Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Changes in tissue inflammation, angiogenesis and apoptosis in endometriosis, adenomyosis and uterine myoma after GnRH agonist therapy.

BACKGROUND Information is limited regarding the multifunctional role of GnRH agonist (GnRHa) therapy in reproductive diseases. We investigated the pattern of changes in inflammatory reaction, micro-vessel density and apoptosis in the tissues collected from women with endometriosis, adenomyosis and uterine myoma who were treated with or without GnRHa therapy. METHODS Biopsy specimens were collected from lesions, myometria and corresponding endometria of 45 women with ovarian endometrioma, 35 women with adenomyosis and 56 women with uterine myoma. A fraction of these women were treated with GnRHa therapy for a variable period of 3-6 months before surgery. We performed immunohistochemical analysis of CD68, a macrophage (Mvarphi) marker and von Willebrand factor (VWF), a vessel marker, using respective antibodies. Changes in apoptosis were examined using TdT-mediated dUTP-biotin nick end-labeling assay and by the immunoexpression of activated caspase-3 in tissues after GnRHa therapy. RESULTS The infiltration of CD68-positive Mvarphi and VWF-positive micro-vessel density were significantly decreased in the endometria of women with endometriosis, adenomyosis and uterine myoma in the GnRHa-treated group when compared with that in the non-treated group. Marked decreases in inflammatory and angiogenic responses were observed in lesions and myometria of these diseases. When compared with the non-treated group, a significant increase in apoptotic index (apoptotic cells per 10 mm(2) area) and quantitative-histogram scores of activated caspase-3 after GnRHa therapy were observed in the eutopic endometria, lesions and myometria of these diseases. CONCLUSIONS GnRHa was able to markedly reduce the inflammatory reaction and angiogenesis and to significantly induce apoptosis in tissues derived from women with endometriosis, adenomyosis and uterine myoma. These multiple biological effects at the tissue level may be involved in the regression of these reproductive diseases.
Translating Video Content to Natural Language Descriptions

Humans use rich natural language to describe and communicate visual perceptions. In order to provide natural language descriptions for visual content, this paper combines two important ingredients. First, we generate a rich semantic representation of the visual content including e.g. object and activity labels. To predict the semantic representation we learn a CRF to model the relationships between different components of the visual input. And second, we propose to formulate the generation of natural language as a machine translation problem using the semantic representation as source language and the generated sentences as target language. For this we exploit the power of a parallel corpus of videos and textual descriptions and adapt statistical machine translation to translate between our two languages. We evaluate our video descriptions on the TACoS dataset, which contains video snippets aligned with sentence descriptions. Using automatic evaluation and human judgments we show significant improvements over several baseline approaches, motivated by prior work. Our translation approach also shows improvements over related work on an image description task.
Developing and testing theory-based and evidence-based interventions to promote switching to arsenic-safe wells in Bangladesh

Millions of people in Bangladesh drink arsenic-contaminated water despite increased awareness of consequences to health. Theory-based and evidence-based interventions are likely to have greater impact on people switching to existing arsenic-safe wells than providing information alone. To test this assumption, we first developed interventions based on an empirical test of the Risk, Attitudes, Norms, Abilities and Self-regulation (RANAS) model of behaviour change. In the second part of this study, a cluster-randomised controlled trial revealed that in accordance with our hypotheses, information alone showed smaller increases in switching to arsenic-safe wells than information with reminders or information with reminders and implementation intentions.
Intestinal mucosal adherence and translocation of commensal bacteria at the early onset of type 2 diabetes: molecular mechanisms and probiotic treatment

A fat‐enriched diet modifies intestinal microbiota and initiates a low‐grade inflammation, insulin resistance and type‐2 diabetes. Here, we demonstrate that before the onset of diabetes, after only one week of a high‐fat diet (HFD), live commensal intestinal bacteria are present in large numbers in the adipose tissue and the blood where they can induce inflammation. This translocation is prevented in mice lacking the microbial pattern recognition receptors Nod1 or CD14, but overtly increased in Myd88 knockout and ob/ob mouse. This ‘metabolic bacteremia’ is characterized by an increased co‐localization with dendritic cells from the intestinal lamina propria and by an augmented intestinal mucosal adherence of non‐pathogenic Escherichia coli. The bacterial translocation process from intestine towards tissue can be reversed by six weeks of treatment with the probiotic strain Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis 420, which improves the animals' overall inflammatory and metabolic status. Altogether, these data demonstrate that the early onset of HFD‐induced hyperglycemia is characterized by an increased bacterial translocation from intestine towards tissues, fuelling a continuous metabolic bacteremia, which could represent new therapeutic targets.
Religiousness, social support and reasons for living in African American and European American older adults: An exploratory study

