Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Anterior Resection for Rectal Cancer With Mesorectal Excision: A Prospective Evaluation of 622 Patients

Objective:This study aims to review the operative results and oncological outcomes of anterior resection for rectal and rectosigmoid cancer. Comparison was made between patients with total mesorectal excision (TME) for mid and distal cancer and partial mesorectal excision (PME) for proximal cancer, when a 4- to 5-cm mesorectal margin could be achieved. Risk factors for local recurrence and survival were also analyzed. Summary Background Data:Anterior resection has become the preferred treatment option rectal cancer. TME with sharp dissection has been shown to be associated with a low local recurrence rate. Controversies still exist as to the need for TME in more proximal tumor. Methods:Resection of primary rectal and rectosigmoid cancer was performed in 786 patients from August 1993 to July 2002. Of these, 622 patients (395 men and 227 women; median age, 67 years) underwent anterior resection. The technique of perimesorectal dissection was used. Patients with mid and distal rectal cancer were treated with TME while PME was performed for those with more proximal tumors. Prospective data on the postoperative results and oncological outcomes were reviewed. Risk factors for anastomotic leakage, local recurrence, and survival of the patients were analyzed with univariate and multivariate analysis. Results:The median level of the tumor was 8 cm from the anal verge (range, 2.5–20 cm) and curative resection was performed in 563 patients (90.5%). TME was performed in 396 patients (63.7%). Significantly longer median operating time, more blood loss, and a longer hospital stay were found in patients with TME. The overall operative mortality and morbidity rates were 1.8% and 32.6%, respectively, and there were no significant differences between those of TME and PME. Anastomotic leak occurred in 8.1% and 1.3% of patients with TME and PME, respectively (P < 0.001). Independent factors for a higher anastomotic leakage rate were TME, the male gender, the absence of stoma, and the increased blood loss. The 5-year actuarial local recurrence rate was 9.7%. The advanced stage of the disease and the performance of coloanal anastomosis were independent factors for increased local recurrence. The 5-year cancer-specific survival was 74.5%. The independent factors for poor survival were the advanced stage of the disease and the presence of lymphovascular and perineural invasion. Conclusions:Anterior resection with mesorectal excision is a safe option and can be performed in the majority of patients with rectal cancer. The local recurrence rate was 9.7% and the cancer-specific survival was 74.5%. When the tumor requires a TME, this procedure is more complex and has a higher leakage rate than in those higher tumors where PME provides adequate mesorectal clearance. By performing TME in patients with mid and distal rectal cancer, the local control and survival of these patients are similar to those of patients with proximal cancers where adequate clearance can be achieved by PME.
Biodegradation of two polyethoxylated nonionic surfactants in sequencing batch reactors

Application of surfactants to increase the mobility of hydrophobic contaminants in soils will create a secondary aqueous waste stream containing mobilized contaminant and surfactant that may be biodegraded. Previous research on surfactant biodegradation focused on low surfactant concentrations, typically less than 0.01% (weight/weight). The goal of this project was to investigate the effect of surfactant concentration, greater than 0.01%, on the rate and extent of surfactant biodegradation. Two nonionic polyethoxylated surfactants, Neodol 91‐8 and Makon 12, were selected for study based on their ability to solubilize hydrophobic organic compounds. Investigations were conducted in bench‐scale sequencing batch reactors at initial surfactant concentrations of 0.01, 0.025, and 0.05%. The surfactants served as the sole carbon source. The average residual nondegradable fractions of surfactant were 0.35 and 0.15 for Makon 12 and Neodol 91‐8, respectively. Although the extent of degradation did not change with initial surfactant concentration, the residual concentration did increase with initial surfactant concentration. Organic carbon removal was best fit by a modified first‐order model. The first‐order rate constant seemed to decrease exponentially with increasing initial surfactant concentration.
Implications of tissue transglutaminase expression in malignant melanoma

Human malignant melanoma is a highly aggressive form of cancer; the 5-year survival rate in patients with stage III or IV disease is <5%. In patients with metastatic melanoma, systemic therapy becomes ineffective because of the high resistance of melanoma cells to various anticancer therapies. We have found previously that development of the drug resistance and metastatic phenotypes in breast cancer cells is associated with increased tissue transglutaminase (TG2) expression. In the study reported here, we investigated TG2 expression and its implications in metastatic melanoma. We found that metastatic melanoma cell lines expressed levels of TG2 up to 24-fold higher than levels in radial growth phase of primary melanoma cell lines. Activation of endogenous TG2 by the calcium ionophore A23187 induced a rapid and strong apoptotic response in A375 cells and A23187-induced apoptosis could be blocked by TG2-specific inhibitors. These findings indicated that activation of endogenous TG2 could serve as a strategy for inducing apoptosis in malignant melanomas. Importantly, tumor samples from patients with malignant melanomas showed strong expression of TG2, suggesting that TG2 expression is selectively up-regulated during advanced developmental stages of melanoma. We observed that 20% to 30% of TG2 protein was present on cell membranes in association with β1 and β5 integrins. This association of TG2 with cell surface integrins promoted strong attachment of A375 cells to fibronectin-coated surfaces, resulting in increased cell survival in serum-free medium. Inhibition of TG2 by small interfering RNA inhibited fibronectin-mediated cell attachment and cell survival functions in A375 cells. Overall, our results suggest that TG2 expression contributes to the development of chemoresistance in malignant melanoma cells by exploiting integrin-mediated cell survival signaling pathways. [Mol Cancer Ther 2006;5(6):1493–503]
Y‐Chromosome Analysis of Ancient Hungarian and Two Modern Hungarian‐Speaking Populations from the Carpathian Basin

