Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of Biological Cell Geometry on Reaction and Diffusion Simulation

PAHs are the reactive toxic chemical compounds which are present as environmental pollutants. These reactive compounds not only diffuse through the membranes of the cell but also partition into the membranes. They react with the DNA of the cell giving rise to toxicity and may cause cancer. To understand the cellular behavior of these foreign compounds, a mathematical model including the reaction-diffusion system and partitioning phenomenon has been developed. In order to reduce the complex structure of the cytoplasm due to the presence of many thin membranes, and to make the model less computationally expensive and numerically treatable, homogenization techniques have been used. The resulting complex system of PDEs generated from the model is implemented in Comsol Multiphysics. The numerical results obtained from the model show a nice agreement with the in vitro cell experimental results. Then the model was reduced to a system of ODEs, a compartment model (CM). The quantitative analysis of the results of the CM shows that it cannot fully capture the features of metabolic system considered in general. Thus the PDE model affords a more realistic representation. In order to see the influence of cell geometry in drug diffusion, the non-spherical axi-symmetric cell geometry is considered, where we showed that the cellular geometry plays an important role in diffusion through the membranes. For further reduction of complexity of the model, another simplified model was developed. In the simplified model, we used PDEs for the extracellular domain, cytoplasm and nucleus, whereas the plasma and nuclear membranes were taken away, and replaced by the membrane flux, using Fick's Law. We further extended the framework of our previously developed model by benchmarking against the results from four different cell lines. Global optimization techniques are used for the parameters describing the diffusion and reaction to fit the measured data. Numerical results were in good agreement with the in vitro results. For the further development of the model, the process of surface bound reactions were added, thus developing a new cell model. The effective equations were derived using iterative homogenization for this model. The numerical results of some of the species were qualitatively verified against the in vitro results found in literature.
Natural Killer Cell-Dependent Anti-Fibrotic Pathway in Liver Injury via Toll-Like Receptor-9

The toll-like receptor-9 (TLR9) agonist cytosine phosphate guanine (CpG), activates hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) and mediates fibrosis. We investigated the TLR9 effects on lymphocyte/HSCs interactions. Liver fibrosis was induced in wild-type (WT) mice by intra-peritoneal carbon-tetrachloride (CCl4) induction for 6 weeks. Fibrotic groups were intravenously treated by a vehicle versus CpG along last 2 weeks. Compared to vehicle-treated fibrotic WT, the in-vivo CpG-treatment significantly attenuated hepatic fibrosis and inflammation, associated with decreased CD8 and increased NK liver cells. In-vitro, co-cultures with vehicle-treated fibrotic NK cells increased HSCs proliferation (P<0.001) while their CpG-treated counterparts achieved a significant decrease. To investigate the role of lymphocytes, TLR9-/- mice induced-hepatic fibrosis were used. Although TLR9-/- mice manifested lower fibrotic profile as compared to their wild-type (WT) counterparts, senescence (SA-β-Gal activity) in the liver and ALT serum levels were significantly greater. In an adoptive transfer model; irradiated WT and TLR9-/- recipients were reconstituted with naïve WT or TLR9-/- lymphocytes. The adoptive transfer of TLR9-/- versus WT lymphocytes led to increased fibrosis of WT recipients. TLR9-/- fibrotic recipients reconstituted with TLR9-/- or WT lymphocytes showed no changes in hepatic fibrosis severity or ALT serum levels. TLR9 activation had inconsistent effects on lymphocytes and HSCs. The net balance of TLR9 activation in WT, displayed significant anti-fibrotic activity, accompanied by CD8 suppression and increased NK-cells, activity and adherence to HSCs. The pro-fibrotic and pro-inflammatory properties of TLR9-/- lymphocytes fail to activate HSCs with an early senescence in TLR9-/- mice.
Unbalanced X chromosome mosaicism in B cells of mice with X-linked immunodeficiency

