Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Integrative Review of Reiki Touch Therapy Research

Reiki touch therapy is a complementary biofield energy therapy that involves the use of hands to help strengthen the body's ability to heal. There is growing interest among nurses to use Reiki in patient care and as a self-care treatment, however, with little supportive empirical research and evidence to substantiate these practices. The purpose of this integrative review is to begin the systematic process of evaluating the findings of published Reiki research. Selected investigations using Reiki for effects on stress, relaxation, depression, pain, and wound healing management, among others is reviewed and summarized. A summary of Reiki studies table illustrates the study descriptions and Reiki treatment protocols specified in the investigations. Synthesis of findings for clinical practice and implications for future research are explored.
THE EFFECT OF REST INTERVAL LENGTH ON REPETITION CONSISTENCY AND PERCEIVED EXERTION DURING NEAR MAXIMAL LOADED BENCH PRESS SETS.

The purpose of this study was to compare different rest intervals between sets on repetition consistency and ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) during consecutive bench press sets with an absolute 3RM load. Sixteen trained men (23.75 ± 4.21 years; 74.63 ± 5.36 kg; 175 ± 4.64 cm; bench press relative strength: 1.44 ± 0.19 kg/kg of body mass) attended four randomly ordered sessions during which five consecutive sets of the bench press were performed with an absolute 3RM load and 1, 2, 3, or 5 minutes of rest interval between sets. The results indicated that significantly greater bench press repetitions were completed with 2, 3 and 5 minutes versus 1 minute rest between sets (p ≤ 0.05); no significant differences were noted between the 2, 3 and 5 minute rest conditions. For the 1 minute rest condition, performance reductions (relative to the first set) were observed commencing with the second set; whereas for the other conditions (2, 3, and 5 minutes rest), performance reductions were not evident until the third and fourth sets. The RPE values prior to each of the successive sets were significantly greater, commencing with the second set for the 1 minute versus the 3 and 5 minute rest conditions. Significant increases were also evident in RPE immediately following each set between the 1 and 5 minute rest conditions from the second through fifth sets. These findings indicate that when utilizing an absolute 3RM load for the bench press, practitioners may prescribe a time-efficient minimum of 2 minutes rest between sets without significant impairments in repetition performance. However, lower perceived exertion levels may necessitate prescription of a minimum of 3 minutes rest between sets.
Effect of Five-Consecutive-Day Exposure to an Anxiogenic Stressor on Sleep-Wake Activity in Rats

Repeated exposure to an anxiogenic stressor (AS) is a known environmental factor for the development of depression, yet the progression of sleep-wake (S-W) changes associated with the onset of AS-induced depression (ASID) is not completely understood. Thus, the aim of this study was to identify these progressive S-W changes by developing ASID in rats, via repeated exposure to an AS, and compare this ASID-associated sleep phenotype with the sleep phenotype of human depression. To achieve this aim, rats were first recorded for a 6 h period of baseline S-W activity without AS. Then, rats were subjected to 5 days of AS [Day 1: inescapable foot-shock; 5 trials of 3 s foot-shocks (1.0 mA) at 3 min intervals; Days 3–5: 15 trials of 5 s foot-shocks at 45 s intervals]. S-W activity was recorded for 6 h immediately after each AS treatment session. Two days later rats were again recorded for 6 h of S-W activity, but with no exposure to the AS (NASD). Compared to the baseline day: Day 1 of AS (ASD-1) increased wakefulness, slow-wave sleep (SWS) latency, and rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep latency, but decreased the total amount of REM sleep; ASD-2 animals remained awake throughout the 6 h S-W recording period; ASD-3, ASD-4, and ASD-5 (ASDs-3–5) decreased wakefulness, SWS latency, and REM sleep latency, but increased the total amount of REM sleep. Interestingly, these results reveal that initial exposure to the AS versus later, repeated exposure to the AS produced opposing S-W changes. On NASD, animals exhibited baseline-like S-W activity, except slightly less REM sleep. These results suggest that repeated AS produces a sleep phenotype that resembles the sleep phenotype of depression in humans, but consistent re-exposure to the AS is required. These results are promising because the methodological simplicity and reversibility of the ASID-associated S-W phenotype could be more advantageous than other animal models for studying the pathophysiological mechanisms that underlie the expression of ASID.
Tartrate-Resistant Acid Phosphatase 5b is a Useful Serum Marker for Diagnosis and Recurrence Detection of Giant Cell Tumor of Bone

