Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A simplified multiscale damage model for the transversely isotropic shale rocks under tensile loading

A simplified multiscale damage model is proposed for the transversely isotropic shale rocks under tensile loading. In this framework, the multiscale representations for the shale rocks are presented by introducing the microcrack-weakened equivalent solid with hierarchical microstructures, whose transversely isotropic properties are obtained by performing multilevel homogenization procedures. To simplify the calculation process for the damage-induced properties, the equivalent isotropic medium is attained by applying the Voigt–Reuss–Hill averaging process to the transversely isotropic solid. Subsequently, the microcrack-induced inelastic compliances are approximately derived in terms of microcrack opening displacements in the equivalent isotropic medium of the shale rock under tensile loading. The sizes and orientations of microcracks are taken as random variables. Both stationary and evolutionary damage models are considered. Microcrack kinetic equations are characterized through the use of a fracture mechanics-based stability criterion and microcrack geometry within a representative volume element. Numerical examples including experimental validations and comparisons with existing micromechanical models are presented to verify the proposed multiscale damage model. Finally, the influences of the silt inclusions and porosity on the material intrinsic and damage-induced properties are discussed.
Recurrent NRAS mutations in pulmonary Langerhans cell histiocytosis

The mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway is constantly activated in Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH). Mutations of the downstream kinases BRAF and MAP2K1 mediate this activation in a subset of LCH lesions. In this study, we attempted to identify other mutations which may explain the MAPK activation in nonmutated BRAF and MAP2K1 LCH lesions. We analysed 26 pulmonary and 37 nonpulmonary LCH lesions for the presence of BRAF, MAP2K1, NRAS and KRAS mutations. Grossly normal lung tissue from 10 smoker patients was used as control. Patient spontaneous outcomes were concurrently assessed. BRAFV600E mutations were observed in 50% and 38% of the pulmonary and nonpulmonary LCH lesions, respectively. 40% of pulmonary LCH lesions harboured NRASQ61K/R mutations, whereas no NRAS mutations were identified in nonpulmonary LCH biopsies or in lung tissue control. In seven out of 11 NRASQ61K/R-mutated pulmonary LCH lesions, BRAFV600E mutations were also present. Separately genotyping each CD1a-positive area from the same pulmonary LCH lesion demonstrated that these concurrent BRAF and NRAS mutations were carried by different cell clones. NRASQ61K/R mutations activated both the MAPK and AKT (protein kinase B) pathways. In the univariate analysis, the presence of concurrent BRAFV600E and NRASQ61K/R mutations was significantly associated with patient outcome. These findings highlight the importance of NRAS genotyping of pulmonary LCH lesions because the use of BRAF inhibitors in this context may lead to paradoxical disease progression. These patients might benefit from MAPK kinase inhibitor-based treatments. Pulmonary Langerhans cell histiocytosis genetic landscape includes recurrent activating NRAS Q61 mutations http://ow.ly/YgsSm
Histopathological and biochemical effects of abamectin on kidney in male albino rats

The present study has been done to evaluate the effect of abamectin on kidney function and histological changes in mal albino rats. The animals were divided into three groups; group1 rats were injected interaperitoneal with a drop of distilled water (0.1 mg/kg) for a period of 15 days and kept under control. And the other two treated groups (1T and 2T) were also daily injected interaperitoneal with abamectin with dose of 0.1 and 0.6 mg/kg body weight respectively for the same period of 15 days. Rats were sacrificed and blood samples were collected immediately from each rat separately in dry clean centrifuge tubes. Blood samples were centrifuged (3000 rpm for 15 min) and plasma was separated to estimate the Creatinine and urea. Tissue sections from the kidney of the control and the treated groups were prepared and stained with haematoxylin and eosin and observed under the microscope. The present results showed that the body weight of rats in the group-1 (control) increased gradually from around 156g to 205.9g in 15 days while in the treated groups 1T and 2T body weight decreased from 268g and 203.6g as initial weight to 259.5g and 196g respectively. The result also showed that the treatment with abamectin caused significant increase in creatinine and urea concentrations compared to control animals Histopathological examination of rat kidneys revealed Congested B.V, Glomerular shrinkage, Glomerular degeneration, Medullary tubular degeneration and Medullary tubular casts in rats treated with abamectin. Data analyses were done by using one way ANOVA at the level of (P<0.05). The results of current study indicated that the abamectin had a great toxic effect on kidney function which causes significant changes in urea and creatinine. Likewise, pathological examination showed abnormalities in the structures of kidney tissues.
Associations of Parental Self-Efficacy With Diet, Physical Activity, Body Composition, and Cardiorespiratory Fitness in Swedish Preschoolers: Results From the MINISTOP Trial

