Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tear-Film Evaporation Rate from Simultaneous Ocular-Surface Temperature and Tear-Breakup Area.

SIGNIFICANCE A corneal heat-transfer model is presented to quantify simultaneous measurements of fluorescein tear-breakup area (TBA) and ocular-surface temperature (OST). By accounting for disruption of the tear-film lipid layer (TFLL), we report evaporation rates through lipid-covered tear. The modified heat-transfer model provides new insights into evaporative dry eye. PURPOSE A quantitative analysis is presented to assess human aqueous tear evaporation rate (TER) through intact TFLLs from simultaneous in vivo measurement of time-dependent infrared OST and fluorescein TBA. METHODS We interpret simultaneous OST and TBA measurements using an extended heat-transfer model. We hypothesize that TBAs are ineffectively insulated by the TFLL and therefore exhibit higher TER than does that for a well-insulting TFLL-covered tear. As time proceeds, TBAs increase in number and size, thereby increasing the cornea area-averaged TER and decreasing OST. Tear-breakup areas were assessed from image analysis of fluorescein tear-film-breakup video recordings and are included in the heat-transfer description of OST. RESULTS Model-predicted OSTs agree well with clinical experiments. Percent reductions in TER of lipid-covered tear range from 50 to 95% of that for pure water, in good agreement with literature. The physical picture of noninsulating or ruptured TFLL spots followed by enhanced evaporation from underlying cooler tear-film ruptures is consistent with the evaporative-driven mechanism for local tear rupture. CONCLUSIONS A quantitative analysis is presented of in vivo TER from simultaneous clinical measurement of transient OST and TBA. The new heat-transfer model accounts for increased TER through expanding TBAs. Tear evaporation rate varies strongly across the cornea because lipid is effectively missing over tear-rupture troughs. The result is local faster evaporation compared with nonruptured, thick lipid-covered tear. Evaporative-driven tear-film ruptures deepen to a thickness where fluorescein quenching commences and local salinity rises to uncomfortable levels. Mitigation of tear-film rupture may therefore reduce dry eye-related symptoms.
The association between shift work and sick leave: a systematic review

Shift work is associated with a number of negative health outcomes, although it is not known whether it is associated with sick leave. This systematic review therefore aimed to determine whether an association exists between shift work and sick leave. A systematic literature search was conducted in six databases on observational studies. Two reviewers independently selected relevant articles and appraised methodological quality. Data extraction was performed independently by review couples. Articles were categorised according to shift work characteristics and summarised using a levels of evidence synthesis. In total, the search strategy yielded 1207 references, of which 24 studies met the inclusion criteria. Nine studies were appraised as high quality and used in the levels of evidence synthesis. Two high quality longitudinal studies found a positive association between fixed evening shifts and longer sick leave for female healthcare workers. The evidence was assessed as strong. Evidence was inconclusive for rotating shifts, shift work including nights, for fixed night work, and for 8-hour and 12-hour shifts. The association found between evening work and sick leave in female healthcare workers implies that the association between shift work and sick leave might be schedule and population specific. To study the association further, more high quality studies are necessary that assess and adjust for detailed shift work exposure.
Gerard W. Ostheimer “What’s New in Obstetric Anesthesia” Lecture

EVERY year, the Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology celebrates the life and legacy of Gerard Ostheimer, M.D., an obstetric anesthesiologist renowned for his wisdom, his passion for life, and his generosity to the society and the specialty. The celebration takes the form of an eponymous lecture given at the Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology Annual Meeting with the purpose of evaluating literature contributions from a single year that are pertinent to the clinical care and research of obstetric anesthesia patients. From more than 1,400 contributions in 2003, 841 were abstracted in the Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology 36th Annual Meeting program syllabus, with general themes summarized in the lecture.This article focuses on four advances that are of importance to anesthesiologists who practice within an obstetric setting. These include advances in the uniquely human obstetric disease, preeclampsia; a leading cause of maternal death, peripartum hemorrhage; the functional physiology of maternal pain and labor analgesia; and the philosophical issues surrounding delivery of care: ethics and consent.
The Significance of Different Diacylgycerol Synthesis Pathways on Plant Oil Composition and Bioengineering

