Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Myofibrillogenesis in living cells microinjected with fluorescently labeled alpha-actinin

Fluorescently labeled alpha-actinin, isolated from chicken gizzards, breast muscle, or calf brains, was microinjected into cultured embryonic myotubes and cardiac myocytes where it was incorporated into the Z-bands of myofibrils. The localization in injected, living cells was confirmed by reacting permeabilized myotubes and cardiac myocytes with fluorescent alpha-actinin. Both living and permeabilized cells incorporated the alpha-actinin regardless of whether the alpha-actinin was isolated from nonmuscle, skeletal, or smooth muscle, or whether it was labeled with different fluorescent dyes. The living muscle cells could beat up to 5 d after injection. Rest-length sarcomeres in beating myotubes and cardiac myocytes were approximately 1.9-2.4 microns long, as measured by the separation of fluorescent bands of alpha-actinin. There were areas in nearly all beating cells, however, where narrow bands of alpha-actinin, spaced 0.3-1.5 micron apart, were arranged in linear arrays giving the appearance of minisarcomeres. In myotubes, alpha-actinin was found exclusively in these closely spaced arrays for the first 2-3 d in culture. When the myotubes became contraction- competent, at approximately day 4 to day 5 in culture, alpha-actinin was localized in Z-bands of fully formed sarcomeres, as well as in minisarcomeres. Video recordings of injected, spontaneously beating myotubes showed contracting myofibrils with 2.3 microns sarcomeres adjacent to noncontracting fibers with finely spaced periodicities of alpha-actinin. Time sequences of the same living myotube over a 24-h period revealed that the spacings between the minisarcomeres increased from 0.9-1.3 to 1.6-2.3 microns. Embryonic cardiac myocytes usually contained contractile networks of fully formed sarcomeres together with noncontractile minisarcomeres in peripheral areas of the cytoplasm. In some cells, individual myofibrils with 1.9-2.3 microns sarcomeres were connected in series with minisarcomeres. Double labeling of cardiac myocytes and myotubes with alpha-actinin and a monoclonal antibody directed against adult chicken skeletal myosin showed that all fibers that contained alpha-actinin also contained skeletal muscle myosin. This was true whether alpha-actinin was present in Z-bands of fully formed sarcomeres or present in the closely spaced beads of minisarcomeres. We propose that the closely spaced beads containing alpha-actinin are nascent Z-bands that grow apart and associate laterally with neighboring arrays containing alpha-actinin to form sarcomeres during myofibrillogenesis.
General Features of Radar‐Observed Boundary Layer Convergence Lines and Their Associated Convection Over a Sharp Vegetation‐Contrast Area

Boundary layer convergence lines (boundaries), an important trigger of convective storms, can be produced by land surface contrasts. This study explored a five‐year summertime radar climatology of boundaries and their associated convection in response to vegetation contrast around the bend of the Yellow River in North China. A total of 323 boundaries were identified with 44% being convection‐associated. The boundaries especially the convective boundaries were more frequent over the arid area than those over the vegetated area and tended to have an orientation parallel to the vegetation contrast line. The boundary activities collocated well with the diurnal variation in surface temperature difference across the vegetation contrast. Compared with the nonconvective boundaries, the convective boundaries formed earlier and moved faster into the inner arid area, obtained maximum length around midday, and then initiated convection. Vegetation contrast might also affect the high‐frequency location and magnitude of boundary‐associated convective precipitation.
Conflict Avoidance between Mobility Robustness Optimization and Mobility Load Balancing

In Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, Mobility Robustness Optimization (MRO) and Mobility Load Balancing (MLB) are two important functions to auto-optimize the network performances. There is a close correlation between them, as they both choose adjusting handover parameters as optimization actions. The conflict may occur between the two functions when they adjust the same handover parameter in opposite directions. This can not improve the performances but waste network resources. In this paper, we present a novel scheme to solve the problem. In order to prevent the occurrence of the conflict, we set an allowed range for MLB in which the handover problems can be prevented. Analyses and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively solve the conflict problem and improve the performances of both functions.
Inactivation defects caused by myotonia-associated mutations in the sodium channel III-IV linker

