LPS is a main causative agent of septic shock. There is a lack of effective therapies. In vitro studies have shown that uptake of apoptotic cells actively inhibits the secretion by activated macrophages (M) of proinflammatory mediators such as TNF- and that such uptake increases the antiinflammatory and immunosuppressive cytokine TGF-. We therefore investigated the protective effect of apoptotic cells against LPS-induced endotoxic shock in mice. The current report is the first study to demonstrate that administration of apoptotic cells can protect mice from LPS-induced death, even when apoptotic cells were administered 24 h after LPS challenge. The beneficial effects of administration of apoptotic cells included 1) reduced circulating proinflammatory cytokines, 2) suppression of polymorphonuclear neutrophil infiltration in target organs, and 3) decreased serum LPS levels. LPS can quickly bind to apoptotic cells

We explore how introducing a non-trivial Mordell-Weil group changes the structure of the Coulomb phases of a five-dimensional gauge theory from an M-theory compactified on an elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau threefolds with a I _2 + I _2 collision of singularities. The resulting gauge theory has a semi-simple Lie algebra _2 or _2 . We compute topological invariants relevant for the physics, such as the Euler characteristic, Hodge numbers, and triple intersection numbers. We determine the matter representation geometrically by computing weights via intersection of curves and fibral divisors. We fix the number of charged hypermultiplets transforming in each representations by comparing the triple intersection numbers and the one-loop prepotential. This condition is enough to fix the number of representation when the Mordell-Weil group is _2 but not when it is trivial. The vanishing of the fourth power of the curvature forms in the anomaly polynomial is enough to fix the number of representations. We discuss anomaly cancellations of the six-dimensional uplifted. In particular, the gravitational anomaly is also considered as the Hodge numbers are computed explicitly without counting the degrees of freedom of the Weierstrass equation.

We introduce the cluster exchange groupoid associated to a non-degenerate quiver with potential, as an enhancement of the cluster exchange graph. In the case that arises from an (unpunctured) marked surface, where the exchange graph is modelled on the graph of triangulations of the marked surface, we show that the universal cover of this groupoid can be constructed using the covering graph of triangulations of the surface with extra decorations. This covering graph is a skeleton for a space of suitably framed quadratic differentials on the surface, which in turn models the space of Bridgeland stability conditions for the 3-Calabi–Yau category associated to the marked surface. By showing that the relations in the covering groupoid are homotopically trivial when interpreted as loops in the space of stability conditions, we show that this space is simply connected.

. Motivated by block partitioned problems arising from group sparsity representation and generalized noncooperative potential games, this paper presents a basic decomposition method for a broad class of multiblock nonsmooth optimization problems subject to coupled linear constraints on the variables that may additionally be individually constrained. The objective of such an optimization problem is given by the sum of two nonseparable functions minus a sum of separable, pointwise maxima of finitely many convex differentiable functions. One of the former two nonseparable functions is of the class LC1 , i.e., differentiable with a Lipschitz gradient, while the other summand is multiconvex. The subtraction of the separable, pointwise maxima of convex functions induces a partial difference-of-convex (DC) structure in the overall objective; yet with all three terms together, the objective is nonsmooth and non-DC, but is blockwise directionally differentiable. By taking advantage of the (negative) pointwise maximum structure in the objective, the developed algorithm and its convergence result are aimed at the computation of a blockwise directional stationary solution, which arguably is the sharpest kind of stationary solutions for this class of nonsmooth problems. This aim is accomplished by combining the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with a semilinearized Gauss–Seidel scheme, resulting in a decomposition of the overall problem into subproblems each involving the individual blocks. To arrive at a stationary solution of the desired kind, our algorithm solves multiple convex subprograms at each iteration, one per convex function in each pointwise maximum. In order to lessen the potential computational burden in each iteration, a probabilistic version of the algorithm is presented and its almost sure convergence is established.

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