The unique properties of vegetable oils from different plants utilized for food, industrial feedstocks, and fuel is dependent on the fatty acid (FA) composition of triacylglycerol (TAG). Plants can use two main pathways to produce diacylglycerol (DAG), the immediate precursor molecule to TAG synthesis: (1) De novo DAG synthesis, and (2) conversion of the membrane lipid phosphatidylcholine (PC) to DAG. The FA esterified to PC are also the substrate for FA modification (e.g., desaturation, hydroxylation, etc.), such that the FA composition of PC-derived DAG can be substantially different than that of de novo DAG. Since DAG provides two of the three FA in TAG, the relative flux of TAG synthesis from de novo DAG or PC-derived DAG can greatly affect the final oil FA composition. Here we review how the fluxes through these two alternate pathways of DAG/TAG synthesis are determined and present evidence that suggests which pathway is utilized in different plants. Additionally, we present examples of how the endogenous DAG synthesis pathway in a transgenic host plant can produce bottlenecks for engineering of plant oil FA composition, and discuss alternative strategies to overcome these bottlenecks to produce crop plants with designer vegetable oil compositions.
CnaA domains in bacterial pili are efficient dissipaters of large mechanical shocks

Significance Bacteria colonizing the oropharynx must adhere despite mechanical challenges from coughing, sneezing, and chewing; however, little is known about how Gram-positive organisms achieve this feat. We studied the pilus adhesive proteins from two Gram-positive organisms and report a conserved mechanism for dissipating the energy of a mechanical perturbation. The two proteins are stable up to forces of 525 pN and 690 pN, respectively, making these proteins the most mechanically stable proteins known. After a perturbation, the proteins refold rapidly at low force, resulting in a large hysteresis with most of the unfolding energy lost as heat. The work presents an initial model whereby transient unfolding at forces of 500–700 pN dissipates mechanical energy and protects covalent bonds from cleavage. Pathogenic bacteria adhere despite severe mechanical perturbations induced by the host, such as coughing. In Gram-positive bacteria, extracellular protein appendages termed pili are necessary for adherence under mechanical stress. However, little is known about the behavior of Gram-positive pili under force. Here, we demonstrate a mechanism by which Gram-positive pili are able to dissipate mechanical energy through mechanical unfolding and refolding of isopeptide bond-delimited polypeptide loops present in Ig-type CnaA domains. Using single-molecule force spectroscopy, we find that these loops of the pilus subunit SpaA of the SpaA-type pilus from Corynebacterium diphtheriae and FimA of the type 2 pilus from Actinomyces oris unfold and extend at forces that are the highest yet reported for globular proteins. Loop refolding is limited by the hydrophobic collapse of the polypeptide and occurs in milliseconds. Remarkably, both SpaA and FimA initially refold to mechanically weaker intermediates that recover strength with time or ligand binding. Based on the high force extensibility, CnaA-containing pili can dissipate ∼28-fold as much energy compared with their inextensible counterparts before reaching forces sufficient to cleave covalent bonds. We propose that efficient mechanical energy dissipation is key for sustained bacterial attachment against mechanical perturbations.
Evaluation of Real-Time PCR versus PCR with Liquid-Phase Hybridization for Detection of Enterovirus RNA in Cerebrospinal Fluid

