Electroacupuncture alleviates cerebral ischemia and reperfusion injury via modulation of the ERK1/2 signaling pathway

Electroacupuncture（EA） has anti-oxidative and anti-inflammatory actions,but whether the neuroprotective effect of EA against cerebral ischemia-reperfusion（I/R） injury involves modulation of the extracellular regulated kinase 1/2（ERK1/2） signaling pathway is unclear.Middle cerebral artery occlusion（MCAO） was performed in Sprague-Dawley rats for 2 hours followed by reperfusion for 24 hours.A 30-minute period of EA stimulation was applied to both Baihui（DU20） and Dazhui（DU14） acupoints in each rat（10 mm EA penetration depth,continuous wave with a frequency of 3 Hz,and a current intensity of 1–3 m A） when reperfusion was initiated.EA significantly reduced infarct volume,alleviated neuronal injury,and improved neurological function in rats with MCAO.Furthermore,high m RNA expression of Bax and low m RNA expression of Bcl-2 induced by MCAO was prevented by EA.EA substantially restored total glutathione reductase（GR）,glutathione（GSH） and glutathione peroxidase（GSH-Px） levels.Additionally,Nrf2 and glutamylcysteine synthetase（GCS） expression levels were markedly increased by EA.Interestingly,the neuroprotective effects of EA were attenuated when ERK1/2 activity was blocked by PD98059（a specific MEK inhibitor）.Collectively,our findings indicate that activation of the ERK1/2 signaling pathway contributes to the neuroprotective effects of EA.Our study provides a better understanding of the regulatory mechanisms underlying the therapeutic effectiveness of EA.

Energy Saving for Automatic Train Control in Moving Block Signaling System

With rapid development of the railway traffic, the moving block signaling system （MBS） method has become more and more important for increasing the track capacity by allowing trains to run in a shorter time-headway while maintaining the required safety margins. In this framework, the tracking target point of the following train is moving forward with its leading train. This paper focuses on the energy saving tracking control of two successive trains in MBS. Nonlinear programming method is used to optimize the energy-saving speed trajectory of the following train. The real-time location of the leading train could be integrated into the optimization process. Due to simplicity, it can be used for online implementation. The feasibility and effectiveness are verified through simulation. The results show that the new method is efficient on energy saving even when disturbances present.

DOA estimation method for wideband signals by block sparse reconstruction

For the direction of arrival（DOA） estimation,traditional sparse reconstruction methods for wideband signals usually need many iteration times.For this problem,a new method for two-dimensional wideband signals based on block sparse reconstruction is proposed.First,a prolate spheroidal wave function（PSWF） is used to fit the wideband signals,then the block sparse reconstruction technology is employed for DOA estimation.The proposed method uses orthogonalization to choose the matching atoms,ensuring that the residual components correspond to the minimum absolute value.Meanwhile,the vectors obtained by iteration are back-disposed according to the corresponding atomic matching rules,so the extra atoms are abandoned in the course of iteration,and the residual components of current iteration are reduced.Thus the original sparse signals are reconstructed.The proposed method reduces iteration times comparing with the traditional reconstruction methods,and the estimation precision is better than the classical two-sided correlation transformation（TCT）algorithm when the snapshot is small or the signal-to-noise ratio（SNR） is low.

A sharp recovery condition for block sparse signals by block orthogonal multi-matching pursuit

We consider the block orthogonal multi-matching pursuit(BOMMP) algorithm for the recovery of block sparse signals.A sharp condition is obtained for the exact reconstruction of block K-sparse signals via the BOMMP algorithm in the noiseless case,based on the block restricted isometry constant(block-RIC).Moreover,we show that the sharp condition combining with an extra condition on the minimum l_2 norm of nonzero blocks of block K-sparse signals is sufficient to ensure the BOMMP algorithm selects at least one true block index at each iteration until all true block indices are selected in the noisy case.The significance of the results we obtain in this paper lies in the fact that making explicit use of block sparsity of block sparse signals can achieve better recovery performance than ignoring the additional structure in the problem as being in the conventional sense.