Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Killed but Metabolically Active Bacillus anthracis Vaccines Induce Broad and Protective Immunity against Anthrax

ABSTRACT Bacillus anthracis is the causative agent of anthrax. We have developed a novel whole-bacterial-cell anthrax vaccine utilizing B. anthracis that is killed but metabolically active (KBMA). Vaccine strains that are asporogenic and nucleotide excision repair deficient were engineered by deleting the spoIIE and uvrAB genes, rendering B. anthracis extremely sensitive to photochemical inactivation with S-59 psoralen and UV light. We also introduced point mutations into the lef and cya genes, which allowed inactive but immunogenic toxins to be produced. Photochemically inactivated vaccine strains maintained a high degree of metabolic activity and secreted protective antigen (PA), lethal factor, and edema factor. KBMA B. anthracis vaccines were avirulent in mice and induced less injection site inflammation than recombinant PA adsorbed to aluminum hydroxide gel. KBMA B. anthracis-vaccinated animals produced antibodies against numerous anthrax antigens, including high levels of anti-PA and toxin-neutralizing antibodies. Vaccination with KBMA B. anthracis fully protected mice against challenge with lethal doses of toxinogenic unencapsulated Sterne 7702 spores and rabbits against challenge with lethal pneumonic doses of fully virulent Ames strain spores. Guinea pigs vaccinated with KBMA B. anthracis were partially protected against lethal Ames spore challenge, which was comparable to vaccination with the licensed vaccine anthrax vaccine adsorbed. These data demonstrate that KBMA anthrax vaccines are well tolerated and elicit potent protective immune responses. The use of KBMA vaccines may be broadly applicable to bacterial pathogens, especially those for which the correlates of protective immunity are unknown.
Patients’ willingness to pay for anti‐emetic treatment

Background: Post‐operative nausea and vomiting (PONV) is a common complication of anaesthesia. This study was conducted in 100 German and 100 Turkish patients scheduled for elective surgery under general anaesthesia to assess the amount patients were willing to pay for an anti‐emetic that completely prevented PONV.
A Research Note on Post-Dating Relationships: The Social Embeddedness of Redefining Romantic Couplings

This is an exploratory, descriptive study of relationship redefinition. Using symbolic interaction theory, this paper examines the contours of post-dating relationships, asking the following questions: 1) how do people orient themselves to one another after a dating reltaionship ends? ; and, 2) what is the power dynamic between one's social network and his or her post-dating relationship? Using a snowball sample (N = 30), interview data are analyzed as narratives about the respondents' construction of post-dating relationships. Until recently, research has focused on postdivorce relationships and has characterized these as maladaptive (Weiss 1975; Spanier and Casto 1979; Berman 1985). This study joins recent research which suggests that relationships between former spouses or lovers may satisfy legitimate needs such as friendship, shared history, and extended social networks (Metts, Cupach and Bejlovec 1989; Aydintug 1995).
Persistence of Parent-Reported ADHD Symptoms From Childhood Through Adolescence in a Community Sample

Objective: To examine ADHD symptom persistence and factors associated with elevated symptom counts in a diverse, longitudinal community-based sample. Method: Parents reported demographics and completed a diagnostic interview repeatedly over a 6-year period. At Time 1, 481 interviews were completed about children (5-13 years); all participants were invited to four annual follow-up interviews, and 379 (79%) completed at least one. Inattentive (IA) and hyperactive-impulsive (HI) symptom counts were modeled with logistic quantile regression, while accounting for study design complexities. Results: The prevalence of seven IA symptoms remained stable from early childhood through late adolescence. The prevalence of eight HI symptoms decreased by more than half over time. After demographic adjustment, the upper quartile of HI symptom counts decreased with age (p < .01). High HI symptom counts persisted more among those with high IA symptom counts (p = .05). Conclusion: This study further characterizes and provides insights into ADHD symptom trajectory through adolescence.
Repeat Traumatic Brain Injury in the Juvenile Rat Is Associated with Increased Axonal Injury and Cognitive Impairments