Missense mutations in the skeletal muscle Na+ channel alpha subunit occur in several heritable forms of myotonia and periodic paralysis. Distinct phenotypes arise from mutations at two sites within the III-IV cytoplasmic loop: myotonia without weakness due to substitutions at glycine 1306, and myotonia plus weakness caused by a mutation at threonine 1313. Heterologous expression in HEK cells showed that substitutions at either site disrupted inactivation, as reflected by slower inactivation rates, shifts in steady-state inactivation, and larger persistent Na+ currents. For T1313M, however, the changes were an order of magnitude larger than any of three substitutions at G1306, and recovery from inactivation was hastened as well. Model simulations demonstrate that these functional difference have distinct phenotypic consequences. In particular, a large persistent Na+ current predisposes to paralysis due to depolarization-induced block of action potential generation.
dPob/EMC is essential for biosynthesis of rhodopsin and other multi-pass membrane proteins in Drosophila photoreceptors

In eukaryotes, most integral membrane proteins are synthesized, integrated into the membrane, and folded properly in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). We screened the mutants affecting rhabdomeric expression of rhodopsin 1 (Rh1) in the Drosophila photoreceptors and found that dPob/EMC3, EMC1, and EMC8/9, Drosophila homologs of subunits of ER membrane protein complex (EMC), are essential for stabilization of immature Rh1 in an earlier step than that at which another Rh1-specific chaperone (NinaA) acts. dPob/EMC3 localizes to the ER and associates with EMC1 and calnexin. Moreover, EMC is required for the stable expression of other multi-pass transmembrane proteins such as minor rhodopsins Rh3 and Rh4, transient receptor potential, and Na+K+-ATPase, but not for a secreted protein or type I single-pass transmembrane proteins. Furthermore, we found that dPob/EMC3 deficiency induces rhabdomere degeneration in a light-independent manner. These results collectively indicate that EMC is a key factor in the biogenesis of multi-pass transmembrane proteins, including Rh1, and its loss causes retinal degeneration. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.06306. 001
Associations of General and Central Adiposity With Incident Diabetes in Chinese Men and Women

OBJECTIVE We assess associations of general and central adiposity in middle age and of young adulthood adiposity with incident diabetes in adult Chinese and estimate the associated population burden of diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS The prospective China Kadoorie Biobank enrolled 512,891 adults 30–79 years of age from 10 localities across China during 2004–2008. During 9.2 years of follow-up, 13,416 cases of diabetes were recorded among 482,589 participants without diabetes at baseline. Cox regression yielded adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) for incident diabetes associated with measures of general (e.g., BMI and BMI at 25 years) and central (e.g., waist circumference [WC]) adiposity. RESULTS The mean (SD) BMI was 23.6 kg/m2 (3.4 kg/m2), and 3.8% had a BMI ≥30 kg/m2. Throughout the range examined (19–32 kg/m2), BMI showed a positive log-linear relationship with diabetes, with adjusted HRs per SD higher usual BMI greater in men (1.98; 95% CI 1.93–2.04) than in women (1.77; 1.73–1.81) (P for heterogeneity <0.001). For WC, HRs per SD were 2.13 (95% CI 2.07–2.19) in men and 1.91 (1.87–1.95) in women (P for heterogeneity <0.001). Mutual adjustment attenuated these associations, especially those of BMI. BMI at age 25 years was weakly positively associated with diabetes (men HR 1.09 [95% CI 1.05–1.12]; women 1.04 [1.02–1.07] per SD), which was reversed after adjustment for baseline BMI. In China, the increase in adiposity accounted for ∼50% of the increase in diabetes burden since 1980. CONCLUSIONS Among relatively lean Chinese adults, higher adiposity—general and central—was strongly positively associated with the risk of incident diabetes. The predicted continuing increase in adiposity in China foreshadows escalating rates of diabetes.
Building Occupancy Estimation with Environmental Sensors via CDBLSTM

