Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relativistic spectral features from X-ray-illuminated spots and the measure of the black hole mass in active galactic nuclei

Narrow spectral features in the 5-6 keV range were recently discovered in the X-ray spectra of a few active galactic nuclei. We discuss the possibility that these features are due to localized spots which occur on the surface of an accretion disc following its illumination by flares. We present detailed line profiles as a function of orbital phase of the spot and its radial distance from a central black hole. Comparison of these computed profiles with observed features can help to estimate parameters of the system. In principle, this method can provide a powerful tool to measure the mass of super-massive black holes in active galactic nuclei. By comparing our simulations with the Chandra and XMM-Newton results, we show, however, that spectra from present generation X-ray satellites are not of good enough quality to exploit the method fully and determine the black hole mass with sufficient accuracy. This task has to be deferred to future missions with high throughput and high energy resolution, such as Constellation-X and Xeus.
“Who’s Gonna Take My Baby?”: Narratives of Creating Placement Plans Among Formerly Pregnant Inmates

Incarcerated pregnant women are nearly immediately separated from their babies after birth, which means they are forced to appoint a caregiver for their babies for the duration of their imprisonment. Little information is known about the caregiving plans of these women. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 35 women who were once pregnant and incarcerated in prisons across the United States, this research explores the ways in which these women construct and account for how they appointed caregivers. The narratives reveal how the women experienced stigma not only for being pregnant outside the societal boundaries that govern pregnancy but also over their placement plans.
α-Glucosidase Inhibitory Activity of Polyphenols from the Burs of Castanea mollissima Blume

Polyphenol extracts from the burs of Castanea mollissima Blume (CMPE) exhibited potential antioxidant and hypoglycemic activities. The α-glucosidase inhibitory activities of CMPE were assessed as a means of elucidating the mechanism behind its hypoglycemic activities. In vitro studies showed that CMPE significantly inhibited both yeast α-glucosidase, through a noncompetitive mode with an IC50 of 0.33 μg/mL, and rat intestinal α-glucosidase. In vivo studies revealed that oral administration of CMPE at doses of 600 mg/kg significantly reduced postprandial blood glucose levels by 27.2% in normal rats following sucrose challenges. Gel permeation chromatography revealed that CMPE exhibited typical characteristics of high-molecular-mass polymers with mean (Mn) and weight (Mw) average molecular weights of 35.4 and 50.7 kDa, respectively, and a polydispersity (Mw/Mn) of 1.432. Acid hydrolysis analysis indicated the presence of ellagitannins. These data suggest that CMPE, enriched with ellagitannins, would be an efficacious dietary supplement for diabetes management through the inhibition of alpha-glucosidase.
ORAM Based Forward Privacy Preserving Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption Schemes

In the cloud era, as more and more businesses and individuals have their data hosted by an untrusted storage service provider, data privacy has become an important concern. In this context, searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) has gained a lot of attention. An SSE scheme aims to protect the privacy of the outsourced data by supporting, at the same time, outsourced search computation. However, the design of an efficient dynamic SSE (DSSE) has been shown to be a challenging task. In this paper, we present two efficient DSSEs that leak a limited amount of information. Both our schemes make a limited use of ORAM algorithms to achieve forward privacy and to minimize the overhead that ORAMs introduce, at the same time. To the best of our knowledge, there is only one other DSSE scheme that offers efficiently forward privacy. Our schemes are parallizable and significantly improve the search and update complexity, as well as the memory access locality.
Efficacy and Safety of Intravitreal Dexamethasone Implants for Treatment of Refractory Diabetic Macular Edema

