Twofold Advantage Research Articles

Capsaicinoids enhance chemosensitivity to chemotherapeutic drugs.

Cytotoxic chemotherapy is the mainstay of cancer treatment. Conventional chemotherapeutic agents do not distinguish between normal and neoplastic cells. This leads to severe toxic side effects, which may necessitate the discontinuation of treatment in some patients. Recent research has identified key molecular events in the initiation and progression of cancer, promoting the design of targeted therapies to selectively kill tumor cells while sparing normal cells. Although, the side effects of such drugs are typically milder than conventional chemotherapies, some off-target effects still occur. Another serious challenge with all chemotherapies is the acquisition of chemoresistance upon prolonged exposure to the drug. Therefore, identifying supplementary agents that sensitize tumor cells to chemotherapy-induced apoptosis and help minimize drug resistance would be valuable for improving patient tolerance and response to chemotherapy. The use of effective supplementary agents provides a twofold advantage in combination with standard chemotherapy. First, by augmenting the activity of the chemotherapeutic drug it can lower the dose needed to kill tumor cells and decrease the incidence and severity of treatment-limiting side effects. Second, adjuvant therapies that lower the effective dose of chemotherapy may delay/prevent the development of chemoresistance in tumors. Capsaicinoids, a major class of phytochemical compounds isolated from chili peppers, have been shown to improve the efficacy of several anti-cancer drugs in cell culture and animal models. The present chapter summarizes the current knowledge about the chemosensitizing activity of capsaicinoids with conventional and targeted chemotherapeutic drugs, highlighting the potential use of capsaicinoids in novel combination therapies to improve the therapeutic indices of conventional and targeted chemotherapeutic drugs in human cancers.

Hybridogenesis

Hybridogenesis is an unusual form of reproduction that is found in hybrids between different species. It involves the selective transmission of one of the parental genomes, while the other one is renewed by mating with the corresponding species. It is seen as a form of sexual parasitism, in which the hybridogenetic genome gains a twofold transmission advantage and exploits the reproductive effort of another species.

Recent Development in Fabrication and Control of Layered-Double Hydroxide Nanostructures

Layered-double hydroxide (LDH)-based nanostructures offer the two-fold advantage of being active catalysts with incredibly large specific surface areas. As such, they have been studied extensively over the last decade and applied in roles as diverse as light source, catalyst, energy storage mechanis...

X-ray study of anisotropically shaped metal halide perovskite nanoparticles in tubular pores

Recently, we have reported that metal halide perovskite nanoparticles formed in nanoporous alumina and silicon thin films exhibit blue shifted photoluminescence due to spatial confinement, thus allowing for color tuning of the emission by varying the pore size. While perovskite nanoparticles grown in nanoporous alumina films have been integrated into LEDs, similar approaches have failed with silicon. Here, we report the results of investigating the structure of the alumina pore system and the perovskite crystallites forming within. We use two x-ray diffraction techniques, namely, small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) and high-energy microbeam wide-angle x-ray scattering (WAXS). SAXS reveals that the alumina pore system diffracts like regularly arranged tubes with the average diameter and nearest neighbor distance of 12 nm and 20 nm, respectively. High-energy microbeam WAXS shows that perovskite nanoparticles within the nanoporous alumina have a distinctly anisotropic shape with the average particle length along and perpendicular to the pore axis of 26 nm and 13 nm, respectively. In contrast, no shape anisotropy has been detected for nanoparticles inside the silicon pores in a previous study. This suggests that utilizing nanoporous alumina has a twofold advantage. First, the tubular alumina pores, spanning the entire insulating film, offer percolated paths for the perovskite to fill. Second, the elongation of the nanoparticles in the tubular alumina pores can be expected to aid device performance as the length of the nanoparticles approaches the active layer thickness (ca. 40 nm) of LEDs, while the small diameter of the crystallites accounts for the observed blue shifted emission.

