Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Testosterone affects language areas of the adult human brain

Although the sex steroid hormone testosterone is integrally involved in the development of language processing, ethical considerations mostly limit investigations to single hormone administrations. To circumvent this issue we assessed the influence of continuous high‐dose hormone application in adult female‐to‐male transsexuals. Subjects underwent magnetic resonance imaging before and after 4 weeks of testosterone treatment, with each scan including structural, diffusion weighted and functional imaging. Voxel‐based morphometry analysis showed decreased gray matter volume with increasing levels of bioavailable testosterone exclusively in Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Particularly, this may link known sex differences in language performance to the influence of testosterone on relevant brain regions. Using probabilistic tractography, we further observed that longitudinal changes in testosterone negatively predicted changes in mean diffusivity of the corresponding structural connection passing through the extreme capsule. Considering a related increase in myelin staining in rodents, this potentially reflects a strengthening of the fiber tract particularly involved in language comprehension. Finally, functional images at resting‐state were evaluated, showing increased functional connectivity between the two brain regions with increasing testosterone levels. These findings suggest testosterone‐dependent neuroplastic adaptations in adulthood within language‐specific brain regions and connections. Importantly, deteriorations in gray matter volume seem to be compensated by enhancement of corresponding structural and functional connectivity. Hum Brain Mapp 37:1738–1748, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Spectrum of MR Imaging Findings in Wernicke Encephalopathy: Are Atypical Areas of Involvement Only Present in Nonalcoholic Patients?

Are MRI findings different in nonalcoholic vs alcoholic Wernicke encephalopathy? Here, the authors assessed MRI in 24 patients and correlated findings with the clinical features of the disease. Despite previous reports stating that nonalcoholic Wernicke encephalopathy presents different and more extensive abnormalities, the results of this study indicate the contrary; that is, there is no difference in MRI findings between groups. The medulla was frequently affected and less than 20% of patients had the typical clinical triad. BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Although MR imaging is considered the most effective method to confirm a diagnosis of WE, MR imaging studies designed to distinguish WE between NA and AL patients have yielded controversial results. The purpose of this study was to determine potential differences in MR imaging features between AL and NA patients with WE and to compare neurologic symptoms with MR imaging findings. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This retrospective study included 24 consecutive patients (male/female, 15:9; mean age, 54 years) diagnosed with WE in a university hospital (AL = 13, NA = 11). Clinical manifestations and MR imaging findings between AL and NA patients were evaluated. Classic WE symptom triad and consciousness level and MR imaging findings were scored and compared with each other. Statistical analyses were performed with χ2, Fisher exact, and Spearman tests. RESULTS: No differences were observed regarding the areas of hyperintense signal intensity on FLAIR imaging and enhancement of the mammillary bodies between AL and NA patients (P > .05). Frequent sites of involvement were the medial thalami (86%), dorsal medulla (82%), tectal plate (77%), and the periaqueductal gray matter (75%). A positive association was found between the consciousness levels of the patients and the involvement of atypical sites (P = .01). Only 4 of the 24 patients (17%) had all 3 symptoms of the classic WE symptom triad. CONCLUSIONS: MR imaging features of WE may not be different between AL and NA patients. The medulla is 1 of the most frequently involved sites, and consciousness level is also associated with atypical site involvement.
COP9-Hedgehog axis regulates the function of the germline stem cell progeny differentiation niche in the Drosophila ovary

Both stem cell self-renewal and lineage differentiation are controlled extrinsically as well as intrinsically. Germline stem cells (GSCs) in the Drosophila ovary provide an attractive model in which to study both stem cell self-renewal and lineage differentiation at the molecular and cellular level. Recently, we have proposed that escort cells (ECs) form a differentiation niche to control GSC lineage specification extrinsically. However, it remains poorly understood how the maintenance and function of the differentiation niche are regulated at the molecular level. Here, this study reveals a new role of COP9 in the differentiation niche to modulate autocrine Hedgehog (Hh) signaling, thereby promoting GSC lineage differentiation. COP9, which is a highly conserved protein complex composed of eight CSN subunits, catalyzes the removal of Nedd8 protein modification from target proteins. Our genetic results have demonstrated that all the COP9 components and the hh pathway components, including hh itself, are required in ECs to promote GSC progeny differentiation. Interestingly, COP9 is required in ECs to maintain Hh signaling activity, and activating Hh signaling in ECs can partially bypass the requirement for COP9 in GSC progeny differentiation. Finally, both COP9 and Hh signaling in ECs promote GSC progeny differentiation partly by preventing BMP signaling and maintaining cellular processes. Therefore, this study has demonstrated that the COP9-Hh signaling axis operates in the differentiation niche to promote GSC progeny differentiation partly by maintaining EC cellular processes and preventing BMP signaling. This provides new insight into how the function of the differentiation niche is regulated at the molecular level. Summary: A COP9-Hh signaling axis, which partly represses BMP signaling, is required in the Drosophila ovary to control germline stem cell lineage specification within the differentiation niche.
Race-ethnicity, nativity, neighbourhood context and reports of unfair treatment by police

