Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Role of Corticosterone on Sleep Homeostasis Induced by REM Sleep Deprivation in Rats

Sleep is regulated by humoral and homeostatic processes. If on one hand chronic elevation of stress hormones impair sleep, on the other hand, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep deprivation induces elevation of glucocorticoids and time of REM sleep during the recovery period. In the present study we sought to examine whether manipulations of corticosterone levels during REM sleep deprivation would alter the subsequent sleep rebound. Adult male Wistar rats were fit with electrodes for sleep monitoring and submitted to four days of REM sleep deprivation under repeated corticosterone or metyrapone (an inhibitor of corticosterone synthesis) administration. Sleep parameters were continuously recorded throughout the sleep deprivation period and during 3 days of sleep recovery. Plasma levels of adrenocorticotropic hormone and corticosterone were also evaluated. Metyrapone treatment prevented the elevation of corticosterone plasma levels induced by REM sleep deprivation, whereas corticosterone administration to REM sleep-deprived rats resulted in lower corticosterone levels than in non-sleep deprived rats. Nonetheless, both corticosterone and metyrapone administration led to several alterations on sleep homeostasis, including reductions in the amount of non-REM and REM sleep during the recovery period, although corticosterone increased delta activity (1.0–4.0 Hz) during REM sleep deprivation. Metyrapone treatment of REM sleep-deprived rats reduced the number of REM sleep episodes. In conclusion, reduction of corticosterone levels during REM sleep deprivation resulted in impairment of sleep rebound, suggesting that physiological elevation of corticosterone levels resulting from REM sleep deprivation is necessary for plentiful recovery of sleep after this stressful event.
Tobacco Use and Environmental Smoke Exposure among Taiwanese Pregnant Smokers and Recent Quitters: Risk Perception, Attitude, and Avoidance Behavior

In this study, we conducted an empirical survey of the avoidance behaviors and risk perceptions of active and passive smoking pregnant smokers and recent quitters. We employed an online questionnaire survey by recruiting 166 voluntary participants from an online parenting community in Taiwan. The results of the empirical survey revealed that three-fourths of smokers quit smoking during pregnancy and one-fourth continued smoking. All pregnant women who continued smoking had partners or lived with relatives who smoked. Current smokers and quitters differed significantly in their risk perceptions and attitudes toward smoking during pregnancy. Most pregnant smokers and quitters adopted passive smoking avoidance behaviors at home and in public. Nevertheless, one-fifth of pregnant women chose not to avoid passive smoking. We concluded that most women stop smoking during pregnancy; however, most women continue to be exposed to passive-smoking environments. Perceived fetal health risks and attitudes toward smoking during pregnancy are critical predictors of the anti-smoking behaviors of pregnant women.
Obstruction-free synchronization: double-ended queues as an example

We introduce obstruction-freedom, a new nonblocking property for shared data structure implementations. This property is strong enough to avoid the problems associated with locks, but it is weaker than previous nonblocking properties-specifically lock-freedom and wait-freedom-allowing greater flexibility in the design of efficient implementations. Obstruction-freedom admits substantially simpler implementations, and we believe that in practice it provides the benefits of wait-free and lock-free implementations. To illustrate the benefits of obstruction-freedom, we present two obstruction-free CAS-based implementations of double-ended queues (deques); the first is implemented on a linear array, the second on a circular array. To our knowledge, all previous nonblocking deque implementations are based on unrealistic assumptions about hardware support for synchronization, have restricted functionality, or have operations that interfere with operations at the opposite end of the deque even when the deque has many elements in it. Our obstruction-free implementations have none of these drawbacks, and thus suggest that it is much easier to design obstruction-free implementations than lock-free and wait-free ones. We also briefly discuss other obstruction-free data structures and operations that we have implemented.
2-Amino-3,8-Dimethylimidazo[4,5-f ]Quinoxaline (MeIQx)–Induced Hepatocarcinogenesis Is Not Enhanced by CYP1A Inducers, Alpha- and Beta-Naphthoflavone

