Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Extract from Shrimp Processing By-Products Protects SH-SY5Y Cells from Neurotoxicity Induced by Aβ25–35

Increased evidence suggests that marine unsaturated fatty acids (FAs) can protect neurons from amyloid-β (Aβ)-induced neurodegeneration. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and gas chromatography (GC) assays showed that the acetone extract 4-2A obtained from shrimp Pandalus borealis industry processing wastes contained 67.19% monounsaturated FAs and 16.84% polyunsaturated FAs. The present study evaluated the anti-oxidative and anti-inflammatory effects of 4-2A in Aβ25–35-insulted differentiated SH-SY5Y cells. Cell viability and cytotoxicity were measured by using 3-(4,5-Dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) assays. Quantitative PCR and Western blotting were used to study the expression of neurotrophins, pro-inflammatory cytokines and apoptosis-related genes. Administration of 20 μM Aβ25–35 significantly reduced SH-SY5Y cell viability, the expression of nerve growth factor (NGF) and its tyrosine kinase TrkA receptor, as well as the level of glutathione, while increased reactive oxygen species (ROS), nitric oxide, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and its TrkB receptor. Aβ25–35 also increased the Bax/Bcl-2 ratio and Caspase-3 expression. Treatment with 4-2A significantly attenuated the Aβ25–35-induced changes in cell viability, ROS, GSH, NGF, TrkA, TNF-α, the Bax/Bcl-2 ratio and Caspase-3, except for nitric oxide, BDNF and TrKB. In conclusion, 4-2A effectively protected SH-SY5Y cells against Aβ-induced neuronal apoptosis/death by suppressing inflammation and oxidative stress and up-regulating NGF and TrKA expression.
High-precision U–Pb ages in the early Tithonian to early Berriasian and implications for the numerical age of the Jurassic–Cretaceous boundary

Abstract. The numerical age of the Jurassic–Cretaceous boundary has been controversial and difficult to determine. In this study, we present high-precision U–Pb geochronological data around the Jurassic–Cretaceous boundary in two distinct sections from different sedimentary basins: the Las Loicas, Neuquén Basin, Argentina, and the Mazatepec, Sierra Madre Oriental, Mexico. These two sections contain primary and secondary fossiliferous markers for the boundary as well as interbedded volcanic ash horizons, allowing researchers to obtain new radioisotopic dates in the late Tithonian and early Berriasian. We also present the first age determinations in the early Tithonian and tentatively propose a minimum duration for the stage as a cross-check for our ages in the early Berriasian. Given our radioisotopic ages in the early Tithonian to early Berriasian, we discuss implications for the numerical age of the boundary.
Pedogenesis of a Retisol with fragipan in Karelia in the context of the Holocene landscape
evolution

Fragipan is a compacted but non-cemented subsurface horizon, considered as a pedogenic horizon, but the mechanism of its formation is not well understood. The main hydro-consolidation hypothesis involves a collapse of soil structure when it is loaded and wet, resulting a reorganisation of pore space. Soils with fragipan never have been marked in Russian soil maps. In the South Karelia, located in Eastern Fennoscandia (34.50921 E and 61.33186 N, 110 m asl) we studied a soil profile of Albic Fragic Retisol (Cutanic), developed in the glacial till of Last Glaciation with flat subhorizontal topography under an aspen-spruce forest. The aim of this study was to demonstrate how the fragic horizon was formed in the Retisol located in South Karelia. Observations were made in each soil horizon using micromorphological method, particle size analysis and the study of mineralogical composition of clay fraction by X-ray diffraction. The analysis of the morphological description combined with the laboratory data have led us to the conclusion that the consolidation of the fragipan occurred after the textural differentiation of the profile, following the Atlantic Optimum, and does not depend on the presence of swelling clay minerals. The well-developed argic horizon was probably formed around 6000 years ago, under climatic conditions more favourable for clay illuviation than in present time. Fragipan is supposed to be developed during the Sub-Boreal cooling.
Disentangling the Effects of Risk Factors and Clinical Care on Subnational Variation in Early Neonatal Mortality in the United States

