Presbycusis-Related Tinnitus and Cognitive Impairment: Gender Differences and Common Mechanisms

Presbycusis-related tinnitus and cognitive impairment are common in the elderly and generate a massive burden on family and society. Except for age, the study explored the gender differences in the prevalence of the three diseases. We found that women have an advantage in maintaining better cognitive and auditory functions. Recent studies suggest the complex links among the three diseases. Peripheral hearing loss can affect sound coding and neural plasticity, which will lead to cognitive impairment and tinnitus. The deficits of the central nervous system, especially central auditory structures, can, in turn, cause the presbycusis. The interaction among three diseases indicated that comprehensive assessment, intervention and treatment in consideration of hearing loss, tinnitus and cognitive impairment are important to decay aging

From Sarcopenia to Frailty: The Pathophysiological Basis and Potential Target Molecules of Intervention

Skeletal muscle is not only an endocrine organ but also one of core components of muscloskeletal system. Sarcopenia refers to a decline in the skeletal muscle mass and function. The former involves the size and number of changes in two types of myofibers, lower satellite cell density, and regeneration ability. The latter shows a loss of muscle strength. Frailty is a geriatric syndrome with multisystem impairment associated with increased vulnerability to stressors. Sarcopenia increases the risk of frailty and may be one of the major causes of physical frailty phenotype. Sarcopenia is also potentially associated with cognitive frailty phenotype. Aging might be the common underlying pathophysiology of sarcopenia and frailty. Therefore, there are some potential target molecules in aging-related signaling pathways that might be associated with sarcopenia and frailty. Nevertheless, sarcopenia can mediate metabolism and promote accelerate systemic aging, frailty, and age-related diseases by myokines in an endocrine manner. Lifestyle interventions (resistance exercise and dietary restriction) of gerontoscience are effective in the prevention of sarcopenia. Some pharmacological agents are registered in different phases of clinical trials for sarcopenia intervention. Phytochemicals, mTOR inhibitors, metformin and acarbose, NAD precursors, and sirtuin activators demonstrated that multiple target antiaging effects might also have preventive and therapeutic perspectives on sarcopenia and frailty

D-STEM: a Design led approach to STEM innovation

Advances in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) disciplines offer opportunities for designers to propose and make products with advanced, enhanced and engineered properties and functionalities. In turn, these advanced characteristics are becoming increasingly necessary as resources become ever more strained through 21st century demands, such as ageing populations, connected communities, depleting raw materials, waste management and energy supply. We need to make things that are smarter, make our lives easier, better and simpler. The products of tomorrow need to do more with less. The issue is how to maximize the potential for exploiting opportunities offered by STEM developments and how best to enable designers to strengthen their position within the innovation ecosystem. As a society, we need designers able to navigate emerging developments from the STEM community to a level that enables understanding and knowledge of the new material properties, the skill set to facilitate absorption into the design ‘toolbox’ and the agility to identify, manage and contextualise innovation opportunities emerging from STEM developments. This paper proposes the blueprint for a new design led approach to STEM innovation that begins to redefine studio culture for the 21st Century

Timing of Triassic tectonic division and postcollisional extension in the eastern part of the Jiaodong Peninsula

The Jiaodong Peninsula is a key region for researching the interaction between the North and South China Plates. Tectonic relationships between collision, exhumation of ultra-high-pressure (UHP) slabs, strike-slip faulting and gold mineralization, are still ambiguous. The eastern part of the Jiaodong Peninsula (Eastern Jiaodong), which includes Triassic intrusions and is less affected by the Tan-Lu Fault Zone, is a key area to examine exhumation dynamics in detail. Systematic field mapping and zircon U–Pb dating of Triassic intrusions establishes that: (1) The UHP wedge in the eastern part of the Jiaodong Peninsula can be divided into the lateral and frontal ramps of a thrust and nappe system. Dating of samples from Donglinghou (244.7 ± 4.2 Ma) and Qingyutan (233.8 ± 8.1 Ma) areas indicates that the collision happened at or before the Middle Triassic. (2) Postcollisional extension intrusions including the Shidao granitoid (216.2 ± 2.4 Ma), and the Chengshantou granitoid (cut by a dolerite dyke dated at 210.5 ± 1.0 Ma), generally strike NE and occurred in a metamorphic core complex below the Upper Jiashan-Xiangshui detachment (U-JSXS). (3) Regional faults in the Jiaodong Peninsula exploited syncollisional foliations of the UHP wedge, which resulted in faults dipping towards the NW and SE. The reactivation of the Lower Jiashan-Xiangshui shear zone (L-JSXS) and its overprinting upon the Tan-Lu fault system may have caused another major episode of exhumation of the syncollisional wedge, and could have been responsible for an extensional environment that favored gold mineralization