Interaction of more than two chemicals from foods is a very important factor for carcinogenic risk assessment and management. 2-Amino-3,8-dimethylimidazo[4,5-f]quinoxaline (MeIQx), one of the most abundant carcinogenic heterocyclic amines in cooked foods, is speculated to be a human liver carcinogen. MeIQx is metabolically activated by CYP1A2 and then N-acetyltransferase (NAT), findings that suggest that its carcinogenic potential might be enhanced by simultaneous exposure to chemical(s) inducing CYP1A2. Therefore, we here investigated the effects of alpha- and beta-naphthoflavone as CYP1A2 inducers on MeIQx-induced rat hepatocarcinogenesis in a medium-term rat liver bioassay. Unexpectedly, no modifying influence of naphthoflavones on MeIQx-induced hepatocarcinogenesis was demonstrated with reference to glutathione S-transferase placental form (GST-P) positive foci in the liver, although up-regulation of CYP1A2 was detected on Western blot analysis. Activity of NAT was not affected. In MeIQx-treated rats, CYP1A expression was mainly detected in zone 3 of the liver where GST-P positive foci were preferentially located, while naphthoflavones alone or combinations of naphthoflavones and MeIQx induced CYP1A expression in zone 1. This difference in intralobular distribution of CYP1A might be related to the fact that MeIQx hepatocarcinogenesis was not modified by the two CYP1A inducers.
Varenicline versus transdermal nicotine patch for smoking cessation: results from a randomised open-label trial

Background: Varenicline, a new treatment for smoking cessation, has demonstrated significantly greater efficacy over placebo and sustained release bupropion (bupropion SR). A study was undertaken to compare a 12-week standard regimen of varenicline with a 10-week standard regimen of transdermal nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) for smoking cessation. Methods: In this 52-week, open-label, randomised, multicentre, phase 3 trial conducted in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, UK and USA, participants were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive varenicline uptitrated to 1 mg twice daily for 12 weeks or transdermal NRT (21 mg/day reducing to 7 mg/day) for 10 weeks. Non-treatment follow-up continued to week 52. The primary outcome was the biochemically confirmed (exhaled carbon monoxide ⩽10 ppm) self-reported continuous abstinence rate (CAR) for the last 4 weeks of the treatment period in participants who had taken at least one dose of treatment. Secondary outcomes included CAR from the last 4 weeks of treatment through weeks 24 and 52, and measures of craving, withdrawal and smoking satisfaction. Results: A total of 376 and 370 participants assigned to varenicline and NRT, respectively, were eligible for analysis. The CAR for the last 4 weeks of treatment was significantly greater for varenicline (55.9%) than NRT (43.2%; OR 1.70, 95% CI 1.26 to 2.28, p<0.001). The week 52 CAR (NRT, weeks 8–52; varenicline, weeks 9–52) was 26.1% for varenicline and 20.3% for NRT (OR 1.40, 95% CI 0.99 to 1.99, p = 0.056). Varenicline significantly reduced craving (p<0.001), withdrawal symptoms (p<0.001) and smoking satisfaction (p<0.001) compared with NRT. The most frequent adverse event was nausea (varenicline, 37.2%; NRT, 9.7%). Conclusions: The outcomes of this trial established that abstinence from smoking was greater and craving, withdrawal symptoms and smoking satisfaction were less at the end of treatment with varenicline than with transdermal NRT. Trial registration number: NCT00143325.
Strength-Duration Properties of the Upper Limb under Surface Electrical Stimulation for Rehabilitation

We introduce a new experimental study on nerve excitability, when surface electrodes stimulate the upper arm in rehabilitative protocols. Nerve excitability is usually described by means of the strength-duration curve, i.e. the stimulation current amplitude versus the pulse duration for threshold activation. With the final aim of designing and validating a nerve model, in the present contribution an extensive experimental session is conducted to investigate how the nerve excitability is influenced by gender, subcutaneous fat layer thickness and FES parameters. Different experiments are conducted and the most appropriate curve-fitting equation for the data is identified. Beside the nerve model validation, the proposed approach can be used for automatic setting of stimulation parameters in FES-based rehabilitation treatments.
Inhibitory Effects of Epigallocatechin-3-Gallate on Microsomal Cyclooxygenase-1 Activity in Platelets