Purpose To evaluate the safety and efficacy of intravitreal dexamethasone (IVD) implants in eyes with diabetic macular edema that did not respond to previous treatment. Methods We included 46 eyes of 46 patients in this retrospective study. Each month, we recorded patient visual acuity with logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution using the Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study chart, central macular thickness measurements with optical coherence tomography, intraocular pressure (IOP), and posttreatment complication occurrence. Results The mean follow-up time was 8.95 ± 1.33 months (range, 6 to 12). Best-corrected visual acuity improved significantly in the first 4 months after IVD, but no statistically significant change was observed over the following 2 months. Although a statistically significant decrease in central macular thickness was observed in the first 3 months, the change was not statistically significant in the following 3 months. There was a statistically significant increase in IOP in the first 2 months, but no statistically significant change was observed in the following months. IOP was controlled with medication in all patients with elevated IOP. Of the 26 phakic patients, two had cataracts requiring surgery. Conclusions Cases of refractory diabetic macular edema that did not respond to previous treatment, such as anti-vascular endothelial growth factor injections and laser photocoagulation, exhibited improvements in visual acuity and decreases in retinal thickness after IVD implantation. Both functional and anatomical effects were observed in the first 3 months after injection. Repeat injections and frequent examination might be required for continued improvement. Side effects, such as cataracts and elevation of IOP, may require medical or surgical treatment.
Generalized state-space observers for chaotic synchronization and secure communication

In this brief, a simple and useful technique for both synchronization and secure communication of chaotic systems is developed. The proposed approach is based on generalized state space observer design for a class of nonlinear systems. By means of regular transformations we show that asymptotic stability is assured under mild conditions. To show accuracy and high performances of the proposed method, the well-known chaotic Lorentz system will be considered as an illustrative example.
Enriching Texture Analysis with Semantic Data

We argue for the importance of explicit semantic modelling in human-centred texture analysis tasks such as retrieval, annotation, synthesis, and zero-shot learning. To this end, low-level attributes are selected and used to define a semantic space for texture. 319 texture classes varying in illumination and rotation are positioned within this semantic space using a pair wise relative comparison procedure. Low-level visual features used by existing texture descriptors are then assessed in terms of their correspondence to the semantic space. Textures with strong presence of attributes connoting randomness and complexity are shown to be poorly modelled by existing descriptors. In a retrieval experiment semantic descriptors are shown to outperform visual descriptors. Semantic modelling of texture is thus shown to provide considerable value in both feature selection and in analysis tasks.
Visual topography of striate projection zone (MT) in posterior superior temporal sulcus of the macaque.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 1. The representation of the visual field in the striate projection zone in the posterior portion of the superior temporal sulcus of the macaque (MT) was mapped with multiunit electrodes. The animals were immobilized and anesthetized and in each animal 25-35 electrode penetrations were typically made over several recording sessions. 2. MT contains a representation of virtually the entire contralateral visual field. The representation of the vertical meridian forms its ventrolateral border and lies near the bottom of the lower bank of the superior temporal sulcus (STS). The representation of the horizontal meridian runs across the floor of STS. The upper field is located ventral and anterior and the lower field dorsal and posterior. The medial border lies at the junction of the floor of STS and its upper bank. 3. MT is similar to striate cortex in being a first-order transformation of the visual field. In both areas, receptive-field size and cortical magnification increase with eccentricity. MT is much smaller than striate cortex and has much larger receptive fields at a given eccentricity and a cruder topography. 4. The results further support the suggestion that MT in the macaque is homologous to visual area MT in New World primates.
Bounds for communication problems in interconnection networks under a linear cost model

In the analysis of communications under the assumption of linear cost and in the context of a distributed memory interconnection network, many authors have noted that a good method for sending a message of length n along a path of length m is to divide the message into some collection of equal or nearly equal packets, and pipeline the communication. We formalize and prove that this notion is optimal in the context of an interconnection network using store and forward communications under the linear cost model. Armed with this proof technique and bounds, we attack problems of broadcasting and gossiping in the contexts of a ring of processors and a complete interconnection of processors. M'e acquire a variety of new upper bounds, and several lower bounds to match.
Synergistic Nisin-Polymyxin Combinations for the Control of Pseudomonas Biofilm Formation

