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In recent years, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has made great progress in the prevention and treatment of cancer. It has gradually revealed its characteristics and advantages in clinical practice, including alleviating clinical symptoms, prolonging survival time, decreasing the adverse effects of chemotherapy, and improving living quality. However, clinical TCM treatment of cancer lacks systematic theoretical guidance, because ancient TCM has not formed a recognized theoretical system of cognitive cancer, and there still are different opinions on the pathogenesis of cancer. Due to the complexity of cancer, the essence of cancer pathogenesis has not been described accurately by using common pathogenic factors, such as pathogenic wind, cold, dampness, summer heat, dryness, and fire. Ancient and modern TCM physicians have a similar understanding that the occurrence of cancer is related to toxin. In the 1990s, the thought of cancerous toxin was first proposed by Prof Zhou Zhongying, a TCM master based on more than 60 years of clinical practice, who used “pandemic Qi (Li-Qi) is a specific pathogenic factor of epidemic disease” in Wenyi Lun(Treatise on Pestilence) for references. The pathogenesis theory of cancerous toxin was gradually established under the guidance of the thought of cancerous toxin. It holds that the cancerous toxin, a special pathogenic factor of cancer, is the key pathogenesis of the occurrence of malignant tumors. According to the pathogenesis theory of cancerous toxin, the basic pathogenesis of malignant tumors is the accumulation of pathogenic factors and cancerous toxin, and the deficiency of the vital Qi (Zheng-Qi). Therefore, the treatment principle involves eliminating pathogenic factors, resolving cancerous toxin, and supporting the vital Qi. The anticancer detoxification methods and the classification of Chinese medicinal herbs with anticancer detoxification effects were put forward. System theory has much in common with the concepts in the theory system of TCM, such as the universal relation theory, asking for a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, the humanism thought, and so on. This article aims to describe, review, and analyze the pathogenesis theory of cancerous toxin based on system theory for clinical practices.

Low resolution is a major factor that negatively impacts the accuracy of remote sensing (RS) interpretation. High-quality super-resolution reconstruction (SRR) can help alleviate this problem. In this study, we present a multistage semantic segmentation training strategy called SRSSTS, which is based on detail-optimized SRR. SRSSTS addresses the challenges of poor reconstruction quality and low semantic segmentation (SS) accuracy of RS images. Our approach involves constructing a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based perceptual-loss-dominated SRR network, which generates texture-realistic, high-quality high-resolution images from low-resolution RS images. We then input the generated images into an SS network in steps and propose a three-stage joint loss to generate segmentation results at different resolutions. SRSSTS is straightforward and efficient, and it can be applied to any SS backbone networks. Additionally, this strategy does not increase computational resources compared to other SR-based segmentation methods, since the SRR network is trained separately. We evaluated the effectiveness of our designed SRR network and SRSSTS on five RS datasets (ISPRS Potsdam and Vaihingen, WHDLD, LoveDA Rural and Urban) with different resolutions, achieving excellent performance compared to an SS model for a single task and other SR-based segmentation methods. Moreover, we observed that the learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS) of the super-resolution (SR) reconstructed images, i.e., the stronger the perception ability, the more helpful it is for the SS task.

Subsurface flow is the core of reservoir engineering. Research on subsurface flow problems can enhance our understanding of the development status of oilfields, thus enabling the prediction of the distribution of residual oil and the formulation of production plans. Machine learning-based methods have been widely studied in developing data-driven models to solve subsurface flow problem. However, a large amount of labeled data are required to build highly accurate models. It is applicable to embed domain-knowledge into data-driven machine learning methods to reduce data requirements. In this study, we propose a residual-enhanced physics-guided machine learning method with hard constraints (RHCs-PGML) to predict reservoir pressure. Specifically, a physics-guided machine learning (PGML) with hard constraints strategy is proposed, which makes the prediction results strictly satisfy the prior domain knowledge to improve the prediction accuracy of the model. In addition, we integrate residual learning in RHC-PGML model to compensate for systematic errors caused by the inability of the embedded physical mechanism to perfectly describe the complex seepage process and further improve the prediction accuracy. The proposed method is verified by a seepage problem in a heterogeneous reservoir model. The results show that the RHC-PGML method can obtain reliable prediction results in the case of sparse and limited data.

Colon cancer (CC) is one of the common malignant tumors in the digestive tract, the prognosis of CC patients has never been satisfying. A Ferrous-dependent form that regulates cell death, plays a key role in cancer development. As a core regulator of ferroptosis, GPX4 has become a potential molecular target for the development of antitumor drugs. Curcumol (Cur), a sesquiterpene natural product, it has significant anti-tumor effect. However, whether Cur mediates ferroptosis in colon cancer and its mechanism are still unclear. This study aimed to investigate the underlying mechanisms of Cur anti-tumor.

