Beyond nanosilica: Geopolymeric nanoaluminosilicates for functional nanocomposites

Nanoaggregates such as nanosilica and carbon black are two of the most important inorganic nanomaterials used in modern technologies including nanocomposites. By using sustainable geopolymer chemistry, we introduce new aluminosilicate nanoaggregates and nanostructured zeolites which may become as important as the aforementioned materials in nanocomposites, with their own unique functionalities. Geopolymer has been extensively studied and utilized as “green cement” in addressing global warming issues, one of the most challenging problems in human sustainability. At the same time, it is one of the few inorganic material systems that can be produced in a large scale and thus has a potential to meet the demand of large-scale applications. We will describe the nature of the sustainable, scalable production methods and discuss the key features of the materials including morphologies, surface areas, porosity, aggregate size, and zeolitic crystallinity. The nanostructured zeolite products demonstrate the ”nano” effect of their own, in terms of the short diffusion lengths within individual crystals and of the high surface area. Examples of their superior performances will be given for their applications in their neat form. Expansion of the original synthetic method has allowed organic-modified nanoaluminosilicates with increased hydrophobicity which can be important in nanocomposite fabrication

Retracted “Serum amyloid P down-regulates CCL-1 expression, and inhibits Ras/MAPK signaling and development of breast cancer”

This article previously published in Volume 17 Issue 16 of this journal in September 2017 has been retracted in line with the guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE,http://publicationethics.org/ resources/guidelines). Retraction: Ding S, Li H, Li X, Wang W, Du X, Dong G, Zhang P. Serum amyloid P down-regulates CCL-1 expression, and inhibits Ras/MAPK signaling and development of breast cancer. Trop J Pharm Res 2017; 16(9):2089-2095 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/tjpr.v16i9.7 To the editor: The figures in the paper were plagiarized partly from an earlier published article, Qi et al, P-selectinmediated tablet adhesion promoters tumor growth. Oncotarget 2015;30:6(9):6584–6596, and data from a master's thesis submitted by Bin Li under the supervision of Professor Lijing Wang and Professor Cuiling Qi. Sincerely, Cuiling Qi and Lijing Wang

Learning to Sample Tasks for Meta Learning

Through experiments on various meta-learning methods, task samplers, and few-shot learning tasks, this paper arrives at three conclusions. Firstly, there are no universal task sampling strategies to guarantee the performance of meta-learning models. Secondly, task diversity can cause the models to either underfit or overfit during training. Lastly, the generalization performance of the models are influenced by task divergence, task entropy, and task difficulty. In response to these findings, we propose a novel task sampler called Adaptive Sampler (ASr). ASr is a plug-and-play task sampler that takes task divergence, task entropy, and task difficulty to sample tasks. To optimize ASr, we rethink and propose a simple and general meta-learning algorithm. Finally, a large number of empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ASr.Comment: 10 pages, 7 tables, 3 figure

Serum amyloid P down-regulates CCL-1 expression, and inhibits Ras/MAPK signaling and development of breast cancer

Purpose: To investigate the role of serum amyloid component P (SAP) on Ras/MAPK pathway in the development of breast cancer (BC) via regulation of chemokine (CC motif) ligand 1 (CCL-1).Methods: Breast cancer (BC) and metastasis models were established using SAP-Tg transgenic mice and WT C57BL/6 mice. The effect of SAP on growth and metastasis was observed. Differentially expressed proteins in SAP-Tg and C57BL/6 serum were analyzed, and further determined by enzymelinked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR). The effect of SAP on CCL1/Ras/MAPK signaling pathway was studied by immunoblotting.Results: Compared with WT control, SAP-Tg BC model showed a significant reduction in tumor volume and prolonged survival (p < 0.05). In the lung metastasis model, SAP-Tg mice showed a decreased number of nodules on the organ surface (p < 0.05). Protein microarray screening results showed that SAP inhibited CCL-1 expression (p < 0.05). CCL-1 mRNA level in SAP-Tg mice was significantly lower than WT control (p < 0.05). After stimulating RAW cells (mouse macrophage line) with SAP recombinant protein, ELISA results showed that CCL-1 secretion significantly decreased (p < 0.05). In both models, P38 and ERK1/2 activation in SAP-Tg mice were significantly lower than that in C57BL/6 mice.Conclusion: SAP inhibits the growth and metastasis of BC, possibly by reducing the secretion of CCL- 1 and inhibiting Ras/MAPK signaling pathway, thus suggesting a possible treatment strategy for breast cancer.Keywords: Serum amyloid component P (SAP), chemokine (CC motif) ligand 1 (CCL-1), Breast cancer, NF-κB, Ras/MAPK signaling pathwa

Evaluating the relationship between user interaction and financial visual analysis

