LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Oral bisphosphonate-related osteonecrosis of the jaw: the first report in Asia

Bisphosphonate-related osteonecrosis of the jaw (BRONJ) is a serious side effect of bisphosphonate therapy. The incidence of BRONJ is known to be low among patients treated with oral bisphosphonates. We investigated the prevalence, demographics, clinical manifestations, and treatment outcome of 24 patients with oral BRONJ in Asian populations. The long-term safety of oral bisphosphonates is clinically important considering the rare but potentially serious complications such as bisphosphonate-related osteonecrosis of the jaw (BRONJ) versus the effect of reducing and preventing osteoporotic fracture. The incidence of BRONJ is known to be low among patients treated with oral bisphosphonates around the world. However, the prevalence in those taking oral bisphosphonates for osteoporosis in Asian populations is unknown. Moreover, a recent article, showing that the majority of reported patients who received alendronate were Asian American, raised concern about the prevalence of oral BRONJ in Asian populations. The objective of this study was to investigate the estimated prevalence, clinical characteristics, and treatment outcome of oral BRONJ in Asian populations. From October 2005 to December 2008, a retrospective review of medical charts identified 24 patients receiving oral bisphosphonates diagnosed as BRONJ at the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Yonsei University Dental Hospital, Seoul, South Korea. The estimated prevalence of oral BRONJ was 0.05–0.07%. The average oral bisphosphonate treatment duration was 43.1 months (range, 5–120 months). Treatment with oral antibiotics and/or surgery including sequestrectomy or alveolectomy showed relatively favorable results. The prevalence of oral BRONJ in Korea is similar to that reported previously in Western populations. We suggest that recognition of BRONJ and appropriate management pre- and post-dental surgery might reduce the frequency of BRONJ among patients receiving oral bisphosphonates.
Role of nitric oxide in muscle regeneration following eccentric muscle contractions in rat skeletal muscle

We examined the role of nitric oxide (NO) in muscle repair and regeneration following repetitive eccentric contractions (ECC). A standardized exercise protocol was used to create eccentric contraction-induced injury to the left tibialis anterior muscle of 48 male Wistar rats (body wt 250–350 g), using a customized isokinetic test device and a bout of 40 ECCs under electrical stimulation. A nitric oxide synthase inhibitor, N(G)-nitro-l-arginine-methyl ester (l-NAME; 35 mg kg−1 day−1), was included in the diet for half the animals (n = 24) beginning 3 days prior to the ECC and continuing throughout the experiment, whereas the other half (n = 24) received a control diet. ECC/+l-NAME and ECC/−l-NAME were killed after the ECC protocol at 0, 1, 3 and 7 days (n = 6 on each day). An unexercised contralateral limb with and without l-NAME infusion served as a respective control muscle at each time point. Muscle NO content, skeletal muscle damage, leukocyte infiltration, calpain activity, and MyoD and myogenin expression were assessed. NO has both pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory properties, and several possible roles for NO in skeletal muscle damage have been postulated. NO content was greater in the ECC/−l-NAME group at all time points (p < 0.05) compared to ECC/+l-NAME. Additionally, significant differences in NO content were observed on day 0 (p < 0.05), and day 3 (p < 0.05), ECC/+l-NAME versus ECC/−l-NAME. One day following the bout of ECC, and NO levels were increased in the ECC/−l-NAME group. Three days following ECC, there was greater myofiber damage (measured by β-glucuronidase activity) and leukocyte invasion in the ECC/−l-NAME group as compared to the ECC/+l-NAME group. One day after ECC, calpain activity was significantly increased in ECC/−l-NAME compared with control muscles (p < 0.05). On days 3 and 7, Myo-D and myogenin gene expression was increased in both groups; however, the degree of regeneration was less in the ECC/+l-NAME-treated animals. These data suggest that NO dynamics have important implications in the regulation of various factors during skeletal muscle regeneration following damaging eccentric muscle contractions.
Influence of different types of environmental enrichment on the behaviour of finishing pigs in two different housing systems: 3. Hanging toy versus rootable toy of the same material

