Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of Specimen Geometry and Strain Rate on Ductile-Brittle Transition Characterisation of Reactor Pressure Vessel Steels Using the Small Punch Technique

The small punch (SP) tensile test, originally developed for assessing the integrity of nuclear containments, has seen a renaissance in recent years with the introduction of a Code of Practice and a standardisation proposal. For nuclear applications, the extremely low volumes of material that are required allows specimens to be manufactured from quasi-destructive scoop samples, surveillance specimens or even previously tested Charpy specimens. The low volume of material also alleviates the health and safety requirements and the cost associated with testing active materials. By assessing the energy absorbed before fracture, it is possible to build an entire SP ductile-brittle transition curve using less material than is required for a single Charpy test.Small punch testing has been performed on SA 508-3 NESC-1 spinning cylinder material to establish ductile-brittle transition data, for comparison to that obtained by conventional Charpy impact test techniques. Multiple SP ductile-brittle transition curves have been constructed, building upon the framework of the existing Code of Practice. Novel geometries and associated machining techniques employed to incorporate notches into the surface of the SP specimen, and also the application of relatively high strain rates have been investigated. Post-test fractography illustrates the influence of both stress raising features and strain rate on small punch fracture behaviour.Copyright © 2015 by ASME
Acidic and uncharged polar residues in the consensus motifs of the yeast Ca2+ transporter Gdt1p are required for calcium transport

The UPF0016 family is a recently identified group of poorly characterized membrane proteins whose function is conserved through evolution and that are defined by the presence of 1 or 2 copies of the E‐φ‐G‐D‐[KR]‐[TS] consensus motif in their transmembrane domain. We showed that 2 members of this family, the human TMEM165 and the budding yeast Gdt1p, are functionally related and are likely to form a new group of Ca2+ transporters. Mutations in TMEM165 have been demonstrated to cause a new type of rare human genetic diseases denominated as Congenital Disorders of Glycosylation. Using site‐directed mutagenesis, we generated 17 mutations in the yeast Golgi‐localized Ca2+ transporter Gdt1p. Single alanine substitutions were targeted to the highly conserved consensus motifs, 4 acidic residues localized in the central cytosolic loop, and the arginine at position 71. The mutants were screened in a yeast strain devoid of both the endogenous Gdt1p exchanger and Pmr1p, the Ca2+‐ATPase of the Golgi apparatus. We show here that acidic and polar uncharged residues of the consensus motifs play a crucial role in calcium tolerance and calcium transport activity and are therefore likely to be architectural components of the cation binding site of Gdt1p. Importantly, we confirm the essential role of the E53 residue whose mutation in humans triggers congenital disorders of glycosylation.
Nursing Home Deficiency Citations for Abuse

Deficiency citations for resident abuse from U.S. nursing homes from 2000 to 2007 are examined. Deficiency citations are given to nursing homes that are in violation of Medicare/Medicaid regulations and four specific deficiency citations (representing, abuse; neglect by staff; criminal screening investigating and reporting; and, abuse prevention and policy development and implementation) were examined. The data came from the Online Survey, Certification, and Reporting (OSCAR) system data (N = 173,219) and the analyses used generalized estimating equations. Abuse deficiency citation rates were relatively stable (from 2000 to 2007), with approximately 20% of facilities per year receiving any one of these citations. For the factors of interest, few significant findings were identified for staffing levels; whereas, a high number of deficiency citations related to quality of care, high number of the most severe deficiency citations, high Medicaid reimbursement rates, and the Medicaid occupancy/reimbursement rate interaction were significantly associated with a greater likelihood of receiving a deficiency citation for abuse.
Prevention and control of schistosomiasis: a current perspective

Abstract Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease that ranks second only to malaria in terms of human suffering in the tropics and subtropics. Five species are known to infect man and there are currently over 240 million people infected worldwide. The cornerstone of control to date has been mass drug administration with 40 mg/kg of praziquantel but there are problems with this approach. Human and bovine vaccines are in various stages of development. Integrated control, targeting the life cycle, is the only approach that will lead to sustainability and future elimination.
Preliminary Validity of the Modified Cigarette Evaluation Questionnaire in Predicting the Reinforcing Effects of Cigarettes That Vary in Nicotine Content

