Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Angiogenic and Vasoprotective Effects of Adrenomedullin on Prevention of Cognitive Decline After Chronic Cerebral Hypoperfusion in Mice

Background and Purpose— Although subcortical vascular dementia, the major subtype of vascular dementia, is caused by a disruption in white matter integrity after cerebrovascular insufficiency, no therapy has been discovered that will restore cerebral perfusion or functional cerebral vessels. Because adrenomedullin (AM) has been shown to be angiogenic and vasoprotective, the purpose of the study was to investigate whether AM may be used as a putative treatment for subcortical vascular dementia. Methods— A model of subcortical vascular dementia was reproduced in mice by placing microcoils bilaterally on the common carotid arteries. Using mice overexpressing circulating AM, we assessed the effect of AM on cerebral perfusion, cerebral angioarchitecture, oxidative stress, white matter change, cognitive function, and brain levels of cAMP, vascular endothelial growth factor, and basic fibroblast growth factor. Results— After bilateral common carotid artery stenosis, mice overexpressing circulating AM showed significantly faster cerebral perfusion recovery due to substantial growth of the capillaries, the circle of Willis, and the leptomeningeal anastomoses and reduced oxidative damage in vascular endothelial cells compared with wild-type mice. Vascular changes were preceded by upregulation of cAMP, vascular endothelial growth factor, and basic fibroblast growth factor. White matter damage and working memory deficits induced by bilateral common carotid artery stenosis were subsequently restored in mice overexpressing circulating AM. Conclusions— These data indicate that AM promotes arteriogenesis and angiogenesis, inhibits oxidative stress, preserves white matter integrity, and prevents cognitive decline after chronic cerebral hypoperfusion. Thus, AM may serve as a strategy to tackle subcortical vascular dementia.
Multilingualism and Sign Languages: From the Great Plains to Australia

"The 12th Volume in the ""Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities Series" The latest entry in the Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities series continues to mine the rich resources found in signing communities throughout the world. Divided into four parts, this collection features 16 internationally renowned linguistics experts whose absorbing studies reflect an astonishing range of linguistic diversity. The sole essay in Part One: Multilingualism describes historic and contemporary uses of North American Indian Sign Language. Part Two: Language Contact examines language-contact phenomena between Auslan/English interpreters and Deaf people in Australia, and the features of bimodal bilingualism in hearing, Italian, native signers. Part Three: Variation reports the results of a study on location variation in Australian Sign Language. Part Four: Discourse Analysis begins with an analysis of how deaf parents and their hearing toddlers establish and maintain sight triangles when conducting signed conversations. The ensuing chapter explores the use of evaluation within an informal narrative in Langue des Signes Quebecoise. The final chapter explicates how a signer depersonalizes the concept of self in an American Sign Language narrative through the use of signs for he and I. "
Active Oxygen Species in Plant Defense against Pathogens

Plant disease resistance to pathogens such as fungi, bacteria, and viruses often depends on whether the plant is able to recognize the pathogen early in the infection process. The recognition event leads to a rapid tissue necrosis at the site of infection, which is called the HR. The HR deprives the pathogen of nutrients and/or releases toxic molecules, thereby confining pathogen growth to a small region of the plant. This response provides resistance to the great majority of potential pathogens (nonhost or species resistance). For a given plant species, a much more limited number of true pathogens exhibit the ability to evade the host recognition system and grow extensively within the plant without evoking host necrosis at a11 or only after considerable delay. In this case, the plant exhibits susceptibility and the extensive growth of the successful pathogen can cause varying degrees of damage. However, certain races within pathogenic bacteria1 or funga1 species are recognized by certain cultivars or genotypes of the host plant species and the HR is triggered. These observations indicate that there is an ongqing evolution of the host plant's ability to recognize pathogen races that were previously unrecognized while the pathogen evolves to avoid recognition by a previously resistant host. Recognition of pathogens triggers a large range of inducible defense mechanisms that are believed to contribute to overall resistance in the plant. The mechanisms induced at the site of infection and associated with the HR include synthesis of antimicrobial compounds called phytoalexins, synthesis of hydrolytic enzymes that attack fungi and bacteria, and alterations in the synthesis of cell-wall structural proteins (for
Risk factors for squamous cell carcinoma of the oesophagus