This study aimed to assess the effects of (1) environmental enrichment with either straw bedding or a plastic toy and (2) the way in which the plastic toy was presented on the behaviour of finishing pigs in two different housing systems. One thousand and twenty four (Large White Landrace) Large White pigs were housed contemporarily in either a straw-based (ST) or fully slatted (FS) building from 35 kg to slaughter at 104 kg. In each building, half of the pens received additional environmental enrichment in the form of a hanging plastic toy. The remaining pens in the ST house were enriched only by the straw bedding. In the FS house, the remaining pens were provided with a rootable toy of the same plastic material presented on the floor of the pen. There was no significant effect of housing system on the level of manipulation of the hanging toy. Within the FS system, the level of manipulation of the hanging toy tended to be higher than that of the plastic toy presented on the floor (P = 0.052). Neither form of additional environmental enrichment provided a comparable level of occupation to that of straw bedding. In the absence of straw, more investigatory behaviours were directed towards both pen-mates (P < 0.001) and pen components (P < 0.001). Further study is required to identify functional forms of environmental enrichment in slatted systems to occupy pigs and prevent them from performing adverse behaviours. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
X-ray structures of the maltose-maltodextrin-binding protein of the thermoacidophilic bacterium Alicyclobacillus acidocaldarius provide insight into acid stability of proteins.

Maltose-binding proteins act as primary receptors in bacterial transport and chemotaxis systems. We report here crystal structures of the thermoacidostable maltose-binding protein from Alicyclobacillus acidocaldarius, and explore its modes of binding to maltose and maltotriose. Further, comparison with the structures of related proteins from Escherichia coli (a mesophile), and two hyperthermophiles (Pyrococcus furiosus and Thermococcus litoralis) allows an investigation of the basis of thermo- and acidostability in this family of proteins.The thermoacidophilic protein has fewer charged residues than the other three structures, which is compensated by an increase in the number of polar residues. Although the content of acidic and basic residues is approximately equal, more basic residues are exposed on its surface whereas most acidic residues are buried in the interior. As a consequence, this protein has a highly positive surface charge. Fewer salt bridges are buried than in the other MBP structures, but the number exposed on its surface does not appear to be unusual. These features appear to be correlated with the acidostability of the A. acidocaldarius protein rather than its thermostability. An analysis of cavities within the proteins shows that the extremophile proteins are more closely packed than the mesophilic one. Proline content is slightly higher in the hyperthermophiles and thermoacidophiles than in mesophiles, and this amino acid is more common at the second position of beta-turns, properties that are also probably related to thermostability. Secondary structural content does not vary greatly in the different structures, and so is not a contributing factor.
Towards Technologically and Competitively Neutral Fiber to the Home (FTTH) Infrastructure

This paper provides a framework for understanding competition and industry structure in the context of Fiber to the Home (FTTH). We present engineering cost models, which indicate that FTTH is a decreasing cost industry, thereby making facilities based competition an unlikely outcome. Non-facilities based competition (or service level competition) in FTTH can happen in data-link layer (or transport) services via unbundled dark fiber (i.e. unbundled network elements) and in higher layer (voice, video and data) services via logical layer unbundling (or open access). FTTH architectures differ in the extent to which they support unbundling and therefore the extent of non-facilities based competition in FTTH depends on the architecture of the shared network over which multiple service providers offer service. Among the four different FTTH architectures considered, the curbside single-wavelength Passive Optical Network architecture (PON) (that has isolated pole-mounted splitters) has the most economical fiber plant but permits unbundling only at the logical layer. Physical plant unbundling is made possible in PONs by establishing Optimal Fiber Aggregation Points (OFAPs) that aggregate multiple splitters (and hence multiple distribution fibers or homes). Unbundling is achieved at the cost of longer distribution loop lengths (vis-à-vis a curbside PON). OFAP architectures further lead to higher utilization of splitter and Optical Line Termination (OLT) ports in markets that have less than 100% penetration, lowers NPV Capital Costs and provides the service provider with a real option to (i) defer investment in OLT ports (ii) deploy multiple data-link layer technologies and (iii) effectively phase in new technologies under both monopoly and competition.
An Ontology-based Approach to Support Text Mining and Information Retrieval in the Biological Domain

This paper describes an ontology-based approach aiming at helping biologists to annotate their documents and at facilitating their information retrieval task. Our approach, based on semantic web technologies, relies on formalised ontologies, semantic annotations of scientific articles and knowledge extraction from texts. We propose a method/system for the generation of ontology-based semantic annotations (MeatAnnot) and a system allowing biologists to draw advanced inferences on these annotations (MeatSearch). This approach was proposed to support biologists working on DNA microarray experiments in the validation and the interpretation of their results, but it can probably be extended to other massive analyses of biological events (as provided by proteomics, metabolomics...).
Study of Trend-Stuffing on Twitter through Text Classification