A comparative analysis of AC/DC transfer standards for comparison of national standards

The development of standards based on quantum effects, in particular, alternating voltage synthesizers, has not yet allowed defining the metrological characteristics of measuring instruments for alternating voltage up to 1,000 V at a frequency up to 1 MHz. Therefore, a comparative analysis of international comparisons of national standards has summarized the possibilities of metrological support with the use of AC/DC voltage transfer standards.The conducted analytical and experimental studies give grounds to state the decisive contribution of national metrological institutes in the formation of the modern equivalence level of AC/DC voltage transfer standards. A comparative analysis of the uncertainty of measurements achieved by the leading national metrology institutes has made it possible to distinguish the most accurate type of thermal voltage converters based on the thermocouples connected in series. Such a measuring instrument allows measuring AC/DC transfer difference with an uncertainty of less than 1 μV/V at certain points of the measuring range.Consideration of the capabilities of the travelling standards to ensure a stable storage of a value of AC/DC voltage transfer difference has indicated the advantage of the thermal converter of an indicated above type, relative to the other types used in the comparisons of AC/DC transfer standards. The calculation of stability coefficients for different types of standards has shown an approximately twofold advantage of thermal converters based on the thermocouple comparing with multi-range thermal comparators on the basis of the root-mean-square voltage sensor. The results of the considered comparisons have shown that there were no advantages of any of the measurement schemes used by the laboratories since no relation has been found between the reported measurement uncertainty and the scheme.The results of the estimation of the frequency influence of the input voltage on the transformation coefficient of the AC/DC voltage transfer standards of the two types have given the grounds to neglect correcting the contribution of this source of uncertainty. The proposed approach to measuring the AC/DC transfer difference with providing the connection with a direct definition allows us to estimate more appropriately this metrological characteristic in two ways

The detrimental effect of autofrettage on externally cracked modern tank gun barrels

Overstraining gun tubes has a twofold advantage. First, it enables the increase of the Safe Maximum Pressure (SMP) in the tube, resulting in a higher muzzle velocity which extends the gun's range and its projectile kinetic energy. Second, it reduces the tube's susceptibility to internal cracking which prolongs its fatigue life. Unfortunately, autofrettage also bears an inherent detrimental effect as it considerably increases the tensile hoop stress at the outer portion of the barrel's wall, which enhances external cracking of the tube by increasing the prevailing Stress Intensity Factor (SIF). In order to quantify this disadvantageous effect, 3-D Mode I SIFs distributions along the front of a single external radial semi-elliptical crack initiating from the outer surface of an autofrettaged modern gun barrel, overstrained by either the Swage or the Hydraulic autofrettage processes, are evaluated. The analysis is performed by the finite element (FE) method, using singular elements along the crack front. Innovative residual stress fields (RSFs), incorporating the Bauschinger effect for both types of autofrettage are applied to the barrel. Hill's [1] RSF is also applied to the tube for comparison reasons. All three RSFs are incorporated in the FE analysis, using equivalent temperature fields. Values for KIA - the SIF resulting from the tensile residual stresses induced by autofrettage are evaluated for: a typical barrel of radii ratio Ro/Ri = 2, crack depth to wall-thickness ratios (a/t = 0.005–0.1), crack ellipticities (a/c = 0.2–1.0), and five levels of Swage, Hydraulic and Hill's autofrettage (ε = 40%, 60%, 70%, 80%, and 100%). In total, 375 different 3-D cases are analyzed. The analysis demonstrates undoubtedly the detrimental effect of all types of autofrettage in increasing the prevailing effective stress intensity factor of external cracks, resulting in crack initiation enhancement and crack growth rate acceleration which considerably shortens the total fatigue life of the barrel. Nonetheless, the detrimental effect is autofrettage-type dependent. Swage and Hydraulic autofrettage RSFs differ substantially from each other. The disadvantageous effect of Swage autofrettage is much greater than that resulting from Hydraulic autofrettage. The results also emphasize the significance of the Bauschinger effect and the importance of the 3-D analysis.

