A comprehensive study of long-term skeletal changes after spinal cord injury in adult rats

Spinal cord injury（SCI）-induced bone loss represents the most severe osteoporosis with no effective treatment.Past animal studies have focused primarily on long bones at the acute stage using adolescent rodents. To mimic chronic SCI in human patients, we performed a comprehensive analysis of long-term structural and mechanical changes in axial and appendicular bones in adult rats after SCI. In this experiment, 4-month-old Fischer 344 male rats received a clinically relevant T13 contusion injury. Sixteen weeks later, sublesional femurs, tibiae,and L4 vertebrae, supralesional humeri, and blood were collected from these rats and additional non-surgery rats for micro-computed tomography（m CT）, micro-finite element, histology, and serum biochemical analyses.At trabecular sites, extreme losses of bone structure and mechanical competence were detected in the metaphysis of sublesional long bones after SCI, while the subchondral part of the same bones showed much milder damage. Marked reductions in bone mass and strength were also observed in sublesional L4 vertebrae but not in supralesional humeri. At cortical sites, SCI induced structural and strength damage in both sub- and supralesional long bones. These changes were accompanied by diminished osteoblast number and activity and increased osteoclast number and activity. Taken together, our study revealed site-specific effects of SCI on bone and demonstrated sustained inhibition of bone formation and elevation of bone resorption at the chronic stage of SCI.

Learning Human-Written Commit Messages to Document Code Changes

Commit messages are important complementary information used in understanding code changes. To address message scarcity, some work is proposed for automatically generating commit messages. However, most of these approaches focus on generating summary of the changed software entities at the superficial level, without considering the intent behind the code changes (e.g., the existing approaches cannot generate such message:"fixing 'null' pointer exception"). Considering developers often describe the intent behind the code change when writing the messages, we propose ChangeDoc, an approach to reuse existing messages in version control systems for automatical commit message generation. Our approach includes syntax, semantic, pre-syntax, and pre-semantic similarities. For a given commit without messages, it is able to discover its most similar past commit from a large commit repository, and recommend its message as the message of the given commit. Our repository contains half a million commits that were collected from SourceForge. We evaluate our approach on the commits from 10 projects. The results show that 21.5% of the recommended messages by ChangeDoc can be directly used without modification, and 62.8% require minor modifications. In order to evaluate the quality of the commit messages recommended by ChangeDoc, we performed two empirical studies involving a total of 40 participants (10 professional developers and 30 students). The results indicate that the recommended messages are very good approximations of the ones written by developers and often include important intent information that is not included in the messages generated by other tools.

不同全球变暖目标下中国气候变化风险区域格局

Climate change will bring huge risks to human society and the economy.Regional climate change risk assessment is an important basic analysis for addressing climate change,which can be expressed as a regional system of comprehensive climate change risk.This study establishes regional systems of climate change risks under the proposed global warming targets.Results of this work are spatial patterns of climate change risks in China,indicated by the degree of climate change and the status of the risk receptors.Therefore,the risks show significant spatial differences.The high-risk regions are mainly distributed in East,South,and central China,while the medium-high risk regions are found in North and southwestern China.Under the 2℃warming target,more than 1/4 of China’s area would be at high and medium-high risk,which is more severe than under the 1.5℃warming target,and would extend to the western and northern regions.This work provides regional risk characteristics of climate change under different global warming targets as a foundation for dealing with climate change.

Bioinformatics Analysis of the Relationship between Lifestyle and Prostate Cancer

In this study,we assessed the relationship between lifestyle and prostate cancer.We selected the Gene Expression Omnibus(GEO)dataset GSE10306 to analyze the expression levels of ataxin10(ATXN10),interferon related developmental regulator 1(IFRD1),formin-binding protein 1 like(FNBP1 L)and THO complex 2(THOC2)in prostate biopsies pre and post intensive nutrition and lifestyle intervention.Following a three-month intervention of nutrition and lifestyle,these genes showed a significant down-regulation.ONCOMINE database analysis showed that the four genes exhibited high expression in prostate cancer tissues compared with normal prostate tissues,which indicated that comprehensive lifestyle changes may modify the progression of prostate cancer mediated by altering the expression of ATXN10,FNBP1 L,THOC2 and IFRD1.Among the four genes,the high expression of IFRD1 was found to indicate a worse overall survival(OS)and disease-free survival(DFS).FNBP1 L and THOC2 were associated with CD8+T cell infiltration of prostate cancer.We also speculated a possible regulatory network for lifestyle to influence miRNA,subsequently influencing the expression of relevant genes.Our findings suggested that these genes may be used as potential target sites for the treatment of prostate cancer.