Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experimental Pain Models Reveal No Sex Differences in Pentazocine Analgesia in Humans

Background: Accumulating evidence suggests that there are sex differences in analgesic responses to opioid agonists. Several studies using an oral surgery pain model have reported more robust analgesia to κ-agonist–antagonists (e.g., pentazocine, nalbuphine, butorphanol) among women than among men. However, evidence of sex differences in κ-agonist–antagonist effects from studies of experimentally induced pain in humans is lacking. Methods: Therefore, the analgesic effects of intravenous pentazocine (0.5 mg/kg) were determined in healthy women (n = 41) and men (n = 38) using three experimental pain models: heat pain, pressure pain, and ischemic pain. Each pain procedure was conducted before and after double-blind administration of both pentazocine and saline, which occurred on separate days in counterbalanced order. Results: Compared with saline, pentazocine produced significant analgesic responses for all pain stimuli. However, no sex differences in pentazocine analgesia emerged. Effect sizes for the sex differences were computed; the magnitude of effects was small, and an equal number of measures showed greater analgesia in men than in women. Also, analgesic responses were not highly correlated across pain modalities, suggesting that different mechanisms may underlie analgesia for disparate types of pain. Conclusions: These findings indicate significant analgesic responses to pentazocine in both men and women across multiple experimental pain assays, and the absence of sex differences contrasts with previous data from the oral surgery model. The most likely explanation for the discrepancy in results is that of differences in the pain assays. These findings are important because they suggest that sex differences in opioid analgesia may be specific to certain types of pain.
SeededFuzz: Selecting and Generating Seeds for Directed Fuzzing

As an improvement on traditional random fuzzing, directed fuzzing utilizes dynamic taint analysis to locate regions of seed inputs which can influence security-sensitive program points, and focuses on mutating these identified regions to generate error-revealing test cases. The seed inputs are of great importance to directed fuzzing, because they essentially determine the number of security-sensitive program points we can test. In this paper, we present a seed selection method complementing with a seed generation method for directed fuzzing. Using static analysis, dynamic monitoring and symbolic execution, our approach can provide directed fuzzing with seeds that can cover more security-sensitive program points in a cost-effective way. We implemented a prototype called Seeded-Fuzz, and applied it to five real-world applications. Experimental results show that starting directed fuzzing with our carefully selected and generated seeds, Seeded-Fuzz can test more critical program sites and detect more bugs.
Secondary organic aerosol formation from isoprene photooxidation under high‐NOx conditions

The oxidation of isoprene (2‐methyl‐1,3‐butadiene) is known to play a central role in the photochemistry of the troposphere, but is generally not considered to lead to the formation of secondary organic aerosol (SOA), due to the relatively high volatility of known reaction products. However, in the chamber studies described here, we measure SOA production from isoprene photooxidation under high‐NOx conditions, at significantly lower isoprene concentrations than had been observed previously. Mass yields are low (0.9–3.0%), but because of large emissions, isoprene photooxidation may still contribute substantially to global SOA production. Results from photooxidation experiments of compounds structurally similar to isoprene (1,3‐butadiene and 2‐ and 3‐methyl‐1‐butene) suggest that SOA formation from isoprene oxidation proceeds from the further reaction of first‐generation oxidation products (i.e., the oxidative attack of both double bonds). The gas‐phase chemistry of such oxidation products is in general poorly characterized and warrants further study.
Antitumoral and antioxidant effect of essential oils and in vitro antioxidant properties of essential oils and aqueous extracts from Salvia pisidica

