363 research outputs found

    The Primacy-of-Warmth Effect on Spontaneous Trait Inferences and the Moderating Role of Trait Valence: Evidence From Chinese Undergraduates

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    Research has shown that warmth and competence are the fundamental content dimensions underlying social judgment, and warmth judgments are primary. However, the overwhelming majority of research concerning “primacy-of-warmth” rests on trait judgment or lexical recognition, and little attention has been paid to spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) that are made on exposure to trait-implying behaviors. Two studies were performed to examine the primacy-of-warmth effect on STIs and to further explore whether trait valence moderates the effect. Consistent with our expectations, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 (for spontaneous trait activation and spontaneous trait binding, respectively) consistently demonstrated the primacy-of-warmth on STIs. Participants were more likely to draw STIs from behaviors implying warmth traits than those implying competence traits. Moreover, the primacy-of-warmth effect on STIs was moderated by trait valence. In concrete terms, participants were more likely to draw STIs from negative warmth behavioral sentences than negative competence behavioral sentences, whereas participants draw STIs from positive warmth behavioral sentences and from positive competence behavioral sentences equally. An original contribution made by our study is that we obtained the primacy-of-warmth effect on STIs, providing further evidence for the primacy-of-warmth effect in the domain of implicit social cognition

    Synthesis of dental resins using diatomite and nano-sized SiO2 and TiO2

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    AbstractThe mechanical properties of dental composites were improved by porous diatomite and nano-sized silica (OX-50) used as co-fillers. The resin composites, filled with silanized OX-50 and silanized diatomite (40:60wt/wt), presented the best flexural strength (133.1MPa), elastic modulus (9.5GPa) and Vickers microhardness (104.0HV). Besides these, TiO2 nanoparticles were introduced to tune the dental resin composites colours which were valued by the CIE-Lab system. The colour parameters (L⁎, a⁎, b⁎) showed that the colour changes of resin composites could be perceived obviously, when 300–400nm TiO2 particles were introduced as fillers. The resin composite, filled with 0.5wt% TiO2, exhibited both clear discolouration (ΔE⁎=3.22) and high mechanical strength. Using scanning electron microscope (SEM) equipped with an energy dispersive X-ray (EDX), the titanium elemental mapping results indicated that the TiO2 particles were distributed evenly in the prepared dental composites

    Homogenisation of water and sediment bacterial communities in a shallow lake (lake Balihe, China)

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    Planktonic and benthic bacterial communities hold central roles in the functioning of freshwater ecosystems and mediate key ecosystem services such as primary production and nutrient remineralisation. Although it is clear that such communities vary in composition both within and between lakes, the environmental factors and processes shaping the diversity and composition of freshwater bacteria are still not fully understood. In order to assess seasonal and spatial variability in lake bacterial communities and identify environmental factors underpinning biogeographical patterns, we performed a large-scale sampling campaign with paired water and sediment sample collection at 18 locations during four seasons in Lake Balihe, a subtropical shallow fish-farming lake in mid-eastern China. Pelagic and benthic bacterial communities were distinctly different in terms of diversity, taxonomic composition and community structure, with Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Cyanobacteria and Alphaproteobacteria dominating lake water, and Acidobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Chloroflexi, Gammaproteobacteria and Deltaproteobacteria dominating sediment. Nevertheless, these two communities had stronger spatial concordance and overlap in taxa during spring and autumn seasons. Together, the main drivers of both the spatial and temporal variations in Lake Balihe bacterial communities were identified as water temperature, turbidity, nitrogen and phosphorus availability, and thermal stratification controlled by wind-mixing and activity of the dense farmed fish populations. Notably, populations affiliated with Firmicutes, known to be abundant in fish gut microbiome, were especially abundant in the summer season and locations where high fish biomass was found, suggesting a potential link between fish gut microbiome and the pelagic bacterial communities. Our findings demonstrated seasonal homogenisation of pelagic and benthic bacterial communities linked to marked shifts in a set of seasonally-driven environmental variables including water temperature and nutrient availability

    Evaluation of Performance of Background Traffic-based CMT-SCTP with Active Queue Management Algorithms

