AlteredAvatar: Stylizing Dynamic 3D Avatars with Fast Style Adaptation

This paper presents a method that can quickly adapt dynamic 3D avatars to arbitrary text descriptions of novel styles. Among existing approaches for avatar stylization, direct optimization methods can produce excellent results for arbitrary styles but they are unpleasantly slow. Furthermore, they require redoing the optimization process from scratch for every new input. Fast approximation methods using feed-forward networks trained on a large dataset of style images can generate results for new inputs quickly, but tend not to generalize well to novel styles and fall short in quality. We therefore investigate a new approach, AlteredAvatar, that combines those two approaches using the meta-learning framework. In the inner loop, the model learns to optimize to match a single target style well; while in the outer loop, the model learns to stylize efficiently across many styles. After training, AlteredAvatar learns an initialization that can quickly adapt within a small number of update steps to a novel style, which can be given using texts, a reference image, or a combination of both. We show that AlteredAvatar can achieve a good balance between speed, flexibility and quality, while maintaining consistency across a wide range of novel views and facial expressions.Comment: 10 main pages, 14 figures. Project page: https://alteredavatar.github.i

RNA-destabilizing Factor Tristetraprolin Negatively Regulates NF-kappa B Signaling

Tristetraprolin (TTP) is a CCCH zinc finger-containing protein that destabilizes mRNA by binding to an AU-rich element. Mice deficient in TTP develop a severe inflammatory syndrome mainly because of overproduction of tumor necrosis factor alpha. We report here that TTP also negatively regulates NF-kappa B signaling at the transcriptional corepressor level, by which it may repress inflammatory gene transcription. TTP expression inhibited NF-kappa B-dependent transcription. However, overexpression of TTP did not affect reporter mRNA stability. Instead, TTP functioned as a corepressor of p65/NF-kappa B. In support of this concept, we found that TTP physically interacted with the p65 subunit of NF-kappa B and was also associated with HDAC1, -3, and -7 in vivo. Treatment with histone deacetylase inhibitors or small interfering RNA induced HDAC1 or HDAC3 knockdown completely or partly abolished the inhibitory activity of TTP on NF-kappa B reporter activation. Consistently, chromatin immuno-precipitation showed decreased recruitment of HDAC1 and increased recruitment of CREB-binding protein on the Mcp-1 promoter in TTP(-/-) cells compared with wild-type cells. Moreover, overexpression of TTP blocked CREB-binding protein-induced acetylation of p65/NF-kappa B. Taken together, these data suggest that TTP may also function in vivo as a modulator in suppressing the transcriptional activity of NF-kappa B

Enrichment of Polychlorinated Biphenyls from Aqueous Solutions Using Fe3O4 Grafted Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes with Poly Dimethyl Diallyl Ammonium Chloride

In this paper, Fe3O4 nanoparticles (Fe3O4 NPs) grafted carboxyl groups of multiwalled carbon nanotubes with cationic polyelectrolyte poly (dimethyldiallylammonium chloride) (PDDA) (MWCNTs-COO−/PDDA@Fe3O4), are successfully synthesized and used for the extraction of six kinds of major toxic polychorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from a large volume of water solution. The hydrophilicity of the PDDA cage can enhance the dispersibility of sorbents in water samples, and the superparamagnetism of the Fe3O4 NPs facilitate magnetic separation which directly led to the simplification of the extraction procedure. With the magnetic solid-phase extraction (MSPE) technique based on the MWCNTs-COO−/PDDA@Fe3O4 sorbents, it requires only 30 min to extract trace levels of PCBs from 500 mL water samples. When the eluate condensed to 1.0 mL, concentration factors for PCBs became over 500. The spiked recoveries of several real water samples for PCBs were in the range of 73.3–98.9% with relative standard deviations varying from 3.8% to 9.4%, reflecting good accuracy of the method. Therefore, preconcentration of trace level of PCBs by using this MWCNTs-COO−/PDDA@Fe3O4 sorbent, which are stable for multiple reuses, from water solution can be performed

Human Ecology, Process Philosophy and the Global Ecological Crisis

This paper argues that human ecology, based on process philosophy and challenging scientific materialism, is required to effectively confront the global ecological crisis now facing us

Alterations of DNA Methylation at GDNF Gene Promoter in the Ventral Tegmental Area of Adult Depression-Like Rats Induced by Maternal Deprivation

