A Broad Range Triboelectric Stiffness Sensor for Variable Inclusions Recognition.

With the development of artificial intelligence, stiffness sensors are extensively utilized in various fields, and their integration with robots for automated palpation has gained significant attention. This study presents a broad range self-powered stiffness sensor based on the triboelectric nanogenerator (Stiff-TENG) for variable inclusions in soft objects detection. The Stiff-TENG employs a stacked structure comprising an indium tin oxide film, an elastic sponge, a fluorinated ethylene propylene film with a conductive ink electrode, and two acrylic pieces with a shielding layer. Through the decoupling method, the Stiff-TENG achieves stiffness detection of objects within 1.0 s. The output performance and characteristics of the TENG for different stiffness objects under 4 mm displacement are analyzed. The Stiff-TENG is successfully used to detect the heterogeneous stiffness structures, enabling effective recognition of variable inclusions in soft object, reaching a recognition accuracy of 99.7%. Furthermore, its adaptability makes it well-suited for the detection of pathological conditions within the human body, as pathological tissues often exhibit changes in the stiffness of internal organs. This research highlights the innovative applications of TENG and thereby showcases its immense potential in healthcare applications such as palpation which assesses pathological conditions based on organ stiffness

Seeing What You Miss: Vision-Language Pre-training with Semantic Completion Learning

Cross-modal alignment is essential for vision-language pre-training (VLP) models to learn the correct corresponding information across different modalities. For this purpose, inspired by the success of masked language modeling (MLM) tasks in the NLP pre-training area, numerous masked modeling tasks have been proposed for VLP to further promote cross-modal interactions. The core idea of previous masked modeling tasks is to focus on reconstructing the masked tokens based on visible context for learning local-to-local alignment. However, most of them pay little attention to the global semantic features generated for the masked data, resulting in the limited cross-modal alignment ability of global representations. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel Semantic Completion Learning (SCL) task, complementary to existing masked modeling tasks, to facilitate global-to-local alignment. Specifically, the SCL task complements the missing semantics of masked data by capturing the corresponding information from the other modality, promoting learning more representative global features which have a great impact on the performance of downstream tasks. Moreover, we present a flexible vision encoder, which enables our model to perform image-text and video-text multimodal tasks simultaneously. Experimental results show that our proposed method obtains state-of-the-art performance on various vision-language benchmarks, such as visual question answering, image-text retrieval, and video-text retrieval

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Impact of Storage Temperature on Green Tea Quality: Insights from Sensory Analysis and Chemical Composition

This study investigated the impact of storage temperatures (−20 °C, room temperature, and 40 °C) on the sensory evaluation, metabolites, and volatile compounds of green tea stored for 12 months. The sensory evaluation revealed that tea samples stored at −20 °C retained their emerald green colour, tender aroma, and refreshing taste. Green tea biochemical constituents, including water extracts and total free amino acids, were measured by Chinese National Standard Methods (GB/T 8305-2013 and GB/T 8314-2013). Tea polyphenols and flavonoids were determined using spectrophotometric methods, while phytochemicals were detected using validated HPLC, and volatile compounds were detected using validated gas chromatography coupled with triple quadrupole mass spectrometry. The analysis showed that tea polyphenols were highest at −20 °C, and flavonoids were significantly reduced at higher temperatures. A similar trend was observed for amino acids, soluble sugar content, and water extracts. Tea catechins, including (-)-epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) and (-)-gallocatechin gallate (GCG), were highest at −20 °C, showing their susceptibility to temperature. A volatile compound analysis revealed distinct profiles with variations in the abundance of compounds, such as di-methyl sulfide, phenyl ethyl alcohol, indole, and benzaldehyde. This study identifies temperature-sensitive compounds, providing insights into the mechanisms underlying tea quality deterioration during storage

The gamma-aminobutyric acid type B (GABA_B) receptor agonist baclofen inhibits morphine sensitization by decreasing the dopamine level in rat nucleus accumbens

