Melatonin transport into mitochondria

Melatonin is a well-known, nighttime-produced indole found in bacteria, eukaryotic unicellulars, animals or vascular plants. In vertebrates, melatonin is the major product of the pineal gland, which accounts for its increase in serum during the dark phase, but it is also produced by many other organs and cell types. Such a wide distribution is consistent with its multiple and well-described functions which include from the circadian regulation and adaptation to seasonal variations to immunomodulatory and oncostatic actions in different types of tumors. The discovery of its antioxidant properties in the early 1990s opened a new field of potential protective functions in multiple tissues. A special mention should be made regarding the nervous system, where the indole is considered a major neuroprotector. Furthermore, mitochondria appear as one of the most important targets for the indole’s protective actions. Melatonin’s mechanisms of action vary from the direct molecular interaction with free radicals (free radical scavenger) to the binding to membrane (MLT1A and MLT1B) or nuclear receptors (RZR/RORα). Receptor binding has been associated with some, but not all of the indole functions reported to date. Recently, two new mechanisms of cellular uptake involving the facilitative glucose transporters GLUT/SLC2A and the proton-driven oligopeptide transporter PEPT1/2 have been reported. Here we discuss the potential importance that these newly discovered transport systems could have in determining the actions of melatonin, particularly in the mitochondria. We also argue the relative importance of passive diffusion vs active transport in different parts of the cell.     

美国德克萨斯州冲突法的变迁

在过去的几个世纪里，德克萨斯州的法律选择学说一直经历着翻天覆地的变化。自德州加入反对本地法运动开始，直至第二次重述的利益分析和最密切联系原则的出现为止，德州似乎一直在逃避着一致性而趋向灵活性。从根本上说，德州冲突法在美国两次冲突法革命的革新中，被赋予更多的政策因素，加上法律选择固有的含糊不清的性质，为德州法院留下了较多不稳定的法律选择因素，在帮助当事人预见法院的法律选择方面所发挥的作用更是日渐式微。因此，对德州冲突法演变的探讨，尤其针对其冲突法理论和方法的变迁方面的讨论，对于解决目前的理论困境，以及探寻未来的理论发展模式有着积极的推动作用。     

网络口碑对市场销售分布的影响:基于不同产品评价标准

网络口碑中的产品信息帮助客户明确他们的需求,从而引起在线市场销售分布的变化.本研究探讨网络口碑对不同市场销售分布的影响,根据产品评价标准的相似性水平对市场进行分类.提出了网络口碑对于不同市场销售分布具体影响的三个假设,并通过从京东商城(www.jd.com)收集的数据进行相应的验证.绘制网络口碑的累积分布函数来代表总的知名度,并使用Wilcoxon符号秩检验从统计学上进行比较来显示高级别产品拥有的不同网络口碑的比例.所有的测试结果都显示足够的显著性,从而支持了三个假设.     

System optimization model of adoption of a new infrastructure with multi-resource and multi-demand sites

This study develops a conceptual system optimization model of adoption of a new infrastructure technology with multiple resource sites and multiple demand sites. With the model, this paper analyzes how the distance, spillover effect, demand, initial investment cost, and learning rate influence the adoption of the new infrastructure technology and presents optimization results of the model in different scenarios. The main findings of the study are: from the perspective of system optimization, (1) different distances among different resource-demand pairs will result in different adoption time of a new infrastructure; (2) technological spillover among different resource-demand pairs will accelerate the adoption of a new infrastructure; (3) it is hard to say that higher demand will pull faster adoption of a new infrastructure, and the optimal time of adopting of a new infrastructure is very sensitive to its technological learning rate.     

Social Media as a Mean for Improved Technical Communication

Technical communication (TC) is an important activity in order to provide the users of technical artifacts with necessary information concerning the operation and maintenance of the products they are using. In the current working procedures of TC, however, the users become too passive. They are just receivers of information. Further, there is no effective feedback from the users to the producers of the information. In order to overcome those problems we here propose an application of social media (SM) in future TC. By using SM as a complementary channel for TC it becomes possible for technology firms to boost their competitive advantage and to improve the quality and completeness of their TC. This technique, however, is still more of a potential and less of a reality. Several problems, mostly concerning security and confidentiality remain to be solved. The empirical base for this work comes from TIC, an EU-funded development project involving several Swedish technology companies. Published research results are somewhat scattered but several sources coherently indicate both the need and potential for SM as a vehicle in TC. By scanning the net it is further possible to identify a number of seemingly successful applications of SM in such applications.     