In this study, we investigated the effect of (–)-epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), a major component of green tea catechins from green tea leaves, on activities of cyclooxygenase (COX)-1 and thromboxane synthase (TXAS), thromboxane A2 (TXA2) production associated microsomal enzymes. EGCG inhibited COX-1 activity to 96.9%, and TXAS activity to 20% in platelet microsomal fraction having cytochrome c reductase (an endoplasmic reticulum marker enzyme) activity and expressing COX-1 (70 kDa) and TXAS (58 kDa) proteins. The inhibitory ratio of COX-1 to TXAS by EGCG was 4.8. These results mean that EGCG has a stronger selectivity in COX-1 inhibition than TXAS inhibition. In special, a nonsteroid anti-inflammatory drug aspirin, a COX-1 inhibitor, inhibited COX-1 activity by 11.3% at the same concentration (50 μM) as EGCG that inhibited COX-1 activity to 96.9% as compared with that of control. This suggests that EGCG has a stronger effect than that of aspirin on inhibition of COX-1 activity. Accordingly, we demonstrate that EGCG might be used as a crucial tool for a strong negative regulator of COX-1/TXA2 signaling pathway to inhibit thrombotic disease-associated platelet aggregation.
Alcohol Consumption and Carotid Atherosclerosis: Evidence of Dose-Dependent Atherogenic and Antiatherogenic Effects Results From the Bruneck Study

Background and Purpose Although a variety of epidemiological studies have suggested a U-shaped association between alcohol and cardiovascular disease, controversy still surrounds the role of atherogenesis in the mediation of alcohol effects. Methods Carotid atherosclerosis was measured with a sensitive and reproducible B-mode score in a random sample of 460 men drawn from the Bruneck Study (baseline examination in 1990). Results The age-adjusted relation between alcohol and carotid artery disease was U shaped, with light drinkers facing a lower atherosclerosis risk (odds ratio, 0.44; 95% confidence interval, 0.23 to 0.85; P=.01) than either abstainers (odds ratio, 1.00) or heavy drinkers (odds ratio, 2.78; 95% confidence interval, 1.32 to 5.84; P<.01). The association was not explained by the lifestyle of alcohol consumers (smoking) or inclusion of former (heavy) drinkers in the reference group. The effect of alcohol was modified by drinking behavior (type of beverage). Approximately a quarter of the atherosclerosis risk caused by severe alcohol consumption was mediated by the risk profile associated with drinking, whereas the apparent beneficial effect of low alcohol intake emerged independent of conventional risk attributes. Conclusions Our results support the hypothesis that adverse and beneficial effects of alcohol on cerebrovascular disease are mediated in part by analogous atherogenic and antiatherogenic properties.
Continuous Theta Burst Stimulation of Angular Gyrus Reduces Subjective Recollection

The contribution of lateral parietal regions such as the angular gyrus to human episodic memory has been the subject of much debate following widespread observations of left parietal activity in healthy volunteers during functional neuroimaging studies of memory retrieval. Patients with lateral parietal lesions are not amnesic, but recent evidence indicates that their memory abilities may not be entirely preserved. Whereas recollection appears intact when objective measures such as source accuracy are used, patients often exhibit reduced subjective confidence in their accurate recollections. When asked to recall autobiographical memories, they may produce spontaneous narratives that lack richness and specificity, but can remember specific details when prompted. Two distinct theoretical accounts have been proposed to explain these results: that the patients have a deficit in the bottom-up capturing of attention by retrieval output, or that they have an impairment in the subjective experience of recollection. The present study aimed to differentiate between these accounts using continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) in healthy participants to disrupt function of specific left parietal subregions, including angular gyrus. Inconsistent with predictions of the attentional theory, angular gyrus cTBS did not result in greater impairment of free recall than cued recall. Supporting predictions of the subjective recollection account, temporary disruption of angular gyrus was associated with highly accurate source recollection accuracy but a selective reduction in participants’ rated source confidence. The findings are consistent with a role for angular gyrus in the integration of memory features into a conscious representation that enables the subjective experience of remembering.
Web document text and images extraction using DOM analysis and natural language processing

