Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
C. elegans DAF-16/FOXO interacts with TGF-ß/BMP signaling to induce germline tumor formation via mTORC1 activation

Activation of the FOXO transcription factor DAF-16 by reduced insulin/IGF signaling (IIS) is considered to be beneficial in C. elegans due to its ability to extend lifespan and to enhance stress resistance. In the germline, cell-autonomous DAF-16 activity prevents stem cell proliferation, thus acting tumor-suppressive. In contrast, hypodermal DAF-16 causes a tumorous germline phenotype characterized by hyperproliferation of the germline stem cells and rupture of the adjacent basement membrane. Here we show that cross-talk between DAF-16 and the transforming growth factor ß (TGFß)/bone morphogenic protein (BMP) signaling pathway causes germline hyperplasia and results in disruption of the basement membrane. In addition to activating MADM/NRBP/hpo-11 gene alone, DAF-16 also directly interacts with both R-SMAD proteins SMA-2 and SMA-3 in the nucleus to regulate the expression of mTORC1 pathway. Knocking-down of BMP genes or each of the four target genes in the hypodermis was sufficient to inhibit germline proliferation, indicating a cell-non-autonomously controlled regulation of stem cell proliferation by somatic tissues. We propose the existence of two antagonistic DAF-16/FOXO functions, a cell-proliferative somatic and an anti-proliferative germline activity. Whereas germline hyperplasia under reduced IIS is inhibited by DAF-16 cell-autonomously, activation of somatic DAF-16 in the presence of active IIS promotes germline proliferation and eventually induces tumor-like germline growth. In summary, our results suggest a novel pathway crosstalk of DAF-16 and TGF-ß/BMP that can modulate mTORC1 at the transcriptional level to cause stem-cell hyperproliferation. Such cell-type specific differences may help explaining why human FOXO activity is considered to be tumor-suppressive in most contexts, but may become oncogenic, e.g. in chronic and acute myeloid leukemia.
How to solve the Santa Claus problem

John Trono published a new exercise in concurrent programming—the Santa Claus problem—and provided a solution based on semaphores [12]. His solution is incorrect because it assumes that a process released from waiting on a semaphore will necessarily be scheduled for execution. We give a simple solution in Ada 95 using higher order synchronization primitives: protected objects and rendezvous. We then give solution in Java, though this solution is not as elegant as the Ada 95 solution because the Java synchronization primitives are rather limited. The problem demonstrates that semaphores, designed for low-level mutual exclusion, are not appropriate for solving difficult concurrent programming problems.
It takes two: the effect of child characteristics on U.S. parents’ motivations for allowing electronic media use

Abstract Extant research on parents’ choices for child media consumption focuses exclusively on parental beliefs and motives along with demographic variables. However, given parental choices are made within the context of the parent–child relationship, this study investigates how perceived child characteristics influence parents’ motives for allowing their children to consume screen media. One hundred and fifty-one parents of children between 6 months and 6 years of age were surveyed regarding their beliefs and motives for using screen media for their child as well as their perceptions of their child’s temperaments as energetic or detached. Results revealed a child’s energetic temperament predicted parental media use motives beyond that of parental media beliefs in ways consistent with expected relational management goals. These results extend the uses and gratifications perspective by supporting the idea that media choices made within a relational context are best understood by considering both members within the relational dynamic.
Geometry of the Borel -- de Siebenthal Discrete Series

Let G0 be a connected, simply connected real simple Lie group. Suppose that G0 has a compact Cartan subgroup T0, so it has discrete series representations. Relative to T0 there is a distinguished positive root system ∆ + for which there is a unique noncompact simple root ν, the “Borel – de Siebenthal system”. There is a lot of fascinating geometry associated to the corresponding “Borel – de Siebenthal discrete series” representations of G0. In this paper we explore some of those geometric aspects and we work out the K0–spectra of the Borel – de Siebenthal discrete series representations. This has already been carried out in detail for the case where the associated symmetric space G0/K0 is of hermitian type, i.e. where ν has coefficient 1 in the maximal root µ, so we assume that the group G0 is not of hermitian type, in other words that ν has coefficient 2 in µ. Several authors have studied the case where G0/K0 is a quaternionic symmetric space and the inducing holomorphic vector bundle is a line bundle. That is the case where µ is orthogonal to the compact simple roots and the inducing representation is 1–dimensional.
Initiation of Electrical Breakdown of Soil by Water Vaporization

The predictions of a simple model of water vaporization in soil are determined and compared with previously published data for the time for the initiation of streamers which leads to soil breakdown under pulsed high-voltage excitation. This model is capable of predicting the relatively long initiation times which have been observed under certain experimental conditions and also provides an explanation for the strong, experimentally determined, dependence of the initiation time on electric field.
Diurnal cortisol dysregulation, functional disability, and depression in women with ovarian cancer

Multiple alterations in circadian rhythms have been observed in cancer patients, including the diurnal rhythm of the adrenal hormone cortisol. Diurnal cortisol alterations have been associated with cancer‐related physiological processes as well as psychological stress. Here we investigate alterations in diurnal cortisol rhythm in ovarian cancer patients, and potential links with depression, life stress, and functional disability.
Comparison between bronchial response to inhaled hypoosmolar and isoosmolar solutions of sodium cromoglycate after exercise challenge.