Validity studies evaluating self-report measures in relation to behavioral preference of cigarettes varying in nicotine content are needed. The current study examined the relationship between ratings on the modified Cigarette Evaluation Questionnaire (mCEQ) and the relative reinforcing effects of Spectrum research cigarettes (15.8, 5.2, 2.4, 0.4 mg per gram of tobacco). Data for this secondary analysis were obtained from a double-blind study (Higgins et al., 2017) evaluating the subjective and reinforcing effects of Spectrum cigarettes under acute smoking abstinence. Current smokers (N = 26) were recruited from three vulnerable smoking populations (economically disadvantaged women of reproductive age, opioid-maintained individuals, individuals with affective disorders). In Phase 1 (five sessions), the mCEQ (Satisfaction, Psychological Reward, Enjoyment of Respiratory Tract Sensations, Craving Reduction, Aversion subscales) was administered following ad lib smoking of Spectrum cigarettes and subscale differences scores were calculated by subtracting ratings of the 15.8 mg/g cigarette from ratings of the reduced nicotine content cigarettes. In Phase 2 (six sessions), participants completed six 2-dose concurrent choice tests. The relationship between mCEQ subscale difference scores from Phase 1 and nicotine dose choice from Phase 2 was examined using mixed-model repeated-measures analyses of variance. Higher Satisfaction and lower Aversion subscale difference scores were associated with choosing the 15.8 mg/g cigarette more than the 5.2, 2.4, and 0.4 mg/g cigarettes. Scores on the other mCEQ subscales were not associated with nicotine choice. These results provide support for validity of the mCEQ Satisfaction and Aversion subscales predicting the relative reinforcing effects and abuse liability of varying nicotine content cigarettes.
Coding over Sets for DNA Storage

In this paper, we study error-correcting codes for the storage of data in synthetic deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). We investigate a storage model where data is represented by an unordered set of $M$ sequences, each of length L. Errors within that model are losses of whole sequences and point errors inside the sequences, such as substitutions, insertions and deletions. We propose code constructions which can correct these errors with efficient encoders and decoders. By deriving upper bounds on the cardinalities of these codes using sphere packing arguments, we show that many of our codes are close to optimal.
Evaluation of Brazilian Primary Health Care From the Perspective of the Users

The objective of this study was to examine the experience of primary care center (PCC) users in Brazil, classified according to the quality of its structure, in relation to the aspects of accessibility, continuity, and acceptability. The source of information was the National Program to Improve Access and Quality of Primary Care in 2013-2014. A total of 109 919 interviewees in 24 055 PCCs comprised the sample. Results show that the structure of a PCC was associated with better indicators of accessibility (oral health and medicines) and continuity of care (patient navigation in the health system). No association was found between indicators of accessibility and the PCC structure.
Molecular determinants of glucocorticoid receptor function and tissue sensitivity to glucocorticoids.

Glucocorticoids play an essential role in maintaining basal and stress-related homeostasis, and lack of glucocorticoid action is incompatible with life in primates. Most known effects of glucocorticoids are mediated by the intracellular GR. The magnitude of a cell's response to glucocorticoids depends both on the hormone level it is exposed to and on its glucocorticoid sensitivity, i.e. the efficiency of GR-mediated signal transduction. In this review, we have summarized the multiple endogenous and exogenous factors that have been shown to be involved in this signaling cascade and, thus, to alter glucocorticoid sensitivity.
A Preliminary Study on the Feasibility of Using a Virtual Reality Cognitive Training Application for Remote Detection of Mild Cognitive Impairment.