Background. High parental self-efficacy (PSE) has been associated with healthy diets and higher levels of physical activity (PA) in children; however, data on PSE in relation to body weight and body composition are scarce. The objective of this study was to investigate associations of PSE with measures of diet, PA, body composition, and physical fitness in early childhood. Method. We used baseline data from the MINISTOP trial in healthy Swedish children (n = 301; 4.5 ± 0.15 years). PSE was assessed using a questionnaire, dietary data were collected using a mobile technology–assisted methodology, and PA was obtained (sedentary behavior and moderate-to-vigorous) by accelerometry. Body composition was measured using the pediatric option for BodPod and cardiorespiratory fitness by the 20 m shuttle run. Linear regression was conducted to evaluate cross-sectional associations of the outcomes in relation to total PSE and scores computed for the individual PSE factors: (1) diet, (2) limit setting of unhealthful behaviors, and (3) PA. Results. Higher scores of total PSE and the diet factor were associated with higher fruit intake (β = 0.82 g/point and 1.99 g/point; p = .014 and .009, respectively) and lower consumption of unhealthy snacks (β = −0.42 g/point and −0.89 g/point; p = .012 and .020, respectively) after adjustment for parental body mass index and education, respondent, and child’s sex and age. No associations were observed between PSE and PA, body composition, or cardiorespiratory fitness. Conclusions. Our study noted that PSE should be considered in conjunction with other strategies for a sustainable impact on childhood obesity.
Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations

Over the last years, deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have transformed the field of computer vision thanks to their unparalleled capacity to learn high level semantic image features. However, in order to successfully learn those features, they usually require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which is both expensive and impractical to scale. Therefore, unsupervised semantic feature learning, i.e., learning without requiring manual annotation effort, is of crucial importance in order to successfully harvest the vast amount of visual data that are available today. In our work we propose to learn image features by training ConvNets to recognize the 2d rotation that is applied to the image that it gets as input. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that this apparently simple task actually provides a very powerful supervisory signal for semantic feature learning. We exhaustively evaluate our method in various unsupervised feature learning benchmarks and we exhibit in all of them state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our results on those benchmarks demonstrate dramatic improvements w.r. t. prior state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised representation learning and thus significantly close the gap with supervised feature learning. For instance, in PASCAL VOC 2007 detection task our unsupervised pre-trained AlexNet model achieves the state-of-the-art (among unsupervised methods) mAP of 54.4% that is only 2.4 points lower from the supervised case. We get similarly striking results when we transfer our unsupervised learned features on various other tasks, such as ImageNet classification, PASCAL classification, PASCAL segmentation, and CIFAR-10 classification. The code and models of our paper will be published on: this https URL .
Spontaneous retrieval reveals right-ear advantage in prospective memory

The goal of this study was to investigate the impact of individual costs on prospective memory performance. Individual costs were assessed by contrasting participants with high costs and those with low costs. Specifically, we tested whether prospective memory performance is moderated by costs, cue-focality and intention specificity. Participants performed a dichotic listening paradigm where they had to indicate whether a word presented to one ear was abstract or concrete while ignoring the word presented to the other ear. For the prospective memory task, participants had to detect target items; half of them were presented focally to the same ear as the relevant words for the ongoing task and half of them were presented non-focally to the other ear. Moreover, half of the participants were given specific instructions and the other half were given categorical instructions. The results revealed a right-ear advantage for participants with low costs but not for participants with high costs. Moreover, the absence of costs was not necessarily accompanied by worse prospective memory performance. Given differential results under the same task conditions, we conclude that individual costs are an important factor which should be considered when investigating prospective memory processes.
Expression of Girdin in primary hepatocellular carcinoma and its effect on cell proliferation and invasion.

Girdin has been proven to play a vital role in the process of proliferation, apoptosis, and invasion in various cancer cells, yet the underlying molecular mechanism in primary hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has not yet been clarified. Thereafter, we performed immunohistochemistry to detect the expression of Girdin in 40 primary HCC tissues and 30 matched adjacent tissues using hepatic carcinoma tissue microarray. Our data showed that the positive expression rate of Girdin in hepatocellular carcinoma tissues was 67.5%, higher than that found in adjacent tissues of 16.7% (P < 0.05). It closely correlates to tumor size, T stage, TNM stage and Edmondson-Steiner stage (P < 0.05) of HCC patients. After specific small interfering RNA of Girdin was transfected into HepG2 and Huh7.5. 1 cells, the proliferation and invasion ability of tumor cells were significantly inhibited. In summary, we suggest that the oncogenic role of Girdin could provide new molecular target for the treatment of HCC.
Assessment of Subcortical Source Localization Using Deep Brain Activity Imaging Model with Minimum Norm Operators: A MEG Study

