Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Fuzzy Vault Scheme

We describe a simple and novel cryptographic construction that we refer to as a fuzzy vault. A player Alice may place a secret value κ in a fuzzy vault and “lock” it using a set A of elements from some public universe U. If Bob tries to “unlock” the vault using a set B of similar length, he obtains κ only if B is close to A, i.e., only if A and B overlap substantially. In constrast to previous constructions of this flavor, ours possesses the useful feature of order invariance, meaning that the ordering of A and B is immaterial to the functioning of the vault. As we show, our scheme enjoys provable security against a computationally unbounded attacker. Fuzzy vaults have potential application to the problem of protecting data in a number of real-world, error-prone environments. These include systems in which personal information serves to authenticate users for, e.g., the purposes of password recovery, and also to biometric authentication systems, in which readings are inherently noisy as a result of the refractory nature of image capture and processing.
Long‐Acting Coronary Vasodilator Drugs: Metamine, Paveril, Nitroglyn and Peritrate

Recognition of the value of glyceryl trinitrate (nitroglycerine) in the treatment and prevention of anginal attacks has confirmed the belief that coronary blood flow may be influenced favorably by drug therapy and has led to a search for vasodilators capable of more prolonged action. The most popular of the newer agents which are alleged to have this desirable effect are Metamine, Paveril, Nitroglyn and Peritrate. In order to evaluate these drugs, the modifying action of each agent on the electrocardiographic response to standard exercise (Master two-step test) was recorded and compared in 21 carefully selected patients with coronary disease. Analysis of the results obtained with varying dosage administered from one to six hours prior to exercise disclosed that Peritrate was vastly superior to the other three drugs and that it alone was worthy of the designation "long-acting coronary vasodilator. "
Dynamic rheological behavior and morphology of polylactide/poly(butylenes adipate‐co‐terephthalate) blends with various composition ratios

Polylactide (PLA)/poly(butylenes adipate-co-terephthalate) (PBAT) blends with various composition ratios were prepared via melt compounding using a twin-screw extruder. The dynamic rheological behavior and morphology of the blends were studied using a parallel-plate rheometer and a scanning electron microscope (SEM), respectively. The results showed that the shear-thinning tendency of blends became stronger with increasing PBAT content. Moreover, at low frequencies, the complex viscosity, storage modulus and loss modulus for blends with 20 wt% PBAT content were higher than that of other samples when PBAT content was less than 50 wt%. Based on SEM images, three distinct morphologies—spherical droplet, elongated fibrous structure, and co-continuous structure—were observed as the content of PBAT increased from 5 to 50 wt%. When the PBAT content reached 70 wt% and above, the morphology became droplets again, with PLA droplets dispersing within the PBAT matrix. In addition, the PLA droplets in the PBAT/PLA (80/20 w/w) blend were smaller and more regular than the PBAT droplets in the PLA/PBAT (80/20 w/w) blend, despite the same composition ratio. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Adv Polym Techn 30: 150–157, 2011; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/adv.20212
MicroRNA Profiling of B Cell Subsets from Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Patients Reveals Promising Novel Biomarkers

MicroRNAs control the differentiation and function of B cells, which are considered key elements in the pathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). However, a common micro(mi)RNA signature has not emerged since published data includes patients of variable ethnic background, type of disease, and organ involvement, as well as heterogeneous cell populations. Here, we aimed at identifying a miRNA signature of purified B cells from renal and non-renal severe SLE patients of Latin American background, a population known to express severe disease. Genome-wide miRNA expression analyses were performed on naive and memory B cells and revealed two categories of miRNA signatures. The first signature represents B cell subset-specific miRNAs deregulated in SLE: 11 and six miRNAs discriminating naive and memory B cells of SLE patients from healthy controls (HC), respectively. Whether the miRNA was up or down-regulated in memory B cells as compared with naive B cells in HC, this difference was abolished in SLE patients, and vice versa. The second signature identifies six miRNAs associated with specific pathologic features affecting renal outcome, providing a further understanding for SLE pathogenesis. Overall, the present work provided promising biomarkers in molecular diagnostics for disease severity as well as potential new targets for therapeutic intervention in SLE.
Early Detection of Ovarian Cancer by Molecular Targeted Ultrasound Imaging Together with Serum Markers of Tumor-Associated Nuclear Change and Angiogenesis

