Electroacupuncture reduces injury to the blood-brain barrier following cerebral ischemia/reperfusion injury

This study used electroacupuncture at Renzhong （DU26） and Baihui （DU20） in a rat model of cerebral ischemia/reperfusion injury. Neurological deficit scores, western blotting, and reverse transcription-PCR results demonstrated that electroacupuncture markedly reduced neurological deficits, decreased corpus striatum aquaporin-4 protein and mRNA expression, and relieved damage to the blood-brain barrier in a rat model of cerebral ischemia/reperfusion injury. These results suggest that electroacupuncture most likely protects the blood-brain barrier by regulating aquaporin-4 expression following cerebral ischemia/reperfusion injury.

Soft Robotics:Morphology and Morphology-inspired Motion Strategy

Robotics has aroused huge attention since the 1950s.Irrespective of the uniqueness that industrial applications exhibit,conventional rigid robots have displayed noticeable limitations,particularly in safe cooperation as well as with environmental adaption.Accordingly,scientists have shifted their focus on soft robotics to apply this type of robots more effectively in unstructured environments.For decades,they have been committed to exploring sub-fields of soft robotics(e.g.,cutting-edge techniques in design and fabrication,accurate modeling,as well as advanced control algorithms).Although scientists have made many different efforts,they share the common goal of enhancing applicability.The presented paper aims to brief the progress of soft robotic research for readers interested in this field,and clarify how an appropriate control algorithm can be produced for soft robots with specific morphologies.This paper,instead of enumerating existing modeling or control methods of a certain soft robot prototype,interprets for the relationship between morphology and morphology-dependent motion strategy,attempts to delve into the common issues in a particular class of soft robots,and elucidates a generic solution to enhance their performance.

Domain-Invariant Similarity Activation Map Contrastive Learning for Retrieval-Based Long-Term Visual Localization

Visual localization is a crucial component in the application of mobile robot and autonomous driving.Image retrieval is an efficient and effective technique in image-based localization methods.Due to the drastic variability of environmental conditions,e.g.,illumination changes,retrievalbased visual localization is severely affected and becomes a challenging problem.In this work,a general architecture is first formulated probabilistically to extract domain-invariant features through multi-domain image translation.Then,a novel gradientweighted similarity activation mapping loss(Grad-SAM)is incorporated for finer localization with high accuracy.We also propose a new adaptive triplet loss to boost the contrastive learning of the embedding in a self-supervised manner.The final coarse-to-fine image retrieval pipeline is implemented as the sequential combination of models with and without Grad-SAM loss.Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on the CMU-Seasons dataset.The strong generalization ability of our approach is verified with the RobotCar dataset using models pre-trained on urban parts of the CMU-Seasons dataset.Our performance is on par with or even outperforms the state-of-the-art image-based localization baselines in medium or high precision,especially under challenging environments with illumination variance,vegetation,and night-time images.Moreover,real-site experiments have been conducted to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the coarse-to-fine strategy for localization.

Biased heteroplasmy within the mitogenomic sequences of Gigantometra gigas revealed by sanger and high-throughput methods

Few studies have explored the differences between Sanger and HTS methods in the results of mitogenome sequencing. We used a single individual of insect to study the differences between the sequences given by Sanger and PCR-free HTS methods. Here we provided evidence for biased results of sequencing due to different methods in the mitochondrial genes of atp6, atp8, cox1, cox2, cox3, Cytb, nad2, nad3, nad4, nad5, rrn S, rrnL, trnH, trn I, and control region at various degrees. Especially, in cox1, the differently sequenced nucleotides account for 2.6% of the complete length. Furthermore, the highest value of the intraspecific genetic distance based on K2 P accounts for 2.5% using a barcode fragment size of cox1（651 bp, Sanger）, while the maximum distance of the corresponding cox1 fragment obtained by the two sequencing methods was 5.0%. We revealed that the methods of Sanger and HTS may give different sequencing results of mitochondrial genes, which may reflect the heteroplasmy of mitogenomes within an insect individual. Therefore, researchers should be very cautious in using the mixed data of a gene given by different methods of sequencing.