Factors associated with rates of gestational weight gain among pregnant women in Batu Pahat district of Johor state, Malaysia

Introduction: This cross-sectional study determines factors associated with the rates of gestational weight gain (GWG) among women in the second and third trimester of pregnancy. Methods: A total of 180 pregnant women (29.2 ± 4.3 years old) attending the maternal and child health clinics in Batu Pahat district were enrolled in the present study be-tween January and February, 2015. Information regarding demographic characteristics, obstetrical history, physical activity, and calorie intake was assessed through direct interview. Anthropometric data were collected from medical records. GWG rates were determined based on 2009 IOM recommendations. Results: Of the 180 pregnant women, 37.2% were at their second trimester and 62.8% were at the third trimester of pregnancy. While 53.3% of them had excessive GWG rate, 28.9% have inadequate GWG rate. More than half of the women (56.7%) were normal weight, 21.1% overweight, 14.4% underweight, and 7.8% obese before pregnant. The total mean activity and energy intake of the pregnant women were 195.9±94.2 MET-hour/week and 2365±709 kcal/day, respectively. The multinomial logistic model indicates that women who were overweight or obese at pre-pregnancy were seven times more likely to have excessive GWG rate (OR = 7.44, 95% CI = 2.07-26.66) as compared to women who were pre-pregnancy normal weight. Conclusions: About four in every five of the pregnant women had their GWG rates outside the IOM recommendations. Women who were overweight/obese at pre-pregnancy were at-risk of having excessive GWG rate, which underlines the importance of targeting these women for pre-conception counselling on GWG

UHPLC-QTOFMS-Based Metabolomic Analysis of the Hippocampus in Hypoxia Preconditioned Mouse

Background: Hypoxia appears in a number of extreme environments, including high altitudes, the deep sea, and during aviation, and occurs in cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory failures and neurological disorders. Though it is well recognized that hypoxic preconditioning (HPC) exerts endogenous neuroprotective effect against severe hypoxia, the mediators and underlying molecular mechanism for the protective effect are still not fully understood. This study established a hippocampus metabolomics approach to explore the alterations associated with HPC.Methods: In this study, an animal model of HPC was established by exposing the adult BALB/c mice to acute repetitive hypoxia four times. Ultra-high liquid chromatography-quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UHPLC-QTOFMS) in combination with univariate and multivariate statistical analyses was employed to deciphering metabolic changes associated with HPC in hippocampus tissue. MetaboAnalyst 3.0 was used to construct HPC related metabolic pathways.Results: The significant metabolic differences in hippocampus between the HPC groups and control were observed, indicating that HPC mouse model was successfully established and HPC could caused significant metabolic changes. Several key metabolic pathways were found to be acutely perturbed, including phenylalanine, tyrosine and tryptophan biosynthesis, taurine and hypotaurine metabolism, phenylalanine metabolism, glutathione metabolism, alanine, aspartate and glutamate metabolism, tyrosine metabolism, tryptophan metabolism, purine metabolism, citrate cycle, and glycerophospholipid metabolism.Conclusion: The results of the present study provided novel insights into the mechanisms involved in the acclimatization of organisms to hypoxia, and demonstrated the neuroprotective mechanism of HPC

Oceanic redox conditions during the terminal Cambrian extinction event

Marine animal diversity during the late Cambrian was reduced by a series of extinctions that have generally been attributed to oceanic anoxic events associated with positive carbon isotope excursions. Here we present carbon and uranium isotope ratios (δ13C and δ238U values) as proxies for global carbon cycle and oceanic redox conditions, respectively, from carbonate rocks of the Wa'ergang section, South China. The dataset spans an interval that includes the last major negative δ13C excursion (TOCE) of the Cambrian Period. The TOCE is a globally documented event, recovery from which corresponds to the terminal Cambrian extinction event. The δ13C and δ238U values covary through the section, shifting initially to lower values, with δ238U falling below the modern open-ocean seawater value from the start to the middle of the profile, followed by a shift to higher values towards the end of the Cambrian. Neither the co-occurrence of δ13C and δ238U negative excursions, nor the association of rising δ238U with extinction have been commonly reported. Here we argue that robust positive coupling of δ13C and δ238U relates to the existence of extensive intermediate reducing settings (from low-O2 suboxia to intermittent anoxia) during the late Cambrian alongside low atmospheric pO2 and a greenhouse climate. Similarly, a stepwise increase in the δ238U baseline in carbonates across the Ediacaran−Cambrian boundary is consistent with the growing importance of an intermediate reducing sink through that interval. We propose further that divergent trends in lower and upper ocean redox conditions could have driven the parallel isotope excursions. An expansion of intermediate reducing conditions, rather than persistent anoxic euxinia, is consistent with the recovery of δ13C and δ238U to higher values, as well as the presence of benthic fauna and shoreward extension of deeper-water fauna that may have had a greater tolerance against hypoxia