强边着色猜想问题的最优图

著名图论专家Erds和Nesetǐil对图的强边色数上界提出了一个猜想:当最大度Δ为偶数时,χ's(G)≤5/4Δ~2;当最大度Δ为奇数时,χ's(G)≤1/4(5Δ~2-2Δ+1);并且给出了当Δ=4时的最优图.此处构造了一族图,并证明了当最大度为奇数时,如果Erd9s和Ne2etǐil提出的强边着色猜想成立,则猜想中的上界是最优的.     

绿色建筑发展关键主体动态博弈——基于供给侧结构性改革视角

 中国绿色建筑市场正处于稳步发展阶段，但仍然存在供需结构不合理、各方利益关系协调不均衡等问题。基于供给侧结构性改革视角，分析了绿色建筑发展过程中“供应侧”和“需求侧”两端正外部经济性特征，构建了政府与供、需两端关键主体动态博弈模型，提出了基于政府、房地产开发商和消费者的对策建议。通过研究，表明绿色建筑发展前期阶段存在正外部经济效应和市场失灵共生现象，供、需两端并不能满足帕累托效率的平衡量要求，只通过市场自身资源配置功能调节绿色建筑市场结构和各主体利益关系存在局限性，政府的适度干预有利于实现供、需两端最优利益组合和利益均衡，有助于加快实现传统建筑市场转型升级。     

Viral journeys on the intracellular highways

Viruses are obligate intracellular pathogens that are dependent on cellular machineries for their replication. Recent technological breakthroughs have facilitated reliable identification of host factors required for viral infections and better characterization of the virus–host interplay. While these studies have revealed cellular machineries that are uniquely required by individual viruses, accumulating data also indicate the presence of broadly required mechanisms. Among these overlapping cellular functions are components of intracellular membrane trafficking pathways. Here, we review recent discoveries focused on how viruses exploit intracellular membrane trafficking pathways to promote various stages of their life cycle, with an emphasis on cellular factors that are usurped by a broad range of viruses. We describe broadly required components of the endocytic and secretory pathways, the Endosomal Sorting Complexes Required for Transport pathway, and the autophagy pathway. Identification of such overlapping host functions offers new opportunities to develop broad-spectrum host-targeted antiviral strategies.     

Cost and Service-Level-Based Model for a Seru Production System Formation Problem with Uncertain Demand

With increasing demand diversification and short product lifecycles, industries now encounter challenges of demand uncertainty. The Japanese seru production system has received increased attention owing to its high efficiency and flexibility. In this paper, the problem of seru production system formation under uncertain demand is researched. A multi-objective optimization model for a seru production system formation problem is developed to minimize the cost and maximize the service level of the system. The purpose of this paper is to formulate a robust production system that can respond efficiently to the stochastic demand. Sample average approximation (SAA) is used to approximate the expected objective of the stochastic programming. The non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) is improved to solve the multi-objective optimization model. Numerical experiments are conducted to test the tradeoff between cost and service level, and how the performance of the seru production system varies with the number of product types, mean and deviation of product volume, and skill-level-based cost.     

Products Ranking Through Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis of Online Heterogeneous Reviews

With the rapid growth of online shopping platforms, more and more customers intend to share their shopping experience and product reviews on the Internet. Both large quantity and various forms of online reviews bring difficulties for potential consumers to summary all the heterogenous reviews for reference. This paper proposes a new ranking method through online reviews based on different aspects of the alternative products, which combines both objective and subjective sentiment values. Firstly, weights of these aspects are determined with LDA topic model to calculate the objective sentiment value of the product. During this process, the realistic meaning of each aspect is also summarized. Then, consumers’ personalized preferences are taken into consideration while calculating total scores of alternative products. Meanwhile, comparative superiority between every two products also contributes to their final scores. Therefore, a directed graph model is constructed and the final score of each product is computed by improved PageRank algorithm. Finally, a case study is given to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. The result demonstrates that while considering only objective sentiment values of the product, the ranking result obtained by our proposed method has a strong correlation with the actual sales orders. On the other hand, if consumers express subjective preferences towards a certain aspect, the final ranking is also consistent with the actual performance of alternative products. It provides a new research idea for online customer review mining and personalized recommendation.