[Epidemiologic survey on the prevalence and distribution of infants' common gastrointestinal symptoms in 7 cities in China: a population-based study]

Objective: Regurgitation, infantile colic, and functional constipation are common gastrointestinal symptoms in childhood, the aim of this study was to explore the prevalence and distribution of these symptoms in China. Methods: A screening program in infants aged 0 to 3 years selected through stratified cluster random sampling was carried out in 7 cities in China. Questionnaires were filled, and then diagnosis were made according to Rome Ⅳ criteria. Areas, (urban-rural), age and gender distribution of prevalence of childhood common gastrointestinal symptoms were analyzed. Results: Totally, 20 932 effective questionnaires were returned. The total number of infants aged 0 to 1 years was 10 193. Regurgitation was diagnosed in 1 960 infants, with the prevalence of 19.2%, among infants aged 0 to 3 months that had highest prevalence (29.8%). The prevalence decreased with age, and differences among different age groups showed significant. For infantile colic, 4 470 infants aged 0 to 5 months were analyzed and the prevalence of infantile colic was 7.3%. The prevalence of infantile colic was the highest in infants aged 1 to 2 months (10.0%). Age specific difference was significant. Of all the infants, functional constipation was diagnosed in 1 755 infants with the prevalence of 8.4%, and the lowest prevalence was found in infants aged 0 to 3 months (6.2%), and the highest prevalence was in infants aged 30 to 36 months (10.0%). The differences in different age group were significant. Conclusion: Symptoms of regurgitation, infantile colic, and functional constipation are common in infants in China, with age specific difference in prevalence of the symptoms.

[Characteristics of Atmospheric BTX near a Main Road in Hefei City]

In order to study levels of BTX near a main road in Hefei in March 2016, benzene, toluene, m-xylene, and o-xylene (BTX) and conventional pollutants (such as NO₂ and SO₂) in the atmosphere were monitored through a home-made differential optical absorption spectroscopy (DOAS) system. Results showed that average concentrations of benzene, toluene, m-xylene, and o-xylene were 21.7, 63.6, 33.9, and 98.7 μg·m^-3, respectively. Compared with other cities both in China and elsewhere, benzene and toluene pollution can be considered to be of medium level, while xylene pollution is serious. Wind direction, T/B ratio, and correlation with CO were also analyzed, together with BTX sources. Result showed that the T/B ratio was 0.8-4.5, with correlation coefficients of benzene, toluene, and CO of 0.55 and 0.34, respectively. These values indicate that benzene and toluene are mainly derived from automotive emissions, also affected by surrounding industrial parks. Xylene is mainly derived from a coating industrial park north of the observation site. It was shown that high night-time concentrations of benzene and toulene could be due to industrial emissions from the industrial parks around the observation site. The ozone formation potential is in the order of o-xylene > m-xylene > toulene > benzene at the observation site. The ozone formation potential of xylene accounted for 85% of total ozone formation potential, indicating that emissions from surrounding industrial parks contribute greatly to ozone formation in the area.

Silver-modified octahedral anatase particles as plasmonic photocatalyst

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Octahedral anatase particles (OAPs) modified with silver NPs by photodeposition.

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Ag/OAPs with enhanced photocatalytic activity under both UV and vis irradiation.

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Electron traps as nucleation sites for silver NPs.

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Polydispersity of silver NPs results in broad LSPR and thus enhanced vis activity.

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TRMC data correlate with photocatalytic activity.

Octahedral anatase particles (OAPs) were modified with silver nanoparticles (NPs) by photodeposition method. The properties of OAPs influenced the properties of silver deposits, and thus the photocatalytic activity of the obtained silver-modified OAPs. Photocatalytic activities were tested under UV and vis irradiation for oxidative decomposition of acetic acid and oxidation of 2-propanol, respectively. The properties of silver-modified OAPs were investigated by XRD, STEM, DRS, XPS and time-resolved microwave conductivity (TRMC) method. It was found that electron traps (ETs) worked as nucleation sites for silver, resulting in formation of smaller silver NPs on smaller OAPs with larger content of ETs. The modification with silver resulted in enhanced photocatalytic activity under both UV and vis irradiation. It was found that larger crystallite size of silver NPs, and thus larger polydispersity of silver deposits resulted in broad and intense plasmon resonance peak causing enhanced visible activity. The correlation between photocatalytic activity and TRMC data, e.g., slower decay of TRMC signal for more active samples, allowed discussion on property-governed photocatalytic activities of silver-modified titania.

