Anti-inflammatory and anti-apoptotic effect of Rhodiola crenulata extract on spinal cord injury in rats

Purpose: To investigate the effects of Rhodiola crenulata on injured spinal cord tissue recovery due to the presence of neuroprotective constituents such as salidroside, tyrosol, rosavins, and crenulatanoside.Methods: Effect of R. crenulata extract (RCE) at doses of 10, 20 and 50 mg kg-1 was investigated for spinal cord injury (SCI) recovery in rat. The anti-inflammatory activity was estimated by haematoxylineosin (H&E) staining and myeloperoxidase activity assay, while the anti-apoptotic effect was investigated by terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick-end labelling (TUNEL) and caspase-3 activity assays in SCI tissue.Results: RCE (10 mg mL-1) treatment resulted in a Basso, Beattie and Bresnahan (BBB) score of 14.50 ± 1.22, while negative control showed a BBB score of 6.17 ± 1.60. H&E staining in test groups treated with 20 and 50 mg kg-1 RCE showed statistically different (p < 0.05) histological scores (2.0 ± 0.37 and 1.83 ± 0.31, respectively) which are higher than those of SCI (S)-induced group. The estimates of apoptosis in SCI tissue) revealed significant differences from the normalised levels in RCE-treated groups.Conclusion: The plant extract produced good recovery of injured spinal tissue,  suggesting that further clinical trials and chemical constituent studies are  warranted.Keywords: Rhodiola crenulata, Haematoxylin-eosin, Caspase-3, Anti-inflammatory, Anti-apoptoti

The Photometric Investigation of V921 Her using the Lunar-based Ultraviolet Telescope of Chang'e-3 mission

The light curve of V921 Her in ultraviolet band observed by the Lunar-based Ultraviolet Telescope (LUT) is analyzed by the Wilson-Devinney code. Our solutions conclude that V921 Her is an early type marginal contact binary system with an additional close-in component. The binary system is under poor thermal contact with a temperature difference of nearly $700K$ between the two components. The close-in component contributes about $19\,\%$ of the total luminosity in the triple system. Combining the radial velocity study together with our photometric solutions, the mass of the primary star and secondary one are calculated to be $M_1 = 1.784(\pm0.055)M_\odot$, $M_2 = 0.403(\pm0.012)M_\odot$. The evolutionary scenario of V921 Her is discussed. All times of light minimum of V921 Her available in the bibliography are taken into account and the $O - C$ curve is analyzed for the first time. The most probable fitting results are discussed in the paper, which also confirm the existence of a third component ($P_3=10.2$ year) around the binary system. The period of V921 Her is also undergoing a continuously rapid increase at a rate of $dP/dt=+2.79\times{10^{-7}}day\cdot year^{-1}$, which may due to mass transfer from the less massive component to the more massive one

Using Knowledge-based Information Systems to Support Management of Wireless Sensor Networking Systems

Currently, researches on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) mainly focus on how to efficiently gather sensing data from WSN, but little attention has been paid to how to effectively manage the large amount of collected sensing data. Information Systems (IS) are appropriatetools for data input, storage, processing, and output. Knowledge Management (KM) further transforms useful information into domain knowledge for decision making by domain experts. In this paper, we propose an approach to management of sensing data and transformation of sensing data into valuable knowledge using knowledge-based information systems. Firstly we propose a frameworkfor knowledge-based information systems which deals with internal and external information using intelligent agents to generate domain knowledge with KM methods. Then we definite a model of knowledge-based information system for WSN to implement intensive sensing data storage, knowledge discovery, statistical analysis, sharing, inquiry, decision support. Finally, a prototype system is developed and tested for the aforementioned ideas