ABSTRACT A LightCycler and two TaqMan real-time PCR assays were evaluated against an older PCR with liquid-phase hybridization method for the detection of enterovirus RNA in 74 patient samples. The two-step LightCycler and the two-step TaqMan formats correlated well with each other (r2 = 0.90) and were equally sensitive compared to the liquid-phase hybridization method, whereas the one-step recombinant Tth DNA polymerase format was rather insensitive, detecting enterovirus RNA in only about one-half of those patient samples previously positive by liquid-phase hybridization. The two-step TaqMan method was optimized utilizing 10 μl of cDNA and demonstrated the highest degree of analytical sensitivity among the methods evaluated in our study, being able to reproducibly quantify down to 510 copies of enteroviral RNA/ml of cerebrospinal fluid. This new assay can be performed in 4 h, is much less labor intensive, and showed less cross-reactivity with rhinovirus than the liquid-phase hybridization assay. Thus, the two-step TaqMan assay should prove useful in the diagnosis of enteroviral meningitis versus bacterial meningitis, thereby resulting in timely and appropriate clinical management that can amount to significant cost savings to the patient and health care system.
Coronary artery calcifications predict long term cardiovascular events in non diabetic Caucasian hemodialysis patients

Vascular calcifications are frequent in chronic renal disease and are associated to significant cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. The long term predictive value of coronary artery calcifications detected by multi-layer spiral computed tomography for major cardiovascular events was evaluated in non-diabetic Caucasian patients on maintenance hemodialysis free of clinical cardiovascular disease. Two-hundred and five patients on maintenance hemodialysis were enrolled into this observational, prospective cohort study. Patients underwent a single cardiac multi-layer spiral computed tomography. Calcium load was quantified and patients grouped according to the Agatston score: group 1 (Agatston score: 0), group 2 (Agatston score 1-400), group 3 (Agatston score 401-1000) and group 4 (Agatston score >1000). Follow-up was longer than seven years. Primary endpoint was death from a major cardiovascular event. Actuarial survival was calculated separately in the four groups with Kaplan-Meier method. Patients who died from causes other than cardiovascular disease and transplanted patients were censored. The “log rank” test was employed to compare survival curves. One-hundred two patients (49.7%) died for a major cardiovascular event during the follow-up period. Seven-year actuarial survival was more than 90% for groups 1 and 2, but failed to about 50% for group 3 and to <10% for group 4. Hence, Agatston score >400 predicts a significantly higher cardiovascular mortality compared with Agatston score <400 (p<0.0001); furthermore, serum Parathyroid hormone levels > 300 pg/l were associated to a lower survival (p < 0.05). Extended coronary artery calcifications detected by cardiac multi-layer spiral computed tomography, strongly predicted long term cardiovascular mortality in non-diabetic Caucasian patients on maintenance hemodialysis. Moreover, it was not related to conventional indices of atherosclerosis, but to other non-traditional risk factors, as serum Parathyroid hormone levels. A full cost-benefit analysis is however necessary to justify a widespread use of cardiac multi-layer spiral computed tomography in clinical practice.
Estimating frontal and parietal involvement in cognitive estimation: a study of focal neurodegenerative diseases

We often estimate an unknown value based on available relevant information, a process known as cognitive estimation. In this study, we assess the cognitive and neuroanatomic basis for quantitative estimation by examining deficits in patients with focal neurodegenerative disease in frontal and parietal cortex. Executive function and number knowledge are key components in cognitive estimation. Prefrontal cortex has been implicated in multilevel reasoning and planning processes, and parietal cortex has been associated with number knowledge required for such estimations. We administered the Biber cognitive estimation test (BCET) to assess cognitive estimation in 22 patients with prefrontal disease due to behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), to 17 patients with parietal disease due to corticobasal syndrome (CBS) or posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) and 11 patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Both bvFTD and CBS/PCA patients had significantly more difficulty with cognitive estimation than controls. MCI were not impaired on BCET relative to controls. Regression analyses related BCET performance to gray matter atrophy in right lateral prefrontal and orbital frontal cortices in bvFTD, and to atrophy in right inferior parietal cortex, right insula, and fusiform cortices in CBS/PCA. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that a frontal-parietal network plays a crucial role in cognitive estimation.
Is there really a de Sitter/CFT duality?

