Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantitative Immunogold Localization of Protein Phosphatase 2B (Calcineurin) in Paramecium Cells

For immunogold EM labeling analysis, we fixed Paramecium cells in 4% formaldehyde and 0.125% glutaraldehyde, followed by low-temperature embedding in unicryl and UV polymerization. We first quantified some obvious but thus far neglected side effects of section staining on immunogold labeling, using mono- or polyclonal antibodies (Abs) against defined secretory and cell surface components, followed by F(ab)2– or protein A–gold conjugates. Use of alkaline lead staining resulted in considerable rearrangement and loss of label unless sections were postfixed by glutaraldehyde after gold labeling. This artifact is specific for section staining with lead. It can be avoided by staining sections with aqueous uranyl acetate only to achieve high-resolution immunogold localization of a protein phosphatase on unicryl sections. In general, phosphatases are assumed to be closely, although loosely, associated with their targets. Because the occurrence of protein phosphatase 2B (calcineurin) in Paramecium has been previously established by biochemical and immunological work, as well as by molecular biology, we have used Abs against mammalian CaN or its subunits, CaN-A and CaN-B, for antigen mapping in these cells by quantitative immunogold labeling analysis. Using ABs against whole CaN, four structures are selectively labeled (with slightly decreasing intensity), i.e., infraciliary lattice (centrin-containing contractile cortical filament network), parasomal sacs (coated pits), and outlines of alveolar sacs (subplasmalemmal calcium stores, tightly attached to the cell membrane), as well as rims of chromatin-containing nuclear domains. In other subcellular regions, gold granules reached densities three to four times above background outside the cell but there was no selective enrichment, e.g., in cilia, ciliary basal bodies, cytosol, mitochondria, trichocysts (dense-core secretory organelles), and non-chromatin nuclear domains. Their labeling density was 4- to 8.5-fold (average 6.5-fold) less than that on selectively labeled structures. Labeling tendency was about the same with Abs against either subunit. Our findings may facilitate the examination of molecular targets contained in the selectively labeled structures.
The IDH1 Mutation-Induced Oncometabolite, 2-Hydroxyglutarate, May Affect DNA Methylation and Expression of PD-L1 in Gliomas

Background: Malignant gliomas are heterogeneous brain tumors with the potential for aggressive disease progression, as influenced by suppressive immunoediting. Given the success and enhanced potential of immune-checkpoint inhibitors in immunotherapy, we focused on the connections between genetic alterations affected by IDH1 mutations and immunological landscape changes and PDL-1 expression in gliomas. Methods: Paired surgically resected tumors from lower-grade gliomas (LGGs) and glioblastomas (GBM) were investigated, and a genetic analysis of patients' primary tumor samples culled from TCGA datasets was performed. Results: The results demonstrate that when compared with IDH1-mutant tumors, IDH1 wildtype tumors represent an immunosuppression landscape and elevated levels of PD-L1 expression. DNA hypo-methylation of the PD-L1 gene, as well as high gene and protein expressions, were observed in the wildtype tumors. We also found that quantitative levels of IDH1 mutant proteins were positively associated with recurrence-free survival (RFS). A key product of the IDH1 mutation (2-hydroxyglutarate) was found to transiently increase DNA methylation and suppress PD-L1 expression. Conclusions: IDH1 mutations impact the immune landscape of gliomas by affecting immune infiltrations and manipulating checkpoint ligand PD-L1 expression. Applications of immune checkpoint inhibitors may be beneficial for chemoradiation-insensitive IDH1-wildtype gliomas.
Role of combination of hexagonal boron nitride and graphite in NAO friction material