The immunodeficiency in CBA/N mice is reflected by abnormal development of a subset of B lymphocytes. However, it is not clear how xid, the mutant gene in CBA/N mice, affects the development of this subset. Specifically, it is not known if the xid gene influences the development of the B cell subset directly or indirectly by providing the improper developmental milieu through effects on other cells. We investigated this question using female mice heterozygous for two x chromosomal genes, xid and Pgk-1 (phosphoglycerate kinase-1). Since females are mosaic because of x chromosome inactivation, their lymphocytes can be studied for the choice of the x chromosome, using the two PGK-1 isoenzymes as the cytological marker. We find that B lymphocytes in the spleen prefer the x chromosome without xid while the remaining splenocytes and cells from other tissues do not. This suggests that xid affects B lymphocytes directly and not through their developmental milieu. Furthermore, our data suggest that the precursors for IgG1- and IgG3-producing cells may be both few and different.
Learning to Play Soccer: Lessons on Meta-cognition from Video Game Design

ABSTRACT Over the past decade, there has been ongoing debate relating to the use of suitable pedagogical approaches for designing learning environments to develop skillful games players. There has, however, been little consideration of the “digital age of learning” and the global success of the digital video game industry. Using the educational work of James Gee, this article attempts to rationalize how a “digital video games approach” differs from other learner-centered pedagogies currently employed for teaching and coaching games. Examination of the literature suggests that the learning gains from Teaching Games for Understanding and the Constraints Led Approach ignore the meta-cognitive dimension of learning how to play games—surely an important consideration for long-term development. Accordingly, by drawing on experiences from digital video game design, we examine how games practitioners might utilize such an approach for meta-cognition in coaching or teaching practice to stimulate player learning.
Asymptotic Conditional Singular Value Decomposition for High‐Dimensional Genomic Data

Summary High‐dimensional data, such as those obtained from a gene expression microarray or second generation sequencing experiment, consist of a large number of dependent features measured on a small number of samples. One of the key problems in genomics is the identification and estimation of factors that associate with many features simultaneously. Identifying the number of factors is also important for unsupervised statistical analyses such as hierarchical clustering. A conditional factor model is the most common model for many types of genomic data, ranging from gene expression, to single nucleotide polymorphisms, to methylation. Here we show that under a conditional factor model for genomic data with a fixed sample size, the right singular vectors are asymptotically consistent for the unobserved latent factors as the number of features diverges. We also propose a consistent estimator of the dimension of the underlying conditional factor model for a finite fixed sample size and an infinite number of features based on a scaled eigen‐decomposition. We propose a practical approach for selection of the number of factors in real data sets, and we illustrate the utility of these results for capturing batch and other unmodeled effects in a microarray experiment using the dependence kernel approach of Leek and Storey (2008, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105, 18718–18723) .
Changes in the activity profiles of soccer players over a three-match training micro cycle

The aim of this study was to investigate soccer players’ recovery by analyzing activity profiles of 11 Polish professional league soccer players over a period of three intense matches. Activity profiles were collected to evaluate each player, who played 3 matches, within a period of 7 days. The Amisco Pro® system was used to collect these data. The total distance, 6 different motor activity intensity ranges, frequencies of different activities, recovery time, speed and some technical elements were observed. The average total distance was 11,286 m and players covered longer distances during every consecutive match. The players covered a greater distance in the 2nd half of the first and third matches. There was a systematic decrease in covered distance at the high speed running level, and an initial distance increase and decrease at the sprinting level. The findings of the study provide a detailed description of the physical demands placed on elite soccer players during short recovery periods, which will influence the way teams approach their training and preparation process, according to intense playing schedules.
Neurodegeneration across stages of cognitive decline in Parkinson disease.