In this paper a de Sitter Space version of Black Hole Complementarity is formulated which states that an observer in de Sitter Space describes the surrounding space as a sealed finite temperature cavity bounded by a horizon which allows no loss of information. We then discuss the implications of this for the existence of boundary correlators in the hypothesized dS/cft correspondence. We find that dS complementarity precludes the existence of the appropriate limits. We find that the limits exist only in approximations in which the entropy of the de Sitter Space is infinite. The reason that the correlators exist in quantum field theory in the de Sitter Space background is traced to the fact that horizon entropy is infinite in QFT.
Quenched lattice QCD with domain wall fermions and the chiral limit

Quenched QCD simulations on three volumes, $8^3 \times$, $12^3 \times$ and $16^3 \times 32$ and three couplings, $\beta=5.7$, 5.85 and 6.0 using domain wall fermions provide a consistent picture of quenched QCD. We demonstrate that the small induced effects of chiral symmetry breaking inherent in this formulation can be described by a residual mass ($\mres$) whose size decreases as the separation between the domain walls ($L_s$) is increased. However, at stronger couplings much larger values of $L_s$ are required to achieve a given physical value of $\mres$. For $\beta=6.0$ and $L_s=16$, we find $\mres/m_s=0.033(3)$, while for $\beta=5.7$, and $L_s=48$, $\mres/m_s=0.074(5)$, where $m_s$ is the strange quark mass. These values are significantly smaller than those obtained from a more naive determination in our earlier studies. Important effects of topological near zero modes which should afflict an accurate quenched calculation are easily visible in both the chiral condensate and the pion propagator. These effects can be controlled by working at an appropriately large volume. A non-linear behavior of $m_\pi^2$ in the limit of small quark mass suggests the presence of additional infrared subtlety in the quenched approximation. Good scaling is seen both in masses and in $f_\pi$ over our entire range, with inverse lattice spacing varying between 1 and 2 GeV.
Hospital readmission after transvenous cardioverter/defibrillator implantation; a single centre study.

AIMS Hospital readmission after implantation of cardioverter/defibrillators has a major impact on quality of life and cost-effectiveness in defibrillator patients. Rehospitalization has not been studied in large patient populations with modern transvenous defibrillation systems. METHODS AND RESULTS We report on incidence, reasons, time in follow-up, duration and predictors of hospital readmission in 180 patients after transvenous implantation of a cardioverter/defibrillator during a follow-up period of 25+/-18 months. There were 156 readmissions in 79 patients with a 0.87 readmission rate per patient during the time followed, a 0.46 readmission rate per patient-year of follow-up and a 0.38 readmission rate per patient-year of follow-up for cardiac reasons. The majority of readmissions was caused by multiple appropriate shock interventions (26%), battery depletion (19%) and lead- and device-related complications (14%). The time to first hospital readmission was 12+/-9 months for arrhythmia-related and 20+/-16 months for other cardiac-related reasons (P<0.05), and could not be predicted by clinical variables, respectively. The duration of rehospitalization was 14+/-15 days for cardiac-related reasons and 12+/-17 days for arrhythmia-related reasons. Age >60 years was an independent predictor of rehospitalization time per patient-year of follow-up for both cardiac-related (P<0.005) and arrhythmia-related reasons (P<0.05). CONCLUSION The rate of hospital readmission per patient-year of follow-up is as high as 0.46 after implantation of a modern cardioverter/defibrillator. Rehospitalization time in such patients is significantly longer in the patient cohort >60 years. The majority of readmissions is caused by multiple appropriate shock treatments. Further studies are needed to systematically investigate strategies for the prevention of rehospitalization in modern ICD therapy.
Theoretical and Experimental Evaluation of Rotational Magnetic Induction Tomography

Magnetic induction tomography (MIT) is a new and emerging tomographic imaging technique, which has found applications in industrial process tomography and material inspection, particularly for imaging metallic objects. In this paper, a rotational MIT (RMIT) system has been developed, in which a coil array is rotated with respect to a central axis perpendicular to the plane of the coil array. The RMIT is capable of producing images with better quality as a result of increasing the number of independent measurements. An eight-coil MIT system has been developed to generate the experimental data required in this paper. To show the proof of principle, a manual rotational scheme has been implemented. The advantages of the RMIT system have been established using theoretical analysis and comparison of the underlying inverse problem in MIT and RMIT. The effectiveness of RMIT has been shown using both synthetic and experimental data. Several image quality measures have been used to critically evaluate RMIT against the traditional MIT system.
Effects of neutralizing antibodies on escape from CD8+ T-cell responses in HIV-1 infection

