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We present Memtrade, the first practical marketplace for disaggregated memory clouds. Clouds introduce a set of unique challenges for resource disaggregation across different tenants, including resource harvesting, isolation, and matching. Memtrade allows producer virtual machines (VMs) to lease both their unallocated memory and allocated-but-idle application memory to remote consumer VMs for a limited period of time. Memtrade does not require any modifications to host-level system software or support from the cloud provider. It harvests producer memory using an application-aware control loop to form a distributed transient remote memory pool with minimal performance impact; it employs a broker to match producers with consumers while satisfying performance constraints; and it exposes the matched memory to consumers through different abstractions. As a proof of concept, we propose two such memory access interfaces for Memtrade consumers -- a transient KV cache for specified applications and a swap interface that is application-transparent. Our evaluation using real-world cluster traces shows that Memtrade provides significant performance benefit for consumers (improving average read latency up to 2.8X) while preserving confidentiality and integrity, with little impact on producer applications (degrading performance by less than 2.1%).

No consensus has been achieved on the benefit of radiotherapy for resected stage IIIA NSCLC patients. The division of stage IIIA has changed significantly in 2017. This study aims to explore the effects of radiotherapy on the survival of patients with resectable stage IIIA NSCLC in the new era.Patients diagnosed with NSCLC between 2010 and 2018 were identified in the 8th edition TNM classification from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database. A nomogram was developed by integrating all independent predictors for lung cancer-specific survival (LCSS). The Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and subgroup analysis were applied to mitigate potential bias. Survival analyses were conducted using the Kaplan Meier curves and Cox proportional hazards regression.A total of 2632 stage IIIA NSCLC patients were enrolled. The C-index of the nomogram for the prediction of LCSS was 0.636 (95% CI, 0.616-0.656). In the group of patients with N2 stage who featured more than 5 positive regional lymph nodes, compared with non-PORT, PORT did prolong postoperative survival time (50 vs. 31 months; P= .005). N2 patients with visceral pleural invasion (VPI), older (age65), or had a larger tumor (size3 cm) could also benefit from adjuvant radiotherapy.Treatment protocol for stage IIIA NSCLC patients should be individualized. Based on our findings, N2 patients with more than 5 positive regional lymph nodes, VPI, larger tumor size (greater than 3 cm), and older (age above 65) could benefit from adjuvant radiotherapy. Further well-designed randomized trials are warranted.

Android overlay enables one app to draw over other apps by creating an extra View layer atop the host View, which nevertheless can be exploited by malicious apps (malware) to attack users. To combat this threat, prior countermeasures concentrate on restricting the capabilities of overlays at the OS level while sacrificing overlays usability; recently, the overlay mechanism has been substantially updated to prevent a variety of attacks, which however can still be evaded by considerable adversaries. To address these shortcomings, a more pragmatic approach is to enable early detection of overlay-based malware during the app market review process, so that all the capabilities of overlays can stay unchanged. For this purpose, in this paper we first conduct a large-scale comparative study of overlay characteristics in benign and malicious apps, and then implement the OverlayChecker system to automatically detect overlay-based malware for one of the worlds largest Android app stores. In particular, we have made systematic efforts in feature engineering, UI exploration, emulation architecture, and run-time environment, thus maintaining high detection accuracy (97% precision and 97% recall) and short per-app scan time (1.7 minutes) with only two commodity servers, under an intensive workload of 10K newly submitted apps per day.

Metastasis and drug resistance are the leading causes of poor prognosis in patients with osteosarcoma. Identifying the relevant factors that drive metastasis and drug resistance is the key to improving the therapeutic outcome of osteosarcoma. Here, we reported that autophagy was highly activated in metastatic osteosarcoma. We found increased autophagolysosomes in metastatic osteosarcoma cell lines by using electron microscopy, Western blot, and immunofluorescence experiments. We further examined the expression of the autophagy-related genes Beclin1 and LC3B in 82 patients through immunohistochemistry and found that Beclin1 and LC3B were highly related to unfavorable prognosis of osteosarcoma. Knockdown of Beclin1 and LC3B reduced invasion, metastasis, and proliferation in metastatic osteosarcoma cells. In vitro and in vivo studies also demonstrated that inhibiting by 3-MA inhibited cell growth and metastasis. Moreover, we demonstrated that autophagy-related genes were activated by SEs and that the inhibition of SEs by JQ-1 decreased the metastasis of osteosarcoma. Overall, our findings highlighted the association of autophagy with osteosarcoma progression and shed new light on autophagy-targeting therapy for osteosarcoma.

