Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Activation of Satellite Glial Cells in Rat Trigeminal Ganglion after Upper Molar Extraction

The neurons in the trigeminal ganglion (TG) are surrounded by satellite glial cells (SGCs), which passively support the function of the neurons, but little is known about the interactions between SGCs and TG neurons after peripheral nerve injury. To examine the effect of nerve injury on SGCs, we investigated the activation of SGCs after neuronal damage due to the extraction of the upper molars in rats. Three, 7, and 10 days after extraction, animals were fixed and the TG was removed. Cryosections of the ganglia were immunostained with antibodies against glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), a marker of activated SGCs, and ATF3, a marker of damaged neurons. After tooth extraction, the number of ATF3-immunoreactive (IR) neurons enclosed by GFAP-IR SGCs had increased in a time-dependent manner in the maxillary nerve region of the TG. Although ATF3-IR neurons were not detected in the mandibular nerve region, the number of GFAP-IR SGCs increased in both the maxillary and mandibular nerve regions. Our results suggest that peripheral nerve injury affects the activation of TG neurons and the SGCs around the injured neurons. Moreover, our data suggest the existence of a neuronal interaction between maxillary and mandibular neurons via SGC activation.
Composite PUF: A new design paradigm for Physically Unclonable Functions on FPGA

Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) designs proposed in the recent literature vary widely in diverse characteristics such as hardware resource requirement, reliability, entropy, and robustness against mathematical cloning. Most of the standalone PUF designs suffer from either poor performance profile or unacceptable resource-overhead. We present a novel PUF design paradigm, termed as PUF Composition, that utilizes smaller PUFs as design building blocks to define a “Composite PUF” having larger challenge-space and superior performance profile at reasonable resource-overhead. A formal framework for PUF composition based on a probabilistic model has also been developed to enable the Composite PUF designer to have a-priori estimate of the relative qualities of several composite PUF options, without actually implementing them physically. The notion of PUF composition, and the probabilistic model developed for delay-PUFs, have both been validated using Ring Oscillator PUF (ROPUF) and Arbiter PUF (APUF) on Xilinx Spartan-3 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA).
Comparative Transcriptome Analysis of the Accessory Sex Gland and Testis from the Chinese Mitten Crab (Eriocheir sinensis)

The accessory sex gland (ASG) is an important component of the male reproductive system, which functions to enhance the fertility of spermatozoa during male reproduction. Certain proteins secreted by the ASG are known to bind to the spermatozoa membrane and affect its function. The ASG gene expression profile in Chinese mitten crab (Eriocheir sinensis) has not been extensively studied, and limited genetic research has been conducted on this species. The advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies enables the generation of genomic resources within a short period of time and at minimal cost. In the present study, we performed de novo transcriptome sequencing to produce a comprehensive transcript dataset for the ASG of E. sinensis using Illumina sequencing technology. This analysis yielded a total of 33,221,284 sequencing reads, including 2.6 Gb of total nucleotides. Reads were assembled into 85,913 contigs (average 218 bp), or 58,567 scaffold sequences (average 292 bp), that identified 37,955 unigenes (average 385 bp). We assembled all unigenes and compared them with the published testis transcriptome from E. sinensis. In order to identify which genes may be involved in ASG function, as it pertains to modification of spermatozoa, we compared the ASG and testis transcriptome of E. sinensis. Our analysis identified specific genes with both higher and lower tissue expression levels in the two tissues, and the functions of these genes were analyzed to elucidate their potential roles during maturation of spermatozoa. Availability of detailed transcriptome data from ASG and testis in E. sinensis can assist our understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved with spermatozoa conservation, transport, maturation and capacitation and potentially acrosome activation.
Discussion Paper No . 270 Screening and Merger Activity

In our paper targets, by setting a reserve price, screen acquirers on their (expected) ability to generate merger-specific synergies. Both empirical evidence and many common merger models suggest that the difference between highand low-synergy mergers becomes smaller during booms. This implies that the target’s opportunity cost for sorting out relatively less fitting acquirers increases and, hence, targets screen less tightly during booms, which leads to a hike in merger activity. Our screening mechanism not only predicts that merger activity is intense during economic booms and subdued during recessions but is also consistent with other stylized facts about takeovers and generates novel testable predictions. JEL Classification Numbers: D21, D80, L11.
task in patients with medial temporal lobe lesions A pencil rescues impaired performance on a visual discrimination Material Supplemental