The Hungarian population belongs linguistically to the Finno‐Ugric branch of the Uralic family. The Tat C allele is an interesting marker in the Finno‐Ugric context, distributed in all the Finno‐Ugric‐speaking populations, except for Hungarians. This question arises whether the ancestral Hungarians, who settled in the Carpathian Basin, harbored this polymorphism or not. 100 men from modern Hungary, 97 Szeklers (a Hungarian‐speaking population from Transylvania), and 4 archaeologically Hungarian bone samples from the 10th century were studied for this polymorphism. Among the modern individuals, only one Szekler carries the Tat C allele, whereas out of the four skeletal remains, two possess the allele. The latter finding, even allowing for the low sample number, appears to indicate a Siberian lineage of the invading Hungarians, which later has largely disappeared.
Mochras borehole revisited: a new global standard for Early Jurassic earth history

The Early Jurassic epoch was a time of extreme environmental change: there are well-documented examples of rapid transitions from cold, or even glacial, climates to super greenhouse events, the latter characterized worldwide by hugely enhanced organic carbon burial, multiple large isotopic anomalies, global sea-level change, and mass extinction (Price, 1999; Hesselbo et al., 2000; Jenkyns, 2010; Korte and Hesselbo, 2011). These icehouse–greenhouse events not only reflect changes in the global climate system but are also thought to have had significant influence on the evolution of Jurassic marine biota (e.g. van de Schootbrugge et al., 2005; Fraguas et al., 2012). Furthermore, the events may serve as analogues for present-day and future environmental transitions.
Improvement of autobiographic memory recovery by means of sad music in Alzheimer’s Disease type dementia

Background and aims: Autobiographic memory undergoes progressive deterioration during the evolution of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The aim of this study was to analyze mechanisms which facilitate recovery of autobiographic memories. We used a repeatedly employed mechanism, music, with the addition of an emotional factor. Methods: Autobiographic memory provoked by a variety of sounds (music which was happy, sad, lacking emotion, ambient noise in a coffee bar and no sound) was analyzed in a sample of 25 patients with AD. Results: Emotional music, especially sad music for remote memories, was found to be the most effective kind for recall of autobiographic experiences. Conclusions: The factor evoking the memory is not the music itself, but rather the emotion associated with it, and is useful for semantic rather than episodic memory.
The mysterious cognitive abilities of bees: why models of visual processing need to consider experience and individual differences in animal performance

Summary Vision is one of the most important modalities for the remote perception of biologically important stimuli. Insects like honeybees and bumblebees use their colour and spatial vision to solve tasks, such as navigation, or to recognise rewarding flowers during foraging. Bee vision is one of the most intensively studied animal visual systems, and several models have been developed to describe its function. These models have largely assumed that bee vision is determined by mechanistic hard-wired circuits, with little or no consideration for behavioural plasticity or cognitive factors. However, recent work on both bee colour vision and spatial vision suggests that cognitive factors are indeed a very significant factor in determining what a bee sees. Individual bumblebees trade-off speed for accuracy, and will decide on which criteria to prioritise depending upon contextual information. With continued visual experience, honeybees can learn to use non-elemental processing, including configural mechanisms and rule learning, and can access top-down information to enhance learning of sophisticated, novel visual tasks. Honeybees can learn delayed-matching-to-sample tasks and the rules governing this decision making, and even transfer learned rules between different sensory modalities. Finally, bees can learn complex categorisation tasks and display numerical processing abilities for numbers up to and including four. Taken together, this evidence suggests that bees do have a capacity for sophisticated visual behaviours that fit a definition for cognition, and thus simple elemental models of bee vision need to take account of how a variety of factors may influence the type of results one may gain from animal behaviour experiments.
The Impact of the 5E Teaching Model on Changes in Neuroscience, Drug Addiction, and Research Methods Knowledge of Science Teachers Attending California's ARISE Professional Development Workshops