Abstract : Overall goal of this study was to examine the feasibility of vascular endothelial growth factor receptor -2 (VEGFR-2)- targeted ultrasound molecular imaging for the detection of spontaneous ovarian cancer (OVCA) at early stage in association with serum anti-nuclear matrix protein (anti-NMP) antibodies (a marker of ovarian malignant transformation) and serum IL-16 levels (a marker of ovarian tumor-associated neoangiogenesis, TAN). This goal was realized by two specific aims. The results of this study showed that VEGFR-2-targeted ultrasound molecular imaging agent bound with its target expressed by ovarian tumors and enhanced the signal intensity of ultrasound imaging. This study also showed that serum prevalence of anti-NMP antibodies and levels of IL-16 increased in association with ovarian malignant transformation and OVCA development. Furthermore, tumor-associated serum IL-16 levels were elevated even before the formation of a solid tumor mass in the ovary. VEGFR-2-targeted molecular ultrasound imaging together with serum anti-NMP antibodies and IL-16 levels, improved early detection of OVCA and detected ovarian tumors when it is limited to a part of the ovary. Thus VEGFR-2-targeted imaging agents showed potential to be a feasible imaging agent for early OVCA detection. Additionally, laying hens offer a feasible preclinical model to develop OVCA-preventive antiangiogenic therapeutics targeting VEGFR-2 expressed by tumor associated microvessels.
Lead Pipe Scale Analysis Using Broad-Beam Argon Ion Milling to Elucidate Drinking Water Corrosion

Abstract Herein, we characterized lead pipe scale removed from a drinking water distribution system using argon ion beam etching and a variety of solids analysis approaches. Specifically, pipe scale cross sections and solids were analyzed using scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray analysis, X-ray diffraction, and acid digestion followed by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry analyses. The pipe scale consisted of at least five layers that contained Pb(II) and Pb(IV) minerals, and magnesium, aluminum, manganese, iron, and silicon solids. The outer layer was enriched with crystalline amorphous manganese and iron, giving it a dark orange to red color. The middle layers consisted of hydrocerussite and plattnerite, and the bottom layer consisted primarily of litharge. Over the litharge layer, hydrocerussite crystals were grown vertically away from the pipe wall, which included formations of plattnerite. Significant amounts of trace contaminant vanadium, likely in the form of vanadinite, and copper accumulated in the scale as well.
Cleaning Associations between Birds and Herbivorous Mammals in Brazil: Structure and Complexity

ABSTRACT. Birds that remove ectoparasites and other food material from their hosts are iconic illustrations of mutualistic—commensalistic cleaning associations. To assess the complex pattern of food resource use embedded in cleaning interactions of an assemblage of birds and their herbivorous mammal hosts in open habitats in Brazil, we used a network approach that characterized their patterns of association. Cleaning interactions showed a distinctly nested pattern, related to the number of interactions of cleaners and hosts and to the range of food types that each host species provided. Hosts that provided a wide range of food types (flies, ticks, tissue and blood, and organic debris) were attended by more species of cleaners and formed the core of the web. On the other hand, core cleaner species did not exploit the full range of available food resources, but used a variety of host species to exploit these resources instead. The structure that we found indicates that cleaners rely on cleaning interactions to obtain food types that would not be available otherwise (e.g., blood-engorged ticks or horseflies, wounded tissue). Additionally, a nested organization for the cleaner bird—mammalian herbivore association means that both generalist and selective species take part in the interactions and that partners of selective species form an ordered subset of the partners of generalist species. The availability of predictable protein-rich food sources for birds provided by cleaning interactions may lead to an evolutionary pathway favoring their increased use by birds that forage opportunistically.
One‐Dimensional p‐Adic Subanalytic Sets