Material Supplemental http://learnmem.cshlp. org/content/suppl/2013/09/25/20.11. 607.DC1. html References http://learnmem.cshlp. org/content/20/11/607.full. html#ref-list-1 This article cites 26 articles, 6 of which can be accessed free at: License Commons Creative . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ described at under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported), as ). After 12 months, it is available http://learnmem.cshlp. org/site/misc/terms.xhtml first 12 months after the full-issue publication date (see This article is distributed exclusively by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the
Identification of Nitrogen Starvation-Responsive MicroRNAs in Arabidopsis thaliana

microRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of negative regulators that take part in many processes such as growth and development, stress responses, and metabolism in plants. Recently, miRNAs were shown to function in plant nutrient metabolism. Moreover, several miRNAs were identified in the response to nitrogen (N) deficiency. To investigate the functions of other miRNAs in N deficiency, deep sequencing technology was used to detect the expression of small RNAs under N-sufficient and -deficient conditions. The results showed that members from the same miRNA families displayed differential expression in response to N deficiency. Upon N starvation, the expression of miR169, miR171, miR395, miR397, miR398, miR399, miR408, miR827, and miR857 was repressed, whereas those of miR160, miR780, miR826, miR842, and miR846 were induced. miR826, a newly identified N-starvation-induced miRNA, was found to target the AOP2 gene. Among these N-starvation-responsive miRNAs, several were involved in cross-talk among responses to different nutrient (N, P, S, Cu) deficiencies. miR160, miR167, and miR171 could be responsible for the development of Arabidopsis root systems under N-starvation conditions. In addition, twenty novel miRNAs were identified and nine of them were significantly responsive to N-starvation. This study represents comprehensive expression profiling of N-starvation-responsive miRNAs and advances our understanding of the regulation of N homeostasis mediated by miRNAs.
Threshold Models of Cascades in Large-Scale Networks

The spread of new beliefs, behaviors, conventions, norms, and technologies in social and economic networks are often driven by cascading mechanisms, and so are contagion dynamics in financial networks. Global behaviors generally emerge from the interplay between the structure of the interconnection topology and the local agents’ interactions. We focus on the Threshold Model (TM) of cascades first introduced by Granovetter (1978). This can be interpreted as the best response dynamics in a network game whereby agents choose strategically between two actions. Each agent is equipped with an individual threshold representing the number of her neighbors who must have adopted a certain action for that to become the agent's best response. We analyze the TM dynamics on large-scale networks with heterogeneous agents. Through a local mean-field approach, we obtain a nonlinear, one-dimensional, recursive equation that approximates the evolution of the TM dynamics on most of the networks of a given size and distribution of degrees and thresholds. We prove that, on all but a fraction of networks with given degree and threshold statistics that is vanishing as the network size grows large, the actual fraction of adopters of a given action is arbitrarily close to the output of the aforementioned recursion. Numerical simulations on some real network testbeds show good adherence to the theoretical predictions.
The impact of tariff reduction on poverty in Zimbabwe, A CGE top-down approach

This paper uses a relatively new approach to quantify the effects of trade liberalisation on poverty. It relies on the combination of a standard, social accounting, matrix-based, computable general equilibrium model and household micro-data. These two tools are used sequentially in order to simulate the impact of trade policy reform. This framework enables the decomposition of the effects of trade liberalisation, which in turn allows for an analysis of alternative social policy packages. The methodology is applied to Zimbabwe for illustration. The results show that poverty is reduced by tariff reduction, although the poor households get the least benefits.
Particle and Fibre Toxicology Pulmonary Response to Intratracheal Instillation of Ultrafine versus Fine Titanium Dioxide: Role of Particle Surface Area

Background: The production and use of nanoparticles is growing rapidly due to the unique physical and chemical properties associated with their nano size and large surface area. Since nanoparticles have unique physicochemical properties, their bioactivity upon exposure to workers or consumers is of interest. In this study, the issue of what dose metric (mass dose versus surface area dose) is appropriate for toxicological studies has been addressed. Rats were exposed by intratracheal instillation to various doses of ultrafine or fine TiO 2. At 1, 7, or 42 days post-exposure, inflammatory and cytotoxic potential of each particle type was compared on both a mass dosage (mg/rat) as well as an equal surface area dosage (cm 2 of particles per cm 2 of alveolar epithelium) basis.
Support Vector Machines on GPU with Sparse Matrix Format