Objective Between 1990 and 2010, the U.S ranking in neonatal mortality slipped from 29th to 45th among countries globally. Substantial subnational variation in newborn mortality also exists. Our objective is to measure the extent to which trends and subnational variation in early neonatal mortality reflect differences in the prevalence of risk factors (gestational age and birth weight) compared to differences in clinical care. Methods Observational study using linked birth and death data for all births in the United States between 1996 and 2006. We examined health service area (HSA) level variation in the expected early neonatal mortality rate, based on gestational age (GA) and birth-weight (BW), and GA-BW adjusted mortality as a proxy for clinical care. We analyzed the relationship between selected health system indicators and GA-BW-adjusted mortality. Results The early neonatal death (ENND) rate declined 12% between 1996 and 2006 (2.39 to 2.10 per 1000 live births). This occurred despite increases in risk factor prevalence. There was significant HSA-level variation in the expected ENND rate (Rate Ratio: 0.73–1.47) and the GA-BW adjusted rate (Rate ratio: 0.63–1.68). Accounting for preterm volume (defined as <34 weeks), the number of neonatologist and NICU beds, 25.2% and 58.7% of the HSA-level variance in outcomes was explained among all births and very low birth weight babies, respectively. Conclusion Improvements in mortality could be realized through the expansion or reallocation of clinical neonatal resources, particularly in HSAs with a high volume of preterm births; however, prevention of preterm births and low-birth weight babies has a greater potential to improve newborn survival in the United States.
Management and Outcomes of Male Breast Cancer in Zaria, Nigeria

Male breast cancer is an uncommon disease accounting for only 1% of all breast cancers. We present the evaluation, treatment and outcome of male patients seen with breast cancer in our institution. Male patients that had histological diagnosis of breast cancer from 2001 to 2010 were retrospectively evaluated. After evaluation patients were treated with modified radical mastectomy. Combination chemotherapy was given to patients with positive axillary lymph nodes. Radiotherapy and hormonal therapy were also employed. There were 57 male patients with breast cancer which accounted for 9% of all breast cancers seen during the study period. Their mean age was 59 ± 2.3 years. The mean tumor diameter was 13 ± 2.5 cm. Fifty three (93%) patients presented with advanced disease including 15 with distant metastasis. Four patients with stage II disease were treated with modified radical mastectomy, chemotherapy and tamoxifen. Of the 30 patients with sage III disease that had modified radical mastectomy, complete axillary clearance and tumor free margins were achieved in 25. Overall 21 (36.8%) patients were tumor free at one year. Overall 5-year survival was 22.8%. In conclusion, male patients with breast cancer present with advanced disease which is associated with poor outcome of treatment.
Effects of various analgesics on the level of prostaglandin E2 during orthodontic tooth movement.

AIM The aim of this double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical study was to evaluate the analgesic effects of preoperative/postoperative ibuprofen and acetaminophen use after bonding and to find a relation between the pain level and the amount of prostaglandin released. MATERIALS AND METHODS Forty-eight patients were included and randomly divided to three equal groups that received either ibuprofen, acetaminophen or placebo for pain relief. The pain levels were measured before bonding, after bonding, at first, second, third, and seventh days on a 100 mm visual analogue scale (VAS) and gingival crevicular fluid (GCF) samples were collected at the same time intervals to measure the amount of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) released. PGE2 levels were determined with ELISA test. The results were evaluated with Wilcoxon and Kruskal–Wallis tests with Bonferroni correction. RESULTS Acetaminophen and placebo groups showed similar pain levels during the first 2 days, whereas ibuprofen group showed lower pain levels during the first day after bonding. PGE2 levels did not show statistically significant difference in time within the analgesic groups. No significant relation between the pain perceived and PGE2 released was found. LIMITATIONS The biggest limitation of this study is the subjective nature of pain and its method of evaluation. CONCLUSIONS The perception of pain by patients taking ibuprofen and acetaminophen at pre/post appliance placement was not different from patients taking placebo. No time-related differences in PGE2 level were found between the groups and no significant correlation was found between the perception of pain and PGE2 levels.
How accurate are assays for 25-hydroxyvitamin D? Data from the international vitamin D external quality assessment scheme.

A recent report highlighted the interlaboratory variability in serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25OHD) results (1). Concerns have also been raised about the apparent inability of some 25OHD assays to reliably measure 25-hydroxyvitamin D2 (25OHD2) (2)(3)(4). The accurate measurement of this metabolite is essential for the monitoring of vitamin-D-deficient patients receiving ergocalciferol, which is the only supplement used in the United States (5) and widely used elsewhere. The international Vitamin D Quality Assessment Scheme (DEQAS) has been monitoring the performance of 25OHD assays since 1989 and now has >100 registered participants in 18 countries. In essence, DEQAS is an ongoing, multicenter trial of the methods used by its participants and provides a unique opportunity to assess the accuracy and specificity of 25OHD methods as well as the analytical performance of a large number of their users. The organization of DEQAS has been described elsewhere (6), and details are available on the DEQAS website (www.deqas.org). In brief, five samples of normal human sera are sent out at 3-month intervals. Participants are asked to measure the total 25OHD concentration in each and return their results within 6 weeks. After statistical analysis of results (7), participants receive a report giving an All-Laboratory Trimmed Mean (ALTM) and Standard Deviation (SD) for each sample. A small study conducted in 1997 (8) showed that the ALTM was a good surrogate for the “true” (target) value produced by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. The accuracy of each result is defined by its percentage bias from the ALTM. Results for each sample are also grouped by method, and a method mean (MM) is produced. The overall accuracy of each method can be assessed from the percentage bias of the method mean from the ALTM: {[(MM − ALTM)/ALTM] × 100}. The …
Title: “Human Hierarchy Formation and Its Health Implications” Topic Area: Evolutionary Anthropology- Status and Health Keywords: Status, Hierarchy, Coalitions, Health, and Humans

