Hepcidin and sports anemia

Iron is an important mineral element used by the body in a variety of metabolic and physiologic processes. These processes are highly active when the body is undergoing physical exercises. Prevalence of exercise-induced iron deficiency anemia (also known as sports anemia) is notably high in athletic populations, particularly those with heavy training loads. The pathogenesis of sports anemia is closely related to disorders of iron metabolism, and a more comprehensive understanding of the mechanism of iron metabolism in the course of physical exercises could expand ways of treatment and prevention of sports anemia. In recent years, there have been remarkable research advances regarding the molecular mechanisms underlying changes of iron metabolism in response to physical exercises. This review has covered these advances, including effects of exercise on duodenum iron absorption, serum iron status, iron distribution in organs, erythropoiesis, and hepcidin’s function and its regulation. New methods for the treatment of exercise-induced iron deficiency are also discussed

Essential Role of Mast Cells in the Visceral Hyperalgesia Induced by T. spiralis Infection and Stress in Rats

Mast cells (MCs) deficient rats (Ws/Ws) were used to investigate the roles of MCs in visceral hyperalgesia. Ws/Ws and wild control (+/+) rats were exposed to T. spiralis or submitted to acute cold restraint stress (ACRS). Levels of proteinase-activated receptor 2 (PAR2) and nerve growth factor (NGF) were determined by immunoblots and RT-PCR analysis, and the putative signal pathways including phosphorylated extracellular-regulated kinase (pERK1/2) and transient receptor potential vanilloid receptor 1 (TRPV1) were further identified. Visceral hyperalgesia triggered by ACRS was observed only in +/+ rats. The increased expression of PAR2 and NGF was observed only in +/+ rats induced by T. spiralis and ACRS. The activation of pERK1/2 induced by ACRS occurred only in +/+ rats. However, a significant increase of TRPV1 induced by T. spiralis and ACRS was observed only in +/+ rats. The activation of PAR2 and NGF via both TRPV1 and pERK1/2 signal pathway is dependent on MCs in ACRS-induced visceral hyperalgesia rats

Broad bandwidth of perceptual learning in second-order contrast modulation detection

Comparing characteristics of learning in first- and second-order systems might inform us about different neural plasticity in the two systems. In the current study, we aim to determine the properties of perceptual learning in second-order contrast modulation detection in normal adults. We trained nine observers to detect second-order gratings at an envelope modulation spatial frequency of 8 cycles/8 with their nondominant eyes. We found that, although training generated the largest improvements around the trained frequency, contrast sensitivity over a broad range of spatial frequencies also improved, with a 4.09-octave bandwidth of perceptual learning, exhibiting specificity to the trained spatial frequency as well as a relatively large degree of generalization. The improvements in the modulation sensitivity function (MSF) were not significantly different between the trained and untrained eyes. Furthermore, training did not significantly change subjects' ability in detecting firstorder gratings. Our results suggest that perceptual learning in second-order detection might occur at the postchannel level in binocular neurons, possibly through reducing the internal noise of the visual system

GLA-GCN: Global-local Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose Estimation from Monocular Video

3D human pose estimation has been researched for decades with promising fruits. 3D human pose lifting is one of the promising research directions toward the task where both estimated pose and ground truth pose data are used for training. Existing pose lifting works mainly focus on improving the performance of estimated pose, but they usually underperform when testing on the ground truth pose data. We observe that the performance of the estimated pose can be easily improved by preparing good quality 2D pose, such as fine-tuning the 2D pose or using advanced 2D pose detectors. As such, we concentrate on improving the 3D human pose lifting via ground truth data for the future improvement of more quality estimated pose data. Towards this goal, a simple yet effective model called Global-local Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network (GLA-GCN) is proposed in this work. Our GLA-GCN globally models the spatiotemporal structure via a graph representation and backtraces local joint features for 3D human pose estimation via individually connected layers. To validate our model design, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets: Human3.6M, HumanEva-I, and MPI-INF-3DHP. Experimental results show that our GLA-GCN implemented with ground truth 2D poses significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods (e.g., up to around 3%, 17%, and 14% error reductions on Human3.6M, HumanEva-I, and MPI-INF-3DHP, respectively). GitHub: https://github.com/bruceyo/GLA-GCN.Comment: 12 pages, Accepted to ICCV 2023, GitHub code: https://github.com/bruceyo/GLA-GC

Crop Rotation Enhances Agricultural Sustainability: From an Empirical Evaluation of Eco-Economic Benefits in Rice Production

Cropping systems greatly impact the productivity and resilience of agricultural ecosystems. However, we often lack an understanding of the quantitative interactions among social, economic and ecological components in each of the systems, especially with regard to crop rotation. Current production systems cannot guarantee both high profits in the short term and social and ecological benefits in the long term. This study combined statistic and economic models to evaluate the comprehensive effects of cropping systems on rice production using data collected from experimental fields between 2017 and 2018. The results showed that increasing agricultural diversity through rotations, particularly potato-rice rotation (PR), significantly increased the social, economic and ecological benefits of rice production. Yields, profits, profit margins, weighted dimensionless values of soil chemical and physical (SCP) and heavy metal (SHM) traits, benefits and externalities generated by PR and other rotations were generally higher than successive rice cropping. This suggests that agricultural diversity through rotations, particularly PR rotation, is worth implementing due to its overall benefits generated in rice production. However, due to various nutrient residues from preceding crops, fertilizer application should be rationalized to improve the resource and investment efficiency. Furthermore, we internalized the externalities (hidden ecological and social benefits/costs) generated by each of the rotation systems and proposed ways of incenting farmers to adopt crop rotation approaches for sustainable rice production