Search Results (9)

In recent years, data from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have shown that the genes coding for transcriptional repressor GATA binding 1 (TRPS1) and tribbles pseudokinase 1 (TRIB1) play an important role in plasma lipid profiles and act as risk factors for coronary heart disease (CHD). The aim of this work was to explore whether single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the TRSP1 (rs231150 and rs2737229) and TRIB1 (rs2980880 and rs2954029) genes are involved in acute coronary syndrome (ACS) and plasma lipid levels. We included 1262 patients diagnosed with ACS and 1051 controls. According to inheritance models, the minor alleles of the SNPs (rs2737229 A, rs2980880 C, and rs2954029 T) were associated with an increased incidence of ACS (p < 0.05). In a sub-analysis that included only the control subjects, the same minor allele frequency was associated with increased total cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol, and LDL-cholesterol levels and low triglyceride levels. In conclusion, rs2737229, rs2980880, and rs2954029 polymorphisms are associated with a risk of developing ACS and with elevated plasma lipid levels. Our results suggest that the TRSP1 and TRIB1 are implicated in the incidence of ACS through of increased of plasma lipid profile. Full article

This paper looks into the impact of China’s new rural land reform, the three rights separation policy (TRSP), on Chinese farmers’ income. Based on data collected from 360 rural households in Anhui Province, China, 2021, this paper constructed the influence pathways of the TRSP on household income and estimated the effects along different pathways using the structural equation model (SEM) model. It showed that through expanding the planting scale and promoting resource-use efficiency, the new land tenure system can indirectly increase transfer-in household income. However, the TRSP has a significant negative direct effect on transfer-out households’ income, and only a slight impact on transferring rural labor to other industries or relaxing the liquidity constraint. In short, the TRSP’s effect on income gains is more prominent in transfer-in households than transfer-out ones, which in the long run would lead to an increased income gap, more so if transfer-out households lack easy access to non-farm employment. Our findings suggest that public authorities should respect farmers’ autonomy in land transfer decisions and pay special attention to labor transfer in poverty alleviation. Meanwhile, widening income disparities among different groups should be heeded while implementing local governments’ service roles. Full article

Everyone aspires to live a healthy life, but many will inevitably experience some form of disease, illness, or accident that results in disability at some point. Rehabilitation plays a crucial role in helping individuals recover from these disabilities and return to their daily activities. Traditional rehabilitation methods are often expensive, are inefficient, and lead to slow progress for patients. However, in this era of technology, various sensor-based automatic rehabilitation is also possible. A Kinect sensor is a skeletal tracking device that captures human motions and gestures. It can provide feedback to the users, allowing them to better understand their progress and adjust their movements accordingly. In this study, stroke-based rehabilitation is presented along with the Toronto Rehab Stroke Pose Dataset (TRSP). Pre-processing of the raw dataset was performed using various features, and several state-of-the-art classifiers were applied to evaluate the data provided by the Kinect sensor. Among the various classifiers, eXtreme Gradient Boosing (XGB) attained the maximum accuracy of 92% for the TRSP dataset. Furthermore, hyperparameters of the XGB have been optimized using a metaheuristic gray wolf optimizer for better performance. Full article

Transcranial magnetic stimulation coupled with electroencephalography (TMS-EEG) allows for the study of brain dynamics in health and disease. Cranial muscle activation can decrease the interpretability of TMS-EEG signals by masking genuine EEG responses and increasing the reliance on preprocessing methods but can be at least partly prevented by coil rotation coupled with the online monitoring of signals; however, the extent to which changing coil rotation may affect TMS-EEG signals is not fully understood. Our objective was to compare TMS-EEG data obtained with an optimal coil rotation to induce motor evoked potentials (M1_standard) while rotating the coil to minimize cranial muscle activation (M1_emg). TMS-evoked potentials (TEPs), TMS-related spectral perturbation (TRSP), and intertrial phase clustering (ITPC) were calculated in both conditions using two different preprocessing pipelines based on independent component analysis (ICA) or signal-space projection with source-informed reconstruction (SSP-SIR). Comparisons were performed with cluster-based correction. The concordance correlation coefficient was computed to measure the similarity between M1_standard and M1_emg TMS-EEG signals. TEPs, TRSP, and ITPC were significantly larger in M1_standard than in M1_emg conditions; a lower CCC than expected was also found. These results were similar across the preprocessing pipelines. While rotating the coil may be advantageous to reduce cranial muscle activation, it may result in changes in TMS-EEG signals; therefore, this solution should be tailored to the specific experimental context. Full article

This paper examines architecture for tourism, focusing on destination design. In the past forty years, tourism destinations and their impact have been affected and transformed by emerging topics such as the impact of social media and the necessity of sustainable indicators in the tourism industry. In the global panorama of ongoing tourism transformations, Saudi Arabia has recently established new governmental opening regulations that started in 2019 for visitors and tourist visa entry. The country is facing a rapidly transforming economy, and new destinations for tourism will impact the country’s growth in the coming years as part of the Sustainable Destination Program in alignment with the ambitious targets of the Saudi National Vision 2030. The adopted methodology of the study compares selected parameters of two significant Saudi Arabian case studies, AlUla and The Red Sea Project (TRSP), for the ongoing sustainable tourism destination development of planned tourist giga projects. According to the findings, AlUla and TRSP demonstrated an intense commitment to sustainable tourism through their efforts concerning protected areas, environmentally friendly transport, and significant rewilding and reforestation. The research’s conclusion emphasizes Saudi Arabia’s commitment to innovative thinking, long-term growth, and sustainable tourism. The study’s implication is primarily suited for destination design; it suggests potential applicability even in smaller-scale tourism development projects or additional comparisons in sustainability design approaches in diverse contexts, particularly in the MENA region. Full article

