Clinical Lipidomics: Effects of Vitamin D in Human Adipose Tissue

Vitamin D is vital for calcium homeostasis and skeletal health, has immunomodulatory effects and is involved in the regulation of differentiation and proliferation of many different cell types. Adipose tissue is an important metabolic organ and a major organ for vitamin D storage. Though, the role of vitamin D and its function in adipose tissue is not fully explored. This thesis applies a solvent extraction method to simultaneously extract lipids and metabolites from adipose tissue samples from a RCT (n=51) with vitamin D (n=25) or placebo (n=26) intervention. Extracted lipid samples were analyzed with UHPLC-MS using an AcquireX data acquisition workflow. The lipids were then identified and quantified with LipidSearch. Multivariate data analysis, among others, was performed to study the differences between the vitamin D and placebo group. A total of 633 lipid were identified and quantified. OPLS models demonstrated a separation between vitamin D and placebo. Results indicated that lipids in adipose tissue may be affected by vitamin D outside of adipose tissue. Though not significant, increase fatty acid 4:0, 20:4 and 20:5 was observed, possibly indicating vitamin D’s activity in production of butyrate and eicosanoid metabolism. Pathway analysis only identified the glycerophospholipid metabolism pathway, though not statistically significant. The results showed a difference in the lipidome between vitamin D and placebo. Though through further examination of the cause of separation, the findings in this thesis were not of statistical significance

Error-aware and energy-efficient routing approach in MANETs

The lifetime of a network is the key design, factor of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). To prolong the lifetime of MANETs, one is forced to attain a tradeoff of minimizing the energy consumption and load balancing. In MANETs, energy waste resulting from retransmission due to high bit error rate (BER) and high frame error rate (FER) of wireless channel is significant. In this paper, we propose two novel protocols termed multi-threshold routing protocol (MTRP) and enhanced multi-threshold routing protocol (EMTRP). MTRP divides the total energy of a wireless node into multiple ranges. The lower bound of each range corresponds to a threshold. The protocol iterates from the highest threshold to the lowest one and chooses those routes with bottleneck energy being larger than the current threshold during each iteration. This approach thus avoids overusing certain routes and achieves load balancing. If multiple routes satisfy the threshold constraint, MTRP selects a route with the smallest hop count to further attain energy efficiency. Based, on MTRP, EMTRP further takes channel condition into consideration and selects routes with better channel condition and consequently reduces the number of retransmissions and saves energy. We analyze the average loss probability (ALP) of the uniform error model and Gilbert error model and give a distributed algorithm to obtain the maximal ALP along a route. Descriptions of MTRP and EMTRP are given in pseudocode form. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed EMTRP outperforms the representative protocol CMMBCR in terms of total energy consumption and load balancing

A Unified Performance Model for Best-Effort Services in WiMAX Networks

Based on the work from the IEEE Working Group 802.16 and ETSI HiperMAN Working Group, the WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) technology is defined by the WiMAX Forum to support fixed and mobile broadband wireless access. In the standard (IEEE 802.16 standard, 2009), it defines several air interface variants, including WirelessMAN-SC, WirelessMAN-OFDM, WirelessMAN-OFDMA and WirelessMAN-HUMAN. WiMAX networks can be operated in two different modes: point to multi-point (PMP) mode and mesh mode. Under the PMP mode, all traffics from subscriber stations (SSs) are controlled by the base station. Mesh mode is a distributed architecture where traffics are allowed to route not only between SSs and the base station but also between SSs. In this chapter, we focus on the WirelessMAN-SC air interface operating in the PMP mode. In WiMAX networks, quality of service (QoS) is provided through five different services classes in the MAC layer (Andrews et al., 2007): 1. Unsolicited grant service (UGS) is designed for real-time applications with constant data rate. These applications always have stringent delay requirement, such as T1/E1. 2. Real-time polling service (rtPS) is designed for real-time applications with variable data rate. These applications have less stringent delay requirement, such as MPEG and VoIP without silence suppression. 3. Extended real-time polling service (ertPS) builds on the efficiency of both UGS and rtPS. It is designed for the applications with variable data rate such as VoIP with silence suppression. 4. Non-real-time polling service (nrtPS) is designed to support variable bit rate non-real-time applications with certain bandwidth guarantee, such as high bandwidth FTP. 5. Best effort service (BE) is designed for best effort applications such as HTTP. To meet the requirements of different service classes, several bandwidth request mechanisms have been defined, namely, unsolicited granting, unicast polling, broadcast polling and piggybacking. In this chapter, we present a performance model for services, such as BE service, based on the broadcast polling mechanism which is contention based and requires he SSs to use the truncated binary exponential backoff (TBEB) algorithm (Kwak et al., 2005) to resolve contention

Recent advances in green industrial networking

[EN] The articles in this special section focus on green industrial networking. Due to the explosive increase in energy usage, it is essential that governmental and industrial institutions address this problem. Therefore, the development of green and low-carbon economy has recently become a hot issue in the industry. It is envisioned in such cases to meet the growing demands for industrial networking with limited resources. This is considered one of the challenges that needs to be addressed. Addressing such key problems will hopefully allow us to reach the realization of sustainable development. We believe that network technologies will be critical and will greatly contribute to achieving large-scale energy savings in all areas of industrial production. In addition, the role of green industrial networking technologies includes not only emission reduction and energy savings in products and services, but also enabling low-carbon emissions in other industries. To meet the requirement of low-carbon economic development, it is necessary to reduce the energy consumption of industrial networking. The need for green industrial networking technologies has been recognized as a challenge during the last few years by our research communities. However, many issues still remain to be addressedHan, G.; Guizani, M.; Lloret, J.; Wu, H.; Chan, S.; Rayes, A. (2016). Recent advances in green industrial networking. IEEE Communications Magazine. 54(10):14-15. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCOM.2016.75882231415541

