2,423 research outputs found
Does political conflict affect bilateral trade or vice versa? Evidence from Sino-U.S. relations
This paper investigates the dynamic causal relationship between
Sino-U.S. political conflict and bilateral trade using a time-varying
(bootstrap) Granger full-sample causality test and sub-sample rolling
window estimation. The result indicates that Sino-U.S. political conflict
and bilateral trade may interact in various ways. Bilateral trade
has both positive and negative effects on political conflict in several
sub-phases, and in turn, political conflict has the same impacts on
bilateral trade. In general, the relationship between Sino-U.S. political
conflict and bilateral trade is not always consistent with the
model of Polachek, which states bilateral trade has significantly
reduced political conflict. In the face of a severe economic situation,
China and the U.S. government should strengthen trade cooperation
and seek common ground of economic interests in order to
expand the improvement of political relations
Does bilateral political relations affect foreign direct investment?
This article employs the bootstrap Granger full-sample and subsample
rolling window estimation to explore the time-varying
property between bilateral political relations and foreign direct
investment based on Sino-Japanese relations. The result identifies
a one-way causal nexus running from bilateral political relations
to foreign direct investment. Bilateral political relations have both
positive and negative influences on foreign direct investment
inflows in different sub-stages, but merely negative impacts on
outflows. However, the reverse causality has not been proven,
which is inconsistent with the model of Polachek et al. that the
increased foreign direct investment is conducive to improving
bilateral political relations. We also divide the BPR into two
dimensions: leader’s visits and diplomatic conflicts to examine the
role of specific political actions. Leader’s visits can significantly
increase FDI inflows and outflows, but diplomatic conflicts have
less impact on FDI. China and Japan should increase dialogue to
ensure bilateral relations’ stability and seek common ground in
economic interests, ultimately providing investors with a favorable
political environment
Bioactive constituent characterization and antioxidant activity of ganoderma lucidum extract fractionated by supercritical carbon dioxide
Ganoderma lucidum has been recognized as a precious fungus in both Chinese and Japanese traditional medicine for centuries. It contains many bioactive ingredients such as triterpenoids and polysaccharides. The present study used supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) fractionation to fractionate Ganoderma lucidum extract into four fractions (R, F1, F2, & F3) and evaluate the correlation between the content of functional components and their antioxidant ability. Relatively high concentrations of the three types of bioactive constituents were simultaneously partitioned into different fractionation collecting vessels. The free radical scavenging ability was greatest in F1. The IC50 of DPPH scavenging ability was 0.90 mg/mL and that of ABTS radicals scavenging activity was 0.45 mg/mL. The correlation analysis of antioxidant ability with total triterpenoids and total polyphenols showed a positive relationship. In conclusion, this study showed that fractionation of Ganoderma lucidum extract using SC-CO2 fractionation technology was able to effectively partition its bioactive components including triterpenoids, polysaccharides and phenolic compounds and also to increase the antioxidant activities of the fractions
Intelligent diagnostic scheme for lung cancer screening with Raman spectra data by tensor network machine learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) has brought tremendous impacts on biomedical
sciences from academic researches to clinical applications, such as in
biomarkers' detection and diagnosis, optimization of treatment, and
identification of new therapeutic targets in drug discovery. However, the
contemporary AI technologies, particularly deep machine learning (ML), severely
suffer from non-interpretability, which might uncontrollably lead to incorrect
predictions. Interpretability is particularly crucial to ML for clinical
diagnosis as the consumers must gain necessary sense of security and trust from
firm grounds or convincing interpretations. In this work, we propose a
tensor-network (TN)-ML method to reliably predict lung cancer patients and
their stages via screening Raman spectra data of Volatile organic compounds
(VOCs) in exhaled breath, which are generally suitable as biomarkers and are
considered to be an ideal way for non-invasive lung cancer screening. The
prediction of TN-ML is based on the mutual distances of the breath samples