Objectives: This study examined the relationship between religiousness, perceived social support, and reasons for living among European American (n = 37; M age = 67.7 years) and African American (n = 35; M age = 71.1 years) older adults, where ethnicity was predicted to behave as a moderator. Method: Community-dwelling participants completed the Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality, the Multidimensional Measure of Perceived Social Support, and the Reasons for Living Inventory. Results: As expected, high religiousness was associated with more reasons for living. Ethnicity alone did not meaningfully account for variance differences in reasons for living, but significant interactions indicated that the relationship between religiousness and reasons for living was stronger for African Americans, whereas the relationship between social support and reasons for living was stronger for European Americans. Conclusion: The present findings may be valuable for understanding potentially modifiable pathways to suicide resilience in diverse populations of older adults.
Evaluation of Flat Fan Nozzles Operating Parameters Under Conditions of Accelerated Boundary and Destructive Wear

Abstract Two tests were carried out to measure the standard flat fan nozzles wear during a specific period of an accelerated wear procedure. The first test aimed at getting 10% increase in the flow rate compared to the nominal flow rate, which is the threshold to replace the nozzles according to the nozzles testing standards. The second test was to wear the nozzles intensively (100 hours of accelerated wear), which represents the use of nozzles beyond the allowed threshold. The results showed that the flow rate reached 1.31 l·min−1 (equal to 10% increase) for the tested nozzles after 35 hours of the wear test. For the second test, the 10% increase of the flow rate was reached after approximately 30 hours. The wear rate reached 27.5% at the end of the test and this is 2.7 times more than the standardized threshold.
Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation in OFDMA Systems with Large Numbers of Base Station Antennas

In this paper, resource allocation for energy-efficient communication in an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) downlink network with a large number of transmit antennas is studied. The considered problem is modeled as a non-convex optimization problem which takes into account the circuit power consumption, imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT), and different quality of service (QoS) requirements including a minimum required data rate and a maximum tolerable channel outage probability. The power allocation, data rate adaptation, antenna allocation, and subcarrier allocation policies are optimized for maximization of the energy efficiency of data transmission (bit/Joule delivered to the users). By exploiting the properties of fractional programming, the resulting non-convex optimization problem in fractional form is transformed into an equivalent optimization problem in subtractive form, which leads to an efficient iterative resource allocation algorithm. In each iteration, the objective function is lower bounded by a concave function which can be maximized by using dual decomposition. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed iterative resource allocation algorithm converges in a small number of iterations and demonstrate the trade-off between energy efficiency and the number of transmit antennas.
Extractive summarization of meeting recordings

Several approaches to automatic speech summarization are discussed below, using the ICSI Meetings corpus. We contrast feature-based approaches using prosodic and lexical features with maximal marginal relevance and latent semantic analysis approaches to summarization. While the latter two techniques are borrowed directly from the ﬁeld of text summarization, feature-based approaches using prosodic information are able to utilize characteristics unique to speech data. We also investigate how the summarization results might deteriorate when carried out on ASR output as opposed to manual transcripts. All of the summaries are of an extractive variety, and are compared using the software ROUGE.
Brexpiprazole in patients with schizophrenia: overview of short- and long-term phase 3 controlled studies

Objective Review efficacy, safety, and tolerability of brexpiprazole in patients with schizophrenia in short- and long-term phase 3 studies. Methods Patients experiencing a current exacerbation of schizophrenia received brexpiprazole in two fixed-dose (2 and 4 mg), 6-week, placebo-controlled studies, one flexible-dose (2–4 mg), 6-week, placebo-control and active reference study, and one fixed-dose (1–4 mg), 52-week, placebo-controlled maintenance study. Results The efficacy of brexpiprazole was demonstrated in the two short-term fixed-dose studies with statistically significant improvements from baseline in Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) total score compared with placebo. In the flexible-dose short-term study, treatment with brexpiprazole resulted in numerically greater improvements in PANSS total score than with placebo that approached statistical significance (p=0.056). A meta-analysis of these short-term studies showed a mean change in PANSS total score of −20.1, reflecting a clinically meaningful reduction in symptoms. In the maintenance study, brexpiprazole had a beneficial effect relative to placebo on time to exacerbation of psychotic symptoms/impending relapse (p<0.0001). For all studies, brexpiprazole demonstrated clinically meaningful treatment effects on the Personal and Social Performance scale. Brexpiprazole had a favourable safety profile, with a relatively low prevalence of activating and sedating side effects. Weight gain in the short-term studies was ~1 kg greater than placebo. No safety concerns were observed with brexpiprazole in laboratory values, electrocardiogram, or vital signs. Conclusions Overall, the results indicate brexpiprazole, used either short-term or as part of a long-term maintenance treatment programme, is an efficacious therapy option in adults with schizophrenia and has a favourable safety/tolerability profile.
Hierarchical Concept Formation in Associative Memory Models and its Application to Memory of Motions for Humanoid Robots