Among the enormous population of head-injured children and young adults are a growing subpopulation who experience repeat traumatic brain injury (RTBI). The most common cause of RTBI in this age group is sports-related concussions, and athletes who have experienced a head injury are at greater risk for subsequent TBI, with consequent long-term cognitive dysfunction. While several animal models have been proposed to study RTBI, they have been shown to either produce injuries too severe, were conducted in adults, involved craniotomy, or failed to show behavioral deficits. A closed head injury model for postnatal day 35 rats was established, and single and repeat TBI (1-day interval) were examined histologically for axonal injury and behaviorally by the novel object recognition (NOR) task. The results from the current study demonstrate that an experimental closed head injury in the rodent with low mortality rates and absence of gross pathology can produce measurable cognitive deficits in a juvenile age group. The introduction of a second injury 24 h after the first impact resulted in increased axonal injury, astrocytic reactivity and increased memory impair
Examining the Complexity of the Campus Racial Climate at a Hispanic Serving Community College

Objective: Despite the growing representation of Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) among community colleges, relatively little is known about student perceptions of the campus climate at these institutions. Although perceptions of campus climate may differ by race and adversely affect students of color, most research has been conducted at predominantly White institutions and through the use of either qualitative or quantitative methods. The present study examines student perceptions of discrimination and bias among Asian, Latina/o, and White students at a community college that has an HSI designation. Method: Employing a parallel mixed-method design, data were collected through the Diverse Learning Environments survey and focus groups at a community college in the western United States. An ANOVA with post hoc tests and a qualitative cross-case analysis were used to assess perceptions of discrimination and bias across racial groups. Results: Student perceptions differed by race with qualitative and quantitative results complementing and contradicting each other. Asian students reported more discrimination and bias on the survey but only shared positive perspectives in a focus group. By contrast, Latina/o students reported less discrimination and bias on the survey but in a focus group shared both positive and negative perceptions of the campus climate. Conclusion: The findings thus suggest that assessing perceptions of the campus climate at racially heterogeneous community colleges, such as HSIs, should employ mixed-methods to capture a more comprehensive picture for students from different racial groups.
A Double-Strand Break Repair Defect in ATM-Deficient Cells Contributes to Radiosensitivity

The ATM protein, which is mutated in individuals with ataxia telangiectasia (AT), is central to cell cycle checkpoint responses initiated by DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). ATM’s role in DSB repair is currently unclear as is the basis underlying the radiosensitivity of AT cells. We applied immunofluorescence detection of γ-H2AX nuclear foci and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis to quantify the repair of DSBs after X-ray doses between 0.02 and 80 Gy in confluence-arrested primary human fibroblasts from normal individuals and patients with mutations in ATM and DNA ligase IV, a core component of the nonhomologous end-joining (NHEJ) repair pathway. Cells with hypomorphic mutations in DNA ligase IV exhibit a substantial repair defect up to 24 h after treatment but continue to repair for several days and finally reach a level of unrepaired DSBs similar to that of wild-type cells. Additionally, the repair defect in NHEJ mutants is dose dependent. ATM-deficient cells, in contrast, repair the majority of DSBs with normal kinetics but fail to repair a subset of breaks, irrespective of the initial number of lesions induced. Significantly, after biologically relevant radiation doses and/or long repair times, the repair defect in AT cells is more pronounced than that of NHEJ mutants and correlates with radiosensitivity. NHEJ-defective cells analyzed for survival following delayed plating after irradiation show substantial recovery while AT cells fail to show any recovery. These data argue that the DSB repair defect underlies a significant component of the radiosensitivity of AT cells.
Logarithmic divergence of the block entanglement entropy for the ferromagnetic Heisenberg model

Recent studies have shown that logarithmic divergence of entanglement entropy as a function of the size of a subsystem is a signature of criticality in quantum models. We demonstrate that the ground-state entanglement entropy of n sites for the ferromagnetic Heisenberg spin-(1/2) chain of the length L in a sector with fixed magnetization y per site grows as (1/2)log{sub 2}[n(L-n)/L]C(y), where C(y)=2{pi}e((1/4)-y{sup 2})
Influenza A H1N1pdm 2009 Virus in Paraguay: Nucleotide Point Mutations in Hemagglutinin and Neuraminidase Genes are not Associated with Drug Resistance

