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Pollen data from China for 6000 and 18,000 C-14 yr BP Were compiled and used to reconstruct palaeovegetation patterns, using complete taxon lists where possible and a biomization procedure that entailed the assignment of 645 polle...
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Pollen data from China for 6000 and 18,000 C-14 yr BP Were compiled and used to reconstruct palaeovegetation patterns, using complete taxon lists where possible and a biomization procedure that entailed the assignment of 645 pollen taxa to plant functional types. A set of 658 modern pollen samples spanning all biomes and regions provided a comprehensive test for this procedure and showed convincing agreement between reconstructed biomes and present natural vegetation types, both geographically and in terms of the elevation gradients in mountain regions of north-eastern and south-western China.
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ABSTRACT: Dairy consumption has been studied extensively in terms of its relationship with testicular cancer (TC), yet this relationship remains unclear. In this systematic review, we aimed to answer whether TC development is asso...
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ABSTRACT: Dairy consumption has been studied extensively in terms of its relationship with testicular cancer (TC), yet this relationship remains unclear. In this systematic review, we aimed to answer whether TC development is associated with (a) high amounts of dairy product consumption, (b) the type of dairy product consumed, (c) increasing levels of dairy product consumption, and (d) dairy consumption during certain periods during the lifecourse. Following a systematic review of the literature, eight studies (all case-control studies) were included in our review. The included studies varied in terms of the dairy product(s) investigated (milk, cheese, cream, butter, and yoghurt) as well as the type of exposure to dairy consumption (e.g., high vs. low exposure, dose-response, and timing during lifecourse). We found that there was no strong evidence that high levels of dairy consumption are associated with risk of TC, conflicting evidence of a doseresponse relationship, inconsistent evidence on whether certain types of dairy are more strongly associated with TC than others, and conflicting evidence that exposure during certain life-course periods affects TC risk more than other periods. There is no consistent evidence to support the premise that dairy product consumption is associated with the risk of TC development. ?2018, ?2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
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To increase the speed of information retrieval, one message may have multiple replicas in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN). In this paper, we adopt a discrete time model and focus on the caching policy of stochastic updating informat...
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To increase the speed of information retrieval, one message may have multiple replicas in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN). In this paper, we adopt a discrete time model and focus on the caching policy of stochastic updating information. In particular, the source creates new version in every time slot with certain probability. New version is usually more useful than the older one. We use a utility function to denote the availability of different versions. To constrain the number of replicas, we propose a probabilistic management policy and nodes to discard information with certain probability determined by the version of the information. Our objective is to find the best value of the probability to maximize the total utility value. Because new version is created with certain probability, nodes other than the source may not know whether the information stored in them is the latest version. Therefore, they can make decisions only according to the local state and decisions based on the local state can be seen as local-policy. We also explore the global-policy, that is, nodes understand the real state. We prove that the optimal policies in both cases conform to the threshold form. Simulations based on both synthetic and real motion traces show the accuracy of our theoretical model. Surprisingly, numerical results show that local-policy is better than the global-policy in some cases.
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A metal-free catalytic method for the synthesis of 2-deoxy glycosides and disaccharides has been developed using stable 2-deoxy glucosyl and galactosyl acetate donors. They could react with a variety of acceptors in the presence o...
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A metal-free catalytic method for the synthesis of 2-deoxy glycosides and disaccharides has been developed using stable 2-deoxy glucosyl and galactosyl acetate donors. They could react with a variety of acceptors in the presence of catalytic amount of TMSOTf at 0癈 to form glycosides, glycoconjugates, and disaccharides with excellent ?selectivity (> 19:1) and yields (up to 99%) in a short time (0.5 h). With this expedient method, several new compounds against human K562 and SMMC7721 cell lines were obtained and tested with in vitro antitumor bioactivities.
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Motivated by the recent applications of the conjugate residual method to nonsymmetric linear systems by Sogabe, Sugihara and Zhang [An extension of the conjugate residual method to nonsymmetric linear systems. J. Comput. Appl. Mat...
