Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Activation of D2‐like receptors in rat ventral tegmental area inhibits cocaine‐reinstated drug‐seeking behavior

Relapse is a hallmark of cocaine addiction. Cocaine‐induced neuroplastic changes in the mesocorticolimbic circuits critically contribute to this phenomenon. Pre‐clinical evidence indicates that relapse to cocaine‐seeking behavior depends on activation of dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area. Thus, blocking such activation may inhibit relapse. Because the activity of dopamine neurons is regulated by D2‐like autoreceptors expressed on somatodendritic sites, this study, using the reinstatement model, aimed to determine whether activation of D2‐like receptors in the ventral tegmental area can inhibit cocaine‐induced reinstatement of extinguished cocaine‐seeking behavior. Rats were trained to self‐administer i.v. cocaine (0.25 mg/infusion) under a modified fixed‐ratio 5 schedule. After such behavior was well learned, rats went through extinction training to extinguish cocaine‐seeking behavior. The effect of quinpirole, a selective D2‐like receptor agonist microinjected into the ventral tegmental area, on cocaine‐induced reinstatement was then assessed. Quinpirole (0–3.2 μg/side) dose‐dependently decreased cocaine‐induced reinstatement and such effects were reversed by the selective D2‐like receptor antagonist eticlopride when co‐microinjected with quinpirole into the ventral tegmental area. The effect appeared to be specific to the ventral tegmental area because quinpirole microinjected into the substantia nigra had no effect. Because D2‐like receptors are expressed on rat ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons projecting to the pre‐frontal cortex and nucleus accumbens, our data suggest that these dopamine circuits may play a critical role in cocaine‐induced reinstatement. The role of potential changes in D2‐like receptors and related signaling molecules of dopamine neurons in the vulnerability to relapse was discussed.
A Kullback–Leibler Divergence Approach to Blind Image Restoration

A new algorithm for maximum-likelihood blind image restoration is presented in this paper. It is obtained by modeling the original image and the additive noise as multivariate Gaussian processes with unknown covariance matrices. The blurring process is specified by its point spread function, which is also unknown. Estimations of the original image and the blur are derived by alternating minimization of the Kullback-Leibler divergence between a model family of probability distributions defined using the linear image degradation model and a desired family of probability distributions constrained to be concentrated on the observed data. The algorithm presents the advantage to provide closed form expressions for the parameters to be updated and to converge only after few iterations. A simulation example that illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is presented.
Multifunctional Effects of Mangosteen Pericarp on Cognition in C57BL/6J and Triple Transgenic Alzheimer's Mice

Mangosteen- (Garcinia mangostana-) based nutraceutical compounds have long been reported to possess multiple health-promoting properties. The current study investigated whether mangosteen pericarp (MP) could attenuate cognitive dysfunction. First, we found that treatment with MP significantly reduced the cell death and increased the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) level in an organotypic hippocampal slice culture (OHSC). We then investigated the effects of age and MP diet on the cognitive function of male C57BL/6J (B6) mice. After 8-month dietary supplementation, the MP diet (5000 ppm) significantly attenuated the cognitive impairment associated with anti-inflammation, increasing BDNF level and decreasing p-tau (phospho-tau S202) in older B6 mice. We further applied MP dietary supplementation to triple transgenic Alzheimer's disease (3×Tg-AD) mice from 5 to 13 months old. The MP diet exerted neuroprotective, antioxidative, and anti-inflammatory effects and reduced the Aβ deposition and p-tau (S202/S262) levels in the hippocampus of 3×Tg-AD mice, which might further attenuate the deficit in spatial memory retrieval. Thus, these results revealed that the multifunctional properties of MP might offer a promising supplementary diet to attenuate cognitive dysfunction in AD.
Learning to Rank With Bregman Divergences and Monotone Retargeting