OBJECTIVE To assess regions and patterns of brain atrophy in patients with Parkinson disease (PD) with normal cognition (PD-NC), mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI), and dementia-level cognitive deficits (PDD). DESIGN Images were quantified using a region-of-interest approach and voxel-based morphometry analysis. We used a high-dimensional pattern classification approach to delineate brain regions that collectively formed the Spatial Pattern of Abnormalities for Recognition of PDD. SETTING The Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders Center at the University of Pennsylvania. SUBJECTS Eighty-four PD patients (61 PD-NC, 12 PD-MCI, and 11 PDD) and 23 healthy control subjects (HCs) underwent magnetic resonance imaging of the brain. RESULTS The PD-NC patients did not demonstrate significant brain atrophy compared with HCs. Compared with PD-NC patients, PD-MCI patients had hippocampal atrophy (β = -0.37; P = .001), and PDD patients demonstrated hippocampal (β = -0.32; P = .004) and additional medial temporal lobe atrophy (β = -0.36; P = .003). The PD-MCI patients had a different pattern of atrophy compared with PD-NC patients (P = .04) and a similar pattern to that of PDD patients (P = .81), characterized by hippocampal, prefrontal cortex gray and white matter, occipital lobe gray and white matter, and parietal lobe white matter atrophy. In nondemented PD patients, there was a correlation between memory-encoding performance and hippocampal volume. CONCLUSIONS Hippocampal atrophy is a biomarker of initial cognitive decline in PD, including impaired memory encoding and storage, suggesting heterogeneity in the neural substrate of memory impairment. Use of a pattern classification approach may allow identification of diffuse regions of cortical gray and white matter atrophy early in the course of cognitive decline.
Deconstructing climate misinformation to identify reasoning errors

Misinformation can have significant societal consequences. For example, misinformation about climate change has confused the public and stalled support for mitigation policies. When people lack the expertise and skill to evaluate the science behind a claim, they typically rely on heuristics such as substituting judgment about something complex (i.e. climate science) with judgment about something simple (i.e. the character of people who speak about climate science) and are therefore vulnerable to misleading information. Inoculation theory offers one approach to effectively neutralize the influence of misinformation. Typically, inoculations convey resistance by providing people with information that counters misinformation. In contrast, we propose inoculating against misinformation by explaining the fallacious reasoning within misleading denialist claims. We offer a strategy based on critical thinking methods to analyse and detect poor reasoning within denialist claims. This strategy includes detailing argument structure, determining the truth of the premises, and checking for validity, hidden premises, or ambiguous language. Focusing on argument structure also facilitates the identification of reasoning fallacies by locating them in the reasoning process. Because this reason-based form of inoculation is based on general critical thinking methods, it offers the distinct advantage of being accessible to those who lack expertise in climate science. We applied this approach to 42 common denialist claims and find that they all demonstrate fallacious reasoning and fail to refute the scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic global warming. This comprehensive deconstruction and refutation of the most common denialist claims about climate change is designed to act as a resource for communicators and educators who teach climate science and/or critical thinking.
Unveiling Non-Linearities through Time Scale Transformations

In this paper, we show that intra-daily foreign exchange rate returns exhibit even stronger nonlinearities than daily or weekly returns. These nonlinearities result from the intra-daily seasonality and the presence of market participants with different time-horizons. Moreover, we present some evidence that both these nonlinearities and the auto-correlation patterns of the volatility can successfully be accounted for by successive time scale transformations.
Media’s Influence on Self-Image and Romantic Relationship Decision-Making in College-Age Clients: What Mental Health Counselors Should Know

ABSTRACT Research indicates that media-influenced decisions potentially assist in leading college-aged students to make negative interpersonal choices, resulting in poor intimate relationships (Storey and McDonald, 2013). However, many mental health counselors inadvertently ignore the effect of media when they work with college-aged clients. To speak to the need for mental health counselors to become aware of the issue, this study examined the phenomenological perspective of eight students. This qualitative study’s results indicate that media portrayal of successful couples and unrealistic expectations affect intimate relationship decision-making.
Beban Kerja, Implikasinya terhadap Motivasi Kerja dengan Kemampuan Kerja sebagai Variabel Intervening pada Karyawan Bank UMKM

