Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effect of Pulping Upon the Dimensions of Wood Tracheids

The dimensions of the fibres in oven-dry blocks of wood from three species (white spruce, Douglas-fir, and larch) were deduced from measurements of bulk density and the number of fibres per unit cross-sectional area. The blocks were then cooked by the soda process to various yields, and the fibre dimensions were redetermined after the blocks had been washed and oven-dried. The weight of the fibres per unit length decreased almost in proportion to the yield loss, being reduced at 40% yield to 42% of its value in wood. This finding indicates that the fibres were shortened to only a small extent by pulping (ca. 4% at 40% yield) and that the major changes were in the transverse dimensions of the fibres. At 40% yield, cell-wall thickness and fibre width were respectively reduced to 52.5% and 84% of their original values. The results were independent of wood species. The changes in the dimensions of the fibres are in keeping with current concepts of the structure of the cell wall.
Connecting the Dots: Linking Osteocyte Activity and Therapeutic Modulation of Sclerostin by Extending a Multiscale Systems Model

The goal of this work was to extend a mathematical, multiscale systems model of bone function, remodeling, and health in order to explore hypotheses related to therapeutic modulation of sclerostin and quantitatively describe purported osteocyte activity within bone remodeling events. A pharmacokinetic model with first‐order absorption and dual elimination pathways was used to describe the kinetics of romosozumab, a monoclonal antibody (mAb) against sclerostin. To describe total circulating sclerostin, an extended indirect response model of inhibition of offset was developed. These models were subsequently linked to the systems model, with sclerostin signaling changes in resorption and formation through established osteocyte‐mediated mechanisms. The model proposes relative contributions of the osteocyte to the RANKL pool, a major player in feedback signaling, and is used to explore hypotheses surrounding attenuation of anabolic activity after multiple doses of sclerostin mAbs, a phenomenon whose mechanism is poorly understood.
Perfluorooctanoic acid exposure is associated with elevated homocysteine and hypertension in US adults

Objective To investigate the association between serum perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) concentration and cardiovascular disease, as measured by homocysteine level and blood pressure in a representative sample of US adults. Methods A cross-sectional study of 2934 adults (≥20 years) who participated in the 2003–2004 and 2005–2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and had detectable levels of PFOA in their serum. The health effects analysed as potentially associated with PFOA exposure included homocysteine level and blood pressure. Results The geometric mean value (95% CI) of the study participants' serum PFOA concentration was 4.00 μg/l (95% CI 3.86 to 4.13). The homocysteine and systolic blood pressure were shown to increase significantly with an increase in the log-transformed serum PFOA concentration, after adjusting for potential confounding variables. Adjusted ORs comparing participants at the 80th versus the 20th percentiles were 2.62 for hypertension (95% CI 2.09 to 3.14), and a positive association was also evident in models based on quartiles or based on restricted cubic splines. Conclusion These findings suggest that background exposure to PFOA may continue a risk factor for the development of cardiovascular diseases.
Flexible Reference Frames for Grasp Planning in Human Parietofrontal Cortex1,2,3

Abstract Reaching to a location in space is supported by a cortical network that operates in a variety of reference frames. Computational models and recent fMRI evidence suggest that this diversity originates from neuronal populations dynamically shifting between reference frames as a function of task demands and sensory modality. In this human fMRI study, we extend this framework to nonmanipulative grasping movements, an action that depends on multiple properties of a target, not only its spatial location. By presenting targets visually or somaesthetically, and by manipulating gaze direction, we investigate how information about a target is encoded in gaze- and body-centered reference frames in dorsomedial and dorsolateral grasping-related circuits. Data were analyzed using a novel multivariate approach that combines classification and cross-classification measures to explicitly aggregate evidence in favor of and against the presence of gaze- and body-centered reference frames. We used this approach to determine whether reference frames are differentially recruited depending on the availability of sensory information, and where in the cortical networks there is common coding across modalities. Only in the left anterior intraparietal sulcus (aIPS) was coding of the grasping target modality dependent: predominantly gaze-centered for visual targets and body-centered for somaesthetic targets. Left superior parieto-occipital cortex consistently coded targets for grasping in a gaze-centered reference frame. Left anterior precuneus and premotor areas operated in a modality-independent, body-centered frame. These findings reveal how dorsolateral grasping area aIPS could play a role in the transition between modality-independent gaze-centered spatial maps and body-centered motor areas.
Plasmid Replicons from Pseudomonas Are Natural Chimeras of Functional, Exchangeable Modules

