Determinants of Chinese cross-border M&As

This paper focuses on two of the key determinants of Chinese cross-border M&A performance, industry preference and currency appreciation. Our results show that although resource-related bidders may be motivated to pursue national strategic goals, they do not sacrifice their shareholders’ wealth. The substantial RMB appreciation following the exchange rate reform leads to higher bidder abnormal returns in the short-term, with no long-term reversal. We find that the insignificant long-term abnormal returns are mainly due to the enhanced empire building invectives and other agency costs of cash-rich firms in some of the currency-driven acquisitions

Probabilistic Single-Valued (Interval) Neutrosophic Hesitant Fuzzy Set and Its Application in Multi-Attribute Decision Making

The uncertainty and concurrence of randomness are considered when many practical problems are dealt with. To describe the aleatory uncertainty and imprecision in a neutrosophic environment and prevent the obliteration of more data, the concept of the probabilistic single-valued (interval) neutrosophic hesitant fuzzy set is introduced

PO-273 Exercise, myocardial insulin resistance and myostatin

Objective  Myostatin (MSTN) is a member of the TGF-β superfamily and is a negative regulator of skeletal muscle growth. MSTN is also expressed in other tissues such as heart and fat. The purpose of this study was to elucidate the occurrence of myocardial IR caused by myocardial MSTN expression, and to elucidate the regulation of MSTN expression by exercise and improve myocardial IR status and myocardial interstitial fibrosis. Methods The literatures on exercise, myocardial IR, and myocardial MSTN published in recent years were reviewed and summarized. Results 1.Myostatin, which is rarely expressed in myocardium under normal conditions, the appropriate amount of MSTN expression has anti-cardiac hypertrophy, and excessive MSTN expression can cause various cardiovascular diseases. In the IR state, the expression of myocardial inflammatory factors is increased, and MSTN is highly expressed. MSTN acts on the myocardium through various pathways, leading to the occurrence of myocardial fibrosis.  In the IR state, possible pathways for inducing high expression of MSTN include: (1) inflammatory factor TNF-α is elevated, and MSTN expression is induced by P38MAPK and NF-KB; (2) The transcription factor Smad-2/3/4 up-regulates the MSTN promoter activity; (3) Glucocorticoid up-regulates MSTN expression; (4) IGF-1 up-regulates MSTN expression via p38MAPK and transcription factor MEF-2; (5) AngII up-regulates MSTN via Ang1 receptor, p38MAPK and MEF-2;(6) urotensin-II and urocortin can stimulate MSTN expression;(7) The ERK-1/2-MEF-2 pathway up-regulates MSTN expression.  3. Possible pathways by which MSTN acts on the myocardium include:(1) MSTN induces Smad2/3 overexpression; (2) MSTN activates the NF-KB pathway; (3) MSTN activates miR-1 expression, inhibits HSP70, and decreases pAkt levels; (4) MSTN inhibits the PI3K-Akt pathway, leading to induction or damage of the downstream pathway.  Regular endurance exercise and resistance exercise improve myocardial IR and myocardial interstitial fibrosis involved in MSTN. This effect is mainly dependent on exercise can effectively improve the body's chronic inflammatory state, down-regulate the MSTN superior inducer, resulting in a series of cascade reactions. Conclusions 1.MSTN expression in myocardial tissue is dose-dependent,proper expression of MSTN in the myocardium can prevent cardiac hypertrophy, and overexpression of MSTN can lead to various cardiovascular diseases. 2.Under the hyperglycemia and inflammation state, it can induce high expression of MSTN. After high expression of myocardial MSTN, it can participate in myocardial IR and can lead to myocardial interstitial fibrosis. 3. Exercise can effectively improve the chronic inflammatory state of the body, down-regulate the level of MSTN induction, improve myocardial IR status and IR-induced myocardial interstitial fibrosis. &nbsp

Single-Cell RNA Sequencing of hESC-Derived 3D Retinal Organoids Reveals Novel Genes Regulating RPC Commitment in Early Human Retinogenesis.