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Motivated by the recent applications of the conjugate residual method to nonsymmetric linear systems by Sogabe, Sugihara and Zhang [An extension of the conjugate residual method to nonsymmetric linear systems. J. Comput. Appl. Math., Vol. 266, 2009, pp. 103--113], this paper describes two conjugate direction methods, BiCR and BiCG, and attempts to extend their applications to compute the stationary probability distribution for an irreducible Markov chain with the aim of finding an alternative basic solver. Numerical experiments show the feasibility of the BiCR and BiCG to some extent, with applications to several practical Markov chain problems.
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Introduction: Osteoarthritis (OA) is the leading cause of pain, loss of function, and disability among elderly, with the knee the most affected joint. It is a heterogeneous condition characterized by complex and multifactorial eti...
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Introduction: Osteoarthritis (OA) is the leading cause of pain, loss of function, and disability among elderly, with the knee the most affected joint. It is a heterogeneous condition characterized by complex and multifactorial etiologies which contribute to the broad variation in symptoms presentation and treatment responses that OA patients present. This poses a challenge for the development of effective treatment on OA. Areas covered: This review will discuss recent development of agents for the treatment of OA, updating our previous narrative review published in 2015. They include drugs for controlling local and systemic inflammation, regulating articular cartilage, targeting subchondral bone, and relieving pain. Expert opinion: Although new OA drugs such as monoclonal antibodies have shown marked effects and favorable tolerance, current treatment options for OA remain limited. The authors believe there is no miracle drug that can be used for all OA patients’; treatment and disease stage is crucial for the effectiveness of drugs. Therefore, early diagnosis, phenotyping OA patients and precise therapy would expedite the development of investigational drugs targeting at symptoms and disease progression of OA.
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The aged brain may not make good use of central resources, so dual task performance may be degraded. From the brain connectome perspective, this study investigated dual task deficits of older adults that lead to task failure of a ...
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The aged brain may not make good use of central resources, so dual task performance may be degraded. From the brain connectome perspective, this study investigated dual task deficits of older adults that lead to task failure of a suprapostural motor task with increasing postural destabilization. Twelve younger (mean age: 25.3 years) and 12 older (mean age: 65.8 years) adults executed a designated force-matching task from a level-surface or a stabilometer board. Force-matching error, stance sway, and event-related potential (ERP) in the preparatory period were measured. The force-matching accuracy and the size of postural sway of the older adults tended to be more vulnerable to stance configuration than that of the young adults, although both groups consistently showed greater attentional investment on the postural task as sway regularity increased in the stabilometer condition. In terms of the synchronization likelihood (SL) of the ERP, both younger and older adults had net increases in the strengths of the functional connectivity in the whole brain and in the fronto-sensorimotor network in the stabilometer condition. Also, the SL in the fronto-sensorimotor network of the older adults was greater than that of the young adults for both stance conditions. However, unlike the young adults, the older adults did not exhibit concurrent deactivation of the functional connectivity of the left temporal-parietal-occipital network for postural-suprapostural task with increasing postural load. In addition, the older adults potentiated functional connectivity of the right prefrontal area to cope with concurrent force-matching with increasing postural load. In conclusion, despite a universal negative effect on brain volume conduction, our preliminary results showed that the older adults were still capable of increasing allocation of neural sources, particularly via compensatory recruitment of the right prefrontal loop, for concurrent force-matching under the challenging postural condition. Nevertheless, dual-task performance of the older adults tended to be more vulnerable to postural load than that of the younger adults, in relation to inferior neural economy or a slow adaptation process to stance destabilization for scant dissociation of control hubs in the temporal-parietal-occipital cortex.
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Gut microbiota may not only affect composition of local immune cells but also affect systemic immune cells. However, it is not completely clear how gut microbiota modulate these immune systems. Here, we found that there exist expa...
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Gut microbiota may not only affect composition of local immune cells but also affect systemic immune cells. However, it is not completely clear how gut microbiota modulate these immune systems. Here, we found that there exist expanded macrophage pools in huREG3γtgIEC mice. REG3γ-associated Lactobacillus, which is homology to Lactobacillus Taiwanese, could enlarge macrophage pools not only in the small intestinal lamina propria but also in the spleen and adipose tissues. STAT3-mediated signal(s) was a critical factor in the Lactobacillus-mediated anti-inflammatory macrophages. We also offered evidence for critical cellular links among REG3γ-associated Lactobacillus, tissue macrophages, and obesity diseases. Anti-inflammatory macrophages in the lamina propria, which are induced by REG3γ-associated Lactobacillus, may migrate into adipose tissues and are involved in resistance against high-fat diet-mediated obesity. Thus, REG3γ-associated Lactobacillus-induced anti-inflammatory macrophages in gut tissues may play a role in adipose tissue homeostasis.
