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Epilepsy is a chronic neurological condition characterized by behavioral, molecular, and neurochemical alterations. Current antiepileptic drugs are associated with various adverse impacts. The main goal of the current study is to investigate the possible anticonvulsant effect of selenium nanoparticles (SeNPs) against pentylenetetrazole (PTZ)-mediated epileptic seizures in mice hippocampus. Sodium valproate (VPA) was used as a standard anti-epileptic drug. Mice were assigned into five groups (n=15): control, SeNPs (5 mg/kg, orally), PTZ (60 mg/kg, intraperitoneally), SeNPs+PTZ and VPA (200 mg/kg)+PTZ. All groups were treated for 10 days. PTZ injection triggered a state of oxidative stress in the hippocampal tissue as represented by the elevated lipoperoxidation, heat shock protein 70 level, and nitric oxide formation while decreased glutathione level and antioxidant enzymes activity. Additionally, the blotting analysis showed downregulation of nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) and heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) in the epileptic mice. A state of neuroinflammation was recorded following the developed seizures represented by the increased pro-inflammatory cytokines. Moreover, neuronal apoptosis was recorded following the development of epileptic convulsions. At the neurochemical level, acetylcholinesterase activity and monoamines content were decreased in the epileptic mice, accompanied by high glutamate and low GABA levels in the hippocampal tissue. However, SeNP supplementation was found to delay the onset and decreased the duration of tonic, myoclonic, and generalized seizures following PTZ injection. Moreover, SeNPs were found to provide neuroprotection through preventing the development of oxidative challenge via the upregulation of Nrf2 and HO-1, inhibiting the inflammatory response and apoptotic cascade. Additionally, SeNPs reversed the changes in the activity and levels of neuromodulators following the development of epileptic seizures. The obtained results suggest that SeNPs could be used as a promising anticonvulsant drug due to its potent antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and neuromodulatory activities.

With the increasing number of dermatology patients owing to ecological deterioration and unhealthy lifestyles, hospitals are experiencing significant diagnostic pressure, and patients are suffering from delayed treatment and poor medical experience. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop accurate skin lesion classification tools. To address this issue, this study proposed the zero attention and complete perception (ZACP), a novel skin lesion classification system based on EfficientNet (EN). ZACP integrates two key modules: ZA and CP. ZA is an improved multi-head attention mechanism that injects zero vectors into key/value vectors, introduces a benchmark to suppress invalid attention to non-semantic regions (e.g., normal skin texture), and enhances the focus on lesions. Derived from the squeeze and excitation (SE) module, the CP embeds the ZA to achieve multiscale attention-retaining SE channel-weighting ability while enabling the ZA to capture local subtle features (e.g., melanoma boundaries) via patch segmentation and positional encoding. Additionally, the original activation function of EN was replaced with Mish to stabilize the training. Evaluated on the authoritative HAM10000 and ISIC2017 datasets, ZACP outperformed the comparative models in terms of accuracy (ACC) and other metrics, achieving 95% and 91% ACC on the two datasets, respectively. The source code is available at: http://github.com/ZACP-DERMATOLOGY .

A novel bidirectional broadside slot antenna array is proposed in this letter. The outstanding merits of this antenna array lie in the minimum width and the highest gain‐to‐area ratio (G/A) compared to previous works. The ingenious combination of the radiation mode and the transmission mode of slots is adopted, eliminating the design of the feed network. Thus, a simple and compact configuration is obtained. Moreover, two metal plates are added vertically at the sides of the slot array, with a more homogeneous radiation aperture and a higher G/A. With the 3D structure, a compact volume of the antenna array is ensured. For performance evaluation, our proof‐of‐concept design is fabricated with a cuboid dimension of 1.94λ0 × 0.12λ0 × 0.12λ0, where λ0 denotes the wavelength in free space at the centre frequency. An impedance bandwidth of 2.38 to 2.49 GHz is achieved, with a maximum gain of 9.7 dBi and a higher G/A of 39.5. The advantages including compact size and high G/A are paving the path for the potential application of communications in long and narrow spaces. In this letter, a novel bidirectional broadside slot antenna array is proposed. The slot antenna array exhibits a high gain and gain‐to‐area ratio with a compact size by ingeniously combining the radiation and transition modes of slots.