It is a widely held view that people rely on incomplete information to find a relationship partner, resulting in non-compensatory choice heuristics. However, recent experimental work typically finds that partner choice follows compensatory choice strategies. To bridge this gap between theory and experimental evidence, we characterize the mate choice problem by distinguishing the information search process from the evaluation process. In an eye-tracking experiment and a MouseLab experiment, we show that people display strong value-directed search heuristics in response to all types of cues and that the magnitude of value-directed searches increases with cue primacy. Cue primacy also explains the interaction effect of cue type and participant sex on the extent of valued-directed search. We further argue that value-directed searching does not necessarily lead to non-compensatory choice rules but may serve compensatory decision-making. Our results demonstrate that people may adopt remarkably smart search heuristics to find an ideal partner efficiently.

Chiral fluorinated amino esters and pyrrolidines are privileged scaffolds in synthetic chemistry and exhibit unique biological properties. We report the facile preparation of these compounds through copper-catalyzed switchable defluoroalkylation and [3 + 2] cycloaddition of trifluoropropene in an asymmetric fashion. The choice of solvent and chiral ligand was crucial for the efficient transformation and exquisite chemoselectivity pattern from identical starting materials that rapidly and reliably incorporate

for particle image velocimetry (PIV) technique, the two-dimensional (2D) PIV by one camera can only obtain 2D velocity field, while three-dimensional (3D) PIV based on tomography by three or four cameras is always complex and expensive. In this work, a binocular-PIV technology based on two cameras was proposed to reconstruct the 3D velocity field of gas-liquid two-phase flow, which is a combination of the binocular stereo vision and cross-correlation based on fast Fourier transform (CC-FFT). The depth of particle was calculated by binocular stereo vision on space scale, and the plane displacement of particles was acquired by CC-FFT on time scale. Experimental results have proved the effectiveness of the proposed method in 3D reconstruction of velocity field for gas-liquid two-phase flow.

An early warning method of compressor valve fault based on multi-parameter signals (vibration, pressure, and temperature) is presented in this work. Due to the complexity working condition, the run data of the compressor are of problems like noise and feature aliasing, which makes it difficult to extract useful features and find out the running law from the original signals. In this work, an improved deep learning network Multi-Level Fusion long short-term memory based on Component Evaluating Empirical Mode Decomposition and Fuzzy C-Means (CEEMD-FCM & MLF-LSTM) for parameter prediction of reciprocating compressor and an information fusion strategy is proposed for compressor valve fault warning. The CEEMD-FCM & MLF-LSTM network consists of data processing block, information learning block, and prediction output block, which is mainly responsible for parameter prediction. In the data processing block, the CEEMD-FCM algorithm is used for parameter decomposition, noise removal, and fuzzy mode (FM) reconstruction, which generates the input for the information learning block to ensure the predicting accuracy and reduce model complexity. MLF-LSTM is constructed to predict the parameter in the future by learning the temporal and spatial characteristics of FMs of the run data. Then, an early warning strategy for compressor valve fault based on multi-source information fusion is developed. Experimental results have verified that the proposed CEEMD-FCM & MLF-LSTM model and early warning strategy could realize early warning of compressor valve fault effectively.

We connected polyglutamic acid and methotrexate (MTX) through disulfide bonds to prepare glutathione-responsive nanoparticles (MTX NPs) and encapsulated doxorubicin (DOX) to obtain dual drug-loaded NPs (DOX/MTX NPs) (Fig. 1). The appearance of the carbonyl stretching vibration peak at approximately 1640 cm−1 in the results of the infrared spectrum proved the successful synthesis of three kinds of nanoparticles (NPs) with different feeding ratios. The particle sizes of NPs with different feeding ratios were 100–200 nm, and the encapsulation of DOX slightly increased the size, while the surface charge was always negative. The release of MTX at 10 mM glutathione (GSH) was as high as 91.45%, and that of DOX was 89.44%, suggesting that the breakage of disulfide bonds leads to the disintegration of NPs. The results of the cell experiment showed that the encapsulation of DOX effectively increased toxicity and side effects in 143B cells and significantly induced cell apoptosis, and the inhibition of the migration rate increased as the feeding ratio increased. In animal experiments, DOX/MTX NPs significantly induced tumor cell apoptosis and inhibited cell proliferation and tumor growth. The nanoparticles had excellent tumor-targeting properties. Tumor-targeted NPs with the combined action of the two drugs provided a good strategy for the efficient and precise treatment of osteosarcoma.

