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Our preliminary experiment indicated the activation of with-nolysine kinases 1 (WNK1) in bone cancer pain (BCP) rats. This study aimed to investigate the underlying mechanisms via which WNK1 contributed to BCP. A rat model of BCP was induced by Walker-256 tumor cell implantation. WNK1 expression and distribution in the lumbar spinal cord dorsal horn and dorsal root ganglion were examined. SPS1-related proline/alanine-rich kinase (SPAK), oxidative stress-responsive kinase 1 (OSR1), sodium-potassium-chloride cotransporter 1 (NKCC1), and potassium-chloride cotransporter 2 (KCC2) expression were assessed. Pain behaviors including mechanical allodynia and movement-evoked pain were measured. BCP rats exhibited significant mechanical allodynia, with increased WNK1 expression in the dorsal horn and dorsal root ganglion neurons, elevated SPAK/OSR1 and NKCC1 expression in the dorsal root ganglion, and decreased KCC2 expression in the dorsal horn. WNK1 knock-down by small interfering alleviated mechanical allodynia and movement-evoked pain, inhibited WNK1-SPAK/OSR1-NKCC1 activities, and restored KCC2 expression. In addition, closantel (a WNK1-SPAK/OSR1 inhibitor) improved pain behaviors, downregulated SPAK/OSR1 and NKCC1 expression, and upregulated KCC2 expression in BCP rats. Activation of WNK1-SPAK/OSR1 signaling contributed to BCP in rats by modulating NKCC1 and KCC2 expression. Therefore, suppression of WNK1-SPAK/OSR1 may serve as a potential target for BCP therapy. PERSPECTIVE: Our findings demonstrated that the WNK1-SPAK/OSR1 signaling contributed to BCP in rats via regulating NKCC1 and KCC2. Suppressing this pathway reduced pain behaviors. Based on these findings, the WNK1-SPAK/OSR1 signaling may be a potential target for BCP therapy.

The potential use of invertebrates as bioreactors to treat environmental pollutants is promising and of great interest. Three types of the persistent organic pollutants (POPs), namely pentachlorophenol (PCP), PAHs (naphthalene and phenanthrene) and dieldrin (DLN), were spiked in soil and treated by using Oryctes rhinoceros larvae, a known pest of coconut trees in southeast Asia, and also the indicators of POP toxicity and the fate and degradability of the ingested POPs were assessed. The larvae were tested at various levels of the POPs and went through an acclimation process. Without acclimation, the tolerance limits of the larvae toward PCP, PAHs and DLN were 200, 100 and 0.1 mg/kg-soil, respectively, yet with acclimation, the tolerance levels increased to 800, 400 and 0.5 mg/kg-soil, respectively. Biodegradation rates of all the tested POPs were &gt, 90% by week 2, with &lt, 5% and nearly 0% remaining in the feces and body of the larvae, respectively. The results suggest that the use of the beetle larvae in soil POP decontamination is doable.

Improving silica film&rsquo, s contact angle (CA) using tetraethoxysilane (TEOS) and iso-butyltrimethoxysilane (iso-BTMS) by the sol-gel method without adding organo-fluoride substances is of interest. Five factors, namely type of solvent, molar ratio and amounts of TEOS and iso-BTMS, mixing intensity, sol aging time, and presence and absence of poly-acrylic acid (PAA), were assessed to improve the static water CA of the film and its surface quality. Results revealed that when ethanol was used as the dissolving solvent and after adding initial iso-BTMS and TEOS concentrations of 0.0270 and 0.0194 mol/L (molar ratio = 1.39), respectively, without sonication and adding PAA/TEOS weight ratio of 0.029, then the maximum static CA of the film reached 147&deg, a nearly super-hydrophobic surface. Under given conditions, long-term film durability was observed, and the added PAA prevented the formation of nonhomogeneous film surfaces caused by the highly clustering aggregation of silanols under high pH conditions.

The dynamic mechanical responses of the ferroelastic materials under uniaxial straining and temperature cycling are studied via the Landau-type phase field model in two dimensions. The model may exhibit a single-well (double-well) energy profile when temperature is greater (less) than the critical temperature. Effective negative stiffness in the vicinity of the temperature-induced solid–solid phase transformation is numerically demonstrated through monotonic uniaxial straining on a single-domain ferroelastic under temperature cycling around the Curie temperature. Under sinusoidal uniaxial straining, the effective Young's modulus and damping, as indicated by the enclosed area of the stress–strain curve, may be largely increased due to the phase transition. Our calculated responses here are consistent with experimental data reported in the literature, as well as theoretical results based on the composite theory with inclusions assumed to have negative modulus. No negative stiffness values are directly assigned in our phase field model as the underlying physics of the order parameters, i.e., spontaneous strains, provides effective negative stiffness into the systems.