In associative neural networks with nonmonotonic activation functions which store hierarchically correlated patterns, bifurcations of attractors take place depending on the parameter of nonmonotonicity. With hierarchically correlated storage patterns, attractors are the stored patterns when the nonmonotonicity is large, and new emergent patterns at around the centers of clusters when the nonmonotonicity is small. The phenomenon itself was shown by the authors (2005) by simulations and applied to memory systems for humanoid robots, which store feature vectors of motion patterns and maintain specific and emergent conceptual representations of motions of humanoid robots. In this paper, we theoretically describe the hierarchical bifurcations of attractors in nonmonotonic associative memory models and discuss the correspondences between the theory and simulation results
The Latent Structure of Psychopathy

A taxometric analysis of the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R) is conducted on a group of 409 male maximum-, medium-, and minimum-security federal prison inmates using the four PCL-R facet scores (interpersonal, affective, impulsive lifestyle, and antisocial behavior) as indicators. Results obtained from three quasi-independent taxometric procedures—mean above minus below a cut, maximum eigenvalue, and latent mode factor analysis—reveal consistent support for a dimensional interpretation of the psychopathy concept in a moderately heterogeneous sample of participants. On the basis of these results, it is concluded that psychopathy falls along a continuum and that high and low scores on the PCL-R reflect quantitative differences in degree rather than qualitative differences in kind.
Use of the SpaceMaker® balloon dissector for repair of sacral pressure sores

Most of the techniques that have been suggested for closure of sacral pressure sores use musculocutaneous flaps. We report our experience in three patients using the SpaceMaker® balloon dissector. The dissector was inserted into the subgluteal maximus muscle plane to expand the muscle and overlying skin, thereby forming bilateral sliding and tension‐free musculocutaneous flaps. The procedure is simple, safe, bloodless, and combines the advantages of advancement of a muscle flap and expansion.
The Influence of Ubiquitin-Related Modifier Protein URM1 on Prion Formation

Jacob Beaver is a senior biology major with a cellular, molecular, and genetics specialization. As a student in Coastal Carolina University's Honors Program, he was excited to conduct an undergraduate thesis project on prions with Dr. Michael Pierce as his adviser. He is also a member of Omicron Delta Kappa, Beta Beta Beta (National Biological Honor Society), Golden Key International Honour Society, and Who's Who Among American University Students. He would like to acknowledge Dr. Pierce for his help with the thesis project; the Biology Department and the Honors Program for the opportunity; Coastal Carolina University for providing the environment; and Mrs. Alayne Clemmons for her editing expertise. ABSTRACT Prions are infectious proteins that are autocatalyzing (formed by altering a regular protein into the structurally different prion form), and are associated with many neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, and Bovine Spongiform encephalopathy (or Mad Cow disease). This experiment tested the effect of three different plasmids—pH317, pER62, and pMP46—on prion formation in both wild-type and Urm1 deletion mutants in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The proposed hypothesis was over-expression of the Ure2 prion forming protein would increase the frequency of prion formation, as well as yield less sustainable prion amyloids (or prion aggregations) that are easier to cure. Another purpose of this experiment was to investigate how the presence or absence of the URM1 gene affects the overall formation of prions. The data showed that over-expression of proteins was seen to increase prion formation, and that over-expression yielding prions were less sustainable across generations. Also shown was that deletion mutants yielded higher numbers of prions than their wild-type counterparts.Curing through use of over-expression and guanidine, which inhibits the chaperone proteins associated with dividing prions during cellular division, proved inconclusive because there was no visible difference between any of the three plasmids.
Feature Selection via Eigenvector Centrality

In an era where accumulating data is easy and storing it inexpensive, feature selection plays a central role in helping to reduce the high-dimensionality of huge amounts of otherwise meaningless data. In this paper, we propose a graph-based method for feature selection that ranks features by identifying the most important ones into arbitrary set of cues. Mapping the problem on an affinity graph where features are the nodes the solution is given by assessing the importance of nodes through some indicators of centrality, in particular, the Eigenvector Centrality (EC). The gist of EC is to estimate the importance of a feature as a function of the importance of its neighbors. Ranking central nodes individuates candidate features, which turn out to be effective from a classification point of view, as proved by a thoroughly experimental section. Our approach has been tested on 7 diverse datasets from recent literature (e.g., biological data, object recognition, among others), and compared against filter, embedded, and wrappers methods. The results are remarkable in terms of accuracy, stability and low execution time.
Compressive sensing signal reconstruction by weighted median regression estimates

