Effects of Taxifolin on Osteoclastogenesis in vitro and in vivo

Osteoporosis is a highly prevalent disease which has been a major public health problem and considered to be associated with chronic low-grade systemic inflammation and oxidative damage. Taxifolin is a natural flavonoid and possesses many pharmacological activities including antioxidant and anti-inflammatory. Because flavonoids have been confirmed to fight osteoporosis and promote bone health, the aim of this study was to investigate the effects of taxifolin on the formation and function of osteoclast. In this study, we examined the effects of taxifolin on osteoclast using both in vitro and in vivo studies. Taxifolin suppressed the activation of nuclear factor-κB, C-Fos and mitogen-activated protein kinase, and also decreased osteoclast-specific genes expression, including Trap, Mmp-9, Cathepsin K, C-Fos, Nfatc1, and Rank. Taxifolin also prevented reactive oxygen species (ROS) production following RANKL stimulation. In addition, taxifolin alleviated ovariectomized-induced bone loss by repressing osteoclast activity and decreasing serum levels of tumor necrosis factor-α, interleukin-1β, interleukin-6 and receptor activator of nuclear factor-κB ligand (RANKL) in vivo. Our results indicated that taxifolin inhibits osteoclastogenesis via regulation of modulation of several RANKL signaling pathways. Therefore, taxifolin may be considered as a potential alternative therapeutic agent for treating osteoclast-related diseases

A Novel High-Throughput Vaccinia Virus Neutralization Assay and Preexisting Immunity in Populations from Different Geographic Regions in China

Background: Pre-existing immunity to Vaccinia Tian Tan virus (VTT) resulting from a large vaccination campaign against smallpox prior to the early 1980s in China, has been a major issue for application of VTT-vector based vaccines. It is essential to establish a sensitive and high-throughput neutralization assay to understand the epidemiology of Vaccinia-specific immunity in current populations in China. Methodology/Principal Findings: A new anti-Vaccinia virus (VACV) neutralization assay that used the attenuated replication-competent VTT carrying the firefly luciferase gene of Photinus pyralis (rTV-Fluc) was established and standardized for critical parameters that included the choice of cell line, viral infection dose, and the infection time. The current study evaluated the maintenance of virus-specific immunity after smallpox vaccination by conducting a non-randomized, crosssectional analysis of antiviral antibody-mediated immune responses in volunteers examined 30–55 years after vaccination. The rTV-Fluc neutralization assay was able to detect neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) against Vaccinia virus without the ability to differentiate strains of Vaccinia virus. We showed that the neutralizing titers measured by our assay were similar to those obtained by the traditional plaque reduction neutralization test (PRNT). Using this assay, we found a low prevalence of NAb to VTT (7.6%) in individuals born before 1980 from Beijing and Anhui provinces in China, and when present, anti-VTT NAb titers were low. No NAbs were detected in all 222 samples from individuals born after 1980. There was no significan

Development of a World Health Organization International Reference Panel for different genotypes of hepatitis E virus for nucleic acid amplification testing.

Globally, hepatitis E virus (HEV) is a major cause of acute viral hepatitis. Epidemiology and clinical presentation of hepatitis E vary greatly by location and are affected by the HEV genotype. Nucleic acid amplification technique (NAT)-based assays are important for the detection of acute HEV infection as well for monitoring chronic cases of hepatitis E. The aim of the study was to evaluate a panel of samples containing different genotypes of HEV for use in nucleic NAT-based assays. The panel of samples comprises eleven different members including HEV genotype 1a (2 strains), 1e, 2a, 3b, 3c, 3e, 3f, 4c, 4g as well as a human isolate related to rabbit HEV. Each laboratory assayed the panel members directly against the 1 World Health Organization (WHO) International Standard (IS) for HEV RNA (6329/10) which is based upon a genotype 3 a strain. The samples for evaluation were distributed to 24 laboratories from 14 different countries and assayed on three separate days. Of these, 23 participating laboratories returned a total of 32 sets of data; 17 from quantitative assays and 15 from qualitative assays. The assays used consisted of a mixture of in-house developed and commercially available assays. The results showed that all samples were detected consistently by the majority of participants, although in some cases, some samples were detected less efficiently. Based on the results of the collaborative study the panel (code number 8578/13) was established as the "1st International Reference Panel (IRP) for all HEV genotypes for NAT-based assays" by the WHO Expert Committee on Biological Standardization. This IRP will be important for assay validation and ensuring adequate detection of different genotypes and clinically important sub-genotypes of HEV

Evaluation of the Potential Use of Spherical Porous Reactive Aggregate (SPoRA) for Internal Curing of Cementitious System

