Anti-cancer mechanism of arctigenin (ARC) in human lung cancer cells

Arctigenin (ARC) is a lignan and is abundant in Asteraceae plant which possesses anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer activities. The current study was performed to investigate if ARC affects cancer progression and metastasis focusing on epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) using invasive human lung cancer cell line, A549. No toxicity was observed in the cells treated with different doses of ARC (12-100 µM). The treatment of ARC repressed TGF-β-stimulated changes of metastatic morphology and cell invasion and migration. ARC inhibited TGF-β-induced phosphorylation and transcriptional activity of SMAD2/3 and expression of snail in dose-dependent and time-dependent manners. ARC also decreased expression of N-cadherin and increased expression of E-cadherin in dose-dependent and time-dependent manners. These changes were accompanied with decreased amount of nuclear phospho-SMAD2 and SMAD3, and nuclear translocation of SMAD2 and SMAD3. Moreover, ARC repressed TGF-β-induced phosphorylation of ERK. Our data demonstrate anti-metastatic activity of ARC in lung cancer model. Key words: ARC, TGF-β, EMT, Lung cance

Turbulent Details Simulation for SPH Fluids via Vorticity Refinement

A major issue in Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) approaches is the numerical dissipation during the projection process, especially under coarse discretizations. High-frequency details, such as turbulence and vortices, are smoothed out, leading to unrealistic results. To address this issue, we introduce a Vorticity Refinement (VR) solver for SPH fluids with negligible computational overhead. In this method, the numerical dissipation of the vorticity field is recovered by the difference between the theoretical and the actual vorticity, so as to enhance turbulence details. Instead of solving the Biot-Savart integrals, a stream function, which is easier and more efficient to solve, is used to relate the vorticity field to the velocity field. We obtain turbulence effects of different intensity levels by changing an adjustable parameter. Since the vorticity field is enhanced according to the curl field, our method can not only amplify existing vortices, but also capture additional turbulence. Our VR solver is straightforward to implement and can be easily integrated into existing SPH methods

whu-nercms at trecvid2021:instance search task

We will make a brief introduction of the experimental methods and results of the WHU-NERCMS in the TRECVID2021 in the paper. This year we participate in the automatic and interactive tasks of Instance Search (INS). For the automatic task, the retrieval target is divided into two parts, person retrieval, and action retrieval. We adopt a two-stage method including face detection and face recognition for person retrieval and two kinds of action detection methods consisting of three frame-based human-object interaction detection methods and two video-based general action detection methods for action retrieval. After that, the person retrieval results and action retrieval results are fused to initialize the result ranking lists. In addition, we make attempts to use complementary methods to further improve search performance. For interactive tasks, we test two different interaction strategies on the fusion results. We submit 4 runs for automatic and interactive tasks respectively. The introduction of each run is shown in Table 1. The official evaluations show that the proposed strategies rank 1st in both automatic and interactive tracks.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Two-element interferometer for millimeter-wave solar flare observations

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a two-element interferometer working in the millimeter wave band (39.5 GHz - 40 GHz) for observing solar radio emissions through nulling interference. The system is composed of two 50 cm aperture Cassegrain antennas mounted on a common equatorial mount, with a separation of 230 wavelengths. The cross-correlation of the received signals effectively cancels the quiet solar component of the large flux density (~3000 sfu) that reduces the detection limit due to atmospheric fluctuations. The system performance is obtained as follows: the noise factor of the AFE in the observation band is less than 2.1 dB, system sensitivity is approximately 12.4 K (~34 sfu) with an integration time constant of 0.1 ms (default), the frequency resolution is 153 kHz, and the dynamic range is larger than 30 dB. Through actual testing, the nulling interferometer observes a quiet sun with a low level of output fluctuations (of up to 50 sfu) and has a significantly lower radiation flux variability (of up to 190 sfu) than an equivalent single-antenna system, even under thick cloud cover. As a result, this new design can effectively improve observation sensitivity by reducing the impact of atmospheric and system fluctuations during observation