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    Abstract Existing researches on performance analysis of SCTP's Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT-SCTP) usually use DropTail algorithm as queue management algorithm without considering the impact of the background traffic. However, the background traffic of realistic network environments has an important impact on the QoS of SCTP. Besides, more and more Active Queue Management (AQM) algorithms have been proposed as a router-based mechanism for early congestion detection to keep the stability of the whole network. This paper investigates the effect of background traffic on the performance of CMT-SCTP, and evaluates the performance of CMT-SCTP under two realistic simulation topologies with reasonable background traffic and different AQM algorithms in NS-2. The simulation results show that: 1) the performance of CMT-SCTP depends on characteristic of background traffic; and 2) the different AQM algorithms used as queue management algorithm under same background traffic have the different effects. Finally, this paper summarizes the proposals to satisfy the QoS requirements in terms of throughput, end-to-end packet delay and loss rate. Since CMT-PF2 is recommended by RFC4960 but without taking impact of cross traffic into account. In the second part, we use the most promising topology which meets the developing network and base on result of analysis mentioned in the first part to analyze the performance CMT-PF1/2/3/4 played respectively, in this part, the most common scenario, symmetric CMT-SCTP, is adopted and CMT-PF algorithm is turned on. A conclusion had been nailed down that, CMT-PF3 can get more advantage in terms of average throughput than CMT-PF2 which is recommended by RFC4960. Per reasonable analyzing, we lastly recommend a more reasonable resolution for realistic network in order to reaching more satisfied QoS

    Notch1 promotes resistance to cisplatin by up-regulating Ecto-5'-nucleotidase (CD73) in triple-negative breast cancer cells

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    Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive molecular subtype that due to lack of druggable targets is treated with chemotherapy as standard of care. However, TNBC is prone to chemoresistance and associates with poor survival. The aim of this study was to explore the molecular mechanisms of chemoresistance in TNBC. Firstly, we found that the mRNA expression of Notch1 and CD73 in cisplatin-treated patient material associated with poor clinical outcome. Further, both were upregulated at the protein level in cisplatin-resistant TNBC cell lines. Overexpression of Notch1 intracellular domain (termed N1ICD) increased expression of CD73, whereas knockdown of Notch1 decreased CD73 expression. Using chromatin immunoprecipitation and Dual-Luciferase assay it was identified that N1ICD directly bound the CD73 promoter and activated transcription. Taken together, these findings suggest CD73 as a direct downstream target of Notch1, providing an additional layer to the mechanisms underlying Notch1-mediated cisplatin resistance in TNBC.</p

    γδT Cells Suppress Liver Fibrosis via Strong Cytolysis and Enhanced NK Cell-Mediated Cytotoxicity Against Hepatic Stellate Cells

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    Liver fibrosis is the excessive accumulation of extracellular matrix proteins, resulting from maladaptive wound healing responses to chronic liver injury. γδT cells are important in chronic liver injury pathogenesis and subsequent liver fibrosis; however, their role and underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. The present study aims to assess whether γδT cells contribute to liver fibrosis regression. Using a carbon tetrachloride (CCl4)-induced murine model of liver fibrosis in wild-type (WT) and γδT cell deficient (TCRδ−/−) mice, we demonstrated that γδT cells protected against liver fibrosis and exhibited strong cytotoxicity against activated hepatic stellate cells (HSCs). Further study show that chronic liver inflammation promoted hepatic γδT cells to express NKp46, which contribute to the direct killing of activated HSCs by γδT cells. Moreover, we identified that an IFNγ-producing γδT cell subset (γδT1) cells exhibited stronger cytotoxicity against activated HSCs than the IL-17-producing subset (γδT17) cells upon chronic liver injury. In addition, γδT cells promoted the anti-fibrotic ability of conventional natural killer (cNK) cells and liver-resident NK (lrNK) cells by enhancing their cytotoxicity against activated HSCs. The cell crosstalk between γδT and NK cells was shown to depend partly on co-stimulatory receptor 4-1BB (CD137) engagement. In conclusion, our data confirmed the protective effects of γδT cells, especially the γδT1 subset, by directly killing activated HSCs and increasing NK cell-mediated cytotoxicity against activated HSCs in CCl4-induced liver fibrosis, which suggest valuable therapeutic targets to treat liver fibrosis

    Effect of void-carbon on blue-shifted luminescence in TADF molecules by theoretical simulations