This paper introduces a novel approach for learning to rank (LETOR) based on the notion of monotone retargeting. It involves minimizing a divergence between all monotonic increasing transformations of the training scores and a parameterized prediction function. The minimization is both over the transformations as well as over the parameters. It is applied to Bregman divergences, a large class of "distance like" functions that were recently shown to be the unique class that is statistically consistent with the normalized discounted gain (NDCG) criterion [19]. The algorithm uses alternating projection style updates, in which one set of simultaneous projections can be computed independent of the Bregman divergence and the other reduces to parameter estimation of a generalized linear model. This results in easily implemented, efficiently parallelizable algorithm for the LETOR task that enjoys global optimum guarantees under mild conditions. We present empirical results on benchmark datasets showing that this approach can outperform the state of the art NDCG consistent techniques.
The realized effect of postpollination sexual selection in a natural plant population

The ultimate importance of postpollination sexual selection has remained elusive, largely because of the difficulty of assigning paternity in the field. Here I use a powerful new molecular marker (AFLP) for paternity analysis in a natural population of the outcrossing angiosperm Persoonia mollis (Proteaceae) to assess male reproductive success following equal pollination of 15 pollen donors on each of 6310 pistils. These results were contrasted with male reproductive success of these same plants following natural mating. Following equal pollination, there was a significant departure from equal siring success, indicating a potential for postpollination sexual selection. The most successful pollen donor sired more than twice the expected number of seeds, and this was largely consistent across recipient plants. However, siring success following natural mating was significantly different from siring success following artificial pollination and showed that the reproductive gains to be made from superior pollen performance did not translate into increased reproductive success following natural mating. As the ecological context for postpollination sexual selection is strong in P.mollis, I suggest that pollen competition may ultimately have only a weak effect on non–random male mating success under natural conditions because the realized opportunities for pollen competition within pistils are limited.
EVALUASI PENGELOLAAN EKOSISTEM MANGROVE PADA DAERAH PERLINDUNGAN LAUT DI DESA BLONGKO, KECAMATAN SINONSAYANG KABUPATEN MINAHASA SELATAN PROVINSI SULAWESI UTARA

ABSTRACT Mangrove ecosystem in Blongko village has many functions for coastal area. The aims of this research was to describe potential and the existing condition of mangrove ecosystem and also to give directive policy strategic for conservation mangrove ecosystem in this area. This research used primary and secondary data. Primary data was gathered by field observation and in-depth interview with 100 respondens by questionnary. Secondary data was gathered by unravel various literature and related institution. The development indicators was used to determine the policy strategic of sustainable mangrove ecosystem. Its was threat, factor, and constraint causing degradation mangrove ecosystem. This research got three policy strategy to carry on of sustainable mangrove ecosystem. Its was increase of human resources quality, protection and continuation of mangrove ecosystem, and low and institution reinforcement. This strategy was expected to depress degradation in mangrove ecosystem. Keywords : Coastal Area; Blongko village; Mangrove Ecosystem; Policy Strategy.
Abcg2 Overexpression Represents a Novel Mechanism for Acquired Resistance to the Multi-Kinase Inhibitor Danusertib in BCR-ABL-Positive Cells In Vitro

The success of Imatinib (IM) therapy in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is compromised by the development of IM resistance and by a limited IM effect on hematopoietic stem cells. Danusertib (formerly PHA-739358) is a potent pan-aurora and ABL kinase inhibitor with activity against known BCR-ABL mutations, including T315I. Here, the individual contribution of both signaling pathways to the therapeutic effect of Danusertib as well as mechanisms underlying the development of resistance and, as a consequence, strategies to overcome resistance to Danusertib were investigated. Starting at low concentrations, a dose-dependent inhibition of BCR-ABL activity was observed, whereas inhibition of aurora kinase activity required higher concentrations, pointing to a therapeutic window between the two effects. Interestingly, the emergence of resistant clones during Danusertib exposure in vitro occurred considerably less frequently than with comparable concentrations of IM. In addition, Danusertib-resistant clones had no mutations in BCR-ABL or aurora kinase domains and remained IM-sensitive. Overexpression of Abcg2 efflux transporter was identified and functionally validated as the predominant mechanism of acquired Danusertib resistance in vitro. Finally, the combined treatment with IM and Danusertib significantly reduced the emergence of drug resistance in vitro, raising hope that this drug combination may also achieve more durable disease control in vivo.
Depositional fluxes and concentrations of 7Be and 210Pb in bulk precipitation and aerosols at the interface of Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts in Spain

[1] Bulk depositional fluxes of 7Be and 210Pb in precipitation measured over a period of 16 months (April 2009–July 2010) in Huelva, Spain varied between 5.6 and 186 Bq m−2 month−1 (annual mean: 834 Bq m−2 year−1) and 0.8 and 8.1 Bq m−2 month−1 (annual mean: 59 Bq m−2 year−1), respectively, with the lowest depositional fluxes occurring during dry summer months. Quantitative evaluation of the precipitation-normalized seasonal depositional fluxes of 7Be and 210Pb indicates that the enrichment factor in winter is < 1.0 while in 2010 spring, it is significantly higher than 1, possibly indicating input of air from the stratosphere-troposphere exchange (for 7Be). The specific activities of 7Be and 210Pb varied from 0.03 to 7.42 Bq L−1 (mean = 2.5 Bq L−1) and 0.005 to 1.07 BqL−1 (mean = 0.23 Bq L−1), respectively, with the highest values corresponding to the spring season. The spatial and temporal variations of 7Be and 210Pb in aerosols from three stations are evaluated and compared to their monthly depositional fluxes. The mean depositional velocity of aerosols using 7Be and 210Pb are similar, ∼0.5 cm s−1 and are compared to other published values. This is the first time the fractional amounts of 7Be and 210Pb in monthly bulk precipitation are compared to the fractional amount of precipitation and provides insight on how the amount of precipitation plays a key role on the scavenging of these nuclides. The importance of dry fallout is evaluated for the study site which has direct implications for other areas in the Mediterranean Climate Zone.
An embedded segmental K-means model for unsupervised segmentation and clustering of speech

Unsupervised segmentation and clustering of unlabelled speech are core problems in zero-resource speech processing. Most approaches lie at methodological extremes: some use probabilistic Bayesian models with convergence guarantees, while others opt for more efficient heuristic techniques. Despite competitive performance in previous work, the full Bayesian approach is difficult to scale to large speech corpora. We introduce an approximation to a recent Bayesian model that still has a clear objective function but improves efficiency by using hard clustering and segmentation rather than full Bayesian inference. Like its Bayesian counterpart, this embedded segmental K-means model (ES-KMeans) represents arbitrary-length word segments as fixed-dimensional acoustic word embeddings. We first compare ES-KMeans to previous approaches on common English and Xitsonga data sets (5 and 2.5 hours of speech): ES-KMeans outperforms a leading heuristic method in word segmentation, giving similar scores to the Bayesian model while being 5 times faster with fewer hyperparameters. However, its clusters are less pure than those of the other models. We then show that ES-KMeans scales to larger corpora by applying it to the 5 languages of the Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2017 (up to 45 hours), where it performs competitively compared to the challenge baseline.1
Perception of Organizational Politics and Job Outcomes in a Public Sector Organization: The Moderating Role of Teamwork

In this study, we proffered a model along with its empirical testing of moderating effect of importance of teamwork on organizational politics and job outcomes by applying multiple regression analysis on observations collected from 200 employees of a public sector bank in Pakistan. The results of three stages regression supported the authors proposed hypothesis that those employees who value teamwork in organization are less affected by organizational politics in term of job satisfaction and particularly, affective organizational commitment in contrary, to others who give little value to expression of teamwork. Therefore, based on statistically significant, interaction of teamwork and organizational politics in proposed model, it is infer that the potential adverse consequences of organizational politics can be mitigated through promoting importance of teamwork within organization.
Improving Argos Doppler Location Using Multiple-Model Kalman Filtering

