A case-control study on environmental and familial risk factors for colorectal cancer in Hong Kong: physical activity reduces colorectal cancer risk

published_or_final_versio

A case-control study on environmental and familial risk factors for colorectal cancer in Hong Kong: dietary determinants of colorectal cancer risk

published_or_final_versio

A case-control study on environmental and familial risk factors for colorectal cancer in Hong Kong: chronic illnesses, medication and family history

published_or_final_versio

The environment, social and governance (ESG) activities and profitability under COVID-19: evidence from the global banking sector

fals

Vibrio cholerae O139 synonym Bengal in Hong Kong [12]

published_or_final_versio

Non-conventional digital signatures and their implementations – A review

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19713-5_36The current technological scenario determines a profileration of trust domains, which are usually defined by validating the digital identity linked to each user. This validation entails critical assumptions about the way users’ privacy is handled, and this calls for new methods to construct and treat digital identities. Considering cryptography, identity management has been constructed and managed through conventional digital signatures. Nowadays, new types of digital signatures are required, and this transition should be guided by rigorous evaluation of the theoretical basis, but also by the selection of properly verified software means. This latter point is the core of this paper. We analyse the main non-conventional digital signatures that could endorse an adequate tradeoff betweeen security and privacy. This discussion is focused on practical software solutions that are already implemented and available online. The goal is to help security system designers to discern identity management functionalities through standard cryptographic software libraries.This work was supported by Comunidad de Madrid (Spain) under the project S2013/ICE-3095-CM (CIBERDINE) and the Spanish Government project TIN2010-19607

Operational Theory of Homodyne Detection

We discuss a balanced homodyne detection scheme with imperfect detectors in the framework of the operational approach to quantum measurement. We show that a realistic homodyne measurement is described by a family of operational observables that depends on the experimental setup, rather than a single field quadrature operator. We find an explicit form of this family, which fully characterizes the experimental device and is independent of a specific state of the measured system. We also derive operational homodyne observables for the setup with a random phase, which has been recently applied in an ultrafast measurement of the photon statistics of a pulsed diode laser. The operational formulation directly gives the relation between the detected noise and the intrinsic quantum fluctuations of the measured field. We demonstrate this on two examples: the operational uncertainty relation for the field quadratures, and the homodyne detection of suppressed fluctuations in photon statistics.Comment: 7 pages, REVTe

Homodyne detection for measuring internal quantum correlations of optical pulses

A new method is described for determining the quantum correlations at different times in optical pulses by using balanced homodyne detection. The signal pulse and sequences of ultrashort test pulses are superimposed, where for chosen distances between the test pulses their relative phases and intensities are varied from measurement to measurement. The correlation statistics of the signal pulse is obtained from the time-integrated difference photocurrents measured.Comment: 7 pages, A4.sty include

A pro-drug of the green tea polyphenol (-)-epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) prevents differentiated SH-SY5Y cells from toxicity induced by 6-hydroxydopamine

Regular consumption of green tea benefits people in prevention from cardiovascular disorders, obesity as well as neurodegenerative diseases. (-)-Epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) is regarded as the most biologically active catechin in green tea. However, the stability and bioavailability of EGCG are restricted. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether a pro-drug, a fully acetylated EGCG (pEGCG), could be more effective in neuroprotection in Parkinsonism mimic cellular model. Retinoic acid (RA)-differentiated neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cells were pre-treated with different concentrations of EGCG and pEGCG for 30 min and followed by incubation of 25 μM 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) for 24 h. We found that a broad dosage range of pEGCG (from 0.1 to 10 μM) could significantly reduce lactate dehydrogenase release. Likewise, 10 μM of pEGCG was effective in reducing caspase-3 activity, while EGCG at all concentrations tested in the model failed to attenuate caspase-3 activity induced by 6-OHDA. Furthermore, Western-blot analysis showed that Akt could be one of the specific signaling pathways stimulated by pEGCG in neuroprotection. It was demonstrated that 25 μM of 6-OHDA significantly suppressed the phosphorylation level of Akt. Only pEGCG at 10 μM markedly increased its phosphorylation level compared to 6-OHDA alone. Taken together, as pEGCG has higher stability and bioavailbility for further investigation, it could be a potential neuroprotective agent and our current findings may offer certain clues for optimizing its application in future. © 2009 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.postprin

New Hepatitis E Virus Genotype in Bactrian Camels, Xinjiang, China, 2013

published_or_final_versio