The Korean case study : past experience and new trends in training policies

Korea's skills development strategy has been highlighted as one of the key driving forces of the country's economic development. This paper examines the main features and evolution of this strategy from the 1960s to the present. In particular, it discusses how the skills development policies have contributed to economic development and poverty reduction. The findings in the paper highlight a set of important lessons for the design and implementation of skills development policies, which could be useful for other developing countries.Education For All,Primary Education,Access&Equity in Basic Education,Population Policies,Labor Markets

Smart nanogels at the air/water interface: structural studies by neutron reflectivity

STFC for provision of consumables and subsistence and access to the ILL facility through the STFC managed UK contribution to the facility (EXP: 9-13-530, 9-11-1721 and 9-11-17446). The European Commission (FP7 Marie Curie Actions, NANOLEM, PIEF-GA-2013-627146 to KZ) and the Chinese Scholarship Council (studentship to HS) are gratefully acknowledged for financial support

Simulation and experimental study of rheological properties of CeO2 – water nanofluid

Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.Metal oxide nanoparticles offer great merits over controlling rheological, thermal, chemical and physical properties of solutions. The effectiveness of a nanoparticle to modify the properties of a fluid depends on its diffusive properties with respect to the fluid. In this study, rheological properties of aqueous fluids (i.e. water) were enhanced with the addition of CeO2 nanoparticles. This study was characterized by the outcomes of simulation and experimental results of nanofluids. The movement of nanoparticles in the fluidic media was simulated by a large-scale molecular thermal dynamic program (i.e. LAMMPS). The COMPASS force field was employed with smoothed particle hydrodynamic potential (SPH) and discrete particle dynamics potential (DPD). However, this study develops the understanding of how the rheological properties are affected due to the addition of nanoparticles in a fluid and the way DPD and SPH can be used for accurately estimating the rheological properties with Brownian effect. The rheological results of the simulation were confirmed by the convergence of the stress autocorrelation function, whereas experimental properties were measured using a rheometer. These rheological values of simulation were obtained and agreed within 5 % of the experimental values; they were identified and treated with a number of iterations and experimental tests. The results of the experiment and simulation show that 10 % CeO2 nanoparticles dispersion in water has a viscosity of 2.0–3.3 mPasPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Role of TRPM2 in H2O2-induced cell apoptosis in endothelial cells

Melastatin-like transient receptor potential channel 2 (TRPM2) is an oxidant-sensitive and cationic non-selective channel that is expressed in mammalian vascular endothelium. Here we investigated the functional role of TRPM2 channels in hydrogen peroxide (H(2)O(2))-induced cytosolic Ca(2+) ([Ca(2+)](i)) elavation, whole-cell current increase, and apoptotic cell death in murine heart microvessel endothelial cell line H5V. A TRPM2 blocking antibody (TM2E3), which targets the E3 region near the ion permeation pore of TRPM2, was developed. Treatment of H5V cells with TM2E3 reduced the [Ca(2+)](i) rise and whole-cell current change in response to H(2)O(2). Suppressing TRPM2 expression using TRPM2-specific short hairpin RNA (shRNA) had similar inhibitory effect. H(2)O(2)-induced apoptotic cell death in H5V cells was examined using MTT assay, DNA ladder formation analysis, and DAPI-based nuclear DNA condensation assay. Based on these assays, TM2E3 and TRPM2-specific shRNA both showed protective effect against H(2)O(2)-induced apoptotic cell death. TM2E3 and TRPM2-specific shRNA also protect the cells from tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha-induced cell death in MTT assay. In contrast, overexpression of TRPM2 in H5V cells resulted in an increased response in [Ca(2+)](i) and whole-cell currents to H(2)O(2). TRPM2 overexpression also aggravated the H(2)O(2)-induced apoptotic cell death. Downstream pathways following TRPM2 activation was examined. Results showed that TRPM2 activity stimulated caspase-8, caspase-9 and caspase-3. These findings strongly suggest that TRPM2 channel mediates cellular Ca(2+) overload in response to H(2)O(2) and contribute to oxidant-induced apoptotic cell death in vascular endothelial cells. Down-regulating endogenous TRPM2 could be a means to protect the vascular endothelial cells from apoptotic cell death.published_or_final_versio

Laser-induced fusion of human embryonic stem cells with optical tweezers

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Anti-obesity effects of Yerba Mate (Ilex Paraguariensis): a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial

Dietary assessment parameters of the Yerba Mate and placebo groups measured at 0, 6 and 12 weeks. (DOC 37.5 kb

The EIIIA domain from astrocyte-derived fibronectin mediates proliferation of oligodendrocyte progenitor cells following CNS demyelination.