The development of the mammalian retina is a complicated process involving the generation of distinct types of neurons from retinal progenitor cells (RPCs) in a spatiotemporal-specific manner. The progression of RPCs during retinogenesis includes RPC proliferation, cell-fate commitment, and specific neuronal differentiation. In this study, by performing single-cell RNA sequencing of cells isolated from human embryonic stem cell (hESC)-derived 3D retinal organoids, we successfully deconstructed the temporal progression of RPCs during early human retinogenesis. We identified two distinctive subtypes of RPCs with unique molecular profiles, namely multipotent RPCs and neurogenic RPCs. We found that genes related to the Notch and Wnt signaling pathways, as well as chromatin remodeling, were dynamically regulated during RPC commitment. Interestingly, our analysis identified that CCND1, a G1-phase cell-cycle regulator, was coexpressed with ASCL1 in a cell-cycle-independent manner. Temporally controlled overexpression of CCND1 in retinal organoids demonstrated a role for CCND1 in promoting early retinal neurogenesis. Together, our results revealed critical pathways and novel genes in early retinogenesis of humans

Learn Single-horizon Disease Evolution for Predictive Generation of Post-therapeutic Neovascular Age-related Macular Degeneration

Most of the existing disease prediction methods in the field of medical image processing fall into two classes, namely image-to-category predictions and image-to-parameter predictions. Few works have focused on image-to-image predictions. Different from multi-horizon predictions in other fields, ophthalmologists prefer to show more confidence in single-horizon predictions due to the low tolerance of predictive risk. We propose a single-horizon disease evolution network (SHENet) to predictively generate post-therapeutic SD-OCT images by inputting pre-therapeutic SD-OCT images with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD). In SHENet, a feature encoder converts the input SD-OCT images to deep features, then a graph evolution module predicts the process of disease evolution in high-dimensional latent space and outputs the predicted deep features, and lastly, feature decoder recovers the predicted deep features to SD-OCT images. We further propose an evolution reinforcement module to ensure the effectiveness of disease evolution learning and obtain realistic SD-OCT images by adversarial training. SHENet is validated on 383 SD-OCT cubes of 22 nAMD patients based on three well-designed schemes based on the quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Compared with other generative methods, the generative SD-OCT images of SHENet have the highest image quality. Besides, SHENet achieves the best structure protection and content prediction. Qualitative evaluations also demonstrate that SHENet has a better visual effect than other methods. SHENet can generate post-therapeutic SD-OCT images with both high prediction performance and good image quality, which has great potential to help ophthalmologists forecast the therapeutic effect of nAMD

Fatigue equation of cement-treated aggregate base materials under a true stress ratio

The objective of this article is to establish a fatigue equation based on the true stress ratio for cement-treated aggregate base materials. The true stress ratio herein means the ratio of the stress and the true strength of the cement-treated aggregate base materials related to loading rates and curing times. The unconfined compressive strength tests and compressive resilience modulus tests were carried out under various loading rates and curing times of 3, 7, 14, 28, 60, 90 days, respectively. According to the test results, the relationship between the unconfined compressive strength (a mix design parameter in China) and the compressive resilience modulus (a structural design parameter and the construction quality control parameter in China) of the cement-treated aggregate base material with different curing times was established. However, it was found that the strengths varied with the loading rates, which is not reflected in the existing fatigue equations. Therefore, it is questionable to obtain the stress ratio of fatigue tests with a fixed strength value obtained from the standard strength test where the loading rate is fixed (in China, the fixed loading rate is 1 mm/min for cement-treated aggregate base materials). Thus, in this paper, the four-point bending strength (i.e., flexural strength) test was carried out at different loading rates to resolve such deficiencies. Based on the strength test results at different loading rates, the true stress ratio of the fatigue test corresponding to the fatigue loading rate can be calculated. Then the four-point bending fatigue test was conducted to establish an improved fatigue equation characterized by the true stress ratio. The results show that the patterns of variation for unconfined compressive strength increasing with the curing time were similar to that of the compressive resilience modulus. The fatigue equation curve based on the true stress ratio can be extended to the strength failure point of (1, 1), where both the true stress ratio and the fatigue life value are one. The internal relationship between the strength failure and the fatigue failure was unified. This article provides a theoretical method and basis for unifying the mix design parameters and the construction quality control parameters