Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Complement Components Showed a Time-Dependent Local Expression Pattern in Constant and Acute White Light-Induced Photoreceptor Damage

Background: Photoreceptor cell death due to extensive light exposure and induced oxidative-stress are associated with retinal degeneration. A correlated dysregulation of the complement system amplifies the damaging effects, but the local and time-dependent progression of this mechanism is not thoroughly understood. Methods: Light-induced photoreceptor damage (LD) was induced in Balb/c mice with white light illumination either for 24 h with 1000 lux (constant model) or 0.5 h with 5000 lux (acute model). Complement protein and mRNA expression levels were compared at 1 and 3 days post-LD for C1s, complement factor B (CFB), mannose binding lectin A, mannose-binding protein-associated serine protease 1 (MASP-1), C3, C4, C9, and complement factor P in retina and RPE/choroid. Histological analyses visualized apoptosis, microglia/macrophage migration, gliosis and deposition of the complement activation marker C3d. Systemic anaphylatoxin serum concentrations were determined using an ELISA. Results: Apoptosis, gliosis and microglia/macrophage migration into the outer nuclear layer showed similar patterns in both models. Local complement factor expression revealed an early upregulation of complement factor mRNA in the acute and constant light regimen at 1 day post-treatment for c1s, cfb, masp-1, c3, c4 and c9 in the RPE/choroid. However, intraretinal complement mRNA expression for c1s, cfb, c3 and c4 was increased at 1 day in the constant and at 3 days in the acute model. A corresponding regulation on protein level in the retina following both LD models was observed for C3, which was upregulated at 1 day and correlated with increased C3d staining in the ganglion cell layer and at the RPE. In the RPE/choroid C1s-complex protein detection was increased at 3 days after LD irrespectively of the light intensities used. Conclusion: LD in mouse eyes is correlated with local complement activity. The time-dependent local progression of complement regulation on mRNA and protein levels were equivalent in the acute and constant LD model, except for the intraretinal, time-dependent mRNA expression. Knowing the relative time courses of local complement expression and cellular activity can help to elucidate novel therapeutic options in retinal degeneration indicating at which time point of disease complement has to be rebalanced.
The Frequency of Nail Changes and Disorders in Iraqi People above 50 Years Old

Background: Nail changes associated with ageing are common in the elderly and include characteristic modifications of color, contour, growth, surface, thickness and histology. No cutaneous examination is complete without a careful clinical evaluation of the nails. Objective: The aim of present work is to assess the frequency of senile nail changes and disorders in Iraqi people above 50 years old compared with control age group (20 - 30 years old). Patients and methods: This case-controlled, cross-sectional study was performed in the outpatient clinic of Dermatology and Venereology Department at the Kufa College of Medicine Teaching Hospital in Najaf Province in the period from September 2010 to April 2011. The study included 200 subjects, of which 100 patients were above 50 years old (study group), and the other 100 subjects were from 20 - 30 years old (control group). A detailed history from each subject was recorded to detect the onset, duration and progression of nail changes and/or disorders, their occupation and any environmental exposure. A careful examination of the nails was carried out to assess the type of nail changes, site and symmetry. Any patient with systemic disease, dermatological disease or with suspected drug intake was excluded from the study. Results: The present work has shown that many nail changes were more frequent among older age individuals than younger age group with significant statistical difference (p = 0.043 - 0.000) like dull opaque appearance, rough lusterlessness, longitudinal ridging, altered thickness, ragged cuticle, altered contour, subungual hyperkeratosis and scaling nail folds. Chromonychia was not statistically significant (14% of study group versus 16% of the control) with p = 0.692. Longitudinal melanonychia was significantly higher in the study group (6% versus 0% of the control) with p = 0.013, while punctate leukonychia was significantly higher in the control group (16% versus 4% of study group) with p = 0.005. Conclusion: Some changes of the nail are significantly correlated with advanced age like dull opaque nails, rough lusterlessness, longitudinal ridging. Therefore, these signs can be regarded as indicative of ageing of healthy Iraqi people.
Alfalfa Living Mulch Advances Biological Control of Soybean Aphid