Plasmids are a main factor for the evolution of bacteria through horizontal gene exchange, including the dissemination of pathogenicity genes, resistance to antibiotics and degradation of pollutants. Their capacity to duplicate is dependent on their replication determinants (replicon), which also define their bacterial host range and the inability to coexist with related replicons. We characterize a second replicon from the virulence plasmid pPsv48C, from Pseudomonas syringae pv. savastanoi, which appears to be a natural chimera between the gene encoding a newly described replication protein and a putative replication control region present in the widespread family of PFP virulence plasmids. We present extensive evidence of this type of chimerism in structurally similar replicons from species of Pseudomonas, including environmental bacteria as well as plant, animal and human pathogens. We establish that these replicons consist of two functional modules corresponding to putative control (REx-C module) and replication (REx-R module) regions. These modules are functionally separable, do not show specificity for each other, and are dynamically exchanged among replicons of four distinct plasmid families. Only the REx-C module displays strong incompatibility, which is overcome by a few nucleotide changes clustered in a stem-and-loop structure of a putative antisense RNA. Additionally, a REx-C module from pPsv48C conferred replication ability to a non-replicative chromosomal DNA region containing features associated to replicons. Thus, the organization of plasmid replicons as independent and exchangeable functional modules is likely facilitating rapid replicon evolution, fostering their diversification and survival, besides allowing the potential co-option of appropriate genes into novel replicons and the artificial construction of new replicon specificities.
Implementing the connected e-bike: challenges and requirements of an IoT application for urban transportation

As local transportation systems are facing enormous challenges in consequence of extensive urban growth, technological advancements are creating unprecedented opportunities as the Internet is extending into the real world, connecting physical items to the virtual world and creating an Internet of Things (IoT). While many activities are exploring corresponding applications, e.g. connecting bicycles to the Internet, widespread economic success of a truly connected device is still outstanding. Focusing on electric bicycles (e-bikes), this study investigates challenges and requirements of an IoT implementation based on GPS trackers from a technological as well as consumer perspective. The results of a four-month field study suggest a high interest of users in data from a connected e-bike but also indicate that technological restrictions still exist e.g. concerning the completeness of collected data. Also, such limitations appear to become further accentuated in view of high user expectations towards the accuracy and visualization of data, pointing to tradeoffs, which may have to be made in the design of IoT implementations between the completeness and convenience of data collection as well as the energy consumption of a sensor and the attractiveness of use cases to consumers.
Reach and Grasp

The short history of Information Systems suggests persistent anxiety about the field's purported lack of academic legitimacy. A common refrain in the anxiety discourse is that legitimacy can be obtained only by creating a strong theoretic core for the field. This essay takes exception with this view, attributing the anxiety to the field's relative youth, its focus on technology in a technophobic institutional environment, and academic ethnocentrism within and without the field. While developing stronger theory might be helpful, it is more important that the IS field pushes back against the hegemony of IS critics outside the field whose arguments masquerade as concerns about academic quality. The anxiety discourse should be replaced by the IS field's aggressive pursuit of new instructional and research opportunities that cross traditional institutional barriers and the pursuit of excellence on academic criteria deemed important by the field itself.
Real-time face relighting via adaptive normal mapping

In this paper, we present a real-time face relighting method for enhancing widely used face photographs such as `selfies'. In contrast with previous relighting methods that estimate and replace the real lighting condition with the intended one, our technique focuses on the aesthetic aspects of relighting with real-time interaction. We estimate the head pose based on the facial features and apply adaptive face normal mapping by transforming and interpolating pre-defined face normal maps. The lighting effect is calculated using adaptively mapped normals and overlaid on the original photograph. The experimental results show that the proposed method generates aesthetic face photographs without a computational overhead, enabling real-time face relighting for mobile applications.
Effect of Potassium Chloride on the Blood Pressure in Two‐Kidney, One Clip Goldblatt Hypertensive Rats