In this paper we extend two theorems from [2] on p‐adic subanalytic sets, where p is a fixed prime number, Qp is the field of p‐adic numbers and Zp is the ring of p‐adic integers. One of these theorems [2, 3.32] says that each subanalytic subset of Zp is semialgebraic. This is extended here as follows.
Quantitative SEU Fault Evaluation for SRAM-Based FPGA Architectures and Synthesis Algorithms

This paper studies the SEU (Single Event Upset) fault for SRAM-based FPGAs. Considering detailed fault behavior on various circuit elements in a post-layout FPGA application, we develop a simulation-based SEU evaluation tool that quantifies fault contribution for each configuration bit. Using this tool and MCNC benchmark circuits, we study the fault characteristics of FPGA circuits and architectures. We show that interconnects not only contribute to the lion share of functional failures, but also have higher failure rate per configuration bit than LUTs. Particularly, multiplexers in local interconnects have the highest failure rate per bit. We find that tuning LUT and cluster sizes helps to reduce the rate (up to 38% in our experiments). In addition, we evaluate two recent fault mitigation algorithms IPD and IPF, which reduce LUT faults by an average of 74% and 15% respectively. But when interconnects are taken into account, the reduction via IPD which considers only LUT faults is merely 6% on chip level. Yet the reduction via IPF which implicitly considers interconnect faults is still around 15%. Therefore, synthesis algorithm should be evaluated with interconnect faults and future algorithms should be developed with consideration of interconnect faults explicitly.
Enhancing text clustering by leveraging Wikipedia semantics

Most traditional text clustering methods are based on "bag of words" (BOW) representation based on frequency statistics in a set of documents. BOW, however, ignores the important information on the semantic relationships between key terms. To overcome this problem, several methods have been proposed to enrich text representation with external resource in the past, such as WordNet. However, many of these approaches suffer from some limitations: 1) WordNet has limited coverage and has a lack of effective word-sense disambiguation ability; 2) Most of the text representation enrichment strategies, which append or replace document terms with their hypernym and synonym, are overly simple. In this paper, to overcome these deficiencies, we first propose a way to build a concept thesaurus based on the semantic relations (synonym, hypernym, and associative relation) extracted from Wikipedia. Then, we develop a unified framework to leverage these semantic relations in order to enhance traditional content similarity measure for text clustering. The experimental results on Reuters and OHSUMED datasets show that with the help of Wikipedia thesaurus, the clustering performance of our method is improved as compared to previous methods. In addition, with the optimized weights for hypernym, synonym, and associative concepts that are tuned with the help of a few labeled data users provided, the clustering performance can be further improved.
Vitamin D Depletion Aggravates Hypertension and Target‐Organ Damage

Background We tested the controversial hypothesis that vitamin D depletion aggravates hypertension and target‐organ damage by influencing renin. Methods and Results Four‐week‐old double‐transgenic rats (dTGR) with excess angiotensin (Ang) II production due to overexpression of the human renin (hREN) and angiotensinogen (hAGT) genes received vitamin D‐depleted (n=18) or standard chow (n=15) for 3 weeks. The depleted group had very low serum 25‐hydroxyvitamin D levels (mean±SEM; 3.8±0.29 versus 40.6±1.19 nmol/L) and had higher mean systolic BP at week 5 (158±3.5 versus 134.6±3.7 mm Hg, P<0.001), week 6 (176.6±3.3 versus 162.3±3.8 mm Hg, P<0.01), and week 7 (171.6±5.1 versus 155.9±4.3 mm Hg, P<0.05). Vitamin D depletion led to increased relative heart weights and increased serum creatinine concentrations. Furthermore, the mRNAs of natriuretic peptides, neutrophil gelatinase‐associated lipocalin, hREN, and rRen were increased by vitamin D depletion. Regulatory T cells in the spleen and in the circulation were not affected. Ang metabolites, including Ang II and the counter‐regulatory breakdown product Ang 1 to 7, were significantly up‐regulated in the vitamin D‐depleted groups, while ACE‐1 and ACE‐2 activities were not affected. Conclusions Short‐term severe vitamin D depletion aggravated hypertension and target‐organ damage in dTGR. Our data suggest that even short‐term severe vitamin D deficiency may directly promote hypertension and impacts on renin‐angiotensin system components that could contribute to target‐organ damage. The findings add to the evidence that vitamin D deficiency could also affect human hypertension.
Opportunities and Challenges of Wireless Sensor Networks in Smart Grid