Enhancing Epitranscriptome Module Detection from m6A-Seq Data Using Threshold-Based Measurement Weighting Strategy

To date, with well over 100 different types of RNA modifications associated with various molecular functions identified on diverse types of RNA molecules, the epitranscriptome has emerged to be an important layer for gene expression regulation. It is of crucial importance and increasing interest to understand how the epitranscriptome is regulated to facilitate different biological functions from a global perspective, which may be carried forward by finding biologically meaningful epitranscriptome modules that respond to upstream epitranscriptome regulators and lead to downstream biological functions; however, due to the intrinsic properties of RNA molecules, RNA modifications, and relevant sequencing technique, the epitranscriptome profiled from high-throughput sequencing approaches often suffers from various artifacts, jeopardizing the effectiveness of epitranscriptome modules identification when using conventional approaches. To solve this problem, we developed a convenient measurement weighting strategy, which can largely tolerate the artifacts of high-throughput sequencing data. We demonstrated on real data that the proposed measurement weighting strategy indeed brings improved performance in epitranscriptome module discovery in terms of both module accuracy and biological significance. Although the new approach is integrated with Euclidean distance measurement in a hierarchical clustering scenario, it has great potential to be extended to other distance measurements and algorithms as well for addressing various tasks in epitranscriptome analysis. Additionally, we show for the first time with rigorous statistical analysis that the epitranscriptome modules are biologically meaningful with different GO functions enriched, which established the functional basis of epitranscriptome modules, fulfilled a key prerequisite for functional characterization, and deciphered the epitranscriptome and its regulation.

Composing Semantic Collage for Image Retargeting

Image retargeting has been applied to display images of any size via devices with various resolutions (e.g., cell phone, TV monitors). To fit an image with the target resolution, certain unimportant regions need to be deleted or distorted and the key problem is to determine the importance of each pixel. Existing methods predict pixel-wise importance in a bottom-up manner via eye fixation estimation or saliency detection. In contrast, the proposed algorithm estimates the pixel-wise importance based on a top-down criterion where the target image maintains the semantic meaning of the original image. To this end, several semantic components corresponding to foreground objects, action contexts, and background regions are extracted. The semantic component maps are integrated by a classification guided fusion network. Specifically, the deep network classifies the original image as object or scene-oriented, and fuses the semantic component maps according to classification results. The network output, referred to as the semantic collage with the same size as the original image, is then fed into any existing optimization method to generate the target image. Extensive experiments are carried out on the RetargetMe dataset and S-Retarget database developed in this work. Experimental results demonstrate the merits of the proposed algorithm over the state-of-the-art image retargeting methods.

Using Support Vector Machine on EEG for Advertisement Impact Assessment

The advertising industry depends on an effective assessment of the impact of advertising as a key performance metric for their products. However, current assessment methods have relied on either indirect inference from observing changes in consumer behavior after the launch of an advertising campaign, which has long cycle times and requires an ad campaign to have already have been launched (often meaning costs having been sunk). Or through surveys or focus groups, which have a potential for experimental biases, peer pressure, and other psychological and sociological phenomena that can reduce the effectiveness of the study. In this paper, we investigate a new approach to assess the impact of advertisement by utilizing low-cost EEG headbands to record and assess the measurable impact of advertising on the brain. Our evaluation shows the desired performance of our method based on user experiment with 30 recruited subjects after watching 220 different advertisements. We believe the proposed SVM method can be further developed to a general and scalable methodology that can enable advertising agencies to assess impact rapidly, quantitatively, and without bias.

Characteristics and formation of typical winter haze in Handan, one of the most polluted cities in China