Homeobox B2 (HOXB2) is a transcription factor that belongs to the homeobox family. Previous investigations have demonstrated that tumor prognosis was strongly linked to aberrant HOXB2 expression. However, the mechanism linking HOXB2 to the tumor microenvironment (TME) and prognosis has not been explored in detail. Three cohorts at different stages of colorectal cancer (GSE17536, GSE17537, GSE14333) demonstrated that elevated HOXB2 expression had significantly association with poorer overall survival (OS), disease-specific survival (DSS), and disease-free survival (DFS). Additionally, the poor prognosis in low grade glioma (LGG) (OS HR = 1.8, P-value = 0.00084; DFS HR = 1.5, P-value = 0.014) was associated with increased HOXB2 expression. Moreover, we also demonstrated that the correlation between HOXB2 expression with prognosis of gastric cancer, breast cancer, and liver cancer. What’s more, the results analyzed by TIMER further showed that HOXB2 expression was associated with immune infiltration level of colon adenocarcinoma (COAD), rectum adenocarcinoma (READ) and LGG, particularly B cells, CD4+ T cells, CD8+ cells. macrophages, neutrophils, and dendritic cells (DCs). The positive correlation between HOXB2 expression and the expression of immune maker genes was also observed. The results of RT-qPCR were reliable and we supposed that HOXB2 expressing validation provided strong evidence for HOXB2 functioning as a novel prognosis biomarker. These findings suggested that poor prognosis and increased immune infiltration levels were found to be correlated with increased HOXB2 expression in multiple cancers, especially in COAD, READ and LGG. Furthermore, in COAD, LGG and READ, HOXB2 potentially regulates TAMs, DCs, T cell exhaustion, and Tregs. Therefore, HOXB2 can serve as a biomarker with special prognostic value and may be involved in the regulation of immune cell infiltration in patients with COAD, READ and LGG.

This work studies the remanent magnetization under a weak and a strong magnetic anomaly in Tranquillitatis and in Oceanus Procellarum respectively, which show similar surface ages of 3.6 Ga and 3.3 Ga. A 3D amplitude inversion is used to reconstruct the distributions of magnetization underground. Since there is no globally measured surface magneticeld for the Moon, a crustal magnetic anomaly model with grid resolution of 0.2° is used. The depth to the bottom of the magnetic source is fixed by the boundary identified by a relative criterion, which is 20% of the recovered maximum magnetization. The results show that the two anomalies have different depths to the bottom and different volumes of magnetic sources. The depth to the bottom of the magnetic carriers, which is possibly the Curie depth, is about 30 km and 50 km under Oceanus and Tranquillitatis. The volumes of the two magnetic sources are at the scale of 104 and 105 km3, respectively. The Bouguer gravity anomalies with spherical harmonics reaching 1200 degree in the two studied regions are also checked. The results supports that the magma intrusions containing different abundances of metallic iron are the most possible origins of the magnetic sources in the studied regions. Besides, the thermal states of lunar crust under the two studied maria were probably different during the acquisition process of remanent magnetization.

Epitaxial growth is one of the most commonly used strategies to precisely tailor heterostructures with well-defined compositions, morphologies, crystal phases, and interfaces for various applications. However, as epitaxial growth requires a small interfacial lattice mismatch between the components, it remains a challenge for the epitaxial synthesis of heterostructures constructed by materials with large lattice mismatch and/or different chemical bonding, especially the noble metal-semiconductor heterostructures. Here, we develop a noble metal-seeded epitaxial growth strategy to prepare highly symmetrical noble metal-semiconductor branched heterostructures with desired spatial configurations, i.e., twenty CdS (or CdSe) nanorods epitaxially grown on twenty exposed (111) facets of Ag icosahedral nanocrystal, albeit a large lattice mismatch (more than 40%). Importantly, a high quantum yield (QY) of plasmon-induced hot-electron transferred from Ag to CdS was observed in epitaxial Ag-CdS icosapods (18.1%). This work demonstrates that epitaxial growth can be achieved in heterostructures composed of materials with large lattice mismatches. The constructed epitaxial noble metal-semiconductor interfaces could be an ideal platform for investigating the role of interfaces in various physicochemical processes.

