Fermented goat milk by selenium-enriched Lactobacillus paracasei alleviates depressive psychological disturbance.

Depression is a prevalent psychiatric disease with the characteristic of persistently gloomy mood. The treatment of depression with traditional therapeutic medications suffers from low efficacy and adverse side effects due to the extremely unpredictable courses and uneven responses to treatment. The goal of this paper was to investigate the preparation of selenium-enriched fermented goat milk and the potential mechanism of its intervention on the chronic unpredictable stress-induced depression mice model. The results showed that Se-Lactobacillus paracasei 20241 (Se-20241) significantly alleviated depressive behavior, reversed the upregulation of inflammatory factors, and attenuated glucocorticoid resistance. Meanwhile, the results showed a modulatory function on oxidative stress dysfunction in the liver, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. The change in abundance of Ileibacterium, Muribaculaceae, Turicibacter, Dubosiella, and Bifidobacterium was also modified. These results provided the theoretical groundwork for the development of psychoactive probiotic supplements for depressed patients and clarified the probable mechanism of Se-20241 for antidepressant impact on the CUMS model.

A novel method for Estimating Time of Flight of ultrasonic echoes through short-time Fourier transforms.

The accurate estimation of time of flight (TOF) of an ultrasonic signal is essential in ultrasonic non-destructive testing (NDT). A novel method for TOF estimation based on the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the time and frequency components of ultrasonic echoes are represented by a STFT. Then, the STFT spectrum of the echoes is projected onto the time domain. Finally, the TOF is estimated by calculating the location of the maximum modulus of STFT spectrum of the signal. A nonlinear Least Squares (LS) estimation method based on Modified Gauss-Newton (MGN) is employed to improve the estimation accuracy. The TOFs of multi-component echo signals are estimated by successive windowing. Numerical simulations and experiment tests show the performance of the proposed method.