Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Training on Working Memory and Inhibitory Control in Young Adults

Different types of interventions have focused on trying to improve Executive Functions (EFs) due to their essential role in human cognition and behavior regulation. Although EFs are thought to be diverse, most training studies have targeted cognitive processes related to working memory (WM), and fewer have focused on training other control mechanisms, such as inhibitory control (IC). In the present study, we aimed to investigate the differential impact of training WM and IC as compared with control conditions performing non-executive control activities. Young adults were divided into two training (WM/IC) and two (active/passive) control conditions. Over six sessions, the training groups engaged in three different computer-based adaptive activities (WM or IC), whereas the active control group completed a program with low control-demanding activities that mainly involved processing speed. In addition, motivation and engagement were monitored through the training. The WM-training activities required maintenance, updating and memory search processes, while those from the IC group engaged response inhibition and interference control. All participants were pre- and post-tested in criterion tasks (n-back and Stroop), near transfer measures of WM (Operation Span) and IC (Stop-Signal). Non-trained far transfer outcome measures included an abstract reasoning test (Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices) and a well-validated experimental task (AX-CPT) that provides indices of cognitive flexibility considering proactive/reactive control. Training results revealed that strongly motivated participants reached higher levels of training improvements. Regarding transfer effects, results showed specific patterns of near transfer effects depending on the type of training. Interestingly, it was only the IC training group that showed far transfer to reasoning. Finally, all trained participants showed a shift toward a more proactive mode of cognitive control, highlighting a general effect of training on cognitive flexibility. The present results reveal specific and general modulations of executive control mechanisms after brief training intervention targeting either WM or IC.
Comparison of Models for IP3 Receptor Kinetics Using Stochastic Simulations

Inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptor (IP3R) is a ubiquitous intracellular calcium (Ca2+) channel which has a major role in controlling Ca2+ levels in neurons. A variety of computational models have been developed to describe the kinetic function of IP3R under different conditions. In the field of computational neuroscience, it is of great interest to apply the existing models of IP3R when modeling local Ca2+ transients in dendrites or overall Ca2+ dynamics in large neuronal models. The goal of this study was to evaluate existing IP3R models, based on electrophysiological data. This was done in order to be able to suggest suitable models for neuronal modeling. Altogether four models (Othmer and Tang, 1993; Dawson et al., 2003; Fraiman and Dawson, 2004; Doi et al., 2005) were selected for a more detailed comparison. The selection was based on the computational efficiency of the models and the type of experimental data that was used in developing the model. The kinetics of all four models were simulated by stochastic means, using the simulation software STEPS, which implements the Gillespie stochastic simulation algorithm. The results show major differences in the statistical properties of model functionality. Of the four compared models, the one by Fraiman and Dawson (2004) proved most satisfactory in producing the specific features of experimental findings reported in literature. To our knowledge, the present study is the first detailed evaluation of IP3R models using stochastic simulation methods, thus providing an important setting for constructing a new, realistic model of IP3R channel kinetics for compartmental modeling of neuronal functions. We conclude that the kinetics of IP3R with different concentrations of Ca2+ and IP3 should be more carefully addressed when new models for IP3R are developed.
Survivin Down-regulation Plays a Crucial Role in 3-Hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl Coenzyme A Reductase Inhibitor-induced Apoptosis in Cancer*