This research describes how race-ethnicity, nativity and neighbourhood characteristics are associated with reports of unfair treatment by police in the previous five years by residentially stable men. Data are from waves 1 and 2 of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey. Results suggest that foreign-born Latinos are less likely than African Americans and US-born whites to report unfair treatment. After accounting for tract percentage Latino, US-born Latinos were less likely to report unfair treatment than African Americans, which partially supports a gradient model. Neighbourhood affluence was negatively associated with reports, but poverty, percentage Latino and immigrant concentration were not. The importance of neighbourhood privilege is highlighted, as is the need to better understand Latino immigrants' experiences with police. Future work should examine immigrants' interpretation of interactions with police and their willingness to report unfair treatment.
Quantitative Two-Color Fluorescence Cross-Correlation Spectroscopy in the Analysis of Polymerase Chain Reaction

Abstract We present results of an approach in which lowdensity labeled DNA itself provides an amplification of the crosscorrelated fluorescent signal in the twocolor crosscorrelation function. Tetramethylrhodamine-4- dUTP and Cy5-dCTP are incorporated by polymerase chain reaction at multiple positions of the same 217 bp t a rget DNA. We call this novel approach the twocolor FCS signal amplification. The signal amplification is an example for interactions of two ligands with diff e rent colors at multiple positions of the same target.
Evolution, Psychology, and John Dewey's Critique of the Reflex Arc Concept

John Dewey's article on the reflex arc concept in psychology was a powerful critique of mechanistic approaches to psychology and a suggestion for a more lively approach based on evolutionary assumptions. In shifting to an evolutionary view and rejecting a mechanical one, Dewey gave priority to activities rather than to entities. A psychology based on activity depicted organisms as acting to alter their own stimuli rather than being prodded from behind to respond. Adopting evolutionary assumptions also helped in understanding the units of the act (stimulus and response) as defined within an activity, like Darwinian species, rather than as predefined from without. The resulting psychology gave an integrated way of understanding the relation between organism and environment and cognition and behavior that had been separated in approaches based on entities. The approach to the act adopted in the reflex arc paper anticipated Dewey's later work, including his (and George Herbert Mead's) social psychology and his aesthetic philosophy. It also anticipated current work on activity theory. Like the latter, it may be particularly useful given the theoretical and practical divisions evident today.
Word Association Norms, Mutual Information, and Lexicography

The term word association is used in a very particular sense in the psycholinguistic literature. (Generally speaking, subjects respond quicker than normal to the word nurse if it follows a highly associated word such as doctor. ) We will extend the term to provide the basis for a statistical description of a variety of interesting linguistic phenomena, ranging from semantic relations of the doctor/nurse type (content word/content word) to lexico-syntactic co-occurrence constraints between verbs and prepositions (content word/function word). This paper will propose an objective measure based on the information theoretic notion of mutual information, for estimating word association norms from computer readable corpora. (The standard method of obtaining word association norms, testing a few thousand subjects on a few hundred words, is both costly and unreliable.) The proposed measure, the association ratio, estimates word association norms directly from computer readable corpora, making it possible to estimate norms for tens of thousands of words.
Problems in learning the concept of natural selection

In a written test investigating the level of understanding of the concept of natural selection, only 18 per cent of a group of first-year university students with an Advanced-level biology background were consistently able to apply this concept to common environmental problems. In their explanations, over half the students mistakenly formulated a ‘theory of adaptation by induced mutation’ instead of a ‘theory of evolution by natural selection’. On further analysis, many students had a poor understanding of adaptation, immunity, the origin of mutations, and the laws of inheritance. A major cause of these interrelated errors was students extrapolating from changes occurring within the lifetime of an individual, to account for evolutionary changes altering populations over many generations.
Cultural and Age Differences of Three Groups of Taiwanese Young Children's Creativity and Drawing

