Anomalous gauge couplings of the Higgs boson at the CERN LHC: Semileptonic mode in WW scatterings

We make a full tree level study of the signatures of anomalous gauge couplings of the Higgs boson at the CERN LHC via the semileptonic decay mode in WW scatterings. Both signals and backgrounds are studied at the hadron level for the Higgs mass in the range 115 GeV to 200 GeV. We carefully impose suitable kinematical cuts for suppressing the backgrounds. To the same sensitivity as in the pure leptonic mode, our result shows that the semileptonic mode can reduce the required integrated luminosity by a factor of 3. If the anomalous couplings in nature are actually larger than the sensitivity bounds shown in the text, the experiment can start the test for an integrated luminosity of 50 inverse fb.Comment: PACS numbers updated. Version published in Phys.Rev.D79,055010(2009

Kimura’s disease: A clinicopathological study of 23 cases

IntroductionKimura’s disease (KD) is an uncommon lymphoproliferative fibroinflammatory disorder. Patients present with head and neck subcutaneous nodules with or without lymphadenopathy. Peripheral blood eosinophilia and elevated serum immunoglobulin E (IgE) levels are typical. This study was designed to delineate the clinicopathological features, pattern of care, and disease course of 23 Taiwanese patients with KD.MethodsWe retrospectively analyzed the clinical data of 23 consecutive cases (16 male and 7 female; age at diagnosis: 12–77 years) of KD diagnosed at our institution from 2015 to 2020.ResultsThe median time from presentation to diagnosis was 1 month. Twenty-one patients presented with unilateral or bilateral head and neck masses. The remaining two presented with right flank and right arm lesions, respectively. Peripheral blood eosinophilia was observed in nine, and elevated IgE levels were observed in four. All were diagnosed using either excisional or core-needle biopsy. Seven patients underwent fine needle aspiration without a diagnostic yield. Salivary gland and lymph node involvement was observed in three and seven patients, respectively. Most lesions showed tissue eosinophilia (100%) and florid follicular hyperplasia (78.26%). Three cases had histological KD-IgG4-RD overlap and three had comorbid IgG4-RD were recognized. Thirteen patients underwent surgical resection, one received adjuvant therapy, and two received prednisolone monotherapy.ConclusionKD should be considered in patients with subcutaneous masses, eosinophilia, and elevated IgE levels. Biopsy remains the gold standard of diagnosis. Increased recruitment of IgG4+ plasma cells is a common feature. Consideration of IgG4-RD in all KD patients may be prudent

Beneficial Effect of the Traditional Chinese Drug Shu-Xue-Tong on Recovery of Spinal Cord Injury in the Rat

Shu-Xue-Tong (SXT) is a traditional Chinese drug widely used to ameliorate stagnation of blood flow, such as brain or myocardial infarction. Whether SXT may have therapeutic value for spinal cord injury (SCI), during which ischemia plays an important role in its pathology, remains to be elucidated. We hypothesized that SXT may promote SCI healing by improving spinal cord blood flow (SCBF), and a study was thus designed to explore this possibility. Twenty-five male Sprague-Dawley rats were used. SCI was induced by compression, and SXT was administrated 24 h postinjury for 14 successive days. The effects of SXT were assessed by means of laser-Doppler flowmetry, motor functional analysis (open-field walking and footprint analysis), and histological analysis (hematoxylin-eosin and thionin staining and NeuN immunohistochemistry). SXT significantly promoted SCBF of the contused spinal cord and enhanced the recovery of motor function. Histological analysis indicated that the lesion size was reduced, the pathological changes were ameliorated, and more neurons were preserved. Based on these results we conclude that SXT can effectively improve SCI

Identification of Genes Directly Responding to DLK1 Signaling in Callipyge Sheep

Background In food animal agriculture, there is a need to identify the mechanisms that can improve the efficiency of muscle growth and protein accretion. Callipyge sheep provide excellent machinery since the up-regulation of DLK1 and RTL1 results in extreme postnatal muscle hypertrophy in distinct muscles. The aim of this study is to distinguish the genes that directly respond to DLK1 and RTL1 signaling from the genes that change as the result of muscle specific effects. Results The quantitative PCR results indicated that DLK1 expression was significantly increased in hypertrophied muscles but not in non-hypertrophied muscles. However, RTL1 was up-regulated in both hypertrophied and non-hypertrophied muscles. Five genes, including PARK7, DNTTIP1, SLC22A3, METTL21E and PDE4D, were consistently co-expressed with DLK1, and therefore were possible transcriptional target genes responding to DLK1 signaling. Treatment of myoblast and myotubes with DLK1 protein induced an average of 1.6-fold and 1.4-fold increase in Dnttip1 and Pde4d expression respectively. Myh4 expression was significantly elevated in DLK1-treated myotubes, whereas the expression of Mettl21e was significantly increased in the DLK1-treated myoblasts but reduced in DLK1-treated myotubes. DLK1 treatment had no impact on Park7 expression. In addition, Park7 and Dnttip1 increased Myh4 and decreased Myh7 promoter activity, resemble to the effects of Dlk1. In contrast, expression of Mettl21e increased Myh7 and decreased Myh4 luciferase activity. Conclusion The study provided additional supports that RTL1 alone was insufficient to induce muscle hypertrophy and concluded that DLK1 was likely the primary effector of the hypertrophy phenotype. The results also suggested that DNTTIP1 and PDE4D were secondary effector genes responding to DLK1 signaling resulting in muscle fiber switch and muscular hypertrophy in callipyge lamb