3-Hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase inhibitors (HRIs) are widely used to reduce serum cholesterol in patients with hypercholesterolemia. Previous studies have shown that HRIs can induce apoptosis in colon cancer cells. In this study, we investigated the mechanisms underlying the apoptosis-inducing effect of HRIs in greater detail. The HRI lovastatin induced apoptosis in the human colon cancer cell line SW480 by blocking the cholesterol synthesis pathway. Immunoblot analysis of antiapoptotic molecules, including survivin, XIAP, cIAP-1, cIAP-2, Bcl-2, and Bcl-XL, revealed that only survivin expression was decreased by lovastatin. Survivin down-regulation by RNA interference induced apoptosis, and survivin overexpression rendered the cells resistant to lovastatin-induced growth inhibition. These results indicate that survivin down-regulation contributes substantially to the proapoptotic properties of lovastatin. Farnesyl pyrophosphate and geranylgeranyl pyrophosphate, two downstream intermediates in the cholesterol synthesis pathway, simultaneously reversed survivin down-regulation and the blocking of Ras isoprenylation by lovastatin. Ras isoprenylation is important for the activation of Ras-mediated signaling, including the activation of the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3-kinase)/Akt pathway. The PI3-kinase inhibitor down-regulated survivin in SW480 cells. In addition, lovastatin blocked Ras activation and Akt phosphorylation. We conclude that survivin down-regulation is crucial in lovastatin-induced apoptosis in cancer cells and that lovastatin decreases survivin expression by inhibiting Ras-mediated PI3-kinase activation via the blocking of Ras isoprenylation.
01 Systems of fuzzy equations in structural mechanics

Systems of linear and nonlinear equations with fuzzy parameters are relevant to many practical problems arising in structure mechanics, electrical engineering, finance, economics and physics. In this paper three methods for solving such equations are discussed: method for outer interval solution of systems of linear equations depending linearly on interval parameters, fuzzy finite element method proposed by Rama Rao and sensitivity analysis method. The performance and advantages of the presented methods is presented using illustrative examples. AMS subject classification: 74S05, 65G20, 65G40, 65M60
Effect of sympathetic nerve stimulation on lung vascular permeability in the rat.

The present study was undertaken to evaluate the role of sympathetic nerves in increasing lung vascular permeability. An isolated rat sympathetic nerve-lung preparation was used. Three minutes after an increase in lung weight was induced by elevating the intravascular pressure, stimulation of sympathetic nerves was performed in the presence of papaverine, which further increased the lung weight in a graded manner. After the nerve stimulation, deposits of carbon were observed in alveolar macrophages and perivascular walls, indicating an increase in vascular permeability. The response of lung weight to the sympathetic nerve stimulation was altered, depending on the magnitude of intravascular pressure change as well as on the voltage and frequency of electrical stimulation. Furthermore, these responses were prevented by tetrodotoxin. Calculation of the relationship between the maximal slope of the graded lung weight gain and the slope obtained just before the nerve stimulation gave a slope ratio at a frequency of 30 cps in normal rats of 4.47 +/- 0.21. Treatment with phentolamine diminished the value to 1.93 +/- 0.15, and with reserpine, to 1.43 +/- 0.14. In reserpinized rats, the slope ratio was restored by an administration of norepinephrine to 2.11 +/- 0.05 at 30 cps, being further increased by propranolol and blocked partially by phentolamine. The capillary filtration coefficient was not affected by either of the agents. In capsaicin-treated rats, sympathetic nerve stimulation did not cause any response in terms of lung weight (slope ratio = 1.0). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Renal Inhibition of Heme Oxygenase-1 Increases Blood Pressure in Angiotensin II-Dependent Hypertension

The goal of this study was to test the hypothesis that renal medullary heme oxygenase (HO) acts as a buffer against Ang-II dependent hypertension. To test this hypothesis, renal medullary HO activity was blocked using QC-13, an imidazole-dioxolane HO-1 inhibitor, or SnMP, a classical porphyrin based HO inhibitor. HO inhibitors were infused via IRMI catheters throughout the study starting 3 days prior to implantation of an osmotic minipump which delivered Ang II or saline vehicle. MAP was increased by Ang II infusion and further increased by IRMI infusion of QC-13 or SnMP. MAP averaged 113 ± 3, 120 ± 7, 141 ± 2, 153 ± 2, and 154 ± 3 mmHg in vehicle, vehicle + IRMI QC-13, Ang II, Ang II + IRMI QC-13, and Ang II + IRMI SnMP treated mice, respectively (n = 6). Inhibition of renal medullary HO activity with QC-13 in Ang II infused mice was also associated with a significant increase in superoxide production as well as significant decreases in antioxidant enzymes catalase and MnSOD. These results demonstrate that renal inhibition of HO exacerbates Ang II dependent hypertension through a mechanism which is associated with increases in superoxide production and decreases in antioxidant enzymes.
System Design for a Synergistic, Low Power Mote/BLE Embedded Platform