The aim of the work was to investigate antitumoral effect of essential oils on cancer cells and their possible protective (antioxidant) effects against hydrogen peroxide-induced cytotoxicity. Also, in vitro antioxidant properties of essential oils and aqueous extracts from wild form and cultivated form of Salvia pisidica were compared.We found out that essential oils from wild form (IC50 128, and 85.17 μg /mL) and cultivated form (IC50 115.00 and 74.83 μg/mL) differed in their antitumoral effects on Hep G2 and H1299 cells respectively. As a very important we consider the finding that both essentials oils significantly reduced the cytotoxicity induced by the strong oxidant in cancer cells. We assume that protective effect of essential oils on cancer cells against H2O2 cytotoxicity can be accompanied by their antioxidant action.Antioxidant properties of essential oils and aqueous extract from wild and cultivated S. pisidica were determined by different test systems. In DPPH assay, the weakest radical scavenging activity was exhibited by the aqueous extract from wild form (66.55 ± 1.15 μg/mL). Similarly inhibition of linoleic acid oxidation of aqueous extract from wild and cultivated form (50.93% and 59.66%) was lower than essential oils. In the case of reducing power assay and hydroxyl radical scavenging activity, a similar activity pattern was observed as given in the first two systems. Essential oils from wild and cultivated form had higher reducing power activity (EC50; 100.99 ± 3.0 and 96.87 ± 3.15 μg/mL) and hydroxyl radical scavenging activity (EC50; 15.99 ± 0.95 and 13.01 ± 1.35 μg/mL) than aqueous extracts.
Building Students’ Developmental Assets to Promote Health and School Success

in the fourth century B.C., the philosopher Menander wrote that health and intellect are the two blessings of life. Today, we understand the compelling connection the ancients could only intuit between healthy bodies and healthy minds. Blue-ribbon groups and commissions such as the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, Congress's Office of Technology Assessment, and the National Education Goals Panel have detailed the connection between health and academic success. No educator would dispute the common-sense notion, backed up by reams of research, that healthy children and youth attend school more, are more interested in their schoolwork, and achieve at higher levels than their less-healthy peers. But what do we as educators focus on most when it comes to students' health? We concentrate on alcohol and other
Black Achievers’ Experiences with Racial Spotlighting and Ignoring in a Predominantly White High School

Background/Context Despite a history of racial oppression and degradation in U.S. schools, African Americans have responded to racism and discrimination in ways that promote educational attainment and school success. Many Black adolescents have been empowered to succeed academically partly because of their awareness of racist practices in education and society. This empowerment to succeed in the face of racism is also seen as resiliency. A growing body of research suggests that despite experiencing racism in schools, many African Americans possess an achievement ethos that demands a commitment to excellence; despite experiencing racism as a stressor, these students develop resilient strategies for resisting racism in the school context. Purpose/Objective/Focus of Study The purpose of this study was to understand the adaptive behaviors that high-achieving Black students employed in a predominantly White high school to maintain school success and a positive racial self-definition. The focus of this article is to examine how these students describe, understand, and respond to experiencing racial microaggressions in classroom, social, and extracurricular domains within their school. Research Design The article includes data from a yearlong qualitative investigation of high-achieving Black students in a predominantly White high school. The author analyzed interview data, participant observations, and field notes and used a grounded theory approach to analyzing the data to arrive at an understanding of how students perceived experiences with racial microaggressions in their school. Findings/Results Findings indicate that students experienced racial microaggressions in the form of sometimes being spotlighted because of their race (i.e., racial spotlighting) and sometimes being ignored because of their race (i.e., racial ignoring). Students managed these experiences by utilizing a variety of resilient strategies that represent varying degrees of resistance. The use of these behavioral strategies demonstrates their resilience not only to racism but also to a school climate in which racism acts as a structural barrier to potentially constrain or impede achievement. These strategies allow students to effectively navigate within and across classroom and nonclassroom domains despite experiencing racial discrimination and to acquire and maintain school success without rejecting their racial identity. Conclusions/Recommendations The article concludes with implications for teacher education and creating culturally inclusive school and classroom environments. The article challenges educators to critically examine the relationships between race, racism, Whiteness, and teaching and learning. Specifically, recommendations are offered for preservice teacher preparation and in-service teacher professional development.
Looking for Trouble: Competition Policy in the U.S. Electricity Industry