In recent years, there have been several solutions to medical image segmentation, such as U-shaped structure, transformer-based network, and multi-scale feature learning method. However, their network parameters and real-time performance are often neglected and cannot segment boundary regions well. The main reason is that such networks have deep encoders, a large number of channels, and excessive attention to local information rather than global information, which is crucial to the accuracy of image segmentation. Therefore, we propose a novel multi-branch medical image segmentation network MBSNet. We first design two branches using a parallel residual mixer (PRM) module and dilate convolution block to capture the local and global information of the image. At the same time, a SE-Block and a new spatial attention module enhance the output features. Considering the different output features of the two branches, we adopt a cross-fusion method to effectively combine and complement the features between different layers. MBSNet was tested on five datasets ISIC2018, Kvasir, BUSI, COVID-19, and LGG. The combined results show that MBSNet is lighter, faster, and more accurate. Specifically, for a $$320 \times 320$$ 320 × 320 input, MBSNet’s FLOPs is 10.68G, with an F1-Score of $$85.29\%$$ 85.29 % on the Kvasir test dataset, well above $$78.73\%$$ 78.73 % for UNet++ with FLOPs of 216.55G. We also use the multi-criteria decision making method TOPSIS based on F1-Score, IOU and Geometric-Mean (G-mean) for overall analysis. The proposed MBSNet model performs better than other competitive methods. Code is available at https://github.com/YuLionel/MBSNet.

Meningioma was the most primary intracranial tumor, but the molecular characteristics and the treatment of malignant meningioma were still unclear. Nine malignant progression-related genes based prognostic signatures were identified by transcriptome analysis between benign meningioma and malignant meningioma. The external dataset GEO136661 and quantitative Real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction were used to verify the prognostic factors. has-miR-3605-5p, hsa-miR-664b-5p, PNRC2, BTBD8, EXTL2, SLFN13, DGKD, NSD2, and BVES were closed with malignant progression. Moreover, Doxorubicin was identified by Connectivity Map website with the differential malignant progression-related genes. CCK-8 assay, Edu assay, wound healing assay, and trans-well experiment were used to reveal that Doxorubicin could inhibit proliferation, migration and invasion of IOMM-Lee Cells.

PDF file - 1132K, The promotion of OPN secretion in macrophages by colorectal cancer cells is partially CD44v6 dependent.

PDF file - 1232K, OPN promote clonogenicity of HT-29 cells on different concentrations.

XLSX file - 190K, Real-time primer sequence

PDF file - 1330K, TAMs promote tumorigenicity of colorectal cancer cells.

XLSX file - 121K, Characteristics of Patients

Purpose: CD44 is of functional importance for tumor initiation and progression in colorectal cancer, but how this molecule benefits cancer cells from the tumor microenvironment, especially tumor-associated macrophages (TAM), remains poorly defined.Experimental Design:In vivo tumorigenic assays were conducted to assess the role of murine TAMs in the tumorigenesis of human colorectal cancer cells. Both in vitro and in vivo osteopontin (OPN) expression levels in TAMs were examined by immunohistochemistry, quantitative PCR, and Western blotting. Soft agar colony formation assays were used to estimate the clonogenicity of colorectal cancer cells that had received different treatments. The relationships between the expression levels of OPN, CD44v6, and CD68 and clinical prognosis were evaluated by tissue microarray analysis.Results: We found that macrophages, when coinjected or cocultured with CD44-positive colorectal cancer cells, were able to produce higher levels of OPN, which in turn facilitated the tumorigenicity and clonogenicity of the colorectal cancer cells. The knockdown of CD44 or treatment with blocking antibodies to CD44 attenuated OPN secretion. OPN, through binding to its receptor CD44, activated c-jun-NH2-kinase signaling and promoted the clonogenicity of colorectal cancer cells. Moreover, tissue microarray data have shown that OPN expression, in combination with CD44v6, has a negative correlation with colorectal cancer patient survival.Conclusions: These results suggest that the OPN–CD44 interaction is important for colorectal cancer progression and could serve as a potential therapeutic target for the treatment of colorectal cancer. Clin Cancer Res; 19(4); 785–97. ©2012 AACR.