Cancer of the oesophagus has great diversity in geographical distribution and incidence. The rate of oesophageal cancer has been increasing in some areas and the reasons for this are not clear. This review outlines fascinating epidemiological aspects and the risk factors for squamous cell carcinoma of the oesophagus. While in the Western world the effects of alcohol and tobacco are substantial preconditions, worldwide other factors, such as diet, nutritional deficiencies, environmental exposure and infectious agents (especially papillomavirus and fungi), play a significant role. Chronic irritation of the oesophagus appears to participate in the process of carcinogenesis, particularly in patients with thermal and/or mechanical injury, achalasia, oesophageal diverticulum, chronic lye stricture, radiation therapy, injection sclerotherapy and gastric resection before the appearance of oesophageal tumour. The association of Plummer–Vinson syndrome, coeliac disease, tylosis and scleroderma with oesophageal cancer has also been reviewed.
Using Topic Modeling to Improve Prediction of Neuroticism and Depression in College Students

We investigate the value-add of topic modeling in text analysis for depression, and for neuroticism as a strongly associated personality measure. Using Pennebaker’s Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) lexicon to provide baseline features, we show that straightforward topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) yields interpretable, psychologically relevant “themes” that add value in prediction of clinical assessments.
Elementary Axioms for Categories of Classes (Extended Abstract)

We axiomatize a notion of “classic structure” on a regular category, isolating the essential properties of the category of classes together with its full subcategory of sets. Like the axioms for a topos, our axiomatization is very simple, but has powerful consequences. In particular, we show that our axiomatized categories provide a sound and complete class of models for Intuitionistic Zermelo-Fraenkel set
Pseudomonas aeruginosa Uses Multiple Pathways To Acquire Iron during Chronic Infection in Cystic Fibrosis Lungs

ABSTRACT Pseudomonas aeruginosa chronically infects the lungs of more than 80% of adult patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) and is a major contributor to the progression of disease pathology. P. aeruginosa requires iron for growth and has multiple iron uptake systems that have been studied in bacteria grown in laboratory culture. The purpose of this research was to determine which of these are active during infection in CF. RNA was extracted from 149 sputum samples obtained from 23 CF patients. Reverse transcription–quantitative real-time PCR (RT-qPCR) was used to measure the expression of P. aeruginosa genes encoding transport systems for the siderophores pyoverdine and pyochelin, for heme, and for ferrous ions. Expression of P. aeruginosa genes could be quantified in 89% of the sputum samples. Expression of genes associated with siderophore-mediated iron uptake was detected in most samples but was at low levels in some samples, indicating that other iron uptake mechanisms are active. Expression of genes encoding heme transport systems was also detected in most samples, indicating that heme uptake occurs during infection in CF. feoB expression was detected in all sputum samples, implying an important role for ferrous ion uptake by P. aeruginosa in CF. Our data show that multiple P. aeruginosa iron uptake mechanisms are active in chronic CF infection and that RT-qPCR of RNA extracted from sputum provides a powerful tool for investigating bacterial physiology during infection in CF.
Increased Heating Efficiency and Selective Thermal Ablation of Malignant Tissue with DNA-Encased Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes

Nanoparticles, including multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs), strongly absorb near-infrared (nIR) radiation and efficiently convert absorbed energy to released heat which can be used for localized hyperthermia applications. We demonstrate for the first time that DNA-encasement increases heat emission following nIR irradiation of MWNTs, and DNA-encased MWNTs can be used to safely eradicate a tumor mass in vivo. Upon irradiation of DNA-encased MWNTs, heat is generated with a linear dependence on irradiation time and laser power. DNA-encasement resulted in a 3-fold reduction in the concentration of MWNTs required to impart a 10 degrees C temperature increase in bulk solution temperature. A single treatment consisting of intratumoral injection of MWNTs (100 microL of a 500 microg/mL solution) followed by laser irradiation at 1064 nm, 2.5 W/cm(2) completely eradicated PC3 xenograft tumors in 8/8 (100%) of nude mice. Tumors that received only MWNT injection or laser irradiation showed growth rates indistinguishable from nontreated control tumors. Nonmalignant tissues displayed no long-term damage from treatment. The results demonstrate that DNA-encased MWNTs are more efficient at converting nIR irradiation into heat compared to nonencased MWNTs and that DNA-encased MWNTs can be used safely and effectively for the selective thermal ablation of malignant tissue in vivo.
Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure

Is heterosexual sex inherently damaging to women? Is it possible for women to enjoy sensuality and pleasure with men that does not increase male power? Lynne Segal's unflinching examination of feminist thinking on sexuality over the past twenty-five years tackles these questions head on. Straightforward and challenging, she invites an exploration of sex in our culture - an exploration that could reverse the traditional male gaze and phallic construction of the heterosexual woman. Only two decades ago, politically aware women often declared themselves both sexual liberationists and feminists - their right to sexual fulfillment symbolized their right to selfhood. However, the most positive women's writing on female sexuality in recent years has come primarily from the lesbian community.Segal addresses the silence of heterosexual feminists on questions of sex and love and notes the shift toward sexual conservatism. She looks at the trends that followed Sixties radicalism: sex as a subversive activity, the "liberated orgasm," sex advice literature, gender uncertainties, Queer politics, antipornography campaigns, the rise of the moral right. The hidden anxieties of male sexuality are also discussed.For both men and women, says Segal, our wildest dreams and worst fears are often projected onto sex. She urges an understanding of how our personal pleasures and pains remain public issues, and how a rethinking of sexual liberation could inspire a truly progressive politics for our time. "It is always another whom we try to reach when we experience desire, it is their physical contact we want - sometimes, any sort of contact will suffice . and by whom we yearn to feel ourselves desired. It is the very greatest of joys, as I experience it . simply to know that we are able to desire, maybe even able to love, some other human adult. " - from the book.
Covering indexes for branching path queries

In this paper, we ask if the traditional relational query acceleration techniques of summary tables and covering indexes have analogs for branching path expression queries over tree- or graph-structured XML data. Our answer is yes --- the forward-and-backward index already proposed in the literature can be viewed as a structure analogous to a summary table or covering index. We also show that it is the smallest such index that covers all branching path expression queries. While this index is very general, our experiments show that it can be so large in practice as to offer little performance improvement over evaluating queries directly on the data. Likening the forward-and-backward index to a covering index on all the attributes of several tables, we devise an index definition scheme to restrict the class of branching path expressions being indexed. The resulting index structures are dramatically smaller and perform better than the full forward-and-backward index for these classes of branching path expressions. This is roughly analogous to the situation in multidimensional or OLAP workloads, in which more highly aggregated summary tables can service a smaller subset of queries but can do so at increased performance. We evaluate the performance of our indexes on both relational decompositions of XML and a native storage technique. As expected, the performance benefit of an index is maximized when the query matches the index definition.
Perceived Risk, the Internet Shopping Experience and Online Purchasing Behavior: A New Zealand Perspective

This paper develops a research model of the importance of consumersâ€™ perceived risk and the Internet shopping experience in the online purchasing behavior of Internet users. The model was tested using a survey of some 700 New Zealand Internet users. Both the perceived risk and perceived benefits of Internet shopping were found to be significantly associated with the amount and frequency of online purchases made. Loss of social interaction in Internet shopping was associated with reduced online spending. The results of the study suggest that Internet retailing Web sites should include features that enhance customer service and reduce perceived risk.
Glutamine Deprivation Causes Enhanced Plating Efficiency of a Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 ICP0-Null Mutant