The emergence and dissemination of multi-drug resistant pathogens is a global concern. Moreover, even greater levels of resistance are conferred on bacteria when in the form of biofilms (i.e., complex, sessile communities of bacteria embedded in an organic polymer matrix). For decades, antimicrobial peptides have been hailed as a potential solution to the paucity of novel antibiotics, either as natural inhibitors that can be used alone or in formulations with synergistically acting antibiotics. Here, we evaluate the potential of the antimicrobial peptide nisin to increase the efficacy of the antibiotics polymyxin and colistin, with a particular focus on their application to prevent biofilm formation of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The results reveal that the concentrations of polymyxins that are required to effectively inhibit biofilm formation can be dramatically reduced when combined with nisin, thereby enhancing efficacy, and ultimately, restoring sensitivity. Such combination therapy may yield added benefits by virtue of reducing polymyxin toxicity through the administration of significantly lower levels of polymyxin antibiotics.
Unsupervised segmentation of cell nuclei in cervical smear images using active contour with adaptive local region fitting energy modelling

In this paper, we propose a method based on an adaptive active contour modelling to segment the cell nuclei from cervical smear images. The basic idea of our method is to make a contour to adaptively deform so as to get a minimized given region energy function. In order to make the evolution of the contour rely less on the intensity homogeneity and achieve the purpose of adaptive segmentation of the cell nuclei, the proposed method utilizes the morphology method to initialize the active contour modelling. Then a Gaussian kernel function is used to extract the local region and defines its local region fitting energy function which approximates the image intensities on the two sides of the contour in the local region. Finally, the Split Bregman method is used to obtain a robust numerical solution and to generate the segmentation results. In our experiments, the proposed approach can obtain accurate segmentation results compared with some state-of-the-art approaches.
The Number of Components of Enhancement Contributing to Short-Term Synaptic Plasticity at the Neuromuscular Synapse during Patterned Nerve Stimulation Progressively Decreases As Basal Release Probability Is Increased from Low to Normal Levels by Changing Extracellular Ca2+

Presynaptic short-term plasticity (STP) dynamically modulates synaptic strength in a reversible manner on a timescale of milliseconds to minutes. For low basal vesicular release probability (prob0), four components of enhancement, F1 and F2 facilitation, augmentation (A), and potentiation (P), increase synaptic strength during repetitive nerve activity. For release rates that exceed the rate of replenishment of the readily releasable pool (RRP) of synaptic vesicles, depression of synaptic strength, observed as a rundown of postsynaptic potential amplitudes, can also develop. To understand the relationship between enhancement and depression at the frog (Rana pipiens) neuromuscular synapse, data obtained over a wide range of prob0 using patterned stimulation are analyzed with a hybrid model to reveal the components of STP. We find that F1, F2, A, P, and depletion of the RRP all contribute to STP during repetitive nerve activity at low prob0. As prob0 is increased by raising Cao2+ (extracellular Ca2+), specific components of enhancement no longer contribute, with first P, then A, and then F2 becoming undetectable, even though F1 continues to enhance release. For levels of prob0 that lead to appreciable depression, only F1 and depletion of the RRP contribute to STP during rundown, and for low stimulation rates, F2 can also contribute. These observations place prob0-dependent limitations on which components of enhancement contribute to STP and suggest some fundamental mechanistic differences among the components. The presented model can serve as a tool to readily characterize the components of STP over wide ranges of prob0.
Environmental dependence of cold dark matter halo formation

We use a high-resolution N-body simulation to study how the formation of cold dark matter haloes is affected by their environments, and how such environmental effects produce the age dependence of halo clustering observed in recent N-body simulations. We estimate, for each halo selected at redshift z = 0, an 'initial' mass M-i defined to be the mass enclosed by the largest sphere which contains the initial barycentre of the halo particles and within which the mean linear density is equal to the critical value for spherical collapse at z = 0. For haloes of a given final mass, M-h, the ratio M-i/M-h has large scatter, and the scatter is larger for haloes of lower final masses. Haloes that form earlier on average have larger M-i/M-h, and so correspond to higher peaks in the initial density field than their final masses imply. Old haloes are more strongly clustered than younger ones of the same mass because their initial masses are larger. The age dependence of clustering for low-mass haloes is entirely due to the difference in the initial/final mass ratio. Low-mass old haloes are almost always located in the vicinity of big structures, and their old ages are largely due to the fact that their mass accretions are suppressed by the hot environments produced by the tidal fields of the larger structure. The age dependence of clustering is weaker for more massive haloes because the heating by large-scale tidal fields is less important.
CompAdaGrad: A Compressed, Complementary, Computationally-Efficient Adaptive Gradient Method