Curing has been considered as an essential process for cementitious materials. Proper curing enables the cement to hydrate developing its potential strength and improving its durability. Inadequate curing can lead to the plastic shrinkage cracking and stress due to drying or temperature changes. Using external water or placing a curing compound on the surface of the concrete to reduce water loss due to evaporation are traditional ways of curing concrete. These methods may not cure the entire concrete and may require longer curing time. Methods have been proposed to help increase curing efficiency such as providing internal curing in concrete. Internal curing is often referred to as curing concrete from the inside by using pre-wetted porous lightweight aggregate (LWA) to provide additional curing water throughout the concrete mixture. This thesis focuses on a novel lightweight aggregate, Spherical Porous Reactive Aggregate (SPoRA), which is produced from waste coal combustion bottom ash and its potential use for internal curing in cementitious system. The production of SPoRA is first introduced in this study, which is converting bottom ash to porous lightweight aggregate using sintering process. Physical properties of SPoRA such as specific gravity and vacuum absorption were determined and analyzed. The LWA used for internal curing should supply a sufficient volume of water to counteract the effect of self-desiccation. Therefore, the water absorption property test was conducted to determine if SPoRA could absorb sufficient water. Once mixing the SPoRA with cement, the desorption property of releasing water for internal curing is also significant as SPoRA should be able to release water over time to properly cure concrete internally. The loss of water from SPoRA can be described through a desorption isotherm that was determined using sorption analyzer in this study. Finally, the physical properties, absorption and desorption behavior of SPoRA are compared to two traditional types of lightweight aggregate (i.e., Expanded Shale, Clay, and Slate) and one foamed glass (produced from waste glass) available in the market.M.S., Civil engineering -- Drexel University, 201

Distinguishing between natural and GAN-generated face images by combining global and local features

With the development of face image synthesis and generation technology based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), it has become a research hotspot to determine whether a given face image is natural or generated. However, the generalization capability of the existing algorithms is still to be improved. Therefore, this paper proposes a general algorithm. To do so, firstly, the learning on important local areas, containing many face key-points, is strengthened by combining the global and local features. Secondly, metric learning based on the ArcFace loss is applied to extract common and discriminative features. Finally, the extracted features are fed into the classification module to detect GAN-generated faces. The experiments are conducted on two publicly available natural datasets (CelebA and FFHQ) and seven GAN-generated datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves a better generalization performance with an average detection accuracy over 0.99 than the state-of-the-art algorithms. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is robust against additional attacks, such as Gaussian blur, and Gaussian noise addition

The Expanding of Proglacial Lake Amplified the Frontal Ablation of Jiongpu Co Glacier since 1985

In High Mountain Asia, most glaciers and glacial lakes have undergone rapid variations throughout changes in the climate. Unlike land-terminating glaciers, lake-terminating glaciers show rapid shrinkage due to dynamic interactions between proglacial lakes and glacier dynamics. In this study, we conducted a detailed analysis of the changes in the surface elevation, velocity, and especially frontal ablation on Jiongpu Co lake-terminating glacier. The results show that the Jiongpu Co glacier has twice as much negative mass balance compared to other glaciers, and the annual surface velocity has anomalously increased (3.6 m a−1 per decade) while other glaciers show a decreased trend. The frontal ablation fraction in the net mass loss of the Jiongpu Co glacier increased from 26% to 52% with the accelerated expansion of the proglacial lake. All available evidence indicates the presence of positive feedback between the proglacial lake and its host glacier. Our findings highlight the existence of proglacial lake affects the spatial change patterns of the lake-terminating glacier. Furthermore, the ongoing enlargement of the lake area amplifies the changes associated with the evolution of the lake-terminating glacier

Multiscale Anchor-Free Region Proposal Network for Pedestrian Detection

Pedestrian detection based on visual sensors has made significant progress, in which region proposal is the key step. There are two mainstream methods to generate region proposals: anchor-based and anchor-free. However, anchor-based methods need more hyperparameters related to anchors for training compared with anchor-free methods. In this paper, we propose a novel multiscale anchor-free (MSAF) region proposal network to obtain proposals, especially for small-scale pedestrians. It usually has several branches to predict proposals and assigns ground truth according to the height of pedestrian. Each branch consists of two components: one is feature extraction, and the other is detection head. Adapted channel feature fusion (ACFF) is proposed to select features at different levels of the backbone to effectively extract features. The detection head is used to predict the pedestrian center location, center offsets, and height to get bounding boxes. With our classifier, the detection performance can be further improved, especially for small-scale pedestrians. The experiments on the Caltech and CityPersons demonstrate that the MSAF can significantly boost the pedestrian detection performance and the log-average miss rate (MR) on the reasonable setting is 3.97% and 9.5%, respectively. If proposals are reclassified with our classifier, MR is 3.38% and 8.4%. The detection performance can be further improved, especially for small-scale pedestrians

Metathesis of Mg2FeH6 and LiNH2 leading to hydrogen production at low temperatures

Mg2FeH6 with a purity of up to 94.5 wt% was synthesized and its interaction with LiNH2 was investigated in this study. It was found that Li4FeH6, normally synthesized by hydriding a mixture of LiH and Fe at 700 degrees C and 5.5 GPa H-2 pressure, can be formed via ball-milling Mg2FeH6 and LiNH2 under ambient conditions following the reaction of Mg2FeH6 + 4LiNH(2) -> Li4FeH6 + 2Mg(NH2)(2), Delta H = -92.8 kJ mol(-1). The formation of Li4FeH6 was confirmed by XRD, FTIR and Mossbauer spectroscopic characterization. Li4FeH6 further reacts with 2Mg(NH2)(2) releasing ca. 4.8 wt% H-2 at 225 degrees C and reabsorbing 3.7 wt% H-2 at 200 degrees C and 50 bar H-2 pressure. Mg(NH2)(2), LiH and Fe are the hydrogenated products