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Abstract Microgravity-induced bone loss results in a 1% bone mineral density loss monthly and can be a mission critical factor in long-duration spaceflight. Biomolecular therapies with dual osteogenic and anti-resorptive functions are promising for treating extreme osteoporosis. We previously confirmed that NELL-like molecule-1 (NELL-1) is crucial for bone density maintenance. We further PEGylated NELL-1 (NELL-polyethylene glycol, or NELL-PEG) to increase systemic delivery half-life from 5.5 to 15.5 h. In this study, we used a bio-inert bisphosphonate (BP) moiety to chemically engineer NELL-PEG into BP-NELL-PEG and specifically target bone tissues. We found conjugation with BP improved hydroxyapatite (HA) binding and protein stability of NELL-PEG while preserving NELL-1’s osteogenicity in vitro. Furthermore, BP-NELL-PEG showed superior in vivo bone specificity without observable pathology in liver, spleen, lungs, brain, heart, muscles, or ovaries of mice. Finally, we tested BP-NELL-PEG through spaceflight exposure onboard the International Space Station (ISS) at maximal animal capacity (n = 40) in a long-term (9 week) osteoporosis therapeutic study and found that BP-NELL-PEG significantly increased bone formation in flight and ground control mice without obvious adverse health effects. Our results highlight BP-NELL-PEG as a promising therapeutic to mitigate extreme bone loss from long-duration microgravity exposure and musculoskeletal degeneration on Earth, especially when resistance training is not possible due to incapacity (e.g., bone fracture, stroke).

Mindfulness is an intervention that was used in many psychiatry treatments. In this study, the subject experienced two different states: (1) attention (i.e., listening to a podcast) and (2) mindfulness (i.e., meditation). Twenty-two students were included in a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course with EEG recording sessions on week four and week six. Brain dynamics were investigated to elucidate the complexity and connectivity of the brain. The alpha PSD increased in all brain areas during mindfulness in both weeks. For complexity, Fractal Dimension (FD) increased significantly during meditation in the week six recording. When comparing the FD in the mindfulness state of week four and week six, we also witnessed a significant increase in the following week. The coherence of the interhemispheric frontal and temporal regions increased significantly in both weeks. In conclusion, the subject successfully transferred from attention to mindfulness, demonstrated by the alpha changes when going from podcast to meditating. An enhancement in brain complexity was found, suggesting an augmentation in cognitive function. Finally, the coherence exhibits strengthened connections in the frontal area.

Financial constraints usually hinder students, especially those in low-middle income countries (LMICs), from seeking mental health interventions. Hence, it is necessary to identify effective, affordable and sustainable counter-stress measures for college students in the LMICs context. This study examines the sustained effects of mindfulness practice on the psychological outcomes and brain activity of students, especially when they are exposed to stressful situations. Here, we combined psychological and electrophysiological methods (EEG) to investigate the sustained effects of an 8-week-long standardized Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) intervention on the brain activity of college students. We found that the Test group showed a decrease in negative emotional states after the intervention, compared to the no statistically significant result of the Control group, as indicated by the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) (33% reduction in the negative score) and Depression, Anxiety, Stress Scale (DASS-42) scores (nearly 40% reduction of three subscale scores). Spectral analysis of EEG data showed that this intervention is longitudinally associated with increased frontal and occipital lobe alpha band power. Additionally, the increase in alpha power is more prevalent when the Test group was being stress-induced by cognitive tasks, suggesting that practicing MBSR might enhance the practitioners’ tolerance of negative emotional states. In conclusion, MBSR intervention led to a sustained reduction of negative emotional states as measured by both psychological and electrophysiological metrics, which supports the adoption of MBSR as an effective and sustainable stress-countering approach for students in LMICs.

The International Space Station (ISS) National Laboratory is dedicated to studying the effects of space on life and physical systems, and to developing new science and technologies for space exploration. A key aspect of achieving these goals is to operate the ISS National Lab more like an Earth-based laboratory, conducting complex end-to-end experimentation, not limited to simple microgravity exposure. Towards that end NASA developed a novel suite of molecular biology laboratory tools, reagents, and methods, named WetLab-2, uniquely designed to operate in microgravity, and to process biological samples for real-time gene expression analysis on-orbit. This includes a novel fluidic RNA Sample Preparation Module and fluid transfer devices, all-in-one lyophilized PCR assays, centrifuge, and a real-time PCR thermal cycler. Here we describe the results from the WetLab-2 validation experiments conducted in microgravity during ISS increment 47/SPX-8. Specifically, quantitative PCR was performed on a concentration series of DNA calibration standards, and Reverse Transcriptase-quantitative PCR was conducted on RNA extracted and purified on-orbit from frozen Escherichia coli and mouse liver tissue. Cycle threshold (Ct) values and PCR efficiencies obtained on-orbit from DNA standards were similar to Earth (1 g) controls. Also, on-orbit multiplex analysis of gene expression from bacterial cells and mammalian tissue RNA samples was successfully conducted in about 3 h, with data transmitted within 2 h of experiment completion. Thermal cycling in microgravity resulted in the trapping of gas bubbles inside septa cap assay tubes, causing small but measurable increases in Ct curve noise and variability. Bubble formation was successfully suppressed in a rapid follow-up on-orbit experiment using standard caps to pressurize PCR tubes and reduce gas release during heating cycles. The WetLab-2 facility now provides a novel operational on-orbit research capability for molecular biology and demonstrates the feasibility of more complex wet bench experiments in the ISS National Lab environment.

