Aspirin Has Antitumor Effects via Expression of Calpain Gene in Cervical Cancer Cells

Aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs show efficacy in the prevention of cancers. It is known that they can inhibit cyclooxygenases, and some studies have shown that they can induce apoptosis. Our objective in this study was to investigate the mechanism by which aspirin exerts its apoptosis effects in human cervical cancer HeLa cells. The effect of aspirin on the gene expression was studied by differential mRNA display RT-PCR. Among the isolated genes, mu-type calpain gene was upregulated by aspirin treatment. To examine whether calpain mediates the antitumor effects, HeLa cells were stably transfected with the mammalian expression vector pCR3.1 containing mu-type calpain cDNA (pCRCAL/HeLa), and tumor formations were measured in nude mice. When tumor burden was measured by day 49, HeLa cells and pCR/HeLa cells (vector control) produced tumors of 2126 mm3 and 1638 mm3, respectively, while pCRCAL/HeLa cells produced markedly smaller tumor of 434 mm3 in volume. The caspase-3 activity was markedly elevated in pCRCAL/HeLa cells. The increased activity levels of caspase-3 in pCRCAL/HeLa cells, in parallel with the decreased tumor formation, suggest a correlation between caspase-3 activity and calpain protein. Therefore, we conclude that aspirin-induced calpain mediates an antitumor effect via caspase-3 in cervical cancer cells

When sex doesn’t sell to men: Mortality salience, disgust and the appeal of products and advertisements featuring sexualized women

Although men typically hold favorable views of advertisements featuring female sexuality, from a Terror Management Theory perspective, this should be less the case when thoughts of human mortality are salient. Two experiments conducted in South Korea supported this hypothesis across a variety of products (e.g., perfume and vodka). Men became more negative towards advertisements featuring female sexuality, and had reduced purchase intentions for those products, after thinking about their own mortality. Study 2 found that these effects were mediated by heightened disgust. Mortality thoughts did not impact women in either study. These findings uniquely demonstrate that thoughts of death interact with female sex-appeal to influence men’s consumer choices, and that disgust mediates these processes. Implications for the role of emotion, and cultural differences, in terror management, for attitudes toward female sexuality, and for marketing strategies are discussed

PG-RCNN: Semantic Surface Point Generation for 3D Object Detection

One of the main challenges in LiDAR-based 3D object detection is that the sensors often fail to capture the complete spatial information about the objects due to long distance and occlusion. Two-stage detectors with point cloud completion approaches tackle this problem by adding more points to the regions of interest (RoIs) with a pre-trained network. However, these methods generate dense point clouds of objects for all region proposals, assuming that objects always exist in the RoIs. This leads to the indiscriminate point generation for incorrect proposals as well. Motivated by this, we propose Point Generation R-CNN (PG-RCNN), a novel end-to-end detector that generates semantic surface points of foreground objects for accurate detection. Our method uses a jointly trained RoI point generation module to process the contextual information of RoIs and estimate the complete shape and displacement of foreground objects. For every generated point, PG-RCNN assigns a semantic feature that indicates the estimated foreground probability. Extensive experiments show that the point clouds generated by our method provide geometrically and semantically rich information for refining false positive and misaligned proposals. PG-RCNN achieves competitive performance on the KITTI benchmark, with significantly fewer parameters than state-of-the-art models. The code is available at https://github.com/quotation2520/PG-RCNN.Comment: Accepted by ICCV 202

Improved Reduction Between SIS Problems over Structured Lattices

Lattice-based cryptographic scheme is constructed based on hard problems on an algebraic structured lattice such as the short integer solution (SIS) problems. These problems are called ring-SIS (R-SIS) and its generalized version, module-SIS (M-SIS). Generally, it has been considered that problems defined on the module-lattice are more difficult than the problems defined on the ideal-lattice. However, Koo, No, and Kim showed that R-SIS is more difficult than M-SIS under some norm constraints of R-SIS. However, this reduction has problems that the rank of the module is limited to about half of the instances of R-SIS, and the comparison is not performed through the same modulus of R-SIS and M-SIS. In this paper, we propose that R-SIS is more difficult than M-SIS with the same modulus under some constraint of R-SIS. Also, we show that R-SIS with the modulus prime $q$ is more difficult than M-SIS with the composite modulus $c$ such that $c$ is divided by $q$. In particular, it shows that through the reduction from M-SIS to R-SIS with the same modulus, the rank of the module is extended as much as the number of instances of R-SIS from half of the number of instances of R-SIS. Finally, this paper shows that R-SIS is more difficult than M-SIS under some constraint, which is tighter than the M-SIS in the previous work