This study investigated the cultural and age effects on children's overall creativity and drawing. 1,055 children ages 6 to 8 from three groups—urban and rural Taiwanese children and Taiwanese children of immigrant mothers, all in public schools—were given a creativity test, a people-drawing test, and a free-drawing test. The results showed that the older Taiwanese children scored higher than the young Taiwanese children on people-drawing and free-drawing, but not overall creativity. Drawing and creativity scores increased in accordance with age. In the six-year-old group, a group difference was found only on the scale of people-drawing. Urban Taiwanese children in the eight-year-old group scored higher than the other two groups of children on creativity and free-drawing. Results are discussed in terms of educational opportunities.
Turn Off the Music! Music Impairs Visual Associative Memory Performance in Older Adults.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY Whether we are explicitly listening to it or not, music is prevalent in our environment. Surprisingly, little is known about the effect of environmental music on concurrent cognitive functioning and whether young and older adults are differentially affected by music. Here, we investigated the impact of background music on a concurrent paired associate learning task in healthy young and older adults. DESIGN AND METHODS Young and older adults listened to music or to silence while simultaneously studying face-name pairs. Participants' memory for the pairs was then tested while listening to either the same or different music. Participants also made subjective ratings about how distracting they found each song to be. RESULTS Despite the fact that all participants rated music as more distracting to their performance than silence, only older adults' associative memory performance was impaired by music. These results are most consistent with the theory that older adults' failure to inhibit processing of distracting task-irrelevant information, in this case background music, contributes to their memory impairments. IMPLICATIONS These data have important practical implications for older adults' ability to perform cognitively demanding tasks even in what many consider to be an unobtrusive environment.
Changes in histone acetylation during mouse oocyte meiosis

We examined global changes in the acetylation of histones in mouse oocytes during meiosis. Immunocytochemistry with specific antibodies against various acetylated lysine residues on histones H3 and H4 showed that acetylation of all the lysines decreased to undetectable or negligible levels in the oocytes during meiosis, whereas most of these lysines were acetylated during mitosis in preimplantation embryos and somatic cells. When the somatic cell nuclei were transferred into enucleated oocytes, the acetylation of lysines decreased markedly. This type of deacetylation was inhibited by trichostatin A, a specific inhibitor of histone deacetylase (HDAC), thereby indicating that HDAC is able to deacetylate histones during meiosis but not during mitosis. Meiosis-specific deacetylation may be a consequence of the accessibility of HDAC1 to the chromosome, because HDAC1 colocalized with the chromosome during meiosis but not during mitosis. As histone acetylation is thought to play a role in propagating the gene expression pattern to the descendent generation during mitosis, and the gene expression pattern of differentiated oocytes is reprogrammed during meiosis to allow the initiation of a new program by totipotent zygotes of the next generation, our results suggest that the oocyte cytoplasm initializes a program of gene expression by deacetylating histones.
Prevalence of Physical Activity Is Lower among Individuals with Chronic Disease.

INTRODUCTION Physical inactivity is associated with increased risk for morbidity and mortality and contributes to health care costs. Although data supporting the secondary preventive benefits of being physically active continues to grow, there is limited data on the prevalence of sufficient volume of leisure-time physical activity among individuals diagnosed with chronic disease. PURPOSE To describe the association between select chronic diseases and the prevalence of sufficient volume of aerobic leisure-time physical activity to achieve substantial health benefits (i.e., ≥150 min·wk) among adults in the United States. METHODS Self-reported leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) and history of select chronic diseases were obtained from a nationally representative sample of noninstitutionalized civilian adults 18 yr or older in the United States who participated in the 2014 National Health Interview Survey (n = 36,697). RESULTS Among all adults, the prevalence of sufficient volume of aerobic LTPA was 50.1% ± 0.5% (mean ± standard error). This prevalence was inversely related to age and was lower in women (47.1% ± 0.6%) compared with men (53.4% ± 0.6%; P < 0.001). Prevalence of sufficient volume of aerobic LTPA was lower for each chronic disease (prevalence range = 26.1%-48.6%) compared with apparently healthy adults (53.6% ± 0.7%). Relative to no chronic disease, each additional chronic disease was associated with an odds ratio of 0.83 (95% confidence interval, 0.81-0.85; P < 0.001) for sufficient volume of aerobic LTPA. CONCLUSIONS The prevalence of sufficient volume of aerobic LTPA to achieve substantial health benefits is inversely related to age and is lower among women and individuals with a chronic disease. Systems to regularly assess physical activity are needed as well as programs to help individuals be more active.
Modeling Sulfur Dioxide Absorption by Fine Water Spray