Influenza virus is associated with upper respiratory tract infections. The fourth influenza pandemic was declared in 2009. The aim of this study was to determine the genetic variability of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic virus circulating in Paraguay. Nasal swabs were collected from 181 patients with flu symptoms managed at the Hospital of the Medical School in Asunción, Paraguay, between August and October 2009. Virus detection was carried out by real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, followed by sequencing of the hemagglutinin and neuraminidase genes, and phylogenetic analysis. H1N1pdm09 was detected in 14.9% (27/181) of the suspected cases. Analysis of 13 samples showed that these viruses the clustered in a single genetic group. Neither the mutation related to exacerbation of disease (D239G in hemagglutinin) nor that related to antiviral resistance (H275Y in neuraminidase), both detected in neighboring countries, were found. This genetic analysis of H1N1pdm09 will help to understand the spread of the disease.
Analysis of Audiometric Differences of Patients with and without Tinnitus in a Large Clinical Database

Human hearing loss (HL) and comorbidities like tinnitus pose serious problems for people’s daily life, which in most severe cases may lead to social isolation, depression, and suicide. Here, we investigate the relationship between hearing deficits and tinnitus. To this end, we conducted a retrospective study on anonymized pure tone and speech audiometric data from patients of the ENT hospital Erlangen in which we compare audiometric data between patients with and without tinnitus. Overall data from 37,661 patients with sensorineural (SHL) or conductive HL (CHL) with (T, 9.5%) or without (NT, 90.5%) a tinnitus percept in different age groups and with different tinnitus pitches were included in this study. The results of the pure tone audiometry comparisons showed significant differences in T patients compared to NT patients. In young patients, we generally found lower hearing thresholds in T compared to NT patients. In adult patients, differences were more heterogeneous: hearing thresholds in T patients were lower in low frequency ranges, while they were higher at high frequencies. Furthermore, lower thresholds were more often found in CHL patients and could rarely be detected in SHL patients. In speech audiometry, only CHL patients with high-pitched tinnitus showed lower thresholds compared to NT patients’ thresholds. The results of this study may point to a biologically plausible functional benefit on hearing thresholds in HL tinnitus patients. We hypothesize that the physiological mechanism of stochastic resonance counteracts HL by adding neuronal noise to the system. This neuronal noise may induce changes in the auditory pathway and finally—as a side effect of threshold improvement—lead to the development of a tinnitus percept. We propose a general model of changed hearing thresholds in T patients, being either decreased or increased compared to NT patients.
Food and Drug Administration approval for medications used in the pediatric intensive care unit: A continuing conundrum

Objectives: Many drugs used in the pediatric intensive care unit are administered “off label,” i.e., they have been neither thoroughly tested for efficacy and safety nor approved for use in children. The U.S. Congress has enacted legislation to promote standards and requirements for Food and Drug Administration labeling for drugs used in pediatrics. Nevertheless, we hypothesized that most medications used in our pediatric intensive care unit were not Food and Drug Administration approved for use in pediatric patients. Design: A list of medications dispensed in the pediatric intensive care unit from January through February 2008 was obtained from our pharmacy database. We then determined whether each medication had been granted Food and Drug Administration approval for use in children. Medications were divided into the following categories: not approved for use in any pediatric age group, approved for use in limited age groups only, and approved for use in all pediatric age groups. Setting: A pediatric intensive care unit at a tertiary care hospital with 26 beds and 1,500 admissions per year. Measurements and Main Results: In the 2-month period, 248 different medications were dispensed with a total of 49,707 medication orders. Sixty (24.2%) of the medications dispensed were not Food and Drug Administration approved for use in any pediatric age group, 106 (42.7%) were approved for use in limited age groups, and 82 (33%) were approved for use in all pediatric age groups. Eleven of the 25 most frequently dispensed medications were approved for use in limited age groups, but none of them was used for the indication or age group for which they were approved. Conclusions: Despite the efforts of Congress, 67% of medications prescribed and administered in the pediatric intensive care unit did not have Food and Drug Administration approval or had only limited approval, underscoring the need for the medical community to demand oversight and research to improve drug labeling for our patient population.
Psychological indicators of balance confidence: relationship to actual and perceived abilities.

