A Review of Researches on Blockchain

Analyzing 242 articles related to the study of blockchain which were published in China and abroad from 2014 to 2016, and from the aspects of literature sources, research subjects, research methods and western countries, the basic frame of blockchain research classification is put forward. Summarize the current blockchain technology progress, research limitations and future development trends. The research shows that the domestic research on the blockchain is more decentralized, non-systematic, and has not reached a certain research depth. What’s more, it is lack of quantitative analysis. Digital currency, Internet finance, and the risk of blockchain technology research will be the focus of future research

Method to Annotate Arrhythmias by Deep Network

This study targets to automatically annotate on arrhythmia by deep network. The investigated types include sinus rhythm, asystole (Asys), supraventricular tachycardia (Tachy), ventricular flutter or fibrillation (VF/VFL), ventricular tachycardia (VT). Methods: 13s limb lead ECG chunks from MIT malignant ventricular arrhythmia database (VFDB) and MIT normal sinus rhythm database were partitioned into subsets for 5-fold cross validation. These signals were resampled to 200Hz, filtered to remove baseline wandering, projected to 2D gray spectrum and then fed into a deep network with brand-new structure. In this network, a feature vector for a single time point was retrieved by residual layers, from which latent representation was extracted by variational autoencoder (VAE). These front portions were trained to meet a certain threshold in loss function, then fixed while training procedure switched to remaining bidirectional recurrent neural network (RNN), the very portions to predict an arrhythmia category. Attention windows were polynomial lumped on RNN outputs for learning from details to outlines. And over sampling was employed for imbalanced data. The trained model was wrapped into docker image for deployment in edge or cloud. Conclusion: Promising sensitivities were achieved in four arrhythmias and good precision rates in two ventricular arrhythmias were also observed. Moreover, it was proven that latent representation by VAE, can significantly boost the speed of convergence and accuracy

Fluorescence Characteristics of Triazine-manufacturing Wastewater

Samples taken at different points in the wastewater treatment process of a triazine-manufacturing plant were scanned by fluorescence spectroscopy, in the wavelength range of 200-900 nm. Reproducibly, the fluorescence spectra revealed one single major peak at excitation and emission wavelengths of 258 and 370 nm respectively. Aqueous solutions of purified active compounds, including Atrazine, Propazine, Simazine, Terbuthylazine, Metolachlor, and Benoxacor, were also scanned. No significant fluorescence was observed in these standard solutions at concentrations up to 100 mg/L. Selected plant samples as well as standard solutions of Atrazine, Metolachlor, and toluene were further analyzed using high-performance liquid chromatography with absorbance and fluorescence detections. Pure Atrazine was found to be light-absorbing but nonfluorescent while Metolachlor, with a benzene ring in its structure, was weakly fluorescent. The plant wastewater samples exhibited a single strong fluorescence peak, which also appeared as the dominant peak in the fluorescence chromatogram of Atrazine standard (due to impurity). The findings strongly suggested that the responsible fluorescent compound in the plant\u27s wastewater was a byproduct of the synthesis processes. The fluorescent compound was found to be effectively removed by the carbon adsorption treatment (CAT) unit employed in the plant but not by the biological activated-sludge treatment process alone. The results indicated the feasibility of using online fluorescence measurements to effectively monitor the performance of the CAT unit

Multiple Naïve Bayes Classifiers Ensemble for Traffic Incident Detection

This study presents the applicability of the Naïve Bayes classifier ensemble for traffic incident detection. The standard Naive Bayes (NB) has been applied to traffic incident detection and has achieved good results. However, the detection result of the practically implemented NB depends on the choice of the optimal threshold, which is determined mathematically by using Bayesian concepts in the incident-detection process. To avoid the burden of choosing the optimal threshold and tuning the parameters and, furthermore, to improve the limited classification performance of the NB and to enhance the detection performance, we propose an NB classifier ensemble for incident detection. In addition, we also propose to combine the Naïve Bayes and decision tree (NBTree) to detect incidents. In this paper, we discuss extensive experiments that were performed to evaluate the performances of three algorithms: standard NB, NB ensemble, and NBTree. The experimental results indicate that the performances of five rules of the NB classifier ensemble are significantly better than those of standard NB and slightly better than those of NBTree in terms of some indicators. More importantly, the performances of the NB classifier ensemble are very stable

InvS Coordinates Expression of PrgH and FimZ and Is Required for Invasion of Epithelial Cells by Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium

ABSTRACT Deep sequencing has revolutionized our understanding of the bacterial RNA world and has facilitated the identification of 280 small RNAs (sRNAs) in Salmonella . Despite the suspicions that sRNAs may play important roles in Salmonella pathogenesis, the functions of most sRNAs remain unknown. To advance our understanding of RNA biology in Salmonella virulence, we searched for sRNAs required for bacterial invasion into nonphagocytic cells. After screening 75 sRNAs, we discovered that the ablation of InvS caused a significant decrease of Salmonella invasion into epithelial cells. A proteomic analysis showed that InvS modulated the levels of several type III secreted Salmonella proteins. The level of PrgH, a type III secretion apparatus protein, was significantly lower in the absence of InvS, consistent with the known roles of PrgH in effector secretion and bacterial invasion. We discovered that InvS modulates fimZ expression and hence flagellar gene expression and motility. We propose that InvS coordinates the increase of PrgH and decrease in FimZ that promote efficient Salmonella invasion into nonphagocytic cells. IMPORTANCE Salmonellosis continues to be the most common foodborne infection reported by the CDC in the United States. Central to Salmonella pathogenesis is the ability to invade nonphagocytic cells and to replicate inside host cells. Invasion genes are known to be regulated by protein transcriptional networks, but little is known about the role played by small RNAs (sRNAs) in this process. We have identified a novel sRNA, InvS, that is involved in Salmonella invasion. Our result will likely provide an opportunity to better understand the fundamental question of how Salmonella regulates invasion gene expression and may inform strategies for therapeutic intervention. </jats:p

