food. Two examples together with numerical simulations show the feasibility of the main results

Dynamic Behaviors of a Discrete Lotka-Volterra Competition System with Infinite Delays and Single Feedback Control

A nonautonomous discrete two-species Lotka-Volterra competition system with infinite delays and single feedback control is considered in this paper. By applying the discrete comparison theorem, a set of sufficient conditions which guarantee the permanence of the system is obtained. Also, by constructing some suitable discrete Lyapunov functionals, some sufficient conditions for the global attractivity and extinction of the system are obtained. It is shown that if the the discrete Lotka-Volterra competitive system with infinite delays and without feedback control is permanent, then, by choosing some suitable feedback control variable, the permanent species will be driven to extinction. That is, the feedback control variable, which represents the biological control or some harvesting procedure, is the unstable factor of the system. Such a finding overturns the previous scholars’ recognition on feedback control variables

Amplitude-robust metastructure with combined bistable and monostable mechanisms for simultaneously enhanced vibration suppression and energy harvesting

This Letter reports an amplitude-robust nonlinear dual-functional metastructure that combines bistable and monostable-hardening mechanisms in the local resonators for simultaneous energy harvesting and vibration suppression. The concept is verified by experiments using a primary beam with six pairs of piezoelectric cantilevered oscillators and numerical analyses using a fully coupled electromechanical model for varying base vibration acceleration and load resistance. The results show that the design offers a wide bandgap at high accelerations, attenuation of transmission peaks, and generation of power over a broad bandwidth, outperforming its linear, pure bistable, and pure monostable counterparts. The dual-functional capabilities are further quantitatively assessed by using a weighted index that reflects both the vibration and power generation behaviors. This study demonstrates opportunities in development of the smart nonlinear metastructures for simultaneous vibration suppression and energy harvesting

An Emotion Type Informed Multi-Task Model for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction

Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE) aims to jointly extract emotion clauses and the corresponding cause clauses from a document, which is important for user evaluation or public opinion analysis. Existing research addresses the ECPE task through a two-step or an end-to-end approach. Although previous work shows promising performances, they suffer from two limitations: 1) they fail to take full advantage of emotion type information, which has advantages for modelling the dependencies between emotion and cause clauses from a semantic perspective; 2) they ignored the interaction between local and global information, which is important for ECPE. To address these issues, we propose an ECPE Pair Generator (ECPE-PG), with a Clause-Encoder layer, a Pre-Output layer and an Information Interaction-based Pair Generation (IIPG) Module embedded. This model first encodes clauses into vector representations through the Clause-Encoder layer and then preforms emotion clause extraction (EE), cause clause extraction (CE) and emotion type extraction (ETE), respectively, through the Pre-Output layer, on the basis of which the IIPG module analyzes the complex emotional logic of relationships between clauses and estimates the candidate pairs based on the interaction of global and local information. It should be noted that emotion type information is regarded as a crucial indication in the IIPG module to assist the identification of emotion-cause pairs. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets

Understand Funding Liquidity and Market Liquidity in a Regime-switching Model

We investigate the time-varying relationship of funding liquidity (FL) and market liquidity (ML) in a Markov regime-switching model. By using a comprehensive U.S. TRACE dataset, we provide strong evidence that FL and corporate bond ML are interlinked, and their impact on each other is highly regime-dependent. We find that FL and ML exhibit a large-and-positive mutual impact when money market is tight and equity market is volatile. But in normal regimes, FL is found to have a negative impact on ML with a much smaller magnitude than those in stressed regimes. Furthermore, FL is more stable than ML with less regime changes. Our paper offers insight on the important mechanism by which central banks can improve ML through the funding market

Transport dynamics analysis in ferromagnetic heterojunction using Raman spectroscopy and magnetic force microscopy