ABSTRACT Isoleucine deprivation of cellular monolayers prior to infection has been reported to result in partial complementation of a herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) ICP0 null (ICP0−) mutant. We now report that glutamine deprivation alone is able to enhance the plating efficiency of an ICP0− virus and that isoleucine deprivation has little or no effect. Because a low glutamine level is associated with stress and because stress is known to induce reactivation, low levels of glutamine may be relevant to the reactivation of HSV-1 from latency. Additionally, we demonstrate that arginine and methionine deprivation result in partial complementation of the ICP0− virus.
Body Composition and BMI Growth Charts in Children With Down Syndrome

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: New US Down syndrome (DS) BMI growth charts were recently published, but their utility in identifying children with excess adiposity or increased cardiometabolic risk (CMR) remains unknown. We sought to compare the ability of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) BMI 85th percentile and DS-specific BMI 85th percentile to identify excess adiposity in children with DS. METHODS: Participants with DS aged 10 to 20 years were enrolled in a cross-sectional CMR study. Data from typically developing children enrolled in the Bone Mineral Density in Childhood Study (BMDCS) were used for comparison. Sensitivity and specificity were calculated to assess the CDC BMI 85th percentile in the BMDCS and DS groups, and the DS-specific BMI 85th percentile in the DS group, relative to fat mass index (FMI) ≥80th percentile, a threshold associated with increased CMR. RESULTS: Included were 121 DS participants (age 14.8 ± 3.3 years, 57% girls) and 7978 BMDCS reference data points (age 15.0 ± 3.0 years, 51.3% girls). The CDC BMI 85th percentile identified FMI ≥80th percentile with 96.9% sensitivity and 87.4% specificity in typically developing children. Similarly, the CDC BMI 85th percentile identified FMI ≥80th percentile with 100% sensitivity and 78.3% specificity in children with DS. In contrast, the sensitivity of the DS-specific BMI 85th percentile was only 62.3% (P < .0001), but was 100% specific. CONCLUSIONS: For children with DS ≥10 years, the CDC BMI growth chart 85th percentile is a better indicator of excess adiposity, than the new DS-specific BMI charts. Additional studies are needed to clarify the relationships of BMI and FMI with CMR in DS.
The new egalitarianism

About the Contributors.Acknowledgements. Editor's Introduction.1. Inequality of Incomes and Opportunities. (Gosta Esping-Anderson). 2. Does Inequality Matter (Ed Miliband). 3. Inequality in the New Knowledge Economy (Robert Atkinson). 4. Opportunity and Life Chances: the Dynamics of Poverty (Robert Walker). 5. Where are the poor? The changing Patterns of Inequality and the.Impact of Attempts to Reduce It. (Anne Power). 6.The New Egalitarianism: Economic Inequality in the UK (Patrick Diamond and Anthony Giddens). 7.Inequality and Recognition Pan-European social conflicts and their political dynamic (Ulrich Beck). 8. New Global Classes: Implications for Politics (Saskia Sasson). 9. Britain's Glue: the Case for Liberal Nationalism (David Goodhart). 10. Why gender equality? (Magdalena Andersson). 11. Social Corrosion, Inequality and Health (Robert Wilkinson). 12. Inequality, Choice and Public Services (Julian Le Grand). Notes.Index.
Living between the extremes: a phenomenological study of how mid-life women recreate their identity after a work transition