Handan, a city within the North China Plain (NCP) region, is a typical city influenced by regional particulate matter (PM) pollution. One-year hourly semi-continuous observation was carried out in 2015 in Handan with the aim of identifying the chemical composition and variations in PM_2.5. Moreover, the concentration of aerosol precursors, meteorological factors, and secondary transformations are considered. The results demonstrate that the annual average PM_2.5 concentration in Handan is 122.35μgm^-3, approximately 3.5 times higher than the Chinese National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) (35μgm^-3), and only 12days were below the guideline. As expected, PM concentrations are highest in winter, especially in December. In addition, we measure the concentrations of five species commonly found in PM, nitrate, sulfate, ammonium, inorganic carbon, and organic carbon. Of these, nitrate and sulfate account for the largest proportion of PM_2.5; during periods when the PM_2.5 concentration was below 400μgm^-3, nitrate dominates, while above this concentration, sulfate dominate. This is likely related to the nitrogen and sulfur oxidation ratios, which are in turn, especially the sulfur oxidation ratio, driven by high relative humidity (>60%). In addition, haze events are driven by other meteorological conditions, wind speed and direction, where low wind speeds from the south and southwest enable pollutant accumulation, which are infrequently interspersed with brief periods with high wind speeds that promote pollutant dispersal. Even though Handan is among the ten most polluted cities in China with regard to air pollution, few studies beyond model simulations have analyzed air pollutant concentrations in this city. Therefore, this study makes a significant contribution to understanding air pollution in Handan, which can further be used to improve our understanding of regional pollution in the highly populated North China Plain. These results have implications for the creation of policies and legislation, as well as other pollution control measures.

Risk Factors Analysis and Death Prediction in Some Life-Threatening Ailments Using Chi-Square Case-Based Reasoning (χ2 CBR) Model

A wealth of data are available within the health care system, however, effective analysis tools for exploring the hidden patterns in these datasets are lacking. To alleviate this limitation, this paper proposes a simple but promising hybrid predictive model by suitably combining the Chi-square distance measurement with case-based reasoning technique. The study presents the realization of an automated risk calculator and death prediction in some life-threatening ailments using Chi-square case-based reasoning (χ² CBR) model. The proposed predictive engine is capable of reducing runtime and speeds up execution process through the use of critical χ² distribution value. This work also showcases the development of a novel feature selection method referred to as frequent item based rule (FIBR) method. This FIBR method is used for selecting the best feature for the proposed χ² CBR model at the preprocessing stage of the predictive procedures. The implementation of the proposed risk calculator is achieved through the use of an in-house developed PHP program experimented with XAMP/Apache HTTP server as hosting server. The process of data acquisition and case-based development is implemented using the MySQL application. Performance comparison between our system, the NBY, the ED-KNN, the ANN, the SVM, the Random Forest and the traditional CBR techniques shows that the quality of predictions produced by our system outperformed the baseline methods studied. The result of our experiment shows that the precision rate and predictive quality of our system in most cases are equal to or greater than 70%. Our result also shows that the proposed system executes faster than the baseline methods studied. Therefore, the proposed risk calculator is capable of providing useful, consistent, faster, accurate and efficient risk level prediction to both the patients and the physicians at any time, online and on a real-time basis.

MeT-DB V2.0: elucidating context-specific functions of N6-methyl-adenosine methyltranscriptome

Methyltranscriptome is an exciting new area that studies the mechanisms and functions of methylation in transcripts. A knowledge base with the systematic collection and curation of context specific transcriptome-wide methylations is critical for elucidating their biological functions as well as for developing bioinformatics tools. Since its inception in 2014, the Met-DB (Liu, H., Flores, M.A., Meng, J., Zhang, L., Zhao, X., Rao, M.K., Chen, Y. and Huang, Y. (2015) MeT-DB: a database of transcriptome methylation in mammalian cells. Nucleic Acids Res., 43, D197-D203), has become an important resource for methyltranscriptome, especially in the N6-methyl-adenosine (m6A) research community. Here, we report Met-DB v2.0, the significantly improved second version of Met-DB, which is entirely redesigned to focus more on elucidating context-specific m6A functions. Met-DB v2.0 has a major increase in context-specific m6A peaks and single-base sites predicted from 185 samples for 7 species from 26 independent studies. Moreover, it is also integrated with a new database for targets of m6A readers, erasers and writers and expanded with more collections of functional data. The redesigned Met-DB v2.0 web interface and genome browser provide more friendly, powerful, and informative ways to query and visualize the data. More importantly, MeT-DB v2.0 offers for the first time a series of tools specifically designed for understanding m6A functions. Met-DB V2.0 will be a valuable resource for m6A methyltranscriptome research. The Met-DB V2.0 database is available at http://compgenomics.utsa.edu/MeTDB/ and http://www.xjtlu.edu.cn/metdb2.

