THE USE OF MANDAMUS TO COMPEL EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS TO CONFER DEGREES

Hispolon is an active phenolic compound of <i>Phellinus igniarius</i>, a mushroom that was recently shown to have antioxidant and anticancer activities in various solid tumors. Here, the molecular mechanisms by which hispolon exerts anticancer effects in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) cells was investigated. The results showed that hispolon suppressed cell proliferation in the various AML cell lines. Furthermore, hispolon effectively induced apoptosis of HL-60 AML cells through caspases-8, -9, and -3 activations and PARP cleavage. Moreover, treatment of HL-60 cells with hispolon induced sustained activation of JNK1/2, and inhibition of JNK by JNK1/2 inhibitor or JNK1/2-specific siRNA significantly abolished the hispolon-induced activation of the caspase-8/-9/-3. In vivo, hispolon significantly reduced tumor growth in mice with HL-60 tumor xenografts. In hispolon-treated tumors, activation of caspase-3 and a decrease in Ki67-positive cells were observed. Our results indicated that hispolon may have the potential to serve as a therapeutic tool to treat AML

Clinical Study of Uric Acid Urolithiasis

Uric acid urolithiasis develops from various causes. To investigate the clinical and biochemical presentation of patients with uric acid urolithiasis, a retrospective study was designed. A total of 46 cases were enrolled between January 2004 and December 2005. The compositions of the stones were analyzed by infrared spectrophotometry. There were 39 males (84.8%) and seven females (15.2%), with a mean age of 61.5 ± 10.6 years and mean body mass index (BMI) of 26.7 ± 3.1 kg/m2. The stone location was kidney in 10 (21.7%), ureter in 22 (41.8%), and bladder in 14 (30.5%). Multiple stones were diagnosed in 36 patients (78.3%). Pre-existing comorbidities included diabetes mellitus in 11 patients (23.9%), hypertension in 23 (50%), gout in 13 (28.2%), and benign prostatic hyperplasia in 14 (30.4%). Mean serum creatinine and uric acid was 1.6 ± 0.6 mg/dL and 7.6 ± 1.8 mg/dL, respectively. There were 27 patients (58%) with creatinine > 1.4 mg/dL. The mean urinary pH was 5.42 ± 0.46. Patients with uric acid urolithiasis were predominantly male, older, with higher BMI, multiple stone presentation, with lower urinary pH, and hyperuricemia. Exacerbation of the renal function should also be of concern because of the high proportion of patients with renal insufficiency diagnosed in this study

RobotPerf: An Open-Source, Vendor-Agnostic, Benchmarking Suite for Evaluating Robotics Computing System Performance

We introduce RobotPerf, a vendor-agnostic benchmarking suite designed to evaluate robotics computing performance across a diverse range of hardware platforms using ROS 2 as its common baseline. The suite encompasses ROS 2 packages covering the full robotics pipeline and integrates two distinct benchmarking approaches: black-box testing, which measures performance by eliminating upper layers and replacing them with a test application, and grey-box testing, an application-specific measure that observes internal system states with minimal interference. Our benchmarking framework provides ready-to-use tools and is easily adaptable for the assessment of custom ROS 2 computational graphs. Drawing from the knowledge of leading robot architects and system architecture experts, RobotPerf establishes a standardized approach to robotics benchmarking. As an open-source initiative, RobotPerf remains committed to evolving with community input to advance the future of hardware-accelerated robotics

High Photoelectric Conversion Efficiency of Metal Phthalocyanine/Fullerene Heterojunction Photovoltaic Device

This paper introduces the fundamental physical characteristics of organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices. Photoelectric conversion efficiency is crucial to the evaluation of quality in OPV devices, and enhancing efficiency has been spurring on researchers to seek alternatives to this problem. In this paper, we focus on organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices and review several approaches to enhance the energy conversion efficiency of small molecular heterojunction OPV devices based on an optimal metal-phthalocyanine/fullerene (C60) planar heterojunction thin film structure. For the sake of discussion, these mechanisms have been divided into electrical and optical sections: (1) Electrical: Modification on electrodes or active regions to benefit carrier injection, charge transport and exciton dissociation; (2) Optical: Optional architectures or infilling to promote photon confinement and enhance absorption