Serum tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase (TRACP) 5b was investigated for use as a marker for diagnosis of giant cell tumor (GCT) of bone and for detection of its recurrence. Four patients with GCT of bone who were initially referred to our hospital were classified as a primary group. Three patients who had local recurrence following curettage were classified as a local recurrence group. Five with no recurrence were classified as a no-recurrence group. Eighteen patients with primary and metastatic malignant bone tumors were also enrolled in the study as a control group. Serum TRACP 5b was measured before the biopsy in all patients and was measured periodically after the operation in patients with GCT of bone. Student t-tests were used for statistical analyses. TRACP 5b was greater than 1500 Um/dL in all primary group patients. Mean TRACP 5b values decreased gradually with post-operative time, showing lower values until local recurrence. The mean value of TRACP 5b of the local recurrence group (753 ± 68.7 mU/dL) was significantly higher than that of the no-recurrence group (340.6 ± 78.3 mU/dL). The mean value of TRACP 5b of the control group (466.9 ± 130.3 mU/dL) was much lower than that of the primary group and markedly lower than that of the local recurrence group. However, no significant difference was found between the no-recurrence group and the control group. Serum TRACP 5b is a useful and convenient marker for diagnosing GCT of bone and for predicting its recurrence.
Enhanced strain-based fatigue methodology for high strength aluminum alloys

Enhanced strain-based fatigue methodology for high strength aluminum alloys Attilio Arcari The design of any mechanical components requires an understanding of the general statical, dynamical and environmental conditions where the components will be operating to give satisfactory results in terms of performance and endurance. The premature failure of any components is undesirable and potentially catastrophic, therefore predictions on performances and endurances of components to proceed with repair or substitution is vital to the stability of the structure where the component is inserted. Improvements to a strain based approach to fatigue were obtained in this study, studying the effects of mean stresses on fatigue life and investigating cyclic mean stress relaxation of two aluminum alloys, 7075-T6511 and 7249-T76511, used in structural aircraft applications. The two aluminum alloys were tested and their fatigue behavior characterized. The project, entirely funded by NAVAIR, Naval Air Systems Command, and jointly coordinated with TDA, Technical Data Analysis Inc., was aimed to obtain fatigue data for both aluminum alloys, with particular interest in 7249 alloy because of its enhanced corrosion resistance, and to give guidelines for improving the performances of FAMS, Fatigue Analysis of Metallic Structures, a life prediction software from the point of view of both mean stress effects and mean stress relaxation. The sensitivity of engineering materials to mean stresses is of high relevance in a strain based fatigue approach. The performance of the most common models used to calculate mean stress correction factors was studied for the two aluminum alloys 7075 and 7249 to give guidelines in the use of those for life predictions. Not only mean stresses have a high influence on fatigue life, but they are also subjected to transient cyclic behaviors. The following study considered both an empirical approach and a plasticity theory approach to simulate and include these transient effects in life calculations. Results will give valid directions to a successful modification of FAMS like any other life calculation software to include in the picture transient phenomena.
The Evolution of Sex through the Baldwin Effect

This article suggests that the fundamental haploid-diploid cycle of eukaryotic sex exploits a rudimentary form of the Baldwin effect. With this explanation for the basic cycle, the other associated phenomena can be explained as evolution tuning the amount and frequency of learning experienced by an organism. Using the well-known NK model of fitness landscapes, it is shown that varying landscape ruggedness varies the benefit of the haploid-diploid cycle, whether based upon endomitosis or syngamy. The utility of pre-meiotic doubling and recombination during the cycle are also shown to vary with landscape ruggedness. This view is suggested as underpinning, rather than contradicting, many existing explanations for sex.
Oncolytic adenoviruses coated with MHC-I tumor epitopes increase the antitumor immunity and efficacy against melanoma