Buildings consume quite a lot of energy; hence, the issue of building energy efficiency has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. A key factor in achieving this objective is occupancy information that directly impacts on energy-related building control systems. In this paper, we leverage on environmental sensors that are nonintrusive and cost-effective for building occupancy estimation. Our result relies on feature engineering and learning. The conventional feature engineering requires one to manually extract relevant features without a clear guideline. This blind feature extraction is labor intensive and may miss some significant implicit features. To address this issue, we propose a convolutional deep bidirectional long short-term memory (CDBLSTM) approach that contains a convolutional network and a deep structure to automatically learn significant features from the sensory data without human intervention. Moreover, the long short-term memory networks are able to capture temporal dependencies in the data and the bidirectional structure can take the past and future contexts into consideration for the final identification of occupancy. We have conducted real experiments to evaluate the performance of our proposed CDBLSTM approach. Instead of estimating the exact number of occupants, we attempt to identify the range of occupants, i.e., zero, low, medium, and high, which is adequate for most of building control systems. The experimental results indicate the effectiveness of our proposed approach compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
Fewest Common Hops (FCH): An Improved Peer Selection Approach for P2P Applications

Underlay-unawareness in P2P systems can result in sub-optimal peer selection for overlay routing and hence poor performance. The majority of underlay aware proposals for peer selection focus on finding the shortest overlay routes by selecting the nearest peers according to proximity. However, in case of multiple and parallel downloads, if the underlay paths between a downloader and its selected nearest peers share a bottleneck, this can cause congestion, leading to performance deterioration instead of improvement. This effect was neglected in previous work because, in today's Internet, the bottleneck is usually not shared as it is the end user's access link. This is no longer the case in more modern scenarios, e.g. with FTTH or with upcoming in-network caching techniques such as DECADE. We propose an improved peer selection approach for P2P applications called Fewest Common Hops (FCH) that ensures proximity based node selection having maximum path disjointness. It is a client based, infrastructure independent heuristic to optimize download time for multiple and parallel downloads in P2P content distribution applications. Simulations show that, even when FCH is implemented in the simplest possible fashion (using only traceroute), it can significantly decrease the download time.
Advances in Brief Inability of Low-or High-Fat Diet to Modulate Late Stages of Colon Carcinogenesis in Sprague-Dawley Rats 1 ' 2

The main objective or the present proposal was to investigate the effect of feeding a lowor high-fat diet in the early and late stages of colon carcinogenesis. Sprague-Dawley male rats were injected with azoxymethane (20 mg/kg/week) for 2 weeks. One week later they were randomly allocated to eat a low-fat (4% beef tallow + 1% corn oil) or a high-fat (18.6% beef tallow + 4.7% corn oil) diet (LF or HF). After 10 weeks of feeding, 10 animals per group were killed, and their colons were evaluated for tumors. The remaining animals in each group were divided further into LF and HF groups. The four experimental groups consisted of groups receiving LF or HF diet throughout the study (LF-LF or HF-HF) and the groups fed LF or HF diet for the first 10 weeks, then assigned the alternate diet for the remainder of the duration (LF-HF or HF-LF). By week 26, the remaining animals were killed, and their colons were evaluated for the number, location and size of tumors. The tumor incidence in the HF-HF and HF-LF groups were higher than the LF-LF and LF-HF groups (81.6 and 84.8% u MÂ»\71.4 and 60.0%). Tumor multiplicity ranged from 1.86 Â±0.26 to 2.54 Â±0.33 in all groups. The average size of tumors and total tumor area/rat were affected significantly by the time at which the diet was fed. Average size and total tumor area in the animals fed HF diet during early stages (HF-HF and HF-LF) were significantly higher than those fed the LF diet during the early stages. Late intervention by specific diets did not affect tumor outcome. Sequential enumeration of aberrant crypt foci of different growth features representing early preneoplastic stages corroborated the findings of the tumor outcome. It was concluded that early preneoplastic stages were more sensitive than their advanced counterparts to the dietary interventions of the present study.
The sandfly fauna (Diptera: Psychodidae: Phlebotominae) of the Parque Estadual da Serra da Tiririca, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) in the state of Rio de Janeiro is sporadic and can be characterised as a peridomestic transmission that occurs in modified natural environments. The aim of this work was to study the fauna and ecological characteristics of sandflies in an environmentally protected area (the State Park of Serra da Tiririca) within the remnants of the Atlantic Forest in the municipalities of Niterói and Maricá and their possible relationship with leishmaniasis. Captures were performed using light traps during the night once a month for one year in both sylvatic environments and areas surrounding homes near the park. A total of 1,037 sandflies were captured, belonging to nine genera and 12 species: Evandromyia tupynambai (34.1%), Migonemyia migonei (20.6%), Brumptomyia cunhai (13.8%), Micropygomyia schreiberi (9.7%), Psathyromyia lanei (6.5%), Brumptomyia nitzulescui (5.7%), Evandromyia edwardsi (5.4%), Nyssomyia intermedia (2.8%), Evandromyia cortelezzii (0.6%), Pintomyia bianchigalatiae (0.5%), Lutzomyia longipalpis (0.2%) and Sciopemyia microps (0.1%). Both Mg. migonei and Ny. intermedia may be acting as vectors of CL in this area.
A collaborative digital library for children