The purpose of this study was to empirically prove effects of workload veriable to job motivation trough workability as intervening variable. This research is conducted in Bank UMKM Surabaya, East Java. The approach used here is descriptive quantitative with explanatory research method. The sample in this research was 66 respondents and the sampling technique used was probability sampling with simple random sampling approach. In this research, the data was analyzed using validity test, reliability test, T-test, F-test, and path analysis to investigate the direct and indirect effect from workload and workability variables toward the work motivation. From the F-test result, it showed positive and significant from workload and workability variables toward the work motivation, while for the T-test there is no significant effect between workload and work motivation, furthermore there is no significant effect between workload and workability, while between the workability and the work motivation, a positive and significant effect is found. In this case, workload has not directly affected significantly toward work motivation, and workload has indirectly affect the work motivation as the intervening variable.
ESC / ESAGuidelines on non-cardiac surgery : cardiovascular assessment andmanagement

Authors/Task Force Members: Steen Dalby Kristensen* (Chairperson) (Denmark), Juhani Knuuti* (Chairperson) (Finland), Antti Saraste (Finland), Stefan Anker (Germany), Hans Erik Bøtker (Denmark), Stefan De Hert (Belgium), Ian Ford (UK), Jose Ramón Gonzalez-Juanatey (Spain), Bulent Gorenek (Turkey), Guy Robert Heyndrickx (Belgium), Andreas Hoeft (Germany), Kurt Huber (Austria), Bernard Iung (France), Keld Per Kjeldsen (Denmark), Dan Longrois (France), Thomas F. Lüscher (Switzerland), Luc Pierard (Belgium), Stuart Pocock (UK), Susanna Price (UK), Marco Roffi (Switzerland), Per Anton Sirnes (Norway), Miguel Sousa-Uva (Portugal), Vasilis Voudris (Greece), Christian Funck-Brentano (France).
Drowsiness assessment using electroencephalogram in driving simulator environment

Traffic accident is one of the most important problems in many countries. One of traffic accident causes is drowsiness. Many studies have been done to solve this problem. One of them is to capture the driver's face expression and estimate the driver's drowsiness. Besides measuring the driver's physiological condition and use it to predict one's drowsiness is also considered. Since drowsiness is strongly related to human brain, by assessing drowsiness using biological signal especially brain signal become the most promising approach to evaluate drowsiness. We proposed a study to investigate the relationship between drowsiness and physiological condition by employing electroencephalogram (EEG) signal and Japanese version of Karolinska sleepiness scale (KSS-J) in driving simulator environment. The result showed alpha band power of EEG signal from occipital lobe in drowsy condition (KSS-J ≥ 7) increased significantly compared with that in alert condition (KSS-J <; 7) with P <; 0.001. Therefore, it is suggested that EEG is effective to find the drowsiness in driving simulator environment.
Dulal Panda Spindle Abnormalities , and Mitotic Arrest Estramustine Is Associated with Tubulin Acetylation , Kinetic Stabilization of Microtubule Dynamics

Estramustine (EM) alone or in combination with other anticancer agents is clinically used for the treatment of hormone refractory prostate cancer. Furthermore, EM has been shown to potently inhibit the proliferation of different types of cancer cells in culture apparently by targeting microtubules; however, the antiproliferative mechanism of action of EM is not clear. In this work, we have shown that EM strongly suppressed the dynamic instability of individual microtubules in MCF-7 cells by reducing the rates of growing and shortening excursions and increasing the time microtubule spent in the pause state. At its half maximal proliferation inhibitory concentration (IC50), EM exerted strong suppressive effects on the dynamics of microtubules in MCF-7 cells without detectably affecting either the organization or the polymerized mass of microtubules. At relatively high concentrations (5 IC50), EM significantly depolymerized microtubules in the cells. Furthermore, the microtubules were found highly acetylated, supporting the conclusion that they were stabilized by the drug. EM treatment induced spindle abnormalities in MCF-7 cells, and a major population of the arrested mitotic cells was multipolar. EM also perturbed the microtubule-kinetochore interaction, thereby activating the spindle assembly checkpoint and leading to apoptotic cell death. [Cancer Res 2008; 68(15):6181–9]
Psychological abuse in Spanish same-sex couples: prevalence and relationship between victims and perpetrators