BACKGROUND It has been demonstrated that virtual reality (VR) applications can be used for the detection of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). OBJECTIVE The aim of this study is to provide a preliminary investigation on whether a VR cognitive training application can be used to detect MCI in persons using the application at home without the help of an examiner. METHODS Two groups, one of healthy older adults (n = 6) and one of MCI patients (n = 6) were recruited from Thessaloniki day centers for cognitive disorders and provided with a tablet PC with custom software enabling the self-administration of the Virtual Super Market (VSM) cognitive training exercise. The average performance (from 20 administrations of the exercise) of the two groups was compared and was also correlated with performance in established neuropsychological tests. RESULTS Average performance in terms of duration to complete the given exercise differed significantly between healthy(μ = 247.41 s/ sd = 89.006) and MCI (μ= 454.52 s/ sd = 177.604) groups, yielding a correct classification rate of 91.8% with a sensitivity and specificity of 94% and 89% respectively for MCI detection. Average performance also correlated significantly with performance in Functional Cognitive Assessment Scale (FUCAS), Test of Everyday Attention (TEA), and Rey Osterrieth Complex Figure test (ROCFT). DISCUSSION The VR application exhibited very high accuracy in detecting MCI while all participants were able to operate the tablet and application on their own. Diagnostic accuracy was improved compared to a previous study using data from only one administration of the exercise. The results of the present study suggest that remote MCI detection through VR applications can be feasible.
Use of Reticulocyte Hemoglobin Content in the Assessment of Iron Deficiency in Children With Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Background: Iron deficiency and anemia affect up to 50% to 75% of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Iron deficiency in IBD may be difficult to diagnose because of the effect of inflammation on iron status biomarkers. Thus, there is a need for better methods to accurately determine iron status in IBD. Objective: The aim of the study was to investigate the association of inflammation with hemoglobin content of reticulocytes (CHr) and the utility of CHr in comparison to standard iron biomarkers. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study of children with IBD. Iron biomarkers (CHr, ferritin, soluble transferrin receptor [sTfR], hepcidin, hemoglobin) were measured along with systemic biomarkers of inflammation (C-reactive protein, &agr;1-acid glycoprotein]. Spearman correlations were used to evaluate the relation of inflammation and iron biomarkers. The criterion standard for iron deficiency was defined as inflammation-corrected ferritin <15 &mgr;g/L or sTfR >8.3 mg/L. Receiver operating characteristic curves were used to estimate the prognostic values of all iron biomarkers to identify patients with iron deficiency. Results: We analyzed data in 62 children ages 5 to 18 years. Sixty-nine percent of our subjects had Crohn disease and 31% had ulcerative colitis, of which 42% were girls and 53% African American. The prevalence of anemia was 32%, of iron deficiency was 52% using ferritin <15 &mgr;g/L or sTfR >8.3 mg/L, 39% using red blood cell distribution width of >14.5%, 26% using body iron stores of <0 mg/kg body weight, 25% using CHr of <28 pg, and 11% using mean corpuscular volume of <75 fL/cell. The prevalence of elevated CRP or AGP was 48%. After correcting ferritin and sTfR levels for inflammation, the prevalence of iron deficiency was 68%. CHr was correlated with C-reactive protein (rs −0.44, P < 0.001) and &agr;1-acid glycoprotein (rs −0.37, P < 0.05). The optimal prognostic value for inflammation-adjusted CHr to predict iron deficiency was 34 pg (area under the receiver operating characteristic of 0.70), with 88% sensitivity and 30% specificity. Conclusions: Iron deficiency and anemia are common in this pediatric IBD cohort. All explored iron biomarkers, including CHr, were affected by inflammation and should be adjusted. A single iron biomarker is unlikely to best predict iron deficiency in pediatric IBD. Iron intervention studies are needed to examine the response of iron biomarkers to iron supplementation in the setting of inflammation.
The Still Bay and Howiesons Poort at Sibudu and Blombos: Understanding Middle Stone Age Technologies