Modern IoT prototyping platforms fall short in terms of energy efficiency, connectivity and software programming practices. We present the design of a new hardware and software platform that addresses these shortcomings by bringing together Mobile, Wearable, Maker and Wireless Sensor Network technologies to enable rapid prototyping with a high degree of synergy and energy efficiency. This is achieved in part by leveraging the Memory Protection Unit on modern microcontrollers along with a novel syscall interface to provide kernel / user isolation and a clean concurrency model. Such a design allows a wide range of languages to be used for application development without significant adaptation. We demonstrate how careful choice of application language allows the naturally asynchronous nature of embedded programming to be expressed cleanly and powerfully. Finally we evaluate the platform in several integrated use cases, providing examples of the capabilities introduced by Synergy.
No increased risk of psychological/behavioral disorders in siblings of women with hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) unless their mother had HG

Hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), severe nausea and vomiting of pregnancy, is characterized by prolonged maternal stress, undernutrition and dehydration. Maternal stress and malnutrition of pregnancy are linked to poor neonatal outcome and associated with poor adult health, and we recently showed that in utero exposure to HG may lead to increased risks of psychological and behavioral disorders in the offspring. In addition, we have shown familial aggregation of HG, which is strong evidence for a genetic component to the disease. In this study, we compare the rates of psychological and behavioral disorders in 172 adults with and 101 adults without a sibling with HG. The rate of emotional/behavioral disorders is identical (15%) in both groups. The results suggest that the etiology of HG is not likely to include genetic factors associated with emotional and behavioral disorders. In addition, this study provides evidence that the increased incidence of psychological/behavioral disorders among offspring of women with HG is attributable to the HG pregnancy itself, rather than to confounding genetic factors linked to HG.
Surgical debulking of pituitary macroadenomas causing acromegaly improves control by lanreotide

Background Macroadenomas causing acromegaly are cured surgically in only around 50% of patients. Primary medical treatment with somatostatin analogues has been suggested to be a means of treating patients with a potentially poor surgical outcome. Previous retrospective studies have also suggested that surgical debulking of pituitary tumours causing acromegaly improves control by somatostatin analogues. No prospective study using lanreotide has been carried out thus far to assess whether this is the case.
Gland segmentation in colon histology images using hand-crafted features and convolutional neural networks

We investigate glandular structure segmentation in colon histology images as a window-based classification problem. We compare and combine methods based on fine-tuned convolutional neural networks (CNN) and hand-crafted features with support vector machines (HC-SVM). On 85 images of H&E-stained tissue, we find that fine-tuned CNN outperforms HC-SVM in gland segmentation measured by pixel-wise Jaccard and Dice indices. For HC-SVM we further observe that training a second-level window classifier on the posterior probabilities - as an output refinement - can substantially improve the segmentation performance. The final performance of HC-SVM with refinement is comparable to that of CNN. Furthermore, we show that by combining and refining the posterior probability outputs of CNN and HC-SVM together, a further performance boost is obtained.
Efficient and verified simulation of a path ensemble for conformational change in a united-residue model of calmodulin

