Sexdependent correlates of arterial firmness throughout Tanzanian grownups

Excessive and prolonged intake of highly palatable, high fat (HF) foods contributes to the pathogenesis of obesity, metabolic syndrome, and cognitive impairment. Exercise can restore energy homeostasis and suppress HF diet preference in rats. However, it is unclear if exercise confers similar protection against the detrimental outcomes associated with a chronic HF diet preference and feeding in both sexes. We used our wheel running (WR) and two-diet choice (chow vs. HF) paradigm to investigate the efficacy of exercise in reversing HF diet-associated metabolic and cognitive dysregulation in rats, hypothesizing that beneficial effects of exercise would be more pronounced in males. All WR rats showed HF diet avoidance upon running initiation, and males, but not females, had a prolonged reduction in HF diet preference. Evofosfamide Moreover, exercise only improved glucose tolerance and insulin profile in males. Compared to sedentary controls, all WR rats improved learning to escape on the Barnes maze. Only WR females increased errors made during subsequent reversal learning trials, indicating a sex-dependent effect of exercise on behavioral flexibility. Taken together, our results suggest that exercise is more effective at attenuating HF-associated metabolic deficits in males, and highlights the importance of developing sex-specific treatment interventions for obesity and cognitive dysfunction.Incorporation of antioxidant agents in edible films and packages often relies in the usage of essential oils and other concentrated hydrophobic liquids, with reliable increases in antimicrobial and antioxidant activities of the overall composite, but with less desirable synthetic sources and extraction methods. Hydroethanolic extracts of commercially-available red macroalgae Gracilaria gracilis were evaluated for their antioxidant potential and phenolic content, as part of the selection of algal biomass for the enrichment of thermoplastic film coatings. The extracts were obtained through use of solid-liquid extractions, over which yield, DPPH radical reduction capacity, total phenolic content, and FRAP activity assays were measured. Solid-to-liquid ratio, extraction time, and ethanol percentages were selected as independent variables, and response surface methodology (RSM) was then used to estimate the effect of each extraction condition on the tested bioactivities. These extracts were electrospun into polypropylene films and the antioxidant activity of these coatings was measured. Similar bioactivities were measured for both 100% ethanolic and aqueous extracts, revealing high viability in the application of both for antioxidant coating purposes, though activity losses as a result of the electrospinning process were above 60% in all cases.Many studies have been conducted to fabricate unique structures on flexible substrates and to apply such structures to a variety of fields. However, it is difficult to produce unique structures such as multilayer, nanospheres and porous patterns on a flexible substrate. We present a facile method of nanospheres based on laser-induced porous graphene (LIPG), by using laser-induced plasma (LIP). We fabricated these patterns from commercial polyimide (PI) film, with a 355 nm pulsed laser. For a simple one-step process, we used laser direct writing (LDW), under ambient conditions. We irradiated the PI film at a defocused plane -4 mm away from the focal plane, for high pulse overlap rate. The effect of the laser scanning speed was investigated by FE-SEM, to observe morphological characterization. Moreover, we confirmed the pattern characteristics by optical microscope, Raman spectroscopy and electrical experiments. The results suggested that we could modulate the conductivity and structural color by controlling the laser scanning speed. In this work, when the speed of the laser is 20 mm/s and the fluence is 5.28 mJ/cm2, the structural color is most outstanding. Furthermore, we applied these unique characteristics to various colorful patterns by controlling focal plane.Aquatic insects comprise 10% of all insect diversity, can be found on every continent except Antarctica, and are key components of freshwater ecosystems. However, aquatic insect genome biology lags dramatically behind that of terrestrial insects. If genomic effort was spread evenly, one aquatic insect genome would be sequenced for every ~9 terrestrial insect genomes. Instead, ~24 terrestrial insect genomes have been sequenced for every aquatic insect genome. This discrepancy is even more dramatic if the quality of genomic resources is considered; for instance, while no aquatic insect genome has been assembled to the chromosome level, 29 terrestrial insect genomes spanning four orders have. We argue that a lack of aquatic insect genomes is not due to any underlying difficulty (e.g., small body sizes or unusually large genomes), yet it is severely hampering aquatic insect research at both fundamental and applied scales. By expanding the availability of aquatic insect genomes, we will gain key insight into insect diversification and empower future research for a globally important taxonomic group.Obstacle detection is one of the essential capabilities for autonomous robots operated on unstructured terrain. In this paper, a novel laser-based approach is proposed for obstacle detection by autonomous robots, in which the Sobel operator is deployed in the edge-detection process of 3D laser point clouds. The point clouds of unstructured terrain are filtered by VoxelGrid, and then processed by the Gaussian kernel function to obtain the edge features of obstacles. The Euclidean clustering algorithm is optimized by super-voxel in order to cluster the point clouds of each obstacle. The characteristics of the obstacles are recognized by the Levenberg-Marquardt back-propagation (LM-BP) neural network. The algorithm proposed in this paper is a post-processing algorithm based on the reconstructed point cloud. Experiments are conducted by using both the existing datasets and real unstructured terrain point cloud reconstructed by an all-terrain robot to demonstrate the feasibility and performance of the proposed approach.