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    Thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) molecules have a theoretical 100% photoluminescence quantum yield in comparison with traditional fluorescent materials, leading to broad application in organic light-emitting diode (OLED). However, the application of TADF molecules with conjugated donor-acceptor structures in blue OLED remains a challenge due to their generally narrow energy gap between frontier molecular orbitals. Recently, a strategy has been approved in the improvement of the performance in TADF, in which void-carbon atoms between donor and acceptor fragments (donor-void-acceptor (D-v-A)) could regulate blue light emission. In this study, we first select three reported isomers followed by two proposed D-v-A TADF isomers to verify the feasibility of the void-carbon strategy through evaluation of the electronic structures in the excited state and photophysical properties. We further proposed a series of TADF molecules by replacing different donor and acceptor fragments to assess the applicability of the void-carbon strategy from the aspect of simulations in electronic structures, different properties of donor and acceptor fragments, photophysical properties, and analysis in the molecular conjugation. The results indicate that void-carbon strategy has conditional feasibility and applicability. Donor-acceptor molecular properties could be tuned through void-carbon strategy on aromatic acceptor fragments during the selection of promising candidates of TADF molecules. However, the void-carbon strategy does not work for the molecules with antiaromatic acceptor fragments, where the steric hindrance of the molecules plays a dominant role. Our work provides insightful guidance for the design of the blue-emission TADF molecules

    Twist Promotes Tumor Metastasis in Basal-Like Breast Cancer by Transcriptionally Upregulating ROR1

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    Rationale: Twist is a key transcription factor for induction of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), which promotes cell migration, invasion, and cancer metastasis, confers cancer cells with stem cell-like characteristics, and provides therapeutic resistance. However, the functional roles and targeted genes of Twist in EMT and cancer progression remain elusive. Methods: The potential targeted genes of Twist were identified from the global transcriptomes of T47D/Twist cells by microarray analysis. EMT phenotype was detected by western blotting and immunofluorescence of marker proteins. The dual-luciferase reporter and chromatin immunoprecipitation assays were employed to observe the direct transcriptional induction of ROR1 by Twist. A lung metastasis model was used to study the pro-metastatic role of Twist and ROR1 by injecting MDA-MB-231 cells into tail vein of nude mice. Bio-informatics analysis was utilized to measure the metastasis-free survival of breast cancer patients. Results: Twist protein was proved to directly activate the transcription of ROR1 gene, a receptor of Wnt5a in non-canonical WNT signaling pathway. Silencing of ROR1 inhibited EMT process, cell migration, invasion, and cancer metastasis of basal-like breast cancer (BLBC) cells. Knockdown of ROR1 also ameliorated the pro-metastatic effect of Twist. Furthermore, analyses of clinical specimens indicated that high expression of both ROR1 and Twist tightly correlates with poor metastasis-free survival of breast cancer patients. Conclusion: ROR1 is a targeted gene of Twist. Twist/ROR1 signaling is critical for invasion and metastasis of BLBC cells

    Prevalence of iron-deficiency anemia in pregnant women with various thalassemia genotypes: Thoughts on iron supplementation in pregnant women with thalassemia genes

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    BackgroundThere are limited studies on iron-deficiency anemia (IDA) in carriers of various thalassemia genotypes. However, for pregnant women (PW) with high iron demand, ignoring the phenomenon of carrying the thalassemia genes combined with IDA may lead to adverse pregnancy outcomes.MethodsThe hematological phenotype indexes of 15,051 PW who received a prenatal diagnosis of thalassemia in our hospital were analyzed, and the plasma ferritin (PF) of 714 anemic pregnant women (APW) was determined.ResultsThe results showed that 87.43% of APW without thalassemia suffered from IDA. Among APW with various thalassemia genotypes, we found that 40.00∼77.78% of subjects with α-thalassemia silent genotypes [αCS (or QS)α/αα (40.00%), –α3.7(or4.2)/αα (57.65%), and αWSα/αα (77.78%)] and 18.18∼84.21% of subjects with α-thalassemia minor genotypes [αCS (or QS)α/–α3.7(or4.2) (18.18%), –α3.7(or4.2)/–α3.7(or4.2) (40.00%), αα/–SEA (44.55%), and αWSα/–α3.7(or4.2) (84.21%)] developed IDA, while in subjects with α-thalassemia intermedia genotypes, only αWSα/–SEA was associated with IDA, with an incidence of 16.67%. However, the incidence of IDA in APW with common β-thalassemia minor genotypes (βCD17(A&gt;T)/β, βCD41/42 (–TTCT)/β, βCD71/72(+A)/β, βIVS–II–654(C&gt;T)/β, and β–28(A&gt;G)/β) was less than 10.85%. In addition, the APW with β-thalassemia minor had a higher PF level than the APW without thalassemia.ConclusionOur study is the first to reveal differences in the prevalence of IDA among PW with various thalassemia genotypes, indicating that the possibility of IDA should be fully considered when managing PW with α-thalassemia silent or minor genotypes in high-risk areas, and that iron supplementation should be monitored dynamically for PW with β-thalassemia minor genotypes
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