Stress in an important determinant of socially mediated causes of poor health. Stress can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, lower immune function, and impair other physiological functions. We review the literature on stress and physiology in primates and other animals in order to extract from it important insights into human health patterns. From this literature, we learn that both dominant and subordinate social status can have negative health consequences, but that low status can have more detrimental, long-term effects on health. Dominant individuals may trade-off between short-term health consequences and the long-term benefits of high status, whereas low status individuals incur high, chronic, and long lasting health costs. Furthermore, human hierarchy formation is hypothesized to be highly dependent on coalitional membership. We build on these findings with a review of some of the human literature on mental health and self-efficacy. Findings suggest that the types and the number of relationships that individuals establish and maintain during their lifetime also influence health. A lack of social support can lead to the perception of lack of control, which, in turn, tends to increase emotional distress, depression, and anxiety. Finally we discuss a few studies suggesting that an individual's cultural background mediates the relationship between social status, social relationships, and health outcomes. We conclude that future research on sociality and human health should focus on multivariate relationships between specific aspects of social hierarchies and alliances, cultural beliefs and values, the stress response, and human health in turn.
State-of-the-art in heterogeneous computing

Node level heterogeneous architectures have become attractive during the last decade for several reasons: compared to traditional symmetric CPUs, they offer high peak performance and are energy and/or cost efficient. With the increase of fine-grained parallelism in high-performance computing, as well as the introduction of parallelism in workstations, there is an acute need for a good overview and understanding of these architectures. We give an overview of the state-of-the-art in heterogeneous computing, focusing on three commonly found architectures: the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, graphics processing units (GPUs), and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). We present a review of hardware, available software tools, and an overview of state-of-the-art techniques and algorithms. Furthermore, we present a qualitative and quantitative comparison of the architectures, and give our view on the future of heterogeneous computing.
IL-1β Processing in Host Defense: Beyond the Inflammasomes

Stimulation and release of proinflammatory cytokines is an essential step for the activation of an effective innate host defense, and subsequently for the modulation of adaptive immune responses. Interleukin-1β (IL-1β) and IL-18 are important proinflammatory cytokines that on the one hand activate monocytes, macropages, and neutrophils, and on the other hand induce Th1 and Th17 adaptive cellular responses. They are secreted as inactive precursors, and the processing of pro-IL-1β and pro-IL-18 depends on cleavage by proteases. One of the most important of these enzymes is caspase-1, which in turn is activated by several protein platforms called the inflammasomes. Inflammasome activation differs in various cell types, and knock-out mice defective in either caspase-1 or inflammasome components have an increased susceptibility to several types of infections. However, in other infections and in models of sterile inflammation, caspase-1 seems to be less important, and alternative mechanisms such as neutrophil-derived serine proteases or proteases released from microbial pathogens can process and activate IL-1β. In conclusion, IL-1β/IL-18 processing during infection is a complex process in which the inflammasomes are only one of several activation mechanisms.
Randomized sub-vectors hashing for high-dimensional image feature matching

High-dimensional image feature matching is an important part of many image matching based problems in computer vision which are solved by local invariant features. In this paper, we propose a new indexing/searching method based on Randomized Sub-Vectors Hashing (called RSVH) for high-dimensional image feature matching. The essential of the proposed idea is that the feature vectors are considered similar (measured by Euclidean distance) when the L2 norms of their corresponding randomized sub-vectors are approximately same respectively. Experimental results have demonstrated that our algorithm can perform much better than the famous BBF (Best-Bin-First) and LSH (Locality Sensitive Hashing) algorithms in extensive image matching and image retrieval applications.
Pesticides and Childhood Cancer: An Update of Zahm and Ward's 1998 Review

Children are exposed to pesticides through a number of sources, including residential and agricultural applications. Parental occupational exposure to pesticides is also a concern because exposures occurring during pregnancy and carry-home residues also contribute to children's cumulative burden. A number of epidemiological studies consistently reported increased risks between pesticide exposures and childhood leukemia, brain cancer, neuroblastoma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Wilms' tumor, and Ewing's sarcoma. An extensive review of these studies was published in 1998 (Zahm & Ward, 1998). Fifteen case-control studies, 4 cohort studies, and 2 ecological studies have been published since this review, and 15 of these 21 studies reported statistically significant increased risks between either childhood pesticide exposure or parental occupational exposure and childhood cancer. Therefore, one can confidently state that there is at least some association between pesticide exposure and childhood cancer. However, an unambiguous mechanistic cause-and-effect relationship between pesticide exposure and childhood cancer was not demonstrated in these studies, and modifying factors such as genetic predisposition, rarely considered in the reviewed studies, likely play an important role. While the time window of exposure may be a crucial determinant for biological effects associated with pesticide exposure on children, studies have not contributed definitive information on the most vulnerable period. Accurate exposure assessment remains a challenge; future epidemiological studies need to assess gene–environment interactions and use improved exposure measures, including separate parental interviews, specific pesticide exposure questions, and semiquantitative exposure measures that can be used to confirm information obtained through questionnaires.
The impact of smoking on gender differences in life expectancy: more heterogeneous than often stated

