Background Chemokine-like factor 1 (CKLF1) is a chemokine increased significantly in ischemic brain poststroke. It shows chemotaxis effects on various immune cells, but the mechanisms of CKLF1 migrating neutrophils are poorly understood. Recent studies have provided evidence that CC chemokine receptor 5 (CCR5), a receptor of CKLF1, is involved in ischemic stroke. Purposes To investigate the effects of HIF-1α guided AAV in ischemic brain, investigating the outcome of stroke, and examining the involvement of CKLF1/CCR5 axis in recruitment of neutrophils. Results HIF-1α guided AAV knocked down CKLF1 in ischemic area and alleviated brain damage of rats. CKLF1 migrated neutrophils through CCR5, worsening inflammatory responses. Akt/GSK-3β pathway may involve in CKLF1/CCR5 axis guided neutrophils chemotaxis. Conclusions CKLF1/CCR5 axis is involved in neutrophils migration of rats with transient cerebral ischemia. CKLF1/CCR5 axis may be a useful target for stroke therapy.Purpose To describe the development process of an existential support program and to explore participants' evaluation of supportive/unsupportive processes of change. Method A five-day existential support program called "Energy for life" was designed including three main elements 1. existential group counseling, 2. art therapy and 3. interaction with nature and aesthetic surroundings. The program was implemented at two different study sites. Focus group interviews were conducted to evaluate the program. Results 40 subjects were recruited (20 for each one of the two study sites) and 36 completed the study (31 women, five men) in the age range from 31 to 76 years and living with cancer across all stages and types. The program resulted in supportive processes of "existential sharing". The existential group counseling included a sharing process which led to an increased awareness and acceptance of one's existential situation and a preparation for the next steps in one's life. Art therapy offered a respite from the illness or the opportunity to express and share difficult thoughts and feelings connected to the illness experience. The interaction with nature/surroundings induced feelings of calmness and peace, increasing self-worth and spiritual belonging. click here Unsupportive processes of change related to the organization of the existential counseling groups, feelings of discomfort with creative engagement and feelings of distress provoked by a hospital environment. Conclusion Through "Energy for life" existential concerns and distress were shared, contained and transformed. Knowledge has been gained about how an existential support program can be designed that explicitly focuses on alleviating patients' existential distress.Early studies posited a relationship between sleep and the basal ganglia, but this relationship has received little attention recently. It is timely to revisit this relationship, given new insights into the functional anatomy of the basal ganglia and the physiology of sleep, which has been made possible by modern techniques such as chemogenetic and optogenetic mapping of neural circuits in rodents and intracranial recording, functional imaging, and a better understanding of human sleep disorders. We discuss the functional anatomy of the basal ganglia, and review evidence implicating their role in sleep. Whilst these studies are in their infancy, we suggest that the basal ganglia may play an integral role in the sleep-wake cycle, specifically by contributing to a thalamo-cortical-basal ganglia oscillatory network in slow-wave sleep which facilitates neural plasticity, and an active state during REM sleep which enables the enactment of cognitive and emotional networks. A better understanding of sleep mechanisms may pave the way for more effective neuromodulation strategies for sleep and basal ganglia disorders.Humans live among other humans, not in isolation. Therefore, the ability to learn and behave in multi-agent environments is essential for any autonomous system that intends to interact with people. Due to the presence of multiple simultaneous learners in a multi-agent learning environment, the Markov assumption used for single-agent environments is not tenable, necessitating the development of new Policy Learning algorithms. Recent Actor-Critic algorithms proposed for multi-agent environments, such as Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients and Counterfactual Multi-Agent Policy Gradients, find a way to use the same mathematical framework as single agent environments by augmenting the Critic with extra information. However, this extra information can slow down the learning process and afflict the Critic with Curse of Dimensionality. To combat this, we propose a novel Deep Neural Network configuration called Deep Multi-Critic Network. This architecture works by taking a weighted sum over the outputs of multiple critic networks of varying complexity and size. The configuration was tested on data collected from a real-world multi-agent environment. The results illustrate that by using Deep Multi-Critic Network, less data is needed to reach the same level of performance as when not using the configuration. This suggests that as the configuration learns faster from less data, then the Critic may be able to learn Q-values faster, accelerating Actor training as well.The actuator of any physical control systems is constrained by amplitude and energy, which causes the control systems to be inevitably affected by actuator saturation. In this paper, impulsive synchronization of coupled delayed neural networks with actuator saturation is presented. A new controller is designed to introduce actuator saturation term into impulsive controller. Based on sector nonlinearity model approach, impulsive controls with actuator saturation and with partial actuator saturation are studied, respectively, and some effective sufficient conditions are obtained. Numerical simulation is presented to verify the validity of the theoretical analysis results. Finally, the impulsive synchronization is applied to image encryption. The experimental results show that the proposed image encryption system has high security properties.