Introduction: Epilepsy is a chronic neurological condition characterized by behavioral, molecular, and neurochemical alterations. Current antiepileptic drugs are associated with various adverse impacts. The main goal of the current study is to investigate the possible anticonvulsant effect of selenium nanoparticles (SeNPs) against pentylenetetrazole (PTZ)-mediated epileptic seizures in mice hippocampus. Sodium valproate (VPA) was used as a standard anti-epileptic drug. Methods: Mice were assigned into five groups (n=15): control, SeNPs (5 mg/kg, orally), PTZ (60 mg/kg, intraperitoneally), SeNPs+PTZ and VPA (200 mg/kg)+PTZ. All groups were treated for 10 days. Results: PTZ injection triggered a state of oxidative stress in the hippocampal tissue as represented by the elevated lipoperoxidation, heat shock protein 70 level, and nitric oxide formation while decreased glutathione level and antioxidant enzymes activity. Additionally, the blotting analysis showed downregulation of nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) and heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) in the epileptic mice. A state of neuroinflammation was recorded following the developed seizures represented by the increased pro-inflammatory cytokines. Moreover, neuronal apoptosis was recorded following the development of epileptic convulsions. At the neurochemical level, acetylcholinesterase activity and monoamines content were decreased in the epileptic mice, accompanied by high glutamate and low GABA levels in the hippocampal tissue. However, SeNP supplementation was found to delay the onset and decreased the duration of tonic, myoclonic, and generalized seizures following PTZ injection. Moreover, SeNPs were found to provide neuroprotection through preventing the development of oxidative challenge via the upregulation of Nrf2 and HO-1, inhibiting the inflammatory response and apoptotic cascade. Additionally, SeNPs reversed the changes in the activity and levels of neuromodulators following the development of epileptic seizures. Conclusion: The obtained results suggest that SeNPs could be used as a promising anticonvulsant drug due to its potent antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and neuromodulatory activities. Keywords: epilepsy, selenium nanoparticles, oxidative stress, neuroinflammation and apoptosis, monoamines, GABA and glutamate

The modeling uncertainties and external disturbances of electro-hydraulic servo system (EHSS) deteriorate the system’s trajectory tracking performance. To cope with this issue, an adaptive backstepping controller based on neural network (NN) is proposed in this paper. A radial-basis-function neural network (RBF NN) is constructed to approximate the lumped uncertainties caused by modeling uncertainties and external disturbances, where the adaptive law is adopted to adjust controller parameters online. The backstepping control is used to eliminate mismatched nonlinear terms and stabilize the system. The dynamic surface control (DSC) is adopted to handle the “explosion of complexity” problem of backstepping method and reduce the computational burden. Compared to the traditional backstepping control, the proposed control scheme improves the steady-state tracking precision and makes the control signal smaller. In addition, the stability analysis shows that the tracking error can asymptotically converge to zero in the face of time-varying unknown dynamics. Simulation and experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the controller in term of tracking accuracy and disturbance rejection in comparison with other controllers for the EHSS.

Hydraulic servo actuator always suffers from various disturbance and uncertainties, which makes it difficult to design a higher performance controller. In this paper, an integral nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller based on extended state observer (ESO-INTSM) is proposed to improve the robust performance of hydraulic servo actuator. The ESO is designed to estimate not only the parametric uncertainties but also the model disturbance. Based on the observed states of ESO, the proposed controllers could enable hydraulic servo actuator to track the desired motion trajectories. The stability of the synthesized controller is proved via Lyapunov analysis, which is very important for high-accuracy tracking control of hydraulic servo actuator. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed control strategy can effectively attenuate the adverse influence caused by the uncertainties and apparently improve the tracking accuracy.

The electro-hydraulic servo system is widely used in industrial automation fields for its merits of the high force to weight ratio, compact size, and fast response. However, the parameter uncertainties and external disturbances of the electro-hydraulic servo system significantly deteriorate the control performance of conventional linear controller in practice. To deal with this problem, sliding mode controller (SMC) that incorporates high gain observer (HGO) is proposed in this paper. HGO is used to obtain the accurate time derivative of position signal for sliding mode controller design. The stability of the control system is guaranteed by Lyapunov stability theory. Comparation simulation is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the presented control scheme.