The adaptive gradient online learning method known as AdaGrad has seen widespread use in the machine learning community in stochastic and adversarial online learning problems and more recently in deep learning methods. The method's full-matrix incarnation offers much better theoretical guarantees and potentially better empirical performance than its diagonal version; however, this version is computationally prohibitive and so the simpler diagonal version often is used in practice. We introduce a new method, CompAdaGrad, that navigates the space between these two schemes and show that this method can yield results much better than diagonal AdaGrad while avoiding the (effectively intractable) $O(n^3)$ computational complexity of full-matrix AdaGrad for dimension $n$. CompAdaGrad essentially performs full-matrix regularization in a low-dimensional subspace while performing diagonal regularization in the complementary subspace. We derive CompAdaGrad's updates for composite mirror descent in case of the squared $\ell_2$ norm and the $\ell_1$ norm, demonstrate that its complexity per iteration is linear in the dimension, and establish guarantees for the method independent of the choice of composite regularizer. Finally, we show preliminary results on several datasets.
Assessing the Long-Term Performance of Cross-Sectoral Strategies for National Infrastructure

National infrastructure systems (energy, transport, digital communications, water, and waste) provide essential services to society. Although for the most part these systems developed in a piecemeal way, they are now an integrated and highly interdependent “system of systems. ” However, understanding the long-term performance trajectory of national infrastructure has proved to be very difficult because of the complexity of these systems (in physical and institutional terms) and because there is little tradition of thinking cross-sectorally about infrastructure system performance. Here, a methodology is proposed for analyzing national multisectoral infrastructure systems performance in the context of uncertain futures, incorporating interdependencies in demand across sectors. Three contrasting strategies are considered for infrastructure provision (capacity intensive, capacity constrained, and decentralized) and multiattribute performance metrics are analyzed in the context of low, medium, and high demographic and economic growth scenarios. The approach is illustrated using Great Britain and provides the basis for the development and testing of long-term strategies for national infrastructure provision. It is especially applicable to mature industrial economics with a large stock of existing infrastructure and challenges of future infrastructure provision.
Cancer Metabolism: Strategic Diversion from Targeting Cancer Drivers to Targeting Cancer Suppliers

Drug development groups are close to discovering another pot of gold-a therapeutic target-similar to the success of imatinib (Gleevec) in the field of cancer biology. Modern molecular biology has improved cancer therapy through the identification of more pharmaceutically viable targets, and yet major problems and risks associated with late-phase cancer therapy remain. Presently, a growing number of reports have initiated a discussion about the benefits of metabolic regulation in cancers. The Warburg effect, a great discovery approximately 70 years ago, addresses the “universality” of cancer characteristics. For instance, most cancer cells prefer aerobic glycolysis instead of mitochondrial respiration. Recently, cancer metabolism has been explained not only by metabolites but also through modern molecular and chemical biological techniques. Scientists are seeking context-dependent universality among cancer types according to metabolic and enzymatic pathway signatures. This review presents current cancer metabolism studies and discusses future directions in cancer therapy targeting bio-energetics, bio-anabolism, and autophagy, emphasizing the important contribution of cancer metabolism in cancer therapy.
The Achilles Heel of the Trojan Horse Model of HIV-1 trans-Infection