This study examined how science teachers’ knowledge of research methods, neuroscience and drug addiction changed through their participation in a 5-day summer science institute. The data for this study evolved from a four-year NIH funded science education project called Addiction Research and Investigation for Science Educators (ARISE). Findings were based on pre- and post-test evaluation data from three annual cohorts in June 2010, 2011 and 2012. Researchers found significant improvement in teacher knowledge overall and on all subscales. Teachers with lower pre-test scores showed the greatest gain in post-test scores. What made this in-service unique was that the 5E pedagogical model was used to teach the teachers and demonstrate 5E instruction in the science classroom. Through the use of the 5E teaching method, we found that teachers in our cohorts with the least skill had higher rates of gain. A strategy that has been used extensively to teach science to children, this model moves away from didactic methods of in-service pedagogy. These findings suggest that the 5E model could be an effective way to teach teachers as well as students, particularly new and or less skilled teachers, who often tend to have high numbers of English Learner (EL) students in their classes.
Book review: Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress

Depression in Japan is a nuanced and rigorous intervention into contemporary narratives about psychiatry and globalization. Based on her own ethnographic research, and making use of anthropological approaches to medicine and psychiatry – which have emphasized the heterogeneity and malleability of biomedical categories in different locales – Kitanaka has written a fascinating account of the category of ‘depression’ in Japan. Her work serves to complexify a story of American psychiatry’s straightforward exportation and transplantation into ‘other’ contexts, by showing how the history and politics of psychiatry in Japan render ‘depression’ a rather different object from what it is in the West. In the process, she also shows how the historiographical narratives we tell about western psychiatry and its allegedly individualizing, biologizing urges must do justice to these differences. The book aims in the first instance to explain the striking rise of depression narratives in Japanese psychiatry and society, but it also interrogates the modes through which we understand and scrutinize epidemiological claims about conditions. Depression was, until recently relatively, unknown among lay Japanese, but has, since the 1990s, been increasingly invoked as a condition accounting for symptoms of fatigue and hopelessness – and in particular related to overwork and suicide. Why is this so? Kitanaka tackles this question by problematizing the ubiquitous claim made within Japanese psychiatry and beyond, that the Japanese rarely suffered from depression before modernity. Historical claims made, both within and outside Japan, about the lack of depression in the country, are, Kitanaka argues, the result of ideas about the difference between western and eastern subjectivity: western selves have interiority and reflexivity, the Japanese self lacks this maturity. Western pharmaceutical medicalization of Japanese distress has been criticized by many as undermining a traditional Japanese ‘cultural self’
MethylationofTwelveCpGs inHumanPapillomavirusType 16 ( HPV 16 ) as an Informative Biomarker for the Triage ofWomen Positive for HPV 16 Infection

An accurate biomarker for the follow-up of women positive for human papillomavirus type 16 (HPV16) DNAmay improve the efficiency of cervical cancer prevention. Previously, we analyzed all 113HPV16CpGs in cervical cytology samples and discovered differential methylation at different stages of premalignancy. In the current study, we identified amethylation biomarker consisting of a panel of 12HPV16 CpG sites in the E5, L2, andL1open reading frames, and testedwhether it fulfilled three necessary conditions of a prospective biomarker. A total of 33 cytology samples fromNorth American andWest African womenwith all grades of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) and invasive cervical cancer (ICC) were analyzed by using DNA bisulfite sequencing. The results showed (i) a highly significant trend for increasing HPV16 biomarker methylation with increasing histologic severity (P < 0.0001), (ii) 100% sensitivity for ICC over a wide range of methylation cutoff scores; 80% detection of CIN3 at cutoff scores up to 39% methylation, and (iii) substantially lower detection of CIN2, from 0% to 71%, depending on the cutoff score. Our results support the prognostic potential of the HPV16 methylation biomarker for the triage to colposcopy of women with HPV16-positive screening tests and, eventually, for the management of women with HPV16-positive CIN2. Cancer Prev Res; 7(5); 1–8. 2014 AACR.
An Approach for R&D Partner Selection in Alliances between Large Companies, and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs): Application of Bayesian Network and Patent Analysis

The enhanced R&D cooperative efforts between large firms and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been emphasized to perform innovation projects and succeed in deploying profitable businesses. In order to promote such win-win alliances, it is necessary to consider the capabilities of large firms and SMEs, respectively. Thus, this paper proposes a new approach of partner selection when a large firm assesses SMEs as potential candidates for R&D collaboration. The first step of the suggested approach is to define the necessary technology for a firm by referring to a structured technology roadmap, which is a useful technique in the partner selection from the perspectives of a large firm. Second, a list of appropriate SME candidates is generated by patent information. Finally, a Bayesian network model is formulated to select an SME as an R&D collaboration partner which fits in the industry and the large firm by utilizing a bibliography with United States patents. This paper applies the proposed approach to the semiconductor industry and selects potential R&D partners for a large firm. This paper will explain how to use the model as a systematic and analytic approach for creating effective partnerships between large firms and SMEs.
The prepared emotional reflex: intentional preparation of automatic approach and avoidance tendencies as a means to regulate emotional responding.