Copper is added in non-asbestos organic (NAO) friction materials (FM) to increase the thermal conductivity and to enhance the lubricity at high temperature apart from the well-accepted fact that it influences tribological performance also. Copper is being phased out slowly in FM formulations because of its proven threat to the aquatic life. Nowadays, the research in this area is being focussed on finding alternatives to Cu. Hexa-boron nitride (hBN) also known as white graphite is a ceramic powdery filler, having crystalline structure similar to that of graphite along with various desirable properties (such as higher thermo-oxidative stability and thermal conductivity) which could be possibly suitable for developing Cu-free FMs. Hence, it was thought worthwhile to explore hBN as a potential ingredient in FM formulation for replacing copper. Five FMs in the form of brake shoes were developed, keeping all other ingredients identical and varying combinations of two solid lubricants viz. graphite and hBN systematically. The amount of these two solid lubricants was purposefully kept high (20%) so that the effect on performance properties could be visible clearly. Samples were tribo-evaluated using chase test rig as per IS 2742 standard. The paper discusses on the influence of these solid lubricants on performance properties of the series of five FMs.
Estimating Consumption Economies of Scale, Adult Equivalence Scales, and Household Bargaining Power

How much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married? What percentage of a married couple`s expenditures are controlled by the husband? How much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart? We propose and estimate a collective model of household behavior that permits identification and estimation of concepts such as these. We model households in terms of the utility functions of its members, a bargaining or social welfare function, and a consumption technology function. We demonstrate generic nonparametric identification of the model, and hence of a version of adult equivalence scales that we call indifference scales, as well as consumption economies of scale, the household`s resource sharing rule or members` bargaining power, and other related concepts.
Immunotherapy Plus Cryotherapy: Potential Augmented Abscopal Effect for Advanced Cancers

Since the 1920s the gold standard for treating cancer has been surgery, which is typically preceded or followed with chemotherapy and/or radiation, a process that perhaps contributes to the destruction of a patient’s immune defense system. Cryosurgery ablation of a solid tumor is mechanistically similar to a vaccination where hundreds of unique antigens from a heterogeneous population of tumor cells derived from the invading cancer are released. However, releasing tumor-derived self-antigens into circulation may not be sufficient enough to overcome the checkpoint escape mechanisms some cancers have evolved to avoid immune responses. The potentiated immune response caused by blocking tumor checkpoints designed to prevent programmed cell death may be the optimal treatment method for the immune system to recognize these new circulating cryoablated self-antigens. Preclinical and clinical evidence exists for the complementary roles for Cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated protein (CTLA-4) and PD-1 antagonists in regulating adaptive immunity, demonstrating that combination immunotherapy followed by cryosurgery provides a more targeted immune response to distant lesions, a phenomenon known as the abscopal effect. We propose that when the host’s immune system has been “primed” with combined anti-CTLA-4 and anti-PD-1 adjuvants prior to cryosurgery, the preserved cryoablated tumor antigens will be presented and processed by the host’s immune system resulting in a robust cytotoxic CD8+ T-cell response. Based on recent investigations and well-described biochemical mechanisms presented herein, a polyvalent autoinoculation of many tumor-specific antigens, derived from a heterogeneous population of tumor cancer cells, would present to an unhindered yet pre-sensitized immune system yielding a superior advantage in locating, recognizing, and destroying tumor cells throughout the body.
Acid-suppressive medication use and the risk for hospital-acquired pneumonia.

