To ensure undisrupted business, large Internet companies need to closely monitor various KPIs (e.g., Page Views, number of online users, and number of orders) of its Web applications, to accurately detect anomalies and trigger timely troubleshooting/mitigation. However, anomaly detection for these seasonal KPIs with various patterns and data quality has been a great challenge, especially without labels. In this paper, we proposed Donut, an unsupervised anomaly detection algorithm based on VAE. Thanks to a few of our key techniques, Donut greatly outperforms a state-of-arts supervised ensemble approach and a baseline VAE approach, and its best F-scores range from 0.75 to 0.9 for the studied KPIs from a top global Internet company. We come up with a novel KDE interpretation of reconstruction for Donut, making it the first VAE-based anomaly detection algorithm with solid theoretical explanation.

Lightweight structural materials with high strength are desirable for advanced applications in transportation, construction, automotive, and aerospace. Bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants with a peak growth rate up to 100 cm per day. Here, a simple and effective top‐down approach is designed for processing natural bamboo into a lightweight yet strong bulk structural material with a record high tensile strength of ≈1 GPa and toughness of 9.74 MJ m−3. More specifically, bamboo is densified by the partial removal of its lignin and hemicellulose, followed by hot‐pressing. Long, aligned cellulose nanofibrils with dramatically increased hydrogen bonds and largely reduced structural defects in the densified bamboo structure contribute to its high mechanical tensile strength, flexural strength, and toughness. The low density of lignocellulose in the densified bamboo leads to a specific strength of 777 MPa cm3 g−1, which is significantly greater than other reported bamboo materials and most structural materials (e.g., natural polymers, plastics, steels, and alloys). This work demonstrates a potential large‐scale production of lightweight, strong bulk structural materials from abundant, fast‐growing, and sustainable bamboo.

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Lightweight structural materials are critical in construction and automobile applications. In past centuries, there has been great success in developing strong structural materials, such as steels, concrete, and petroleum-based composites, most of which, however, are either too heavy, high cost, or nonrenewable. Biosourced composites are attractive alternatives to conventional structural materials, especially when high mechanical strength is presented. Here we demonstrate a strong, lightweight bio-based structural material derived from bamboo via a two-step manufacturing process involving partial delignification followed by microwave heating. Partial delignification is a critical step prior to microwave heating as it makes the cell walls of bamboo softer and exposes more cellulose nanofibrils, which enables superior densification of the bamboo structure via heat-driven shrinkage. Additionally, microwave heating, as a fast and uniform heating method, can drive water out of the bamboo structure, yet without destroying the material’s structural integrity, even after undergoing a large volume reduction of 28.9%. The resulting microwave-heated delignified bamboo structure demonstrates outstanding mechanical properties with a nearly 2-times improved tensile strength, 3.2-times enhanced toughness, and 2-times increased bending strength compared to natural bamboo. Additionally, the specific tensile strength of the modified bamboo structure reaches 560 MPa cm3 g–1, impressive given that its density is low (1.0 g cm–3), outperforming common structural materials, such as steels, metal alloys, and petroleum-based composites. These excellent mechanical properties combined with the resource abundance, renewable and sustainable features of bamboo, as well as the rapid, scalable manufacturing process, make this strong microwave-processed bamboo structure attractive for lightweight, energy-efficient engineering applications.

Keeping continuity with our previous study that revealed direct correlations between CRC metastasis and enhanced CacyBP protein levels, here we attempt to improve our understanding of the mechanisms involved within this enigmatic process. Overexpression of CacyBP (CacyBP-OE) in primary CRC cell and its knock down (CacyBP-KD) in the metastatic CRC cells revealed (through phenotypic studies) the positive impact of the protein on metastasis. Additionally, two individual 4-plex iTRAQ based comparative proteomics experiments were carried out on the CacyBP-OE and CacyBP-KD cells, each with two biological replicates. Mining of proteomics data identified total 279 (63.80% up-regulated and 36.20% down-regulated) proteins to be significantly altered in expression level for the OE set and in the KD set, this number was 328 (48.78% up-regulated and 51.22% downregulated). Functional implications of these significantly regulated proteins were related to metastatic phenotypes such as cell migration, invasion, adhesion and proliferation. Gene ontology analysis identified integrin signaling as the topmost network regulated within CacyBP-OE. Further detection of caveolar mediated endocytosis in the top hit list correlated this phenomenon with the dissociation of integrins from the focal adhesion complex which are known to provide the traction force for cell movement when transported back to the leading edge. This finding was further supported by the data obtained from CacyBP-KD data set showing down-regulation of proteins necessary for integrin endocytosis. Furthermore, intracellular calcium levels (known to influence integrin mediated cell migration) were found to be lowered in CacyBP-KD cells indicating decreased cell motility and vice versa for the CacyBP-OE cells. Actin nucleation by ARP-WASP complex, known to promote cell migration, was also identified as one of the top regulated pathways in CacyBP-OE cells.

BackgroundTwist2 has been shown to promote human tumor invasion as in breast cancer and cervical cancer. However, whether Twist2 promotes human ovarian cancer progression remains to be elucidated. Here, we investigate the role of Twist2 in ovarian cancer invasion and metastasis as well as the underlying molecular mechanisms.MethodsTwist2 expression was detected by Immunohistochemistry (IHC) on tissue microarray of human ovarian cancers with scoring procedure according to the staining intensity and pattern. Twist2 gene was stably introduced into SKOV-3 ovarian cancer cells to examine the changes of cellular morphology, motility, invasiveness, and EMT molecular markers.ResultsTwist2 expression is significantly increased in ovarian cancers along with the FIGO disease stage, indicating that Twist2 may be associated with ovarian cancer metastasis. Overexpression of Twist2 induced the EMT phenotype including downregulation of E-cadherin, and upregulation of N-cadherin and β-catenin in human ovarian cancer cells, suggesting that Twist2 might promote β-catenin release from the E-cadherin/β-catenin complex through inhibition of E-cadherin. Thus, β-catenin degradation was inhibited due to inhibition of APC, and the Wnt/β-catenin pathway was then activated by nuclear β-catenin accumulation, which may activate transcription of downstream target genes to promote tumor invasion and metastasis. Collectively, these data indicated that β-catenin is involved in Twist2-induced EMT in ovarian cancer.ConclusionOur data indicates that upregulation of Twist2 is correlated with the FIGO stage in human ovarian cancers. In this report, we demonstrated that nuclear β-catenin is accumulated in Twist2-induced EMT cells to facilitates ovarian cancer invasion and metastasis.

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