Over the last three years, a digital library interface has been developed where two children can collaborate using multiple mice on a single computer to access multimedia information concerning animals. This technology, SearchKids, supports past work in copresent collaborative zoomable interfaces for young children. This paper describes the differences in children's collaborative behaviour and dialogue when using two different software conditions to search for animals in the digital library. In this study, half the children had to 'confirm' their collaborative activities (e.g. both children had to click on a given area to move to that area). The other half used an 'independent' collaboration technique (e.g. just one mouse click allowed the pair to move to that area). The participants in this study were 98 second and third grade children (ages 7-9 year-old) from a suburban public elementary school in Prince George's County, Maryland. The results of the study show distinct differences between conditions in how children discussed their shared goals, collaborative tasks, and what outcomes they had in successfully finding multimedia information in the digital library.
Speech in Noisy Environments: robust automatic segmentation, feature extraction, and hypothesis combination

The first evaluation for Speech in Noisy Environments (SPINE1) was conducted by the Naval Research Labs (NRL) in August, 2000. The purpose of the evaluation was to test existing core speech recognition technologies for speech in the presence of varying types and levels of noise. In this case the noises were taken from military settings. Among the strategies used by Carnegie Mellon University's successful systems designed for this task were session-adaptive segmentation, robust mel-scale filtering for the computation of cepstra, the use of parallel front-end features and noise-compensation algorithms, and parallel hypotheses combination through word-graphs. This paper describes the motivations behind the design decisions taken for these components, supported by observations and experiments.
Reasoning, Models, and Images: Behavioral Measures and Cortical Activity

The goal of this study was to investigate the neurocognitive processes of mental imagery in deductive reasoning. Behavioral studies yielded four sorts of verbal relations: (1) visuospatial relations that are easy to envisage both visually and spatially; (2) visual relations that are easy to envisage visually but hard to envisage spatially; (3) spatial relations that are hard to envisage visually but easy to envisage spatially; and (4) control relations that are hard to envisage both visually and spatially. In three experiments, visual relations slowed the process of reasoning in comparison with control relations, whereas visuospatial and spatial relations yielded inferences comparable to those of control relations. An experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging showed that in the absence of any correlated visual input (problems were presented acoustically via headphones), all types of reasoning problems evoked activity in the left middle temporal gyrus, in the right superior parietal cortex, and bilaterally in the precuneus. In the prefrontal cortex, increased activity was found in the middle and inferior frontal gyri. However, only the problems based on visual relations also activated areas of the visual association cortex corresponding to V2. The results indicate that cortical activity during reasoning depends on the nature of verbal relations. All relations elicit mental models that underlie reasoning, but visual relations in addition elicit visual images. This account resolves inconsistencies in the previous literature.
T-cell homing receptor expression in IgA nephropathy.

