No abstract

An experiment has been carried out to investigate the effect of lighting on the perception of atmosphere in a living room, using three types of light sources: halogen, fluorescent and LED lamps. In a psychophysical experiment, 29 native Chinese observers assessed eight lighting conditions having different luminances and correlated colour temperatures. For each condition, 71 scales were employed using the categorical judgment method. Factor analysis identified two underlying dimensions: liveliness and cosiness. This agrees with those found by Vogels who used Dutch observers to assess atmosphere perception. Both observer groups also agreed that an increase of luminance would make the room more lively. However, there were also some disagreements such as a higher CCT source would make the room more lively for Chinese observers but less lively for Dutch observers.

Metastasis is responsible for more than 90% of the mortality observed among patients with breast cancer. Human phosphatidylethanolamine-binding protein 4 (hPEBP4) is a novel member of the PEBP family and functions as an anti-apoptotic molecule. Here, we found that the metastatic MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells expressed much higher levels of hPEBP4 than the nonmetastatic MCF-7 breast cancer cells and that the expression levels of hPEBP4 were positively correlated with the metastasis of clinical breast cancer. The hPEBP4 overexpression in the MDA-MB-231 cells significantly promoted cell invasion in vitro and increased the development of lymph node metastasis in vivo. Conversely, the silencing of hPEBP4 suppressed the cell-invasive ability both in vitro and in vivo. Further investigation showed that hPEBP4 promoted the expression or activity of the metastasis-related proteinases MMP (matrix metalloproteinase) 2, MMP9 and MMP13. This hPEBP4-potentiated cell invasion and MMP expression is due to an increase in Akt activation. Knockdown of Akt restored hPEBP4-induced breast tumor metastasis in the hPEBP4-MDA-MB-231 xenograft mouse model. Moreover, we found that hPEBP4 functioned as a scaffolding molecule and enhanced the association of Akt with Src to promote Akt tyrosine phosphorylation, a prerequisite for the full activation of Akt, in a phosphatidylethanolamine-binding domain-dependent manner. Given the present information about human breast cancer, these functional data from cell culture and animal studies suggest that, in human breast cancer hPEBP4 is a novel and clinically relevant metastasis accelerator gene and may be a new diagnostic marker and therapeutic target for breast cancer metastasis.

An experiment was conducted to investigate the white illumination in a room and to assess the appearance of the room and colour patches in it. The room was illuminated by LED lighting providing 25 different illuminant chromaticities distributed around the blackbody locus. The whiteness results confirmed the findings of Rea and Freyssinier that the locus exhibiting a white appearance is located above and below the blackbody locus when the correlated colour temperature is above and below 4000 K, respectively. The appearance of the room and the colour patches were assessed using typical colour appearance attributes including brightness, colourfulness and hue composition. Various visual phenomena have been revealed by the results. The effects of correlated colour temperature and Duv on the appearance attributes were also examined.