Disturbances of apoptotic cell clearance in systemic lupus erythematosus

Systemic lupus erythematosus is a multifactorial autoimmune disease with an as yet unknown etiopathogenesis. It is widely thought that self-immunization in systemic lupus is driven by defective clearance of dead and dying cells. In lupus patients, large numbers of apoptotic cells accumulate in various tissues including germinal centers. In the present review, we discuss the danger signals released by apoptotic cells, their triggering of inflammatory responses, and the breakdown of B-cell tolerance. We also review the pathogenic role of apoptotic cell clearance in systemic lupus erythematosus

Geometric curvatures of plane symmetry black hole

In this paper, we study the properties and thermodynamic stability of the plane symmetry black hole from the viewpoint of geometry. Weinhold metric and Ruppeiner metric are obtained, respectively. The Weinhold curvature gives phase transition points, which correspond to the first-order phase transition only at N=1, where $N$ is a parameter in the plane symmetry black hole. While the Ruppeiner one shows first-order phase transition points for arbitrary $N\neq 1$. Both of which give no any information about the second-order phase transition. Considering the Legendre invariant proposed by Quevedo et. al., we obtain a unified geometry metric, which gives a correctly the behavior of the thermodynamic interactions and phase transitions. The geometry is also found to be curved and the scalar curvature goes to negative infinity at the Davies' phase transition points when the logarithmic correction is included.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure

Dynamic Analysis and Optimization of a Production Control System under Supply and Demand Uncertainties

This study investigates the dynamic performance and optimization of a typical discrete production control system under supply disruption and demand uncertainty. Two different types of uncertain demands, disrupted demand with a step change in demand and random demand, are considered. We find that, under demand disruption, the system’s dynamic performance indicators (the peak values of the order rate, production completion rate, and inventory) increase with the duration of supply disruption; however, they increase and decrease sequentially with the supply disruption start time. This change tendency differs from the finding that each kind of peak is independent of the supply disruption start time under no demand disruption. We also find that, under random demand, the dynamic performance indicators (Bullwhip and variance amplification of inventory relative to demand) increase with the disruption duration, but they have a decreasing tendency as demand variance increases. In order to design an adaptive system, we propose a genetic algorithm that minimizes the respective objective function on the system’s dynamic performance indicators via choosing appropriate system parameters. It is shown that the optimal parameter choices relate closely to the supply disruption start time and duration under disrupted demand and to the supply disruption duration under random demand

Ethyl 2-phenyl-5-trifluoro­methyl-1,3-thia­zole-4-carboxyl­ate

In the title compound, C13H10F3NO2S, the dihedral angle between the thia­zole and phenyl rings is 5.15 (1)°. No inter­molecular hydrogen bonding is observed in the crystal structure

A Generalized Robust Minimization Framework for Low-Rank Matrix Recovery

This paper considers the problem of recovering low-rank matrices which are heavily corrupted by outliers or large errors. To improve the robustness of existing recovery methods, the problem is solved by formulating it as a generalized nonsmooth nonconvex minimization functional via exploiting the Schatten p-norm (0 < p ≤1) and Lq(0 < q ≤1) seminorm. Two numerical algorithms are provided based on the augmented Lagrange multiplier (ALM) and accelerated proximal gradient (APG) methods as well as efficient root-finder strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed generalized approach is more inclusive and effective compared with state-of-the-art methods, either convex or nonconvex