Tamoxifen (TAM) resistance is a major challenge in treating oestrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancers. It is possible that the H 2 S synthase cystathionine-γ-lyase (CSE), which has been previously shown to promote tumour growth and metastasis in other cancer cells, is involved in this resistance. Therefore, we investigated CSE's role and potential mechanisms in TAM-resistant breast cancer cells. First, we examined the effect of CSE expression on TAM sensitivity and resistance in MCF7 (breast cancer) cells. The findings revealed that CSE was directly associated with TAM sensitivity and involved in TAM resistance in ER+ breast cancer cells, indicating that it may be useful as a biomarker. Next, we wanted to determine the molecular mechanism of CSE's role in TAM resistance. Using cell migration, co-immunoprecipitation, western blotting, and cell viability assays, we determined that the CSE/H2S system can affect the expression of PPARγ by promoting the sulfhydrylation of PPARγ, which regulates the transcriptional activity of ACSL1. ACSL1, in turn, influences STAT3 activation by affecting the phosphorylation, palmitoylation and dimerization of STAT3, ultimately leading to the development of TAM resistance in breast cancer. Finally, we examined the effect of CSE inhibitors on reducing drug resistance to determine whether CSE may be used as a biomarker of TAM resistance. We observed that the novel CSE inhibitor I194496 can reverse TAM resistance in TAM-resistant breast cancer via targeting the PPARγ/ACSL1/STAT3 signalling pathway. Overall, our data indicate that CSE may serve as a biomarker of TAM resistance and that the CSE inhibitor I194496 is a promising candidate for combating TAM resistance.

Recently, flexible sensors have gained significant attention due to their potential applications in soft robotics and biomimetic intelligent devices. However, the successful production of favorable flexible sensors integrated with high flexibility, sensitivity and excellent environment adaptability toward multiple external stimuli is still an enormous challenge. Herein, a lightweight polymeric porous sponge capable of detecting an external magnetic field and strain excitations is proposed by assembling a sodium alginate/chitosan (SA/CHI) porous sponge with micron carbonyl iron and nanoscale Fe3O4 magnetic particles (MPs). Based on the double network structure, the SA/CHI sponge possesses preferable mechanical strength and hydrophilicity, demonstrating its high flexibility and deformability. More importantly, the electrical response of the SA/CHI sponge sensors can display remarkable variation under external magnetic and mechanical stimuli due to their superior magnetic characteristics and electrical conductivity. Meanwhile, their sensing properties can maintain relatively stable recoverability and repeatability towards the periodic excitations and releases. Additionally, a potential mechanism is provided to investigate their stimuli-sensitive behavior. It is highly dependent on the microstructure variations in MPs and conductive multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNTs) networks. Due to its exceptional magnetic controllability and appropriate electrical sensitivity, the proposed sensor shows high potential in wearable multi-sensing electronics and intelligent transport devices.

Flexible sensors can measure various stimuli owing to their exceptional flexibility, stretchability, and electrical properties. However, the integration of multiple stimuli into a single sensor for measurement is challenging. To address this issue, the sensor developed in this study utilizes the natural biopolymers sodium alginate and carboxymethyl cellulose to construct a dual interpenetrating network, This results in a flexible porous sponge that exhibits a dual-modal response to strain and magnetic stimulation. The dual-mode flexible sensor achieved a maximum tensile strength of 429 kPa and elongation at break of 24.7%. It also exhibited rapid response times and reliable stability under both strain and magnetic stimuli. The porous foam sensor is intended for use as a wearable electronic device for monitoring joint movements of the body. It provides a swift and stable sensing response to mechanical stimuli arising from joint activities, such as stretching, compression, and bending. Furthermore, the sensor generates opposing response signals to strain and magnetic stimulation, enabling real-time decoupling of different stimuli. This study employed a simple and environmentally friendly manufacturing method for the dual-modal flexible sensor. Because of its remarkable performance, it has significant potential for application in smart wearable electronics and artificial electroskins.