BACKGROUND This study compares several psychological indicators of balance confidence in relation to physical performance, past and current experience, gender bias, and other perceptions of daily functioning. METHODS Sixty community-dwelling ambulatory elders (aged 65-95) were administered the Falls Efficacy Scale (FES), the Activities-Specific Balance Confidence Scale (ABC), and three dichotomous questions on fear of falling, activity avoidance, and perceived need for personal assistance to ambulate outdoors. Performance measures on walking (average speed) and balance (static posturography) were obtained on a subsample of 21 subjects. RESULTS Balance confidence assessed by the ABC and self-perceived need for personal assistance with outdoor ambulation were the only indicators significantly associated with the performance measures. As expected, perceived balance capabilities were more strongly related to current behavior (frequency of doing specific activities) than to past experience (fall history). Gender differences in self-report emerged for the global fear-of-falling indicator but not for the two efficacy ratings. CONCLUSIONS Psychological indicators of balance confidence are important to measure both in conjunction with balance test performance and as a legitimate focus of rehabilitation. Of the various indicators assessed here, the dichotomous fear-of-falling question appears to have the least utility. Perceived need for personal assistance to ambulate outdoors has merit as an initial clinical screening question for discriminating persons on the basis of both physical ability and confidence. The ABC scale appears to have the greatest utility as an evaluative index for older persons at a moderate to high level of functioning.
QoS guarantee and power distribution for soft handoff connections in cellular CDMA downlinks

A two-phase power distribution scheme for supporting quality-of-service (QoS) and best effort traffic is proposed. We first formulate the power distribution for QoS traffic as an optimization problem so that the number of simultaneously transmitting connections is maximized. Optimum power distribution is difficult to implement in practice due to both the computational complexity and the requirement for global information about the mobile station (MS) locations, connection channel conditions, and traffic load in the system. We then propose a heuristic scheme of power distribution for soft handoff (SHO) connections. The full scheme includes an initial power distribution (IPD) and a power distribution adjustment (PDA). IPD allocates BS power resource based on the channel condition of each individual connection, while PDA further coordinates the power distribution between neighboring base stations (BSs) in order to accommodate more connections. The proposed power distribution scheme can achieve a capacity close to that of the optimum power distribution, while providing much higher transmission throughput for best effort data traffic. The proposed power distribution scheme can be applied to existing SHO schemes for efficient BS power resource usage. The scheme does not require global information, and its implementation can be further simplified by performing IPD only with slight performance degradation.
3D-CNN in Drug Resistance Detection and Tuberculosis Classification

Object classification is a very demanding field in computer vision, especially when dealing with medical imaging datasets, which are often small and have unbalanced distributions. Deep learning (DL) methods have proven to be effective in dealing with such problems and have established themselves as the state-of-the-art. ImageCLEFtuberculosis is a challenge that encompasses the classification problem on medical images, and is divided into two subtasks: Drug Resistance Detection and Tuberculosis classification. For both subtasks, provided images were pre-processed to segment the lungs from the CT volumes. Afterwards, pre-processed CT volumes were fed in batches to a 3D convolutional neural network. Test results for the Drug Resistance detection task scored an accuracy of 46.5% and AUC of 0.46, while in the Tuberculosis classification task an accuracy of 24% and Cohen’s Kappa value of 0.022 were obtained. Using data augmentation and weight normalization, the overfitting problem could be reduced, and submitted models’ performance improved.
A critical race inquiry into the training experiences of early career professionals who identify as black women in counseling psychology

