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In cardiomyocytes, Ca2+ entry through voltage-dependent Ca2+ channels (VDCCs) binds to and activates RyR2 channels, resulting in subsequent Ca2+ release from the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) and cardiac contraction. Previous research has documented the molecular coupling of small-conductance Ca2+-activated K+ channels (SK channels) to VDCCs in mouse cardiac muscle. Little is known regarding the role of RyRs-sensitive Ca2+ release in the SK channels in cardiac muscle. In this study, using whole-cell patch clamp techniques, we observed that a Ca2+-activated K+ current (IK,Ca) recorded from isolated adult C57B/L mouse atrial myocytes was significantly decreased by ryanodine, an inhibitor of ryanodine receptor type 2 (RyR2), or by the co-application of ryanodine and thapsigargin, an inhibitor of the sarcoplasmic reticulum calcium ATPase (SERCA) (p<0.05, p<0.01, respectively). The activation of RyR2 by caffeine increased the IK,Ca in the cardiac cells (p<0.05, p<0.01, respectively). We further analyzed the effect of RyR2 knockdown on IK,Ca and Ca2+ in isolated adult mouse cardiomyocytes using a whole-cell patch clamp technique and confocal imaging. RyR2 knockdown in mouse atrial cells transduced with lentivirus-mediated small hairpin interference RNA (shRNA) exhibited a significant decrease in IK,Ca (p<0.05) and [Ca2+]i fluorescence intensity (p<0.01). An immunoprecipitated complex of SK2 and RyR2 was identified in native cardiac tissue by co-immunoprecipitation assays. Our findings indicate that RyR2-mediated Ca2+ release is responsible for the activation and modulation of SK channels in cardiac myocytes.

A rolling bearing is an important connecting part between rotating machines. It is susceptible to mechanical stress and wear, which affect the running state of bearings. In order to effectively identify the fault types and analyze the fault severity of rolling bearings, a rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on multiscale amplitude-aware permutation entropy (MAAPE) and random forest is proposed in this paper. The vibration signals of rolling bearings to be analyzed are decomposed into different coarse-grained time series by using the coarse-graining procedure in multiscale entropy, highlighting the fault dynamic characteristics of vibration signals at different scales. The fault features contained in the coarse-grained time series at different time scales are extracted by using amplitude-aware permutation entropy’s sensitive characteristics to signal amplitude and frequency changes to form fault feature vectors. The fault feature vector set is used to establish the random forest multi-classifier, and the fault type identification and fault severity analysis of rolling bearings is realized through random forest. In order to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments were fully conducted in this paper. The experimental results show that multiscale amplitude-aware permutation entropy can effectively extract fault features of rolling bearings from vibration signals, and the extracted feature vectors have high separability. Compared with other rolling bearing fault diagnosis methods, the proposed method not only has higher fault type identification accuracy, but also can analyze the fault severity of rolling bearings to some extent. The identification accuracy of four fault types is up to 96.0% and the fault recognition accuracy under different fault severity reached 92.8%.

Abstract.Although Beclin 1 has been demonstrated to exert an important role in cell autophagy during carcinogenesis, its biological function in lung cancer has yet to be fully elucidated. A previous study by our laboratory identified that knockdown of Beclin 1 promoted cell growth and inhibited apoptosis in the A549 lung cancer cell line. In the present study, a Beclin 1 lentiviral expression vector was constructed, and an A549 cell line was established with a steady expression of Beclin 1. Furthermore, the effect of Beclin 1 overexpression on cell invasion and apoptosis, changes in the activities of the apoptosis-associated caspases-3 and -9, and the overexpression of esophageal cancer-related gene 4 (ECRG4) were examined. The results demonstrated that the overexpression of Beclin 1 in A549 cells reduced cell invasion by Matrigel invasion assay and promoted apoptosis by flow cytometric analysis (P<0.01) compared with Lenex-packaged lentiviral particles and non-transfected control groups. Furthermore, the overexpression of Beclin 1 in A549 cells increased the activities of caspases-3 and -9 and the expression of ECRG4 (P<0.01) compared with Lenex-packaged lentiviral particles and non-transfected control groups. In conclusion, the overexpression of Beclin 1 promoted apoptosis and decreased invasion by upregulating the expression of ECRG4 in A549 lung adenocarcinoma cells. Therefore, the selection of Beclin l as a target for gene therapy represents a more effective method for the treatment of lung cancer. IntroductionBeclin l (the mammalian counterpart of the yeast Atg6 gene) is an essential player in autophagy. Allelic loss or deficiency of the Beclin 1 gene has been demonstrated in human breast cancer, ovarian cancer and prostate cancer; in lung cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma, cervical cancer and lymphoma, the expression of Beclin 1 is very low/almost undetectable (1-4). A previous study identified that Beclin 1 -/-mice died early in embryonic development (5). Although Beclin 1 +/-mice were able to survive, the incidence of cancer was much higher in these animals. In addition, the measured in vivo cell autophagy activity was markedly decreased, and cells reproduced faster in Beclin 1-deficient animals. These findings clearly suggested that there is a close correlation between the inhibition of autophagy activity and the occurrence of cancer.Although Beclin 1 has been demonstrated to exert an important role in cell autophagy during carcinogenesis, its biological function in lung cancer has yet to be fully elucidated. A previous study by our laboratory identified that knockdown of Beclin 1 promoted cell growth and inhibited apoptosis in the A549 lung cancer cell line (6). In the present study, a Beclin 1 lentiviral expression vector was constructed, and an A549 cell line was established with a steady expression of Beclin 1. The effects of Beclin 1 overexpression on cell invasion and apoptosis, changes in the activities of the apoptosis-associated caspases-3 and -9, and the expression of esophageal cancer-related...