CONTEXT The use of acid-suppressive medication has been steadily increasing, particularly in the inpatient setting, despite lack of an accepted indication in the majority of these patients. OBJECTIVE To examine the association between acid-suppressive medication and hospital-acquired pneumonia. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS Prospective pharmacoepidemiologic cohort study. All patients who were admitted to a large, urban, academic medical center in Boston, Massachusetts, from January 2004 through December 2007; at least 18 years of age; and hospitalized for 3 or more days were eligible for inclusion. Admissions with time spent in the intensive care unit were excluded. Acid-suppressive medication use was defined as any order for a proton-pump inhibitor or histamine(2) receptor antagonist. Traditional and propensity-matched multivariable logistic regression were used to control for confounders. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Incidence of hospital-acquired pneumonia, defined via codes from the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM), in patients exposed and unexposed to acid-suppressive medication. RESULTS The final cohort comprised 63 878 admissions. Acid-suppressive medication was ordered in 52% of admissions and hospital-acquired pneumonia occurred in 2219 admissions (3.5%). The unadjusted incidence of hospital-acquired pneumonia was higher in the group exposed to acid-suppressive medication than in the unexposed group (4.9% vs 2.0%; odds ratio [OR], 2.6; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.3-2.8). Using multivariable logistic regression, the adjusted OR of hospital-acquired pneumonia in the group exposed to acid-suppressive medication was 1.3 (95% CI, 1.1-1.4). The matched propensity-score analyses yielded identical results. The association was significant for proton-pump inhibitors (OR, 1.3; 95% CI, 1.1-1.4) but not for histamine(2) receptor antagonists (OR, 1.2; 95% CI, 0.98-1.4). CONCLUSIONS In this large, hospital-based pharmacoepidemiologic cohort, acid-suppressive medication use was associated with 30% increased odds of hospital-acquired pneumonia. In subset analyses, statistically significant risk was demonstrated only for proton-pump inhibitor use.
Deep Spatial Pyramid Match Kernel for Scene Classification

Several works have shown that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can be easily adapted to different datasets and tasks. However, for extracting the deep features from these pre-trained deep CNNs a fixedsize (e.g., 227×227) input image is mandatory. Now the state-of-the-art datasets like MIT-67 and SUN-397 come with images of different sizes. Usage of CNNs for these datasets enforces the user to bring different sized images to a fixed size either by reducing or enlarging the images. The curiosity is obvious that “Isn’t the conversion to fixed size image is lossy ? ”. In this work, we provide a mechanism to keep these lossy fixed size images aloof and process the images in its original form to get set of varying size deep feature maps, hence being lossless. We also propose deep spatial pyramid match kernel (DSPMK) which amalgamates set of varying size deep feature maps and computes a matching score between the samples. Proposed DSPMK act as a dynamic kernel in the classification framework of scene dataset using support vector machine. We demonstrated the effectiveness of combining the power of varying size CNN-based set of deep feature maps with dynamic kernel by achieving state-of-the-art results for high-level visual recognition tasks such as scene classification on standard datasets like MIT67 and SUN397.
Perceptions of the risks of password related activities

Many studies have investigated people’s risky password related activities such as writing down passwords, sharing them with other people and re-using them across accounts, but few studies have investigated people’s perceptions of the risks of these activities. This paper reports on an online survey with 129 people rating the risks of 11 different password related activities in four domains (social networking, email, eBanking and eCommerce). There were fewer differences between the perceived riskiness of activities due to domain than expected, but differences between the activities and the numbers of respondents who said they would engage in the different activities. There were interesting patterns of differences in the ratings of the riskiness, severity of the consequences, usefulness and likelihood of encountering the different activities, which may help explain why people undertake risky password activities.
Optimal Surface Segmentation in Volumetric Images-A Graph-Theoretic Approach

Efficient segmentation of globally optimal surfaces representing object boundaries in volumetric data sets is important and challenging in many medical image analysis applications. We have developed an optimal surface detection method capable of simultaneously detecting multiple interacting surfaces, in which the optimality is controlled by the cost functions designed for individual surfaces and by several geometric constraints defining the surface smoothness and interrelations. The method solves the surface segmentation problem by transforming it into computing a minimum s{\hbox{-}} t cut in a derived arc-weighted directed graph. The proposed algorithm has a low-order polynomial time complexity and is computationally efficient. It has been extensively validated on more than 300 computer-synthetic volumetric images, 72 CT-scanned data sets of different-sized plexiglas tubes, and tens of medical images spanning various imaging modalities. In all cases, the approach yielded highly accurate results. Our approach can be readily extended to higher-dimensional image segmentation.
What Skills Do Student Interpreters Need to Learn in Sight Translation Training