Objective: To study the expression and DNA methylation of the Glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) gene in the development of depression-like behaviors in rats experiencing maternal deprivation stress in early life.Methods: Newborn SD rats were randomly assigned to a normal control group (NOR) or maternal deprivation group (MD). An open field test (OPT), sucrose preference test (SPT), and a forced swimming test (FST) were used to evaluate rats' behaviors. Protein, mRNA, and methylation levels were measured by ELISA/Western blot, real-time PCR, and BiSulfte Amplicon sequencing PCR, respectively.Results: MD rats had significantly shorter total distance and more fecal pellets in OPT, a lower sucrose preference rate in SPT, and a longer immobility time in FST than NOR rats. Compared with NOR rats, MD rats showed a significantly higher plasma corticosterone (CORT) level. The levels of plasma dopamine (DA) and the GDNF were significantly lower in the MD rats than in NOR rats. In the ventral tegmental area (VTA) tissues, MD rats had a significantly higher level of methylation at the GDNF gene promoter than NOR rats. The expression of the GDNF mRNA and protein were significantly lower in MD rats than in NOR rats. The total distance was significantly correlated with plasma DA and GDNF, the DNA methylation level at the GDNF promoter and the GDNF mRNA level in the VTA. Fecal pellets showed a significant correlation with plasma CORT. The sucrose preference rate was significantly correlated with plasma DA, the DNA methylation level at the GDNF promoter and the GDNF mRNA level in the VTA. Immobility time showed a significant correlation with the plasma DA, the plasma GDNF and the GDNF mRNA level in the VTA.Conclusion: up-regulation of DNA methylation at the GDNF gene promotor and the subsequent down-regulation of the GDNF gene expression in the VTA, may be involved in the development of depression-like behaviors in rats experiencing MD in early life

Waste Heat Recovery from Diesel Engine Exhaust Using a Single-Screw Expander Organic Rankine Cycle System: Experimental Investigation of Exergy Destruction

The organic Rankine cycle is a mature small-scale power generation technology for harnessing low- to mid-temperature heat sources. However, the low efficiency of the cycle still hinders its widespread implementation. To optimize the cycle’s performance, it is crucial to identify the source and magnitude of losses within each component of the cycle. This study, thus, aims to investigate the irreversible losses and their effect on the performance of the system. A prototype organic Rankine cycle (ORC) with the exhaust of a diesel engine as the heat source was developed to experimentally investigate the system and ascertain the losses. The experiments were performed at steady-state conditions at different evaporation pressures from 1300 kPa to 1600 kPa. The exergy loss and exergetic efficiency of the individual component and the overall system was estimated from the experimentally measurement of the pressure, temperature, and mass flow rate. The results indicate that the exergy losses of the evaporator are almost 60 kW at different evaporation pressures and the exergy loss rate is from 69.1% to 65.1%, which accounted for most of the total exergy loss rate in the organic Rankine cycle system. Meanwhile, the highest shaft efficiency and exergetic efficiency of the screw expander are 49.8% and 38.4%, respectively, and the exergy losses and exergy loss rate of the pump and pipe are less than 0.5 kW and 1%. Due to the relatively higher exergy loss of the evaporator and the low efficiency of expander, the highest exergetic efficiency of the organic Rankine cycle system is about 10.8%. The study concludes that the maximum improvement potential lies in the evaporator, followed by the expander

Antiferromagnetic to Ferrimagnetic Phase Transition and Possible Phase Coexistence in Polar Magnets (Fe1−x_{1-x}Mnx_x)2_2Mo3_3O8_8

In the present work, magnetic properties of single crystal (Fe$_{1-x}$Mn$_x$)$_2$Mo$_3$O$_8$ ($0<x<1$) have been studied by performing extensive measurements. A detailed magnetic phase diagram is built up, in which antiferromagnetic state dominates for $x<0.25$ and ferrimagnetic phase arises for $x>0.3$. Meanwhile, sizeable electric polarization of spin origin is commonly observed in all samples, no matter what the magnetic state is. For the samples hosting a ferrimagnetic state, square-like magnetic hysteresis loops are revealed, while the remnant magnetization and coercive field can be tuned drastically by simply varying the Mn-content or temperature. Possible coexistence of the antiferromagnetic and ferrimagnetic phases is proposed to be responsible for the remarkable modulation of magnetic properties in the samples

Combining DI-ESI–MS and NMR datasets for metabolic profiling

Metabolomics datasets are commonly acquired by either mass spectrometry (MS) or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), despite their fundamental complementarity. In fact, combining MS and NMR datasets greatly improves the coverage of the metabolome and enhances the accuracy of metabolite identification, providing a detailed and high-throughput analysis of metabolic changes due to disease, drug treatment, or a variety of other environmental stimuli. Ideally, a single metabolomics sample would be simultaneously used for both MS and NMR analyses, minimizing the potential for variability between the two datasets. This necessitates the optimization of sample preparation, data collection and data handling protocols to effectively integrate direct-infusion MS data with one-dimensional (1D) 1H NMR spectra. To achieve this goal, we report for the first time the optimization of (i) metabolomics sample preparation for dual analysis by NMR and MS, (ii) high throughput, positive-ion direct infusion electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (DI-ESI-MS) for the analysis of complex metabolite mixtures, and (iii) data handling protocols to simultaneously analyze DI-ESI-MS and 1D 1H NMR spectral data using multiblock bilinear factorizations, namely multiblock principal component analysis (MB-PCA) and multiblock partial least squares (MB-PLS). Finally, we demonstrate the combined use of backscaled loadings, accurate mass measurements and tandem MS experiments to identify metabolites significantly contributing to class separation in MB-PLS-DA scores. We show that integration of NMR and DI-ESI-MS datasets yields a substantial improvement in the analysis of neurotoxin involvement in dopaminergic cell death