AbstractThe ZnO/La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 thin film was epitaxially fabricated on LaAlO3 (100) by pulse laser deposition. The Raman scattering on the single layer LaSrMnO and junction ZnO/La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 was investigated in a giant softening by 490cm−1 John-Teller, 620 and 703cm−1 optical phonon modes. The Raman spectra LaSrMnO and ZnO/La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 were observed with distinct features, i.e., the thickness was in dependent of frequency and intensity. The dynamics results showed that the spin–orbital coupling was caused by anomalies tilt of MnO6 octahedron. The LSMO/ZnO junction exhibited excellent junction positive magneto-resistance behavior in the temperature range of 77–300K. The kinetic energy gain was achieved by orbital competition, strong crystal field and charge order of energy band splitting. The transport orbits were in the environment of the ferromagnetic-orbital ordering. The structures of barriers could be adjusted by junction interface and domain boundary condition in terms of the presence of spin–orbital fluctuating

The relationship between self-efficacy and aggressive behavior in boxers: the mediating role of self-control

P. 1-9El comportamiento agresivo ha sido uno de los temas centrales de la psicología deportiva, mientras que el comportamiento agresivo de los boxeadores ha recibido una atención limitada. Aunque algunas publicaciones informaron que la autoeficacia se relaciona con el comportamiento agresivo, el mecanismo por el cual la autoeficacia afecta el comportamiento agresivo no está claro. El presente estudio investigó la relación entre la autoeficacia y el comportamiento agresivo, así como el efecto del autocontrol como factor mediador. Este estudio utiliza la Escala de autoeficacia para atletas, el Cuestionario de autocontrol para atletas y el Cuestionario de agresión de Buss-Perry. Esta relación se explora a través de medidas auto-informadas de N = 414 boxeadores profesionales chinos, n = 243 eran hombres y n = 171 mujeres, la edad promedio fue M = 17.72 años (SD = 3.147), los participantes, el número promedio de los años de ejercicio fueron M = 3.89 años (SD = 2.734); Los resultados mostraron que los boxeadores masculinos reportaron mayor agresividad que las boxeadoras; se encontró que la autoeficacia y el autocontrol mejoraron a medida que aumentaba la edad de los participantes; A mayor nivel de competencia, mayores niveles de autoeficacia y autocontrol; La autoeficacia se relacionó negativamente con el comportamiento agresivo y se correlacionó positivamente con el autocontrol. El autocontrol también se correlacionó negativamente con el comportamiento agresivo entre los boxeadores. El autocontrol tuvo un efecto de mediación total en la relación entre la autoeficacia y el comportamiento agresivoS

The Janus Interface: How Fine-Tuning in Large Language Models Amplifies the Privacy Risks

The era post-2018 marked the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), with innovations such as OpenAI's ChatGPT showcasing prodigious linguistic prowess. As the industry galloped toward augmenting model parameters and capitalizing on vast swaths of human language data, security and privacy challenges also emerged. Foremost among these is the potential inadvertent accrual of Personal Identifiable Information (PII) during web-based data acquisition, posing risks of unintended PII disclosure. While strategies like RLHF during training and Catastrophic Forgetting have been marshaled to control the risk of privacy infringements, recent advancements in LLMs, epitomized by OpenAI's fine-tuning interface for GPT-3.5, have reignited concerns. One may ask: can the fine-tuning of LLMs precipitate the leakage of personal information embedded within training datasets? This paper reports the first endeavor to seek the answer to the question, particularly our discovery of a new LLM exploitation avenue, called the Janus attack. In the attack, one can construct a PII association task, whereby an LLM is fine-tuned using a minuscule PII dataset, to potentially reinstate and reveal concealed PIIs. Our findings indicate that, with a trivial fine-tuning outlay, LLMs such as GPT-3.5 can transition from being impermeable to PII extraction to a state where they divulge a substantial proportion of concealed PII. This research, through its deep dive into the Janus attack vector, underscores the imperative of navigating the intricate interplay between LLM utility and privacy preservation