In recent years, STEM and STEAM education in early childhood have become topics of interest in most countries and territories worldwide, both in application and research. In this study, a bibliometric method was applied to evaluate 54 publications extracted from the Scopus database. Our main findings indicate that the research trend in this field has seen a significant increase in scientific output over the past 5 years, with publications accounting for 85.19% of the dataset. While Malaysia led in the number of publications, Singapore had the highest citation rates and the strongest international collaboration among the countries. The most active research institutions mainly came from Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Research on STEM/STEAM education for early childhood in the region primarily focused on issues such as teaching methods, skill development for children, and professional development for teachers. The paper also discussed some potential directions for research on STEM/STEAM education for early childhood in the Southeast Asian region.

In the past few years, the lane detection technique has become a key factor for autonomous driving systems and self-driving cars on the road. Among the various vehicle subsystems, the lane detection module is one of the essential parts of the Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS). Conventional lane detection approaches use machine vision algorithms to find straight lines in road scene images. However, it is challenging to identify straight or curved lane markings in complex environments. To deal with this problem, this paper presents a lane detection technique based on deep learning. It is combined with a 3D convolutional network, so the temporal information is added to the network architecture. Using the front camera images, the system can immediately detect the lane marking information ahead. Moreover, we propose an approach for improvement by adding the time axis to the network architecture. In addition to using 3D-ResNet50, the temporal convolution and spatial convolution are separated for processing. The accuracy is 91.34% improved after adding time and space split convolution with LeakyReLU. The experiments carried out using real scene images have demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed technique for applications to various complex scenes.

The ability to reliably measure the depth of the object surface is very important in a range of high-value industries. With the development of 3D vision techniques, RGB-D cameras have been widely used to perform the 6D pose estimation of target objects for a robotic manipulator. Many applications require accurate shape measurements of the objects for 3D template matching. In this work, we develop an RGB-D camera based on the structured light technique with gray-code coding. The intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the camera system are determined by a calibration process. 3D reconstruction of the object surface is based on the ray triangulation principle. We construct an RGB-D sensing system with an industrial camera and a digital light projector. In the experiments, real-world objects are used to test the feasibility of the proposed technique. The evaluation carried out using planar objects has demonstrated the accuracy of our RGB-D depth measurement system.

Recent advances in deep neural networks have been successfully demonstrated with fairly good accuracy for multi-class activity identification. However, existing methods have limitations in achieving complex spatial-temporal dependencies. In this work, we design two stream fusion attention (2SFA) connected to a temporal bidirectional gated recurrent unit (GRU) one-layer model and classified by prediction voting classifier (PVC) to recognize the action in a video. Particularly in the proposed deep neural network (DNN), we present 2SFA for capturing appearance information from red green blue (RGB) and motion from optical flow, where both streams are correlated by proposed fusion attention (FA) as the input of a temporal network. On the other hand, the temporal network with a bi-directional temporal layer using a GRU single layer is preferred for temporal understanding because it yields practical merits against six topologies of temporal networks in the UCF101 dataset. Meanwhile, the new proposed classifier scheme called PVC employs multiple nearest class mean (NCM) and the SoftMax function to yield multiple features outputted from temporal networks, and then votes their properties for high-performance classifications. The experiments achieve the best average accuracy of 70.8% in HMDB51 and 91.9%, the second best in UCF101 in terms of 2DConvNet for action recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to give some sufficient conditions for the boundedness of commutators of -adic Hardy-Cesàro operators with symbols in weighted central BMO type spaces on the Herz spaces, Morrey spaces and Morrey-Herz spaces with both the Muckenhoupt and power weights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Huperzine A, isolated from Huperzia serrata, is a potent, specific, and reversible inhibitor of acetylcholinesterase with high efficiency and low toxicity. To evaluate the presence of huperzine A in Vietnamese H serrata, a reliable capillary zone electrophoresis method was developed. The analytical conditions were established using 80 mM ammonium acetate buffer, pH 6.0, hydrodynamic injection at 50 mbar for 5 s, applied voltage of 20 kV, temperature at 25 °C, uncoated fused-silica capillary, 56 cm (50 cm effective length) × 70 µm inner diameter, and ultraviolet detection at 310 nm. The recovery rates ranged from 98.05% to 100.64%, with a relative standard deviation <2%. Good linear regression was observed in the concentration range of 1 to 500 µg/mL, with a correlation coefficient of 0.9994. The limit of detection and limit of quantification were 0.33 and 1.0 µg/mL, respectively. These results demonstrate that this method is simple, selective, and suitable for performing quality control for huperzine A derived from Vietnamese H serrata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the backward problem for the parabolic equation with memory. We prove that the nonlocal problem is well-posed for 0