Detection of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background with JUNO

As an underground multi-purpose neutrino detector with 20 kton liquid scintillator, Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is competitive with and complementary to the water-Cherenkov detectors on the search for the diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB). Typical supernova models predict 2-4 events per year within the optimal observation window in the JUNO detector. The dominant background is from the neutral-current (NC) interaction of atmospheric neutrinos with 12C nuclei, which surpasses the DSNB by more than one order of magnitude. We evaluated the systematic uncertainty of NC background from the spread of a variety of data-driven models and further developed a method to determine NC background within 15\% with {\it{in}} {\it{situ}} measurements after ten years of running. Besides, the NC-like backgrounds can be effectively suppressed by the intrinsic pulse-shape discrimination (PSD) capabilities of liquid scintillators. In this talk, I will present in detail the improvements on NC background uncertainty evaluation, PSD discriminator development, and finally, the potential of DSNB sensitivity in JUNO

Potential of Core-Collapse Supernova Neutrino Detection at JUNO

JUNO is an underground neutrino observatory under construction in Jiangmen, China. It uses 20kton liquid scintillator as target, which enables it to detect supernova burst neutrinos of a large statistics for the next galactic core-collapse supernova (CCSN) and also pre-supernova neutrinos from the nearby CCSN progenitors. All flavors of supernova burst neutrinos can be detected by JUNO via several interaction channels, including inverse beta decay, elastic scattering on electron and proton, interactions on C12 nuclei, etc. This retains the possibility for JUNO to reconstruct the energy spectra of supernova burst neutrinos of all flavors. The real time monitoring systems based on FPGA and DAQ are under development in JUNO, which allow prompt alert and trigger-less data acquisition of CCSN events. The alert performances of both monitoring systems have been thoroughly studied using simulations. Moreover, once a CCSN is tagged, the system can give fast characterizations, such as directionality and light curve

Genome-wide association study of lung adenocarcinoma in East Asia and comparison with a European population

Lung adenocarcinoma is the most common type of lung cancer. Known risk variants explain only a small fraction of lung adenocarcinoma heritability. Here, we conducted a two-stage genome-wide association study of lung adenocarcinoma of East Asian ancestry (21,658 cases and 150,676 controls; 54.5% never-smokers) and identified 12 novel susceptibility variants, bringing the total number to 28 at 25 independent loci. Transcriptome-wide association analyses together with colocalization studies using a Taiwanese lung expression quantitative trait loci dataset (n = 115) identified novel candidate genes, including FADS1 at 11q12 and ELF5 at 11p13. In a multi-ancestry meta-analysis of East Asian and European studies, four loci were identified at 2p11, 4q32, 16q23, and 18q12. At the same time, most of our findings in East Asian populations showed no evidence of association in European populations. In our studies drawn from East Asian populations, a polygenic risk score based on the 25 loci had a stronger association in never-smokers vs. individuals with a history of smoking (P interaction  = 0.0058). These findings provide new insights into the etiology of lung adenocarcinoma in individuals from East Asian populations, which could be important in developing translational applications

Genome-wide association study of lung adenocarcinoma in East Asia and comparison with a European population.

Lung adenocarcinoma is the most common type of lung cancer. Known risk variants explain only a small fraction of lung adenocarcinoma heritability. Here, we conducted a two-stage genome-wide association study of lung adenocarcinoma of East Asian ancestry (21,658 cases and 150,676 controls; 54.5% never-smokers) and identified 12 novel susceptibility variants, bringing the total number to 28 at 25 independent loci. Transcriptome-wide association analyses together with colocalization studies using a Taiwanese lung expression quantitative trait loci dataset (n = 115) identified novel candidate genes, including FADS1 at 11q12 and ELF5 at 11p13. In a multi-ancestry meta-analysis of East Asian and European studies, four loci were identified at 2p11, 4q32, 16q23, and 18q12. At the same time, most of our findings in East Asian populations showed no evidence of association in European populations. In our studies drawn from East Asian populations, a polygenic risk score based on the 25 loci had a stronger association in never-smokers vs. individuals with a history of smoking (Pinteraction = 0.0058). These findings provide new insights into the etiology of lung adenocarcinoma in individuals from East Asian populations, which could be important in developing translational applications