Advance preparation of action courses toward emotional stimuli is an effective means to regulate impulsive emotional behavior. Our experiment shows that performing intentional acts of approach and avoidance in an evaluation task influences the unintended activation of approach and avoidance tendencies in another task in which stimulus valence is irrelevant. For the evaluation-relevant blocks, participants received either congruent (positive-approach, negative-avoidance) or incongruent (positive-avoidance, negative-approach) mapping instructions. In the evaluation-irrelevant blocks, approach- and avoidance-related lever movements were selected in response to a stimulus feature other than valence (affective Simon task). Response mapping in the evaluation task influenced performance in the evaluation-irrelevant task: An enhanced affective Simon effect was observed with congruent mapping instructions; in contrast, the effect was reversed when the evaluation task required incongruent responses. Thus, action instructions toward affective stimuli received in one task determined affective response tendencies in another task where these instructions were not in effect. These findings suggest that intentionally prepared short-term links between affective valence and motor responses elicit associated responses without a deliberate act of will, operating like a "prepared reflex. "
Frequency Distribution of COMT Polymorphisms in Greek Patients with Schizophrenia and Controls: A Study of SNPs rs737865, rs4680, and rs165599

Schizophrenia, a severe psychiatric condition, is characterized by disturbances of cognition, emotion, and social functioning. The disease affects almost 1% of world population. Recent studies evaluating the role of catechol-O-methyltransferase enzyme (COMT) polymorphisms in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia have resulted in ambiguous findings. The current study examined the association of schizophrenia with three COMT polymorphisms, namely, rs737865, rs4680, and rs165599 in a Greek population. There was no significant association between schizophrenia and any of the three SNPs examined. However, haplotype analysis showed that cases have higher frequency of the T-A-A haplotype, and participants with that haplotype were at increased risk for developing schizophrenia (OR = 1.52; CL : 1.12–2.08; P = 0.008). Furthermore, patients with schizophrenia displayed an excess of TC/AA/AA and the TT/AA/GA genotypes. Similarly a protective effect of TT/GG/GG and TT/GA/GG was suggested by our results.
Experimental Validation of a Geometrical Nonlinear Permeance Network Based Real-Time Induction Machine Model

Real-time digital simulation of electrical machines and drives is a cost-effective approach in evaluating the true behavior of newly designed machines and controllers before applying them in a real system. Although many studies exist regarding the optimized models of power electronic drives and digital controllers for real-time simulation, the real-time models of electrical machines are still limited to the lumped parameter electric circuit models. This is mainly due to the complexity of a detailed electrical machine model which makes it computationally expensive. This paper presents the modeling, real-time implementation, finite element analysis, and experimental validation of a nonlinear geometrical permeance network based induction machine model. A nonlinear permeance network model (PNM) is developed for the real-time simulation of a 3-hp squirrel cage induction machine with closed rotor slots. Several studies both under open-loop and closed-loop control conditions are conducted, and the results obtained from the offline and real-time simulations and the experiment are compared with each other to show the effectiveness of the proposed PNM model.
Contextual Therapy

ABSTRACT This paper uses detailed case analysis to illustrate the intergenerational concepts of loyalty, legacy, and relational stagnation described by Boszormenyi-Nagy in his Contextual Therapy approach. Special emphasis is given to how the therapist assesses the ethical dimension of a couple's interactions and links this to reported symptoms and relationship difficulties among all family members.
Gene Deletions in Mycobacterium bovis BCG Stimulate Increased CD8+ T Cell Responses

ABSTRACT Mycobacteria, the etiological agents of tuberculosis and leprosy, have coevolved with mammals for millions of years and have numerous ways of suppressing their host's immune response. It has been suggested that mycobacteria may contain genes that reduce the host's ability to elicit CD8+ T cell responses. We screened 3,290 mutant Mycobacterium bovis bacillus Calmette Guerin (BCG) strains to identify genes that decrease major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I presentation of mycobacterium-encoded epitope peptides. Through our analysis, we identified 16 mutant BCG strains that generated increased transgene product-specific CD8+ T cell responses. The genes disrupted in these mutant strains had disparate predicted functions. Reconstruction of strains via targeted deletion of genes identified in the screen recapitulated the enhanced immunogenicity phenotype of the original mutant strains. When we introduced the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) gag gene into several of these novel BCG strains, we observed enhanced SIV Gag-specific CD8+ T cell responses in vivo. This study demonstrates that mycobacteria carry numerous genes that act to dampen CD8+ T cell responses and suggests that genetic modification of these genes may generate a novel group of recombinant BCG strains capable of serving as more effective and immunogenic vaccine vectors.