Anaerobic digestion (AD) has been known as a feasible process for the conversion of organic waste to biogas. This research aimed to study the performance of an internal circulation (IC) anaerobic reactor treating food processing wastewater under different organic loading rates. The experiment was carried out in a lab-scale of IC reactor at ambient temperature. The reactor was made of poly-methyl methacrylate with dimensions of IC reactor had 1.8 m in height and square surface with 0.12 m in width, the working volume was 25 L. After the acclimation period, the reactor was run for 72 d which was divided into four stages corresponding to four levels of organic loading rate (OLR) as 5; 10; 15 and 20 kg COD m-3 d-1. During the experimental period, influent and effluent supernatant was sampled daily and analysed such chemical parameters of pH, TSS (Total suspended solids), COD (Chemical oxygen demand), TN (Total nitrogen), TP (Total phosphorous), biogas volume to evaluate the performance of IC reactor. The result showed that OLR had a significant effect on the removal of organic and nutrient matters in IC reactor. At each level of OLR, the removal efficiency was low at the start and gradually improved to become stable at the end of the phase. IC reactor was good at COD removal and achieved the maximum removal rate 85.4 % at OLR as 10 kg COD m-3 d-1. When OLR increased to 15 and 20 kg COD m-3 d-1, the reactor could perform stably at maximum COD removal as 84.3 % and 72 %. The maximum biogas production rate was achieved as 93.8 L day-1 at day 72nd of the experiment. This study suggests that IC anaerobic reactor is applicable for the removing of organic matter in wastewater at high organic loading rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To achieve a better understanding of accumulation of paclitaxel and related taxanes in Himalayan yew (Taxus wallichiana Zucc.) callus mass, induction and growth of calli from needles and petioles under light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and production of paclitaxel and baccatin were investigated. Calli were induced from needles and petioles on Gamborg's B5 medium supplemented with 1 mg·l-1 kinetin and 4 mg·l-1 2,4-D under different com-binations of blue and red LEDs. Calli were further cultured in that medium under the same lighting conditions. Callus induction from needles and petioles and growth was better under blue LEDs than under red LEDs and fluorescent light. The combinations of blue and red LEDs produced variable results. The paclitaxel content of these calli was quantified by high-performance liquid chromatography. The paclitaxel content of calli derived from needles was 0.00628% and the 10-DAB (10-Deacetylbaccatin III) content was 0.00366%. The paclitaxel content of calli derived from petioles was 0.00412%, and no 10-DAB was detected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognition is one of the most vital brain functions, which ranges from assisting students in recalling what they have been taught to assisting us in concentrating while accomplishing chores. Nowadays, many jobs require advanced cognitive abilities, particularly among high school and university students. As a result, preserving or improving our cognitive abilities has become necessary in modern society. Alpha-wave music, which targets the brain frequency range from 8 to 12 Hz, is a promising approach to boosting cognitive performance. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the immediate, short term, or long term effects of alpha wave music on the cognitive performance and brain activity of students. In an online experiment, two groups of students were recruited and randomized into control and experimental groups. The experimental group was required to listen to alpha music for two weeks (here called the intervention). Participants from both groups will have their cognitive performance assessed before, immediately after, and two weeks following the intervention. In the immediate effect experiment, another group of participants have their alpha relative power evaluated while performing different tasks. The results of the online experiment revealed that feedback from participants listening to alpha music are mostly positive, while the response time of cognitive tasks indicated an improvement trend (p

Highlights: [•] The Lycopodiella cernua alkaloid fraction (VLC) inhibited AChE activity in vitro. [•] VLC significantly reversed cognitive impairments in mice by passive avoidance test. [•] VLC reduced escape latency and prolonged swimming times in mice by water maze task. [•] Vietnamese L. cernua inhibited AChE activity and might be useful for AD. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The acute vertebrobasilar occlusion associated with the poor prognosis, particularly tandem occlusion. However, few data on the efficacy of the endovascular therapy was indicated in this occlusion. We investigated whether the additional rescue extracranial vertebral stenting improved clinical outcome by modified Rankin scale (mRS) score within 3 months after the procedure.This was a retrospective analysis of patients with acute posterior tandem occlusion who were treated with rescue extracranial vertebral stenting between December 2020 and January 2024 at our hospital. Clinical, neuroimaging, procedural, and complication data were collected. Primary outcomes included the rate of good outcomes (mRS ≤ 2) at 3-month follow-up.Nine patients who underwent rescue extracranial vertebral stenting in posterior circulation tandem occlusions were enrolled in the study. All patients were achieved the successful recanalization (mTICI ≥ 2b). Of Dotter technique in the “distal-to-proximal” approach, Diagnostic-Dotter made up 66.7%. Five patients (55.6%) with good outcome (mRS ≤ 2) at 3 months, and 1 patient (11.1%) underwent suboccipital decompressive craniectomy due to the malignant cerebellar infarction.Our study suggests that despite the small series with posterior tandem occlusions, the rescue extracranial vertebral stenting could be an important alternative treatment followed by mechanical thrombectomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]