PDF file - 1587K, Kaplan-Meier curves of survival rate for 190 patients.

PDF file - 1365K, Co-culture of HT-29 and macrophages promotes OPN secretion in macrophages.

PDF file - 1119K, A CD44v6 neutralizing antibody blocks the OPN-induced enhanced clonogenicity.

XLSX file - 212K, Correlation between CD68 and OPN in primary colorectal cancer

PDF file - 1070K, SDS-PAGE analysis of purified OPN.

PDF file - 2531K, Supplementary Figure S1. PrPc is correlated with tumor grade, metastasis and outcomes. Supplementary Figure S2. PrPc co-expresses with CD44 and enriches CSC Supplementary Figure S3. PrPc confers greater metastatic capacity in spleen-to-liver metastasis Supplementary Figure S4. PrPc is functional importance for metastatic capacity Supplementary Figure S5. PrPc induces EMT in CCSCs Supplementary Table 1. Analysis of CD44+PrPc+, CD44+PrPc-, CD44-PrPc+, and CD44-PrPc- subpopulations from 31 CRC patients Supplementary Table 2. Tumor-initiating incidence of CD44+PrPc+, CD44+PrPc-, CD44-PrPc+ and CD44-PrPc- CRC subpopulations Supplementary Table 3. Primers for quantitative PCR

The United States, EU members, and Russia share extensive and important interests in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in terms of geo-security, energy, and values. The US–EU–Russia trilateral interaction in this region features three characteristics: intensifying security competition between Washington and Moscow; closer transatlantic coordination against Russia; and growing wariness about China’s larger economic footprint. New changes have taken place in the regional distribution of power amid continued China–US competition, increasingly diverging values among the United States, Germany, and CEE countries like Poland and Hungary, and heightening geopolitical tensions between Washington and Germany on the one hand and Russia on the other. China–CEEC (CEE countries) cooperation is also coming under mounting geopolitical pressure, owing to Washington’s containment policy toward China, the EU’s weakening control over the CEE countries, Russia’s shift from a defensive to an offensive posture in response to Western sanctions, the new German government’s values-based diplomacy, and the European Commission’s new China policy. However, the transatlantic world is not a monolith. The EU’s weakening control over CEE countries and Washington’s deteriorating relations with Poland and Hungary are bringing potential opportunities for furthering China–CEEC cooperation. The aforementioned factors merit closer attention as important variables in CEE countries’ China policies.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic presented unforeseen obstacles to prospective medical students such as Medical College of Admission Test (MCAT) scheduling postponements and technical challenges during virtual interviews. Students were also faced with difficult decisions post-submission such as having to choose a program without ever visiting a school in-person. Objective: The primary objective of the present study was to assess the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on medical school admission preferences and application-related costs. This may also provide feedback to medical school administrators for future improvements to the application process. Methods: A retrospective survey of the class of 2024 (Co24; non-COVID-19 cohort) and class of 2025 (Co25; COVID-19 cohort) was conducted in the Fall of 2021 via the Qualtrics online survey software. Statistical analysis incorporated the chi-square test on the Likert scale. Results: There were 195 survey respondents: 77 students from the Co2024 and 89 students from the Co25. More students in the Co25 had to reschedule their MCAT compared to the Co24 (56.1% versus 14.3%; p $500) compared to the Co25 who interviewed virtually (65.1% versus 2.4%; p Conclusion: Matriculated medical students at an allopathic medical school who applied during the COVID-19 pandemic had more pre-application hurdles when compared to prior cohorts. Students in the COVID-19 cohort, who primarily had virtual interviews, had less travel-related costs but felt more limited in their experience of a school’s culture. Despite this, however, the COVID-19 cohort still expressed a preference for virtual interviews.