Although sight translation is widely taught in interpreter education and practicsed in the field, there has been a dearth of studies on sight translation. This paper presents the preliminary findings of a pilot study comparing six student interpreters and three professional interpreters’ sight translation of an English speech text into Korean, which is their A language. This paper examines their sight translation performances in terms of accuracy, target language expressions and delivery qualities. The results indicate that student interpreters need to further develop their reading skills to accurately understand the source text and distinguish key ideas from ancillary ideas. The data analysis also reveals that student interpreters need to make conscious efforts to distance themselves from the source language form and develop translation skills to avoid literal translations. These findings have pedagogical implications for sight translation training. This paper discusses condensation strategy as an effective method to enhance delivery and target language qualities. Finally, this paper calls for further research on this under-researched component in the interpreting curriculum.
Pre-avalanche structural rearrangements in the bulk of granular medium: Experimental evidence

Granular avalanches are typical threshold-type phenomena implying the loss of stability of granular packings when their slope exceeds a critical angle. Detection of avalanche precursors is important for both basic studies and numerous applications. In this respect, only surface observations are presently available, whereas other known techniques are not suitable to detect internal pre-avalanche rearrangements expected from physical considerations and numerical simulations. Here, we report the first experimental evidence of avalanche precursors and the long-lasting post-avalanche rearrangements in the bulk of 3D granular packings. We use an original nonlinear-acoustic probing methodology which is selectively sensitive to the state of weakest intergrain contacts. This methodology allowed us to clearly detect transient pre-avalanche rearrangements of the weak-contact network. Those rearrangements get stronger and exhibit quasi-periodicity closer to the avalanche triggering, whereas the statistics of the sounding signal amplitude shows clear transition from Gaussian to power law behavior.
Pretreatment Rostral Anterior Cingulate Cortex Theta Activity in Relation to Symptom Improvement in Depression: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Importance Major depressive disorder (MDD) remains challenging to treat. Although several clinical and demographic variables have been found to predict poor antidepressant response, these markers have not been robustly replicated to warrant implementation in clinical care. Increased pretreatment rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) theta activity has been linked to better antidepressant outcomes. However, no prior study has evaluated whether this marker has incremental predictive validity over clinical and demographic measures. Objective To determine whether increased pretreatment rACC theta activity would predict symptom improvement regardless of randomization arm. Design, Setting, and Participants A multicenter randomized clinical trial enrolled outpatients without psychosis and with chronic or recurrent MDD between July 29, 2011, and December 15, 2015 (Establishing Moderators and Biosignatures of Antidepressant Response for Clinical Care [EMBARC]). Patients were consecutively recruited from 4 university hospitals: 634 patients were screened, 296 were randomized to receive sertraline hydrochloride or placebo, 266 had electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings, and 248 had usable EEG data. Resting EEG data were recorded at baseline and 1 week after trial onset, and rACC theta activity was extracted using source localization. Intent-to-treat analysis was conducted. Data analysis was performed from October 7, 2016, to January 19, 2018. Interventions An 8-week course of sertraline or placebo. Main Outcomes and Measures The 17-item Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression score (assessed at baseline and weeks 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8). Results The 248 participants (160 [64.5%] women, 88 [35.5%] men) with usable EEG data had a mean (SD) age of 36.75 (13.15) years. Higher rACC theta activity at both baseline (b = −1.05; 95% CI, −1.77 to −0.34; P = .004) and week 1 (b = −0.83; 95% CI, −1.60 to −0.06; P < .04) predicted greater depressive symptom improvement, even when controlling for clinical and demographic variables previously linked with treatment outcome. These effects were not moderated by treatment arm. The rACC theta marker, in combination with clinical and demographic variables, accounted for an estimated 39.6% of the variance in symptom change (with 8.5% of the variance uniquely attributable to the rACC theta marker). Conclusions and Relevance Increased pretreatment rACC theta activity represents a nonspecific prognostic marker of treatment outcome. This is the first study to date to demonstrate that rACC theta activity has incremental predictive validity. Trial Registration clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT01407094
Quality Assessment of Kumu Injection, a Traditional Chinese Medicine Preparation, Using HPLC Combined with Chemometric Methods and Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Multiple Alkaloids by Single Marker