It has been widely accepted that interactive visualization techniques enable users to more effectively form hypotheses and identify areas for more detailed investigation. There have been numerous empirical user studies testing the effectiveness of specific visual analytical tools. However, there has been limited effort in connecting a user’s interaction with his reasoning for the purpose of extracting the relationship between the two. In this paper, we present an approach for capturing and analyzing user interactions in a financial visual analytical tool and describe an exploratory user study that examines these interaction strategies. To achieve this goal, we created two visual tools to analyze raw interaction data captured during the user session. The results of this study demonstrate one possible strategy for understanding the relationship between interaction and reasoning both operationally and strategically. Index Terms: H.5.2 [Information Interfaces And Presentatio

A Dimensional Structure based Knowledge Distillation Method for Cross-Modal Learning

Due to limitations in data quality, some essential visual tasks are difficult to perform independently. Introducing previously unavailable information to transfer informative dark knowledge has been a common way to solve such hard tasks. However, research on why transferred knowledge works has not been extensively explored. To address this issue, in this paper, we discover the correlation between feature discriminability and dimensional structure (DS) by analyzing and observing features extracted from simple and hard tasks. On this basis, we express DS using deep channel-wise correlation and intermediate spatial distribution, and propose a novel cross-modal knowledge distillation (CMKD) method for better supervised cross-modal learning (CML) performance. The proposed method enforces output features to be channel-wise independent and intermediate ones to be uniformly distributed, thereby learning semantically irrelevant features from the hard task to boost its accuracy. This is especially useful in specific applications where the performance gap between dual modalities is relatively large. Furthermore, we collect a real-world CML dataset to promote community development. The dataset contains more than 10,000 paired optical and radar images and is continuously being updated. Experimental results on real-world and benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method

The valproate mediates radio-bidirectional regulation through RFWD3-dependent ubiquitination on Rad51

Ionizing radiation (IR) can induce DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) in tumor cells during radiotherapy (RT), but the efficiency of RT is limited because of the toxicity to normal cells. Locating an adjuvant treatment to alleviate damage in normal cells while sensitizing tumor cells to IR has attracted much attention. Here, using the 7,12-dimethylbenz[α]anthracene (DMBA)-induced malignant transformed MCF10A cells, we found that valproate (VPA), a histone deacetylase inhibitor (HDACi), radiosensitized transformed cells while alleviated IR-induced damage in normal cells at a safe dose (0.5 mM). We further demonstrated the decrease of homologous recombination (HR)-associated Rad51 in the transformed cells was related to the increase of its ubiquitination regulated by E3 ligase RFWD3 for the radiosensitization, which was opposite to normal cells, indicating that RFWD3-dependent ubiquitination on Rad51 was involved in the VPA-mediated radio-bidirectional effect. Through DMBA-transformed breast cancer rat model, VPA at 200 mg/kg radiosensitized tumor tissue cells by increasing RFWD3 and inhibited Rad51, while radioprotected normal tissue cells by decreasing RFWD3 and enhanced Rad51. In addition, we found high-level Rad51 was associated with tumorigenesis and poor prognosis in breast cancer patients. Our findings uncovered RFWD3-dependent Rad51 ubiquitination was the novel mechanism of VPA-mediated radio-bidirectional effect, VPA is a potential adjuvant treatment for tumor RT

Laser speckle contrast imaging to monitor microcirculation: An effective method to predict outcome in patients with sepsis and septic shock

Background: This study examines the microcirculation of patients with sepsis and septic shock using Laser Speckle Contrast Imaging (LSCI) technology, to enhance monitoring and predict outcomes of sepsis and septic shock.Methods: From 01 July 2021, to 31 January 2022, 44 patients diagnosed with septic shock and sepsis were included in the study, their clinical data were collected, and LSCI was used to monitor the mean peripheral blood flow perfusion index (PI).Results: The average peripheral blood flow PI of septic shock patients was significantly lower than that of septic patients, with a cutoff value of 26.25. The average peripheral blood flow PI negatively correlated with acute physiology and chronic health evaluation (APACHE) Ⅱ score (p = .01 < .05), sequential organ failure assessment (SOFA) score (p < .01), and lactic acid levels (p = .01 < .05). We report average peripheral blood flow no correlation with age, mean arterial pressure, body temperature, oxygen saturation, heart rate, and body mass index. There was no correlation with procalcitonin, C-reactive protein (CRP), red blood cell distribution width, or platelet distribution width (p > .05). PI significantly correlated with the group sepsis and septic shock (p < .001, r = −.865). And PI significantly correlated with the outcome or mortality (p = .007 < .05, r = −.398). The ROC curve was calculated for PI and the sensitivity was 81.3%, and the specificity was 75% when PI cutoff value chooses 20.88.Conclusion: LSCI technology successfully detected the fingertip microcirculation of patients with septic shock. LSCI can reliably differentiate patients with sepsis vs patients with septic shock. Additionally, the average peripheral blood PI negatively correlated with APACHE Ⅱ, SOFA score, and lactate acid levels, providing useful and supplementary information for the diagnosis and monitoring of septic shock. Trial registration: Chictr2100046761. Registered on May 28, 2021.Clinical Trial Registration:clinicaltrials.gov, identifier Chictr210004676