Abstract 60: Perirenal Adipose Hypertrophy In A Congenic LH Rat: A Role For C17h6orf52

Central obesity, high blood pressure, dyslipidemia, and insulin resistance are a collection of cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors that form the basis of the Metabolic Syndrome (MetS) and represent a major public health burden worldwide. The phenotypes that define MetS are all highly heritable, but their genetic complexity necessitates the use of animal models to tease apart novel pathways. The Lyon Hypertensive (LH) rat is a well-characterized model of MetS, exhibiting profound differences in features of MetS compared to its metabolically healthy control, the Lyon Normotensive (LN) rat. To understand the genomic causes of MetS, we developed a congenic rat model, where a portion of LN chromosome 17 is introgressed on the LH genomic background. Male and female LH congenic (CON) rats and LH controls were phenotyped for a variety of MetS characteristics, including body growth and composition by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), metabolic rate (Promethion system), and adipose tissue collection and histological examination. There were significant decreases in body weight in the CON rats of both sexes compared to LH. We also found significant female-specific increases in body fat and decreases in metabolic rate. Tissue collection revealed the source of the increased adiposity in the female CON rats was specific to perirenal white adipose tissue (PWAT) and was further explained by significant hypertrophy in those adipocytes. Genome resequencing of the parental strains identified a gene, C17h6orf52 , as a strong contender underlying the phenotype differences in the congenics, with predicted amino acid changes and the loss of Nr2f2 transcription factor binding sites.

A Framework for Instantaneous Driver Drowsiness Detection Based on Improved HOG Features and Naïve Bayesian Classification

Due to their high distinctiveness, robustness to illumination and simple computation, Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) features have attracted much attention and achieved remarkable success in many computer vision tasks. In this paper, an innovative framework for driver drowsiness detection is proposed, where an adaptive descriptor that possesses the virtue of distinctiveness, robustness and compactness is formed from an improved version of HOG features based on binarized histograms of shifted orientations. The final HOG descriptor generated from binarized HOG features is fed to the trained Naïve Bayes (NB) classifier to make the final driver drowsiness determination. Experimental results on the publicly available NTHU-DDD dataset verify that the proposed framework has the potential to be a strong contender for several state-of-the-art baselines, by achieving a competitive detection accuracy of 85.62%, without loss of efficiency or stability.

Progress without exclusion in the search for an evolutionary basis of music

Mehr et al.'s hypothesis that the origins of music lie in credible signaling emerges here as a strong contender to explain early adaptive functions of music. Its integration with evolutionary biology and its specificity mark important contributions. However, much of the paper is dedicated to the exclusion of popular alternative hypotheses, which we argue is unjustified and premature.

Gastrointestinal Delivery of APIs from Chitosan Nanoparticles

Successful clinical treatment outcomes rely on achieving optimal systemic delivery of therapeutics. The oral route of administering Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) remains formidable because of ease to the patient and convenience. Yet, the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) poses several barriers that need to be surmounted prior to systemic availability, especially for Class IV type drugs. Drug delivery systems in the form of nanoparticles (NP), can be appropriately formulated to alter the physicochemical properties of APIs, thereby addressing constraints related to absorption from the GIT. Polymers offer amenability in the fabrication of NP due to their diversity. Chitosan has emerged as a strong contender in orally deliverable NP because it is biocompatible, biodegradable and muco-adhesive. Due to the positively charged amine moieties within chitosan (NH3+), interactions with the negatively charged sialic acid of mucin within the mucosa is possible, which favors delayed GI transit and epithelial uptake. This ultimately results in improved systemic bioavailability. Thus, we expect research in the use of chitosan in oral NP delivery to intensify as we transcend the frontier toward clinical testing of viable formulations.

EFFICIENCY IN WRITING SOFTWARE WITH VIM

Modal editing is a, nowadays rare, concept that offers multiple interaction modes which are optimized for specific types of actions and interactions within a text editor. This study aimed to provide insight on the pros and cons of using a nowadays considered “outdated” piece of software called Vim for daily usage, and how its rationale helps its users to realize their objectives in an efficient and powerful manner. Furthermore, a test case with several subjects was put into place to gauge exactly how Vim compares to a standard editor on a particular scenario with timed comparison, following up on an analysis that was made based on the results of that experiment. Ultimately, it was concluded that, even for an old-fashioned tool, when certain criteria were met, Vim still posed as a strong contender for automating repetitive tasks, performing considerably faster than its adversaries. This experiment also served as a motive to demonstrate what might be gained from a tool with such a difficult learning curve.