ABSTRACT The stimulation of the immune system using oncolytic adenoviruses (OAds) has attracted significant interest and several studies suggested that OAds immunogenicity might be important for their efficacy. Therefore, we developed a versatile and rapid system to adsorb tumor-specific major histocompatibility complex class I (MHC-I) peptides onto the viral surface to drive the immune response toward the tumor epitopes. By studying the model epitope SIINFEKL, we demonstrated that the peptide-coated OAd (PeptiCRAd) retains its infectivity and the cross presentation of the modified-exogenous epitope on MHC-I is not hindered. We then showed that the SIINFEKL-targeting PeptiCRAd achieves a superior antitumor efficacy and increases the percentage of antitumor CD8+ T cells and mature epitope-specific dendritic cells in vivo. PeptiCRAds loaded with clinically relevant tumor epitopes derived from tyrosinase-related protein 2 (TRP-2) and human gp100 could reduce the growth of primary-treated tumors and secondary-untreated melanomas, promoting the expansion of antigen-specific T-cell populations. Finally, we tested PeptiCRAd in humanized mice bearing human melanomas. In this model, a PeptiCRAd targeting the human melanoma-associated antigen A1 (MAGE-A1) and expressing granulocyte and macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) was able to eradicate established tumors and increased the human MAGE-A1-specific CD8+ T cell population. Herein, we show that the immunogenicity of OAds plays a key role in their efficacy and it can be exploited to direct the immune response system toward exogenous tumor epitopes. This versatile and rapid system overcomes the immunodominance of the virus and elicits a tumor-specific immune response, making PeptiCRAd a promising approach for clinical testing.
A nonexclusive task decomposition method for modular neural networks

Modular neural networks (MNNs) architectures have been developed aiming to outperform single neural nets. One of the main drawbacks in the construction of the MNNs is the task decomposition which consists in divide the problem into simpler sub-problems. This paper proposes a novel task decomposition method in which the classes of the problem can be divided redundantly. Thus, two different expert modules can have the same class. This is specially interesting for problems that have multimodal classes. The proposed MNN, called Redundant Pattern Distributor, is compared with other ones over many databases and the results show its effectiveness.
Estimating phoneme class conditional probabilities from raw speech signal using convolutional neural networks

In hybrid hidden Markov model/artificial neural networks (HMM/ANN) automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, the phoneme class conditional probabilities are estimated by first extracting acoustic features from the speech signal based on prior knowledge such as, speech perception or/and speech production knowledge, and, then modeling the acoustic features with an ANN. Recent advances in machine learning techniques, more specifically in the field of image processing and text processing, have shown that such divide and conquer strategy (i.e., separating feature extraction and modeling steps) may not be necessary. Motivated from these studies, in the framework of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), this paper investigates a novel approach, where the input to the ANN is raw speech signal and the output is phoneme class conditional probability estimates. On TIMIT phoneme recognition task, we study different ANN architectures to show the benefit of CNNs and compare the proposed approach against conventional approach where, spectral-based feature MFCC is extracted and modeled by a multilayer perceptron. Our studies show that the proposed approach can yield comparable or better phoneme recognition performance when compared to the conventional approach. It indicates that CNNs can learn features relevant for phoneme classification automatically from the raw speech signal.
A CFAR optimization for low frequency UWB SAR change detection algorithms

This paper presents a study on the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) filter design for change detection algorithms (CDA). More specifically, we are interested in CFAR filters used in CDA for low frequency ultra-wideband (UWB) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems. The filter design performance was evaluated in terms of false alarm rate (FAR) and probability of detection (PD). For evaluation purposes, we considered a set of SAR images obtained with the CARABAS-II system. The results are compared with the ones presented in [1], where the same CDA was considered, except for the CFAR filter. The results show that relevant FAR performance improvements can be obtained by just modifying the CFAR filter parameters taking into account the image resolution and target characteristics.
Role of the Protein Tyrosine Phosphatase Shp2 in Homeostasis of the Intestinal Epithelium