The classification of archaeological assemblages in the Middle Stone Age of South Africa in terms of diversity and temporal continuity has significant implications with respect to recent cultural evolutionary models which propose either gradual accumulation or discontinuous, episodic processes for the emergence and diffusion of cultural traits. We present the results of a systematic technological and typological analysis of the Still Bay assemblages from Sibudu and Blombos. A similar approach is used in the analysis of the Howiesons Poort (HP) assemblages from Sibudu seen in comparison with broadly contemporaneous assemblages from Rose Cottage and Klasies River Cave 1A. Using our own and published data from other sites we report on the diversity between stone artifact assemblages and discuss to what extent they can be grouped into homogeneous lithic sets. The gradual evolution of debitage techniques within the Howiesons Poort sequence with a progressive abandonment of the HP technological style argues against the saltational model for its disappearance while the technological differences between the Sibudu and Blombos Still Bay artifacts considerably weaken an interpretation of similarities between the assemblages and their grouping into the same cultural unit. Limited sampling of a fragmented record may explain why simple models of cultural evolution do not seem to apply to a complex reality.
Towards performance isolation in multi-tenant SaaS applications

Multi-tenancy has shown promising results in achieving high operational cost efficiency by sharing hardware and software resources among multiple customer organisations, called tenants. In the context of cloud computing, this paradigm enables cloud providers to reduce operational costs by dividing resources and to simplify application management and maintenance. Maximum cost efficiency is achieved with application-level multi-tenancy. However, this high level of resource sharing complicates performance isolation between the different tenants, i.e. ensuring compliance with the SLAs of the different tenants and ensuring that the behaviour of one tenant cannot adversely affect the performance of the other tenants. This paper explores the challenges of performance isolation in the context of multi-tenant SaaS applications. In addition, we propose a middleware architecture to enforce performance isolation based on the tenant-specific SLAs, using a tenant-aware profiler and a scheduler. Our prototype reveals promising initial results.
OXA-244-Producing Escherichia coli Isolates, a Challenge for Clinical Microbiology Laboratories

ABSTRACT OXA-244 is a single-point-mutant derivative of OXA-48 displaying reduced carbapenemase activity. Here, we report the microbiological features of seven OXA-244-producing Escherichia coli isolates. Only one isolate grew on ChromID Carba Smart medium (bioMérieux), but six of the seven isolates grew on ChromID extended-spectrum-β-lactamase (ESBL) medium (bioMérieux), as they coproduced an ESBL and/or a plasmid-encoded cephalosporinase. The production of a carbapenemase was detected in 57.1%, 71.4%, 71.4%, and 100% of the E. coli isolates using the Carba NP test, the Rapidec Carba NP test (bioMérieux), a matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization–time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) hydrolysis assay (Bruker), and the OXA-48 K-SeT assay (Coris BioConcept), respectively. Our results indicate that OXA-244-producing E. coli isolates are difficult to detect, which may lead to their silent spread.
Back to Basics: Benchmarking Canonical Evolution Strategies for Playing Atari

Evolution Strategies (ES) have recently been demonstrated to be a viable alternative to reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms on a set of challenging deep learning problems, including Atari games and MuJoCo humanoid locomotion benchmarks. While the ES algorithms in that work belonged to the specialized class of natural evolution strategies (which resemble approximate gradient RL algorithms, such as REINFORCE), we demonstrate that even a very basic canonical ES algorithm can achieve the same or even better performance. This success of a basic ES algorithm suggests that the state-of-the-art can be advanced further by integrating the many advances made in the field of ES in the last decades.We also demonstrate that ES algorithms have very different performance characteristics than traditional RL algorithms: on some games, they learn to exploit the environment and perform much better while on others they can get stuck in suboptimal local minima. Combining their strengths and weaknesses with those of traditional RL algorithms is therefore likely to lead to new advances in the state-of-the-art for solving RL problems.
Robotic finger rehabilitation system for stroke patient using surface EMG armband