Emerging general-purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) provides a multi-core platform for wide applications, including machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we proposed several techniques to accelerate Support Vector Machines (SVM) on GPUs. Sparse matrix format is introduced into parallel SVM to achieve better performance. Experimental results show that the speedup of 55x–133.8x over LIBSVM can be achieved in training process on NVIDIA GeForce GTX470.
Heavy Metal Content in Soils under Different Wastewater Irrigation Patterns in Chihuahua, Mexico

An area near the city of Chihuahua has been traditionally irrigated with wastewater to grow forage crops. It has been hypothesized that metal levels could be found in these soils high enough to cause potential health problems to the population. The objective of this study was to determine heavy metal concentrations in different soils due to irrigation practices. Four soil types were evaluated; a soil with a past and present history of wastewater irrigation (S1), a soil with a history of wastewater irrigation until 2003 (S2), a soil with no irrigation history (S3), and a soil similar to S1 and adjacent to the river where the wastewater is transported (S11). Three soil depths were evaluated; 0–15, 15–30 and 30–50 cm. Consequently, a total of 150 soil samples were analyzed evaluating pH, EC, OM and the following elements; Na, K, Cd, Pb, Ni, Cr, Cu and Fe. The pH (P=0.000) and EC (P=0.000) were different for each soil type but no differences were noted for soil depth and the interaction. Maximum pH levels were noted in S3 with a value of 8.74 while maximum EC was observed in S1 with a value of 0.850 dSm−1. The OM level was different for soil type (P=0.000), soil depth (P=0.005) and the interaction (P=0.014). S1 and S11 obtained maximum levels of OM while minimum levels were noted in S3. Maximum OM levels were observed at the 0–15 cm depth followed by the 15–30 cm depth and finally at the 30–50 cm depth. The highest concentration of metals was as follows: K in S1 (359.3 mg kg−1); Cd in S1 (4.48 mg kg−1); Pb in S11 (155.83 mg kg−1); Ni in S1 (10.74 mg kg−1); Cu in S1 (51.36 mg kg−1); B in S3 (41.5 mg kg−1); Fe in S3 (20,313.0 mg kg−1), Cr in S3 (44.26 mg kg−1) and Na in S3 (203.0 mg kg−1). The conclusion is that some metals are present in the soils due to anthropogenic activities but others are present in natural forms.
Polygon decomposition based on the straight line skeleton

We propose a novel type of decomposition for polygonal shapes. It is thought that, for the task of object recognition, the human visual system uses a part-based representation. Decompositions based on skeletons have been previously proposed in computer vision. Our method is the first one, however, based on the straight line skeleton. Compared to the medial axis, the straight line skeleton has a few advantages: it contains only straight segments and has a lower combinatorial complexity. The skeletal nodes and the way they are generated are the basis for our decomposition, which has two stages that result in a decomposition into (possibly overlapping) parts. First, a number of visually striking parts are identified, then their boundaries are successively simplified, by locally removing detail. Our method runs in time ((n+r1+r22)log2 n), after the skeleton construction, where n is the number of vertices in the polygon, r1 the number of split events, and r2 the number of reflex edge annihilations. The decomposition is invariant to rigid motions and uniform scalings. We present results indicating that it provides plausible decompositions for a variety of shapes. This makes it attractive for partial shape matching in content-based image retrieval.
Diversity, Host Specialization, and Geographic Structure of Filarial Nematodes Infecting Malagasy Bats

We investigated filarial infection in Malagasy bats to gain insights into the diversity of these parasites and explore the factors shaping their distribution. Samples were obtained from 947 individual bats collected from 52 sites on Madagascar and representing 31 of the 44 species currently recognized on the island. Samples were screened for the presence of micro- and macro-parasites through both molecular and morphological approaches. Phylogenetic analyses showed that filarial diversity in Malagasy bats formed three main groups, the most common represented by Litomosa spp. infecting Miniopterus spp. (Miniopteridae); a second group infecting Pipistrellus cf. hesperidus (Vespertilionidae) embedded within the Litomosoides cluster, which is recognized herein for the first time from Madagascar; and a third group composed of lineages with no clear genetic relationship to both previously described filarial nematodes and found in M. griveaudi, Myotis goudoti, Neoromicia matroka (Vespertilionidae), Otomops madagascariensis (Molossidae), and Paratriaenops furculus (Hipposideridae). We further analyzed the infection rates and distribution pattern of Litomosa spp. , which was the most diverse and prevalent filarial taxon in our sample. Filarial infection was disproportionally more common in males than females in Miniopterus spp. , which might be explained by some aspect of roosting behavior of these cave-dwelling bats. We also found marked geographic structure in the three Litomosa clades, mainly linked to bioclimatic conditions rather than host-parasite associations. While this study demonstrates distinct patterns of filarial nematode infection in Malagasy bats and highlights potential drivers of associated geographic distributions, future work should focus on their alpha taxonomy and characterize arthropod vectors.
Climate Change and the World's “Sacred Sea”—Lake Baikal, Siberia

Lake Baikal—the world's largest, oldest, and most biotically diverse lake—is responding strongly to climate change, according to recent analyses of water temperature and ice cover. By the end of this century, the climate of the Baikal region will be warmer and wetter, particularly in winter. As the climate changes, ice cover and transparency, water temperature, wind dynamics and mixing, and nutrient levels are the key abiotic variables that will shift, thus eliciting many biotic responses. Among the abiotic variables, changes in ice cover will quite likely alter food-web structure and function most because of the diverse ways in which ice affects the lake's dominant primary producers (endemic diatoms), the top predator (the world's only freshwater seal), and other abiotic variables. Melting permafrost will probably exacerbate the effects of additional anthropogenic stressors (industrial pollution and cultural eutrophication) and could greatly affect ecosystem functioning.
Issues on Retrieval of Sound Effects in Large Collaborative Databases

New ways of producing information, knowledge, and culture through social, rather than proprietary relations, are probably reponsible for the recent proliferation of online communities. Many of these communities aim to collaboratively create large multimedia databases. The context in which these sites are growing and many of their important aspects are presented and discussed in this work. From all of them, the retrieval issues of sound effects have been selected as main focus of the thesis. Specifically, aspects concerning the annotation of such large databases by means of collaborative tagging, and others dealing with the study of alternative ways to retrieve audio content, such as sound search by phonetic similarity. The collaborative sound database Freesound.org has been chosen for the experiments. First of all, an study about issues such as how users annotate the sounds in the database, have been conducted, detecting some well– known problems in collaborative tagging, such as polysemy, synonymy, and the scarcity of the existing annotations. Then, a subset of sounds rarely or scarcely tagged were selected for the experiments, where a content–based audio similarity system aiming at automatically enhancing these annotations have been proposed. The reported results show that 77% of the test collection were enhanced using the recommended tags, with a high agreement among the subjects. We have also studied alternative interfaces that allow different criteria when browsing and retrieving these databases, with the motivation that such large repositories may have different levels of descriptions, and thus different ways of browsing may be allowed. The proposed system attempts on extracting automatically timbre information at the phoneme level, by means of phonetic similarity. Hence, the keyword-based search can be complemented, allowing at the same time a more natural retrieval, since given that onomatopoeic representation of sounds are very common ways to describe them. Promising results are reported, and even still further improvements have to be considered in order to extend it to more sound categories with successful performance.
Recovery of Amiloride-Sensitive Neural Coding during Regeneration of the Gustatory Nerve: Behavioral–Neural Correlation of Salt Taste Discrimination

The chorda tympani (CT) nerve innervating the anterior tongue contains two types of NaCl-responsive fibers: one, the N-type, receives input from receptor cells, the NaCl responses of which are strongly inhibited by amiloride, whereas the other, the E-type, receives input from cells poorly sensitive or insensitive to amiloride. To investigate the formation of this differentially responsive neural system, we crushed the mouse CT nerve and examined the subsequent recovery of NaCl responses and amiloride sensitivity of the regenerated nerve and behavioral discrimination between NaCl and KCl. At 2 weeks after the nerve crush, no significant response of the nerve to chemical stimuli was observed. At 3 weeks, responses to salts gradually reappeared. In this period, almost all single fibers responding to NaCl were insensitive to amiloride (E-type). At 4 weeks, some of the single fibers showed amiloride sensitivity (N-type) and behavioral discrimination between NaCl and KCl reappeared. After ≥5 weeks, the number of N-type fibers had reached the control level and became approximately equal to that of E-type fibers. During the course of recovery, N-type and E-type fibers were clearly distinguishable on the basis of their amiloride sensitivities, their KCl/NaCl response ratios, and their concentration–response relationships to NaCl. These results suggest that two salt-responsive systems are independently reformed after the nerve crush. The selective synapse reformation may account for recovery of behavioral discrimination between NaCl and KCl after taste nerve crush and regeneration. It may also explain stable sensory coding for taste quality during the continuous turnover of receptor cells in the healthy animal.