The effectiveness of a sodium cromoglycate isoosmolar solution (288 mOsmol/L) versus hypoosmolar commercial solution (40 mOsmol/L) was studied in 14 asthmatic children with exercise-induced asthma. The mean FEV1 after exercise in patients pretreated with a sodium cromoglycate hypotonic solution compared with FEV1 at rest was -2% +/- 10%. The mean FEV1 after exercise in patients pretreated with an isotonic solution compared with FEV1 at rest was 3% +/- 6%. This statistically significant difference (P less than .01) proves that the effectiveness of sodium cromoglycate can be improved by raising the osmolarity to isotonic levels.
Why Do I Feel More Confident? Bandura's Sources Predict Preservice Teachers' Latent Changes in Teacher Self-Efficacy

Teacher self-efficacy (TSE) is associated with a multitude of positive outcomes for teachers and students. However, the development of TSE is an under-researched area. Bandura (1997) proposed four sources of self-efficacy: mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological and affective states. This study introduces a first instrument to assess the four sources for TSE in line with Bandura's conception. Gathering evidence of convergent validity, the contribution that each source made to the development of TSE during a practicum at a school was explored for two samples of German preservice teachers. The first sample (N = 359) were beginning preservice teachers who completed an observation practicum. The second sample (N = 395) were advanced preservice teachers who completed a teaching practicum. The source measure showed good reliability, construct validity, and convergent validity. Latent true change modeling was applied to explore how the sources predicted changes in TSE. Three different models were compared. As expected, results showed that TSE changes in both groups were significantly predicted by mastery experiences, with a stronger relationship in the advanced group. Further, the results indicated that mastery experiences were largely informed by the other three sources to varying degrees depending on the type of practicum. Implications for the practice of teacher education are discussed in light of the results.
Rethinking the Literary Merit of Graphic Novels

To say that graphic novels have attracted attention from educators is by now axiomatic. Professional journals, like this one, routinely feature articles that extol their virtue as a pedagogical tool. Books attest to the creative ways teachers are using them to scaffold students as readers and writers. Sessions devoted to graphic novels at the National Council of Teachers of English’s annual convention are invariably well attended and seem to proliferate in number from one year to the next. By all accounts, it would seem that educators have embraced a form of text whose older brother, the comic book, was scorned by teachers in the not-so-distant past. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. When Melanie Hundley, on behalf of the editors of The ALAN Review, invited me to contribute a column on graphic novels for an issue of the journal devoted to the influence of film, new media, digital technology, and the image on young adult literature, I was only too happy to oblige because it afforded me the opportunity to confront two assumptions that strike me as characterizing arguments for using graphic novels in schools: the first is that graphic novels are a means to an end, an assumption that usually results in overlooking their literary merit; the second assumes that students will embrace graphic novels enthusiastically, in spite of the stigmas attached to them. Literary Merit or Means to an End? : The Professional Debate
Neuroprotective Effects of Glial Cell Line-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Mediated by an Adeno-Associated Virus Vector in a Transgenic Animal Model of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a relentlessly progressive lethal disease that involves selective annihilation of motoneurons. Glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) is proposed to be a promising therapeutic agent for ALS and other motor neuron diseases. Because adeno-associated virus (AAV) has been developed as an attractive gene delivery system with proven safety, we explored the therapeutic efficacy of intramuscular delivery of the GDNF gene mediated by an AAV vector (AAV-GDNF) in the G93A mouse model of ALS. We show here that AAV-GDNF leads to substantial and long-lasting expression of transgenic GDNF in a large number of myofibers with its accumulation at the sites of neuromuscular junctions. Detection of GDNF labeled with FLAG in the anterior horn neurons, but not β-galactosidase expressed as a control, indicates that most of the transgenic GDNF observed there is retrogradely transported GDNF protein from the transduced muscles. This transgenic GDNF prevents motoneurons from their degeneration, preserves their axons innervating the muscle, and inhibits the treated-muscle atrophy. Furthermore, four-limb injection of AAV-GDNF postpones the disease onset, delays the progression of the motor dysfunction, and prolongs the life span in the treated ALS mice. Our finding thus indicates that AAV-mediated GDNF delivery to the muscle is a promising means of gene therapy for ALS.
Teaching Self-Care to Caregivers: Effects of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction on the Mental Health of Therapists in Training