The collaborative and low-cost nature of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) brings significant advantages over traditional communication technologies used in today's electric power systems. Recently, WSNs have been widely recognized as a promising technology that can enhance various aspects of today's electric power systems, including generation, delivery, and utilization, making them a vital component of the next-generation electric power system, the smart grid. However, harsh and complex electric-power-system environments pose great challenges in the reliability of WSN communications in smart-grid applications. This paper starts with an overview of the application of WSNs for electric power systems along with their opportunities and challenges and opens up future work in many unexploited research areas in diverse smart-grid applications. Then, it presents a comprehensive experimental study on the statistical characterization of the wireless channel in different electric-power-system environments, including a 500-kV substation, an industrial power control room, and an underground network transformer vault. Field tests have been performed on IEEE 802.15. 4-compliant wireless sensor nodes in real-world power delivery and distribution systems to measure background noise, channel characteristics, and attenuation in the 2.4-GHz frequency band. Overall, the empirical measurements and experimental results provide valuable insights about IEEE 802.15. 4-compliant sensor network platforms and guide design decisions and tradeoffs for WSN-based smart-grid applications.
VP 3 , a Structural Protein of Infectious Pancreatic Necrosis Virus , Interacts with RNA-Dependent RNA Polymerase VP 1 and with Double-Stranded RNA

Infectious pancreatic necrosis virus (IPNV) is a bisegmented, double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) virus of the Birnaviridae family that causes widespread disease in salmonids. Its two genomic segments are encapsulated together with the viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, VP1, and the assumed internal protein, VP3, in a single-shell capsid composed of VP2. Major aspects of the molecular biology of IPNV, such as particle assembly and interference with host macromolecules, are as yet poorly understood. To understand the infection process, analysis of viral protein interactions is of crucial importance. In this study, we focus on the interaction properties of VP3, the suggested key organizer of particle assembly in birnaviruses. By applying the yeast two-hybrid system in combination with coimmunoprecipitation, VP3 was proven to bind to VP1 and to self-associate strongly. In addition, VP3 was shown to specifically bind to dsRNA in a sequence-independent manner by in vitro pull-down experiments. The binding between VP3 and VP1 was not dependent on the presence of dsRNA. Deletion analyses mapped the VP3 self-interaction domain within the 101 N-terminal amino acids and the VP1 interaction domain within the 62 C-terminal amino acids of VP3. The C-terminal end was also crucial but not sufficient for the dsRNA binding capacity of VP3. For VP1, the 90 C-terminal amino acids constituted the only dispensable part for maintaining VP3-binding ability. Kinetic analysis revealed the presence of VP1-VP3 complexes prior to the formation of mature virions in IPNV-infected CHSE-214 cells, which indicates a role in promoting the assembly process.
Imagining One’s Own and Someone Else’s Body Actions: Dissociation in Anorexia Nervosa