A novel theoretical model was developed to determine the removal efficiency of sulfur dioxide using fine water spray. The droplet pH, diameter, S(IV) concentration, sulfur dioxide concentration, and liquid-to-gas ratio are found to influence the absorption of sulfur dioxide by the fine water spray. The results demonstrate that the absorption of sulfur dioxide by the fine water spray increases as the droplet diameter falls. The concentration gradient between the interface of the gaseous and liquid phases causes the absorption of sulfur dioxide by the droplets to increase as the initial S(IV) concentration decreases or the sulfur dioxide concentration increases. The results indicate that the performance of the fine water spray in removing sulfur dioxide is generally improved by reducing the droplet diameter or the initial S(IV) concentration, or by increasing the sulfur dioxide concentration, the droplet pH or the liquid-to-gas ratio. The proposed model reveals the parameters that should be controlled in using a fine water spray device and a method for improving its performance in removing sulfur dioxide.
Collective Efficacy Predicting Experience of Material Hardship in Low-Income Neighborhoods

Research suggests that neighborhood processes, such as collective efficacy, have a meaningful impact on families and are potentially modifiable factors that can be targeted by interventions to improve outcomes for residents of low-income neighborhoods. The present study examines relationships between the two component parts of collective efficacy (neighborhood social cohesion and informal social control) and three measures of material hardship (food security, housing security, and unmet medical need), in a stratified random sample of households in low-income neighborhoods (N = 7,496). Confirmatory factor analyses indicate that collective efficacy is best represented as two factors rather than one factor. Multilevel structural equation models show that social cohesion at the individual and neighborhood levels, but not informal social control, is predictive of material hardship. Although statistically significant, these results must be interpreted with caution as social cohesion accounts for only a small portion of variance in hardship outcomes.
A μNMR CMOS transceiver using a butterfly-coil input for integration with a digital microfluidic device inside a portable magnet

This paper reports a CMOS transceiver apt for integration with a digital microfluidic device, allowing electronic-automated sample management and measurement of micro-nuclear magnetic resonance (μNMR) signals inside a portable magnet. The transmitter (TX) employs an all-digital state control and a pulse sequence synthesizer to emit the exciting pulses for the samples. The receiver (RX) is led by a low-noise amplifier (LNA) using multi-stage NMOS-PMOS-complementary differential pairs, to achieve a sub-nV/√Hz input-referred noise. The RX baseband is a 6th-order Butterworth, dynamic-baseband-bandwidth lowpass filter (2.5 to 20 kHz), which suppresses the out-of-band noise and offers a fast recovery time between the exciting pulses, reducing the dead time of the RX for better sensitivity. Fabricated in 0.18-μm CMOS, the transceiver occupies a die area of 2.1 mm2 and consumes 6.6/23.7 mW of power in the TX/RX mode.
An integrated method for blind separation and dereverberation of convolutive audio mixtures

This paper proposes an integrated method for the blind separation and dereverberation of convolutive audio mixtures. The proposed method is based on multichannel blind deconvolution in the frequency domain. Significant points to be emphasized are as follows: (1) The objective function for optimizing the deconvolution system is derived based on a time-varying all-pole model of source signals, which was proven to be effective for single source dereverberation. This provides the proposed method with the capacity for both separation and dereverberation. (2) An efficient optimization algorithm is developed. This algorithm is realized by decomposing the deconvolution system into an instantaneous separation part and a multichannel auto-regressive part. Illustrative experimental results with an RT60 of 0.6 seconds are reported, where the proposed method showed superiority over a conventional frequency-domain blind separation method.
Genome-Wide Identification of Circular RNAs in Arabidopsis thaliana

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a family of transcripts with covalently closed circular structures and still largely unknown functions. Large numbers of circRNAs have been found in various biological processes in humans and animals, but fewer circRNAs have been identified in plants. We performed a genome-wide analysis of circRNAs in Arabidopsis thaliana via deep sequencing. We constructed 14 strand-specific libraries from 13 samples of plants from four developmental stages, four stress treatments, and five organs and a mixed sample across the lifespan. In total, we identified 5861 circRNAs, including 1275 novel ones, using the strict threshold of at least two unique back-spliced supporting reads. The circRNAs were non-randomly distributed in all chromosomes; most were exonic. Sequence similarity analysis of circRNAs between A. thaliana and four other species showed that some circRNAs are conserved in plants. Functional annotation indicated that many parent genes of circRNAs are involved in many fundamental processes including plant development, reproduction, and response to stimulus. In addition, a small proportion of circRNAs was shown to be potential targets of miRNAs, indicating that the circRNAs could interact with miRNAs to regulate gene expression. qRT-PCR analysis revealed that circRNAs displayed diverse expression patterns at different growth stages. Our results provide an important resource for continuing circRNA research in A. thaliana, and should enhance our understanding of circRNAs in plants.