Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of school-based prevention program in Turkey: Results of a 24-month study

Objective: In this paper, cavity experiences of children with different levels of eruption and cavity activities that are enrolled at an elementary school with semi-rural characteristics in Kırıkkale Provincial center were monitored for 2 years after a variety of protective applications. Materials and Methods: Three hundred and twenty-two children at the age of 7–11 were included in this study. Children were grouped as follows according to their cavity experiences and applications done: Group 1 - control group (with or without cavities) – was given hygiene training only; Group 2 - with medium level cavity activity (2–4 cavities in average) – oral hygiene training + surface restoration applied; Group 3 - children with 2–4 cavities on average – oral hygiene training + professional flour gel applied; Group 4 - children with 2–4 cavities in average – oral hygiene training + flour gel applied with brush; Group 5 - children with extreme cavity activity (children with 5 or more cavities) – oral hygiene training + surface restoration + professional flour gel combination applied. Results: At the end of the 2nd year, 277 children were reached. The increase of number of cavities in permanent teeth was determined as 35%, 0%, 1%, 0%, and 7% in groups 1–5, respectively. The difference between groups was found to be significant (Chi-square analysis, Pearson Chi-square = 27.002, P < 0.01). Conclusion: These findings have showed that, in Kırıkkale Provincial center, some cavity-preventive measures such as surface restoration and gel applications, along with hygiene training, could provide optimum protection for school-age children.
Memristor Emulator for Memristor Circuit Applications

A memristor emulator which imitates the behavior of a TiO2 memristor is presented. Our emulator is built from off-the-shelf solid state components. To develop real world memristor circuit applications, the emulator can be used for breadboard experiments in real time. Two or more memristor emulators can be connected in serial, in parallel, or in hybrid (serial and parallel combined) with identical or opposite polarities. With a simple change of connection, each memristor emulator can be switched between a decremental configuration or an incremental configuration. The hardware and spice simulation of the proposed emulator showed promising results that provides an alternative solution of hp TiO2 memristor model in real circuit.
Intramuscular versus intravenous therapy for prehospital status epilepticus.

BACKGROUND Early termination of prolonged seizures with intravenous administration of benzodiazepines improves outcomes. For faster and more reliable administration, paramedics increasingly use an intramuscular route. METHODS This double-blind, randomized, noninferiority trial compared the efficacy of intramuscular midazolam with that of intravenous lorazepam for children and adults in status epilepticus treated by paramedics. Subjects whose convulsions had persisted for more than 5 minutes and who were still convulsing after paramedics arrived were given the study medication by either intramuscular autoinjector or intravenous infusion. The primary outcome was absence of seizures at the time of arrival in the emergency department without the need for rescue therapy. Secondary outcomes included endotracheal intubation, recurrent seizures, and timing of treatment relative to the cessation of convulsive seizures. This trial tested the hypothesis that intramuscular midazolam was noninferior to intravenous lorazepam by a margin of 10 percentage points. RESULTS At the time of arrival in the emergency department, seizures were absent without rescue therapy in 329 of 448 subjects (73.4%) in the intramuscular-midazolam group and in 282 of 445 (63.4%) in the intravenous-lorazepam group (absolute difference, 10 percentage points; 95% confidence interval, 4.0 to 16.1; P<0.001 for both noninferiority and superiority). The two treatment groups were similar with respect to need for endotracheal intubation (14.1% of subjects with intramuscular midazolam and 14.4% with intravenous lorazepam) and recurrence of seizures (11.4% and 10.6%, respectively). Among subjects whose seizures ceased before arrival in the emergency department, the median times to active treatment were 1.2 minutes in the intramuscular-midazolam group and 4.8 minutes in the intravenous-lorazepam group, with corresponding median times from active treatment to cessation of convulsions of 3.3 minutes and 1.6 minutes. Adverse-event rates were similar in the two groups. CONCLUSIONS For subjects in status epilepticus, intramuscular midazolam is at least as safe and effective as intravenous lorazepam for prehospital seizure cessation. (Funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and others; ClinicalTrials.gov number, ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00809146.).
A novel, minimally-invasive technique of cartilage repair in the human knee using arthroscopic microfracture and injections of mesenchymal stem cells and hyaluronic acid--a prospective comparative study on safety and short-term efficacy.