mapped to the quantum Hilbert space. Thanks to the quantum probabilistic
interpretation, the certainty of the predictions can be quantitatively
characterized. The accuracy of the samples with high certainty is almost
100. The incorrectly-classified samples exhibit obviously lower certainty,
and thus can be decipherably identified as anomalies, which will be handled by
human experts to guarantee high reliability. Our work sheds light on shifting
the ``AI for biomedical sciences'' from the conventional non-interpretable ML
schemes to the interpretable human-ML interactive approaches, for the purpose
of high accuracy and reliability.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure
MOAP-1 Mediates Fas-Induced Apoptosis in Liver by Facilitating tBid Recruitment to Mitochondria
SummaryFas apoptotic signaling regulates diverse physiological processes. Acute activation of Fas signaling triggers massive apoptosis in liver. Upon Fas receptor stimulation, the BH3-only protein Bid is cleaved into the active form, tBid. Subsequent tBid recruitment to mitochondria, which is facilitated by its receptor MTCH2 at the outer mitochondrial membrane (OMM), is a critical step for commitment to apoptosis via the effector proteins Bax or Bak. MOAP-1 is a Bax-binding protein enriched at the OMM. Here, we show that MOAP-1-deficient mice are resistant to Fas-induced hepatocellular apoptosis and lethality. In the absence of MOAP-1, mitochondrial accumulation of tBid is markedly impaired. MOAP-1 binds to MTCH2, and this interaction appears necessary for MTCH2 to engage tBid. These findings reveal a role for MOAP-1 in Fas signaling in the liver by promoting MTCH2-mediated tBid recruitment to mitochondria
Association of healthy lifestyle with incident cardiovascular diseases among hypertensive and normotensive Chinese adults
Background:Â Whether lifestyle improvement benefits in reducing cardiovascular diseases (CVD) events extend to hypertensive patients and whether these benefits differ between hypertensive and normotensive individuals is unclear. This study aimed to investigate the associations of an overall healthy lifestyle with the subsequent development of CVD among participants with hypertension and normotension.
Methods:Â Using data from the Suzhou subcohort of the China Kadoorie Biobank study of 51,929 participants, this study defined five healthy lifestyle factors as nonsmoking or quitting for reasons other than illness; nonexcessive alcohol intake; relatively higher physical activity level; a relatively healthy diet; and having a standard waist circumference and body mass index. We estimated the associations of these lifestyle factors with CVD, ischemic heart disease (IHD) and ischemic stroke (IS).
Results: During a follow-up of 10.1 years, this study documented 6,151 CVD incidence events, 1,304 IHD incidence events, and 2,243 IS incidence events. Compared to those with 0–1 healthy lifestyle factors, HRs for those with 4–5 healthy factors were 0.71 (95% CI: 0.62, 0.81) for CVD, 0.56 (95% CI: 0.42, 0.75) for IHD, and 0.63 (95% CI: 0.51, 0.79) for IS among hypertensive participants. However, we did not observe this association among normotensive participants. Stratified analyses showed that the association between a healthy lifestyle and IHD risk was stronger among younger participants, and the association with IS risk was stronger among hypertensive individuals with lower household incomes.
Conclusion:Â Adherence to a healthy lifestyle pattern is associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular diseases among hypertensive patients, but this benefit is not as pronounced among normotensive patients
Improved Breath Phase and Continuous Adventitious Sound Detection in Lung and Tracheal Sound Using Mixed Set Training and Domain Adaptation
Previously, we established a lung sound database, HF_Lung_V2 and proposed
convolutional bidirectional gated recurrent unit (CNN-BiGRU) models with
adequate ability for inhalation, exhalation, continuous adventitious sound
(CAS), and discontinuous adventitious sound detection in the lung sound. In
this study, we proceeded to build a tracheal sound database, HF_Tracheal_V1,
containing 11107 of 15-second tracheal sound recordings, 23087 inhalation
labels, 16728 exhalation labels, and 6874 CAS labels. The tracheal sound in
HF_Tracheal_V1 and the lung sound in HF_Lung_V2 were either combined or used
alone to train the CNN-BiGRU models for respective lung and tracheal sound
analysis. Different training strategies were investigated and compared: (1)
using full training (training from scratch) to train the lung sound models
using lung sound alone and train the tracheal sound models using tracheal sound
alone, (2) using a mixed set that contains both the lung and tracheal sound to
train the models, and (3) using domain adaptation that finetuned the
pre-trained lung sound models with the tracheal sound data and vice versa.