Exploring the benefits of an asymmetric monostable potential function in broadband vibration energy harvesting

This letter explores the benefits offered by an asymmetric monostable potential function over the conventional symmetric linear and bistable potential functions in broadband vibration energy harvesting. Multi-stable harvesters such as the bistable and tristable harvesters provide an order of magnitude higher power than the linear harvesters while undergoing inter-well oscillations. However, when the excitation noise levels are insufficient to trigger inter-well oscillations, such harvesters provide very low power output. We propose a monostable configuration with an asymmetric potential energy function that is capable of providing a high energy output starting from excitation levels as low as 0.005 g2/Hz (g denotes acceleration due to gravity). The superior performance of the proposed asymmetric configuration over the conventional linear and bistable configurations is demonstrated through experiments, considering a band-limited white noise excitation. The experimental results also indicate that the asymmetric configuration delivers higher power at lower strain levels than the bistable configuration, mitigating the burden on the piezoelectric transducer. Thus, the asymmetric configuration offers a two-fold advantage in energy harvesting, leading to an increase in both the power output and the lifetime of the piezoelectric transducer.

Spin-dependent magneto-thermopower of narrow-gap lead chalcogenide quantum wells

A semi-classical analysis of magneto-thermopower behaviour, namely, the Seebeck and Nernst effect (NE) in quantum wells of IV-VI lead salts with significant extrinsic Rashba spin-orbit coupling (RSOC) is performed in this report. In addition to the spin-dependent Seebeck effect that has been observed before, we also theoretically predict a similar spin-delineated behavior for its magneto-thermal analog, the spin-dependent NE. The choice of lead salts follows from a two-fold advantage they offer, in part, to their superior thermoelectric properties, especially PbTe, while their low band gaps and high spin-orbit coupling make them ideal candidates to study RSOC governed effects in nanostructures. The calculations show a larger longitudinal magneto-thermopower for the spin-up electrons while the transverse components are nearly identical. In contrast, for a magnetic field free case, the related power factor calculations reveal a significantly higher contribution from the spin-down ensemble and suffer a reduction with an increase in the electron density. We also discuss qualitatively the limitations of the semi-classical approach for the extreme case of a high magnetic field and allude to the observed thermopower behaviour when the quantum Hall regime is operational. Finally, techniques to modulate the thermopower are briefly outlined.

A Centralized Health Monitoring System Using Health Related Sensors Integrated to the Mobile

This article describes how health sensors, which measure health parameters, are miniaturized to fit the size of a mobile. They aim to integrate these sensors along with a mobile so as to provide data measurement to the vast population which use the mobile, and thus, create regional grid networks. The authors aim to use the mobile for updating health parameters as well as be the focal point of communication of the health information. As a result, the mobile would provide targeted distribution of the health information, which is advantageous compared to the traditional means of mass distribution of information. Also, a mobile acts as a focal point of gathering health related parameters, it provides a twofold advantage for setting up a low-cost region-specific health monitoring system.

Aquaporin-1 inhibition reduces metastatic formation in a mouse model of melanoma.

Aquaporin‐1 (AQP1) is a proangiogenic water channel protein promoting endothelial cell migration. We previously reported that AQP1 silencing by RNA interference reduces angiogenesis‐dependent primary tumour growth in a mouse model of melanoma. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that AQP1 inhibition also affects animal survival and lung nodule formation. Melanoma was induced by injecting B16F10 cells into the back of C57BL6J mice. Intratumoural injection of AQP1 siRNA and CTRL siRNA was performed 10 days after tumour cell implantation. Lung nodule formation was analysed after the death of the mice. Western blot was used to quantify HIF‐1α, caspase‐3 (CASP3) and metalloproteinase‐2 (MMP2) protein levels. We found that AQP1 knock‐down (KD) strongly inhibited metastatic lung nodule formation. Moreover, AQP1 siRNA‐treated mice showed a twofold survival advantage compared to mice receiving CTRL siRNAs. The reduced AQP1‐dependent tumour angiogenesis caused a hypoxic condition, evaluated by HIF‐1α significant increase, in turn causing an increased level of apoptosis in AQP1 KD tumours, assessed by CASP3 quantification and DNA fragmentation. Importantly, a decreased level of MMP2 after AQP1 KD indicated a decreased activity against extracellular matrix associated with reduced vascularization and metastatic formation. In conclusion, these findings highlight an additional role for AQP1 as an important determinant of tumour dissemination by facilitating tumour cell extravasation and metastatic formation. This study adds knowledge on the role played by AQP1 in tumour biology and supports the view of AQP1 as a potential drug target for cancer therapy.