INTRODUCTION Most current cell-based cartilage repair techniques require some form of scaffolds and 2 separate surgical procedures. We propose a novel, scaffold-less technique of cartilage repair in the human knee that combines arthroscopic microfracture and outpatient intra-articular injections of autologous bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and hyaluronic acid (HA). MATERIALS AND METHODS Seventy matched (age, sex, lesion size) knees with symptomatic cartilage defects underwent cartilage repair with the proposed technique (n = 35) or an open technique (n = 35) in which the MSCs were implanted beneath a sutured periosteal patch over the defect. Prospective evaluation of both groups were performed using the International Cartilage Repair Society (ICRS) Cartilage Injury Evaluation Package, which included questions from the Short-Form (SF-36) Health Survey, International Knee Documentation Committee (IKDC) subjective knee evaluation form, Lysholm knee scale, and Tegner activity level scale. Postoperative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) evaluation was also performed at 1 year for most patients. RESULTS There were no clinically significant adverse events reported through the course of our study. At the fi nal follow-up (mean = 24.5 months), there was significant improvement in mean IKDC, Lysholm, SF-36 physical component score and visual analogue pain scores in both treatment groups. CONCLUSION In the short term, the results of this novel technique are comparable to the open procedure with the added advantages of being minimally invasive and requiring only a single operation under general anaesthesia. Its safety has been validated and its efficacy is currently being evaluated in an ongoing randomised controlled trial.
Role of stress-activated OCT4A in the cell fate decisions of embryonal carcinoma cells treated with etoposide

Tumor cellular senescence induced by genotoxic treatments has recently been found to be paradoxically linked to the induction of “stemness. ” This observation is critical as it directly impinges upon the response of tumors to current chemo-radio-therapy treatment regimens. Previously, we showed that following etoposide (ETO) treatment embryonal carcinoma PA-1 cells undergo a p53-dependent upregulation of OCT4A and p21Cip1 (governing self-renewal and regulating cell cycle inhibition and senescence, respectively). Here we report further detail on the relationship between these and other critical cell-fate regulators. PA-1 cells treated with ETO display highly heterogeneous increases in OCT4A and p21Cip1 indicative of dis-adaptation catastrophe. Silencing OCT4A suppresses p21Cip1, changes cell cycle regulation and subsequently suppresses terminal senescence; p21Cip1-silencing did not affect OCT4A expression or cellular phenotype. SOX2 and NANOG expression did not change following ETO treatment suggesting a dissociation of OCT4A from its pluripotency function. Instead, ETO-induced OCT4A was concomitant with activation of AMPK, a key component of metabolic stress and autophagy regulation. p16ink4a, the inducer of terminal senescence, underwent autophagic sequestration in the cytoplasm of ETO-treated cells, allowing alternative cell fates. Accordingly, failure of autophagy was accompanied by an accumulation of p16ink4a, nuclear disintegration, and loss of cell recovery. Together, these findings imply that OCT4A induction following DNA damage in PA-1 cells, performs a cell stress, rather than self-renewal, function by moderating the expression of p21Cip1, which alongside AMPK helps to then regulate autophagy. Moreover, this data indicates that exhaustion of autophagy, through persistent DNA damage, is the cause of terminal cellular senescence.
Network A/B Testing: From Sampling to Estimation

A/B testing, also known as bucket testing, split testing, or controlled experiment, is a standard way to evaluate user engagement or satisfaction from a new service, feature, or product. It is widely used in online websites, including social network sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to make data-driven decisions. The goal of A/B testing is to estimate the treatment effect of a new change, which becomes intricate when users are interacting, i.e., the treatment effect of a user may spill over to other users via underlying social connections.When conducting these online controlled experiments, it is a common practice to make the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) that each individual's response is affected by their own treatment only. Though this assumption simplifies the estimation of treatment effect, it does not hold when network interference is present, and may even lead to wrong conclusion. In this paper, we study the problem of network A/B testing in real networks, which have substantially different characteristics from the simulated random networks studied in previous works. We first examine the existence of network effect in a recent online experiment conducted at LinkedIn; Secondly, we propose an efficient and effective estimator for Average Treatment Effect (ATE) considering the interference between users in real online experiments; Finally, we apply our method in both simulations and a real world online experiment. The simulation results show that our estimator achieves better performance with respect to both bias and variance reduction. The real world online experiment not only demonstrates that large-scale network A/B test is feasible but also further validates many of our observations in the simulation studies.
Cystatin F is a biomarker of prion pathogenesis in mice

Misfolding of the cellular prion protein (PrPC) into the scrapie prion protein (PrPSc) results in progressive, fatal, transmissible neurodegenerative conditions termed prion diseases. Experimental and epidemiological evidence point toward a protracted, clinically silent phase in prion diseases, yet there is no diagnostic test capable of identifying asymptomatic individuals incubating prions. In an effort to identify early biomarkers of prion diseases, we have compared global transcriptional profiles in brains from pre-symptomatic prion-infected mice and controls. We identified Cst7, which encodes cystatin F, as the most strongly upregulated transcript in this model. Early and robust upregulation of Cst7 mRNA levels and of its cognate protein was validated in additional mouse models of prion disease. Surprisingly, we found no significant increase in cystatin F levels in both cerebrospinal fluid or brain parenchyma of patients with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease compared to Alzheimer’s disease or non-demented controls. Our results validate cystatin F as a useful biomarker of early pathogenesis in experimental models of prion disease, and point to unexpected species-specific differences in the transcriptional responses to prion infections.
Author ' s personal copy Ectomycorrhizal mats alter forest soil biogeochemistry