CAREER PROFESSIONALS WHO IDENTIFY AS BLACK WOMEN IN COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGY by REISHA ERNESTINE MOXLEY (Under the Direction of Edward Delgado-Romero) ABSTRACT This critical-race grounded theory study examined the process of multicultural competence development for early career counseling psychologists who identified as Black women and trained in predominantly White institutions or programs. The critical analytical lens utilized in this study informed the formation of a learner-based theory for development of multicultural competence. The Process of Development of Multicultural Competence for Black Women in Predominantly White Training Institutions or Programs involves one external event and five internal steps. These are: (1) an Awareness of Subjectivities, Pre-Encounter Expectations of Study in Counseling Psychology (2) an Assessment of Safety, a Confrontation of Biases (3) Accommodation of New Information (4) Adjustment of Subjectivities and, finally (5) an Adoption of an Aspirational View of Multicultural Competence. This process of development and implications for training and research in counseling psychology are discussed.
High Discrepancy of Driver Mutations in Patients with NSCLC and Synchronous Multiple Lung Ground-Glass Nodules

Background: The aim of this study was to investigate the discordance rates of eight known driver mutations among multiple matched intrapulmonary ground-glass nodules (GGNs) in non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. Methods: Tumors from 35 patients with multiple lesions resected, including confirmed NSCLC and at least one GGN, were analyzed for mutations in EGFR, KRAS, HER2, BRAF, and PIK3CA together with fusions in ALK, ROS1, and RET. Results: From 35 patients, a total of 72 lesions (60 were GGNs) were analyzed. These included nine adenocarcinoma in situ, nine minimal invasive adenocarcinoma, and 54 invasive adenocarcinoma. Among them, 33 tumor lesions (45.8 %) were found harboring EGFR mutations: 13 tumors with exon 19 deletion, 18 with L858R on exon 21, and two with both exon 19 del and L858R mutation. There were 5 tumors (6.9 %) harboring EML4-ALK fusion, four HER2 mutations (5.6%), three KRAS mutations (4.2%), one ROS1 fusion and one BRAF mutation. When we used the matched tumors to determine the intertumor discrepancy, only six out of 30 patients harbored identical mutations. The discordance rate of driver mutations was 80% (24 of 30) in those patients harboring at least one of the detected driver mutations. The median disease-free survival was 41.2 months (95% confidence interval: 35.8–52.6 months) and the median overall survival was “still not reached” in this cohort. Conclusions: We found a high discrepancy of driver mutations among NSCLC patients with GGNs and a favorable prognosis after multiple lesions resection, which support surgical resection in this situation as a reasonable approach.
Sciurus ignitus (Rodentia: Sciuridae)

Abstract: Sciurus ignitus (Gray, 1867) is a Neotropical tree squirrel commonly known as the Bolivian squirrel. It is a small-bodied, understory and mid-canopy dweller that occurs within the evergreen lowland and montane tropical rain forests along the eastern slope of the Andes in Peru, Bolivia, and extreme northern Argentina, and the western Amazon Basin in Brazil and Peru between 200 and 2,700 m in elevation. S. ignitus is 1 of 28 species in the genus Sciurus, and 1 of 8 in the subgenus Guerlinguetus. The taxonomic status of this species, as with other small sciurids in Peru and Bolivia, remains ambiguous. S. ignitus is currently listed as “Data Deficient” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.
Correlation of hormone receptors with pathological features in human breast cancer

Correlations have been found between certain pathologic features and estrogen and progesterone receptor status of mammary carcinoma. Well‐differentiated carcinomas were more frequently receptor positive than poorly differentiated tumors. An increasing degree of lymphocytic and plasmacytic infiltrate in the tumor was associated with a decreasing incidence of estrogen receptor activity. In addition, elastosis in primary carcinomas has been correlated with response to endocrine therapy in patients with advanced disease. With increasing amounts of elastosis in the primary tumor, there was an increase in the response rate. Also, patients with estrogen receptor positive tumors with no elastosis showed a response rate similar to that of estrogen receptor‐negative tumors. Hormone receptor analysis is most valuable when considered with other factors.