Enhanced pqsigRM: Code-Based Digital Signature Scheme with Short Signature and Fast Verification for Post-Quantum Cryptography

We present a novel code-based digital signature scheme, called Enhanced pqsigRM for post-quantum cryptography (PQC). This scheme is based on modified Reed–Muller (RM) codes, which modified RM codes with several security problems. Enhanced pqsigRM is a strengthened version of pqsigRM, which was submitted to NIST PQC standardization in round 1. The proposed scheme has the advantage of short signature size, fast verification cycles. For 128 bits of classical security, the signature size of the proposed scheme is 1032 bytes, which corresponds to 0.42 times that of Crystals-Dilithium, and the number of median verification cycles is 235,656, which is smaller than that of Crystals-Dilithium. Also, we use public codes, called modified RM codes, that are more difficult to distinguish from random codes. We use (U,U + V )-codes with high-dimensional hull to make these. Using modified RM codes, the proposed signature scheme resists various known attacks on RM-code-based cryptography. The proposed decoder samples from coset elements with small Hamming weight for any given syndrome and efficiently finds such elements

Clinical Characteristics and Risk Factors for Nosocomial Candidemia in Medical Intensive Care Units: Experience in a Single Hospital in Korea for 6.6 Years

The aim of this study was to determine candidemia incidence among patients in a medical intensive-care unit (MICU) and the associated mortality rate and to identify risk factors associated with candidemia. We retrospectively performed a 1:3 matched case-control study of MICU patients with candidemia. Controls were matched for sex, age, and Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II score. Candidemia incidence was 9.1 per 1,000 admissions. The most common pathogen was Candida albicans. Crude mortality was 96% among candidemia patients and 52% among controls (P<0.001). Mortality differed significantly between the groups according to Kaplan-Meier survival analysis (P=0.024). Multivariate analysis identified the following independent risk factors for candidemia: central venous catheterization (odds ratio [OR] = 3.2, 95% confidence interval [CI]=1.2-9.0), previous steroid therapy (OR=4.7, 95% CI=1.8-12.1), blood transfusion during the same admission period (OR=6.3, 95% CI=2.4-16.7), and hepatic failure upon MICU admission (OR=6.9, 95% CI=1.7-28.4). In conclusion, we identify an additional independent risk factor for candidemia, the presence of hepatic failure on MICU admission. Therefore, increased awareness of risk factors, including hepatic failure, is necessary for the management of candidemia

Prognostic Factors of Neurological Complications in Spinal Surgeries

Study Design Retrospective study. Purpose To determine prognostic factors of neurological complications (NCs) of posterior thoracolumbar surgeries. Overview of Literature There have been few reports on the prognosis of NCs according to the causes and treatment methods. Methods The subjects were 65 patients who had NCs for 19 years (1995–2013) after posterior thoracolumbar surgeries in Seoul Sacred Heart General Hospital. The degree of neurological injury was assessed using numeric scales as follows: G1, increased leg pain or sensory loss; G2, hemiparesis; G3, paraparesis; G4, cauda equine syndrome; and G5, complete paraplegia. The relative degree of neurological recovery was evaluated using four numeric scales as follows: Gr1, complete recovery; Gr2, almost complete recovery with residual sensory loss or numbness; Gr3, partial recovery with apparent neurological deficit; and Gr4, no recovery. The prognostic factors were investigated in terms of demographic and surgical variables that were available in a retrospective review. Results The causes were as follows: epidural hematoma (EH), 25 patients (38.5%); insufficient decompression and fusion, 14 patients (21.5%); mechanical injury, 11 patients (16.9%); insufficient discectomy, four patients (6.2%); and unknown, 11 patients (23.1%). The grade of neurological injury was as follows: G1, 11 patients (16.9%); G2, 34 patients (52.3%); G3, 15 patients (23.1%); G4, three patients (4.6%); and G5, two patients (3.1%). Thirteen patients received conservative treatment, and 52 underwent revision surgeries. Neurological recovery was as follows: Gr1, 21 patients (32.3%); Gr2, 17 patients (26.2%); Gr3, 20 patients (30.8%); and Gr4, seven patients (10.8%). The prognosis depended on the causes (p =0.041). The subgroup analysis of the revision group revealed a significant correlation between the degree of neurological recovery and the timing of revision, irrespective of causes (r =0.413, p =0.002). Conclusions The prognosis of NC depended on the causes. EH was the best and unknown was the worst prognostic factor. Revision should be performed as soon as possible for a better prognosis