CLEC14A was up-regulated in hepatocellular carcinoma and may function as a potential diagnostic biomarker

Objective: The current work aimed to investigate the expression and potential clinical significance of C-type Lectin domain family 14 (CLEC14A) in hepatocellular carcinoma. Methods: The relative expressions of CLEC14A in the Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) tissue and adjacent normal tissue of 105 HCC patients were examined using RT-qPCR methods. Furthermore, Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve was drawn for exploring the diagnostic value of CLEC14A. Next, the expressions of CLEC14A in HCC cell lines and normal liver epithelial cells were compared, and the effects of knockdown of CLEC14A on the growth and apoptosis of HCC cells were examined. Results: The authors found that the expression of CLEC14A was markedly increased in hepatocellular carcinoma tumors in comparison with the adjacent tissue, and the expression level of CLEC14A was positively correlated with the size and differentiation of the tumor. Moreover, results of ROC analysis showed CLEC14A might function as a sensitive diagnostic biomarker for HCC. Furthermore, CLEC14A was up-regulated in HCC cell lines, and transient over-expression of CLEC14A decreased the proliferation and increased the apoptosis of HCC cells in vitro. Conclusions: Our results suggested that CLEC14A was up-regulated in HCC and might function as a potential diagnostic marker

A nontrivial solution for a nonautonomous Choquard equation with general nonlinearity

With the help of the monotonicity trick, a nonautonomous Choquard equations with general nonlinearity is studied and a nontrivial solution is obtained

catena-Poly[[tetra­aqua­manganese(II)]-μ-5-carboxyl­ato-1-carboxyl­atomethyl-2-oxidopyridinium-κ2 O 5:O 1]

In the title coordination polymer, [Mn(C8H5NO5)(H2O)4]n, the MnII atom is coordinated by two carboxyl­ate O atoms from two 5-carboxyl­ato-1-carboxyl­atomethyl-2-oxidopyridinium (L 2−) ligands and by four water mol­ecules in a distorted octa­hedral geometry. The L 2− ligands bridge the Mn atoms into an infinite chain motif along [100]; the chains are further inter­linked by O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds into a three-dimensional supra­molecular net

Experimental study of a new type of floating breakwater

A new type of floating breakwater (FB) is proposed in this paper. Its hydrodynamic performance has been tested. The structure of the new breakwater named cylindrical floating breakwater (CFB) consists of two parts: a main body of rigid cylinders, and a flexible mesh cage containing a number of suspending balls that are intended to absorb the wave energy into their mechanical energy. A series of experiments were carried out on the new floating breakwater and traditional double pontoons and box floating breakwaters to compare their performances. A two-dimensional wave flume was used in the experiment; the incident and transmitted waves, the tensions on the mooring lines and the motion responses of the floating breakwaters were measured. Results showed that the new floating breakwater had a better performance than the traditional double pontoons and the box floating breakwaters: wave transmission was significantly reduced by the mesh cage with the balls, especially for long waves

Testing and Data Reduction of the Chinese Small Telescope Array (CSTAR) for Dome A, Antarctica

The Chinese Small Telescope ARray (hereinafter CSTAR) is the first Chinese astronomical instrument on the Antarctic ice cap. The low temperature and low pressure testing of the data acquisition system was carried out in a laboratory refrigerator and on the 4500m Pamirs high plateau, respectively. The results from the final four nights of test observations demonstrated that CSTAR was ready for operation at Dome A, Antarctica. In this paper we present a description of CSTAR and the performance derived from the test observations.Comment: Accepted Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics (RAA) 1 Latex file and 20 figure

Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarks

With the rise of deep convolutional neural networks, object detection has achieved prominent advances in past years. However, such prosperity could not camouflage the unsatisfactory situation of Small Object Detection (SOD), one of the notoriously challenging tasks in computer vision, owing to the poor visual appearance and noisy representation caused by the intrinsic structure of small targets. In addition, large-scale dataset for benchmarking small object detection methods remains a bottleneck. In this paper, we first conduct a thorough review of small object detection. Then, to catalyze the development of SOD, we construct two large-scale Small Object Detection dAtasets (SODA), SODA-D and SODA-A, which focus on the Driving and Aerial scenarios respectively. SODA-D includes 24828 high-quality traffic images and 278433 instances of nine categories. For SODA-A, we harvest 2513 high resolution aerial images and annotate 872069 instances over nine classes. The proposed datasets, as we know, are the first-ever attempt to large-scale benchmarks with a vast collection of exhaustively annotated instances tailored for multi-category SOD. Finally, we evaluate the performance of mainstream methods on SODA. We expect the released benchmarks could facilitate the development of SOD and spawn more breakthroughs in this field. Datasets and codes are available at: \url{https://shaunyuan22.github.io/SODA}