Emerging Trends, Issues, and Challenges in Big Data and Its Implementation toward Future Smart Cities

(c) 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other worksHan, G.; Guizani, M.; Lloret, J.; Chan, S.; Wan, L.; Guibene, W. (2017). Emerging Trends, Issues, and Challenges in Big Data and Its Implementation toward Future Smart Cities. IEEE Communications Magazine. 55(12):16-17. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCOM.2017.8198795S1617551

Comparison of maximal myocardial blood flow during adenosine infusion with that of intravenous dipyridamole in normal men

AbstractObjective. This study compared quantitatively the efficacy of intravenous adenosine and dipyridamole for pharmacologic induction of myocardial hyperemia.Background. Pharmacologic vasodilation is used increasingly for induction of myocardial hyperemia in conjunction with radionuclide imaging of myocardial blood flow. Although both intravenous dipyridamole and adenosine have been used, the magnitude of hyperemia induced by these agents and the hyperemia to baseline blood flow ratios have not been quantified and compared.Methods. Twenty normal volunteers were studied with dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) and intravenous nitrogen-13 ammonia. Myocardial blood flow was quantified with a two-compartment tracer kinetic model.Results. Myocardial blood flow at rest averaged 1.1 ± 0.2 ml/min per g and increased significantly to 4.4 ± 0.9 ml/min per g during adenosine and 43 ± 1.3 ml/min per g after dipyridamole administration. Hyperemia to baseline flow ratios averaged 4.3 ± 1.6 for adenosine and 4.0 ± 1.3 for dipyridamole. The average flow ratios and the maximal flows achieved were similar for both agents, but there was considerable variation in the individual response to these agents, as indicated by the range of hyperemia to baseline flow ratios (from 2.0 to 8.4 for adenosine and from 1.5 to 5.8 for dipyridamole). in addition, the hyperemic responses to dipyridamole and to adenosine differed by > 1 ml/min per g in nine subjects.Conclusions. Despite these inter- and istraindividual differences, we conclude that both agents are equally effective in producing myocardial hyperemia

Adaptive Deterministic Packet Marking

An efficient method is presented for signaling link price information using single-bit marks. It exploits side information in the IPid field of the IP header to allow the maximum price on a flow’s path to be estimated. It automatically adapts the resolution with which the price is quantized, depending on how quickly the price changes. The algorithm does not depend on the number of hops in a link. A marking scheme with improved compatibility with current ECN (RFC 3168) is also proposed

A Preliminary Psychometric Investigation of a Chinese Version of the Engaged Teachers Scale (C-ETS)

This study examines the psychometric properties of a Chinese version of the Engaged Teacher Scale (C-ETS). A translated questionnaire with 16 items was administered to a sample of 341 primary and secondary school teachers in Hong Kong. A series of confirmatory factor analyses were performed to assess the construct, convergent, and discriminant validity of the scale in alternative models. Results provide support for a second-order model with teacher engagement as an overarching construct with four hypothesized dimensions: emotional engagement, cognitive engagement, social engagement (students), and social engagement (colleagues). The C-ETS provides a useful measure for teacher engagement in Chinese societies. Contributions and limitations of the study are discussed

Microstructure and Discharge Performance of Aluminum Al 6061 Alloy as Anode for Electrolyte Activated Battery

Electrolyte activated battery finds its important use during natural disaster emergencies, such as floods and typhoons. Nevertheless, high corrosion rate will deteriorate the discharge performance of the battery and it is influenced by the type of electrolyte and discharge current. In this study, the corrosion and discharge performance of a commercial Al 6061 aluminum alloy as an anode are investigated at different discharge currents (0.001, 0.01, and 1 mA) and in different electrolytes, namely salt water, urea, and distilled water. Scanning electron microscopy results show that electrode in salt water has the most serious corrosion, followed by that of in urea and in distilled water. These electrodeelectrolyte combinations are further investigated with potentiodynamic polarization, galvanostatic discharge, and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) to understand their discharge potential, discharge behavior, and corrosion mechanism. Among all combinations, aluminum in water is found to have the highest discharge performance with discharge potentials ranging from 716 to 744 mV, regardless of discharge current

Synthesis and Characterization of Metal Hydride/Carbon Aerogel Composites for Hydrogen Storage

Two materials currently of interest for onboard lightweight hydrogen storage applications are sodium aluminum hydride (NaAlH4), a complex metal hydride, and carbon aerogels (CAs), a light porous material connected by several spherical nanoparticles. The objectives of the present work have been to investigate the synthesis, characterization, and hydrogenation behavior of Pd-, Ti- or Fe-doped CAs, NaAlH4, and MgH2 nanocomposites. The diameters of Pd nanoparticles onto CA’s surface and BET surface area of CAs were 3–10 nm and 700–900 m2g−1, respectively. The H2 storage capacity of metal hydrides has been studied using high-pressure TGA microbalance and they were 4.0, 2.7, 2.1, and 1.2 wt% for MgH2-FeTi-CAs, MgH2-FeTi, CAs-Pd, and 8 mol% Ti-doped NaAlH4, respectively, at room temperature. Carbon aerogels with higher surface area and mesoporous structures facilitated hydrogen diffusion and adsorption, which accounted for its extraordinary hydrogen storage phenomenon. The hydrogen adsorption abilities of CAs notably increased after inclusion of metal hydrides by the “hydrogen spillover” mechanisms