Preparation of GHZ states via Grover's quantum searching algorithm

In this paper we propose an approach to prepare GHZ states of an arbitrary multi-particle system in terms of Grover's fast quantum searching algorithm. This approach can be regarded as an extension of the Grover's algorithm to find one or more items in an unsorted database.Comment: 9 pages, Email address: [email protected]

A Blueprint for Applications in Enterprise Information Portals

Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce, EC) is thoroughly changing business models of organizations (governments, corporations, and communities) and individuals the way of living and working. However, the major success will accrue to those companies that are willing to transform their organizations and business processes, which is the scope of e-Business. An Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) provides real time information and integrated applications to knowledge workers, employees, customers, business partners and the general public as well. Effective applications of EIP facilitate high quality strategic decisions. That is, an EIP can enhance an organization’s productivity, improve the collaboration to facilitate E-Commerce and gain competitive advantages. However, the EIP solutions are usually too expensive to small businesses. With Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) approach, this paper presents an economic way to design a low-cost EIP that leverages existing systems. Moreover, a prototype is implemented to show the feasibility. For the external data access, the web mining technology is utilized to mine some relevant and valuable web contents from the Internet and put these contents into the document warehouse. By combining the textual information inside the document warehouse and the numeric data from the data warehouse, competitive advantages can be provided over those who work with just the numbers

Epidemiology and management of gout in Taiwan: a nationwide population study

INTRODUCTION: Gout is the most common inflammatory arthritis worldwide and is the only type of chronic arthritis that potentially can be ‘cured’. However, data on gout incidence, prevalence and management, assessed at multiple time points in the same population, are sparse, particularly in Asian populations. The aim of this study was to describe trends in the epidemiology of gout in the general population of Taiwan. METHODS: The National Health Insurance Research Database was used to identify patients with gout and to estimate the prevalence and incidence of gout for each calendar year from 2005 to 2010. The pattern of gout management was also examined. RESULTS: Of 23,371,362 beneficiaries in 2010, there were 1,458,569 prevalent and 56,595 incident cases of gout, giving a prevalence of 6.24% (95% confidence interval (CI), 6.23% to 6.25%) and an incidence of 2.74 (95% CI, 2.72 to 2.76) per 1,000 person-years. The annual percentage change (APC) of the standardised prevalence was −0.7% (95% CI, −1.7% to 0.3%; P = 0.14), suggesting that the prevalence of gout was essentially the same throughout the study period. However, The APC of incidence was −13.4 (95% CI, −16.1 to −10.6) between 2005 and 2007 and −2.1 (95% CI, −10.4 to 7.1) between 2007 and 2010. Regions with the highest prevalence and incidence were eastern coastal counties and offshore islets, where indigenous people are clustered. Among prevalent gout cases in 2010, only 22.93% (95% CI, 22.87% to 23.00%) were prescribed urate-lowering treatment (ULT), which remained unchanged between 2005 and 2010 at an APC of 0.0 (95% CI, −3.8 to 4.0). Uricosuric agents were more commonly prescribed than xanthine oxidase inhibitors in Taiwan. CONCLUSIONS: In Taiwan, 1 in 16 people have gout. Whereas the incidence has decreased recently, the prevalence remains unchanged. Management of gout in Taiwan is poor, with only one in five affected people being treated with ULT

Early Blockade of TLRs MyD88-Dependent Pathway May Reduce Secondary Spinal Cord Injury in the Rats

To determine the role of toll-like receptors (TLRs) myeloid differentiation factor 88 (MyD88) dependent pathway in the spinal cord secondary injury, compression injury was made at T8 segment of the spinal cord in adult male Sprague-Dawley rats. Shown by RT-PCR, TLR4 mRNA in the spinal cord was quickly elevated after compression injury. Intramedullary injection of MyD88 inhibitory peptide (MIP) resulted in significant improvement in locomotor function recovery at various time points after surgery. Meanwhile, injury area, p38 phosphorylation, and proinflammation cytokines in the injured spinal cord were significantly reduced in MIP-treated animals, compared with control peptide (CP) group. These data suggest that TLRs MyD88-dependent pathway may play an important role in the development of secondary spinal cord injury, and inhibition of this pathway at early time after primary injury could effectively protect cells from inflammation and apoptosis and therefore improve the functional recovery