An Optimal Method for Diffusion Parameters of Nonlinear Diffusion Problem of Drug Releasing in 2D-Disc Device by Separate Variable Method

An optimization control model and the corresponding computational method drawing the diffusion parameters of the nonlinear problem for the drug releasing in the 2D-disc device were given in this paper. Firstly, based on the nonlinear diffusion equation of the drug releasing in the 2D-disc device, we used the linear diffusion problem to discrete the nonlinear diffusion problem with the discrete space and the discrete time. Then, by the separate variable method, the solution of the linear problem was given. Next, the least square method based on the separate variable idea (LSMSV) was used to estimate the nonlinear appropriate diffusion parameters. Finally, a numerical example was presented to show that the control model and the numerical method were valid for computing the diffusion coefficient of the nonlinear problem for the drug releasing in the 2D-disc device

The Predictive Relationship between Earthquake Intensity and Tweets Rate for Real-Time Ground Motion Estimation

The standard measure for evaluation of the immediate effects of an earthquake on people and man-made structures is intensity. Intensity estimates are widely used for emergency response, loss estimation, and distribution of public information after earthquake occurrence (Wood and Neumann, 1931; Brazee, 1976). Modern intensity assessment procedures process a variety of information sources. Those sources are primarily from two main categories: physical sensors (seismographs and accelerometers) and social sensors (witness reports). Acquiring new data sources in the second category can help to speed up the existing procedures for intensity calculations. One potentially important data source in this category is the widespread microblogging platform Twitter, ranked ninth worldwide as of January 2016 by number of active users, similar to 320 million (Twitter, 2016). In our previous studies, empirical relationships between tweet rate and observed modified Mercalli intensity (MMI) were developed using data from the M 6.0 South Napa, California, earthquake (Napa earthquake) that occurred on 24 August 2014 (Kropivnitskaya et al., 2016). These relationships allow us to stream data from social sensors, supplementing data from other sensors to produce more accurate real-time intensity maps. In this study, we validate empirical relationships between tweet rate and observed MMI using new data sets from earthquakes that occurred in California, Japan, and Chile during March-April 2014. The statistical complexity of the validation test and calibration process is complicated by the fact that the Twitter data stream is limited for open public access, reducing the number of available tweets. In addition, in this analysis only spatially limited positive tweets (marked as a tweet about the earthquake) are incorporated into the analysis, further limiting the data set and restricting our study to a historical data set. In this work, the predictive relationship for California is recalibrated slightly, and a new set of relationships is estimated for Japan and Chile

Evaluation of cloned cells, animal model, and ATRA sensitivity of human testicular yolk sac tumor

The testicular yolk sac tumor (TYST) is the most common neoplasm originated from germ cells differentiated abnormally, a major part of pediatric malignant testicular tumors. The present study aimed at developing and validating the in vitro and vivo models of TYST and evaluating the sensitivity of TYST to treatments, by cloning human TYST cells and investigating the histology, ultra-structure, growth kinetics and expression of specific proteins of cloned cells. We found biological characteristics of cloned TYST cells were similar to the yolk sac tumor and differentiated from the columnar to glandular-like or goblet cells-like cells. Chromosomes for tumor identification in each passage met nature of the primary tumor. TYST cells were more sensitive to all-trans-retinoic acid which had significantly inhibitory effects on cell proliferation. Cisplatin induced apoptosis of TYST cells through the activation of p53 expression and down-regulation of Bcl- expression. Thus, we believe that cloned TYST cells and the animal model developed here are useful to understand the molecular mechanism of TYST cells and develop potential therapies for human TYST

A Robust Secure Hybrid Analog and Digital Receive Beamforming Scheme for Efficient Interference Reduction

Medium-scale or large-scale receive antenna array with digital beamforming can be employed at receiver to make a significant interference reduction but leads to expensive cost and high complexity of the RF-chain circuit. To deal with this issue, classic analog-and-digital beamforming (ADB) structure was proposed in the literature for greatly reducing the number of RF-chains. Based on the ADB structure, in this paper, we propose a robust hybrid ADB scheme to resist directions of arrival (DOAs) estimation errors. The key idea of our scheme is to employ null space projection (NSP) in the analog beamforming domain and diagonal loading (DL) method in digital beamforming domain. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs more robustly, and moreover, it has a significant improvement on the receive signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio compared to NSP ADB scheme and DL method

Parent-of-origin-specific allelic associations among 106 genomic loci for age at menarche.

Age at menarche is a marker of timing of puberty in females. It varies widely between individuals, is a heritable trait and is associated with risks for obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and all-cause mortality. Studies of rare human disorders of puberty and animal models point to a complex hypothalamic-pituitary-hormonal regulation, but the mechanisms that determine pubertal timing and underlie its links to disease risk remain unclear. Here, using genome-wide and custom-genotyping arrays in up to 182,416 women of European descent from 57 studies, we found robust evidence (P < 5 × 10(-8)) for 123 signals at 106 genomic loci associated with age at menarche. Many loci were associated with other pubertal traits in both sexes, and there was substantial overlap with genes implicated in body mass index and various diseases, including rare disorders of puberty. Menarche signals were enriched in imprinted regions, with three loci (DLK1-WDR25, MKRN3-MAGEL2 and KCNK9) demonstrating parent-of-origin-specific associations concordant with known parental expression patterns. Pathway analyses implicated nuclear hormone receptors, particularly retinoic acid and γ-aminobutyric acid-B2 receptor signalling, among novel mechanisms that regulate pubertal timing in humans. Our findings suggest a genetic architecture involving at least hundreds of common variants in the coordinated timing of the pubertal transition

The Enhancing Effects of the Light Chain on Heavy Chain Secretion in Split Delivery of Factor VIII Gene

Coagulation factor VIII (FVIII) is secreted as a heterodimer consisting of a heavy chain (HC) and a light chain (LC), which can be expressed independently and reassociate with recovery of biological activity. Because of the size limitation of adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors, a strategy for delivering the HC and LC separately has been developed. However, the FVIII HC is secreted 10–100-fold less efficiently than the LC. In this study, we demonstrated that the F309S mutation and enhanced B-domain glycosylations alone are not sufficient to improve FVIII HC secretion, which suggested a role of the FVIII LC in regulating HC secretion. To characterize this role of the FVIII LC, we compared FVIII HC secretion with and without the LC via post-translational protein trans-splicing. As demonstrated in vitro, ligation of the LC to the HC significantly increased HC secretion. Such HC secretion increases were also confirmed in vivo by hydrodynamic injection of FVIII intein plasmids into hemophilia A mice. Moreover, similar enhancement of HC secretion can also be observed when the LC is supplied in trans, which is probably due to the spontaneous association of the HC and the LC in the secretion pathway. In sum, enhancing the secretion of the FVIII HC polypeptide may require the proper association of the FVIII LC polypeptide in cis or in trans. These results may be helpful in designing new strategies to improve FVIII gene delivery

The serious games ecosystem: Interdisciplinary and intercontextual praxis

This chapter will situate academia in relation to serious games commercial production and contextual adoption, and vice-versa. As a researcher it is critical to recognize that academic research of serious games does not occur in a vaccum. Direct partnerships between universities and commercial organizations are increasingly common, as well as between research institutes and the contexts that their serious games are deployed in. Commercial production of serious games and their increased adoption in non-commercial contexts will influence academic research through emerging impact pathways and funding opportunities. Adding further complexity is the emergence of commercial organizations that undertake their own research, and research institutes that have inhouse commercial arms. To conclude, we explore how these issues affect the individual researcher, and offer considerations for future academic and industry serious games projects

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe