Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sensory integration during blood loss in conscious rabbits

Central nervous system integration of sensory inputs is critical for orchestrating physiological responses to stress. The focus of my doctoral research was investigating the physiological consequences of sensory stimulation to begin to answer the question of how the body integrates information about stress, pain and other sensory inputs. Conscious, chronically instrumented rabbits were used to minimize the influence of anesthesia and surgery. Two studies explored the role of the midbrain periaqueductal gray in modulating the cardiovascular response to hemorrhage and sensory stimulation. Other studies describe the assessment and use of a model of visceral pain, colorectal distension, to quantify the effect of concurrent stress and pain on the cardiovascular and respiratory response to blood loss. The results from these studies provide insight into 1) a central nervous system site for integration of multiple sensory inputs; and 2) potential sex differences in the response to concurrent stress, pain and hemorrhage.
Intracellular Ca2+ Dynamics During Spontaneous and Evoked Activity of Leech Heart Interneurons: Low-Threshold Ca Currents and Graded Synaptic Transmission

In oscillatory neuronal networks that pace rhythmic behavior, Ca2+ entry through voltage-gated Ca channels often supports bursting activity and mediates graded transmitter release. We monitored simultaneously membrane potential and/or ionic currents and changes of Ca fluorescence (using the fluorescence indicator Ca Orange) in spontaneously active and experimentally manipulated oscillator heart interneurons in the leech. We show that changes in Ca fluorescence in these interneurons during spontaneous bursting and evoked activity reflect the slow wave of that activity and that these changes in Ca fluorescence are mediated by Ca2+ entry primarily through low-threshold Ca channels. Spatial and temporal maps of changes in Ca fluorescence indicate that these channels are widely distributed over the neuritic tree of these neurons. We establish a correlation between the amount of transmitter released, as estimated by the integral of the postsynaptic current, and the change in Ca fluorescence. In experiments in which we were able to record presynaptic low-threshold Ca currents, associated IPSCs, and presynaptic changes in Ca fluorescence from fine neuritic branches of heart interneurons near their region of synaptic contact with their contralateral partner, there was a close association between the rise in Ca fluorescence and the rise of the postsynaptic conductance. The changes in Ca fluorescence that we record at the end of fine neuritic branches appear to reflect changes in [Ca2+]i that mediate graded synaptic release in leech heart interneurons. These results indicate that widely distributed low-threshold Ca currents play an important role in generating rhythmic activity and in mediating graded transmitter release.
An adaptationist perspective on the psychology of intergroup prejudice

Humans did not evolve to be racist, and racism is not an evolved psychological adaptation. For psychological traits to be considered adaptations, the problems that they are designed to solve must have been recurrent throughout the evolutionary history of the human lineage for long enough to have been shaped by natural selection. This is not likely to have been the case with racism, since only technologies developed relatively recently (in evolutionary time scale) have allowed humans to travel the types of long distances that enable members of differing racial groups to interact (Stringer & McKie, 1997). It is thus unlikely that natural selection shaped the human mind to produce a psychological system that was designed to promote racially biased cognition, attitudes, and behaviors. More plausibly, the mind generates mental representations of the self and others that might be described as racist as an epiphenomenon, or ‘‘by-product,’’ of mechanisms evolved to solve other categories of adaptive challenges in our evolutionary past. But does this mean that understanding the psychology of racism precludes an evolutionary analysis of its origins and maintenance? No, it does not, as the scope of evolutionary approaches to human psychology is not limited to investigations of features of the mind that can plausibly be described as evolved adaptations but
Experience with Connected and Disconnected Operation of Portable Notebook Computers in Distributed Systems

DOC (Disconnected Operation Cache) is a two-level client caching system designed and implemented to support connected and disconnected operation of small form-factor, battery powered portable computers. This paper describes some design features of DOC, and our experiences with running it in the software engineering environment of AST Research. The uniqueness of the DOC project stems from the fact that it has been designed to completely support client caching and disconnected operation of currently existing portable notebook computers. The AST's local area network consisting of several Novell servers and top of the line notebooks running MS/DOS 6.2 as clients communicating via an Ethernet connection are used to support the system and perform experiments. DOC supports "connected", "partially disconnected", and "disconnected" modes of operation. The partially disconnected mode of operation has been designed to permit DOC to respond to requests on certain files that are not modified frequently, without server involvement. Results of our experiments indicate not only considerable performance gains for "connected" and "partially disconnected" system but also successful operation in the disconnected mode.
Simple Cystatin C Formula for Estimation of Glomerular Filtration Rate in Overweight Patients with Diabetes Mellitus Type 2 and Chronic Kidney Disease