Dense hyphal mats formed by ectomycorrhizal (EcM) fungi are prominent features in Douglas-fir forest ecosystems, and have been estimated to cover up to 40% of the soil surface in some forest stands. Two morphotypes of EcM mats have been previously described: rhizomorphic mats, which have thick hyphal rhizomorphs and are found primarily in the organic horizon, and hydrophobic mats, which occur in the mineral horizon and have an ashy appearance. This study surveyed EcMmat and non-mat soils from eight early and late seral conifer forest stands at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in western Oregon. EcM mats were classified by morphology and taxonomic identities were determined by DNA sequencing. A variety of chemical and biochemical properties, including enzymes involved in C, N, and P cycling were measured. Analysis was confined to a comparison of rhizomorphic mats colonizing the organic horizon with non-mat organic soils, and hydrophobic mats with non-mat mineral soils. Both the organic and mineral horizons showed differences betweenmat and non-mat enzyme profiles when compared on a dry weight basis. In the organic horizon, rhizomorphic mats had greater chitinase activity than non-mat soils; and in the mineral horizon, hydrophobic mats had increased chitinase, phosphatase, and phenoloxidase activity compared to the non-mat soil. The rhizomorphic mats had 2.7 times more oxalate than the nonmats and significantly lower pH. In the mineral horizon, hydrophobic mats had 40 times more oxalate and significantly lower pH than non-mat mineral soils. Microbial biomass C was not significantly different between the rhizomorphic mat and non-mat organic soils. In the mineral horizon, however, the hydrophobic mats had greater microbial biomass C than the non-mat soils. These data demonstrate that soils densely colonized by EcM fungi create a unique soil environment with distinct microbial activities when compared to non-mat forest soils. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The neural representation of facial expression

Faces provide information critical for effective social interactions. A face can be used to determine who someone is, where they are looking and how they are feeling. How these different aspects of a face are processed has proved a popular topic of research over the last 25 years. However, much of this research has focused on the perception of facial identity and as a result less is known about how facial expression is represented in the brain. For this reason, the primary aim of this thesis was to explore the neural representation of facial expression. First, this thesis investigated which regions of the brain are sensitive to expression and how these regions represent facial expression. Two regions of the brain, the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and the amygdala, were more sensitive to changes in facial expression than identity. There was, however, a dissociation between how these regions represented information about facial expression. The pSTS was sensitive to any change in facial expression, consistent with a continuous representation of expression. In comparison, the amygdala was only sensitive to changes in expression that resulted in a change in the emotion category. This reflects a more categorical response in which expressions are assigned into discrete categories of emotion. Next, the representation of expression was further explored by asking what information from a face is used in the perception of expression. Photographic negation was used to disrupt the surface-based facial cues (i.e. pattern of light and dark across the face) while preserving the shape-based information carried by the features of the face. This manipulation had a minimal effect on judgements of expression, highlighting the important role of the shape-based information in judgements of expression. Furthermore, combining the photo negation technique with fMRI demonstrated that the representation of faces in the pSTS was predominately based on feature shape information. Finally, the influence of facial identity on the neural representation of facial expression was measured. The pSTS, but not the amygdala, was most responsive to changes in facial expression when the identity of the face remained the same. It was found that this sensitivity to facial identity in the pSTS was a result of interactions with regions thought to be involved in the processing of facial identity. In this way identity information can be used to process expression in a socially meaningful way.
Statin therapy in patients with acute coronary syndrome: low-density lipoprotein cholesterol goal attainment and effect of statin potency

Background Elevated low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) is associated with an increased risk of coronary artery disease. Current guidelines recommend an LDL-C target of <70 mg/dL (<1.8 mmol/L) for acute coronary syndrome (ACS) patients, and the first-line treatment to lower lipids is statin therapy. Despite current guidelines and the efficacious lipid-lowering agents available, about half of patients at very high risk, including ACS patients, fail to achieve their LDL-C goal. This study assessed LDL-C goal attainment according to use of high and low potency statins in routine practice in Thailand. Methods A retrospective cohort study was performed by retrieving data from medical records and the electronic hospital database for a tertiary care hospital in Thailand between 2009 and 2011. Included were ACS patients treated with statins at baseline and with follow-up of LDL-C levels. Patients were divided into high or low potency statin users, and the proportion reaching the LDL-C goal of <70 mg/dL was determined. A Cox proportional hazard model was applied to determine the relationship between statin potency and LDL-C goal attainment. Propensity score adjustment was used to control for confounding by indication. Results Of 396 ACS patients (60% males, mean age 64.3±11.6 years), 229 (58%) were treated with high potency statins and 167 (42%) with low potency statins. A quarter reached their target LDL-C goal (25% for patients on high potency statins and 23% on low potency statins). High potency statins were not associated with increased LDL-C goal attainment (adjusted hazards ratio 1.22, 95% confidence interval 0.79–1.88; P=0.363). Conclusion There was no significant effect of high potency statins on LDL-C goal attainment. Moreover, this study showed low LDL-C goal attainment for patients on either low or high potency statins. The reasons for the low LDL-C goal attainment rate warrants further investigation.
Social Experiments in the Mesoscale: Humans Playing a Spatial Prisoner's Dilemma