Results showed that the models trained only by lung sound performed poorly in
the tracheal sound analysis and vice versa. However, the mixed set training and
domain adaptation can improve the performance of exhalation and CAS detection
in the lung sound, and inhalation, exhalation, and CAS detection in the
tracheal sound compared to positive controls (lung models trained only by lung
sound and vice versa). Especially, a model derived from the mixed set training
prevails in the situation of killing two birds with one stone.Comment: To be submitted, 31 pages, 6 figures, 5 table
Initial experience with an electron FLASH research extension (FLEX) for the Clinac system
Purpose: Radiotherapy delivered at ultra-high-dose-rates (≥40 Gy/s), that is, FLASH, has the potential to effectively widen the therapeutic window and considerably improve the care of cancer patients. The underlying mechanism of the FLASH effect is not well understood, and commercial systems capable of delivering such dose rates are scarce. The purpose of this study was to perform the initial acceptance and commissioning tests of an electron FLASH research product for preclinical studies.
Methods: A linear accelerator (Clinac 23EX) was modified to include a nonclinical FLASH research extension (the Clinac-FLEX system) by Varian, a Siemens Healthineers company (Palo Alto, CA) capable of delivering a 16 MeV electron beam with FLASH and conventional dose rates. The acceptance, commissioning, and dosimetric characterization of the FLEX system was performed using radiochromic film, optically stimulated luminescent dosimeters, and a plane-parallel ionization chamber. A radiation survey was conducted for which the shielding of the pre-existing vault was deemed sufficient.
Results: The Clinac-FLEX system is capable of delivering a 16 MeV electron FLASH beam of approximately 1 Gy/pulse at isocenter and reached amaximum dose rate \u3e3.8 Gy/pulse near the upper accessory mount on the linac gantry. The percent depth dose curves of the 16 MeV FLASH and conventional modes for the 10 Ă— 10 cm2 applicator agreed within 0.5 mm at a range of 50% of the maximum dose. Their respective profiles agreed well in terms of flatness but deviated for field sizes \u3e10 Ă— 10 cm2. The output stability of the FLASH system exhibited a dose deviation of \u3c1%.Preliminary cell studies showed that the FLASH dose rate (180 Gy/s) had much less impact on the cell morphology of 76N breast normal cells compared to the non-FLASH dose rate (18 Gy/s), which induced large-size cells.
Conclusion: Our studies characterized the non-clinical Clinac-FLEX system as a viable solution to conduct FLASH research that could substantially increase access to ultra-high-dose-rate capabilities for scientists
Simplified Models for LHC New Physics Searches
This document proposes a collection of simplified models relevant to the
design of new-physics searches at the LHC and the characterization of their
results. Both ATLAS and CMS have already presented some results in terms of
simplified models, and we encourage them to continue and expand this effort,
which supplements both signature-based results and benchmark model
interpretations. A simplified model is defined by an effective Lagrangian
describing the interactions of a small number of new particles. Simplified
models can equally well be described by a small number of masses and
cross-sections. These parameters are directly related to collider physics
observables, making simplified models a particularly effective framework for
evaluating searches and a useful starting point for characterizing positive
signals of new physics. This document serves as an official summary of the
results from the "Topologies for Early LHC Searches" workshop, held at SLAC in
September of 2010, the purpose of which was to develop a set of representative
models that can be used to cover all relevant phase space in experimental
searches. Particular emphasis is placed on searches relevant for the first
~50-500 pb-1 of data and those motivated by supersymmetric models. This note
largely summarizes material posted at http://lhcnewphysics.org/, which includes
simplified model definitions, Monte Carlo material, and supporting contacts
within the theory community. We also comment on future developments that may be
useful as more data is gathered and analyzed by the experiments.Comment: 40 pages, 2 figures. This document is the official summary of results
from "Topologies for Early LHC Searches" workshop (SLAC, September 2010).
Supplementary material can be found at http://lhcnewphysics.or
- …