Gel composition and brine concentration effect on hydrogel dehydration subjected to uniaxial compression

Gel treatment is a process that injects the gel into a reservoir to control the conformance and improve the sweep efficiency of injection fluids. At a certain pressure gradient, the gel dehydrates in a reservoir due to mechanical forces. This work evaluates the effects of the gel composition and brine concentration on gel dehydration under uniaxial compression. A sodium acrylate-co-acrylamide based gel cross-linked with N, N\u27-Methylenebisacrylamide (MBAA) was used for the study. The compression test is performed with a rheometer with a plate-plate geometry. The gel dehydration under pressure was measured to see how gel dehydration would be impacted by the brine concentration or the change in gel compositions including monomer and crosslinker concentration. Then, the elastic modulus (G\u27) and the loss modulus (G\u27\u27) of the gels before and after the compression were measured. This process aimed to assess the variations of the gel mechanical properties caused by compression-induced dehydration. The result shows the gel composition has a great impact on the gel dehydration under uni-axial compression. The amount of gel dehydration increases when gel swelling degree increases for all experimental factors. The gel after compression has a lower G\u27 and a higher G\u27\u27compared with the gel before compression, indicating damage on gel networks. This work is of significance on optimizing gel treatments for conformance control. It may also provide a reference for hydrogel applications in other fields --Abstract, page iii

Failure of strong unique continuation for harmonic functions on RCD Spaces

Unique continuation of harmonic functions on $RCD$ space is a long-standing open problem, with little known even in the setting of Alexandrov spaces. In this paper, we establish the weak unique continuation theorem for harmonic functions on $RCD(K,2)$ spaces and give a counterexample for strong unique continuation in the setting of $RCD(K,N)$ space for any $N\geq 4$ and any $K\in \mathbb{R}$

Mining the Impact of Investor Sentiment on Stock Market from WeChat

In this study, the CSI 300 Index in China mainland and original articles from authoritative stock WeChat public accounts are investigated regarding their relations. First, a sentence-level sentiment classification approach for analyzing investor sentiment polarities in text corpus is proposed by expanding synonyms. Then, the Granger causality test is utilized to examine the impact of sentiment index on the stock price and volume-values. It shows that the influence of overall investor sentiment on volume-values is more rapid than that on stock price and the impact of positive sentiment is found to be more lasting than the negative in both stock price and volume-values. Furthermore, it is worth noting that there is a dual-stage phenomenon in the impact of positive sentiment on volume-values, which indicates that some investors react to positive information immediately while others may choose to wait and follow the trend

NMI inhibits cancer stem cell traits by downregulating hTERT in breast cancer.

N-myc and STAT interactor (NMI) has been proved to bind to different transcription factors to regulate a variety of signaling mechanisms including DNA damage, cell cycle and epithelial-mesenchymal transition. However, the role of NMI in the regulation of cancer stem cells (CSCs) remains poorly understood. In this study, we investigated the regulation of NMI on CSCs traits in breast cancer and uncovered the underlying molecular mechanisms. We found that NMI was lowly expressed in breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs)-enriched populations. Knockdown of NMI promoted CSCs traits while its overexpression inhibited CSCs traits, including the expression of CSC-related markers, the number of CD44+CD24- cell populations and the ability of mammospheres formation. We also found that NMI-mediated regulation of BCSCs traits was at least partially realized through the modulation of hTERT signaling. NMI knockdown upregulated hTERT expression while its overexpression downregulated hTERT in breast cancer cells, and the changes in CSCs traits and cell invasion ability mediated by NMI were rescued by hTERT. The in vivo study also validated that NMI knockdown promoted breast cancer growth by upregulating hTERT signaling in a mouse model. Moreover, further analyses for the clinical samples demonstrated that NMI expression was negatively correlated with hTERT expression and the low NMI/high hTERT expression was associated with the worse status of clinical TNM stages in breast cancer patients. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the interaction of YY1 protein with NMI and its involvement in NMI-mediated transcriptional regulation of hTERT in breast cancer cells. Collectively, our results provide new insights into understanding the regulatory mechanism of CSCs and suggest that the NMI-YY1-hTERT signaling axis may be a potential therapeutic target for breast cancers

E-Cadherin/β-Catenin Complex and the Epithelial Barrier

E-Cadherin/β-catenin complex plays an important role in maintaining epithelial integrity and disrupting this complex affect not only the adhesive repertoire of a cell, but also the Wnt-signaling pathway. Aberrant expression of the complex is associated with a wide variety of human malignancies and disorders of fibrosis resulting from epithelial-mesenchymal transition. These associations provide insights into the complexity that is likely responsible for the fibrosis/tumor suppressive action of E-cadherin/β-catenin