Optimizing Peptide-Conjugated Lipid Nanoparticles for Efficient siRNA Delivery across the Blood-Brain Barrier and Treatment of Glioblastoma Multiforme.

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a WHO grade 4 glioma and the most common malignant primary brain tumor. Addressing the clinical management of GBM presents an exceptionally daunting and intricate challenge, particularly in overcoming the blood-brain barrier (BBB) to deliver effective therapies to the brain. Nanotechnology-based drug delivery systems have exhibited considerable promise in tackling this aggressive brain cancer.

Experimental study on gas permeability and radon control performance of red clay covering layer on uranium mill tailings pond.

The decommissioning of uranium mill tailings pond generally employs covering layer to diminish radon exhalation, with soil permeability, thickness, and moisture content being essential considerations in assessing the efficacy of radon reduction. This research uses a proprietary multi-field coupled seepage testing apparatus and a simulated covering layer radon exhalation device to evaluate samples' permeability and radon control effectiveness across different covering layer thicknesses, pressure gradients, and moisture content levels. The findings demonstrate that gas permeability diminishes with increasing covering layer thickness, exhibiting a more pronounced decline at pressures below 0.

Task-Specific Design of a Porous Aromatic Framework as an Ultrastable Platform for Enantioselective Organocatalysis.

A hydroxyl-tagged porous aromatic framework PAF-NBU2-OH was task-specifically designed and successfully synthesized targeted toward immobilizing chiral catalysts. Using proline-type compound as model chiral organocatalyst, PAF-NBU2-OH was used as a platform to covalently link proline-type group. The obtained PAF-immobilized organocatalyst PAF-NBU2-OPro featured high chemical stability in different solvents even under very harsh conditions.

TraInterSim: Adaptive and Planning-Aware Hybrid-Driven Traffic Intersection Simulation.

Traffic intersections are important scenes that can be seen almost everywhere in the traffic system. Currently, most simulation methods perform well at highways and urban traffic networks. In intersection scenarios, the challenge lies in the lack of clearly defined lanes, where agents with various motion plannings converge in the central area from different directions.

Structural insights into neurokinin 3 receptor activation by endogenous and analogue peptide agonists.

Neurokinin 3 receptor (NK3R) is a tachykinin receptor essential for the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis. The endogenous peptide agonist neurokinin B (NKB) preferentially activates NK3R, while substance P (SP) binds preferentially to NK1R. In addition, the SP analogue senktide more potently activates NK3R than NKB and SP.

SSAGCN: Social Soft Attention Graph Convolution Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction.

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is an important technique of autonomous driving. In order to accurately predict the reasonable future trajectory of pedestrians, it is inevitable to consider social interactions among pedestrians and the influence of surrounding scene simultaneously, which can fully represent the complex behavior information and ensure the rationality of predicted trajectories obeyed realistic rules. In this article, we propose one new prediction model named social soft attention graph convolution network (SSAGCN), which aims to simultaneously handle social interactions among pedestrians and scene interactions between pedestrians and environments.

Emotion Priming in People with Williams Syndrome.

Emotion categories configure the basic semantic knowledge of the human cognitive structure. Previous studies with people with Williams syndrome (WS) investigated their ability to process basic emotions and the dimensions of emotional valences. However, little is known about the categorization of emotions from the subordinate perspective of lexical words in people with WS.

Contrastive Proposal Extension With LSTM Network for Weakly Supervised Object Detection.

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) has attracted more and more attention since it only uses image-level labels and can save huge annotation costs. Most of the WSOD methods use Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) as their basic framework, which regard it as an instance classification problem. However, these methods based on MIL tend to only converge on the most discriminative regions of different instances, rather than their corresponding complete regions, that is, insufficient integrity.

Influence of a watertight optical window with plain glass on the light distribution of an LED transmitter for underwater wireless optical communications.

Underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) has attracted much attention recently, thanks to its high transmission speed. In many UWOC applications, the transmitter is based on light emitting diodes (LEDs). This is because it has up to a 120° divergence angle, which is helpful with establishing the communication link more easily.

Influence of watertight optical window with plain glass on receiving field for underwater wireless optical communication.

Underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) has attracted much attention recently due to its superiority of high transmission speed. In many UWOC applications, to establish communication links easier, the receiver has quite a wide field. However, the performance of the receiving field is affected by watertight encapsulation in practice, especially when the optical window is produced with plain glass.

Efficient Total Synthesis and Herbicidal Activity of 3-Acyltetramic Acids: Endogenous Abscisic Acid Synthesis Regulators.

An efficient synthesis method will allow a large number of tetramic acid analogues to be synthesized for property and potency optimization. In this study, a facile and efficient method was described for the synthesis of 3-acyltetramic acids. The synthesis was accomplished mainly via (1) mild intramolecular cyclization and (2) the formation of β-ketoamides between nucleophiles and acyl Meldrum's acids.

Cyanidin-3-O-glucoside mediated photodegradation of profenofos in water.