Twitter has become an important mechanism for users to keep up with friends as well as the latest popular topics, reaching over 20 million unique visitors monthly and generating over 1.2 billion tweets a month. To make popular topics easily accessible, Twitter lists the current most tweeted topics on its homepage as well as on most user pages. This provides a one-click shortcut to tweets related to the most popular or trending topics. Due to the increased visibility of tweets associated with a trending topic, miscreants and spammers have started exploiting them by posting unrelated tweets to such topics – a practice we call trend-stuffing. We study the use of text-classification over 600 trends consisting of 1.3 million tweets and their associated web pages to identify tweets that are closely-related to a trend as well as unrelated tweets. Using Information Gain, we reduce the original set of over 12,000 features for tweets and over 500,000 features for the associated web pages by over 91% and 99%, respectively, showing that any additional features would have a low Information Gain of less than 10 and 0.016 bits, respectively. We compare the use of näıve Bayes, C4.5 decision trees, and Decision Stumps over the individual sets of features. Then, we combine classifier predictions for the tweet text and associated web page text. Although we find that the C4.5 decision tree classifier achieves the highest average F1-measure of 0.79 on the tweet text and 0.9 on the associated web page content, we recommend the use of the näıve Bayes classifier. The näıve Bayes classifier performs slightly worse with an average F1-measure of 0.77 on the tweet text and 0.74 on the associated web page content, but its required training time is significantly smaller.
Realisation of Single-Resistance-Controlled Sinusoidal Oscillator: A new application of the CDTA

Among various modern active building blocks, the recently introduced ’current differencing transconductance amplifier’ (CDTA) is emerging as a very flexible and versatile building block for analog circuit design and has been used earlier for realizing a variety of functions. In this paper, a new application of the CDTA in realising a Single Resistance Controlled Sinusoidal Oscillator has been introduced. The proposed circuit employs only a single CDTA alongwith a bare minimum of only four passive components and yet offers the advantages of (i) independent control of condition of oscillation and frequency of oscillation and (ii) low active and passive sensitivities. The workability of the proposed configuration has been demonstrated by experimental results. Key-Words: Current Differencing Transconductance Amplifier, Sinusoidal oscillator, Current-mode circuits.
Rigid-Foldable Thick Origami

In this paper, a method is proposed for geometrically constructing thick panel structures that follow the kinetic behavior of rigid origami by using tapered or two-ply panels and hinges located at their edges. The proposed method can convert generalized pattern of rigid-foldable origami into thick panels structure with kinetic motion, which leads to novel designs of origami for various engineering purposes including architecture.
Developing early warning systems to predict students' online learning performance

An early warning system can help to identify at-risk students, or predict student learning performance by analyzing learning portfolios recorded in a learning management system (LMS). Although previous studies have shown the applicability of determining learner behaviors from an LMS, most investigated datasets are not assembled from online learning courses or from whole learning activities undertaken on courses that can be analyzed to evaluate students’ academic achievement. Previous studies generally focus on the construction of predictors for learner performance evaluation after a course has ended, and neglect the practical value of an ‘‘early warning’’ system to predict at-risk students while a course is in progress. We collected the complete learning activities of an online undergraduate course and applied data-mining techniques to develop an early warning system. Our results showed that, timedependent variables extracted from LMS are critical factors for online learning. After students have used an LMS for a period of time, our early warning system effectively characterizes their current learning performance. Data-mining techniques are useful in the construction of early warning systems; based on our experimental results, classification and regression tree (CART), supplemented by AdaBoost is the best classifier for the evaluation of learning performance investigated by this study. 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Does gaze perception facilitate overt orienting

Recent studies have demonstrated the facilitation of responses to peripheral targets cued by the direction of the gaze of a face. However, in the absence of data from an eye tracker, it has been unclear to what extent these effects are due to the participants making small saccades in response to the cue that bring them closer to the congruent location of the cued targets. We used an eye tracker to show that while such cue-driven saccades occur, they do not account for the main cueing effects observed. Additionally, by using the same general paradigm as has previously been used with infants, we suggest that different mechanisms underlie eye gaze cueing effects in infants and adults. When attention is directed toward a particular location, the visual processing of targets in that location is facilitated, resulting in faster reaction times to detect or discriminate targets at that location than in locations that are not cued (Posner & Cohen, 1980). Several recent studies with adults have demonstrated that the direction of gaze of a face can cue visuospatial orienting in a viewer (e. Driver and colleagues manipulated the direction of gaze of a computerized face and found that judgements about a peripheral letter discrimination task were faster when the targets were in a location congruent with the direction of gaze. This effect was observed even when participants knew that the target letters were more likely to be presented in a location opposite to that cued by the eye gaze direction. In these and other related experiments, participants' eye movements were not closely monitored, leading Driver and colleagues to state that they could not discriminate between covert and overt orienting explanations of their results, and that in future it would be useful to monitor saccadic movements We thank Bruce Hood for allowing us to use his eye gaze shift stimulus and Gergely Csibra for software. We acknowledge financial support from the MRC (Programme Grant G97 15587) and Birkbeck College.
Cardiorespiratory Fitness Is Associated With Cognitive Performance in Older But Not Younger Adults.