SUMMARY Tbe effects of potassium loading on blood pressure (BP) and the renln-angiotensin-aldosterone system were investigated in two-kidney, one clip Goldblatt hypertensive rats. Two series of experiments were performed: one was begun just after renal artery constriction, and tbe other, after hypertension had developed. Potassium loading significantly attenuated tbe development of hypertension, and was also able to abate existing renovascular hypertension. In both studies, potassium loading increased fluid intake and urine volume, which were accompanied by increased excretion of sodium and potassium. In spite of the massive diuretic effect, potassium loading significantly attenuated tbe increased plasma renin activity (PRA) induced by renal artery constriction, while it further enhanced the increased plasma aldosterone concentration (PAC) in twokidney, one clip Goldblatt hypertensive rats. There was no significant difference in the values of serum sodium and potassium between tbe two groups with or without potassium loading. These results suggest that potassium may attenuate the development of hypertension and reduce the elevated BP by diuresis and natriuresis and by suppression of the PRA in two-kidney, one clip Goldblatt hypertensive rats.
Elimination of Retroviral Infectivity by N-Ethylmaleimide with Preservation of Functional Envelope Glycoproteins

ABSTRACT The zinc finger motifs in retroviral nucleocapsid (NC) proteins are essential for viral replication. Disruption of these Cys-X2-Cys-X4-His-X4-Cys zinc-binding structures eliminates infectivity. To determine if N-ethylmaleimide (NEM) can inactivate human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) or simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) preparations by alkylating cysteines of NC zinc fingers, we treated infectious virus with NEM and evaluated inactivation of infectivity in cell-based assays. Inactivation was rapid and proportional to the NEM concentration. NEM treatment of HIV-1 or SIV resulted in extensive covalent modification of NC and other internal virion proteins. In contrast, viral envelope glycoproteins, in which the cysteines are disulfide bonded, remained intact and functional, as assayed by high-performance liquid chromatography, fusion-from-without analyses, and dendritic cell capture. Quantitative PCR assays for reverse transcription intermediates showed that NEM and 2,2′-dipyridyl disulfide (aldrithiol-2), a reagent which inactivates retroviruses through oxidation of cysteines in internal virion proteins such as NC, blocked HIV-1 reverse transcription prior to the formation of minus-strand strong-stop products. However, the reverse transcriptase from NEM-treated virions remained active in exogenous template assays, consistent with a role for NC in reverse transcription. Since disruption of NC zinc finger structures by NEM blocks early postentry steps in the retroviral infection cycle, virus preparations with modified NC proteins may be useful as vaccine immunogens and probes of the role of NC in viral replication.
UsiGesture: An environment for integrating pen-based interaction in user interface development

Several algorithms have been developed for pen-based gesture recognition. Yet, their integration in streamline engineering of interactive systems is bound to several shortcomings: they are hard to compare to each other, determining which one is the most suitable in which situation is a research problem, their performance largely vary depending on contextual parameters that are hard to predict, their fine-tuning in a real interactive application is a challenge. In order to address these shortcomings, we developed UsiGesture, an engineering method and a software support platform that accommodates multiple algorithms for pen-based gesture recognition in order to integrate them in a straightforward way into interactive computing systems. The method is aimed at providing designers and developers with support for the following steps: defining a dataset that is appropriate for an interactive system (e.g., made of commands, symbols, characters), determining the most suitable gesture recognition algorithm depending on contextual variables (e.g., user, platform, environment), fine-tuning the parameters of this algorithm by multi-criteria optimization (e.g., system speed and recognition rate vs. human distinguishability and perception), and incorporation of the fine-tuned algorithm in an integrated development environment for engineering interactive systems.
Adverse Prognostic Value of Persistent Office Blood Pressure Elevation in White Coat Hypertension

Stratification of cardiovascular risk is of fundamental importance in white coat hypertension (WCH) to identify individuals in need of closer follow-up and perhaps antihypertensive drug treatment. In subjects representative of the general population of Monza (Italy), the risk of cardiovascular and all-cause mortality was assessed >16 years in stable and unstable WCH individuals, that is, those in whom ambulatory blood pressure (BP) normality was associated with a persistent or nonpersistent office BP elevation at 2 consecutive visits, respectively. Data were compared with those from an entirely normotensive group, that is, ambulatory and persistent office BP normality. Compared with the normotensive group, the risk of cardiovascular and all-cause death was not significantly different in unstable WCH, whereas in stable WCH the risk was increased also when data were adjusted for baseline confounders, including ambulatory BP (hazard ratio, 16; P=0.001 for cardiovascular death and 1.92; P=0.02 for all-cause death). At a multivariable analysis, office BP was among the factors independently predicting death, and results were superimposable with use of Monza population–derived and guidelines-derived cutoff values for ambulatory BP normality (125/79 and 130/80 mm Hg, respectively). Thus, only when office BP is persistently elevated does WCH reflect the existence of an abnormal long-term mortality risk. This means that in WCH office BP is prognostically relevant and that repeated collection of its values is clinically important to better define patient risk.
Limited Role for Iron Regulation in Coxiella burnetii Pathogenesis