The computational sampling of rare, large-scale, conformational transitions in proteins is a well appreciated challenge—for which a number of potentially efficient path-sampling methodologies have been proposed. Here, we study a large-scale transition in a united-residue model of calmodulin using the “weighted ensemble” (WE) approach of Huber and Kim. Because of the model's relative simplicity, we are able to compare our results with brute-force simulations. The comparison indicates that the WE approach quantitatively reproduces the brute-force results, as assessed by considering (i) the reaction rate, (ii) the distribution of event durations, and (iii) structural distributions describing the heterogeneity of the paths. Importantly, the WE method is readily applied to more chemically accurate models, and by studying a series of lower temperatures, our results suggest that the WE method can increase efficiency by orders of magnitude in more challenging systems.
Regulation of pre-T cell receptor (pT alpha-TCR beta) gene expression during human thymic development

In murine T cell development, early thymocytes that productively rearrange the T cell receptor (TCR) beta locus are selected to continue maturation, before TCR alpha expression, by means of a pre-TCR alpha- (pT alpha-) TCR beta heterodimer (pre-TCR). The aim of this study was to identify equivalent stages in human thymocyte development. We show here that variable-diversity-joining region TCR beta rearrangement and the expression of full-length TCR beta transcripts have been initiated in some immature thymocytes at the TCR alpha/beta- CD4+CD8- stage, and become common in a downstream subset of TCR alpha/beta- CD4+CD8+ thymocytes that is highly enriched in large cycling cells. TCR beta chain expression was hardly detected in TCR alpha/beta- CD4+CD8- thymocytes, whereas cytoplasmic TCR beta chain was found in virtually all TCR alpha/beta- CD4+CD8+ blasts. In addition, a TCR beta complex distinct from the mature TCR alpha/beta heterodimer was immunoprecipitated only from the latter subset. cDNA derived from TCR alpha/beta- CD4+CD8+ blasts allowed us to identify and clone the gene encoding the human pT alpha chain, and to examine its expression at different stages of thymocyte development. Our results show that high pT alpha transcription occurs only in CD4+CD8- and CD4+CD8+ TCR alpha/beta- thymocytes, whereas it is weaker in earlier and later stages of development. Based on these results, we propose that the transition from TCR alpha/beta- CD4+CD8- to TCR alpha/beta- CD4+CD8+ thymocytes represents a critical developmental stage at which the successful expression of TCR beta promotes the clonal expansion and further maturation of human thymocytes, independent of TCR alpha.
An Ensemble Method to Produce High-Quality Word Embeddings

A currently successful approach to computational semantics is to represent words as embeddings in a machine-learned vector space. We present an ensemble method that combines embeddings produced by GloVe (Pennington et al., 2014) and word2vec (Mikolov et al., 2013) with structured knowledge from the semantic networks ConceptNet (Speer and Havasi, 2012) and PPDB (Ganitkevitch et al., 2013), merging their information into a common representation with a large, multilingual vocabulary. The embeddings it produces achieve state-of-the-art performance on many word-similarity evaluations. Its score of $\rho = . 596$ on an evaluation of rare words (Luong et al., 2013) is 16% higher than the previous best known system.
The Structure of the Chinese Material Value Scale: An Eastern Cultural View

This study investigated the structure of the Chinese Material Value Scale (MVS). A two-factor structure, rather than the original three-factor structure, was proposed for China by means of confirmatory factor analysis. Direct evidence showed that the dimensions of success and happiness could be merged together. Both explicit and implicit methods were used to examine the relationship between success and happiness based on possession. In particular, as an implicit method, the dot-probe paradigm recording participants’ response time supported the idea that the two-factors could be merged together. The results also showed that for Chinese people, success to an extent means happiness, while the converse is not necessarily true. Chinese are much more concerned about social evaluation than their own feelings, and this cultural characteristic is reflected in our findings.
Prognostic significance of psychosocial factors in African‐American and white breast cancer patients

It has been suggested that psychosocial factors, such as coping and emotional support, influence cancer survival, but results have been inconclusive. Given the scarce data from racially/ethnically diverse populations, the authors investigated the prognostic significance of selected psychosocial variables in a cohort of African‐American women and white women with breast cancer.
Switch to Biological Agent in Psoriasis Significantly Improved Clinical and Patient-Reported Outcomes in Real-World Practice