In clinical practice the glomerular filtration rate (GFR) is estimated from serum creatinine-based equations like the Cockcroft-Gault formula (C&G) and Modification of Diet in Renal Disease formula (MDRD). Recently, serum cystatin C-based equations, the newer creatinine formula (The Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Collaboration formula (CKD-EPI)), and equation that use both serum creatinine and cystatin C (CKD-EPI creatinine & cystatin formula) were proposed as new GFR markers. Present study compares serum creatinine-based equations, combined (including both serum creatinine and cystatin C) equation, and serum simple cystatin C formula (100/serum cystatin C) against 51CrEDTA clearance in 113 adult overweight Caucasians with diabetes mellitus type 2 (DM2) and chronic kidney disease (CKD). The results of present study demonstrated that the simple cystatin C formula could be a useful tool for the evaluation of renal function in overweight patients with DM2 and impaired kidney function in daily clinical practice in hospital and especially in outpatients. Despite the advantages of the simple cystatin C formula, cystatin C-based equations cannot completely replace the “gold standard” for estimation of the GFR in a population of DM2 patients with CKD, but may contribute to a more accurate selection of patients requiring such invasive and costly procedures.
Boys being boys: Eco-Double consciousness, splash violence, and environmental education

ABSTRACT This article shares three vignettes, drawn from the life experience of its authors and five years of research at two schools, to illustrate the “choice” many males are forced to make between normalized “masculine” indifference and a stigmatized caring relationship with the natural world. We suggest this dissociation results, for some, in a kind of eco-double consciousness. The first vignette draws on memories from a male author encountering typical threats of violence for continuing to “proclaim” care for forested places. The second describes a cis male child who at the age of eight dubs himself “eco-boy,” but by 10, is resigned to hiding his ethic of care in order to fit in with other boys. The last vignette examines an instance between two six-year-old cis boys, a female researcher, and several ants. We suggest shirking from the significance of these commonplace experiences with the adage “boys will be boys” is an excusatory move and that educators ought to be aware and address gendered expressions of power, violence, and care at a young age when the necessity for an eco-double consciousness first emerges. The conclusion emphasizes the need for educators to trouble masculine norms by finding ways to respond to the normalization of ecological violence, to keep open the possibility of developing eco-care in young males, and to trouble the notion of “boys being boys. ”
Repetitive Religious Chanting Modulates the Late-Stage Brain Response to Fear- and Stress-Provoking Pictures

Chanting and praying are among the most popular religious activities, which are said to be able to alleviate people’s negative emotions. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this mental exercise and its temporal course have hardly been investigated. Here, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the effects of chanting the name of a Buddha (Amitābha) on the brain’s response to viewing negative pictures that were fear- and stress-provoking. We recorded and analyzed electroencephalography (EEG) data from 21 Buddhists with chanting experience as they viewed negative and neutral pictures. Participants were instructed to chant the names of Amitābha or Santa Claus silently to themselves or simply remain silent (no-chanting condition) during picture viewing. To measure the physiological changes corresponding to negative emotions, electrocardiogram and galvanic skin response data were also collected. Results showed that viewing negative pictures (vs. neutral pictures) increased the amplitude of the N1 component in all the chanting conditions. The amplitude of late positive potential (LPP) also increased when the negative pictures were viewed under the no-chanting and the Santa Claus condition. However, increased LPP was not observed when chanting Amitābha. The ERP source analysis confirmed this finding and showed that increased LPP mainly originated from the central-parietal regions of the brain. In addition, the participants’ heart rates decreased significantly when viewing negative pictures in the Santa Claus condition. The no-chanting condition had a similar decreasing trend although not significant. However, while chanting Amitābha and viewing negative pictures participants’ heart rate did not differ significantly from that observed during neutral picture viewing. It is possible that the chanting of Amitābha might have helped the participants to develop a religious schema and neutralized the effect of the negative stimuli. These findings echo similar research findings on Christian religious practices and brain responses to negative stimuli. Hence, prayer/religious practices may have cross-cultural universality in emotion regulation. This study shows for the first time that Buddhist chanting, or in a broader sense, repetition of religious prayers will not modulate brain responses to negative stimuli during the early perceptual stage, but only during the late-stage emotional/cognitive processing.
Priming: getting ready for battle.

