ALBERT

Description: ABSTRACT Sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ) is a ubiquitous air pollutant. The previous studies have documented the adverse effects of SO 2 on nervous system health, suggesting that acutely SO 2 inhalation at high concentration may be associated with neurotoxicity and increase risk of hospitalization and mortality of many brain disorders. However, the remarkable features of air pollution exposure are lifelong duration and at low concentration; and it is rarely reported that whether there are different responses on synapse when rats inhaled same mass of SO 2 at low concentration with a longer term. In this study, we evaluated the synaptic plasticity in rat hippocampus after exposure to same mass of SO 2 at various concentrations and durations (3.5 and 7 mg/m 3 , 6 h/day, for 4 weeks; and 14 and 28 mg/m 3 , 6 h/day, for 1 week). The results showed that the mRNA level of synaptic plasticity marker Arc, glutamate receptors (GRIA1, GRIA2, GRIN1, GRIN2A, and GRIN2B) and the protein expression of memory related kinase p-CaMKпα were consistently inhibited by SO 2 both in 1 week and 4 weeks exposure cases; the protein expression of presynaptic marker synaptophysin, postsynaptic density protein 95 (PSD-95), protein kinase A (PKA), and protein kinase C (PKC) were increased in 1 week exposure case, and decreased in 4 weeks exposure case. Our results indicated that SO 2 inhalation caused differential synaptic injury in 1 week and 4 weeks exposure cases, and implied the differential effects might result from different PKA- and/or PKC-mediated signal pathway. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Environ Toxicol, 2014.

Description: IJERPH, Vol. 15, Pages 1347: Human Exposure to Ferret Badger Rabies in Taiwan International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health doi: 10.3390/ijerph15071347 Authors: Tai-Hwa Shih Jeng-Tung Chiang Hung-Yi Wu Satoshi Inoue Cheng-Ta Tsai Shih-Chiang Kuo Cheng-Yao Yang Chang-Young Fei On 17 July 2013, Taiwan confirmed multiple cases of the rabies virus (RABV) in the wild Taiwan Ferret badger (TFB) (Melogale moschata) member of the family Mustelidae. This study aims at investigating the risk factors for human exposure to rabid TFBs. Statistical inference based on Pearson correlation showed that there was a strong positive correlation between the total number of positive TFB rabies cases and the number of rabid TFBs involved with human activities in 81 enzootic townships (r = 0.91; p < 0.001). A logistic regression analysis indicated that the risk probability of a human being bitten by rabid TFBs was significantly higher when there were no dogs around (35.55% versus 6.17% (indoors, n = 171, p = 0.0001), and 52.00% versus 5.26% (outdoors, n = 44, p = 0.021)), and whether or not there was a dog around was the only crucial covariate that was statistically significantly related to the risk of a human being bitten. In conclusion, this study showed the value of having vaccinated pets as a deterrent to TFB encounters and as a buffer to prevent human exposure to rabid TFBs. The presence of unvaccinated pets could become a significant risk factor in the longer term if rabies isn’t controlled in TFBs because of the spillover between the sylvatic and urban cycles of rabies. Consequently, raising dogs, as well as keeping rabies vaccinations up-to-date for them, can be considered an effective preventive strategy to reduce the risk for human exposure to rabid TFBs.

Description: Overexposure to manganese (Mn) has been known to induce nitrosative stress. The dysregulation of autophagy has implicated in nitric oxide (NO) bioactivity alterations. However, the mechanism of Mn-induced autophagic dysregulation is unclear. The protein of Bcl-2 was considered as a key role that could participate to the autophagy signaling regulation. To further explore whether S-nitrosylation of Bcl-2 involved in Mn-induced autophagy dysregulation, we treated human neuroblastoma (SH-SY5Y) cells with Mn and pretreated cells with 1400 W, a selective iNOS inhibitor. After cells were treated with 400 μM Mn for 24 h, there were significant increases in production of NO, inducible NO synthase (iNOS) activity, the mRNA and protein expressions of iNOS. Interestingly, autophagy was activated after cells were treated with Mn for 0–12 h; while the degradation process of autophagy-lysosome pathway was blocked after cells were treated with Mn for 24 h. Moreover, S-nitrosylated JNK and Bcl-2 also increased and phospho-JNK and phospho-Bcl-2 reduced in Mn-treated cells. Then, the affinity between Bcl-2 and Beclin-1 increased significantly in Mn-treated cells. We used the 1400 W to neutralize Mn-induced nitrosative stress. The results showed that S-nitrosylated JNK and Bcl-2 reduced while their phosphorylation were recovered to some extent. The findings revealed that NO-mediated S-nitrosylation of Bcl-2 directly affected the interaction between Beclin-1 and Bcl-2 leading to autophagy inhibition.