The static random-access memory (SRAM) cells used in the high radiation environment of aerospace have become highly vulnerable to single-event effects (SEE). Therefore, a 12T SRAM-hardened circuit (RHB-12T cell) for the soft error recovery is proposed using the radiation hardening design (RHBD) concept. To verify the performance of the RHB-12T, the proposed cell is simulated by the 28 nm CMOS process and compared with other hardened cells (Quatro-10T, WE-Quatro-12T, RHM-12T, RHD-12T, and RSP-14T). The simulation results show that the RHB-12T cell can recover not only from single-event upset caused by their sensitive nodes but also from single-event multi-node upset caused by their storage node pairs. The proposed cell exhibits 1.14×/1.23×/1.06× shorter read delay than Quatro-10T/WE-Quatro-12T/RSP-14T and 1.31×/1.11×/1.18×/1.37× shorter write delay than WE-Quatro-12T/RHM-12T/RHD-12T/RSP-14T. It also shows 1.35×/1.11×/1.04× higher read stability than Quatro-10T/RHM-12T/RHD-12T and 1.12×/1.04×/1.09× higher write ability than RHM-12T/RHD-12T/RSP-14T. All these improvements are achieved at the cost of a slightly larger area and power consumption. Full article

Studies using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) have demonstrated the importance of direction and intensity of the applied current when the primary motor cortex (M1) is targeted. By varying these, it is possible to stimulate different subsets of neural elements, as demonstrated by modulation of motor evoked potentials (MEPs) and motor behaviour. The latter involves premotor areas as well, and among them, the presupplementary motor area (pre–SMA) has recently received significant attention in the study of motor inhibition. It is possible that, similar to M1, different neuronal populations can be activated by varying the direction and intensity of TMS; however, the absence of a direct electrophysiological outcome has limited this investigation. The problem can be solved by quantifying direct cortical responses by means of combined TMS and electroencephalography (TMS–EEG). We investigated the effect of variable coil orientations (0°, 90°, 180° and 270°) and stimulation intensities (100%, 120% and 140% of resting motor threshold) on local mean field potential (LMFP), transcranial evoked potential (TEP) peaks and TMS–related spectral perturbation (TRSP) from pre–SMA stimulation. As a result, early and late LMFP and peaks were larger, with the coil handle pointing posteriorly (0°) and laterally (90°). This was true also for TRSP in the β–γ range, but, surprisingly, θ–α TRSP was larger with the coil pointing at 180°. A 90° orientation activated the right M1, as shown by MEPs elicitation, thus limiting the spatial specificity of the stimulation. These results suggest that coil orientation and stimulation intensity are critical when stimulating the pre–SMA. Full article

The role of the essential trace element selenium in hypothalamic physiology has begun to come to light over recent years. Selenium is used to synthesize a family of proteins participating in redox reactions called selenoproteins, which contain a selenocysteine residue in place of a cysteine. Past studies have shown that disrupted selenoprotein expression in the hypothalamus can adversely impact energy homeostasis. There is also evidence that selenium supports leptin signaling in the hypothalamus by maintaining proper redox balance. In this study, we generated mice with conditional knockout of the selenocysteine tRNA^[Ser]Sec gene (Trsp) in an orexigenic cell population called agouti-related peptide (Agrp)-positive neurons. We found that female Trsp^AgrpKO mice gain less weight while on a high-fat diet, which occurs due to changes in adipose tissue activity. Female Trsp^AgrpKO mice also retained hypothalamic sensitivity to leptin administration. Male mice were unaffected, however, highlighting the sexually dimorphic influence of selenium on neurobiology and energy homeostasis. These findings provide novel insight into the role of selenoproteins within a small yet heavily influential population of hypothalamic neurons. Full article

Selenoproteins are a class of proteins with the selenium-containing amino acid selenocysteine (Sec) in their primary structure. Sec is incorporated into selenoproteins via recoding of the stop codon UGA, with specific cis and trans factors required during translation to avoid UGA recognition as a stop codon, including a Sec-specific tRNA, tRNA^[Ser]Sec, encoded in mice by the gene Trsp. Whole-body deletion of Trsp in mouse is embryonically lethal, while targeted deletion of Trsp in mice has been used to understand the role of selenoproteins in the health and physiology of various tissues. We developed a mouse model with the targeted deletion of Trsp in brown adipocytes (Trsp^f/f-Ucp1-Cre^+/−), a cell type predominant in brown adipose tissue (BAT) controlling energy expenditure via activation of adaptive thermogenesis, mostly using uncoupling protein 1 (Ucp1). At room temperature, Trsp^f/f-Ucp1-Cre^+/− mice maintain oxygen consumption and Ucp1 expression, with male Trsp^f/f-Ucp1-Cre^+/− mice accumulating more triglycerides in BAT than both female Trsp^f/f-Ucp1-Cre^+/− mice or Trsp^f/f controls. Acute cold exposure neither reduced core body temperature nor changed the expression of selenoprotein iodothyronine deiodinase type II (Dio2), a marker of adaptive thermogenesis, in Trsp^f/f-Ucp1-Cre^+/− mice. Microarray analysis of BAT from Trsp^f/f-Ucp1-Cre^+/− mice revealed glutathione S-transferase alpha 3 (Gsta3) and ELMO domain containing 2 (Elmod2) as the transcripts most affected by the loss of Trsp. Male Trsp^f/f-Ucp1-Cre^+/− mice showed mild hypothyroidism while downregulating thyroid hormone-responsive genes Thrsp and Tshr in their BATs. In summary, modest changes in the BAT of Trsp^f/f-Ucp1-Cre ^+/− mice implicate a mild thyroid hormone dysfunction in brown adipocytes. Full article