This qualitative research study examined the "lived experiences" of learning identity during work transitions among three women (ages 35 to 55) who were not previously married. The research question was how do particular mid-life women who engage in a work transition re-construct the meaning of (or make sense of) their identity? Primary research questions included the following: * What effect does the work transition experience have on one‘s identity? * What kind of feedback was received concerning the work transition? * How does one‘s identity affect what the new work role means to the participant? * How are various aspects of identity re-negotiated over time in the new career in order to reconcile a more whole or complete sense of self within the new work environment? * What aspects of identity (formation, or re-creation) remain difficult, and are these struggles dependent on length of time spent in the previous career? * Does one need to define oneself differently in order to accomplish the tasks required by the new work role? Research questions asked how co-researchers described their work transition, as well as inquiring about the feedback participants received during and after the transition process. The study found that within the transition experiences the following themes emerged: finding one‘s purpose in life; sensing unease during transitions; learning how to be in control through various means such as maturity, time, education, support/belonging, spirituality, hope and humor; passiveness with money, decisionmaking, and peer support; learning stereotypes versus learning one‘s purpose; learning marriage and singleness messages; conflict in the family of origin; and progressive
High level quantitative interconnect estimation for Early Design Space Exploration

In this paper, we present an approach for prediction of interconnect resources at the early stages of design. This approach was developed as an extension to the Quipu multi-dimensional quantitative prediction model for early design space exploration. Quipu is a part of the Delft Workbench project, a semi-automatic tool platform supporting integrated hardware-software co-design for heterogeneous computing systems. Because of the highly iterative nature of design in such tool platforms, fast and early estimates of hardware properties are required. One aspect of particular importance is the utilization of interconnect resources, which has increased with designs becoming larger, even to the point where some designs are no longer routable. We establish a method of estimating interconnect from a C-level description using partial least squares regression (PLSR) and software complexity metrics (SCM) for use in the Delft Workbench tool platform. We show that our approach can make predictions with an expected error of 31.6%.
GABAB-mediated inhibition of multiple modes of glutamate release in the nucleus of the solitary tract

Fawley JA, Peters JH, Andresen MC. GABAB-mediated inhibition of multiple modes of glutamate release in the nucleus of the solitary tract. J Neurophysiol 106: 1833–1840, 2011. First published July 6, 2011; doi:10.1152/jn.00476. 2011. —In the caudal portions of the solitary tract (ST) nucleus, primary sensory afferents fall into two broad classes based on the expression of transient receptor potential vanilloid type 1 (TRPV1) receptors. Both afferent classes (TRPV1 / ) have indistinguishable glutamate release mechanisms for ST-evoked excitatory postsynaptic currents (EPSCs). However, TRPV1 terminals release additional glutamate from a unique, TRPV1-operated vesicle pool that is temperature sensitive and facilitated by ST activity to generate asynchronous EPSCs. This study tested whether presynaptic -aminobutyric acid (GABA)B receptors inhibit both the evoked and TRPV1operated release mechanisms on second-order ST nucleus neurons. In horizontal slices, shocks activated single ST axons and evoked the timeinvariant (latency jitter 200 s), glutamatergic EPSCs, which identified second-order neurons. Gabazine eliminated GABAA responses in all recordings. The GABAB agonist baclofen inhibited the amplitude of ST-EPSCs from both TRPV1 and TRPV1 afferents with a similar EC50 ( 1.2 M). In TTX, GABAB activation decreased miniature EPSC (mEPSC) rates but not amplitudes, suggesting presynaptic actions downstream from terminal excitability. With calcium entry through voltageactivated calcium channels blocked by cadmium, baclofen reduced mEPSC frequency, indicating that GABAB reduced vesicle release by TRPV1-dependent calcium entry. GABAB activation also reduced temperature-evoked increases in mEPSC frequency, which relies on TRPV1. Our studies indicate that GABAB G protein-coupled receptors are uniformly distributed across all ST primary afferent terminals and act at multiple stages of the excitation-release cascades to suppress both action potential-triggered and TRPV1-coupled glutamate transmission pathways. Moreover, the segregated release cascades within TRPV1 ST primary afferents represent independent, potential targets for differential modulation.