Subcortical structures are involved in many healthy and pathological brain processes. It is crucial for many studies to use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to assess the ability to detect subcortical generators. This study aims to assess the source localization accuracy and to compare the characteristics of three inverse operators in the specific case of subcortical generators. MEG has a low sensitivity to subcortical sources mainly because of their distance from sensors and their complex cyto-architecture. However, we show that using a realistic anatomical and electrophysiological model of deep brain activity (DBA), the sources make measurable contributions to MEG sensors signals. Furthermore, we study the point-spread and cross-talk functions of the wMNE, sLORETA and dSPM inverse operators to characterize distortions in cortical and subcortical regions and to study how noise-normalization methods can improve or bias accuracy. We then run Monte Carlo simulations with neocortical and subcortical activations. In the case of single hippocampus patch activations, the results indicate that MEG can indeed localize the generators in the head and the body of the hippocampus with good accuracy. We then tackle the question of simultaneous cortical and subcortical activations. wMNE can detect hippocampal activations that are embedded in cortical activations that have less than double their amplitude, but it does not completely correct the bias to more superficial sources. dSPM and sLORETA can still detect hippocampal activity above this threshold, but such detection might include the creation of ghost deeper sources. Finally, using the DBA model, we showed that the detection of weak thalamic modulations of ongoing brain activity is possible.
Scalable Generalized Dynamic Topic Models

Dynamic topic models (DTMs) model the evolution of prevalent themes in literature, online media, and other forms of text over time. DTMs assume that word co-occurrence statistics change continuously and therefore impose continuous stochastic process priors on their model parameters. These dynamical priors make inference much harder than in regular topic models, and also limit scalability. In this paper, we present several new results around DTMs. First, we extend the class of tractable priors from Wiener processes to the generic class of Gaussian processes (GPs). This allows us to explore topics that develop smoothly over time, that have a long-term memory or are temporally concentrated (for event detection). Second, we show how to perform scalable approximate inference in these models based on ideas around stochastic variational inference and sparse Gaussian processes. This way we can train a rich family of DTMs to massive data. Our experiments on several large-scale datasets show that our generalized model allows us to find interesting patterns that were not accessible by previous approaches.
Autophagic Mechanism in Anti-Cancer Immunity: Its Pros and Cons for Cancer Therapy

Autophagy, a self-eating machinery, has been reported as an adaptive response to maintain metabolic homeostasis when cancer cells encounter stress. It has been appreciated that autophagy acts as a double-edge sword to decide the fate of cancer cells upon stress factors, molecular subtypes, and microenvironmental conditions. Currently, the majority of evidence support that autophagy in cancer cells is a vital mechanism bringing on resistance to current and prospective treatments, yet whether autophagy affects the anticancer immune response remains unclear and controversial. Accumulated studies have demonstrated that triggering autophagy is able to facilitate anticancer immunity due to an increase in immunogenicity, whereas other studies suggested that autophagy is likely to disarm anticancer immunity mediated by cytotoxic T cells and nature killer (NK) cells. Hence, this contradiction needs to be elucidated. In this review, we discuss the role of autophagy in cancer cells per se and in cancer microenvironment as well as its dual regulatory roles in immune surveillance through modulating presentation of tumor antigens, development of immune cells, and expression of immune checkpoints. We further focus on emerging roles of autophagy induced by current treatments and its impact on anticancer immune response, and illustrate the pros and cons of utilizing autophagy in cancer immunotherapy based on preclinical references.
Hilbert’s sixth problem and the failure of the Boltzmann to Euler limit

This paper addresses the main issue of Hilbert’s sixth problem, namely the rigorous passage of solutions to the mesoscopic Boltzmann equation to macroscopic solutions of the Euler equations of compressible gas dynamics. The results of the paper are that (i) in general Hilbert’s program will fail because of the appearance of van der Waals–Korteweg capillarity terms in a macroscopic description of motion of a gas, and (ii) the van der Waals–Korteweg theory itself might satisfy Hilbert’s quest for a map from the ‘atomistic view’ to the laws of motion of continua. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Hilbert’s sixth problem’.
Effect of Electrode Distance in Grid Electrode: Numerical Models and In Vitro Tests