Background: Although clinical studies have shown efficacy of biological agents in moderate to severe psoriasis, observational studies of real-world effectiveness are rare. Objective: To analyse the psoriasis area and severity index (PASI) and quality of life by the EQ-5D questionnaire and dermatology quality of life index (DLQI) in psoriasis patients who switched from conventional systemic treatment to biological agents in clinical practice. Furthermore, to analyse patient groups with the highest benefit of biological agents. Methods: Longitudinal, observational study based on the Swedish National Registry for Systemic Treatment of Pso-riasis, PsoReg. Outcomes of biological-naïve patients who switched to a biological agent (n = 267) were analysed before switch and at the first follow-up. Results: Patients significantly improved in EQ-5D, DLQI and PASI (p < 0.001). Patients with DLQI ≥10 and/or PASI ≥10 had the greatest benefits from biological agents in terms of EQ-5D. Conclusions: Patients with moderate to severe psoriasis benefit from biological agents in clinical practice; the patients with the highest benefits were those with high pretreatment PASI and DLQI scores.
The Longitudinal Association of Lead with Blood Pressure

Background. Several investigators have reported an association of blood lead or bone lead with increased blood pressure and hypertension, but questions remain concerning whether these effects are acute or chronic in nature. Methods. In this longitudinal study, we evaluated the relation of lead, measured in blood and tibia, to changes in blood pressure between 1994 and 1998. We studied 496 current and former employees of a chemical-manufacturing facility in the eastern United States who had previous occupational exposure to inorganic and organic lead. Cohort members who provided three or four blood pressure measurements during the study were included. Results. Mean age at baseline was 55.8 years with a mean of 18 years since last occupational exposure to lead. Blood lead at baseline averaged 4.6 &mgr;g/dL (standard deviation [SD] = 2.6) or 0.22 &mgr;mole/Liter (SD = 0.13). Tibia lead at year three averaged 14.7-&mgr;g/gm (SD = 9.4) bone mineral. Change in systolic blood pressure during the study was associated with lead dose, with an average annual increase of 0.64 mmHg (standard error [SE] = 0.25), 0.73 mmHg (SE = 0.26), and 0.61 mmHg (SE = 0.27) for every standard deviation increase in blood lead at baseline, tibia lead at year three, or peak past tibia lead, respectively. Conclusions. The results support an etiologic role for lead in the elevation of systolic blood pressure among adult males and are consistent with both acute and chronic modes of action.
Simultaneous proteomic and genomic analysis of primary Ta urothelial cell carcinomas for the prediction of tumor recurrence.

BACKGROUND The prediction of tumor recurrence in patients with Ta urothelial cell carcinoma is inaccurate and new prognostic markers are desirable. MATERIALS AND METHODS Surface-enhanced laser-desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (SELDI-TOF MS) was performed on 33 primary Ta tumors (16 and 17 tumors were from patients with long and short recurrence-free periods, respectively) and data were compared to previously obtained mRNA expression profiles of 49 genes. RESULTS The intensities of a protein peak at m/z 33331 varied most significantly between the two patient groups (p = 0.0048). This was comparable to survivin, whose mRNA expression differed most significantly (p = 0.0042) of the 49 genes. ROC analysis revealed an area under the curve for protein peak 33331 and survivin of 0.78 (95% CI, 0.62-0.94) and 0.79 (95% CI, 0.63-0.94), respectively. Protein peak 33331 and survivin identified 3 (17%) and 8 (47%) patients with a recurrence-free period of at least 4 years, respectively, without generating false-negatives. CONCLUSION These findings indicate that SELDI-TOF MS and real-time Q-PCR analysis on the same tissue can result in the identification of markers with comparable differential expression. Such combined analyses may yield combinations of several markers that might improve disease prognosis.