Abstract Despite evidence for biological control in North America, outbreaks of the invasive soybean aphid, Aphis glycines Matsumura (Hemiptera: Aphididae), continue to occur on soybean (Glycine max L. Merr.). Our objectives were to determine whether natural enemies delay aphid establishment and limit subsequent population growth and whether biological control can be improved by altering the within-field habitat. We hypothesized that a living mulch would increase the abundance of the aphidophagous community in soybean and suppress A. glycines establishment and population growth. We measured natural enemy and A. glycines abundance in soybean grown with and without an alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) living mulch. Soybean grown with an alfalfa living mulch had 45% more natural enemies and experienced a delay in A. glycines establishment that resulted in lower peak populations. From our experiments, we concluded that the current natural enemy community in Iowa can delay A. glycines establishment, and an increase in aphidophagous predator abundance lowered the rate of A. glycines population growth preventing economic populations (i.e., below the current economic threshold) from occurring. Incorporation of a living mulch had an unexpected impact on A. glycines population growth, lowering the aphids’ intrinsic rate of growth, thus providing a bottom-up suppression of A. glycines. We suggest future studies of living mulches or cover crops for A. glycines management should address both potential sources of suppression. Furthermore, our experience suggests that more consistent biological control of A. glycines may be possible with even partial resistance that slows but does not prevent reproduction.
Amygdala Engagement in Response to Subthreshold Presentations of Anxious Face Stimuli in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Preliminary Insights

Current theoretical models of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have proposed that impairments in the processing of social/emotional information may be linked to amygdala dysfunction. However, the extent to which amygdala functions are compromised in ASD has become a topic of debate in recent years. In a jittered functional magnetic resonance imaging study, sub-threshold presentations of anxious faces permitted an examination of amygdala recruitment in 12 high functioning adult males with ASD and 12 matched controls. We found heightened neural activation of the amygdala in both high functioning adults with ASD and matched controls. Neither the intensity nor the time-course of amygdala activation differed between the groups. However, the adults with ASD showed significantly lower levels of fusiform activation during the trials compared to controls. Our findings suggest that in ASD, the transmission of socially salient information along sub-cortical pathways is intact: and yet the signaling of this information to structures downstream may be impoverished, and the pathways that facilitate subsequent processing deficient.
Generic constructions of secure-channel free searchable encryption with adaptive security

For searching keywords against encrypted data, public key encryption scheme with keyword search PEKS, and its extension secure-channel free PEKS SCF-PEKS, has been proposed. In this paper, we extend the security of SCF-PEKS, calling it adaptive SCF-PEKS, wherein an adversary modeled as a "malicious-but-legitimate" receiver is allowed to issue test queries adaptively. We show that adaptive SCF-PEKS can be generically constructed by anonymous identity-based encryption only. That is, SCF-PEKS can be constructed without any additional cryptographic primitive when compared with the Abdalla et al. PEKS construction J. Cryptology 2008, even though adaptive SCF-PEKS requires additional functionalities. We also propose other adaptive SCF-PEKS construction, which is not fully generic but is efficient compared with the first one. Finally, we instantiate an adaptive SCF-PEKS scheme via our second construction that achieves a similar level of efficiency for the costs of the test procedure and encryption, compared with the non-adaptive secure SCF-PEKS scheme by Fang et al. CANS2009. Copyright © 2014John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Thermal conditions in a simulated office environment with convective and radiant cooling systems

The thermal conditions in a two person office room were measured with four air conditioning systems: chilled beam (CB), chilled beam with radiant panel (CBR), chilled ceiling with ceiling installed mixing ventilation (CCMV) and four desk partition mounted local radiant cooling panels with mixing ventilation (MVRC). CB was based on convection cooling while the remaining three systems (CBR, CCMV and MVRC) on combined radiant and convective cooling. Measurements were performed in design (64 W/m 2 ) and usual (38 W/m 2 ) cooling conditions. Air temperature, operative temperature, radiant asymmetry, air velocity and turbulent intensity were measured and draft rate levels calculated in the room. Manikin-based equivalent temperature (MBET) was determined by two thermal manikins to identify the impact of the local thermal conditions generated by the studied systems on occupants’ thermal comfort. The results revealed that the differences in thermal conditions between the four systems were not significant. This result was contrary to the expectation that operative temperature would be lower in the CCMV case. The velocity levels in the occupied zone were slightly higher in both CB and CBR cases. However the highest measured values were located outside the workstations.
A Metamaterial Series-Fed Linear Dipole Array with Reduced Beam Squinting

The recent implementation of negative-refractive-index (NRI) media by periodically loading host transmission-lines (TL) with lumped-element series capacitors and shunt inductors has led to the development of numerous practical devices based on NRI-TL metamaterials (MTM). The MTM feed networks were shown to be useful in series-fed linear arrays for effectively replacing one-wavelength long conventional meandered transmission lines, thus achieving compact, broadside radiators, whose beam squints less with frequency. In addition, the MTM feed networks can be used to create linear arrays whose main beam remains virtually fixed at a negative angle from broadside as the frequency is varied. Alternatively, a single CPS MTM feedline operating inside the radiation cone can be used to implement a leaky-wave antenna (LWA), which can be recognized as the dual of the CPW line to create a backward LWA
Author ' s personal copy Hierarchical nanoparticle morphology for platinum supported on SrTiO 3 ( 0 0 1 ) : A combined microscopy and X-ray scattering study