Knowledge-tuning Large Language Models with Structured Medical Knowledge Bases for Reliable Response Generation in Chinese

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks in general domains. However, LLMs sometimes generate responses with the hallucination about medical facts due to limited domain knowledge. Such shortcomings pose potential risks in the utilization of LLMs within medical contexts. To address this challenge, we propose knowledge-tuning, which leverages structured medical knowledge bases for the LLMs to grasp domain knowledge efficiently and facilitate reliable response generation. We also release cMedKnowQA, a Chinese medical knowledge question-answering dataset constructed from medical knowledge bases to assess the medical knowledge proficiency of LLMs. Experimental results show that the LLMs which are knowledge-tuned with cMedKnowQA, can exhibit higher levels of accuracy in response generation compared with vanilla instruction-tuning and offer a new reliable way for the domain adaptation of LLMs.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Yang Naimei - prática de vida de uma flapper chinesa do desenvolvimento da mulher na China

As one of the earliest movie stars in China, Yang Naimei's life reflects the process of professionalization and modernization of Chinese women in the early 20th century. This study discusses the life practices and significance of Yang Naimei as a Chinese flapper. Flapper refers to the modern girl who arose in Europe and America in the 1920s as a challenge to traditional lifestyles. Yang Naimei fully embodied the characters of the flapper. She often played an unruly woman on the screen, and she had many relationships in her life, accumulating wealth and a reputation with her acting career. However, society at that time did not provide enough space for the sustainable development of the women’s generation, like Yang Naimei, in economic, political and personal life. After the loss of her youth, she was disposed of by the film industry and suffered from poverty and disease in the latter half of her life. Taking Yang Naimei as an illustration of the times can reflect the twists and turns in the treatment of Chinese women offered by the society.Yang Naimei (杨耐梅) é uma estrela de cinema chinesa da primeira metade do século XX. O estudo discute a prática de vida e o significado de Yang Naimei como uma flapper chinesa. Flapper se refere à garota moderna que cresceu na Europa e na América, na década de 1920, e desafia o estilo de vida tradicional. Yang Naimei é boa em atuar como uma mulher indisciplinada, na tela. Ela teve muitos relacionamentos em sua vida. Ela acumulou riqueza e reputação com sua carreira de atriz, que incorpora totalmente as características da flapper. No entanto, a sociedade da época não oferecia espaço suficiente para o desenvolvimento sustentável da geração de mulheres, como Yang Naimei, na vida econômica, política e pessoal. Com a sua juventude passada, ela foi eliminada pela indústria cinematográfica e sofreu com a pobreza e a doença, na segunda metade de sua vida. Tomando Yang Naimei como uma silhueta dos tempos, pode-se refletir sobre as voltas e reviravoltas do caminho de desenvolvimento das mulheres chinesas

A Unified Multiple-Phase Fluids Framework Using Asymmetric Surface Extraction and the Modified Density Model

Multiple-phase fluids’ simulation and 3D visualization comprise an important cooperative visualization subject between fluid dynamics and computer animation. Interactions between different fluids have been widely studied in both physics and computer graphics. To further the study in both areas, cooperative research has been carried out; hence, a more authentic fluid simulation method is required. The key to a better multiphase fluid simulation result is surface extraction. Previous works usually have problems in extracting surfaces with unnatural fluctuations or detail missing. Gaps between different phases also hinder the reality of simulation. In this paper, we propose a unified surface extraction approach integrated with a modified density model for the particle-based multiphase fluid simulation. We refine the original asymmetric smoothing kernel used in the color field and address a binary tree scheme for surface extraction. Besides, we employ a multiphase fluid framework with modified density to eliminate density deviation between different fluids. With the methods mentioned above, our approach can effectively reconstruct the fluid surface for particle-based multiphase fluid simulation. It can also resolve the issue of overlaps and gaps between different fluids, which has widely existed in former methods for a long time. The experiments carried out in this paper show that our approach is able to have an ideal fluid surface condition and have good interaction effects