The Argos service was launched in 1978 to serve environmental applications, including oceanography, wildlife tracking, fishing vessel monitoring, and maritime safety. The system allows for worldwide near-real-time positioning and data collection of platform terminal transmitters (PTTs). The positioning of the PTTs is achieved by exploiting the Doppler shift in the carrier frequency of the transmitter as recorded by satelliteborne Argos receivers. Until March 15, 2011, a classical nonlinear least squares estimation technique was systematically used to estimate Argos positions. Since then, a second positioning algorithm using a multiple-model Kalman filter was implemented in the operational Argos positioning software. This paper presents this new algorithm and analyzes its performance using a large data set obtained from over 200 mobiles carrying both an Argos transmitter and a GPS receiver used as ground truth. The results show that the new algorithm significantly improves the positioning accuracy, particularly in difficult conditions (for class-A and class-B locations, in the Argos terminology). Moreover, the new algorithm enables the retrieval of a larger number of estimated positions and the systematic estimation of the location error.
The Web's hidden order

The past decade has witnessed the birth and explosive growth of the World Wide Web, both in terms of content and user population. Figure 1 shows the exponetial growth in the number of Web servers. The number of users online has been growing exponentially as well. Whereas in 1996 there were 61 million users, at the close of 1998 over 147 million people had internet access worldwide. In the year 2000, the number of internet users more than doubled again to 400 million[1]. With its remarkable growth, the Web has popularized electronic commerce, and as a result an increasing segment of the world's population conducts commercial transactions online. From its very onset, the Web has demonstrated a tremendous variety in the size of its features. Surprisingly, we found out that there is order to the apparent arbitrariness of its growth. One observed pattern is that there are many small elements contained within the web, but few large ones. A few sites consist of millions of pages, but millions of sites only contain a handful of pages. Few sites contain millions of links, but many sites have one or two. Millions of users flock to a few select sites, giving little attention to millions of others. This diversity can expressed in mathematical fashion as a distribution of a particular form, called a power law, meaning that the probability of attaining a certain size x is proportional to 1/x to a power τ, where τ is greater than or equal to1. When a distribution of some property has a power law form, the system looks the same at all length scales. What this means is that if one were to look at the distribution of site sizes for one arbitrary range, say just sites which have between 10,000 and 20,000 pages, it would look the same as for a different range, say 10 to 100 pages. In other words, zooming in or out in the distribution, one keeps obtaining the same result. It also means that if one can determine the distribution of pages per site for a range of pages, one can then predict what the distribution will be for another range. Power laws also imply that the average behavior of the system is not typical. A typical size is one that is encountered most frequently, while the average is the sum of all the sizes, divided by the number of sites. If one were to select a group of sites at random and count the number of pages in each one, the majority of the sites would be smaller than average. This discrepancy between average and typical behavior is due to the skew of the distribution. Equally interesting, power law distributions have very long tails, which means that there is a finite probability of finding sites extremely large compared to the average.
Interactions between Polymorphonuclear Leukocytes and Pseudomonas aeruginosa Biofilms on Silicone Implants In Vivo

ABSTRACT Chronic infections with Pseudomonas aeruginosa persist because the bacterium forms biofilms that are tolerant to antibiotic treatment and the host immune response. Scanning electron microscopy and confocal laser scanning microscopy were used to visualize biofilm development in vivo following intraperitoneal inoculation of mice with bacteria growing on hollow silicone tubes, as well as to examine the interaction between these bacteria and the host innate immune response. Wild-type P. aeruginosa developed biofilms within 1 day that trapped and caused visible cavities in polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMNs). In contrast, the number of cells of a P. aeruginosa rhlA mutant that cannot produce rhamnolipids was significantly reduced on the implants by day 1, and the bacteria were actively phagocytosed by infiltrating PMNs. In addition, we identified extracellular wire-like structures around the bacteria and PMNs, which we found to consist of DNA and other polymers. Here we present a novel method to study a pathogen-host interaction in detail. The data presented provide the first direct, high-resolution visualization of the failure of PMNs to protect against bacterial biofilms.
Interventions to improve health outcomes for patients with low literacy