BACKGROUND IgA nephropathy (IgAN) is characterized by mesangial deposition of polymeric IgA (pIgA). In IgAN, mucosal pIgA production is reduced while systemic production is increased, making the latter the likely source of mesangial pIgA, and suggesting a displacement of pIgA-producing cells from mucosal to systemic sites. Upon activation, lymphocytes migrate through the circulation up-regulating homing receptors (HR) which direct their return to appropriate effector locations. We investigated the HR expression of T-cell subsets in IgAN, healthy adults and membranous nephropathy (MN). METHODS Peripheral blood cells were labelled for CD3, CD4 and CD8, and for L-selectin (naive cells), integrin alpha4beta1 (systemically homing cells) and integrin alpha4beta7 (mucosally homing cells) and analysed by flow immunocytometry. RESULTS In IgAN, CD3 T cells displayed reduced L-selectin and increased alpha4beta1hi expression, with no difference in alpha4beta7. No abnormality of T-cell HR expression was found in MN. Both IgAN and healthy adults maintained their patterns of T-cell HR expression when studied again at a later time point, and the changes in IgAN were entirely accounted for by the CD4 T-cell subset with CD8 HR expression being normal. CONCLUSIONS The consistently reduced L-selectin expression by CD4 T cells indicates increased activation of this subset in IgAN. These activated cells express alpha4beta1 rather than alpha4beta7, and therefore home to systemic effector sites. CD4 T cells regulate antibody production, including IgA. As pIgA is overproduced in systemic sites in IgAN, we hypothesize that these activated systemic homing CD4 T cells may direct the aberrant systemic pIgA production observed in IgAN.
A new view of the motor cortex

Three main views of the primate motor cortex have been proposed over the 140 years of its study. These views are not necessarily incompatible. In the homunculus view, the motor cortex functions as a rough map of the body’s musculature. In the population-code view, populations of broadly tuned neurons combine to specify hand direction or some other parameter of movement. In the recently proposed action map view, common actions in the movement repertoire are emphasized in different regions of cortex. In the action map view, to fully understand the organization of the motor cortex, it is necessary to study the structure and complexity of the movement repertoire and understand how that statistical structure is mapped onto the cortical surface. This chapter discusses the action map in the primate brain and how some of the complex actions represented there may play a role in social behavior.
Learning directional co-occurrence for human action classification

Spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) based methods have shown promising results for human action classification. However, state-of-art works typically utilize bag-of-visual words (BoVW), which focuses on the statistical distribution of features but ignores their inherent structural relationships. To solve this problem, a descriptor, namely directional pair-wise feature (DPF), is proposed to encode the mutual direction information between pairwise words, aiming at adding more spatial discriminant to BoVW. Firstly, STIP features are extracted and classified into a set of labeled words. Then in each frame, the DPF is constructed for every pair of words with different labels, according to their assigned directional vector. Finally, DPFs are quantized to be a probability histogram as a representation of human action. The proposed method is evaluated on two challenging datasets, Rochester and UT-interaction, and the results based on chi-squared kernel SVM classifiers confirm that our method can classify human actions with high accuracies.
Learning Innate Face Preferences

New born humans preferentially orient to facelike patterns at birth, but months of experience with faces are required for full face processing abilities to develop. Several models have been proposed for how the interaction of genetic and evironmental influences can explain these data. These models generally assume that the brain areas responsible for newborn orienting responses are not capable of learning and are physically separate from those that later learn from real faces. However, it has been difficult to reconcile these models with recent discoveries of face learning in newborns and young infants. We propose a general mechanism by which genetically specified and environment-driven preferences can coexist in the same visual areas. In particular, newborn face orienting may be the result of prenatal exposure of a learning system to internally generated input patterns, such as those found in PGO waves during REM sleep. Simulating this process with the HLISSOM biological model of the visualsystem, we demonstrate that the combination of learning and internal patterns is an efficient way to specify and develop circuitry for face perception. This prenatal learning can account for the newborn preferences for schematic and photographic images of faces, providing a computational explanation for how genetic influences interact with experience to construct a complex adaptive system.