Background: Throughout industrialized countries, tobacco consumption is seen as the predominant driver of both the trend and the extent of gender differences in life expectancy. However, several factors raise doubts to this generalization. We hypothesize that the impact of smoking on the gender gap is context-specific and differs between populations. Methods: We decompose the gender differences in life expectancy into fractions caused by smoking and other non-biological factors for 53 industrialized countries and the period 1955–2009 to assess the significance of smoking among the causes that can be influenced by direct or indirect interference. Results: The trend of the gender gap can indeed be attributed to smoking in most populations of the western world. However, with regard to the overall extent of male excess mortality, smoking is the main driver only in the minority of the studied populations. While the impact of smoking to gender differences in life expectancy declines in all populations, the contribution of other non-biological factors is in most cases higher at the end than at the beginning of the observation period. Conclusions: Over-generalized statements suggesting that smoking is the main driver of the gender gap in all populations can be misleading. The results of this study demonstrate that—regardless of the prevailing effect of smoking—many populations have still remarkable potentials to further narrow their gender gaps in life expectancy. Although measures to further reduce the prevalence of tobacco consumption must be continued, more attention should be directed to the growing importance of other non-biological factors.
[A clinical report on hydrophilic acrylic foldable lens implantation].

OBJECTIVE To investigate the therapeutic effects of hydrophilic acrylic foldable lens implantation. METHODS This prospective randomized placebo-controlled study comprised 214 eyes of 190 patients after phacoemulsification. The hydrophilic acrylic foldable lens was implanted in group 1 (114 eyes), and the PMMA intraocular lens (IOL) implanted in the control group 2 (100 eyes). Within the 3-6 month follow-up period, the changes of visual acuity, corneal astigmatism and endothelial cells, the location of IOL and the degree of posterior capsular opaqueness postoperatively between the two groups were compared. RESULTS The visual acuity of group 1 was significantly better than that of group 2 within 3 days postoperatively (P < 0.05), but there was no statistically significant difference after 3 months. The surgically induced astigmatism, incidents of posterior capsular opaqueness and subluxation of IOL of group 1 were significantly lower than that of group 2 after 3 months postoperatively (P < 0.05). The comparison of the endothelial cell loss ratio between the two groups was not significantly different (P > 0.05). CONCLUSION The hydrophilic acrylic foldable IOL is easy to handle during implantation, highly biocompatible in the eyes, with less postoperative inflammatory reactions and shorter recovery period, and may provide satisfactory therapeutic effects.
Blockade of endogenous IL-18 ameliorates TNBS-induced colitis by decreasing local TNF-alpha production in mice.

BACKGROUND & AIMS Interleukin (IL) 18 has proinflammatory effects. IL-18 plays a pivotal role in Th1 responses, but its proinflammatory activities extend beyond Th1 cells, including macrophages and production of tumor necrosis factor (TNF) alpha and IL-1beta. IL-18 is up-regulated in colonic specimens of patients with Crohn's disease. The goal of this study was to evaluate the role of IL-18. METHODS Activity of IL-18 was neutralized using recombinant human IL-18 binding protein isoform a (rhIL-18BPa) in trinitrobenzene sulfonic acid (TNBS)-induced colitis. RESULTS Mice treated daily with rhIL-18BPa (8 mg/kg) had significant reductions in clinical score, body weight loss, and colon weight increase compared with saline-treated mice. Histologic analysis showed that rhIL-18BPa-treated mice developed only mild colitis without signs of ulceration, with a mean total score of 9.8 +/- 1.3 points compared with 15.9 +/- 1.1 points observed in saline-treated mice with colitis. Analysis of cytokine levels in colon homogenates showed a significant decrease in TNF-alpha, IL-6, and IL-1beta after rhIL-18BPa treatment but no effect on interferon gamma. The therapeutic potential of rhIL-18BPa treatment was confirmed in TNBS mice that were treated only on days 8 and 9 after the start of the experiment. In these mice, significant reductions in total colitis score and colon weight were also observed. CONCLUSIONS These findings show that inhibition of rhIL-18BPa bioactivity, via rhIL-18BPa, may be beneficial for the treatment of IBD.