Background Patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) usually report feeling larger than they really are. This body overestimation appears to be related not only to the patient’s body image but also to an abnormal representation of the body in action. In previous work on a body-scaled anticipation task, anorexic patients judged that they could not pass through a door-like aperture even when it was easily wide enough - suggesting the involvement of the body schema. In the present study, we sought to establish whether this erroneous judgment about action is specifically observed when it concerns one’s own body or whether it is symptomatic of a general impairment in perceptual discrimination. Methods Twenty-five anorexic participants and 25 control participants were presented with a door-like aperture. They had to judge whether or not the aperture was wide enough for them to pass through (i.e. first-person perspective, 1PP) and for another person present in the testing room to pass through (i.e. third-person perspective, 3PP). Results We observed a higher passability ratio (i.e. the critical aperture size to shoulder width ratio) in AN patients for 1PP but not for 3PP. Moreover, the magnitude of the passability ratio was positively correlated not only with the extent of the patient’s body and eating concerns but also with the body weight prior to disease onset. Our results suggest that body overestimation can affect judgments about the capacity for action but only when they concern the patient’s own body. This could be related to impairments of the overall network involved in the emergence of the body schema and in one’s own perspective judgments. Conclusion Overestimation of the body schema might occur because the central nervous system has not updated the new, emaciated body, with maintenance of an incorrect representation based on the patient’s pre-AN body dimensions.
Optimisation of a Hybrid Energy Scavenger with Piezoelectric/Magnetic Coupling for Sensor-Bearing Units

Vibration monitoring based on wireless distributed sensors is currently used in steelmaking plants to early detect structural damage occurring in the rolling mill components. This approach allows overcoming some severe limitations of access to those industrial equipments, but sensors need a local power supply. Vibration energy harvesting based on piezoelectric materials is therefore proposed for this purpose. Nevertheless, very often it happens that dimensions of the energy scavenger are incompatible with the size of the system, thus not allowing a perfect tuning of its resonance upon the frequency of the dynamic excitation. Moreover, sometimes the amplitude of vibration is too low to induce a sufficient amount of energy conversion. Those problems motivated a previous work of the author, about the feasibility of plucking the flexible structure through either a relative motion or rotation of the harvested system and the energy scavenger, respectively. To avoid the drawbacks due to the wear in plucking the material, a contactless electromechanical coupling was proposed. The interaction between two permanent magnets, being one applied to the scavenger tip and the other fixed, was used to excite the vibration and the electromechanical conversion through the piezoelectric layer. The effectiveness of such hybrid system composed by the structure with surface bonded piezoelectric layers and the couple of magnets was investigated and compared to the power requirements of some sensors currently used to measure the dynamic response of the backup roll bearings located at the outer crown of the rolling mill. An optimisation of the whole device to increase the overall performance is proposed by following some approaches assessed in the literature and tested on some specimens of energy scavenger. The optimisation activity was based on a suitable selection of the piezoelectric material aimed at reaching the highest electromechanical coupling with a good mechanical strength and on a suitable shaping of the electrode surface aimed at assuring the largest efficiency in the energy conversion.
Optimization of TMAH etching for MEMS

Tetra-methyl ammonium hydroxide (TMAH) is an anisotropic silicon etchant that is gaining considerable use in silicon sensor micromachining due to its excellent compatibility with CMOS processing, selectivity, anisotropy and relatively low toxicity, as compared to the more used KOH and EDP etchants. In this paper, the influence of temperature and concentration of the TMAH solution together with oxidizer additions is studied in order to optimize the anisotropic silicon etching for MEMS fabrication. In particular this optimized etchant formulation has been employed at ITC-Irst in the development of a basic fabrication process for piezoresistive pressure sensors based on a silicon membrane and four resistors connected in a Weatherstone bridge configuration. The active element of the sensor, i.e. the thin silicon membrane, is formed by etching anisotropically from the backside of the wafer. Both process and etching have to be tuned and matched in order to obtain an optimum fabrication sequence. Some improvements such as higher etch rate and better surface finish have been obtained by the addition of ammonium peroxidsulfate as oxidizing agent under different conditions. This simplifies both the post processing and the tech set-up. The process parameters and the thermo-electro-mechanical characteristics of the pressure sensors were tested and are compared with the analytical and numerical simulations.