Preparation for the role of therapist can occur on both professional and personal levels. Research has found that therapists are at risk for occupationally related psychological problems. It follows that self-care may be a useful complement to the professional training of future therapists. The present study examined the effects of one approach to self-care, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), for therapists in training. Using a prospective, cohort-controlled design, the study found participants in the MBSR program reported significant declines in stress, negative affect, rumination, state and trait anxiety, and significant increases in positive affect and self-compassion. Further, MBSR participation was associated with increases in mindfulness, and this enhancement was related to several of the beneficial effects of MBSR participation. Discussion highlights the potential for future research addressing the mental health needs of therapists and therapist trainees.
Factors influencing the development of evidence-based practice: a research tool.

AIM The paper reports a study to develop and test a tool for assessing a range of factors influencing the development of evidence-based practice among clinical nurses. BACKGROUND Achieving evidence-based practice is a goal in nursing frequently cited by the profession and in government health policy directives. Assessing factors influencing the achievement of this goal, however, is complex. Consideration needs to be given to a range of factors, including different types of evidence used to inform practice, barriers to achieving evidence-based practice, and the skills required by nurses to implement evidence-based care. METHODS Measurement scales currently available to investigate the use of evidence in nursing practice focus on nurses' sources of knowledge and on barriers to the use of research evidence. A new, wider ranging Developing Evidence-Based Practice questionnaire was developed and tested for its measurement properties in two studies. In study 1, a sample of 598 nurses working at two hospitals in one strategic health authority in northern England was surveyed. In study 2, a slightly expanded version of the questionnaire was employed in a survey of 689 community nurses in 12 primary care organizations in two strategic health authorities, one in northern England and the other in southern England. FINDINGS The measurement characteristics of the new questionnaire were shown to be acceptable. Ten significant, and readily interpretable, factors were seen to underlie nurses' relation to evidence-based practice. CONCLUSION Strategies to promote evidence-based practice need to take account of the differing needs of nurses and focus on a range of sources of evidence. The Developing Evidence-Based Practice questionnaire can assist in assessing the specific 'evidencing' tendencies of any given group of nurses.
Kiwi Forego Vision in the Guidance of Their Nocturnal Activities

BACKGROUND In vision, there is a trade-off between sensitivity and resolution, and any eye which maximises information gain at low light levels needs to be large. This imposes exacting constraints upon vision in nocturnal flying birds. Eyes are essentially heavy, fluid-filled chambers, and in flying birds their increased size is countered by selection for both reduced body mass and the distribution of mass towards the body core. Freed from these mass constraints, it would be predicted that in flightless birds nocturnality should favour the evolution of large eyes and reliance upon visual cues for the guidance of activity. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We show that in Kiwi (Apterygidae), flightlessness and nocturnality have, in fact, resulted in the opposite outcome. Kiwi show minimal reliance upon vision indicated by eye structure, visual field topography, and brain structures, and increased reliance upon tactile and olfactory information. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE This lack of reliance upon vision and increased reliance upon tactile and olfactory information in Kiwi is markedly similar to the situation in nocturnal mammals that exploit the forest floor. That Kiwi and mammals evolved to exploit these habitats quite independently provides evidence for convergent evolution in their sensory capacities that are tuned to a common set of perceptual challenges found in forest floor habitats at night and which cannot be met by the vertebrate visual system. We propose that the Kiwi visual system has undergone adaptive regressive evolution driven by the trade-off between the relatively low rate of gain of visual information that is possible at low light levels, and the metabolic costs of extracting that information.
PTMcode v2: a resource for functional associations of post-translational modifications within and between proteins

The post-translational regulation of proteins is mainly driven by two molecular events, their modification by several types of moieties and their interaction with other proteins. These two processes are interdependent and together are responsible for the function of the protein in a particular cell state. Several databases focus on the prediction and compilation of protein–protein interactions (PPIs) and no less on the collection and analysis of protein post-translational modifications (PTMs), however, there are no resources that concentrate on describing the regulatory role of PTMs in PPIs. We developed several methods based on residue co-evolution and proximity to predict the functional associations of pairs of PTMs that we apply to modifications in the same protein and between two interacting proteins. In order to make data available for understudied organisms, PTMcode v2 (http://ptmcode.embl.de) includes a new strategy to propagate PTMs from validated modified sites through orthologous proteins. The second release of PTMcode covers 19 eukaryotic species from which we collected more than 300 000 experimentally verified PTMs (>1 300 000 propagated) of 69 types extracting the post-translational regulation of >100 000 proteins and >100 000 interactions. In total, we report 8 million associations of PTMs regulating single proteins and over 9.4 million interplays tuning PPIs.
Education and electoral participation: reported versus actual voting behaviour

