Brinchpurcell1157

Flexible organic single crystals are evolving as new materials for optical waveguides that can be used for transfer of information in organic optoelectronic microcircuits. Integration in microelectronics of such crystalline waveguides requires downsizing and precise spatial control over their shape and size at the microscale, however that currently is not possible due to difficulties with manipulation of these small, brittle objects that are prone to cracking and disintegration. Here we demonstrate that atomic force microscopy (AFM) can be used to reshape, resize and relocate single-crystal microwaveguides in order to attain spatial control over their light output. Using an AFM cantilever tip, mechanically compliant acicular microcrystals of three N -benzylideneanilines were bent to an arbitrary angle, sliced along their longest axis into thinner crystals, cut into shorter crystals of arbitrary length, and moved across a solid surface. When excited by using laser light, such bent microcrystals act as active optical microwaveguides that transduce their fluorescence, with the total intensity of transduced light being dependent on the optical path length. This micromanipulation of the crystal waveguides using AFM is non-invasive, and after bending their emissive spectral output remains unaltered. The approach reported here effectively overcomes the difficulties that are commonly encountered with reshaping and positioning of small delicate objects (the "thick fingers" problem), and can be applied to mechanically reconfigure organic optical waveguides in order to attain spatial control over their output in two and three dimensions in optical microcircuits. © 2020 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.Nature has engineered delicate synergistic covalent and supramolecular polymers (CSPs) to achieve advanced life activities like the role of thin filament in muscle contraction. Constructing artificial synergistic CSP materials with bioinspired mechanically adaptive features, however, represents a challenging goal. Here, we report an artificial CSP system to illustrate the integration of covalent polymer (CP) and supramolecular polymer (SP) in a synergistic fashion, along with the emergence of notable mechanical and dynamic properties which are unattainable when the two polymers are formed individually. The synergistic effect relies on the peculiar network structures consisted of SPs and CPs, and thus makes the resultant CSPs an overall improvement in the mechanical performance of stiffness, strength, stretchability, toughness, and elastic recovery. Moreover, the dynamic properties including self-healing, stimuli-responsiveness, and reprocessing are retained in CSPs as well, manifesting themselves as programmable and tunable materials. © 2020 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.Micro-RNAs (miRNAs) are highly evolutionarily conserved short-length/noncoding RNA molecules that modulate a wide range of cellular functions in many cell types by regulating the expression of a variety of targeted genes. miRNAs have also recently emerged as key regulators of neuronal genes mediating the effects of psychostimulant drugs and memory-related neuroplasticity processes. Smoking is a predominant addictive behaviour associated with millions of deaths worldwide, and nicotine is a potent natural psychoactive agonist of cholinergic receptors, highly abundant in cigarettes. The influence of miRNAs modulation on cholinergic signalling in the nervous system remains however poorly explored. Using miRNA knockout mice and biochemical, electrophysiological and pharmacological approaches, we examined the effects of miR-132/212 gene disruption on the levels of hippocampal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, total ERK and phosphorylated ERK (pERK) and MeCP2 protein levels, and studied the impact of nicotine stimulation on hippocampal synaptic transmission and synaptic depression and strengthening. miR-132/212 deletion significantly altered α7-nAChR and pERK protein levels, but not total ERK or MeCP2, and resulted in both exacerbated synaptic depression and virtually abolished memory-related synaptic strengthening upon nicotine stimulation. These observations reveal a functional miRNAs/nicotinergic signalling interplay critical for nicotinic-receptor expression and neuroplasticity in brain structures relevant for drug addiction and learning and memory functions. © 2020 The Authors. Addiction Biology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for the Study of Addiction.BACKGROUND Accurate interpretation of hip MRI is time-intensive and difficult, prone to inter- and intrareviewer variability, and lacks a universally accepted grading scale to evaluate morphological abnormalities. https://www.selleckchem.com/peptide/dulaglutide.html PURPOSE To 1) develop and evaluate a deep-learning-based model for binary classification of hip osteoarthritis (OA) morphological abnormalities on MR images, and 2) develop an artificial intelligence (AI)-based assist tool to find if using the model predictions improves interreader agreement in hip grading. STUDY TYPE Retrospective study aimed to evaluate a technical development. POPULATION A total of 764 MRI volumes (364 patients) obtained from two studies (242 patients from LASEM [FORCe] and 122 patients from UCSF), split into a 65-25-10% train, validation, test set for network training. FIELD STRENGTH/SEQUENCE 3T MRI, 2D T2 FSE, PD SPAIR. ASSESSMENT Automatic binary classification of cartilage lesions, bone marrow edema-like lesions, and subchondral cyst-like lesions using the MRNet, interreader terreader agreement in all pathologies. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE 3 TECHNICAL EFFICACY STAGE 1. © 2020 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.There is now increasing evidence demonstrating that obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) contributes to microvascular disorder. However, whether OSA is associated with impaired coronary flow reserve is still unclear. Therefore, we conducted this systematic review and meta-analysis to summarize current evidence. In a systematic review, PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library and Web of Science were searched; five observational studies fulfilled the selection criteria and were included in this study. Data were extracted from selected studies and meta-analysis was performed using random-effects modelling. In all, 829 OSA patients and 507 non-OSA subjects were included and assessed for coronary flow reserve (CFR), the clinical indicator of coronary microvascular dysfunction (CMD). For all studies, OSA was significantly associated with reduced CFR. The pooled weighted mean difference (WMD) of CFR was -0.78 (95% confidence interval [CI] -1.25 to -0.32, p ＜ 0.001, I2  = 84.4%). The difference in the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) between studies can explain 89% of heterogeneity (coef = -0.