The nonequilibrium evolution near the phase boundary

We study the nonequilibrium evolution near the phase boundary of the 3D Ising model, and find that the average of relaxation time (RT) near the first-order phase transition line (1st-PTL) is significantly larger than that near the critical point (CP). As the system size increases, the average of RT near the 1st-PTL increases at a higher power compared to that near the CP. We further show that RT near the 1st-PTL is not only non-self-averaging, but actually self-diverging: relative variance of RT increases with system size. The presence of coexisting and metastable states results in a substantial increase in randomness near the 1st-PTL, making it difficult to achieve equilibrium.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Phosphatidylethanolamine binding protein 1 enhances sensitivity of gastric cancer cell to 5-fluorouracil via inhibition of cell proliferation, migration and invasion

Purpose: To determine the association between phosphatidylethanolamine binding protein 1, which is an Raf kinase inhibitor protein (RKIP), and 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) via analysis of the association between RKIP and clinical responses in individuals treated using fluorouracil-based chemotherapy.Methods: Human gastric cancer cell lines MGC-803 and SGC-7901 were used in this study. Cell viability was measured using 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay. Apoptosis and migration were determined with flow cytometry and Transwell chamber assays, respectively. The mRNA and protein expressions of apoptosis-related factors were assayed using realtime polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and Western blotting, respectively, while the expression of RKIP was determined by immunohistochemical staining.Results: Chemotherapeutic drug (5-FU) treatment induced low RKIP expression levels in tumorigenic GC cells, thereby sensitizing the cells to apoptosis (8.57 vs 1.25 %, p < 0.01). The highest RKIP level correlated well with initiation of apoptosis (4.20 vs 1.25 %, p < 0.01). Following in vitro downregulation of RKIP, there was increase in the viability and proliferation of RKIP-inhibited cells over time, and these changes were linked to alterations in cell cycle phases and increased optical density in MTT proliferation assay (1.55 vs 1.18, p < 0.01). In vitro Transwell assay measurement revealed an association between RKIP downregulation and enhancement of cell migration potential (652 vs 436, p < 0.01). Ectopic RKIP expression restored the apoptotic sensitivity of resistant cells (14.30 vs 1.36 %, p <0.01). This sensitization was annulled by upregulation of survival routes. Reduction of RKIP by expression of antisense and siRNA conferred resistance on cancer cells sensitive to 5-FU-mediated apoptosis (6.88 vs 2.13 %, p < 0.01).Conclusion: Thus, RKIP is a promising therapeutic strategy for improving the efficacy of clinically relevant chemotherapeutic drugs for GC. Keywords: Gastric cancer, Raf kinase inhibitor protein, Cell proliferation, Invasion, Apoptosis, Chemotherapy,  Phosphatidylethanolamine binding protein

Adaptive Meshing Based on the Multi-level Partition of Unity and Dynamic Particle Systems for Medical Image Datasets

Surface meshes extracted from sparse medical images contain surface artifacts, there will produce serious distortion and generate numerous narrow triangle meshes. In order to eliminate the impact of the above factors, this paper presents a novel method for generating smooth and adaptive meshes from medical image datasets. Firstly, extracting the stack of contours by means of image segmentation and translating the contours into point clouds. The improved Multi-Level Partition of Unity (MPU) implicit functions are used to fit the point clouds for creating the implicit surface. Then, sampling implicit surface through dynamic particle systems based on Gaussian curvature, dense particles sampling in the high curvature region, sparse particles sampling in the low curvature region. Finally, generating triangle meshes based on particle distribution by using the Delaunay triangulation algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method can generate high-quality triangle meshes with distributed adaptively and have a nice gradation of triangle mesh density on the surface curvature

Pseudo-Parity-Time Symmetry in Optical Systems

We introduce a novel concept of the pseudo-parity-time (pseudo-PT) symmetry in periodically modulated optical systems with balanced gain and loss. We demonstrate that whether or not the original system is PT symmetric, we can manipulate the property of t

GC-MS and UHPLC-QTOFMS-assisted identification of the differential metabolites and metabolic pathways in key tissues of Pogostemon cablin

Pogostemon cablin is an important aromatic medicinal herb widely used in the pharmaceutical and perfume industries. However, our understanding of the phytochemical compounds and metabolites within P. cablin remains limited. To our knowledge, no integrated studies have hitherto been conducted on the metabolites of the aerial parts of P. cablin. In this study, twenty-three volatile compounds from the aerial parts of P. cablin were identified by GC-MS, predominantly sesquiterpenes. Quantitative analysis showed the highest level of patchouli alcohol in leaves (24.89 mg/g), which was 9.12 and 6.69-fold higher than in stems and flowers. UHPLC-QTOFMS was used to analyze the non-volatile compounds of leaf, stem and flower tissues. The differences in metabolites between flower and leaf tissues were the largest. Based on 112, 77 and 83 differential metabolites between flower-leaf, flower-stem and leaf-stem, three tissue-specific biomarkers of metabolites were identified, and the differential metabolites were enriched in several KEGG pathways. Furthermore, labeling differential metabolites in the primary and secondary metabolic pathways showed that flowers accumulated more lipids and amino acids, including proline, lysine and tryptophan; the leaves accumulated higher levels of terpenoids, vitamins and flavonoids, and stems contained higher levels of carbohydrate compounds. Based on the role of acetyl coenzyme A, the distribution and possible exchange mechanism of metabolites in leaves, stems and flowers of P. cablin were mapped for the first time, laying the groundwork for future research on the metabolites in P. cablin and their regulatory role

Pre-Trained AlexNet Architecture with Pyramid Pooling and Supervision for High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification

The rapid development of high spatial resolution (HSR) remote sensing imagery techniques not only provide a considerable amount of datasets for scene classification tasks but also request an appropriate scene classification choice when facing with finite labeled samples. AlexNet, as a relatively simple convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, has obtained great success in scene classification tasks and has been proven to be an excellent foundational hierarchical and automatic scene classification technique. However, current HSR remote sensing imagery scene classification datasets always have the characteristics of small quantities and simple categories, where the limited annotated labeling samples easily cause non-convergence. For HSR remote sensing imagery, multi-scale information of the same scenes can represent the scene semantics to a certain extent but lacks an efficient fusion expression manner. Meanwhile, the current pre-trained AlexNet architecture lacks a kind of appropriate supervision for enhancing the performance of this model, which easily causes overfitting. In this paper, an improved pre-trained AlexNet architecture named pre-trained AlexNet-SPP-SS has been proposed, which incorporates the scale pooling—spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) and side supervision (SS) to improve the above two situations. Extensive experimental results conducted on the UC Merced dataset and the Google Image dataset of SIRI-WHU have demonstrated that the proposed pre-trained AlexNet-SPP-SS model is superior to the original AlexNet architecture as well as the traditional scene classification methods

The Role of Beauty as Currency Belief in Acceptance of Cosmetic Surgery and Career Aspiration among Chinese Young Women

Investigation of the “beauty as currency” hypothesis in the framework of Objectification theory with a sample of Chinese young wome