Web has emerged as the most important source of information in the world. This has resulted in need for automated software components to analyze web pages and harvest useful information from them. However, in typical web pages the informative content is surrounded by a very high degree of noise in the form of advertisements, navigation bars, links to other content, etc. Often the noisy content is interspersed with the main content leaving no clean boundaries between them. This noisy content makes the problem of information harvesting from web pages much harder. Therefore, it is essential to be able to identify main content of a web page and automatically isolate it from noisy content for any further analysis. Most existing approaches rely on prior knowledge of website specific templates and hand-crafted rules specific to websites for extraction of relevant content. We propose a generic approach that does not require prior knowledge of website templates. While HTML DOM analysis and visual layout analysis approaches have sometimes been used, we believe that for higher accuracy in content extraction, the analyzing software needs to mimic a human user and understand content in natural language similar to the way humans intuitively do in order to eliminate noisy content. In this paper, we describe a combination of HTML DOM analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for automated extractions of main article with associated images from web pages.
Ultrafine Particles from Traffic Emissions and Children’s Health (UPTECH) in Brisbane, Queensland (Australia): Study Design and Implementation

Ultrafine particles are particles that are less than 0.1 micrometres (µm) in diameter. Due to their very small size they can penetrate deep into the lungs, and potentially cause more damage than larger particles. The Ultrafine Particles from Traffic Emissions and Children’s Health (UPTECH) study is the first Australian epidemiological study to assess the health effects of ultrafine particles on children’s health in general and peripheral airways in particular. The study is being conducted in Brisbane, Australia. Continuous indoor and outdoor air pollution monitoring was conducted within each of the twenty five participating school campuses to measure particulate matter, including in the ultrafine size range, and gases. Respiratory health effects were evaluated by conducting the following tests on participating children at each school: spirometry, forced oscillation technique (FOT) and multiple breath nitrogen washout test (MBNW) (to assess airway function), fraction of exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO, to assess airway inflammation), blood cotinine levels (to assess exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke), and serum C-reactive protein (CRP) levels (to measure systemic inflammation). A pilot study was conducted prior to commencing the main study to assess the feasibility and reliably of measurement of some of the clinical tests that have been proposed for the main study. Air pollutant exposure measurements were not included in the pilot study.
The invisible frontier. A multiple species model for the origin of behavioral modernity

Two contradictory theories of human cognitive evolution have been developed to model how, when, and among what hominid groups behavioral modernity emerged. The first model, which has long been the dominant paradigm, links these behavioral innovations to a cultural “revolution” by anatomically modern humans in Europe at around 40,000 years ago, coinciding with the first arrival of our species in this region.1–4 According to this model, the sudden and explosive character of this change is demonstrated by the appearance in the archeological record of previously unseen carvings, personal ornaments, musical instruments, depictions on cave walls, and new stone and bone technology. A variant of this model sees behavioral modernity resulting from a rapid biological change, a brain mutation producing no apparent change in skull anatomy, which occurred in Europe or, more probably, in Africa at ca. 50,000 years ago.56.
Controlled Performance Evaluation of the DiversiLab Repetitive-Sequence-Based Genotyping System for Typing Multidrug-Resistant Health Care-Associated Bacterial Pathogens