ABSTRACT Using survey data of voters in Tanzania, this article shows that while education does not affect self-reported voting in general elections, it increases actual voting. The less educated are more likely to claim to have voted without having done so, which may explain why previous studies of voting in developing countries fail to find an effect of education. We demonstrate the importance of this finding by using our survey data to generate predicted voting probabilities for the respondents to the 2012 Afrobarometer survey in Tanzania and show that while mean self-reported voting does not differ much at different levels of education, the differences become significant when taking into account voting misrepresentation.
Automated workload-aware elasticity of NoSQL clusters in the cloud

The use of cloud computing has gained extreme popularity. Through cloud platforms that provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS), users can elastically provision resources enabling automated application throttling. Usually, scaling is either manually performed or through a service that dynamically consolidates cloud resources based on a predefined policy. However, these policies are simplistic, threshold based and may not be able to capture specific application behaviors according to configuration parameters and applied workload type. In this work, we extend TIRAMOLA, a cloud-enabled framework that allows automated resizing of NoSQL clusters, in order to identify different workload types and apply the most beneficial scaling action according to user defined policies. We perform a thorough analysis of how different query types are handled by modern NoSQL systems and evaluate the performance of a NoSQL cluster of varying size, over mixed workload types and magnitudes. We utilize this knowledge to fine tune the extended TIRAMOLA's policies in order to take accurate scaling decisions. We perform an extensive experimental evaluation of workload aware and unaware versions on an HBase cluster and our analysis confirms that the former can operate successfully in any environment, behaving accordingly to any input load.
Characterization of binding and biological effects of monoclonal antibodies against a human tumor necrosis factor receptor

Three different antibodies against a human TNF receptor (htr-1, htr-5, and htr-9) have been examined for their binding pattern to U937 cells and ability to mimic TNF-alpha activity in U937 cells, Fs4 fibroblasts, and human endothelial cells. Flow cytometric analysis revealed that htr- 5 and htr-9 bound specifically to a TNF receptor on U937 cells that could be blocked by pretreatment with rTNF-alpha. Pretreatment of U937 cells with rTNF-beta blocked the binding of htr-9, but to a lesser extent htr-5 binding. Pretreatment with htr-5 inhibited the binding of htr-9 to U937 cells while pretreatment with htr-9 did not inhibit htr-5 binding. These results indicate that htr-5 and htr-9 recognize distinct but overlapping epitopes of a human TNF receptor on U937 cells and that htr-5 may be close to a TNF-alpha-specific domain of the binding site. Pretreatment with htr-5 or htr-9 only minimally reduced binding of BrTNF-alpha to U937 cells; however, these antibodies were much more effective in inhibiting BrTNF-alpha binding to HL-60 cells. Furthermore, it was found that htr-1 and htr-9, but not htr-5, had TNF- alpha activity on U937 cells, Fs4 fibroblasts, and endothelial cells and that the TNF-alpha activity induced by htr-9 was completely inhibited by htr-5. However, the cytotoxic activity of TNF-alpha was only partially inhibited by htr-5 on U937 cells while htr-5 had no effect on TNF-alpha activity on Fs4 cells. The data suggest that a common epitope is involved in inducing TNF-alpha activity in three different cell systems.
The interaction among donor characteristics, severity of liver disease, and the cost of liver transplantation

Accurate assessment of the impact of donor quality on liver transplant (LT) costs has been limited by the lack of a large, multicenter study of detailed clinical and economic data. A novel, retrospective database linking information from the University HealthSystem Consortium and the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network registry was analyzed using multivariate regression to determine the relationship between donor quality (assessed through the Donor Risk Index [DRI]), recipient illness severity, and total inpatient costs (transplant and all readmissions) for 1 year following LT. Cost data were available for 9059 LT recipients. Increasing MELD score, higher DRI, simultaneous liver–kidney transplant, female sex, and prior liver transplant were associated with increasing cost of LT (P < 0.05). MELD and DRI interact to synergistically increase the cost of LT (P < 0.05). Donors in the highest DRI quartile added close to $12,000 to the cost of transplantation and nearly $22,000 to posttransplant costs in comparison to the lowest risk donors. Among the individual components of the DRI, donation after cardiac death (increased costs by $20,769 versus brain dead donors) had the greatest impact on transplant costs. Overall, 1‐year costs were increased in older donors, minority donors, nationally shared organs, and those with cold ischemic times of 7‐13 hours (P < 0.05 for all). In conclusion, donor quality, as measured by the DRI, is an independent predictor of LT costs in the perioperative and postoperative periods. Centers in highly competitive regions that perform transplantation on higher MELD patients with high DRI livers may be particularly affected by the synergistic impact of these factors. Liver Transpl, 2011. © 2011 AASLD.