Combining Electrochemical Nitrate Reduction and Anammox for Treatment of Nitrate-Rich Wastewater: A Short Review

Treatment of nitrate-rich wastewater is important but challenging for the conventional biological denitrification process. Here, we propose combining the electrochemical reduction and anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) processes together for treatment of nitrate-rich wastewater. This article reviews the mechanism and current research status of electrochemical reduction of nitrate to ammonium as well as the mechanism and applicability of the anammox process. This article discusses the principles, superiorities, and challenges of this combined process. The feasibility of the combined process depends on the efficiency of electrochemical nitrate reduction to ammonium and the conditions in the anammox process to use the reduced ammonium as the substrate to achieve deep nitrogen removal. The article provides a feasible strategy for using the electrochemical reduction and anammox combined process to treat nitrate-rich wastewater

Highlights of the 2nd International Symposium on Tribbles and Diseases: Tribbles tremble in therapeutics for immunity, metabolism, fundamental cell biology and cancer

The Tribbles (TRIB) family of pseudokinase proteins has been shown to play key roles in cell cycle, metabolic diseases, chronic inflammatory disease, and cancer development. A better understanding of the mechanisms of TRIB pseudokinases could provide new insights for disease development and help promote TRIB proteins as novel therapeutic targets for drug discovery. At the 2nd International Symposium on Tribbles and Diseases held on May 7‒9, 2018 in Beijing, China, a group of leading Tribbles scientists reported their findings and ongoing studies about the effects of the different TRIB proteins in the areas of immunity, metabolism, fundamental cell biology and cancer. Here, we summarize important and insightful overviews from 4 keynote lectures, 13 plenary lectures and 8 short talks that took place during this meeting. These findings may offer new insights for the understanding of the roles of TRIB pseudokinases in the development of various diseases

Innate immune activation by inhaled lipopolysaccharide, independent of oxidative stress, exacerbates silica-induced pulmonary fibrosis in mice

Acute exacerbations of pulmonary fibrosis are characterized by rapid decrements in lung function. Environmental factors that may contribute to acute exacerbations remain poorly understood. We have previously demonstrated that exposure to inhaled lipopolysaccharide (LPS) induces expression of genes associated with fibrosis. To address whether exposure to LPS could exacerbate fibrosis, we exposed male C57BL/6 mice to crystalline silica, or vehicle, followed 28 days later by LPS or saline inhalation. We observed that mice receiving both silica and LPS had significantly more total inflammatory cells, more whole lung lavage MCP-1, MIP-2, KC and IL-1β, more evidence of oxidative stress and more total lung hydroxyproline than mice receiving either LPS alone, or silica alone. Blocking oxidative stress with N-acetylcysteine attenuated whole lung inflammation but had no effect on total lung hydroxyproline. These observations suggest that exposure to innate immune stimuli, such as LPS in the environment, may exacerbate stable pulmonary fibrosis via mechanisms that are independent of inflammation and oxidative stress. © 2012 Brass et al

Multi-view Super Vector for Action Recognition

Images and videos are often characterized by multiple types of local descriptors such as SIFT, HOG and HOF, each of which describes certain aspects of object feature. Recognition systems benefit from fusing multiple types of these descriptors. Two widely applied fusion pipelines are descriptor concatenation and kernel average. The first one is effective when different descriptors are strongly corre-lated, while the second one is probably better when de-scriptors are relatively independent. In practice, however, different descriptors are neither fully independent nor fully correlated, and previous fusion methods may not be satis-fying. In this paper, we propose a new global representa-tion, Multi-View Super Vector (MVSV), which is composed of relatively independent components derived from a pair of descriptors. Kernel average is then applied on these com-ponents to produce recognition result. To obtain MVSV, we develop a generative mixture model of probabilistic canoni-cal correlation analyzers (M-PCCA), and utilize the hidden factors and gradient vectors of M-PCCA to construct MVSV for video representation. Experiments on video based ac-tion recognition tasks show that MVSV achieves promising results, and outperforms FV and VLAD with descriptor con-catenation or kernel average fusion strategy. 1