Infection of plants by necrotizing pathogens or colonization of plant roots with certain beneficial microbes causes the induction of a unique physiological state called "priming. " The primed state can also be induced by treatment of plants with various natural and synthetic compounds. Primed plants display either faster, stronger, or both activation of the various cellular defense responses that are induced following attack by either pathogens or insects or in response to abiotic stress. Although the phenomenon has been known for decades, most progress in our understanding of priming has been made over the past few years. Here, we summarize the current knowledge of priming in various induced-resistance phenomena in plants.
Life Cycle Assessment Goes to Washington: Lessons from a New Regulatory Design Libraries Archives Life Cycle Assessment Goes to Washington: Lessons from a New Regulatory Design

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a quantitative tool that measures the bundled impact of an individual product over its entire life cycle, from "cradle-to-grave. " LCA has been developed over many decades to improve industry's environmental performance, and also to create environmental labels for consumer products. But in recent years, LCA has been used to inform policy and set regulatory standards. This thesis examines early experience with the first U.S. life-cycle policy: state Low-Carbon Fuel Standards (LCFS). California is the first state to implement an LCFS, which caps the total carbon intensity of the transportation fuels sold in the state. Regulators measure the carbon value of different fuels on a fuel-cycle basis, including upstream extraction, processing, harvesting, conversion, and transport. California's recent experience indicates that, while a life-cycle approach to policy brings numerous environmental benefits, LCA is not well matched to applications that rank different products or assign numeric benchmarks for dissimilar products. Further, since LCA was developed for individual products, it lacks capacity to deal with dynamic interactions, industry-wide impacts, and forecasting, all of which are important for policy decisions. As an alternative, future policies that are organized around life-cycle impacts should first establish concrete goals with a thorough planning and visioning process, and then apply LCA as an exploratory tool to determine the low-impact methods to achieve these articulated goals. Thesis Supervisor: Judith Layzer Title: Linde Career Development Associate Professor of Environmental Policy, MIT Thesis Reader: Jim Kleinschmit Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Minneapolis MN
Biomaterials as bonding wires for integrated circuit nanopackaging

Today's miniaturization of integrated circuits for MEMS and NEMS systems depends strongly on the limitations of integrated circuit packaging. The integration of biomaterials as nano bonding wires may result in an improvement of the properties of such systems up to the development of novel innovative systems. That implies that currently missing methods and techniques have to be developed to enable an industrial feasible handling, manipulating and characterizing of such biomaterials. So the main objectives have to be the development methods which are fully automatable, fast, reliable, robust to environmental changes as well as useable at a dry environment of clean room facilities or the vacuum environment of SEM chambers. According to this, the target of the presented efforts is to develop such methods for a usage of biomaterials to solve packaging problems at the nanoscale. This paper presents a novel concept and first experimental results of the handling of cellulose fibers as well as DNA wires, for an automatable handling and characterization of such bio nano bonding wires. Methods for the handling and characterization of cellulose fibers in the SEM will be presented as well as DNA-handling methods with an AFM at dry conditions, which can also be used in the vacuum chamber.
The Effect of Social Norm Activation on the Expression of Opinions Concerning Gay Men and Blacks

The influence of social norm activation on the expression of opinions concerning gay men (Experiment 1) and Blacks (Experiment 2) was explored. In both experiments, participants reported their opinions after hearing a confederate give prejudiced or nonprejudiced opinions (making a prejudiced or nonprejudiced norm salient) or simply in the presence of a confederate. Results showed that participants in both experiments reported less prejudiced opinions after a nonprejudiced norm was made salient, relative to the control condition. Activation of a prejudiced norm did not have a significant effect, relative to the control condition. Furthermore, the powerful effect of activating the nonprejudiced social norm was observed regardless of participants' prejudice level. Results are consistent with the notion that, in contemporary society, the social norm opposing prejudice is stronger than the norm favoring prejudice.
The Potential for Speech Intelligibility Improvement Using the Ideal Binary Mask and the Ideal Wiener Filter in Single Channel Noise Reduction Systems: Application to Auditory Prostheses

Whereas state-of-the-art single-channel noise reduction algorithms for auditory prostheses demonstrate an appreciable suppression of the noise and improved speech quality, they are unable, thus far, to improve the intelligibility of noise-degraded speech signals. Alternative approaches to speech enhancement using a binary time-frequency mask have demonstrated substantial intelligibility improvements in low signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) conditions under ideal settings, making this a promising research direction for auditory prostheses. These approaches exploit the sparsity and disjoint-ness of speech spectra in their short-time-frequency representation to preserve only the target-dominant time-frequency regions in the processed output. State-of-the-art noise reduction algorithms in contrast are soft-decision approaches which weight each time-frequency region in proportion to the prevailing SNR. However, the potential for intelligibility improvement using these approaches has not been examined systematically vis-à-vis the binary mask alternative. This contribution compares the performance of an ideal soft-decision system, exemplified by the ideal Wiener filter (IWF), and the ideal binary mask (IBM) for single-channel speech enhancement for auditory prostheses. To obtain results relevant to this application area, a (relatively) low spectral resolution, modelled using the Bark-spectrum scale, is used for both the IWF and the IBM. This spectral resolution is comparable to that being used in commercial hearing instruments. The comparison is in terms of potential for intelligibility improvement and resulting signal quality. Intelligibility tests carried out under various noise conditions and SNRs show that the IWF leads to higher intelligibility scores than the IBM in low SNR conditions. Under non-ideal parameter estimates, it is demonstrated that the IWF approach is also much less sensitive to estimation errors. Quality-wise, a preference for the IWF exists. This was evaluated using a two-stage, pair-wise preference-rating test.
Nitrogen incorporation and retention by bacteria, algae, and fauna in a subtropical, intertidal sediment: An in situ 15N‐labeling study