In the aftermath of the California energy crisis, there has been a shift in the focus of electricity regulators away from the fostering of a competitive market structure and towards the application of regulations to specific market outcomes. Such a focus stands in marked contrast to the general principles governing competition policies in other industries. This shift is in part influenced by the clear failure of earlier attempts to establish a competitive market structure in California. But was this a failure of the policy, or of the tools that were used to implement it? In this chapter, I describe the tests historically used by regulators as screens for the potential abuse of market power by suppliers. More advanced methods, such as models of oligopoly competition, can potentially provide a much better understanding of the competitive outlook for a market. However, much uncertainty surrounds the development and application of such models. I apply an oligopoly model of the California market to actual market data to test the ability of such models to recreate true market outcomes. I also explore the potential impact of an alternative plan for the divestiture of California's thermal generation units. The results indicate that a more substantial, but still plausible, reduction in supplier concentration would have saved consumers nearly $2 billion during the summer of 2000.
Universal immunization of infants with low doses of a low-cost, plasma-derived hepatitis B vaccine in South Africa.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of universal vaccination against viral hepatitis B in South Africa among 18-month-old rural children. METHODS Children were immunized with a course of low-dose (1.5 microg), plasma-derived hepatitis B vaccine at 6, 10 and 14 weeks of age, and blood samples from the children were tested for three hepatitis B markers: hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg), anti-HBs and anti-HBc. FINDINGS One year after vaccination, a protective anti-HBs antibody titre of at least 10 IU/l was present in 669/769 (87.0%) of blood serum samples tested. Only 3/756 children (0.4%) were HBsAg positive and a fourth child was anti-HBc positive (HBsAg negative). This is a marked decrease compared to the hepatitis B prevalences reported in previous studies. Among rural migrant mine-workers, for example, HBsAg prevalence was 9.9%, and was 10.1% among children 0-6 years of age in the Eastern Cape Province. CONCLUSION The low-dose, plasma-derived hepatitis B vaccine, which is affordable to most developing countries, was very successful in controlling endemic hepatitis B infection, where the virus is predominantly spread by horizontal transmission among infants and young children.
The Burden of Large and Small Duct Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis in Adults and Children: A Population-Based Analysis

OBJECTIVES:The epidemiology of primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) has been incompletely assessed by population-based studies. We therefore conducted a population-based study to determine: (a) incidence rates of large and small duct PSC in adults and children, (b) the risk of inflammatory bowel disease on developing PSC, and (c) patterns of clinical presentation with the advent of magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography (MRCP). METHODS:All residents of the Calgary Health Region diagnosed with PSC between 2000 and 2005 were identified by medical records, endoscopic, diagnostic imaging, and pathology databases. Demographic and clinical information were obtained. Incidence rates were determined and risks associated with PSC were reported as rate ratios (RR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI). RESULTS:Forty-nine PSC patients were identified for an age- and gender-adjusted annual incidence rate of 0.92 cases per 100,000 person-years. The incidence of small duct PSC was 0.15/100,000. In children the incidence rate was 0.23/100,000 compared with 1.11/100,000 in adults. PSC risk was similar in Crohn's disease (CD; RR 220.0, 95% CI 132.4–343.7) and ulcerative colitis (UC; RR 212.4, 95% CI 116.1–356.5). Autoimmune hepatitis overlap was noted in 10% of cases. MRCP diagnosed large duct PSC in one-third of cases. Delay in diagnosis was common (median 8.4 months). A minority had complications at diagnosis: cholangitis (6.1%), pancreatitis (4.1%), and cirrhosis (4.1%). CONCLUSIONS:Pediatric cases and small duct PSC are less common than adult large duct PSC. Surprisingly, the risk of developing PSC in UC and CD was similar. Autoimmune hepatitis overlap was noted in a significant minority of cases.
Coxiella burnetii Phagocytosis Is Regulated by GTPases of the Rho Family and the RhoA Effectors mDia1 and ROCK