Providing secure, efficient, and privacy-preserving user authentication in mobile networks is a challenging problem due to the inherent mobility of users, variety of attack vectors, and resource-constrained nature of user devices. Recent studies show that identity-based cryptosystems can eliminate the certificate overhead and thus address the issues associated with public-key infrastructure technology-which is a rare bit of good news in today's computer security world. In this paper, we employ three representative identity-based remote user authentication schemes (i.e., Truong et al.'s scheme, Li et al.'s scheme, and Zhang et al.'s scheme) as case studies to reveal the challenges and subtleties in designing a practical authentication scheme for mobile devices. First, we demonstrate that Truong et al. 's scheme, which was presented at the IEEE AINA 2012, cannot achieve a few important security goals under our new attacking scenarios: 1) it fails to resist against known session-specific temporary information attack; 2) it cannot withstand key compromise impersonation attack; and 3) it is of poor usability. Second, we show that Li et al.'s privacy-preserving scheme, which was proposed at GLOBECOM 2012, is subject to some subtle (yet severe) efficiency problems that make it virtually impossible for any practical use. Third, we scrutinize a “provably secure” scheme for roaming services in mobile networks designed by Zhang et al. at SCN 2015 and find it prone to collusion attack and replay attack. Further, we investigate into the underlying causes for these identified failures, and figure out an improvement over Truong et al. 's scheme to overcome the revealed challenges while maintaining reasonable efficiency.

The impact of nanoplastics (NPs) on human health is still not well understood, and more research is needed to better understand the risks associated with these particles. In this study, we found that oral administration of polyethylene (PE) NPs in a mice model significantly disrupted the intestinal microenvironment, which shapes adaptive immune response and favors the established in situcolorectal tumor growth. Using single-cell RNA sequencing technology, we show that NPs triggered colon IL-1β-producing macrophages by inducing lysosome damage, leading to colonic Treg and Th17 differentiation associated with T cell exhaustion, which creates a colon environment that favors the tumor initiation and progress. A similar effect is also observed in polystyrene NPs. Our result provides insight into the potential link between NPs ingestion and colon tumorigenesis, and the urgency of addressing plastic pollution worldwide.

Hyperoside (HYP), a naturally occurring flavonoid compound, exerts multiple biological functions including myocardial protection, antiredox, and anti-inflammatory activities. However, the role of HYP on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and the underlying mechanism need to be further established. Here, we show that HYP treatment profoundly alleviated dextran sulfate sodium-induced ulcerative colitis in mice, characterized by reduced pathological scores, preserved tissue integrity, suppressed colonic inflammation, and balanced Th17/Treg response. Mechanistically, HYP was shown to restrain the expression of the E3 ubiquitin ligase, makorin ring finger protein 1 (MKRN1), which in turn promoted the ubiquitination and proteasomal degradation of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPARγ), an essential regulator of Th17 and Treg differentiation. Consequently, HYP treatment enhanced PPARγ signaling and hence promoted Treg differentiation while suppressing Th17 cell development during colitis. Thus, our data indicate that HYP acts through the MKRN1/PPARγ axis to modulate the Th17/Treg axis and thereby confers protection against experimental colitis. The findings extend our understanding about HYP action and may provide a potential therapeutic target for IBD.

Since the birth of eBay, the world's first online shopping platform in 1995, there have been more and more shopping websites. The interfaces of online shopping websites have also changed dramatically. And user experience of online shopping is influenced by interaction design factors of the web interfaces. Thus, this article discusses how interactive design affects people's shopping experience through online shopping interfaces. Rosenzweig (2015) points out being easy to use and effectiveness are two important principles in user experience design. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to illustrate how different interactive design factors affect users' shopping experience by analyzing the usability and efficiency of the examples of eBay's and Amazon's interfaces. The analysis of the two online shopping interfaces indicates that user experience is influenced by the feedback and Fitts' law factor in terms of usability. Besides, it is affected by the navigation and time factor based on efficiency. According to the research of this article, designers can optimize people's shopping experience by improving the usability and efficiency of websites in interface design.

To develop an analytical method for determination of plasma concentrations of muscone in rats following oral administration of artificial musk, with the aim of investigating the pharmacokinetic profile of artificial musk. Plasma samples were pretreated with acetonitrile to precipitate proteins. Headspace injection coupled with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry was used for quantitative analysis of muscone concentrations. A strong linear relationship was obtained for plasma muscone concentrations ranging from 75.6 to 7560 ng·mL−1  R2=0.9998, with the minimum detectable concentration being 25 ng·mL−1. The within-day and interday precision for determination of three different concentrations of muscone were favorable (RSD < 25%). The average absolute recovery ranged from 83.7 to 88.6%, with an average relative recovery of 100.5 to 109.8%. The method described was characterized by stability and reliability, and in the present study showed significant specificity and high sensitivity. This method would be applicable to the analysis of plasma concentrations of muscone in preclinical contexts, where artificial musk is used.