Measurement of shape and deformation of insect wing

To measure the shape and deformation of an insect wing, a scanning setup adopting laser triangulation and image matching was developed. Only one industry camera with two light sources was employed to scan the transparent insect wings. 3D shape and point to point full field deformation of the wings could be obtained even when the wingspan is less than 3 mm. The venation and corrugation could be significantly identified from the results. The deformation of the wing under pin loading could be seen clearly from the results as well. Calibration shows that the shape and deformation measurement accuracies are no lower than 0.01 mm. Laser triangulation and image matching were combined dexterously to adapt wings' complex shape, size, and transparency. It is suitable for insect flight research or flapping wing micro-air vehicle development.

Laugier-Hunziker syndrome: A case report

Laugier-Hunziker syndrome (LHS) is a rare, benign, acquired pigmentary condition mainly affecting lips, oral mucosa and acral area, frequently associated with longitudinal melanonychia. Herein, we reported a 45-year-old female case with LHS. The clinical, dermoscopic, histopathologic features of LHS were reviewed and the important differential diagnosis was discussed.

Knockdown of Golgi phosphoprotein 2 inhibits hepatocellular carcinoma cell proliferation and motility

Golgi phosphoprotein 2 (GP73) is highly expressed in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells, where it serves as a biomarker and indicator of disease progression. We used MTS assays, anchorage-independent cell colony formation assays and a xenograft tumor model to show that GP73-specific siRNAs inhibit HCC proliferation in HepG2, SMMC-7721, and Huh7 cell lines and in vivo. Following GP73 silencing, levels of p-Rb, a factor related to metastasis, were reduced, but cell cycle progression was unaffected. Our results suggest that GP73 silencing may not directly suppress proliferation, but may instead inhibit cell motility. Results from proliferation assays suggest GP73 reduces expression of epithelial mesenchymal transition (EMT)-related factors and promotes cell motility, while transwell migration and invasion assays indicated a possible role in metastasis. Immunofluorescence co-localization microscopy and immunoblotting showed that GP73 decreases expression of N-cadherin and E-cadherin, two key factors in EMT, which may in turn decrease intracellular adhesive forces and promote cell motility. This study confirmed that GP73 expression leads to increased expression of EMT-related proteins and that GP73 silencing reduces HCC cell migration in vitro. These findings suggest that GP73 silencing through siRNA delivery may provide a novel low-toxicity therapy for the inhibition of tumor proliferation and metastasis.

APOE4 Induces Site-Specific Tau Phosphorylation Through Calpain-CDK5 Signaling Pathway in EFAD-Tg Mice

APOE4 is the greatest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD), particularly associated with increased levels of amyloid-β (Aβ) and amyloid deposition. However, it remains unclear whether APOE4 is associated with greater tau phosphorylation and neurofibrillary tangle formation, a hallmark of AD leading to structural disruption of the neuronal cytoskeleton. The current study used 3 and 7 month old EFAD mice, which express human APOE and over-express specifically human Aβ42 via 5 familial-AD (FAD) mutations, to investigate APOE genotype-specific effects on site-specific tau phosphorylation. The results reveal that AD-like site-specific tau phosphorylation was increased in E4FAD mice, accompanied by disrupted cortical neuronal morphology, compared to E3FAD mice. Further analysis demonstrated that the levels of CDK5, its regulatory subunits (p35 and p25) and calpain (including calpain1 and calpain2), but not GSK3β, were significantly increased in E4FAD mice compared to E3FAD mice. These results suggest that the APOE4 genotype contributes to increased site-specific tau phosphorylation via activation of the calpain-CDK5 signaling pathway.

High salt induced hypertension leads to cognitive defect

Although increasing evidences suggest a relationship between hypertension and brain function for years, it is still unclear whether hypertension constitutes a risk factor for cognitive decline and its underlying mechanism. In the present study, an experimental animal model of hypertension simply by feeding rats with high salt diet was employed. We found that long-term high salt intake caused a marked increase of systolic blood pressure linked to a declined regional cerebral blood flow. Fear conditioning and morris water maze behavioral test revealed that high salt diet induced hippocampal dependent spatial reference memory deficits, while a decreased synaptogenesis without neuronal loss in hippocampus was observed in high salt treated rats. Furthermore, we found that high salt induced a decrease of intracellular calcium, which inactivated CaMK II and resulted in dephosphorylation of CREB at Ser133. These findings suggest a novel etiopathogenic mechanism of cognitive deficit induced by hypertension, which is initiated by high salt diet.