Genotoxicity and Cytotoxicity of 4-Nonylphenol Ethoxylate on Lymphocytes as Assessed by the Comet Assay

Surfactants, which are prevalent at industrial sites and in the environment generally, are potential risk factors in human carcinogenesis. The widespread industrial use of surfactants such as 4-alkylphenol ethoxylates and their prevalence in many cleaning products have provoked studies about surfactant concentrations in water and their toxicity levels. Up to now, these substances have mainly been tested on aquatic organisms. Though tests on human cell lines are rare. The alkaline Comet assay was performed to evaluate the genotoxicity of 4-nonylphenol ethoxylate, a biodegradable product of 4-alkylphenol ethoxylate, in human lymphocytes. Concentrations tested ranged from 0.15 to 150 µg/mL. Test concentrations of 10 to 15 µg/mL caused an increase level of DNA migration in human cells, but without inducing excessive toxicity (viability > 80%). Though induced levels of DNA migration starting at concentrations of 30 µg/mL may have been due to excessive levels of cytotoxicity (viability < 70%). Based on these data, 4-nonylphenol ethoxylate can induce DNA damage in human lymphocytes but at higher concentrations than are normally found in river or drinking water. However, considering the prevalence of surfactants, the measured genotoxicity of these substances is of concern. Further investigations on human target cells are necessary to evaluate the carcinogenic impact of surfactants and reconsider their environmental acceptance.     

A weighted full-reference image quality assessment based on visual saliency

In full reference image quality assessment (IQA), the images without distortion are usually employed as reference, while the structures in both reference images and distorted images are ignored and all pixels are equally treated. In addition, the role of human visual system (HVS) is not taken account into subjective IQA metric. In this paper, a weighted full-reference image quality metric is proposed, where a weight imposed on each pixel indicates its importance in IQA. Furthermore, the weights can be estimated via visual saliency computation, which can approximate the subjective IQA via exploiting the HVS. In the experiments, the proposed metric is compared with several objective IQA metrics on LIVE release 2 and TID 2008 database. The results demonstrate that SROCC and PLCC of the proposed metric are 0.9647 and 0.9721, respectively,which are higher than other methods and it only takes 427.5 s, which is lower than that of most other methods.     

Design of a decentralized modular architecture for flexible and extensible production systems

In the European manufacturing industry, production batches are decreasing, resulting in an increase in required changeovers. Companies are pushed to respond quickly and cost-efficient to changing markets. One way for Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) to become more agile, is to incorporate industrial robots in their production processes; larger enterprises already use this versatile piece of equipment for large batch sizes. To do so, a new perspective and approach is required, tailored to dynamic manufacturing systems in which production systems and components can be easily reconfigured, altered, swapped or replaced. A modular system architecture was developed within project SInBot upon which challenges in dynamic cooperation between robots and humans were projected. The developed system uses decentralized control and distributed intelligence, linked through an extensible, flexible, and fault-tolerant communication architecture. The rapidly growing complexity of traditional systems is compared to its decentralized counterpart to illustrate some of the many advantages of this new system architecture. A manufacturing scenario analogue is discussed and the approach to verify the performance of inner-system components, as well as the benefits of this approach. Key challenges that are encountered in implementing the cooperation into the current industrial environments are identified and projected upon the verification system.     

用于考察外源添加剂对卷烟常规烟气指标影响的样品制备因子筛选

为筛选用于考察外源添加剂对卷烟常规烟气指标影响的样品制备关键控制因子,采用L_8(2~7)正交试验设计进行香兰素及乙基麦芽酚的添加实验.卷烟常规烟气指标变化数值通过极差分析、方差分析,结果显示:参比卷烟种类是影响卷烟烟气总粒相物、焦油、水分的高度显著因子,就试验采用的1R5F和3R4F参比卷烟而言,添加剂在高焦油3R4F卷烟中对常规烟气指标的影响比其在低焦油1R5F卷烟中的影响大;添加剂种类与浓度的交互作用不仅对卷烟烟气总粒相物有高度显著影响,而且对总粒相物中的水分也有显著影响;因此,规范样品制备,可减少误差、保证后续外源添加剂加入对卷烟常规烟气指标影响评价结果和推断的可靠性及科学性.     

Human action recognition using multi-layer codebooks of key poses and atomic motions

Taking fully into consideration the fact that one human action can be intuitively considered as a sequence of key poses and atomic motions in a particular order, a human action recognition method using multi-layer codebooks of key poses and atomic motions is proposed in this paper. Inspired by the dynamics models of human joints, normalized relative orientations are computed as features for each limb of human body. In order to extract key poses and atomic motions precisely, feature sequences are segmented into pose feature segments and motion feature segments dynamically, based on the potential differences of feature sequences. Multi-layer codebooks of each human action are constructed with the key poses extracted from pose feature segments and the atomic motions extracted from motion feature segments associated with each two key poses. The multi-layer codebooks represent action patterns of each human action, which can be used to recognize human actions with the proposed pattern-matching method. Three classification methods are employed for action recognition based on the multi-layer codebooks. Two public action datasets, i.e., CAD-60 and MSRC-12 datasets, are used to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain a comparable or better performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.     