Description: Future Internet, Vol. 9, Pages 53: Towards a New Digital Era: Observing Local E-Government Services Adoption in a Chinese Municipality Future Internet doi: 10.3390/fi9030053 Authors: Yao Yang As electronic government services (e-government) evolve, traditional applications such as online portals are encountering challenges in a new digital era in which people thirst for more convenient, diverse channels of communication with their government. Despite the efforts devoted to the promotion of Social Networking Service (SNS) use in e-government for the past few years, empirical studies regarding this ongoing trend are still insufficient. In the local administration of China, a special collaboration between local governments and private Internet enterprises is happening: government services are imported into commercial SNS platforms known as WeChat and Weibo. This research conducts a case study of a Chinese municipality premised upon survey data (N = 605) collected in Chongqing. It examines the determinants of e-services adoption in four major local applications: two traditional government-led services “Government website portal” and “Government official app” (traditional government-led services), and two built-in government services on social networking applications “Weibo Government official account” “WeChat Public Services”. The paper aims to provide a closer understanding of current trends in local government e-services, or in this case, an innovative trial of Chinese e-government practices.

Description: Overexposure to manganese (Mn) has been known to induce alpha-synuclein (α-Syn) oligomerization, which is degraded mainly depending on endoplasmic reticulum stress (ER stress) and autophagy pathways. However, little data reported the cross-talk between ER stress and autophagy on Mn-induced α-Syn oligomerization. To explore the relationship between ER stress and autophagy, we used 4-phenylbutyric acid (4-PBA, the ER stress inhibitor), rapamycin (Rap, autophagy activator) and 3-methyladenine (3-MA, autophagy inhibitor) in mice model of manganism. After 4 weeks of treatment with Mn, both ER stress and autophagy were activated. Exposed to Mn also resulted in α-Syn oligomerization and neuronal cell damage in the brain tissue of mice, which could be relieved by 4-PBA pretreatment. Moreover, when the ER stress was inhibited, the activation of autophagy was also inhibited. Rap pretreatment significantly activated autophagy and decreased α-Syn oligomers. However, 3-MA pretreatment inhibited autophagy resulting in increase of α-Syn oligomers, and compensatorily activated PERK signaling pathway. Our results also demonstrated that the inhibition of autophagy by 3-MA aggravated neuronal cell damage. The findings clearly demonstrated that the cross-talking between autophagy and ER stress might play an important role in the α-Syn oligomerization and neurotoxicity by Mn.

Description: Sensors, Vol. 18, Pages 2503: Grey Model Optimized by Particle Swarm Optimization for Data Analysis and Application of Multi-Sensors Sensors doi: 10.3390/s18082503 Authors: Chenming Li Hongmin Gao Junlin Qiu Yao Yang Xiaoyu Qu Yongchang Wang Zhuqing Bi Data on the effective operation of new pumping station is scarce, and the unit structure is complex, as the temperature changes of different parts of the unit are coupled with multiple factors. The multivariable grey system prediction model can effectively predict the multiple parameter change of a nonlinear system model by using a small amount of data, but the value of its q parameters greatly influences the prediction accuracy of the model. Therefore, the particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to optimize the q parameters and the multi-sensor temperature data of a pumping station unit is processed. Then, the change trends of the temperature data are analyzed and predicted. Comparing the results with the unoptimized multi-variable grey model and the BP neural network prediction method trained under insufficient data conditions, it is proved that the relative error of the multi-variable grey model after optimizing the q parameters is smaller.

Description: IJGI, Vol. 7, Pages 349: Joint Alternate Small Convolution and Feature Reuse for Hyperspectral Image Classification ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information doi: 10.3390/ijgi7090349 Authors: Hongmin Gao Yao Yang Chenming Li Hui Zhou Xiaoyu Qu A hyperspectral image (HSI) contains fine and rich spectral information and spatial information of ground objects, which has great potential in applications. It is also widely used in precision agriculture, marine monitoring, military reconnaissance and many other fields. In recent years, a convolutional neural network (CNN) has been successfully used in HSI classification and has provided it with outstanding capacity for improving classification effects. To get rid of the bondage of strong correlation among bands for HSI classification, an effective CNN architecture is proposed for HSI classification in this work. The proposed CNN architecture has several distinct advantages. First, each 1D spectral vector that corresponds to a pixel in an HSI is transformed into a 2D spectral feature matrix, thereby emphasizing the difference among samples. In addition, this architecture can not only weaken the influence of strong correlation among bands on classification, but can also fully utilize the spectral information of hyperspectral data. Furthermore, a 1 × 1 convolutional layer is adopted to better deal with HSI information. All the convolutional layers in the proposed CNN architecture are composed of small convolutional kernels. Moreover, cascaded composite layers of the architecture consist of 1 × 1 and 3 × 3 convolutional layers. The inputs and outputs of each composite layer are stitched as the inputs of the next composite layer, thereby accomplishing feature reuse. This special module with joint alternate small convolution and feature reuse can extract high-level features from hyperspectral data meticulously and comprehensively solve the overfitting problem to an extent, in order to obtain a considerable classification effect. Finally, global average pooling is used to replace the traditional fully connected layer to reduce the model parameters and extract high-dimensional features from the hyperspectral data at the end of the architecture. Experimental results on three benchmark HSI datasets show the high classification accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method.