Creativity plays an irreplaceable role in economic and technological development. It seems that religion has a negative association with creativity. If it is true, how can we interpret the rapid development of human society with religious believers comprising 81% of global population? Based on the datasets of the World Values Survey and the Global Creativity Index, this study examined the effects of different religions/denominations on national creativity, and the moderation effect of gross domestic product per capita (GDPpc) in 87 countries. The results showed that: (1) religiosity was negatively associated with creativity at national level; (2) Proportions of Protestant and Catholic adherents in a country were both positively associated with national creativity, while proportion of Islam adherents was negatively associated with national creativity; (3) GDPpc moderated the relationships of creativity with overall religiosity, proportion of Protestant adherents, and proportion of Catholic adherents. In countries with high GDPpc, national religiosity and proportion of Islam could negatively predict national creativity, and proportion of Protestants could positively predict national creativity; in countries with low GDPpc, these relationships became insignificant. These findings suggest that national religiosity hinders creativity to a certain extent. However, some denominations (i.e., Protestant and Catholic) may exert positive influences on creativity due to their religious traditions and values. The religion–creativity relationship at national level only emerges in affluent countries.

Her research interests include natural language understanding, Digital Control Technology, and deep learning.

Both offline and online human behaviors are affected by personality. Of special interests are online games, where players have to impersonate specific roles and their behaviors are extensively tracked by the game. In this paper, we propose to study the relationship between players' personality and game behavior in League of Legends (LoL), one of the most popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games. We use linear mixed effects (LME) models to describe relationships between players' personality traits (measured by the Five Factor Model) and two major aspects of the game: the impersonated roles and in-game actions. On the one hand, we study relationships within the game environment by modeling role attributes from match behaviors and vice versa. On the other hand, we analyze the relationship between a player's five personality traits and their game behavior by showing significant correlations between each personality trait and the set of corresponding behaviors. Our findings suggest that personality and behavior are highly entangled and provide a new perspective to understand how personality can affect behavior in role-based online games.

There are obvious differences between different types of environmental regulations, which are manifested in different environmental protection tendencies and goals, and there are also significant differences in policy implementation. Therefore, it is an urgent empirical problem to quantitatively evaluate the impact of heterogeneous environmental regulations on the transformation and upgrading of industrial structure. Based on this, this paper empirically tests the impact of heterogeneous environmental regulations on the transformation and upgrading of industrial structure on the basis of measuring the level of industrial structure transformation and upgrading. The results show that the transformation and upgrading level of China's industrial structure increased year by year from 2000 to 2017. The three types of environmental regulatory measures have effectively promoted the transformation and upgrading of the industrial structure, and the market incentive environmental regulation (MER) has a significantly higher role in the advancement of the industrial structure than the command-controlled environmental regulation (CER) and the voluntary public participation environmental regulation (VER). The three types of environmental regulations have gradually highlighted the role of environmental regulations in promoting the transformation and upgrading of industrial structure with the improvement of the level of regional economic development. In the mechanism test, it is found that technological innovation has partial mediating effect in the process of CER affecting the transformation and upgrading of industrial structure, MER and public VER have complete mediating effect, while FDI has only partial mediating effect in the process of three types of environmental regulation affecting the transformation and upgrading of industrial structure.