In this paper, we address the compressive sensing signal reconstruction problem by solving an ℓ0-regularized Least Absolute Deviation (LAD) regression problem. A coordinate descent algorithm is developed to solve this ℓ0-LAD optimization problem leading to a two-stage operation for signal estimation and basis selection. In the first stage, an estimation of the sparse signal is found by a weighted median operator acting on a shifted-and-scaled version of the measurement samples with weights taken from the entries of the projection matrix. The resultant estimated value is then passed to the second stage that tries to identify whether the corresponding entry is relevant or not. This stage is achieved by a hard threshold operator with adaptable thresholding parameter that is suitably tuned as the algorithm progresses.
Role of protease inhibitors and acylation stimulating protein in the adipogenesis in 3T3-L1 cells

Treatment of AIDS (HIV) and hepatitis C virus needs protease inhibitors (PI) to prevent viral replication. Uses of PI in therapy are usually associated with a decrease in body weight and dyslipidemia. Acylation stimulating protein (ASP) is a protein synthesized in adipocytes to increase triglycerides biosynthesis, for that the relation of PI and ASP to adipogenesis is tested in this work. ASP expression was increased during 3T3-L1 differentiation and reached a peak at day 8 with cell maturation. Addition of PI during adipocytes differentiation dose dependently and significantly (p < 0.5) inhibited the degree of triglycerides (TG) accumulation. Moreover, presence of ASP (450 ng/mL) in media significantly (p < 0.5) stimulated the degree of TG accumulation and there was additive stimulation for ASP when added with insulin (10 µg/mL). Finally, when ASP in different doses (Low, 16.7; Medium, 45 and High, 450 ng/mL) incubated with a dose of ×150 PI, ASP partially inhibited the PI-inhibited adipogenesis and TG accumulation. The results in this study show that PI inhibit lipids accumulation and confirm role of ASP in TG biosynthesis and adipogenesis.
Frequency deviation of thermal power plants due to wind farms

This paper presents the results of a study on the frequency deviation of the utility grid due to wind power fluctuations. The deviation is estimated by a deterministic method based on the transfer functions of system components. As the grid frequency is regulated, the deviation can limit high wind power penetration. The research identifies speed governors as one key component in enabling high wind penetration and there is need to factor their increased wear and tear into the ancillary services cost. It also raises the question as to whether the existing standards set for frequency deviation, which have to be complied at the points of connection of wind energy providers, are adequate to promote high wind penetration
Newcastle disease virotherapy induces long‐term survival and tumor‐specific immune memory in orthotopic glioma through the induction of immunogenic cell death

The oncolytic features of several naturally oncolytic viruses have been shown on Glioblastoma Multiforme cell lines and in xenotransplant models. However, orthotopic glioma studies in immunocompetent animals are lacking. Here we investigated Newcastle disease virus (NDV) in the orthotopic, syngeneic murine GL261 model. Seven days after tumor induction, mice received NDV intratumorally. Treatment significantly prolonged median survival and 50% of animals showed long‐term survival. We demonstrated immunogenic cell death (ICD) induction in GL261 cells after NDV infection, comprising calreticulin surface exposure, release of HMGB1 and increased PMEL17 cancer antigen expression. Uniquely, we found absence of secreted ATP. NDV‐induced ICD occurred independently of caspase signaling and was blocked by Necrostatin‐1, suggesting the contribution of necroptosis. Autophagy induction following NDV infection of GL261 cells was demonstrated as well. In vivo, elevated infiltration of IFN‐γ+ T cells was observed in NDV‐treated tumors, along with reduced accumulation of myeloid derived suppressor cells. The importance of a functional adaptive immune system in this paradigm was demonstrated in immunodeficient Rag2−/− mice and in CD8+ T cell depleted animals, where NDV slightly prolonged survival, but failed to induce long‐term cure. Secondary tumor induction with GL261 cells or LLC cells in mice surviving long‐term after NDV treatment, demonstrated the induction of a long‐term, tumor‐specific immunological memory response by ND virotherapy. For the first time, we describe the therapeutic activity of NDV against GL261 tumors, evidenced in an orthotopic mouse model. The therapeutic effect relies on the induction of ICD in the tumor cells, which primes adaptive antitumor immunity.
Bootstrap control

In this paper, we present a new way to control linear stochastic systems. The method is based on statistical bootstrap techniques. The optimal future control signal is derived in such a way that unknown noise distribution and uncertainties in parameter estimates are taken into account. This is achieved by resampling from existing data when calculating statistical distributions of future process values. The bootstrap algorithm takes care of arbitrary loss functions and unknown noise distribution even for small estimation sets. The efficient way of utilizing data implies that the method is also well suited for slowly time-varying stochastic systems.