Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Familiarity on Reward Anticipation in Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorders

Background Previous research on the reward system in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) suggests that children with ASD anticipate and process social rewards differently than typically developing (TD) children—but has focused on the reward value of unfamiliar face stimuli. Children with ASD process faces differently than their TD peers. Previous research has focused on face processing of unfamiliar faces, but less is known about how children with ASD process familiar faces. The current study investigated how children with ASD anticipate rewards accompanied by familiar versus unfamiliar faces. Methods The stimulus preceding negativity (SPN) of the event-related potential (ERP) was utilized to measure reward anticipation. Participants were 6- to 10-year-olds with (N = 14) and without (N = 14) ASD. Children were presented with rewards accompanied by incidental face or non-face stimuli that were either familiar (caregivers) or unfamiliar. All non-face stimuli were composed of scrambled face elements in the shape of arrows, controlling for visual properties. Results No significant differences between familiar versus unfamiliar faces were found for either group. When collapsing across familiarity, TD children showed larger reward anticipation to face versus non-face stimuli, whereas children with ASD did not show differential responses to these stimulus types. Magnitude of reward anticipation to faces was significantly correlated with behavioral measures of social impairment in the ASD group. Conclusions The findings do not provide evidence for differential reward anticipation for familiar versus unfamiliar face stimuli in children with or without ASD. These findings replicate previous work suggesting that TD children anticipate rewards accompanied by social stimuli more than rewards accompanied by non-social stimuli. The results do not support the idea that familiarity normalizes reward anticipation in children with ASD. Our findings also suggest that magnitude of reward anticipation to faces is correlated with levels of social impairment for children with ASD.
Fourier–Bessel Basis Functions for the Analysis of Elliptical Domain Metasurface Antennas

An approach based on the method of moments and using a set of stretched Fourier–Bessel basis functions (FBBFs) is presented for the analysis of elliptical domain metasurfaces (MTSs). This shape is preferred to the traditional circular domain, when a better control of the aperture efficiency is required. The proposed formulation makes use of a harmonic decomposition of the substrate dyadic Green's function to efficiently compute the reaction integrals. It is shown that the computation time associated with the sheet impedance matrix calculation is almost not affected by the stretching of the FBBFs. The obtained formulation is efficient since the orthogonality of the FBBFs is preserved and well adapted to an MTS optimization process. The simulation results are compared with measurements of a realistic MTS antenna implemented with subwavelength printed patches.
Short- and long-term outcomes of adult allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant patients admitted to the intensive care unit in the peritransplant period

Abstract Survival of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant (aHSCT) recipients in the intensive care unit (ICU) has been poor. We retrospectively analyzed the short- and long-term outcomes of aHSCT patients admitted to the ICU over a 12-year period. Of 1235 adult patients who had aHSCT between 2002 and 2013, 161 (13%) were admitted to the ICU. The impact of clinical parameters was assessed and outcomes were compared for the periods 2002–2007 and 2008–2013. The ICU, in-hospital, 1- and 5-year survival rates were 64.6%, 46%, 33% and 20%, respectively. Mechanical ventilation and vasopressor use predicted for worse hospital- and overall survival (OS). After 2008, the requirement for mechanical ventilation and vasopressors, and the diagnosis of sepsis were reduced. While hospital mortality decreased from 69% to 44%, long-term survival (LTS) remained unchanged. Late deaths, due to causes not associated with the ICU such as relapse and graft-versus-host disease, increased. As thresholds for transplant are lowered, improvements in ICU outcomes for aHSCT recipients may be limited.
Inducers of Senescence, Toxic Compounds, and Senolytics: The Multiple Faces of Nrf2-Activating Phytochemicals in Cancer Adjuvant Therapy

The reactivation of senescence in cancer and the subsequent clearance of senescent cells are suggested as therapeutic intervention in the eradication of cancer. Several natural compounds that activate Nrf2 (nuclear factor erythroid-derived 2-related factor 2) pathway, which is involved in complex cytoprotective responses, have been paradoxically shown to induce cell death or senescence in cancer. Promoting the cytoprotective Nrf2 pathway may be desirable for chemoprevention, but it might be detrimental in later stages and advanced cancers. However, senolytic activity shown by some Nrf2-activating compounds could be used to target senescent cancer cells (particularly in aged immune-depressed organisms) that escape immunosurveillance. We herein describe in vitro and in vivo effects of fifteen Nrf2-interacting natural compounds (tocotrienols, curcumin, epigallocatechin gallate, quercetin, genistein, resveratrol, silybin, phenethyl isothiocyanate, sulforaphane, triptolide, allicin, berberine, piperlongumine, fisetin, and phloretin) on cellular senescence and discuss their use in adjuvant cancer therapy. In light of available literature, it can be concluded that the meaning and the potential of adjuvant therapy with natural compounds in humans remain unclear, also taking into account the existence of few clinical trials mostly characterized by uncertain results. Further studies are needed to investigate the therapeutic potential of those compounds that display senolytic activity.
Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-parametric Instance Discrimination

Neural net classifiers trained on data with annotated class labels can also capture apparent visual similarity among categories without being directed to do so. We study whether this observation can be extended beyond the conventional domain of supervised learning: Can we learn a good feature representation that captures apparent similarity among instances, instead of classes, by merely asking the feature to be discriminative of individual instances? We formulate this intuition as a non-parametric classification problem at the instance-level, and use noise-contrastive estimation to tackle the computational challenges imposed by the large number of instance classes. Our experimental results demonstrate that, under unsupervised learning settings, our method surpasses the state-of-the-art on ImageNet classification by a large margin. Our method is also remarkable for consistently improving test performance with more training data and better network architectures. By fine-tuning the learned feature, we further obtain competitive results for semi-supervised learning and object detection tasks. Our non-parametric model is highly compact: With 128 features per image, our method requires only 600MB storage for a million images, enabling fast nearest neighbour retrieval at the run time.
Small non‐coding RNAs are altered by short‐term sprint interval training in men

Small non‐coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are emerging as important molecules for normal biological processes and are deregulated in disease. Exercise training is a powerful therapeutic strategy that prevents cardiometabolic disease and improves cardiorespiratory fitness and performance. Despite the known systemic health benefits of exercise training, the underlying molecular mechanisms are incompletely understood. Recent evidence suggests a role for epigenetic mechanisms, such as microRNAs, but whether other small ncRNAs are modulated by chronic exercise training is unknown. Here, we used small RNA sequencing to explore whether sprint interval training (SIT) controls the abundance of circulating small ncRNAs in human whole blood samples. Ten healthy men performed SIT three times a week for 6 weeks. After training, subjects showed marked improvements in maximal oxygen consumption and cycling performance with concurrent changes to the abundance of diverse species of circulating small ncRNAs (n = 1266 small ncRNAs, n = 13 microRNAs, q < 0.05). Twelve microRNAs altered by 6 weeks of SIT were ubiquitously expressed microRNAs and two regulated important signaling pathways, including p53, thyroid hormone and cell cycle signaling. MicroRNAs altered by 6 weeks of SIT were unchanged after a single session of SIT (n = 24, all P > 0.05). Relative to older individuals, younger subjects exhibited an increased acute SIT‐induced fold change in miR‐1301‐3p (P = 0.02) – a microRNA predicted to target mRNAs involved in alternative splicing, phosphoprotein and chromosomal rearrangement processes (all P < 0.001). Our findings indicate many species of circulating small ncRNAs are modulated by exercise training and that they could control signaling pathways responsible for health benefits achieved from exercise.
RP105 alleviates myocardial ischemia reperfusion injury via inhibiting TLR4/TRIF signaling pathways

The Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) signal pathway-induced inflammation is considered to be a crucial link to myocardial ischemia reperfusion injury (MIRI). Our previous study proved that radioprotective 105 kDa protein (RP105), a negative regulator of TLR4, performed a protective role in MIRI by anti-apoptosis approach. However, the mechanism of RP105 cardioprotection of anti-inflammation is still unclear. This study aimed to explore the underlying mechanism of RP105 anti-inflammation effect in MIRI. We established a rat model of MIRI induced by ligation of the left anterior descending coronary artery for 30 min followed by 2 h reperfusion. Animals were pre-infected with Ad-EGFP-RP105, Ad-EGFP or saline at the apex of the heart. All rats were sacrificed to collect blood samples and myocardial tissue and assessed by immunofluorescence, blood biochemical analysis, Evans blue/triphenyltetrazolium chloride (TTC), hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining, enzyme-linked immuno sorbent assay (ELISA), western blot analysis, quantitative PCR and electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA). RP105 overexpression with adenovirus vectors reduced serum myocardial enzyme (CK-MB and LDH) activities, decreased myocardial infarct size, mitigated inflammatory factors interferon-β and tumor necrosis factor-α during MIRI. We also found that Ad-RP105 group exerted distinct repression of TLR4/TRIF signal pathway related proteins and mRNAs (TRIF, TBK-1, IRF3 and p-IRF3) with a low transcriptional activity of IRF3. These findings first expounded that RP105 could alleviate the ischemia reperfusion induced inflammatory status in heart via inhibiting TLR4/TRIF signaling pathway and provided a theoretical foundation of RP105 gene in MIRI.
Correlated variability modifies working memory fidelity in primate prefrontal neuronal ensembles

Significance The working memory (WM)-related activity in the primate prefrontal cortex (PFC) is hypothesized to arise from the structure of the network in which the neurons are embedded. Recent studies have also shown that it is difficult to predict the properties of neuronal ensembles from the properties of individually examined neurons. By recording the activity of neuronal ensembles in the macaque PFC, we found evidence supporting the network origins of WM activity and discovered features of WM coding in neuronal ensembles that were inaccessible in prior single neuron studies. Most notably, we found that correlated firing rate variability between neurons (i.e., noise correlations) can improve WM coding and that neurons not selective for WM can improve WM coding when part of an ensemble. Neurons in the primate lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) encode working memory (WM) representations via sustained firing, a phenomenon hypothesized to arise from recurrent dynamics within ensembles of interconnected neurons. Here, we tested this hypothesis by using microelectrode arrays to examine spike count correlations (rsc) in LPFC neuronal ensembles during a spatial WM task. We found a pattern of pairwise rsc during WM maintenance indicative of stronger coupling between similarly tuned neurons and increased inhibition between dissimilarly tuned neurons. We then used a linear decoder to quantify the effects of the high-dimensional rsc structure on information coding in the neuronal ensembles. We found that the rsc structure could facilitate or impair coding, depending on the size of the ensemble and tuning properties of its constituent neurons. A simple optimization procedure demonstrated that near-maximum decoding performance could be achieved using a relatively small number of neurons. These WM-optimized subensembles were more signal correlation (rsignal)-diverse and anatomically dispersed than predicted by the statistics of the full recorded population of neurons, and they often contained neurons that were poorly WM-selective, yet enhanced coding fidelity by shaping the ensemble’s rsc structure. We observed a pattern of rsc between LPFC neurons indicative of recurrent dynamics as a mechanism for WM-related activity and that the rsc structure can increase the fidelity of WM representations. Thus, WM coding in LPFC neuronal ensembles arises from a complex synergy between single neuron coding properties and multidimensional, ensemble-level phenomena.
Modelling three‐dimensional rotating flows in cylindrical‐shaped vessels