Late, but not early, arriving younger siblings foster firstborns’ understanding of second-order false belief

This study examined the influence of younger siblings on children’s understanding of second-order false belief. In a representative community sample of firstborn children (N=229) with a mean age of 7years (SD=4.58), false belief was assessed during a home visit using an adaptation of a well-established second-order false belief narrative enacted with Playmobil figures. Children’s responses were coded to establish performance on second-order false belief questions. When controlling for verbal IQ and age, the existence of a younger sibling predicted a twofold advantage in children’s second-order false belief performance, yet this was the case only for firstborns who experienced the arrival of a sibling after their second birthday. These findings provide a foundation for future research on family influences on social cognition.

Neural Network Monitoring Model for Industrial Gas Turbine

Monitoring and diagnostic faults of industrial gas turbine are not an easy way by using conventional methods due to the nature and complexity of faults. Artificial neural network is considered an efficient tool to monitor and diagnose faults. In this paper, we proposed an efficient neural network model to monitor the gas turbine engine for on-line processing with a twofold advantage. First, the model is able to diagnose the fault in case of uncertainty or corrupted data. Second, it can predict the extent of the deterioration of the performance efficiency of the turbine engine through a simple graphical user interface. The experiment has been done on five faulty conditions and the proposed neural network model tested with new dataset. The results have proven that, the proposed model produced satisfactory results with10 -10 mean square error that considered optimal results when compared with training data sets.

Next-Generation Boron-Crosslinked Fracturing Fluids: Breaking the Lower Limits on Polymer Loadings

Summary Hydraulic fracturing is a robust stimulation technique that has been used for more than 60 years to help increase the recovery rate of hydrocarbons from reservoirs. Hydraulic-fracturing fluids are key components of the process. Significant efforts have been made to refine the fluids and advance new technology to help improve the economics, efficiency, and safety of the systems. Specifically, the pursuit of fluids that provide reliable and consistent performance while using lower concentrations of polymer, usually guar or a guar derivative, has been a recurrent point of emphasis in fracturing-fluid advancement. There are many advantages of using lower polymer concentrations, including lower costs, improved logistics, and introducing less polymer with its associated residues into the fracture, among others. This paper presents a new fracturing fluid that combines a next-generation boron crosslinker with a new hydroxypropyl guar (HPG) to be crosslinked with 40 to 60% less polymer than used in conventional borate-crosslinked fluids. For this fluid, HPG loadings in the range of 8 to 12 lbm/1,000 gal were used to produce boron-crosslinked stimulation fluids stable up to 200°F. Fluid-viscosity testing showed stable fracturing fluids with controlled breaking profiles at temperatures up to 180°F. Dynamic proppant-suspension testing indicated that the new fracturing fluid exhibited proppant transport equal to or better than conventional borate fluids. Regained-permeability testing with Berea sandstone cores exceeded 75% at 160°F, 85% at 180°F, and 95% at 200°F. In addition, excellent fluid cleanup was measured by retained proppant-pack conductivity with 2 lbm/ft2 of 20/40-mesh lightweight ceramic proppant. This new boron-crosslinked fluid retains the “rehealable” property and flexibility of conventional borate-crosslinked fluids; however, the polymer is crosslinked at or near the minimum concentration at which the polymer chains can entangle (and are capable of crosslinking), which is an improvement compared with conventional borate fluids. This concentration is known as the critical overlap concentration, c*, of the polymer. The use of the new crosslinking technology coupled with the new HPG allows for a two-fold advantage in terms of residue reduction. The derivatized polymer requires additional processing, yielding a cleaner polymer with less residue, and the lower polymer dosage results in a further reduction of residue compared with conventional fluids.

