In this study, the pull-in phenomenon of a Nano-actuator is investigated employing a nonlocal Bernoulli-Euler beam model with clamped-clamped conditions. The model accounts for viscous damping, residual stresses, the van der Waals (vdW) force and electrostatic forces with nonlocal effects. The hybrid differential transformation/finite difference method (HDTFDM) is used to analyze the nonlocal effects on a graphene sheet nanobeam, which is electrostatically actuated under the influence of the coupling effect, the von Kármán nonlinear strains and the fringing field effect. The pull-in voltage as calculated by the presented model deviates by no more than 0.29% from previous literature, verifying the validity of the HDTFDM. Furthermore, the nonlocal nonlinear behavior of the electrostatically actuated nanobeam is investigated, and the effects of viscous damping, residual stresses, and length-gap ratio are examined in detail. Overall, the results reveal that small scale effects significantly influence the characteristics of the graphene sheet nanobeam actuator.

The COllaborative project of Development of Anthropometrical measures in Twins (CODATwins) project is a large international collaborative effort to analyze individual-level phenotype data from twins in multiple cohorts from different environments. The main objective is to study factors that modify genetic and environmental variation of height, body mass index (BMI, kg/m2) and size at birth, and additionally to address other research questions such as long-term consequences of birth size. The project started in 2013 and is open to all twin projects in the world having height and weight measures on twins with information on zygosity. Thus far, 54 twin projects from 24 countries have provided individual-level data. The CODATwins database includes 489,981 twin individuals (228,635 complete twin pairs). Since many twin cohorts have collected longitudinal data, there is a total of 1,049,785 height and weight observations. For many cohorts, we also have information on birth weight and length, own smoking behavior and own or parental education. We found that the heritability estimates of height and BMI systematically changed from infancy to old age. Remarkably, only minor differences in the heritability estimates were found across cultural–geographic regions, measurement time and birth cohort for height and BMI. In addition to genetic epidemiological studies, we looked at associations of height and BMI with education, birth weight and smoking status. Within-family analyses examined differences within same-sex and opposite-sex dizygotic twins in birth size and later development. The CODATwins project demonstrates the feasibility and value of international collaboration to address gene-by-exposure interactions that require large sample sizes and address the effects of different exposures across time, geographical regions and socioeconomic status.

I argue that experiences can have microphenomenal structures, where the macrophenomenal properties we introspect are realized by non-introspectible microphenomenal properties. After explaining what it means to ascribe a microstructure to experience, I defend the thesis against its principal philosophical challenge, discuss how the thesis interacts with other philosophical issues about experience, and consider our prospects for investigating the microphenomenal realm.

Norovirus, a major cause of gastroenteritis in people of all ages worldwide, was first reported in South Korea in 1999. The most common causal agents of pediatric acute gastroenteritis are norovirus and rotavirus. While vaccination has reduced the pediatric rotavirus infection rate, norovirus vaccines have not been developed. Therefore, prediction and prevention of norovirus are very important. Norovirus is divided into genogroups GI–GVII, with GII.4 being the most prevalent. However, in 2012–2013, GII.17 showed a higher incidence than GII.4 and a novel variant, GII.P17-GII.17, appeared. In this study, 204 stool samples collected in 2013–2014 were screened by reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction; 11 GI (5.39%) and 45 GII (22.06%) noroviruses were identified. GI.4, GI.5, GII.4, GII.6 and GII.17 were detected. The whole genomes of the three norovirus GII.17 were sequenced. The whole genome of GII.17 consists of three open reading frames of 5109, 1623 and 780 bp. Compared with 20 GII.17 strains isolated in other countries, we observed numerous changes in the protruding P2 domain of VP1 in the Korean GII.17 viruses. Our study provided genome information that might aid in epidemic prevention, epidemiology studies and vaccine development.

The persistent coverage control problem is formulated based on cell discretisation of two-dimensional mission space and time-increasing cell ages. A new performance function is defined to represent the coverage level of the mission space, and time behaviour is evaluated by the probabilistic method based on the detection model of agents. For comparison, persistent coverage controllers are designed by a target-based approach and a reactive approach. Both controllers are designed in a distributed manner using Voronoi tessellation and Delaunay graph-based local information sharing. Numerical simulation is performed to analyse the evaluated mean age of cells and evaluated coverage level over time for the designed persistent coverage controllers. The differences between the evaluation model and simulation situation are discussed.

Coal mine dust is produced from complex materials which consist of organic sedimentary phases, inorganic minerals, and trace elements. The dust varies in its chemical compositions and is capable of causing lung injury when inhaled. The purpose of this study was to perform scanning electron microscopy combined with energy dispersive spectrometry, wavelength dispersive spectrometry and X-ray diffraction analyses of three coal dusts and examine their effects on rat lung alveolar macrophages (AM) in cell culture. The coal dusts were obtained from coal surfaces of anthracite, meager and fat coal mines. AM were harvested by bronchoalveolar lavage from adult male Wistar rats and were cultured in Eagle's medium at 37°C.

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Previous studies suggest that genetic variants in the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) may alter oxytocin dose requirement for labor induction and may increase risk for preterm labor and neurodevelopmental disorders. However, the mechanisms of actions of these variants remain unknown. The goal of this study was to functionally characterize common missense and noncoding variants in OXTR. First, we aimed to determine the effects of missense variants on two major aspects of receptor function: calcium signaling and β-arrestin recruitment. Second, we used allelic expression imbalance assays in an effort to identify regulatory single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in noncoding regions of OXTR that alter OXTR mRNA expression. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: We used the Exome Aggregation Consortium database to identify the 12 most prevalent missense single nucleotide variants in OXTR. To determine the functional effects of these variants, we transfected human embryonic kidney cells (a common model system used to study receptor function) with wild type OXTR, variant OXTR, or empty vector control. We used the calcium-sensitive dye Fluo4 to quantify intracellular calcium flux in response to oxytocin treatment, and used bioluminescence resonance energy transfer assays to measure recruitment of the signaling partner β-arrestin to the receptor. To investigate potential effects of noncoding SNPs on OXTR mRNA expression, we quantified allele-specific expression of OXTR in human uterine tissue obtained from participants at the time of Cesarean section. We used next-generation sequencing (Illumina MiSeq) to count alleles of a reporter SNP in OXTR exon 3. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Of the 12 most prevalent missense single nucleotide variants, four were predicted to be deleterious by PolyPhen variant annotation software. We anticipate that these variants will alter receptor signaling through calcium or β-arrestin pathways. We further observed that a reporter SNP in OXTR exon 3 exhibits significant allelic expression imbalance in a subset of our myometrial tissue samples, indicating that OXTR expression may be regulated by a functional SNP. Our current work focuses on discovering the functional SNPs in OXTR responsible for the pattern of allelic expression imbalance seen in mRNA. In the future, we will seek to explore the effects of these variants on uterine function by using genome editing of uterine smooth muscle cells. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Our results suggest that both missense and noncoding variants may affect OXTR expression and function. Future studies may suggest that OXTR sequencing, genotyping, or expression analysis would be useful to identify individuals likely to respond or fail to respond to safe doses of oxytocin for labor induction. Personalizing approaches for labor induction in this way would increase the safety of oxytocin and potentially reduce maternal morbidity and mortality.