Flavonoids can sensitize and quench the photolysis of pesticides such as profenofos in surface water. Profenofos has been frequently detected in surface and underground water. The present study investigated the photolysis of profenofos under various conditions, including natural and artificial light illumination, with and without cyanidin-3-O-glucoside (Cy3G) and in pure and surface water.

Investigating basic emotion knowledge of people with Williams syndrome.

Background: Emotional recognition is a key aspect of mentalizing other people's minds. People with Williams syndrome (WS) are reported to be hypersocial and empathetic; however, few studies have investigated their emotion processing ability.

Aims: This study aimed to examine emotion knowledge in people with WS and to further understand their emotion-related mentalizing ability.

Structural insights into the activation of somatostatin receptor 2 by cyclic SST analogues.

The endogenous cyclic tetradecapeptide SST14 was reported to stimulate all five somatostatin receptors (SSTR1-5) for hormone release, neurotransmission, cell growth arrest and cancer suppression. Two SST14-derived short cyclic SST analogues (lanreotide or octreotide) with improved stability and longer lifetime were developed as drugs to preferentially activate SSTR2 and treat acromegalia and neuroendocrine tumors. Here, cryo-EM structures of the human SSTR2-Gi complex bound with SST14, octreotide or lanreotide were determined at resolutions of 2.

Selective, stepwise photodegradation of chlorothalonil, dichlobenil and dichloro- and trichloro-isophthalonitriles enhanced by cyanidin in water.

Chlorothalonil, a widely used chloroisophthalonitrile fungicide, is highly toxic to aquatic organisms and amphibians. It is essential to understand the persistence and fate of chlorothalonil in aquatic environments. Cyanidin is one of the most common phytopolyphenolics in nature and is a strong antioxidant.

Enantiomer metabolism of acephate and its metabolite methamidophos in in vitro tea (Camellia sinensis L.) systems: Comparison between cell suspensions and excised tissues.

Enantioselective metabolism of chiral pesticide in plants is very important. In vitro system has become an effective means to study the metabolism of pesticides in plants, but the study on the metabolism of chiral pesticides has not been reported. This work compared the enantiomer metabolic behavior of acephate and its metabolite methamidophos between tea cell suspensions and excised tea stem with leaves.

Development of a rabies virus-based retrograde tracer with high trans-monosynaptic efficiency by reshuffling glycoprotein.

Rabies virus (RV) is the most widely used vector for mapping neural circuits. Previous studies have shown that the RV glycoprotein can be a target to improve the retrograde transsynaptic tracing efficiency. However, the current versions still label only a small portion of all presynaptic neurons.

TriATNE: Tripartite Adversarial Training for Network Embeddings.

Existing network embedding algorithms based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) improve the robustness of node embeddings by selecting high-quality negative samples with the generator to play against the discriminator. Since most of the negative samples can be easily discriminated from positive samples in graphs, their poor competitiveness weakens the function of the generator. Inspired by the sales skills in the market, in this article, we present tripartite adversarial training for network embeddings (TriATNE), a novel adversarial learning framework for learning stable and robust node embeddings.

Homocysteine is Associated with the Development of Cerebral Small Vessel Disease: Retrospective Analyses from Neuroimaging and Cognitive Outcomes.

Objective: As the population ages, a growing burden of cerebral small vessel disease (cSVD) has sparked extensive concerns recently. Homocysteine (Hcy), as a traditional risk factor for atherosclerosis, may also participate in the development of cSVD. By comprehensively assessing Hcy's correlation with different MRI markers of cSVD and cognitive outcomes in a homogeneous population with cSVD, this study aims to explore the value of Hcy in the clinical management of cSVD.

Different conformational responses of the β-adrenergic receptor-Gs complex upon binding of the partial agonist salbutamol or the full agonist isoprenaline.

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are responsible for most cytoplasmic signaling in response to extracellular ligands with different efficacy profiles. Various spectroscopic techniques have identified that agonists exhibiting varying efficacies can selectively stabilize a specific conformation of the receptor. However, the structural basis for activation of the GPCR-G protein complex by ligands with different efficacies is incompletely understood.

Excellent UV Resistance of Polylactide by Interfacial Stereocomplexation with Double-Shell-Structured TiO Nanohybrids.

The durable application of polylactide (PLA) under atmospheric conditions is restricted by its poor ultraviolet (UV) stability. To improve the UV stability of polymers, titanium dioxide (TiO) is often used as a UV light capture agent. However, TiO is also a photocatalytic agent, with detrimental effects on the polymer properties.

Context-Aware Block Net for Small Object Detection.

State-of-the-art object detectors usually progressively downsample the input image until it is represented by small feature maps, which loses the spatial information and compromises the representation of small objects. In this article, we propose a context-aware block net (CAB Net) to improve small object detection by building high-resolution and strong semantic feature maps. To internally enhance the representation capacity of feature maps with high spatial resolution, we delicately design the context-aware block (CAB).