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We examined the effects of reversible inactivation of a higher-order, pattern/form-processing, postero-temporal visual (PTV) cortex on the background activities and spike-responses of single neurons in the ipsilateral cytoarchitec...
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We examined the effects of reversible inactivation of a higher-order, pattern/form-processing, postero-temporal visual (PTV) cortex on the background activities and spike-responses of single neurons in the ipsilateral cytoarchitectonic area 19 (putative area V3) of anesthetized domestic cats. Very occasionally (2/28), silencing recurrent “feedback” signals from PTV, resulted in significant and reversible reduction in background activity of area 19 neurons. By contrast, in large proportions of area 19 neurons, PTV inactivation resulted in: (i) significant reversible changes in the peak magnitude of their responses to visual stimuli (35.5%; 10/28); (ii) substantial reversible changes in direction selectivity indices (DSIs; 43%; 12/28); and (iii) reversible, upward shifts in preferred stimulus velocities (37%; 7/19). Substantial (≥20°) shifts in preferred orientation and/or substantial (≥20°) changes in width of orientation-tuning curves of area 19 neurons were however less common (26.5%; 4/15). In a series of experiments conducted earlier, inactivation of PTV also induced upward shifts in the preferred velocities of the ipsilateral cytoarchitectonic area 17 (V1) neurons responding optimally at low velocities. These upward shifts in preferred velocities of areas 19 and 17 neurons were often accompanied by substantial increases in DSIs. Thus, in both the primary visual cortex and the “intermediate” visual cortex (area 19), feedback from PTV plays a modulatory role in relation to stimulus velocity preferences and/or direction selectivity, that is, the properties which are usually believed to be determined by the inputs from the dorsal thalamus and/or feedforward inputs from the primary visual cortices. The apparent specialization of area 19 for processing information about stationary/slowly moving visual stimuli is at least partially determined, by the feedback from the higher-order pattern-processing visual area. Overall, the recurrent signals from the higher-order, pattern/form-processing visual cortex appear to play an important role in determining the magnitude of spike-responses and some “motion-related” receptive field properties of a substantial proportion of neurons in the intermediate form-processing visual area—area 19.
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Practical mobile communication systems suffer from time-variant channel fading and cochannel interference, both of which give rise to challenges concerning strategy design and performance analysis in wireless relay networks. Altho...
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Practical mobile communication systems suffer from time-variant channel fading and cochannel interference, both of which give rise to challenges concerning strategy design and performance analysis in wireless relay networks. Although these two aspects have attracted concerns in recent studies, most researchers still focused on dealing with a single problem and avoided intricate joint considerations. In this paper, we investigate the cooperative strategies for the communications of two cochannel pairs over time-correlated Rayleigh channels, and the system consists of a relay-assisted pair (Pair 1) along with a direct transmission pair (Pair 2). We begin with a theoretical evaluation on a conventional relay selection (RS) algorithm that maximizes outdated signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (M-SINR), and then develop a more sophisticated method that involves extra statistical and interference information based on the concept of minimizing outage probability (MOP). Closed-form outage probability expressions are derived for both pairs with each RS algorithm, and the MOP-type selection is confirmed to outperform M-SINR in robustness against channel fluctuation when the network operates on medium-to-high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Implementation issues of the RS methods are discussed to clarify their overhead and to support their practicability. Further, an interference control scheme is proposed to guarantee Pair 2 communication quality under either RS algorithm by disqualifying the relays that probably cause severe cochannel interference to Pair 2. The interference control mechanism is carried out via a novel threshold parameter $varepsilon$ that represents the tolerance of outage performance degradation of Pair 2 resulting from interference. The closed-form analysis validates that the given $varepsilon$ is rational for an arbitrar- network scenario, and it can balance the two pairs' outage behavior under a proper configuration. We reveal the influence of factors such as average SNR, transmit rate, and network topology on system performance to make a comprehensive comparison between diverse cooperative strategies.
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