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The rapid increase of offshore projects at Taiwan Strait in recent decade has been debated for elevated noise levels. However, there are no studies on long-term assessment of noise levels and impact of noise on marine organisms. The passive acoustic monitoring was conducted at the foremost wind farm area in Taiwan to assess the sound levels and the impact of noise on fish vocalization behavior. Predominately, in the soundscape around the Taiwan Strait, two chorusing types (Type 1 and Type 2) from the Sciaenid family of fishes exist. Ambient sound levels significantly increased from 2014 to 2019, while the chorusing Types 1 and 2 were observed in a lower percentage of the recordings. Additionally, chorusing peak intensity and duration significantly reduced over the years for both choruses. This is the first field-based evidence to demonstrate the consequences of increasing anthropogenic noise having the potential to alter the vocalization behavior of the fish., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

A Chinese patient with severe hypertriglyceridemia was found to have similar clinical features to that of malignant hyperlipemia in infancy. DNA sequence analysis of the apoC-II gene from the patient's parents revealed a novel heterozygous mutation of T-->A substitution at position -190 base in the apoC-II promoter. We speculated that the patient was a homozygote of the same mutation that resulted in the deficiency of apoC-II. In vitro expression studies showed T-->A substitution in the apoC-II promoter leads to a decrease by approximately 20% in transcriptional activity compared with its counterpart that inserted the normal promoter. These results suggested that T-->A substitution at position -190 in the apoC-II gene promoter only partly affected transcriptional activity of the apoC-II promoter, leading to decrease of apoC-II expression in quantity.

The role of the adventitia in vascular function and vascular lesion formation has been largely ignored. This study observed the activation of the adventitia and specifically the fibroblasts in the development of atherosclerosis in the apoE(-/-) mouse. The results showed a gradual increase in expression of collagen types I and III after 2, 4, and 8 weeks of hyperlipidic diet. The earliest expression of monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) protein and mRNA was detected in the adventitial fibroblast before the formation of intimal lesions. Proliferation, too, was first found in the adventitial fibroblasts. We hypothesize that the adventitial fibroblast is activated in the early stage of atherosclerosis. Adventitial inflammation may be an early event in the development of atherosclerotic lesions.

A patient with severe hypertriglyceridemia and recurrent pancreatitis was found to have significantly decreased lipoprotein lipase (LPL) activity and normal apolipoprotein C-II concentration in post-heparin plasma. DNA analysis of the LPL gene revealed two mutations, one of which was a novel homozygous G-->C substitution, resulting in the conversion of a translation initiation codon methionine to isoleucine (LPL-1). The second was the previously reported heterozygous substitution of glutamic acid at residue 242 with lysine (LPL-242). In vitro expression of both mutations separately or in combination demonstrated that LPL-1 had approximately 3% protein mass and 2% activity, whereas LPL-242 had undetectable activity but normal mass. The combined mutation LPL-1-242 exhibited similar changes as for LPL-1, with markedly reduced mass, and for LPL-242, with undetectable activity. These results suggest that the homozygous initiator codon mutation rather than the heterozygous LPL-242 alteration was mainly responsible for the patient phenotypes.

A novel impedance cardiograph event detection method using wavelet transform is proposed. When compared to the C and E points in the pressure-volume loop, the wavelet method performs significantly better than the traditional method (P < 0.05) in the B and X points detection even after the addition of 20% artificial noise into the test signal. Nevertheless, the SVs estimated by ICG are poorly correlated with values measured by the conductance catheter.