This paper reports on a study concerned with the numerical simulation of dough kneading that arises in the food processing industry. The flows considered are in a complex domain setting. Two dough mixers running at various rotation speeds are studied; one with a single stirrer and the other with two stirrers. Stirrers are fixed on the lid of the vessel and the motion is driven by the rotation of the outer vessel. Two different mixer orientations are considered, generating horizontal or vertical‐rotating flow fields. Three‐dimensional numerical simulations are performed on the full flow equations in a cylindrical polar co‐ordinates system, through a finite‐element, semi‐implicit time stepping, Taylor–Galerkin pressure‐correction scheme. The results reflect excellent agreement against the equivalent experimental findings. The motivation for this work is to develop advanced technology to model the kneading of dough. The ultimate target is to predict and adjust the design of dough mixers, so that optimal dough processing may be achieved notably, with reference to local rate‐of‐work input. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Ultramorphological Characteristics of Podocyte Development in the Human Fetal Metanephros

The aim of this study was to determine the developmental characteristics of podocytes in the human fetal metanephros using scanning electron microscopy, light microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy. Kidney samples of 15 human fetuses of both sexes (gestational age 10–22 weeks) were analyzed. At the S-shaped body stage, primitive podocytes were arranged in a layer of cuboidal cells beneath the vascular cleft. When observed from Bowman’s space, the demarcation between adjacent podocytes was not clear, but mild depressions indicated cell boundaries. At the more advanced S-shaped body stage, podocytes were polygonal, with a flat apical surface. They were in close contact, but boundaries between adjacent cells were distinct. After initial separation of their apical parts, podocytes continued to separate from each other along their lateral sides. Their shape changed from polygonal to spherical, resembling clusters of grapes. Cytoplasmic buds could be seen at the base of some podocytes initially, when all podocytes were spherical. Parallel with the development of the first capillary loops, wider intercellular spaces were noted between elliptical-shaped podocytes. Podocytes then developed cytoplasmic processes and became flattened and star shaped. Their cell bodies separated from the glomerular basement membrane through the insertion of thick processes under the cell body. Thick primary processes ramified to form the foot processes, which interdigitated on the surface of capillary loops. During the capillary loop stage, the degree of differentiation of the podocytes varied among various glomerular regions, as well as within the same capillary loop.
Rietveld‐based energy‐dispersive residual stress evaluation: analysis of complex stress fields σij(z)

A method for the evaluation of strongly inhomogeneous residual stress fields in the near-surface region of polycrystalline materials is introduced, which exploits the full information content contained in energy-dispersive (ED) diffraction patterns. The macro-stress-induced diffraction line shifts ΔEψhkl observed in ED sin2ψ measurements are described by modeling the residual stress state σij(z) in real space, based on Rietveld's data analysis concept. Therefore, the proposed approach differs substantially from currently used methods for residual stress gradient analysis such as the `universal plot' method, which enable access to the Laplace stress profiles σij(τ). With the example of shot-peened samples made of either 100Cr6 steel or Al2O3, it is demonstrated that the simultaneous refinement of all diffraction patterns obtained in a sin2ψ measurement with hundreds of diffraction lines provides very stable solutions for the residual stress depth profiles. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed evaluation concept even allows for consideration of the residual stress component σ33(z) in the thickness direction, which is difficult to detect by conventional sin2ψ analysis.
The JCMT Gould Belt Survey: a first look at SCUBA-2 observations of the Lupus I molecular cloud