Myanmar’s Transition and the Resurgence of Buddhist Nationalism

Myanmar began a transition in 2011 that ended almost 50 years of military rule. During the transition, a nationalist movement called for protecting Buddhism from an “Islamic threat.” Anti-Islam nationalism was not new in Burmese history, yet the timing of its resurgence deserves attention. I argue that the incumbents’ anticipated electoral weakness in transitional elections was the primary reason for its resurgence. The incumbents sought to maximize societal support, and they faced a strong contender, the National League for Democracy, whose probability of winning was high. Social opposition was also significant by the time military rule ended. In a campaign to pass reforms to better “protect” Buddhism, the incumbents used monks to cast doubt on the NLD’s ability to represent Buddhist interests and to recruit former regime opponents who were nationalists. The incumbents garnered wide support for the reforms, yet it was insufficient for an electoral victory.

Effects of reduction factor on rain attenuation predictions over millimeter-wave links for 5G applications

Millimeter-wave will be the strong contender for the terrestrial link using for 5G networks. So it is imperative to examine these frequency bands to ensure the uninterrupted services when 5G network is connected in tropical regions. A critical challenge of link-budgeting in mm-wave 5G networks is the precise estimation of rain attenuation for short-path links. The difficulties are further intensified in the tropical areas where the rainfall rate is very high. Different models are proposed to predict rain attenuation, however recent measurements show huge discrepancies with predictions for shorter links at mm-wave. The path reduction factor is the main parameter in the prediction model for predicting total attenuation from specific rain attenuation. This study investigates four path reduction factor models for the prediction of rain attenuation. A comparison was made between these models based on rain attenuation data measured at 26 GHz at 300 m and 1.3 km links in Malaysia. All models are found to predict rain attenuation at a 1.3 km link with minimum errors, while tremendous discrepancies are observed for 300 m link. Hence it is highly recommended to further investigate the reduction factor model for shorter links less than 1 km

DAVE: Optimizing Wasabi Agriculture Through Automation and Successive Approximation

Wasabi agriculture continues to predominantly rely on traditional practices. There currently exists an abundance of botanical literature surrounding the optimization of the wasabi growth environment to increase crop quality, however this research is detached and independent. Considering the recent rise to prominence of cyber-agriculture technology, its use in further optimizing the wasabi growth environment should be considered. By designing and constructing two wasabi-oriented food computer prototype iterations, uniting and synchronizing the results of existing wasabi optimization research, and growing Wasabia japonica plants inside these food computers, it was found that despite the widely reported difficulty of traditional wasabi farming, the crop is a strong contender for novel cyber-agriculture: the plant tissues showed a 69.3% increase in flavour compound (allyl isothiocyanate) concentration overall. The plants also exhibited a 74.7% decrease in overall plant mass, pointing to a well-documented phenomenon dubbed the “dilution effect” present in intensive agriculture. Overall, given future design improvements and more extensive data collection, there exists the possibility to revolutionize wasabi agriculture by engineering cyber-agriculture solutions tailored to wasabi growth.

Third-party transfers in WLCG using HTTP

Since its earliest days, the Worldwide LHC Computational Grid (WLCG) has relied on GridFTP to transfer data between sites. The announcement that Globus is dropping support of its open source Globus Toolkit (GT), which forms the basis for several FTP client and servers, has created an opportunity to reevaluate the use of FTP. HTTP-TPC, an extension to HTTP compatible with WebDAV, has arisen as a strong contender for an alternative approach. In this paper, we describe the HTTP-TPC protocol itself, along with the current status of its support in different implementations, and the interoperability testing done within the WLCG DOMA working group’s TPC activity. This protocol also provides the first real use-case for token-based authorisation for this community. We will demonstrate the benefits of such authorisation by showing how it allows HTTP-TPC to support new technologies (such as OAuth, OpenID Connect, Macaroons and SciTokens) without changing the protocol. We will also discuss the next steps for HTTP-TPC and the plans to use the protocol for WLCG transfers.

Large bandgap of pressurized trilayer graphene

Graphene-based nanodevices have been developed rapidly and are now considered a strong contender for postsilicon electronics. However, one challenge facing graphene-based transistors is opening a sizable bandgap in graphene. The largest bandgap achieved so far is several hundred meV in bilayer graphene, but this value is still far below the threshold for practical applications. Through in situ electrical measurements, we observed a semiconducting character in compressed trilayer graphene by tuning the interlayer interaction with pressure. The optical absorption measurements demonstrate that an intrinsic bandgap of 2.5 ± 0.3 eV could be achieved in such a semiconducting state, and once opened could be preserved to a few GPa. The realization of wide bandgap in compressed trilayer graphene offers opportunities in carbon-based electronic devices.