Electrochemotherapy is an emerging local treatment for the management of superficial tumors and, among these, also chest wall recurrences from breast cancer. Generally, the treatment of this peculiar type of tumor requires the coverage of large skin areas. In these cases, electrochemotherapy treatment by means of standard small size needle electrodes (an array of 0.73 cm spaced needles, which covers an area of 1.5 cm2) is time-consuming and can allow an inhomogeneous coverage of the target area. We have previously designed grid devices suitable for treating an area ranging from 12 to 200 cm2. In this study, we propose different approaches to study advantages and drawbacks of a grid device with needles positioned 2 cm apart. The described approach includes a numerical evaluation to estimate electric field intensity, followed by an experimental quantification of electroporation on a cell culture. The electric field generated in a conductive medium has been studied by means of 3-dimensional numerical models with varying needle pair distance from 1 to 2 cm. In particular, the electric field evaluation shows that the electric field intensity with varying needle distance is comparable in the area in the middle of the 2 electrodes. Differently, near needles, the electric field intensity increases with the increasing electrode distance and supply voltage. The computational results have been correlated with experimental ones obtained in vitro on cell culture. In particular, electroporation effect has been assessed on human breast cancer cell line MCF7, cultured in monolayer. The use of 2-cm distant needles, supplied by 2000 V, produced an electroporation effect in the whole area comprised between the electrodes. Areas of cell culture where reversible and irreversible electroporation occurred were identified under microscope by using fluorescent dyes. The coupling of computation and experimental results could be helpful to evaluate the effect of the needle distance on the electric field intensity in cell cultures in terms of reversible or irreversible electroporation.
Dihydrotestosterone: Biochemistry, Physiology, and Clinical Implications of Elevated Blood Levels

Abstract Benefits associated with lowered serum DHT levels after 5α-reductase inhibitor (5AR-I) therapy in men have contributed to a misconception that circulating DHT levels are an important stimulus for androgenic action in target tissues (e.g., prostate). Yet evidence from clinical studies indicates that intracellular concentrations of androgens (particularly in androgen-sensitive tissues) are essentially independent of circulating levels. To assess the clinical significance of modest elevations in serum DHT and the DHT/testosterone (T) ratio observed in response to common T replacement therapy, a comprehensive review of the published literature was performed to identify relevant data. Although the primary focus of this review is about DHT in men, we also provide a brief overview of DHT in women. The available published data are limited by the lack of large, well-controlled studies of long duration that are sufficiently powered to expose subtle safety signals. Nonetheless, the preponderance of available clinical data indicates that modest elevations in circulating levels of DHT in response to androgen therapy should not be of concern in clinical practice. Elevated DHT has not been associated with increased risk of prostate disease (e.g., cancer or benign hyperplasia) nor does it appear to have any systemic effects on cardiovascular disease safety parameters (including increased risk of polycythemia) beyond those commonly observed with available T preparations. Well-controlled, long-term studies of transdermal DHT preparations have failed to identify safety signals unique to markedly elevated circulating DHT concentrations or signals materially different from T.
A Meta‐Analysis of Factors Affecting Local Adaptation between Interacting Species

Adaptive divergence among populations can result in local adaptation, whereby genotypes in native environments exhibit greater fitness than genotypes in novel environments. A body of theory has developed that predicts how different species traits, such as rates of gene flow and generation times, influence local adaptation in coevolutionary species interactions. We used a meta‐analysis of local‐adaptation studies across a broad range of host‐parasite interactions to evaluate predictions about the effect of species traits on local adaptation. We also evaluated how experimental design influences the outcome of local adaptation experiments. In reciprocally designed experiments, the relative gene flow rate of hosts versus parasites was the strongest predictor of local adaptation, with significant parasite local adaptation only in the studies in which parasites had greater gene flow rates than their hosts. When nonreciprocal studies were included in analyses, species traits did not explain significant variation in local adaptation, although the overall level of local adaptation observed was lower in the nonreciprocal than in the reciprocal studies. This formal meta‐analysis across a diversity of host‐parasite systems lends insight into the role of both biology (species traits) and biologists (experimental design) in detecting local adaptation in coevolving species interactions.
Structure, dynamics, and function of the monooxygenase P450 BM-3: insights from computer simulations studies

The monooxygenase P450 BM-3 is a NADPH-dependent fatty acid hydroxylase enzyme isolated from soil bacterium Bacillus megaterium. As a pivotal member of cytochrome P450 superfamily, it has been intensely studied for the comprehension of structure–dynamics–function relationships in this class of enzymes. In addition, due to its peculiar properties, it is also a promising enzyme for biochemical and biomedical applications. However, despite the efforts, the full understanding of the enzyme structure and dynamics is not yet achieved. Computational studies, particularly molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, have importantly contributed to this endeavor by providing new insights at an atomic level regarding the correlations between structure, dynamics, and function of the protein. This topical review summarizes computational studies based on MD simulations of the cytochrome P450 BM-3 and gives an outlook on future directions.