This paper presents observations of the Lupus I molecular cloud at 450 and 850 μm with Submillimetre Common User Bolometer Array (SCUBA-2) as part of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope Gould Belt Survey (JCMT GBS). Nine compact sources, assumed to be the discs of young stellar objects (YSOs), 12 extended protostellar, pre-stellar and starless cores, and one isolated, low-luminosity protostar, are detected in the region. Spectral energy distributions, including submillimetre fluxes, are produced for 15 YSOs, and each is fitted with the models of Robitaille et al. The proportion of Class 0/I protostars is higher than that seen in other Gould Belt regions such as Ophiuchus and Serpens. Circumstellar disc masses are calculated for more evolved sources, while protostellar envelope masses are calculated for protostars. Up to four very low luminosity objects are found; a large fraction when compared to other Spitzer c2d regions. One YSO has a disc mass greater than the minimum mass solar nebula. 12 starless/protostellar cores are detected by SCUBA-2 and their masses are calculated. The stability of these cores is examined using both the thermal Jeans mass and a turbulent virial mass when possible. Two cores in Lupus I are super-Jeans and contain no known YSOs. One of these cores has a virial parameter of 1.1 ± 0.4, and could therefore be pre-stellar. The high ratio of Class 0/I to Class III YSOs (1:1), and the presence of a pre-stellar core candidate, provides support for the hypothesis that a shock recently triggered star formation in Lupus I.
VITALITY-ALS, a phase III trial of tirasemtiv, a selective fast skeletal muscle troponin activator, as a potential treatment for patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: study design and baseline characteristics

Abstract Objective: To assess the efficacy of tirasemtiv, a fast skeletal muscle troponin activator, vs. placebo on respiratory function and other functional measures in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This study was designed to confirm and extend results from a large phase IIb trial and maximize tolerability with a slower dose escalation. Methods: VITALITY-ALS (NCT02496767) was a multinational, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, parallel-group study in ALS patients. Participants who tolerated two weeks of open-label tirasemtiv (125 mg twice a day) were randomized 3:2:2:2 to placebo or one of three target total daily dose levels of tirasemtiv (250, 375, or 500 mg). Participants randomized to tirasemtiv escalated their dose every two weeks to their target dose level or maximum tolerated dose. The primary outcome measure was change in slow vital capacity from baseline to 24 weeks. Secondary endpoints assessed the effect of tirasemtiv on muscle strength and certain respiratory milestones of disease progression. A four-week randomized withdrawal phase followed 48 weeks of treatment to evaluate the possibility of sustained benefit or rebound decline. Results: Data collection will be complete in the fourth quarter of 2017. Conclusions: VITALITY-ALS was a phase III trial designed to evaluate the efficacy, safety, and tolerability of tirasemtiv in ALS.
Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Open Access Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance in the Diagnosis of Acute Heart Transplant Rejection: a Review

Background: Screening for organ rejection is a critical component of care for patients who have undergone heart transplantation. Endomyocardial biopsy is the gold standard screening tool, but non-invasive alternatives are needed. Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) is well suited to provide an alternative to biopsy because of its ability to quantify ventricular function, morphology, and characterize myocardial tissue. CMR is not widely used to screen for heart transplant rejection, despite many trials supporting its use for this indication. This review summarizes the different CMR sequences that can detect heart transplant rejection as well as the strengths and weaknesses of their application.
Transgenic expression of survivin in keratinocytes counteracts UVB-induced apoptosis and cooperates with loss of p53.

The inhibitor of apoptosis protein survivin has been implicated in both cell cycle control and apoptosis resistance. To discriminate between these different roles, we used transgenic expression of survivin in the skin as a model for cell proliferation, differentiation, and apoptosis. Transgenic mice expressing survivin under the control of a keratin-14 promoter developed normally, without histologic abnormalities of the skin or hair, epidermal hyperplasia, or developmental abnormalities of basal or suprabasal epidermis. Keratinocyte proliferation assessed under basal conditions, or after ultraviolet-B (UVB) irradiation, or phorbol ester stimulation was unchanged in survivin transgenic mice. In contrast, survivin expression inhibited UVB-induced apoptosis in vitro and in vivo (i.e., sunburn cell formation), whereas it did not affect Fas-induced cell death. When crossed with p53 knockout mice, transgenic expression of survivin in a p53(+/-) background substituted for the loss of a second p53 allele and further inhibited UVB-induced apoptosis. These data provide the first in vivo evidence that survivin inhibits apoptosis and suggest that this pathway may oppose the elimination of cancerous cells by p53.