Protein tyrosine phosphorylation is thought to be important for regulation of the proliferation, differentiation, and rapid turnover of intestinal epithelial cells (IECs). The role of protein tyrosine phosphatases in such homeostatic regulation of IECs has remained largely unknown, however. Src homology 2–containing protein tyrosine phosphatase (Shp2) is a ubiquitously expressed cytoplasmic protein tyrosine phosphatase that functions as a positive regulator of the Ras–mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling pathway operative downstream of the receptors for various growth factors and cytokines, and it is thereby thought to contribute to the regulation of cell proliferation and differentiation. We now show that mice lacking Shp2 specifically in IECs (Shp2 CKO mice) develop severe colitis and die as early as 3 to 4 weeks after birth. The number of goblet cells in both the small intestine and colon of Shp2 CKO mice was markedly reduced compared with that for control mice. Furthermore, Shp2 CKO mice showed marked impairment of both IEC migration along the crypt-villus axis in the small intestine and the development of intestinal organoids from isolated crypts. The colitis as well as the reduction in the number of goblet cells apparent in Shp2 CKO mice were normalized by expression of an activated form of K-Ras in IECs. Our results thus suggest that Shp2 regulates IEC homeostasis through activation of Ras and thereby protects against the development of colitis.
Tackling asthma phenotypes in community studies

Episodic wheezing with variable airflow obstruction (asthma) defines a syndrome that is well recognised and much studied. It is now clear that this syndrome is heterogeneous in its clinical features, treatment response, prognosis and pathophysiological mechanisms. Causation remains elusive, yet the differences in asthma prevalence across the world,1 the effect of migration on changing asthma prevalence2 and the rise in asthma prevalence in the past decades highlight very potent gene and environmental effects that modify the clinical expression of asthma.3 Studying asthma heterogeneity is a useful way to disentangle these complex issues.4 The intense focus on allergic mechanisms has given us very precise understanding of the Th2–eosinophil mechanistic pathway, effective and specific treatment—for example, anti-immunoglobulin E (IgE) monoclonal antibody treatment—and shown that a primary prevention strategy based on this approach is not likely to be beneficial. Current attention is focusing on patterns of granulocyte infiltration, specifically the presence or absence of eosinophils and neutrophils.5 There is clear heterogeneity in these responses among adults with asthma, where a non-eosinophilic pattern of response is associated with more severe persistent asthma, non-response to corticosteroid therapy and certain specific trigger factors such as tobacco smoking and occupational exposures. Furthermore, it is also possible to link the granulocyte response patterns to key immunological mechanisms, such as eosinophils with Th2 lymphocyte responses and neutrophils with dysfunctional innate immune responses.6 This approach integrates basic mechanisms with clinical asthma heterogeneity to yield endogenous asthma phenotypes, or “endotypes”. 7 While the application of the …
Cholesterol Enhances Helicobacter pylori Resistance to Antibiotics and LL-37

ABSTRACT The human gastric pathogen Helicobacter pylori steals host cholesterol, modifies it by glycosylation, and incorporates the glycosylated cholesterol onto its surface via a cholesterol glucosyltransferase, encoded by cgt. The impact of cholesterol on H. pylori antimicrobial resistance is unknown. H. pylori strain 26695 was cultured in Ham's F12 chemically defined medium in the presence or absence of cholesterol. The two cultures were subjected to overnight incubations with serial 2-fold dilutions of 12 antibiotics, six antifungals, and seven antimicrobial peptides (including LL-37 cathelicidin and human alpha and beta defensins). Of 25 agents tested, cholesterol-grown H. pylori cells were substantially more resistant (over 100-fold) to nine agents than were H. pylori cells grown without cholesterol. These nine agents included eight antibiotics and LL-37. H. pylori was susceptible to the antifungal drug pimaricin regardless of cholesterol presence in the culture medium. A cgt mutant retained cholesterol-dependent resistance to most antimicrobials but displayed increased susceptibility to colistin, suggesting an involvement of lipid A. Mutation of lpxE, encoding lipid A1-phosphatase, led to loss of cholesterol-dependent resistance to polymyxin B and colistin but not other antimicrobials tested. The cgt mutant was severely attenuated in gerbils, indicating that glycosylation is essential in vivo. These findings suggest that cholesterol plays a vital role in virulence and contributes to the intrinsic antibiotic resistance of H. pylori.
Lymphoma‐ and leukemia‐associated chromosomal translocations in healthy individuals