Teaching Weight-Gravity and Gravitation in Middle School

This study deals with the school instruction of the concept of weight. The historical review reveals the major steps in changing weight definition reflecting the epistemological changes in physics. The latest change drawing on the operation of weighing has been not widely copied into physics education. We compared the older instruction based on the gravitational definition of weight with the newer one based on the operational definition. The experimental teaching was applied in two versions, simpler and extended. The study examined the impact of this instruction on the middle school students in regular teaching environment. The experiment involved three groups (N = 486) of 14-year-old students (ninth grade). The assessment drew on a written questionnaire and personal interviews. The elicited schemes of conceptual knowledge allowed to evaluate the impact on students’ pertinent knowledge. The advantage of the new teaching manifested itself in the significant decrease of the well-known misconceptions such as “space causes weightlessness,” “weight is an unchanged property of the body considered,” and “heavier objects fall faster”. The twofold advantage—epistemological and conceptual—of the operational definition of weight supports the correspondent curricular changes of its adoption.

Experimental verification of the rate of charge improvement using photovoltaic MPPT hardware for the battery and ultracapacitor storage devices

The paper displays the experimental charging of the battery and the ultracapacitor (UC) energy storage devices utilizing the Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) and the Non-MPPT strategies with the photovoltaic solar panels. Normally in the standalone frameworks, the batteries are the workforce yet the applications that demand peak currents, the ultracapacitors apart from these batteries can serve better. With high power density UCs, the twofold advantage of battery energy density and ultracapacitor power density is achievable. The batteries and the ultracapacitors are charged as separate energy storage devices utilizing the Non-MPPT charging first and after that by the MPPT charging strategies. A comparison is made between two charging methods for these energy storage devices. The efficiency improvement, the charging rate improvement and the payback period calculations are performed. 1.2V Ni-MH batteries, 12V lead-acid batteries and 12V, 20F UCs are tested by above said two methods. Moreover, a test bench is created to perform the simulations in Matlab/Simulink®. The simulated and experimented results demonstrate the higher level of matching and the overall improvement in the charging rate is quite significant utilizing the MPPT strategies for the batteries and the UCs.

Some studies on the effect of fly ash and lime on physical and mechanical properties of expansive clay

Fly ash is one of the most plentiful and versatile of the industrial by-products. At present, nearly 150 million tonnes of fly ash is being generated annually in India posing dual problem of environmental pollution and difficulty in disposal. This calls for establishing strategies to use the same effectively and efficiently. However, it is only in geotechnical engineering applications such as the construction of embankments/dykes, as back fill material, as a sub-base material etc., its large-scale utilization is possible either alone or with soil. Soil stabilization can be achieved by various means such as compaction, soil replacement, chemical improvement, earth reinforcement etc. Usually, in the case of clay soils, chemical improvement is commonly most effective since it can strengthen the soil, to remove its sensitivity both to water and its subsequent stress history. Among chemical means or additives, fly ash/lime provides an economic and powerful means of improvement, as demonstrated by the significant transformation that is evident on mixing with heavy clay. In the present investigation, different percent fly ashes (10%, 20%, 40%, 60% & 80%) were added to a highly expansive soil from India by dry weight of the natural soil, and subjected to various tests. The important properties that are necessary for using fly ash in many geotechnical applications are index properties, compaction characteristics, compressibility characteristics, permeability and strength. Based on test results, it has been found that using fly ash for improvement of soils has a two-fold advantage. First, to avoid the tremendous environmental problems caused by large scale dumping of fly ash and second, to reduce the cost of stabilization of problematic/marginal soils and improving their engineering properties for safe construction of Engineering Structures.