AbstractOBJECTIVE: To perform a systematic review of interventions designed to improve health outcomes for persons with low literacy skills. DATA SOURCES: We searched MEDLINE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health (CINAHL), Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), Public Affairs Information Service (PAIS), Industrial and Labor Relations Review (ILLR), PsycInfo, and Ageline from 1980 to 2003. STUDY SELECTION: We included controlled and uncontrolled trials that measured literacy and examined the effect of interventions for people with low literacy on health outcomes, including health knowledge, health behaviors, use of health care resources, intermediate markers of disease status, and measures of morbidity or mortality. Two abstractors reviewed each study for inclusion. Disagreements were resolved by consensus among the research team. DATA EXTRACTION: One reviewer abstracted data from each article into an evidence table; the second reviewer checked each entry. Disagreements about information in evidence tables were resolved by team consensus. Both data extractors independently completed an 11-item quality scale for each article; scores were averaged to give a final measure of article quality. DATA SYNTHESIS: We identified 20 articles examining interventions designed to improve health among people with low literacy. The most common outcome studied was health knowledge; fewer studies examined health behaviors, intermediate markers, or measures of disease prevalence or severity. The effectiveness of interventions appeared mixed. Limitations in research quality and heterogeneity in outcome measures make drawing firm conclusions about effective strategies difficult. Only 5 articles examined the interaction between literacy level and the effect of the intervention; they also found mixed results. CONCLUSIONS: Several interventions have been developed to improve health for people with low literacy. Limitations in study design, interventions tested, and outcomes assessed make drawing conclusions about effectiveness difficult. Further research is required to understand better the types of interventions that are most effective and efficient for overcoming literacy-related barriers to good health.
Superior cervical gangliectomy induces non-exudative age-related macular degeneration in mice

ABSTRACT Non-exudative age-related macular degeneration, a prevalent cause of blindness, is a progressive and degenerative disease characterized by alterations in Bruch's membrane, retinal pigment epithelium, and photoreceptors exclusively localized in the macula. Although experimental murine models exist, the vast majority take a long time to develop retinal alterations and, in general, these alterations are ubiquitous, with many resulting from non-eye-specific genetic manipulations; additionally, most do not always reproduce the hallmarks of human age-related macular degeneration. Choroid vessels receive sympathetic innervation from the superior cervical ganglion, which, together with the parasympathetic system, regulates blood flow into the choroid. Choroid blood flow changes have been involved in age-related macular degeneration development and progression. At present, no experimental models take this factor into account. The aim of this work was to analyze the effect of superior cervical gangliectomy (also known as ganglionectomy) on the choroid, Bruch's membrane, retinal pigment epithelium and retina. Adult male C57BL/6J mice underwent unilateral superior cervical gangliectomy and a contralateral sham procedure. Although superior cervical gangliectomy induced ubiquitous choroid and choriocapillaris changes, it induced Bruch's membrane thickening, loss of retinal pigment epithelium melanin content and retinoid isomerohydrolase, the appearance of drusen-like deposits, and retinal pigment epithelium and photoreceptor atrophy, exclusively localized in the temporal side. Moreover, superior cervical gangliectomy provoked a localized increase in retinal pigment epithelium and photoreceptor apoptosis, and a decline in photoreceptor electroretinographic function. Therefore, superior cervical gangliectomy recapitulated the main features of human non-exudative age-related macular degeneration, and could become a new experimental model of dry age-related macular degeneration, and a useful platform for developing new therapies. Summary: Ubiquitous alteration of choroid circulation causes localized retinal alterations in mice that are similar to human non-exudative age-related macular degeneration, thus providing a new potential experimental model of the disease.