The morphology of metal nanoparticles supported on oxide substrates plays an important role in heterogeneous catalysis and in the nucleation of thin films. For platinum evaporated onto SrTiO3 (0 0 1) and vacuum annealed we find an unexpected growth formation of Pt nanoparticles that aggregate into clusters without coalescence. This hierarchical nanoparticle morphology with an enhanced surface-tovolume ratio for Pt is analyzed by grazing incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), atomic force microscopy (AFM) and high-resolution scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The nanoparticle constituents of the clusters measure 2–4 nm in size and are nearly contiguously spaced where the average edge-to-edge spacing is less than 1 nm. These particles make up the clusters, which are 10–50 nm in diameter and are spaced on the order of 100 nm apart. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author at: Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern University, 2220 Campus Dr., Evanston, IL 60208, USA. Tel. : +1 847 491 3570; fax: +1 847 491 7820. E-mail address: bedzyk@northwestern.edu (M.J. Bedzyk).
Using Selectively Applied Accelerated Molecular Dynamics to Enhance Free Energy Calculations

Accelerated molecular dynamics (aMD) has been shown to enhance conformational space sampling relative to classical molecular dynamics; however, the exponential reweighting of aMD trajectories, which is necessary for the calculation of free energies relating to the classical system, is oftentimes problematic, especially for systems larger than small poly peptides. Here, we propose a method of accelerating only the degrees of freedom most pertinent to sampling, thereby reducing the total acceleration added to the system and improving the convergence of calculated ensemble averages, which we term selective aMD. Its application is highlighted in two biomolecular cases. First, the model system alanine dipeptide is simulated with classical MD, all-dihedral aMD, and selective aMD, and these results are compared to the infinite sampling limit as calculated with metadynamics. We show that both forms of aMD enhance the convergence of the underlying free energy landscape by 5-fold relative to classical MD; however, selective aMD can produce improved statistics over all-dihedral aMD due to the improved reweighting. Then we focus on the pharmaceutically relevant case of computing the free energy of the decoupling of oseltamivir in the active site of neuraminidase. Results show that selective aMD greatly reduces the cost of this alchemical free energy transformation, whereas all-dihedral aMD produces unreliable free energy estimates.
Dissociable Retrosplenial and Hippocampal Contributions to Successful Formation of Survey Representations

During everyday navigation, humans encounter complex environments predominantly from a first-person perspective. Behavioral evidence suggests that these perceptual experiences can be used not only to acquire route knowledge but also to directly assemble map-like survey representations. Most studies of human navigation focus on the retrieval of previously learned environments, and the neural foundations of integrating sequential views into a coherent representation are not yet fully understood. We therefore used our recently introduced virtual-reality paradigm, which provides accuracy and reaction-time measurements precisely indicating the emergence of survey knowledge, and functional magnetic resonance imaging while participants repeatedly encoded a complex environment from a first-person ground-level perspective. Before the experiment, we gave specific instructions to induce survey learning, which, based on the clear evidence for emerging survey knowledge in the behavioral data from 11 participants, proved successful. Neuroimaging data revealed increasing activation across sessions only in bilateral retrosplenial cortices, thus paralleling behavioral measures of map expertise. In contrast, hippocampal activation did not follow absolute performance but rather reflected the amount of knowledge acquired in a given session. In other words, hippocampal activation was most prominent during the initial learning phase and decayed after performance had approached ceiling level. We therefore conclude that, during navigational learning, retrosplenial areas mainly serve to integrate egocentric spatial information with cues about self-motion, whereas the hippocampus is needed to incorporate new information into an emerging memory representation.
An Acidic Cluster of Human Cytomegalovirus UL99 Tegument Protein Is Required for Trafficking and Function

ABSTRACT The human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) virion is comprised of a linear double-stranded DNA genome, proteinaceous capsid and tegument, and a lipid envelope containing virus-encoded glycoproteins. Of these components, the tegument is the least well defined in terms of both protein content and function. Several of the major tegument proteins are phosphoproteins (pp), including pp150, pp71, pp65, and pp28. pp28, encoded by the UL99 open reading frame (ORF), traffics to vacuole-like cytoplasmic structures and was shown recently to be essential for envelopment. To elucidate the UL99 amino acid sequences necessary for its trafficking and function in the HCMV replication cycle, two types of viral mutants were analyzed. Using a series of recombinant viruses expressing various UL99-green fluorescent protein fusions, we demonstrate that myristoylation at glycine 2 and an acidic cluster (AC; amino acids 44 to 57) are required for the punctate perinuclear and cytoplasmic (vacuole-like) localization observed for wild-type pp28. A second approach involving the generation of several UL99 deletion mutants indicated that at least the C-terminal two-thirds of this ORF is nonessential for viral growth. Furthermore, the data suggest that an N-terminal region of UL99 containing the AC is required for viral growth. Regarding virion incorporation or UL99-encoded proteins, we provide evidence that suggests that a hypophosphorylated form of pp28 is incorporated, myristoylation is required, and sequences within the first 57 amino acids are sufficient.
Hierarchical neural networks and enhanced class posteriors for social signal classification