We performed a 15N‐labeling study to investigate nitrogen incorporation and retention by the benthic microbial community (bacteria and benthic microalgae) and fauna in the intertidal sediment of the subtropical Australian Brunswick Estuary. The main experiment involved an in situ 15N pulse‐chase experiment. After injection of 15NH4+ into the sediment, 15N was traced into bulk sediment, total hydrolyzable amino acids (THAAs, representing bulk proteinaceous biomass), the bacterial biomarker D‐alanine, and fauna over a 30‐ d period. Additional experiments included short‐term (24 h) incubations of sediment cores injected with different 15N‐labeled substrates (NH4+, NO3−, urea, and an amino acid mixture) and sediment core incubations for analysis of benthic fluxes of O2, dissolved inorganic carbon, NH4+, NOx−, dissolved organic nitrogen, and N2. 15N was rapidly incorporated and strongly retained in microbial biomass (THAAs) during the 30‐d period in situ, indicating efficient recycling of 15N by the benthic microbial community. Analysis of 15N in D‐alanine revealed a major bacterial contribution (50–100%) to total microbial 15N incorporation and retention. 15N was also incorporated into fauna via grazing on 15N‐labeled microbial biomass, but this was a negligible fraction (<1%) of total 15N in the sediment. Altogether, results show that efficient recycling of nitrogen by the benthic microbial community can be an important mechanism for nitrogen retention in the sediment and an important pathway supporting benthic microbial production.
Willingness to pay and conjoint analysis to determine women's preferences for ovarian stimulating hormones in the treatment of infertility in Spain

BACKGROUND Despite many advances in assisted reproductive techniques (ART), little is known about preferences for technological developments of women undergoing fertility treatments. The aims of this study were to investigate the preferences of infertile women undergoing ART for controlled ovarian stimulation (COS) treatments; to determine the utility values ascribed to different attributes of COS treatments; and to estimate women's willingness to pay (WTP) for COS. METHODS A representative sample of ambulatory patients ready to receive, or receiving, COS therapies for infertility were recruited from seven specialized private centres in six autonomous communities in Spain. Descriptive, inferential and conjoint analyses (CA) were used to elicit preferences and WTP. Attributes and levels of COS treatments were identified by literature review and two focus groups with experts and patients. WTP valuations were derived by a combination of double-bounded (closed-ended) and open questions and contingent ranking methods. RESULTS In total, 160 patients [mean (standard deviation; SD) age: 35.8 (4.2) years] were interviewed. Over half of the participants (55.0%) had a high level of education (university degree), most (78.8%) were married and half (50.0%) had an estimated net income of >€1502 per month and had paid a mean (SD) €1194.17 (€778.29) for their most recent hormonal treatment. The most frequent causes of infertility were related to sperm abnormalities (50.3%). In 30.6% of cases, there were two causes of infertility. The maximum WTP for COS treatment was €800 (median) per cycle; 35.5% were willing to pay an additional €101–€300 for a 1–2% effectiveness gain in the treatment. Utility values (CA) showed that effectiveness was the most valued attribute (39.82), followed by costs (18.74), safety (17.75) and information sharing with physicians (14.93). CONCLUSIONS WTP for COS therapies exceeds current cost. Additional WTP exists for 1–2% effectiveness improvement. Effectiveness and costs were the most important determinants of preferences, followed by safety and information sharing with physicians.
No Chemopreventive Effect of Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs on Nonmelanoma Skin Cancer: Evidence from Meta-Analysis

Background Nonmelanoma skin cancer (NMSC),which includes squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and basal cell carcinoma (BCC), is the most common form of cancer, and its incidence is increasing. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) have been reported to be chemopreventive for NMSC. However, the results from published studies were controversial. Methods We searched the PubMed and Embase databases for relevant studies. Moreover, relevant reviews regarding the use of NSAIDs for NMSC patients were examined for potential inclusive studies. To measure the effects of NSAIDs, the relative risk (RR) was analyzed. Results A Total of 8 studies were included in our meta-analysis. We found that NSAIDs use was not associated with a reduced risk of SCC or BCC under the random effects model (pooled RR = 0.86, 95% CI, 0.73–1.02, P = 0.085; pooled RR = 0.94, 95% CI 0.85–1.04, P = 0.266; respectively). Conclusion From the included studies, we found no statistically significant chemopreventive effect on NMSC of NSAIDs. This finding warrants more prospective studies evaluating the relationship between NSAIDs and NMSC.