ABSTRACT Fast, reliable, and versatile typing tools are essential to differentiate among related bacterial strains for epidemiological investigation and surveillance of health care-associated infection with multidrug-resistant (MDR) pathogens. The DiversiLab (DL) system is a semiautomated repetitive-sequence-based PCR system designed for rapid genotyping. The DL system performance was assessed by comparing its reproducibility, typeability, discriminatory power, and concordance with those of pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and multilocus sequence typing (MLST) and by assessing its epidemiological concordance on well-characterized MDR bacterial strains (n = 165). These included vanA Enterococcus faecium, extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL)-producing strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae, Escherichia coli, and Acinetobacter baumannii, and ESBL- or metallo-β-lactamase (MBL)-producing Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains. The DL system showed very good performance for E. faecium and K. pneumoniae and good performance for other species, except for a discrimination index of <95% for A. baumannii and E. coli (93.9% and 93.5%, respectively) and incomplete concordance with MLST for P. aeruginosa (78.6%) and E. coli (97.0%). Occasional violations of MLST assignment by DL types were noted for E. coli. Complete epidemiological concordance was observed for all pathogens, as all outbreak-associated strains clustered in identical DL types that were distinct from those of unrelated strains. In conclusion, the DL system showed good to excellent performance, making it a reliable typing tool for investigation of outbreaks caused by study pathogens, even though it was generally less discriminating than PFGE analysis. For E. coli and P. aeruginosa, MLST cannot be reliably inferred from DL type due to phylogenetic group violation or discordance.
Biodegradation and Biocompatibility of Poly L-lactic Acid Implantable Mesh

Purpose The purpose of this study was to evaluate the biodegradation and biocompatibility of poly L-lactic acid (PLLA) implantable mesh under in vitro and in vivo conditions. Methods PLLA mesh was examined for changes in weight and tensile strength. The histology of the tissue around the PLLA implant was also evaluated. Results The weight and tensile strength of the PLLA prosthesis was stable for 180 days. In addition, the surface of the PLLA mesh was not digested under in vitro or in vivo conditions as determined by scanning electron microscope. Histologically, there were no significant changes in the diameters of implanted PLLA mesh and subtype fibers over the course of 180 days. Likewise, there were no significant changes in the number of inflammatory and mast cells after 180 days, nor was there an increase in the percentage of collagen surrounding the PLLA mesh. Conclusions The results indicate that PLLA prostheses have good rigidity and biocompatibility in vivo and in vitro.
Paradoxical role of the 19 S proteasomal regulator 1 Paradoxical resistance of multiple myeloma to proteasome inhibitors 1 by decreased levels of 19 S proteasomal subunits 2 3

29 30 Paradoxical role of the 19S proteasomal regulator 3 ABSTRACT 31 Hallmarks of cancer, including rapid growth and aneuploidy, can result in non-32 oncogene addiction to the proteostasis network that can be exploited clinically. The 33 defining example is the exquisite sensitivity of multiple myeloma (MM) to 20S 34 proteasome inhibitors, such as carfilzomib. However, MM patients invariably acquire 35 resistance to these drugs. Using a next-generation shRNA platform, we found that 36 proteostasis factors, including chaperones and stress-response regulators, controlled the 37 response to carfilzomib. Paradoxically, 19S proteasome regulator knockdown induced 38 resistance to carfilzomib in MM and non-MM cells. 19S subunit knockdown did not 39 affect the activity of the 20S subunits targeted by carfilzomib nor their inhibition by the 40 drug, suggesting an alternative mechanism, such as the selective accumulation of 41 protective factors. In MM patients, lower 19S levels predicted a diminished response to 42 carfilzomib-based therapies.
Drying Shrinkage of Concrete: Experiments and Numerical Models

The paper presents some results of experimental program focused on drying and shrinkage of large concrete specimens. Segments of walls with thicknesses 200, 400 and 800 mm and standard cylinders 150x300 mm were used as specimens. Each segment has embedded 4 vibrating wire strain gauges in axis plane for measurements of shrinkage strain and plastic tubes of various lengths for measurements of pore relative humidity in different depths. Relative humidity and temperature of ambient environment were not controlled, however they were recorded very closely. Measure shrinkage strains are compared with prediction based on shrinkage models. The most important predictive models are used for comparison: Model Code 2010, Eurokód 2, Model ACI 209-R92, Model B4 a Model B4s.