This study investigates the prevalence of psychological abuse victimization in same-sex couples and the relationship between being a victim and a perpetrator of these negative behaviours. The final sample consisted of 107 adults residing in Spain who identified themselves as lesbian women and gay men, and who had been involved in a conflictive same-sex relationship. Participants were asked how frequently they would label their experience of psychological abuse and three different estimation methods were used. Furthermore, the relationship between being a victim and being a perpetrator of psychological abuse behaviours was calculated through the behavioural estimation method using a questionnaire. The results showed that the prevalence rates varied from 11.3% to 56.6%, depending on the estimation method, and they revealed that there was no correlation between receiving and enacting psychological abuse behaviours. The variation in prevalence rates highlights methodological differences that limit the extent to which comparisons can be made across studies. Three estimation methods are introduced to stimulate future research on this issue.
Exploiting Image-trained CNN Architectures for Unconstrained Video Classification

We conduct an in-depth exploration of different strategies for doing event detection in videos using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained for image classification. We study different ways of performing spatial and temporal pooling, feature normalization, choice of CNN layers as well as choice of classifiers. Making judicious choices along these dimensions led to a very significant increase in performance over more naive approaches that have been used till now. We evaluate our approach on the challenging TRECVID MED'14 dataset with two popular CNN architectures pretrained on ImageNet. On this MED'14 dataset, our methods, based entirely on image-trained CNN features, can outperform several state-of-the-art non-CNN models. Our proposed late fusion of CNN- and motion-based features can further increase the mean average precision (mAP) on MED'14 from 34.95% to 38.74%. The fusion approach achieves the state-of-the-art classification performance on the challenging UCF-101 dataset.
The Recent Evolution of the Dwarf Starburst Galaxy NGC 625 from Hubble Space Telescope Imaging

New Hubble Space Telescope WFPC2 imaging of the dwarf starburst galaxy NGC 625 is presented. These data, which are 80% complete to V and I magnitudes of 26.0 and 25.3, respectively, allow us to study the recent star formation history of NGC 625. Using outlying red giant stars, we derive a tip of the red giant branch (TRGB) distance modulus of 27.95 ± 0.07. This corresponds to a distance of 3.89 ± 0.22 Mpc, placing this system on the far side of the Sculptor Group. NGC 625 has a well-defined radial stellar population gradient, evidenced by a central concentration of young main-sequence stars and a red giant branch (RGB)/asymptotic giant branch (AGB) ratio that increases with galactocentric distance. The prominent AGB is very red, similar to the population found in the Local Group dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 6822. The RGB stars can be detected out far from the central star-forming activity and show an elliptical distribution in agreement with the galaxy's outer H I distribution. Using Hα and Hβ narrowband imaging and previous optical spectroscopy, we identify substantial and varying internal extinction associated with the central active star formation regions. This extinction, which varies from AV = 0.0 to 0.6 mag, hampers efforts to derive a detailed recent star formation history. To better understand the effects of internal extinction on the analysis of young stellar populations, synthetic models are presented that, for the first time, examine and account for this effect. Using the luminous blue helium-burning stars, we construct a simple model of the recent (<100 Myr) star formation in which an elevated but declining star formation rate has been present over this entire period. This is at odds with the presence of spectroscopic Wolf-Rayet (W-R) features in the major star formation region, which implies a short duration (≤5 Myr) for the recent starburst. This suggests that starbursts displaying W-R features are not necessarily all of a short duration. Finally, we speculate on the possible causes of the present burst of star formation in this apparently isolated galaxy and compare it with other nearby, well-studied dwarf starburst systems.