Several technological solutions have ben recently proposed for fingers rehabilitation in patients who were affected by a stroke, in particular for those who cannot generate the finger force but with preserved sEMG signals. In fact, a very promising approach uses a robot rehabilitation system controlled through sEMG signals. However, this system has two main problems: 1) the placement of electrodes is made manually and this could bring to a non-optimal detection of signals; 2) the cost of treatments is very high, mainly due to the usage of single-use, dispodsable electrodes. Our proposal is to use a robot rehabilitation system with a low-cost armband instead of standard electrodes. The armband has 8 sEMG sensors and a 9-DoF inertial sensor, it has electrically safe setup with low voltage battery and Bluetooth protocol. Moreover it is a very low cost and reusable equipment. The validity of the proposal was confirmed through experiments.
Spread spectrum compressed sensing MRI using chirp radio frequency pulses

Compressed sensing has shown great potential in reducing data acquisition time in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Recently, a spread spectrum compressed sensing MRI method modulates an image with a quadratic phase. It performs better than the conventional compressed sensing MRI with variable density sampling, since the coherence between the sensing and sparsity bases are reduced. However, spread spectrum in that method is implemented via a shim coil which limits its modulation intensity and is not convenient to operate. In this letter, we propose to apply chirp (linear frequency-swept) radio frequency pulses to easily control the spread spectrum. To accelerate the image reconstruction, an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm is modified by exploiting the complex orthogonality of the quadratic phase encoding. Reconstruction on the acquired data demonstrates that more image features are preserved using the proposed approach than those of conventional compressed sensing MRI.
Phase 1 dose‐escalation trial of clofarabine followed by escalating dose of fractionated cyclophosphamide in adults with relapsed or refractory acute leukaemias

The prognosis of patients with relapsed and refractory acute leukaemia (RRAL) is very poor. Forty patients with RRAL were enroled [28 acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), 12 acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL)] in this Phase 1 dose‐escalation trial of daily‐infused clofarabine (CLO) followed by cyclophosphamide (CY) for four consecutive days (CLO‐CYx4). The median age was 48·5 years. The median number of prior regimens was 2 (range 1–5), and 6/40 patients (15%) had prior allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplant. 28/40 patients (70%) had adverse genetic features. 6/40 patients (15%) died within 60 d of induction (two infections, four progressive disease). The average time to neutrophil recovery (absolute neutrophil count ≥0·5 × 109/l was 34 d, (range, 17–78). The overall response rate (ORR) was 33% (13/40), with seven complete remissions (18%), four complete remissions with incomplete recovery of blood counts (10%), and two partial remissions (5%). ORR was 25% (7/28), and 50% (6/12), for AML and ALL respectively. Notably, the clinical responses were independent of dose level. 7/17 patients (41%) exhibited CLO‐mediated enhancement of CY‐induced DNA, which was associated with, but not necessary for, improved clinical outcomes. In summary, the CLO‐CYx4 regimen was well tolerated and had activity in patients with RRAL, especially relapsed ALL. Therefore, CLO‐CYx4 can be considered a salvage therapy for adults with RRALs, and warrants further investigations.
Cell shortening and calcium dynamics in epicardial and endocardial myocytes from the left ventricle of Goto‐Kakizaki type 2 diabetic rats

What is the central question of this study? To investigate haemodynamic dysfunction in the type 2 diabetic Goto‐Kakizaki (GK) rat, we measured shortening and Ca2+ transport in ventricular myocytes from epicardial (EPI) and endocardial (ENDO) regions. What is the main finding and its importance? EPI and ENDO GK myocytes displayed similar hypertrophy. Time to peak (TPK) and time to half (THALF) relaxation were prolonged in EPI GK myocytes. TPK Ca2+ transient was prolonged and THALF decay of the Ca2+ transient was shortened in EPI GK myocytes. Amplitude of shortening, Ca2+ transient and sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ were unaltered in EPI and ENDO myocytes from Goto‐Kakizaki compared with control rats. We demostrated regional differences in shortening and Ca2+ transport in Goto‐Kakizaki rats.