The GTPases belonging to the Rho family control the actin cytoskeleton rearrangements needed for particle internalization during phagocytosis. ROCK and mDia1 are downstream effectors of RhoA, a GTPase involved in that process. Coxiella burnetii, the etiologic agent of Q fever, is internalized by the host´s cells in an actin-dependent manner. Nevertheless, the molecular mechanism involved in this process has been poorly characterized. This work analyzes the role of different GTPases of the Rho family and some downstream effectors in the internalization of C. burnetii by phagocytic and non-phagocytic cells. The internalization of C. burnetii into HeLa and RAW cells was significantly inhibited when the cells were treated with Clostridium difficile Toxin B which irreversibly inactivates members of the Rho family. In addition, the internalization was reduced in HeLa cells that overexpressed the dominant negative mutants of RhoA, Rac1 or Cdc42 or that were knocked down for the Rho GTPases. The pharmacological inhibition or the knocking down of ROCK diminished bacterium internalization. Moreover, C. burnetii was less efficiently internalized in HeLa cells overexpressing mDia1-N1, a dominant negative mutant of mDia1, while the overexpression of the constitutively active mutant mDia1-ΔN3 increased bacteria uptake. Interestingly, when HeLa and RAW cells were infected, RhoA, Rac1 and mDia1 were recruited to membrane cell fractions. Our results suggest that the GTPases of the Rho family play an important role in C. burnetii phagocytosis in both HeLa and RAW cells. Additionally, we present evidence that ROCK and mDia1, which are downstream effectors of RhoA, are involved in that process.
A Variational Approach to Removing Multiplicative Noise

This paper focuses on the problem of multiplicative noise removal. We draw our inspiration from the modeling of speckle noise. By using a MAP estimator, we can derive a functional whose minimizer corresponds to the denoised image we want to recover. Although the functional is not convex, we prove the existence of a minimizer and we show the capability of our model on some numerical examples. We study the associated evolution problem, for which we derive existence and uniqueness results for the solution. We prove the convergence of an implicit scheme to compute the solution.
Submarine canyons: hotspots of benthic biomass and productivity in the deep sea

Submarine canyons are dramatic and widespread topographic features crossing continental and island margins in all oceans. Canyons can be sites of enhanced organic-matter flux and deposition through entrainment of coastal detrital export, dense shelf-water cascade, channelling of resuspended particulate material and focusing of sediment deposition. Despite their unusual ecological characteristics and global distribution along oceanic continental margins, only scattered information is available about the influence of submarine canyons on deep-sea ecosystem structure and productivity. Here, we show that deep-sea canyons such as the Kaikoura Canyon on the eastern New Zealand margin (42°01′ S, 173°03′ E) can sustain enormous biomasses of infaunal megabenthic invertebrates over large areas. Our reported biomass values are 100-fold higher than those previously reported for deep-sea (non-chemosynthetic) habitats below 500 m in the ocean. We also present evidence from deep-sea-towed camera images that areas in the canyon that have the extraordinary benthic biomass also harbour high abundances of macrourid (rattail) fishes likely to be feeding on the macro- and megabenthos. Bottom-trawl catch data also indicate that the Kaikoura Canyon has dramatically higher abundances of benthic-feeding fishes than adjacent slopes. Our results demonstrate that the Kaikoura Canyon is one of the most productive habitats described so far in the deep sea. A new global inventory suggests there are at least 660 submarine canyons worldwide, approximately 100 of which could be biomass hotspots similar to the Kaikoura Canyon. The importance of such deep-sea canyons as potential hotspots of production and commercial fisheries yields merits substantial further study.
An experimental study of the role of the ego in work. II. The significance of task-orientation in work

In a previous paper (5), an experiment was reported in which it was demonstrated that the resolution of tension-systems in work can occur as a result of another person' activity as well as one's own. Recall of interrupted (partner-completed) and self-completed tasks performed in a cooperative work relationship was equally frequent. In Zeigarnik's experiment (10), which was the prototype for our Cooperative Work Experiment (CW), interrupted tasks were recalled about 60 percent more often than completed ones. Four additional experiments, ramifying from the results of the CW Experiment, will be reported in this paper. For a detailed description of the tasks used, and of general procedure, the reader is referred to the preceding paper (5) in this series.
Design and control of a bio-inspired soft wearable robotic device for ankle–foot rehabilitation