Elucidating the changes in the heterogeneity and function of radiation-induced cardiac macrophages using single-cell RNA sequencing

PurposeA mouse model of irradiation (IR)-induced heart injury was established to investigate the early changes in cardiac function after radiation and the role of cardiac macrophages in this process.MethodsCardiac function was evaluated by heart-to-tibia ratio, lung-to-heart ratio and echocardiography. Immunofluorescence staining and flow cytometry analysis were used to evaluate the changes of macrophages in the heart. Immune cells from heart tissues were sorted by magnetic beads for single-cell RNA sequencing, and the subsets of macrophages were identified and analyzed. Trajectory analysis was used to explore the differentiation relationship of each macrophage subset. The differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were compared, and the related enriched pathways were identified. Single-cell regulatory network inference and clustering (SCENIC) analysis was performed to identify the potential transcription factors (TFs) which participated in this process.ResultsCardiac function temporarily decreased on Day 7 and returned to normal level on Day 35, accompanied by macrophages decreased and increased respectively. Then, we identified 7 clusters of macrophages by single-cell RNA sequencing and found two kinds of stage specific macrophages: senescence-associated macrophage (Cdkn1ahighC5ar1high) on Day 7 and interferon-associated macrophage (Ccr2highIsg15high) on Day 35. Moreover, we observed cardiac macrophages polarized over these two-time points based on M1/M2 and CCR2/major histocompatibility complex II (MHCII) expression. Finally, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) and Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analyses suggested that macrophages on Day 7 were characterized by an inflammatory senescent phenotype with enhanced chemotaxis and inflammatory factors, while macrophages on Day 35 showed enhanced phagocytosis with reduced inflammation, which was associated with interferon-related pathways. SCENIC analysis showed AP-1 family members were associated with IR-induced macrophages changes.ConclusionWe are the first study to characterize the diversity, features, and evolution of macrophages during the early stages in an IR-induced cardiac injury animal model

Measles Resurgence Associated with Continued Circulation of Genotype H1 Viruses in China, 2005

Measles morbidity and mortality decreased significantly after measles vaccine was introduced into China in 1965. From 1995 to 2004, average annual measles incidence decreased to 5.6 cases per 100,000 population following the establishment of a national two-dose regimen. Molecular characterization of wild-type measles viruses demonstrated that genotype H1 was endemic and widely distributed throughout the country in China during 1995-2004. A total of 124,865 cases and 55 deaths were reported from the National Notifiable Diseases Reporting System (NNDRS) in 2005, which represented a 69.05% increase compared with 2004. Over 16,000 serum samples obtained from 914 measles outbreaks and the measles IgM positive rate was 81%. 213 wild-type measles viruses were isolated from 18 of 31 provinces in China during 2005, and all of the isolates belonged to genotype H1. The ranges of the nucleotide sequence and predicted amino acid sequence homologies of the 213 genotype H1 strains were 93.4%-100% and 90.0%-100%, respectively. H1-associated cases and outbreaks caused the measles resurgence in China in 2005. H1 genotype has the most inner variation within genotype, it could be divided into 2 clusters, and cluster 1 viruses were predominant in China throughout 2005

Multi-omics approach identifies PI3 as a biomarker for disease severity and hyper-keratinization in psoriasis

BACKGROUND: Psoriasis is an immune-mediated inflammatory skin disease. Psoriasis severity evaluation is important for clinicians in the assessment of disease severity and subsequent clinical decision making. However, no objective biomarker is available for accurately evaluating disease severity in psoriasis. OBJECTIVE: To define and compare biomarkers of disease severity and progression in psoriatic skin. METHODS: We performed proteome profiling to study the proteins circulating in the serum from patients with psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis, and transcriptome sequencing to investigate the gene expression in skin from the same cohort. We then used machine learning approaches to evaluate different biomarker candidates across several independent cohorts. In order to reveal the cell-type specificity of different biomarkers, we also analyzed a single-cell dataset of skin samples. In-situ staining was applied for the validation of biomarker expression. RESULTS: We identified that the peptidase inhibitor 3 (PI3) was significantly correlated with the corresponding local skin gene expression, and was associated with disease severity. We applied machine learning methods to confirm that PI3 was an effective psoriasis classifier, Finally, we validated PI3 as psoriasis biomarker using in-situ staining and public datasets. Single-cell data and in-situ staining indicated that PI3 was specifically highly expressed in keratinocytes from psoriatic lesions. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that PI3 may be a psoriasis-specific biomarker for disease severity and hyper-keratinization

Photocatalytic Degradation of Organic Pollutants in Water Using Graphene Oxide Composite

Developing sustainable and less-expensive technique is always challenging task in water treatment process. This chapter explores the recent development of photocatalysis technique in organic pollutant removal from the water. Particularly, advantages of graphene oxide in promoting the catalytic performance of semiconductor, metal nanoparticle and polymer based photocatalyst materials. Owing to high internal surface area and rapid electron conducting property of graphene oxide fostering as backbone scaffold for effective hetero-photocatalyst loading, and rapid photo-charge separation enables effective degradation of pollutant. This chapter summaries the recent development of graphene oxide composite (metal oxide, metal nanoparticle, metal chalcogenides, and polymers) in semiconductor photocatalysis process towards environmental remediation application