OBJECTIVES
Aging is associated with declines in executive function and episodic memory. Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) has been associated with enhanced executive function in older adults (OA), but the relationship with episodic memory remains unclear. The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between CRF and cognition in young and OA and whether CRF mitigates age-related cognitive decline.


METHODS
Participants completed exercise testing to evaluate CRF (peak VO2) and neuropsychological testing to assess cognition.


RESULTS
In OA, peak VO2 was positively related to executive function, as well as to accuracy on an experimental face-name memory task and visual episodic memory. In young adults (YA), a relationship between peak VO2 and cognition was not evident. High-fit OA performed as well as YA on executive function measures. On episodic memory measures, YA performed better than high-fit OA, who in turn performed better than low-fit OA.


CONCLUSIONS
CRF is positively associated with executive function and episodic memory in OA and attenuates age-related cognitive decline. We provide preliminary support for the age-dependence hypothesis, which posits that cognition and CRF relationships may be most readily observed during lifetime periods of significant neurocognitive development.
Unified constant-frequency integration control of three-phase standard bridge boost rectifiers with power-factor correction

Abstract: In this paper, a three-phase six-switch standard boost rectifier with unity-power-factor-correction is investigated. A general equation is derived that relates input phase voltage and duty ratios of switches in continuous conduction mode. Based on one of solutions and using One-Cycle Control, a Unified Constant-frequency Integration (UCI) controller for powerfactor-correction (PFC) is proposed. For the standard bridge boost rectifier, unity-power-factor and low total-harmonicdistortion (THD) can be realized in all three phases with a simple circuit that is composed of one integrator with reset along with several flips-flops, comparators, and some logic and linear components. It does not require multipliers and threephase voltage sensors, which are used in many other control approaches. In addition, it employs constant switching frequency modulation that is desirable for industrial applications. The proposed control approach is simple and reliable. Theoretical analysis is verified by simulation and experimental results.
Benefits of environmental management system in Polish companies compliant with ISO 14001.

This article describes the benefits of implementing an environmental management system (EMS) conforming to the ISO 14001 standard in Polish companies. Experience shows that implementing an environmental management system in a company can bring a number of benefits, not only for the company itself but also to the whole surrounding environment. Prevention of pollution, which is the idea underlying the concept of an environmental management system, generates mechanisms aimed at minimizing material, resource and energy consumption. It is difficult to identify the benefits which directly arise from environmental management system implementation, as well as the benefits which indirectly spring from maintaining the system. The following article is an attempt to classify the benefits gained according to a number of factors. These factors are related to operational activities and management in an organization. Moreover, some notable benefits that improve the state of natural environment are described in this article. The following article can inform many organizations about the benefits of implementing environmental management system compliant with ISO 14001 standard and convince them to implement such a system. Moreover, thanks to this article some groups of benefits resulting from implementing, maintaining and continually improving an environmental management system will be pinpointed. The survey presented in this article was conducted out in 700 companies that have certified their environmental management systems at ISO 14001 standard.
Virus-induced gene silencing unravels multiple transcription factors involved in floral growth and development in Phalaenopsis orchids

Orchidaceae, one of the largest angiosperm families, has significant commercial value. Isolation of genes involved in orchid floral development and morphogenesis, scent production, and colouration will advance knowledge of orchid flower formation and facilitate breeding new varieties to increase the commercial value. With high-throughput virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS), this study identified five transcription factors involved in various aspects of flower morphogenesis in the orchid Phalaenopsis equestris. These genes are PeMADS1, PeMADS7, PeHB, PebHLH, and PeZIP. Silencing PeMADS1 and PebHLH resulted in reduced flower size together with a pelaloid column containing petal-like epidermal cells and alterations of epidermal cell arrangement in lip lateral lobes, respectively. Silencing PeMADS7, PeHB, and PeZIP alone resulted in abortion of the first three fully developed flower buds of an inflorescence, which indicates the roles of the genes in late flower development. Furthermore, double silencing PeMADS1 and PeMADS6, C- and B-class MADS-box genes, respectively, produced a combinatorial phenotype with two genes cloned in separate vectors. Both PeMADS1 and PeMADS6 are required to ensure the normal development of the lip and column as well as the cuticle formation on the floral epidermal cell surface. Thus, VIGS allows for unravelling the interaction between two classes of MADS transcription factors for dictating orchid floral morphogenesis.