Central nervous system remyelination by oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) ultimately fails in the majority of multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions. Remyelination benefits from transient expression of factors that promote migration and proliferation of OPCs, which may include fibronectin (Fn). Fn is present in demyelinated lesions in two major forms; plasma Fn (pFn), deposited following blood-brain barrier disruption, and cellular Fn, synthesized by resident glial cells and containing alternatively spliced domains EIIIA and EIIIB. Here, we investigated the distinctive roles that astrocyte-derived Fn (aFn) and pFn play in remyelination. We used an inducible Cre-lox recombination strategy to selectively remove pFn, aFn or both from mice, and examined the impact on remyelination of toxin-induced demyelinated lesions of spinal cord white matter. This approach revealed that astrocytes are a major source of Fn in demyelinated lesions. Furthermore, following aFn conditional knockout, the number of OPCs recruited to the demyelinated lesion decreased significantly, whereas OPC numbers were unaltered following pFn conditional knockout. However, remyelination completed normally following conditional knockout of aFn and pFn. Both the EIIIA and EIIIB domains of aFn were expressed following demyelination, and in vitro assays demonstrated that the EIIIA domain of aFn mediates proliferation of OPCs, but not migration. Therefore, although the EIIIA domain from aFn mediates OPC proliferation, aFn is not essential for successful remyelination. Since previous findings indicated that astrocyte-derived Fn aggregates in chronic MS lesions inhibit remyelination, aFn removal may benefit therapeutic strategies to promote remyelination in MS.JMJS is recipient of a Junior Scientific Masterclass MD/PhD fellowship from the University Medical Center Groningen. This work was supported by grants from the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO, WB, VIDI and Aspasia), the Dutch MS Research Foundation (‘Stichting MS Research’, WB, JMJS, DH), the UK MS Society (CZ, RJMF), and the Research School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences (BCN, JMJS). Parts of this study were performed at the UMCG Microscopy and Imaging Center (UMIC), which is supported by NWO grants 40-00506-98-9021 and 175-010-2009-023.This is the final version of the article. It was first published by Wiley at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/glia.2274

Single Cell Transfection through Precise Microinjection with Quantitatively Controlled Injection Volumes

Cell transfection is a technique wherein foreign genetic molecules are delivered into cells. To elucidate distinct responses during cell genetic modification, methods to achieve transfection at the single-cell level are of great value. Herein, we developed an automated micropipette-based quantitative microinjection technology that can deliver precise amounts of materials into cells. The developed microinjection system achieved precise single-cell microinjection by pre-patterning cells in an array and controlling the amount of substance delivered based on injection pressure and time. The precision of the proposed injection technique was examined by comparing the fluorescence intensities of fluorescent dye droplets with a standard concentration and water droplets with a known injection amount of the dye in oil. Injection of synthetic modified mRNA (modRNA) encoding green fluorescence proteins or a cocktail of plasmids encoding green and red fluorescence proteins into human foreskin fibroblast cells demonstrated that the resulting green fluorescence intensity or green/red fluorescence intensity ratio were well correlated with the amount of genetic material injected into the cells. Single-cell transfection via the developed microinjection technique will be of particular use in cases where cell transfection is challenging and genetically modified of selected cells are desiredpublished_or_final_versio

Privacy-Preserving Patient Similarity Learning in a Federated Environment: Development and Analysis

Background: There is an urgent need for the development of global analytic frameworks that can perform analyses in a privacy-preserving federated environment across multiple institutions without privacy leakage. A few studies on the topic of federated medical analysis have been conducted recently with the focus on several algorithms. However, none of them have solved similar patient matching, which is useful for applications such as cohort construction for cross-institution observational studies, disease surveillance, and clinical trials recruitment. Objective: The aim of this study was to present a privacy-preserving platform in a federated setting for patient similarity learning across institutions. Without sharing patient-level information, our model can find similar patients from one hospital to another. Methods: We proposed a federated patient hashing framework and developed a novel algorithm to learn context-specific hash codes to represent patients across institutions. The similarities between patients can be efficiently computed using the resulting hash codes of corresponding patients. To avoid security attack from reverse engineering on the model, we applied homomorphic encryption to patient similarity search in a federated setting. Results: We used sequential medical events extracted from the Multiparameter Intelligent Monitoring in Intensive Care-III database to evaluate the proposed algorithm in predicting the incidence of five diseases independently. Our algorithm achieved averaged area under the curves of 0.9154 and 0.8012 with balanced and imbalanced data, respectively, in ??-nearest neighbor with ??=3. We also confirmed privacy preservation in similarity search by using homomorphic encryption. Conclusions: The proposed algorithm can help search similar patients across institutions effectively to support federated data analysis in a privacy-preserving manner