To ensure their survival, microbial pathogens have evolved diverse strategies to subvert host immune defenses. The human retrovirus HIV-1 has been proposed to hijack the natural endocytic function of dendritic cells (DCs) to infect interacting CD4 T cells in a process termed trans-infection. Although DCs can be directly infected by certain strains of HIV-1, productive infection of DCs is not required during trans-infection; instead, DCs capture and internalize infectious HIV-1 virions in vesicles for later transmission to CD4 T cells via vesicular exocytosis across the infectious synapse. This model of sequential endocytosis and exocytosis of intact HIV-1 virions has been dubbed the “Trojan horse” model of HIV-1 trans-infection. While this model gained rapid favor as a strong example of how a pathogen exploits the natural properties of its cellular host, our recent studies challenge this model by showing that the vast majority of virions transmitted in trans originate from the plasma membrane rather than from intracellular vesicles. This review traces the experimental lines of evidence that have contributed to what we view as the “rise and decline” of the Trojan horse model of HIV-1 trans-infection.
Matched filtering with rate back-off for low complexity communications in very large delay spread channels

We study the possibility to transmit data over channels with large delay spreads under the constraint of a very simple receiver which has only one tap. Such a scheme is of interest when a cost-efficient way to transmit potentially high data rates are sought after. We investigate the performance of the optimal prefilter for this scheme and compare it to a simplified, so-called time-reversal (TR) prefilter which has very low complexity. At low SNRs, the TR prefilter and the optimal prefilter are equivalent. At high SNRs, the TR prefilter achieves a performance that is independent from the delay spread of the channel and hence its performance is the same for any bandwidth. In applications where bandwidth is abundant, such as ultra-wide band (UWB) communications, any required performance can be obtained by TR prefilters with a rate back-off transmission (i.e. transmission rate lower than the allowable bandwidth). Similar performance can also be obtained with full-rate transmission using several transmit antennas. This performance is guaranteed, since the high diversity of the large delay spread channel effectively eliminates any fading.
The Improved Bounds of Restricted Isometry Constant for Recovery via $\ell_{p}$ -Minimization

Nonconvex ℓ<sub>p</sub>-minimization with p ∈ (0,1) has been studied recently in the context of compressed sensing. In this paper, we prove that as long as the sensing matrix A ∈ R<sup>m×n</sup> satisfies restricted isometry property with δ<sub>2k</sub> ∈ (0,1), every k-sparse signal x ∈ R<sup>n</sup> can be recovered exactly from linear measurement y=Ax via solving some ℓ<sub>p</sub>-minimization problem. In fact, it is shown that p <; min {1,1.0873(1-δ<sub>2k</sub>)} suffices for the exact k-sparse recovery of ℓ<sub>p</sub>-minimization, which improves the existing results greatly.
Intestinal Transportations of Main Chemical Compositions of Polygoni Multiflori Radix in Caco-2 Cell Model

Context. Polygoni Multiflori Radix (PMR) is originated from the root of Polygonum multiflorum Thunb. and used in oriental countries for centuries. However, little researches pay close attention to the absorption of its major constituents. Objective. Transepithelial transport of TSG, RL, PL, and four anthraquinones is carried out. Materials and Methods. Caco-2 cell monolayer, which represented a well-established model for the study of intestinal transport of nutrients and xenobiotics, was used in this paper. Results. The apparent permeability coefficients (P app) in the Caco-2 cell monolayers were TSG (2.372 × 10−9) < EG (2.391 × 10−9) < EN (2.483 × 10−9) < PL (4.917 × 10−9) < RN (1.707 × 10−8) < RL (1.778 × 10−8) < AE (1.952 × 10−8). Thus, RN, RL, and AE were considered partly absorbed, while other constituents were hardly absorbed. Discussion and Conclusion. Glycosides showed poor permeabilities than aglycones. In the meantime, TSG and EN gave out poor recovery rates in this assay, which indicated that TSG and EN may accumulate or metabolise in the Caco-2 cells. In silico prediction indicated that Gibbs energy (r = 0.751, p < 0.05) and heat of form (r = 0.701, p < 0.05) were strongly positively correlated with P app.