A Security-Awareness Virtual Machine Management Scheme Based on Chinese Wall Policy in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing gets increasing attention for its capacity to leverage developers from infrastructure management tasks. However, recent works reveal that side channel attacks can lead to privacy leakage in the cloud. Enhancing isolation between users is an effective solution to eliminate the attack. In this paper, to eliminate side channel attacks, we investigate the isolation enhancement scheme from the aspect of virtual machine (VM) management. The security-awareness VMs management scheme (SVMS), a VMs isolation enhancement scheme to defend against side channel attacks, is proposed. First, we use the aggressive conflict of interest relation (ACIR) and aggressive in ally with relation (AIAR) to describe user constraint relations. Second, based on the Chinese wall policy, we put forward four isolation rules. Third, the VMs placement and migration algorithms are designed to enforce VMs isolation between the conflict users. Finally, based on the normal distribution, we conduct a series of experiments to evaluate SVMS. The experimental results show that SVMS is efficient in guaranteeing isolation between VMs owned by conflict users, while the resource utilization rate decreases but not by much

A User-Centered Mapping Design for Geomorphological Hazard Thematic Map

Numerous studies have concentrated on developing user-centered designs for hazard zone maps but rarely for hazard-oriented geomorphological maps, named as Geomorphological Hazard Thematic Maps (GHTMs) in this study, which provide more detailed information about natural hazards. This study developed a user-centered mapping design for GHTMs for nonexperts in geomorphology. We invited civil engineers and high school educators to evaluate a sample GHTM\u27s design in group and focus group panel interviews. The civil engineers preferred maps with more geomorphological features, whereas the educators preferred simple designs. Both groups indicated that the inclusion of essential facilities and road networks is essential. The map was also adjusted by adding hillshade layer and by changing the symbology for mass wasting, fault scarps, and fluvial features to increase clarity and simplicity. This case study is the first step toward developing user-centered mapping designs for hazard communication that will deepen their understanding of natural hazards

Electrophysiological Characteristics in Depressive Personality Disorder: An Event-Related Potential Study

This study aimed to investigate the neurophysiological characteristics of young people with depressive personality disorder using event-related potentials (ERP). To explore the effects of visual-emotional words on ERP, mainly N350, we recruited 19 individuals with a depressive personality disorder and 10 healthy controls. ERP were recorded while the subjects took decisions on target words that were classified into three categories: emotionally positive, negative, and neutral. The ERP signals were then separately averaged according to the subjects’ classifications. Data analysis showed that the amplitude of N350 was larger in response to positive and negative words than to neutral words. The latency of N350 was longer in negative words, in contrast with positive and neutral words. However, no difference was found between the two groups. These results suggest that neurophysiological characteristics of young people with a depressive personality disorder in visual-emotional word processing have not yet been influenced by their personality traits. To some extent, N350 reflected semantic processes and was not sensitive to participants’ mood state

ReSimAD: Zero-Shot 3D Domain Transfer for Autonomous Driving with Source Reconstruction and Target Simulation

Domain shifts such as sensor type changes and geographical situation variations are prevalent in Autonomous Driving (AD), which poses a challenge since AD model relying on the previous-domain knowledge can be hardly directly deployed to a new domain without additional costs. In this paper, we provide a new perspective and approach of alleviating the domain shifts, by proposing a Reconstruction-Simulation-Perception (ReSimAD) scheme. Specifically, the implicit reconstruction process is based on the knowledge from the previous old domain, aiming to convert the domain-related knowledge into domain-invariant representations, e.g., 3D scene-level meshes. Besides, the point clouds simulation process of multiple new domains is conditioned on the above reconstructed 3D meshes, where the target-domain-like simulation samples can be obtained, thus reducing the cost of collecting and annotating new-domain data for the subsequent perception process. For experiments, we consider different cross-domain situations such as Waymo-to-KITTI, Waymo-to-nuScenes, Waymo-to-ONCE, etc, to verify the zero-shot target-domain perception using ReSimAD. Results demonstrate that our method is beneficial to boost the domain generalization ability, even promising for 3D pre-training.Comment: Code and simulated points are available at https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/3DTrans#resima