Chromosomal translocations (CTs) are hallmark mutations of hematopoietic malignancy that result in the deregulated expression of oncogenes or the generation of novel fusion genes. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) can be used to detect illegitimate recombinations of genomic DNA sequences as a more sensitive assay than cytogenetics for determining the presence of CTs. Both direct DNA‐PCR and reverse transcriptase‐PCR were used to examine healthy individuals for lymphoma‐ and leukemia‐associated CTs. Two oncogene‐activating CTs [t(14;18)(q32;q21) and t(8;14)(q24;q32)] and one fusion‐gene CT [t(2;5)(p23;q35)] from lymphomas and five fusion‐gene CTs from leukemia [t(9;22)(q34;q11), t(4;11)(q21;q23), t(15;17)(q22;q11), t(12;21)(p13;q22), t(8;21)(q22;q22)] were detected in such studies. The biological implication is that CTs associated with malignant tumors may also be found in cells that are not neoplastic. CTs are characteristic attributes of neoplastic clones but are by themselves insufficient to cause malignant transformation. A better understanding of the special biology of non‐neoplastic CT‐bearing cells will provide insight into their putative role as tumor precursors. Prospective epidemiological studies are needed to determine whether such cells in healthy individuals may, in some instances, become clonogenic founders of lymphoma or leukemia. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Endothelin-1 – Induced Arrhythmogenic Ca 2 Signaling Is Abolished in Atrial Myocytes of Inositol-1 , 4 , 5-Trisphosphate ( IP 3 ) – Receptor Type 2 – Deficient Mice

Recent studies have suggested that inositol-1,4,5-trisphosphate-receptor (IP3R)–mediated Ca 2 release plays an important role in the modulation of excitation–contraction coupling (ECC) in atrial tissue and the generation of arrhythmias, specifically chronic atrial fibrillation (AF). IP3R type-2 (IP3R2) is the predominant IP3R isoform expressed in atrial myocytes. To determine the role of IP3R2 in atrial arrhythmogenesis and ECC, we generated IP3R2-deficient mice. Our results revealed that endothelin-1 (ET-1) stimulation of wild-type (WT) atrial myocytes caused an increase in basal [Ca ]i, an enhancement of action potential (AP)-induced [Ca 2 ]i transients, an improvement of the efficacy of ECC (increased fractional SR Ca release), and the occurrence of spontaneous arrhythmogenic Ca release events as the result of activation of IP3R-dependent Ca 2 release. In contrast, ET-1 did not alter diastolic [Ca ]i or cause spontaneous Ca release events in IP3R2-deficient atrial myocytes. Under basal conditions the spatio-temporal properties (amplitude, rise-time, decay kinetics, and spatial spread) of [Ca ]i transients and fractional SR Ca 2 release were not different in WT and IP3R2-deficient atrial myocytes. WT and IP3R2-deficient atrial myocytes also showed a significant and very similar increase in the amplitude of AP-dependent [Ca ]i transients and Ca 2 spark frequency in response to isoproterenol stimulation, suggesting that both cell types maintained a strong inotropic reserve. No compensatory changes in Ca regulatory protein expression (IP3R1, IP3R3, RyR2, NCX, SERCA2) or morphology of the atria could be detected between WT and IP3R2-deficient mice. These results show that lack of IP3R2 abolishes the positive inotropic effect of neurohumoral stimulation with ET-1 and protects from its arrhythmogenic effects. (Circ Res. 2005;96:1274-1281.)