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Repeated morphine exposure can induce behavioral sensitization. There are evidences have shown that central gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) system is involved in morphine dependence. However, the effect of a GABA_B receptor agonist baclofen on morphine-induced behavioral sensitization in rats is unclear.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We used morphine-induced behavioral sensitization model in rat to investigate the effects of baclofen on behavioral sensitization. Moreover, dopamine release in the shell of the nucleus accumbens was evaluated using microdialysis assay in vivo.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The present study demonstrated that morphine challenge (3 mg/kg, s.c.) obviously enhanced the locomotor activity following 4-day consecutive morphine administration and 3-day withdrawal period, which indicated the expression of morphine sensitization. In addition, chronic treatment with baclofen (2.5, 5 mg/kg) significantly inhibited the development of morphine sensitization. It was also found that morphine challenge 3 days after repeated morphine administration produced a significant increase of extracellular dopamine release in nucleus accumbens. Furthermore, chronic treatment with baclofen decreased the dopamine release induced by morphine challenge.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our results indicated that gamma-aminobutyric acid system plays an important role in the morphine sensitization in rat and suggested that behavioral sensitization is a promising model to study the mechanism underlying drug abuse.</p

Preparation and Photocatalysis of CuO/Bentonite Based on Adsorption and Photocatalytic Activity

A CuO/bentonite composite photocatalyst was prepared to fully utilize the adsorption capacity of bentonite and the photocatalytic activity of CuO. CuO and bentonite were chosen as a photocatalyst due to the excellent optical property of CuO and large specific surface area of bentonite, together with their high stability and low production cost. The sample was characterized by XRD, SEM, and BET. The effects of several factors on degradation process were investigated such as dosage of H2O2, irradiation time, pH of the solution, and dosage of catalyst. The optimum conditions for decolorization of methylene blue solution by CuO/bentonite were determined. Under optimal conditions, the decolorization efficiency of methylene blue by a 1.4% CuO/bentonite (400 °C) composite photocatalyst under visible irradiation at 240 min reached 96.98%. The degradation process follow edpseudo-second-order kinetics. The photocatalytic mechanism is discussed in detail. This composite structure provides a new solution to the cycle and aggregation of the photocatalyst in water

Pull-based distributed event-triggered circle formation control for multi-agent systems with directed topologies

This paper investigates a circle formation control problem for multi-agent systems with directed topologies via pull-based distributed event-triggered control principles. Firstly, for scenarios of continuous communication, a pull-based distributed event-triggered principle is proposed. It is proved that if the communication topology is irreducible and has a directed spanning tree, the event-triggered coupling continuous communication can lead multiple agents to form a desired circle formation. Then, the results are extended to discontinuous communication scenarios, where all the agents use a model of their neighborhoods to generate self-triggered instants without monitoring continuously, update the local controller here, and if necessary, local broadcast information based on the adopted control inputs to neighboring agents. In addition, Zeno behavior can be excluded during the whole process. Finally, numerical simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed circle formation control methods.Peer reviewe

Elastic Modulus and Strength of Rock-Like Material with Locked-In Stress

Locked-in stress is a special stress objectively existing in the rock which has an important influence on the mechanical properties. However, there were few studies on the locked-in stress in rocks. The locked-in stress was simplified into spherical inclusions of stress. Based on the Eshelby inclusion theory, the influence equation of the locked-in stress on the elastic modulus of the rock is derived. Through experiment, the expression of elastic modulus of rock-like material with locked-in stress based on M-T method is determined. Based on Mohr-Coulomb criterion and effective stress principle, the equations for the influence of locked-in stress on strength of rock-like material under uniaxial and conventional triaxial conditions were deduced. Through experimental verification, an empirical formula for the strength of rock-like material containing locked-in stress is obtained. This article provided a method for further studying of the locked-in stress in rock-like material and has certain reference value