We describe the design and control of a wearable robotic device powered by pneumatic artificial muscle actuators for use in ankle–foot rehabilitation. The design is inspired by the biological musculoskeletal system of the human foot and lower leg, mimicking the morphology and the functionality of the biological muscle–tendon–ligament structure. A key feature of the device is its soft structure that provides active assistance without restricting natural degrees of freedom at the ankle joint. Four pneumatic artificial muscles assist dorsiflexion and plantarflexion as well as inversion and eversion. The prototype is also equipped with various embedded sensors for gait pattern analysis. For the subject tested, the prototype is capable of generating an ankle range of motion of 27° (14° dorsiflexion and 13° plantarflexion). The controllability of the system is experimentally demonstrated using a linear time-invariant (LTI) controller. The controller is found using an identified LTI model of the system, resulting from the interaction of the soft orthotic device with a human leg, and model-based classical control design techniques. The suitability of the proposed control strategy is demonstrated with several angle-reference following experiments.
A comparative ideotype, yield component and cultivation value analysis for spring wheat adaptation in Finland

In this study Mixed structural covariance, Path and Cultivation Value analyses and the CERES-Wheat crop model were used to evaluate vegetation and yield component variation affecting yield potential between different high-latitude (> 60° N lat.) and mid-European (< 60° N lat.) spring wheat ( Triticum aestivum L.) genotypes currently cultivated in southern Finland. Path modeling results from this study suggest that especially grains/ear, harvest index (HI) and maximum 1000 kernel weight were significant factors defining the highest yield potential. Mixed and Cultivation value modeling results suggest that when compared with genotypes introduced for cultivation before 1990s, modern spring wheat genotypes have a significantly higher yielding capacity, current high yielding mid-European genotypes even exceeding the 5 t ha -1 non-potential baseline yield level (y b ). Because of a forthcoming climate change, the new high yielding wheat genotypes have to adapt for elevated temperatures and atmospheric CO 2 growing conditions in northern latitudes. The optimized ideotype profiles derived from the generic high-latitude and mid-European genotypes are presented in the results. High-latitude and mid-European ideotype profiles with factors estimating the effects of concurrent elevated CO 2 and temperature levels with photoperiodical daylength effects can be utilized when designing future high yielding ideotypes adapted to future growing conditions. The CERES-Wheat ideotype modeling results imply, that with new high yielding mid-European ideotypes, the non-potential baseline yield (y b ) would be on average 5150 kg ha -1 level (+ 108 %) vs. new high-latitude ideotypes (y b 4770 kg ha -1 , 100%) grown under the elevated CO 2(700ppm) ×temperature (+3oC) growing conditions projected by the year 2100 climate change scenario in southern Finland.
Energy-efficient relay deployment in next generation cellular networks

Relay enhanced cellular system is a promising infrastructure redesign to enhance the performance of next generation mobile networks. The use of intermediate nodes to relay information from source to destination is efficient in eliminating black spots, extending coverage region, prolonging battery lifetime of users. Recently, energy efficiency of mobile networks has drawn research attentions. Relay deployment from the perspective of energy efficiency is an interesting issue which has not been deeply addressed. In this paper, we investigate energy-efficient relay deployment by determining the optimal number and location of relays in next generation cellular networks. We establish a mathematic model for analyzing energy efficiency measured by `Joule per bit' in relay aided cellular networks, where the pathloss status related to the cell traffic busy level is considered. We conduct intensive simulation experiments based on the model with realistic broadband channel propagation conditions. Our findings suggest that introducing appropriate number of relay nodes with proper locations into the cellular system can improve system energy efficiency without compromising system throughput.