Hierarchical Novelty-Familiarity Representation in the Visual System by Modular Predictive Coding

Predictive coding has been previously introduced as a hierarchical coding framework for the visual system. At each level, activity predicted by the higher level is dynamically subtracted from the input, while the difference in activity continuously propagates further. Here we introduce modular predictive coding as a feedforward hierarchy of prediction modules without back-projections from higher to lower levels. Within each level, recurrent dynamics optimally segregates the input into novelty and familiarity components. Although the anatomical feedforward connectivity passes through the novelty-representing neurons, it is nevertheless the familiarity information which is propagated to higher levels. This modularity results in a twofold advantage compared to the original predictive coding scheme: the familiarity-novelty representation forms quickly, and at each level the full representational power is exploited for an optimized readout. As we show, natural images are successfully compressed and can be reconstructed by the familiarity neurons at each level. Missing information on different spatial scales is identified by novelty neurons and complements the familiarity representation. Furthermore, by virtue of the recurrent connectivity within each level, non-classical receptive field properties still emerge. Hence, modular predictive coding is a biologically realistic metaphor for the visual system that dynamically extracts novelty at various scales while propagating the familiarity information.

Ontology-based affective models to organize artworks in the social semantic web

In this paper, we focus on applying sentiment analysis to resources from online art collections, by exploiting, as information source, tags intended as textual traces that visitors leave to comment artworks on social platforms. We present a framework where methods and tools from a set of disciplines, ranging from Semantic and Social Web to Natural Language Processing, provide us the building blocks for creating a semantic social space to organize artworks according to an ontology of emotions. The ontology is inspired by the Plutchik’s circumplex model, a well-founded psychological model of human emotions. Users can be involved in the creation of the emotional space, through a graphical interactive interface. The development of such semantic space enables new ways of accessing and exploring art collections.The affective categorization model and the emotion detection output are encoded into W3C ontology languages. This gives us the twofold advantage to enable tractable reasoning on detected emotions and related artworks, and to foster the interoperability and integration of tools developed in the Semantic Web and Linked Data community. The proposal has been evaluated against a real-word case study, a dataset of tagged multimedia artworks from the ArsMeteo Italian online collection, and validated through a user study.

Reactive silicon infiltration of carbon bonded preforms embedded in powder field modifiers heated by microwaves

Reactive silicon infiltration (RSI) is a process to produce silicon carbide parts by infiltrating microporous preforms bound by pyrolized carbon. Even if RSI is considered one of the fastest manufacturing techniques for the production of SiC parts, long time is required to heat and cool the electric furnaces used for their batch processing.In this paper, we show the benefits of applying microwave power to perform RSI. In this sense a new set up in which preforms are embedded into powder field modifiers is presented. The use of SiC/BN powders as microwave field modifiers revealed the twofold advantage of being an efficient way to heat up the components uniformly while being impermeable to molten silicon.Si–SiC bulk, composite and macroporous ceramics were successfully infiltrated in few minutes. Due to plasma formation, vacuum was not applied. Infiltrations were thus performed at ambient pressure. Finally the different microstructures produced by microwave heating at ambient pressure were compared with standard material produced by conventional heating under vacuum.

Breaking the parthenogenesis fertilization barrier: direct and indirect selection pressures promote male fertilization of parthenogenetic females

All else being equal, females would double their fecundity through parthenogenetic reproduction. On the other hand, males should be subject to positive selection pressures to coerce parthenogenetic females into sexual fertilization, because the twofold advantage of parthenogenesis is achieved at the expense of the male genetic contribution. Interestingly, although male coercion superficially imposes the cost of sex on parthenogenetic females, it would confer a reproductive benefit even on the parthenogens. This is because females fertilized by coercive males gain indirect reproductive success via sons inheriting coercion, who would succeed in mating with other parthenogens in the next generation (sons’ effect). In this study, using two mathematical models, I show for the first time that the indirect sons’ effect of male coercion plays an important role in the maintenance of sex in potentially parthenogenetic species. The first model, which compares the fitness of a female reproducing parthenogenetically with that of a female mating with a coercive male, demonstrates that the sons’ effect can outweigh the cost of sex and resolve sexual conflict over reproductive modes. My second model of population genetics, which analyses the dynamics of coercion and parthenogenesis, shows that the occurrence of parthenogenetic reproduction is suppressed in the presence of the sons’ effect of male coercion. These results indicate that the sons’ effect of male coercion helps to maintain sexual reproduction at an evolutionary time scale, as well as offset the twofold cost of males in the invasion phase of the coercion.