Understanding the drivers of geographic variation in species richness is one of the fundamental goals in ecology and biogeography. Fish is the key element in freshwater ecosystem and the focus of fishery production and biological conservation. Chinese freshwater fish fauna is rich and largely endemic due to variable geography and climate. By compiling the published data on fish richness for 86 nature reserves, and taking environmental predictors into consideration, we aimed to test latitudinal and longitudinal gradients in fish richness and the relative roles of energy availability, physiological tolerance, climatic seasonality and habitat heterogeneity hypotheses in explaining geographic fish richness pattern. Fish richness in China's nature reserves decreases with latitude and showed a hump-shaped relationship with longitude. Latitudinal fish richness is mainly shaped by mean temperature of the coldest month. Mean elevation and associated changes in temperature lead to longitudinal fish richness gradient. Among the four hypotheses tested, physiological tolerance hypothesis performs best and accounts for 55.4 % of the spatial variance in fish richness. Minimum temperature and precipitation are the primary determinants of fish species richness. Habitat heterogeneity is not negligible since adding river density to physiological tolerance model can explain additional 2 % variance in fish richness. Our results can provide useful information for regional fish production and conservation.

It remains unclear whether the latitudinal diversity gradients of micro- and macro-organisms are driven by the same macro-environmental variables. We used the newly completed species catalog and distribution information of bryophytes in China to explore their spatial species richness patterns, and to investigate the underlying roles of energy availability, climatic seasonality, and environmental heterogeneity in shaping these patterns. We then compared these patterns to those found for woody plants. We found that, unlike woody plants, mosses and liverworts showed only weakly negative latitudinal trends in species richness. The spatial patterns of liverwort richness and moss richness were overwhelmingly explained by contemporary environmental variables, although explained variation was lower than that for woody plants. Similar to woody plants, energy and climatic seasonality hypotheses dominate as explanatory variables but show high redundancy in shaping the distribution of bryophytes. Water variables, that is, the annual availability, intra-annual variability and spatial heterogeneity in precipitation, played a predominant role in explaining spatial variation of species richness of bryophytes, especially for liverworts, whereas woody plant richness was affected most by temperature variables. We suggest that further research on spatial patterns of bryophytes should incorporate the knowledge on their ecophysiology and evolution.

The remnant of heavy oil, often expressed as total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPHs), in soil and/or sludge is commonly encountered by and often ruins the habitat of some indigenous insects. Recent studies indicate that some of the insects could stand the impact and some not just survived but might serve as an oil degrader. The potential of using indigenous insects in treating oil pollution is of interests in this study. In Asia, the potential oil-exposed rhinoceros beetle, Oryctes rhinoceros, was studied herein due to two major interests: one is its tolerance to heavy oil, and the other its ability to remove the oil. Two sets of the experiments spiked with different amounts of heavy oil were conducted in series, and the results of the larval mortality rate, growth rate, feces production, substrate conversion ratio and percent of oil removal were monitored as performance indicators during these treatments. The obtained results showed that the ingestion of heavy oil at a 5000 mg/kg level significantly deteriorated the survival rate (37% left) of the tested larvae, yet oil-experienced larvae could survive in up to 10,000 mg/kg of heavy oil (100% survived). As for the heavy oil removal via larval ingestion, at a 10,000 mg/kg level of oil in the substrate, the percent of weekly removal of heavy oil by larva ingestion was consistent throughout the second run at 56.4 ± 5.6%. These results demonstrated the potential use of beetle larvae as a bioreactor in pollutant removal.

Microstructured plates, consisting of various conventional and re-entrant cells, are numerically constructed and analyzed for their effective elastic properties under in-plane deformation. The finite element numerical method is adopted. The calculated effective Poisson's ratios of the plates are found to be in the range between −1 and 1, in consistency with the theory of two-dimensional elasticity. Auxetic angles need to be greater than about 20° in order to obtain negative Poisson's ratio. Increasing the auxetic angles reduces the effective pure shear modulus. Elastically anisotropic characteristics of the homogenized plate are analyzed with the calculated effective Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio, and pure shear modulus.

A low power binary frequency shift keying (BFSK) transmitter has been proposed for capsule endoscope applications. The transmitter IC includes a low drop-out (LDO) regulator, a crystal oscillator, a class-E power amplifier (PA) and a frequency synthesizer with dual control loops. The parameters of the transmitter, including carrier frequency, frequency deviation and etc., can be set by a serial 3-wire interface. The transmitter IC is implemented in TSMC 0.35 mum CMOS process occupies 3.47 mm2 and can be fabricated in a fully digital process. For supply voltage down to 1.85 V, and the transmitter center frequency set to 416 MHz, a maximum data rate of 2 Mbps can be achieved with -24 dBm output power and only 4.0 mW power consumption