Despite substantial advances in our knowledge of immune responses against HIV-1 and of its evolution within the host, it remains unclear why control of the virus eventually breaks down. Here, we present a new theoretical framework for the infection dynamics of HIV-1 that combines antibody and CD8+ T-cell responses, notably taking into account their different lifespans. Several apparent paradoxes in HIV pathogenesis and genetics of host susceptibility can be reconciled within this framework by assigning a crucial role to antibody responses in the control of viraemia. We argue that, although escape from or progressive loss of quality of CD8+ T-cell responses can accelerate disease progression, the underlying cause of the breakdown of virus control is the loss of antibody induction due to depletion of CD4+ T cells. Furthermore, strong antibody responses can prevent CD8+ T-cell escape from occurring for an extended period, even in the presence of highly efficacious CD8+ T-cell responses.
Investor Sentiment, Beta, and the Cost of Equity Capital

The security market line accords with the capital asset pricing model by taking on an upward slope in pessimistic sentiment periods, but is downward sloping during optimistic periods. We hypothesize that this finding obtains because periods of optimism attract equity investment by unsophisticated, overconfident, traders in risky opportunities (high beta stocks), whereas such traders stay along the sidelines during pessimistic periods. Thus, high beta stocks become overpriced in optimistic periods, but during pessimistic periods, noise trading is reduced, so that traditional beta pricing prevails. Unconditional on sentiment, these effects offset each other. Although rational explanations cannot completely be ruled out, analyses using earnings expectations, fund flows, the probability of informed trading, and order imbalances do provide evidence that noise traders are more bullish about high beta stocks when sentiment is optimistic, whereas investor behavior appears to accord more closely with rationality during pessimistic periods, supporting our hypothesis.
Novel Epoxy Activated Hydrogels for Solving Lactose Intolerance

“Lactose intolerance” is a medical problem for almost 70% of the world population. Milk and dairy products contain 5–10% w/v lactose. Hydrolysis of lactose by immobilized lactase is an industrial solution. In this work, we succeeded to increase the lactase loading capacity to more than 3-fold to 36.3 U/g gel using epoxy activated hydrogels compared to 11 U/g gel using aldehyde activated carrageenan. The hydrogel's mode of interaction was proven by FTIR, DSC, and TGA. The high activity of the epoxy group was regarded to its ability to attach to the enzyme's –SH, –NH, and –OH groups, whereas the aldehyde group could only bind to the enzyme's –NH2 group. The optimum conditions for immobilization such as epoxy chain length and enzyme concentration have been studied. Furthermore, the optimum enzyme conditions were also deliberated and showed better stability for the immobilized enzyme and the Michaelis constants, K m and V max, were doubled. Results revealed also that both free and immobilized enzymes reached their maximum rate of lactose conversion after 2 h, albeit, the aldehyde activated hydrogel could only reach 63% of the free enzyme. In brief, the epoxy activated hydrogels are more efficient in immobilizing more enzymes than the aldehyde activated hydrogel.
An Experimental Study of Some Comfort-related Properties of Cotton—Acrylic Knitted Fabrics

The interaction of water with fabrics, which incorporates water vapor permeability, wicking abilities and drying behaviors of the fabrics, are tested to obtain some comfort-related properties of fabrics from cotton, acrylic and cotton—acrylic blends. The effects of categorical variables such as fiber composition, yarn count and tightness on the comfort properties are tested. Results of the experimental study show that the transfer and longitudinal wicking abilities of fabrics increase with the use of coarse yarns while the drying rates increase with the use of comparatively finer yarns. Furthermore, both longitudinal and transfer wicking abilities as well as drying rates of the fabrics studied increase with the increase in the acrylic fiber ratio within the composition.