Background The evolutionary origin of cooperation among unrelated individuals remains a key unsolved issue across several disciplines. Prominent among the several mechanisms proposed to explain how cooperation can emerge is the existence of a population structure that determines the interactions among individuals. Many models have explored analytically and by simulation the effects of such a structure, particularly in the framework of the Prisoner's Dilemma, but the results of these models largely depend on details such as the type of spatial structure or the evolutionary dynamics. Therefore, experimental work suitably designed to address this question is needed to probe these issues. Methods and Findings We have designed an experiment to test the emergence of cooperation when humans play Prisoner's Dilemma on a network whose size is comparable to that of simulations. We find that the cooperation level declines to an asymptotic state with low but nonzero cooperation. Regarding players' behavior, we observe that the population is heterogeneous, consisting of a high percentage of defectors, a smaller one of cooperators, and a large group that shares features of the conditional cooperators of public goods games. We propose an agent-based model based on the coexistence of these different strategies that is in good agreement with all the experimental observations. Conclusions In our large experimental setup, cooperation was not promoted by the existence of a lattice beyond a residual level (around 20%) typical of public goods experiments. Our findings also indicate that both heterogeneity and a “moody” conditional cooperation strategy, in which the probability of cooperating also depends on the player's previous action, are required to understand the outcome of the experiment. These results could impact the way game theory on graphs is used to model human interactions in structured groups.
RF absorption involving biological macromolecules

The fundamental intramolecular frequency of a globular protein can be obtained from the measurements of acoustic velocities of bulk protein matter. This lowest frequency for common size molecules is shown to be above several hundred GHz. All modes below this frequency would then be intermolecular modes or bulk modes of the molecule and surrounding matter or tissue. The lowest frequency modes of an extended DNA double helix are also shown to be bulk modes because of interaction with water. Only DNA modes, whose frequency is well above 4 GHz, can be intrahelical modes, that is, confined to the helix rather than in the helix plus surroundings. Near 4 GHz, they are heavily damped and, therefore, not able to resonantly absorb. Modes that absorb radio frequency (RF) below this frequency are bulk modes of the supporting matter. Bulk modes rapidly thermalize all absorbed energy. The implication of these findings for the possibility of athermal RF effects is considered. The applicability of these findings for other biological molecules is discussed. Bioelectromagnetics 25:441–451, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Cerebrovascular regulation in men and women: stimulus-specific role of cyclooxygenase

Greater cerebral artery vasodilation mediated by cyclooxygenase (COX) in female animals is unexplored in humans. We hypothesized that young, healthy women would exhibit greater basal cerebral blood flow (CBF) and greater vasodilation during hypoxia or hypercapnia compared to men, mediated by a larger contribution of COX. We measured middle cerebral artery velocity (MCAv, transcranial Doppler ultrasound) in 42 adults (24 women, 18 men; 24 ± 1 years) during two visits, in a double‐blind, placebo‐controlled design (COX inhibition, 100 mg oral indomethacin, Indo). Women were studied early in the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle (days 1–5). Two levels of isocapnic hypoxia (SPO2 = 90% and 80%) were induced for 5‐min each. Separately, hypercapnia was induced by increasing end‐tidal carbon dioxide (PETCO2) 10 mmHg above baseline. A positive change in MCAv (ΔMCAv) reflected vasodilation. Basal MCAv was greater in women compared to men (P < 0.01) across all conditions. Indo decreased baseline MCAv (P < 0.01) similarly between sexes. Hypoxia increased MCAv (P < 0.01), but ΔMCAv was not different between sexes. Indo did not alter hypoxic vasodilation in either sex. Hypercapnia increased MCAv (P < 0.01), but ΔMCAv was not different between sexes. Indo elicited a large decrease in hypercapnic vasodilation (P < 0.01) that was similar between sexes. During the early follicular phase, women exhibit greater basal CBF than men, but similar vasodilatory responses to hypoxia and hypercapnia. Moreover, COX is not obligatory for hypoxic vasodilation, but plays a vital and similar role in the regulation of basal CBF (~30%) and hypercapnic response (~55%) between sexes.