ABSTRACT In gram-negative bacteria, iron acquisition proteins are commonly regulated by Fur (ferric uptake regulator), which binds iron-regulated promoters (the Fur box). We hypothesized that Coxiella burnetii requires iron and employs an iron-regulatory system and used various approaches to define a Fur regulon. Cloned C. burnetii fur complemented an Escherichia coli fur deletion mutant. A ferrous iron transporter gene (CBU1766), a putative iron binding protein-encoding gene (CBU0970), and a cation efflux pump gene (CBU1362) were identified by genome annotation and using a Fur titration assay. Bioinformatically predicted Fur box-containing promoters were tested for transcriptional control by iron. Five genes demonstrated at least a twofold induction with minimal iron. Putatively regulated genes were evaluated in a two-plasmid regulator/promoter heterologous expression system. These data suggested a very limited Fur-regulated system in C. burnetii. In an in vitro tissue culture model, a significant increase in bacterial growth was observed with infected cells treated with deferoxamine in comparison to growth under iron-replete conditions. In an iron-overloaded animal model in vivo, the level of bacterial growth detected in the iron-injected animals was significantly decreased in comparison to growth in control animals. In a low-iron-diet animal model, a significant increase in splenomegaly was observed, but no significant change in bacterial growth was identified. The small number of predicted iron acquisition systems, few Fur-regulated genes, and enhanced replication under a decreased iron level predict a requirement of a low level of iron for survival, perhaps to avoid creation of additional reactive oxygen radicals.
Symbol Grounding Association in Multimodal Sequences with Missing Elements

In this paper, we extend a symbolic association framework for being able to handle missing elements in multimodal sequences. The general scope of the work is the symbolic associations of object-word mappings as it happens in language development in infants. In other words, two different representations of the same abstract concepts can associate in both directions. This scenario has been long interested in Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, and Neuroscience. In this work, we extend a recent approach for multimodal sequences (visual and audio) to also cope with missing elements in one or both modalities. Our method uses two parallel Long Short-Term Memories (LSTMs) with a learning rule based on EM-algorithm. It aligns both LSTM outputs via Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). We propose to include an extra step for the combination with the max operation for exploiting the common elements between both sequences. The motivation behind is that the combination acts as a condition selector for choosing the best representation from both LSTMs. We evaluated the proposed extension in the following scenarios: missing elements in one modality (visual or audio) and missing elements in both modalities (visual and sound). The performance of our extension reaches better results than the original model and similar results to individual LSTM trained in each modality.
Enlightening the malaria parasite life cycle: bioluminescent Plasmodium in fundamental and applied research

The unicellular protozoan parasites of the genus Plasmodium impose on human health worldwide the enormous burden of malaria. The possibility to genetically modify several species of malaria parasites represented a major advance in the possibility to elucidate their biology and is now turning laboratory lines of transgenic Plasmodium into precious weapons to fight malaria. Amongst the various genetically modified plasmodia, transgenic parasite lines expressing bioluminescent reporters have been essential to unveil mechanisms of parasite gene expression and to develop in vivo imaging approaches in mouse malaria models. Mainly the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and the rodent parasite P. berghei have been engineered to express bioluminescent reporters in almost all the developmental stages of the parasite along its complex life cycle between the insect and the vertebrate hosts. Plasmodium lines expressing conventional and improved luciferase reporters are now gaining a central role to develop cell based assays in the much needed search of new antimalarial drugs and to open innovative approaches for both fundamental and applied research in malaria.
Brief Mindfulness Meditation Improves Mental State Attribution and Empathizing

The ability to infer and understand the mental states of others (i.e., Theory of Mind) is a cornerstone of human interaction. While considerable efforts have focused on explicating when, why and for whom this fundamental psychological ability can go awry, considerably less is known about factors that may enhance theory of mind. Accordingly, the current study explored the possibility that mindfulness-based meditation may improve people’s mindreading skills. Following a 5-minute mindfulness induction, participants with no prior meditation experience completed tests that assessed mindreading and empathic understanding. The results revealed that brief mindfulness meditation enhanced both mental state attribution and empathic concern, compared to participants in the control group. These findings suggest that mindfulness may be a powerful technique for facilitating core aspects of social-cognitive functioning.