Deep Unsupervised Hashing with Latent Semantic Components

Deep unsupervised hashing has been appreciated in the regime of image retrieval. However, most prior arts failed to detect the semantic components and their relationships behind the images, which makes them lack discriminative power. To make up the defect, we propose a novel Deep Semantic Components Hashing (DSCH), which involves a common sense that an image normally contains a bunch of semantic components with homology and co-occurrence relationships. Based on this prior, DSCH regards the semantic components as latent variables under the Expectation-Maximization framework and designs a two-step iterative algorithm with the objective of maximum likelihood of training data. Firstly, DSCH constructs a semantic component structure by uncovering the fine-grained semantics components of images with a Gaussian Mixture Modal~(GMM), where an image is represented as a mixture of multiple components, and the semantics co-occurrence are exploited. Besides, coarse-grained semantics components, are discovered by considering the homology relationships between fine-grained components, and the hierarchy organization is then constructed. Secondly, DSCH makes the images close to their semantic component centers at both fine-grained and coarse-grained levels, and also makes the images share similar semantic components close to each other. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed hierarchical semantic components indeed facilitate the hashing model to achieve superior performance.Comment: 9 pages, 15 figure

EFFECTS OF HYPOXIC HEPATOMA-DERIVED EXOSOME miR-1260b ON M2 MACROPHAGES AND MECHANISM

Objective To explore the effects of the hypoxic hepatoma-derived exosome miR-1260b on the M2 subtype of tumor-associated macrophages and the underlying mechanism. Methods MHCC97H (97H) cells were treated with 100 μmol/L CoCl2 for 24 h to obtain hypoxic 97H cells. THP-1 cells were treated with propylene glycol methyl ether acetate (PMA) for 24 h to derive M0 macrophages. The relative expression of CD11b in THP-1 cells was measured by real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR). After co-culture with normoxic/hypoxic 97H cells for 48 h, the relative gene expression of CD163, CD206, and TNF-α in M0 macrophages was measured by RT-qPCR. The exosomes of normoxic/hypoxic 97H cells were extracted by low temperature differential centrifugation. A transmission electron microscope was used to observe the shape of the exosomes. The particle diameter was measured using a nanoparticle tracking analyzer. Western blot was used to determine the relative expression of apoptosis-inducing factor 6-interacting protein (Alix) and calnexin in the exosomes. After co-culture with the exosomes for 48 h, the relative expression of CD206 in M0 macrophages was measured by RT-qPCR. The exosomes labeled with Dil stain were co-cultured with M0 macrophages for 24 h, and then M0 macrophages were examined for the fluorescence reaction using a fluorescence microscope. The expression of miR-1260b in the exosomes was measured by RT-qPCR. After M0 and M2 macrophages were transfected with miR-1260b Mimic/Inhibitor, the expression of CD206 and TNF-α in the cells was determined by RT-qPCR. After co-culture with normoxic/hypoxic 97H cells transfected with miR-1260b Inhibitor, M0 macrophages were measured for the relative expression of CD206 and TNF-α by RT-qPCR. Results There was significantly high expression of CD11b in M0 macrophages derived from THP-1 cells after 24 h PMA treatment (t=78.14,P&lt;0.05). M0 macrophages co-cultured with hypoxic 97H cells showed significantly increased expression of CD163 and CD206 and significantly decreased expression of TNF-α (t=14.23-46.88,P&lt;0.05). The exosome particles secreted by hypoxic 97H cells were successfully isolated and extracted, which could be phagocytized by M0 macrophages. Western blot showed that the exosome particles had high expression of Alix protein and very little expression of calnexin. The results of RT-qPCR showed that co-culture with hypoxic hepatoma-derived exosomes significantly increased the expression of CD206 in M0 macrophages (t=17.06,P&lt;0.05). The expression of miR-1260b was significantly increased in hypoxic hepatoma-derived exosomes (t=12.09,P&lt;0.05). M0 macrophages highly expressed CD206 and lowly expressed TNF-α after transfection with miR-1260b Mimic (t=8.82,8.22,P&lt;0.05), and highly expressed TNF-α after transfection with the Inhibitor (t=16.88,P&lt;0.05). Pre-transfection of miR-1260b Mimic into normoxic 97H cells significantly increased the expression of CD206 and significantly decreased the expression of TNF-α (t=26.95,21.45,P&lt;0.05). Pre-transfection of miR-1260b Inhibitor into hypoxic 97H cells significantly changed the expression of CD206 and TNF-α (t=9.09,12.54,P&lt;0.05). Conclusion Hypoxic hepatoma-derived exosomes can induce M2 macrophage polarization. miR-1260b is a key target for macrophage polarization by hypoxic hepatoma cell-derived exosomes, which promotes the immune escape of hepatoma cells