The initial stage of structural transformation of Aβ42 peptides from the human and mole rat in the presence of Fe2+ and Fe3+: Related to Alzheimer's disease

The early stage of secondary structural conversion of amyloid beta (Aβ) to misfolded aggregations is a key feature of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Under normal physiological conditions, Aβ peptides can protect neurons from the toxicity of highly concentrated metals. However, they become toxic under certain conditions. Under conditions of excess iron, amyloid precursor proteins (APP) become overexpressed. This subsequently increases Aβ production. Experimental studies suggest that Aβ fibrillation (main-pathway) and amorphous (off-pathway) aggregate formations are two competitive pathways driven by factors such as metal binding, pH and temperature. In this study, we performed molecular dynamic (MD) simulations to examine the initial stage of conformational transformations of human Aβ (hAβ) and rat Aβ (rAβ) peptides in the presence of Fe²⁺ and Fe³⁺ ions. Our results demonstrated that Fe²⁺ and Fe³⁺ play key roles in Aβs folding and aggregation. Fe³⁺ had a greater effect than Fe²⁺on Aβs’ folding during intermolecular interactions and subsequently, had a greater effect in decreasing structural diversity. Fe²⁺ was observed to be more likely than Fe³⁺ to interact with nitrogen atoms from the residues of imidazole rings of His. rAβ peptides are more energetically favorable than hAβ for intermolecular interactions and amorphous aggregations. We concluded that most hAβ structures were energetically unfavorable. However, hAβs with intermolecular β-sheet formations in the C-terminal were energetically favorable. It is notable that Fe²⁺ can change the surface charge of hAβ. Furthermore, Fe³⁺ can promote C-terminal folding by binding to Glu22 and Ala42, and by forming stable β-sheet formations on the C-terminal. Fe³⁺ can also pause the main-pathway by inducing random aggregations.     

Development and optimization of ultra-high performance supercritical fluid chromatography mass spectrometry method for high-throughput determination of tocopherols and tocotrienols in human serum

The goal of this study was to develop an effective supercritical fluid chromatography method using single quadrupole MS for analysis of all isomeric forms of vitamin E. Finally, two fast and effective methods, the high resolution one and the high speed one, for the determination of 8 vitamin E isomers in human serum were developed.     

Determinants of the intention to use Buy-Online,Pickup In-Store (BOPS): The moderating effects of situational factors and product type

Despite the wider introduction of the buy online and pick up in-store (BOPS) service by retailers, research on BOPS is still sparse, especially those from the consumer perspective. This paper employs the scenario-based factorial survey method to investigate how the perceived characteristics of innovation and the perceived risk of online shopping influence the consumers’ intention to use BOPS while also considering the moderating effects of situational factors (location convenience) and product type (involvement). Our findings indicated that the consumer perceptions of relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and risks involved in online shopping are important antecedents to intention to use BOPS, and that these relationships were significantly moderated by locational convenience and product involvement. The implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are discussed in detail.     

An exploratory study for investigating the critical success factors for cloud migration in the Saudi Arabian higher education context

Saudi universities have at their disposal a huge number of low cost IT resources to aid in teaching, research and learning. By migrating to cloud services, Saudi universities will be moving data and programs from local servers to the internet, thereby providing users with the ability to access and share information at any time from multiple devices. The migration to cloud-based IT resources is not yet widespread in Saudi universities due to several challenges including security, legal policies and implementation. At present, there is lack of research and guidance for Saudi universities on how to overcome these challenges and how contextual factors can influence the successful migration to the educational clouds.This research presents a framework for the successful migration to cloud technology in the Saudi Arabian universities. In this research, a set of key critical success factors (CSFs) were identified by synthesizing components from studies concerned with the migration of cloud for higher education and factors identified from the successful implementation of WBL (Web Based Learning) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) on higher education in Saudi Arabia. Based on this knowledge, the proposed framework was evaluated via expert review and a survey by IT specialists from the Saudi universities. The initial CSFs were updated based on the expert reviews and the results were analysed. Based on the findings at this stage, additional CSFs were added to the framework as suggested by the experts. Subsequently, in order to confirm the reviewed CSFs, additional investigation via a structured online questionnaire was conducted and the outcome was analysed via one-sample t-test with the data integrity analysed via Cronbach’s alpha. The outcome indicated the majority of CSFs to be statistically significant except the Physical Location CSF. Potential future study and contributions are discussed.     

New application of human eye model in the verification of spot diagram with refractive diopter

In response to the rapid advancement of auto-refractor technology, most optometry shops provide refraction services. Despite their speed and convenience, the measurement values provided by auto-refractors include a significant degree of error due to psychological and physical factors. Therefore, there is a need for repetitive testing to obtain a smaller mean error value. However, even repetitive testing itself might not be sufficient to ensure accurate measurements. Therefore, research on a method of measurement that can complement auto-refractor measurements and provide confirmation of refraction results needs to be conducted. The customized optometry model described herein can satisfy the above requirements. From the existing optical technologies, using human eye measurement devices to obtain individual relevant optical feature parameters is no longer difficult. These parameters allow us to construct an optometry model for individual eyeballs. They also allow us to compute spot diagrams produced from the optometry model using the CODE V macro programming language before recognizing the geometrical spot diagram with the back-propagation neural network algorithm to obtain the accurate refractive diopter. Results show that the accuracy achieved was above 98% and that this application could significantly enhance the service quality of refraction.