Optimal designs for an additive quadratic mixture model involving the amount of mixture

This paper is concerned with D- and A-optimal designs for a quadratic additive model for experiments with mixtures, in which the response depends not only on the relative proportions but also on the actual amounts of the mixture components. It is found that the origin and vertices of the simplex are support points of these optimal designs, and when the number of mixture components increases, other support points shift gradually from barycentres of depth 1 to barycentres of higher depths. It is shown that the D-optimal designs have high efficiency in terms of A-optimality, and vice versa.published_or_final_versio

CD4 T lymphocyte autophagy is upregulated in the salivary glands of primary Sjögren’s syndrome patients and correlates with focus score and disease activity

Background: Primary Sjögren’s syndrome (pSS) is a common chronic autoimmune disease characterized by lymphocytic infiltration of exocrine glands and peripheral lymphocyte perturbation. In the current study, we aimed to investigate the possible pathogenic implication of autophagy in T lymphocytes in patients with pSS. Methods: Thirty consecutive pSS patients were recruited together with 20 patients affected by sicca syndrome a nd/or chronic sialoadenitis and 30 healthy controls. Disease activity and damage were evaluated according to SS disease activity index, EULAR SS disease activity index, and SS disease damage index. T lymphocytes were analyzed for the expression of autophagy-specific markers by biochemical, molecular, and histological assays in peripheral blood and labial gland biopsies. Serum interleukin (IL)-23 and IL-21 levels were quantified by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Results: Our study provides evidence for the first time that autophagy is upregulated in CD4+ T lymphocyte salivary glands from pSS patients. Furthermore, a statistically significant correlation was detected between lymphocyte autophagy levels, disease activity, and damage indexes. We also found a positive correlation between autophagy enhancement and the increased salivary gland expression of IL-21 and IL-23, providing a further link between innate and adaptive immune responses in pSS. Conclusions: These findings suggest that CD4+ T lymphocyte autophagy could play a key role in pSS pathogenesis. Additionally, our data highlight the potential exploitation of T cell autophagy as a biomarker of disease activity and provide new ground to verify the therapeutic implications of autophagy as an innovative drug target in pSS

Cryptanalysis of a data security protection scheme for VoIP

A voice-over-Internet protocol technique with a new hierarchical data security protection (HDSP) scheme using a secret chaotic bit sequence has been recently proposed. Some insecure properties of the HDSP scheme are pointed out and then used to develop known/chosen-plaintext attacks. The main findings are: given n known plaintexts, about (100–(50/2n))% of secret chaotic bits can be uniquely determined; given only one specially-chosen plaintext, all secret chaotic bits can be uniquely derived; and the secret key can be derived with practically small computational complexity when only one plaintext is known (or chosen). These facts reveal that HDSP is very weak against known/chosen-plaintext attacks. Experiments are given to show the feasibility of the proposed attacks. It is also found that the security of HDSP against the brute-force attack is not practically strong. Some countermeasures are discussed for enhancing the security of HDSP and several basic principles are suggested for the design of a secure encryption scheme

Altered thymic differentiation and modulation of arthritis by invariant NKT cells expressing mutant ZAP70

Various subsets of invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells with different cytokine productions develop in the mouse thymus, but the factors driving their differentiation remain unclear. Here we show that hypomorphic alleles of Zap70 or chemical inhibition of Zap70 catalysis leads to an increase of IFN-gamma-producing iNKT cells (NKT1 cells), suggesting that NKT1 cells may require a lower TCR signal threshold. Zap70 mutant mice develop IL-17-dependent arthritis. In a mouse experimental arthritis model, NKT17 cells are increased as the disease progresses, while NKT1 numbers negatively correlates with disease severity, with this protective effect of NKT1 linked to their IFN-gamma expression. NKT1 cells are also present in the synovial fluid of arthritis patients. Our data therefore suggest that TCR signal strength during thymic differentiation may influence not only IFN-gamma production, but also the protective function of iNKT cells in arthritis

Superconductivity in HfTe5 across weak to strong topological insulator transition induced via pressures

Recently, theoretical studies show that layered HfTe5 is at the boundary of weak & strong topological insulator (TI) and might crossover to a Dirac semimetal state by changing lattice parameters. The topological properties of 3D stacked HfTe5 are expected hence to be sensitive to pressures tuning. Here, we report pressure induced phase evolution in both electronic & crystal structures for HfTe5 with a culmination of pressure induced superconductivity. Our experiments indicated that the temperature for anomaly resistance peak (Tp) due to Lifshitz transition decreases first before climbs up to a maximum with pressure while the Tp minimum corresponds to the transition from a weak TI to strong TI. The HfTe5 crystal becomes superconductive above ~5.5 GPa where the Tp reaches maximum. The highest superconducting transition temperature (Tc) around 5 K was achieved at 20 GPa. Crystal structure studies indicate that HfTe5 transforms from a Cmcm phase across a monoclinic C2/m phase then to a P-1 phase with increasing pressure. Based on transport, structure studies a comprehensive phase diagram of HfTe5 is constructed as function of pressure. The work provides valuable experimental insights into the evolution on how to proceed from a weak TI precursor across a strong TI to superconductors

Observation of a ppb mass threshoud enhancement in \psi^\prime\to\pi^+\pi^-J/\psi(J/\psi\to\gamma p\bar{p}) decay

The decay channel $\psi^\prime\to\pi^+\pi^-J/\psi(J/\psi\to\gamma p\bar{p})$ is studied using a sample of $1.06\times 10^8$ $\psi^\prime$ events collected by the BESIII experiment at BEPCII. A strong enhancement at threshold is observed in the $p\bar{p}$ invariant mass spectrum. The enhancement can be fit with an $S$-wave Breit-Wigner resonance function with a resulting peak mass of $M=1861^{+6}_{-13} {\rm (stat)}^{+7}_{-26} {\rm (syst)} {\rm MeV/}c^2$ and a narrow width that is $\Gamma<38 {\rm MeV/}c^2$ at the 90% confidence level. These results are consistent with published BESII results. These mass and width values do not match with those of any known meson resonance.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Chinese Physics

A multi-gene signature predicts outcome in patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.

© 2014 Haider et al.; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Improved usage of the repertoires of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) profiles is crucially needed to guide the development of predictive and prognostic tools that could inform the selection of treatment options

Evaluating the Feasibility of Forward Osmosis in Diluting RO Concentrate Using Pretreatment Backwash Water

Forward osmosis (FO) is an excellent membrane process to dilute seawater (SW) reverse osmosis (RO) concentrate for either to increase the water recovery or for safe disposal. However, the low fluxes through FO membranes as well the biofouling/scaling of FO membranes are bottlenecks of this process requiring larger membrane area and membranes with anti-fouling properties. This study evaluates the performance of hollow fibre and flat sheet membranes with respect to flux and biofouling. Ferric hydroxide sludge was used as impaired water mimicking the backwash water of a filter that is generally employed as pretreatment in a SWRO plant and RO concentrate was used as draw solution for the studies. Synthetic salts are also used as draw solutions to compare the flux produced. The study found that cellulose triacetate (CTA) flat sheet FO membrane produced higher flux (3-6 L m-2 h-1) compared to that produced by polyamide (PA) hollow fibre FO membrane (less than 2.5 L m-2 h-1) under the same experimental conditions. Therefore, long-term studies conducted on the flat sheet FO membranes showed that fouling due to ferric hydroxide sludge did not allow the water flux to increase more than 3.15 L m-2 h-1