Kumu injection (KMI) is a common-used traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) preparation made from Picrasma quassioides (D. Don) Benn. rich in alkaloids. An innovative technique for quality assessment of KMI was developed using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) combined with chemometric methods and qualitative and quantitative analysis of multi-components by single marker (QAMS). Nigakinone (PQ-6, 5-hydroxy-4-methoxycanthin-6-one), one of the most abundant alkaloids responsible for the major pharmacological activities of Kumu, was used as a reference substance. Six alkaloids in KMI were quantified, including 6-hydroxy-β-carboline-1-carboxylic acid (PQ-1), 4,5-dimethoxycanthin-6-one (PQ-2), β-carboline-1-carboxylic acid (PQ-3), β-carboline-1-propanoic acid (PQ-4), 3-methylcanthin-5,6-dione (PQ-5), and PQ-6. Based on the outcomes of twenty batches of KMI samples, the contents of six alkaloids were used for further chemometric analysis. By hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA), radar plots, and principal component analysis (PCA), all the KMI samples could be categorized into three groups, which were closely related to production date and indicated the crucial influence of herbal raw material on end products of KMI. QAMS combined with chemometric analysis could accurately measure and clearly distinguish the different quality samples of KMI. Hence, QAMS is a feasible and promising method for the quality control of KMI.
Tooth erosion and dental caries in schoolchildren: is there a relationship between them?

Aim: To identify a possible association between the occurrence of dental caries and tooth erosion and to correlate the dietary factor with an increased risk of dental caries. Methods: A crosssectional study in a multistage random sample of 1,211, 8 to 12-years-old Brazilian schoolchildren in private and public schools was conducted in Pelotas, Brazil. The prevalence of dental caries and tooth erosion was assessed. Dietary habits data were collected by a structured questionnaire. Data were analyzed using Poisson regression model taking into account the cluster sample (Prevalence ratio - PR; 95% Confidence Interval - CI). Results: The prevalence of dental caries and tooth erosion was 32.4% (95% CI: 30.0; 35.2) and 25.0% (95% CI: 23.4; 29.0), respectively. Most children had high consumption of sweets (65%). Consumption of fruits, such as oranges (31%), strawberries (23.6%), pineapple (12%), and natural fruit juices (oranges, lemon) was low. Soft drinks consumption, 3 or more times a week was observed in 40% of the children. Conclusions: Dental caries was not statistically associated with tooth erosion. The consumption of acidic fruits/drinks was not associated with dental caries. Dental caries and dental erosion were not associated with each other and with acidic fruits or drinks consumption.
Observations of Drizzle in Nocturnal Marine Stratocumulus

Abstract In situ and radar data from the second field study of the Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus (DYCOMS-II) have been used to study drizzle in stratocumulus. Measurements indicate that drizzle is prevalent. During five of seven analyzed flights precipitation was evident at the surface, and on roughly a third of the flights mean surface rates approached or exceeded 0.5 mm day−1. Additional analysis of the structure and variability of drizzle indicates that the macroscopic (flight averaged) mean drizzle rates at cloud base scale with H3/N where H is the flight-averaged cloud depth and N the flight-averaged cloud droplet number concentration. To a lesser extent flight-to-flight variability in the mean drizzle rate also scales well with differences in the 11- and 4-μm brightness temperatures, and the cloud-top effective radius. The structure of stratocumulus boundary layers with precipitation reaching the surface is also investigated, and a general picture emerges of large flight-averaged dr.