With the impressive advances of deep learning in recent years the interest in neural networks has resurged in the fields of automatic speech recognition and emotion recognition. In this paper we apply neural networks to address speaker-independent detection and classification of laughter and filler vocalizations in speech. We first explore modeling class posteriors with standard neural networks and deep stacked autoencoders. Then, we adopt a hierarchical neural architecture to compute enhanced class posteriors and demonstrate that this approach introduces significant and consistent improvements on the Social Signals Sub-Challenge of the Interspeech 2013 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge (ComParE). On this task we achieve a value of 92.4% of the unweighted average area-under-the-curve, which is the official competition measure, on the test set. This constitutes an improvement of 9.1% over the baseline and is the best result obtained so far on this task.
Facile chemical solution synthesis of p-type delafossite Ag-based transparent conducting AgCrO2 films in an open condition

Recent progress in transparent conducting components stimulates the extensive exploration of p-type transparent conducting oxide (TCO) materials. Here, we report the synthesis of a class of p-type delafossite Ag-based TCO thin films, AgCrO2 (ACO), using a facile chemical solution route in an open condition. Firstly, the evolution of microstructure, morphology, and optical properties with respect to annealing temperature is reported. The stoichiometric ACO thin films show self-assembled c-axis orientation. The 500 °C-annealed ACO thin film presents a relatively high quality, dense surface and good optical transmittance amongst all the derived thin films. Then, to improve the conductivity, Mg doping effects are investigated. Upon Mg doping, p-type conductivity is obtained for thin films of AgCr1−xMgxO2 (0.04 ≤ x ≤ 0.20). The conductivity initially increases from 3.1 × 10−3 to 67.7 × 10−3 S cm−1 with x increasing from 0.04 to 0.12 and then slightly decreases with further increasing Mg concentration. The Hall results display that the hole concentration gradually increases with increasing Mg dopant concentration, and the carrier mobility first increases with x increasing from 0.04 to 0.12, while decreases with x further increasing from 0.12 to 0.20. A high magnitude of optical transmittance near 60% in the visible region and wide optical bandgaps (3.41–3.66 eV) of the AgCr1−xMgxO2 thin films are observed. The facial fabrication of ACO thin films in an open condition will provide a start for the synthesis of Ag-based delafossite thin films.
A model of complex cell development by information separation

Neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) of primates are selective for location, orientation, and spatial frequency. Among them, complex cells are characterized by their selectivity to orientation and spatial frequency while lacking sensitivity to position or phase tuning (dark/bright line center) within a restricted range. The development of the shift invariance property of complex cells has been successfully explained by the temporal trace learning which takes advantage of the temporal coherence of visual stimuli (P. Földiák, Neural Computation 1991;3:194). We have carried out mathematical modeling of complex cell development without temporal trace mechanism. The model network consists of three layers of E, S, and C layer which model excitatory cells in LGN or V1, and simple cells, and complex cells in V1, respectively. Neurons in layer E have position selectivity, and neurons in layer S are line detectors for a specific position. During the learning phase, the network is exposed to randomly located short oriented bars, and neurons in layer C self-organize its selectivity to the inputs. The learning rules are Hebbian or SOM (self-organizing map) type between layers S and C, and anti-Hebbian between layers E and C by which neurons are forced to represent uncorrelated aspect of the inputs. We demonstrate that neurons in layer C learn invariance to shift in input position. Our model explains complex cell development in terms of the principle of information separation. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 38(7): 76–83, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience. wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.20483
Production-Oriented Models for Speech Recognition

Acoustic modeling in speech recognition uses very little knowledge of the speech production process. At many levels our models continue to model speech as a surface phenomenon. Typically, hidden Markov model (HMM) parameters operate primarily in the acoustic space or in a linear transformation thereof; state-to-state evolution is modeled only crudely, with no explicit relationship between states, such as would be afforded by the use of phonetic features commonly used by linguists to describe speech phenomena, or by the continuity and smoothness of the production parameters governing speech. This survey article attempts to provide an overview of proposals by several researchers for improving acoustic modeling in these regards. Such topics as the controversial Motor Theory of Speech Perception, work by Hogden explicitly using a continuity constraint in a pseudo-articulatory domain, the Kalman filter based Hidden Dynamic Model, and work by many groups showing the benefits of using articulatory features instead of phones as the underlying units of speech, will be covered.