Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Arp2/3 Inhibition Induces Amoeboid-Like Protrusions in MCF10A Epithelial Cells by Reduced Cytoskeletal-Membrane Coupling and Focal Adhesion Assembly

Here we demonstrate that Arp2/3 regulates a transition between mesenchymal and amoeboid protrusions in MCF10A epithelial cells. Using genetic and pharmacological means, we first show Arp2/3 inhibition impairs directed cell migration. Arp2/3 inhibition results in a dramatically impaired cell adhesion, causing deficient cell attachment and spreading to ECM as well as an 8-fold decrease in nascent adhesion assembly at the leading edge. While Arp2/3 does not play a significant role in myosin-dependent adhesion growth, mature focal adhesions undergo large scale movements against the ECM suggesting reduced coupling to the ECM. Cell edge protrusions occur at similar rates when Arp2/3 is inhibited but their morphology is dramatically altered. Persistent lamellipodia are abrogated and we observe a markedly increased incidence of blebbing and unstable pseuodopods. Micropipette-aspiration assays indicate that Arp2/3-inhibited cells have a weak coupling between the cell cortex and the plasma membrane, and suggest a potential mechanism for increased pseudopod and bleb formation. Pseudopods are not sensitive to reduced in formin or myosin II activity. Collectively, these results indicate that Arp2/3 is not necessary for rapid protrusion of the cell edge but plays a crucial role in assembling focal adhesions required for its stabilization.
Curcumin and turmeric delay streptozotocin-induced diabetic cataract in rats.

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of curcumin and its source, turmeric, on streptozotocin-induced diabetic cataract in rats. METHODS Wistar-NIN rats were selected and diabetes was induced by streptozotocin (35 mg/kg body weight, intraperitoneally) and divided into four groups (group II-V). The control (group I) rats received only vehicle. Group I and II animals received an unsupplemented AIN-93 diet, and those in groups III, IV, and V received 0.002% and 0.01% curcumin and 0.5% turmeric, respectively, in an AIN-93 diet for a period of 8 weeks. Cataract progression due to hyperglycemia was monitored by slit lamp biomicroscope and classified into four stages. At the end of 8 weeks, the animals were killed and the biochemical pathways involved in the pathogenesis of cataract such as oxidative stress, polyol pathway, alterations in protein content and crystallin profile in the lens were investigated, to understand the possible mechanism of action of curcumin and turmeric. Blood glucose and insulin levels were also determined. RESULTS Although, both curcumin and turmeric did not prevent streptozotocin-induced hyperglycemia, as assessed by blood glucose and insulin levels, slit lamp microscope observations indicated that these supplements delayed the progression and maturation of cataract. The present studies suggest that curcumin and turmeric treatment appear to have countered the hyperglycemia-induced oxidative stress, because there was a reversal of changes with respect to lipid peroxidation, reduced glutathione, protein carbonyl content and activities of antioxidant enzymes in a significant manner. Also, treatment with turmeric or curcumin appears to have minimized osmotic stress, as assessed by polyol pathway enzymes. Most important, aggregation and insolubilization of lens proteins due to hyperglycemia was prevented by turmeric and curcumin. Turmeric was more effective than its corresponding levels of curcumin. CONCLUSIONS The results indicate that turmeric and curcumin are effective against the development of diabetic cataract in rats. Further, these results imply that ingredients in the study's dietary sources, such as turmeric, may be explored for anticataractogenic agents that prevent or delay the development of cataract.
People’s perception on climate change and its effects on livelihood in Kitui County

This paper examines people’s perception on climate change and the effect of the changing climate on their livelihood in Kitui County. Kitui County is a semi-arid region which experiences long dry spells that make a large section of the land almost unutilized most of the year. Majority of the farmers practice small scale farming with a large percentage owning less than five acres of land. The size of the farm is one of the factors that determines the amount of food produced which subsequently affects their livelihood. Food production can be improved by increasing the land under crop cultivation which will eventually increase food production and availability. Normally, for subsistence agriculture, farm holding size plays a major role in determining a household’s food production and security. In this study, a total of 400 small scale farmers were interviewed on their perception of the changing climate with a view of gauging its effect on their livelihood. Structured questionnaires, oral interview, Focus Group Discussion (FGD) and direct observation were employed in data collection. The results indicate that the changing climate has led to higher temperatures and more frequent and longer droughts which have resulted in less food production which negatively affects their livelihood. In this study, many of the farmers owned small farms and relied on rainfall for their agricultural activities. The over reliance on rainfall made it difficult for the farmers to put their farms into productive use all year round especially during the dry season due to the unpredictability of the rainfall.
New Information on the Cranial Anatomy of Acrocanthosaurus atokensis and Its Implications for the Phylogeny of Allosauroidea (Dinosauria: Theropoda)

Background Allosauroidea has a contentious taxonomic and systematic history. Within this group of theropod dinosaurs, considerable debate has surrounded the phylogenetic position of the large-bodied allosauroid Acrocanthosaurus atokensis from the Lower Cretaceous Antlers Formation of North America. Several prior analyses recover Acrocanthosaurus atokensis as sister taxon to the smaller-bodied Allosaurus fragilis known from North America and Europe, and others nest Acrocanthosaurus atokensis within Carcharodontosauridae, a large-bodied group of allosauroids that attained a cosmopolitan distribution during the Early Cretaceous. Methodology/Principal Findings Re-evaluation of a well-preserved skull of Acrocanthosaurus atokensis (NCSM 14345) provides new information regarding the palatal complex and inner surfaces of the skull and mandible. Previously inaccessible internal views and articular surfaces of nearly every element of the skull are described. Twenty-four new morphological characters are identified as variable in Allosauroidea, combined with 153 previously published characters, and evaluated for eighteen terminal taxa. Systematic analysis of this dataset recovers a single most parsimonious topology placing Acrocanthosaurus atokensis as a member of Allosauroidea, in agreement with several recent analyses that nest the taxon well within Carcharodontosauridae. Conclusions/Significance A revised diagnosis of Acrocanthosaurus atokensis finds that the species is distinguished by four primary characters, including: presence of a knob on the lateral surangular shelf; enlarged posterior surangular foramen; supraoccipital protruding as a double-boss posterior to the nuchal crest; and pneumatic recess within the medial surface of the quadrate. Furthermore, the recovered phylogeny more closely agrees with the stratigraphic record than hypotheses that place Acrocanthosaurus atokensis as more closely related to Allosaurus fragilis. Fitch optimization of body size is also more consistent with the placement of Acrocanthosaurus atokensis within a clade of larger carcharodontosaurid taxa than with smaller-bodied taxa near the base of Allosauroidea. This placement of Acrocanthosaurus atokensis supports previous hypotheses of a global carcharodontosaurid radiation during the Early Cretaceous.
Health, welfare, and productivity of pigs housed under Specific-Stress-Free conditions in comparison with two-site systems.

This study describes the effects of housing pigs under optimal climatic conditions in a Specific-Stress-Free (SSF) housing system on health, behavior, immunological responsiveness, and production performance of 78 pigs from 10 litters. Pigs housed in an SSF system, where they were neither mixed nor transported, were compared with a control group of pigs for which transport was simulated and which were mixed at approximately 25 kg; transportation to another location and mixing are usual procedures in two-site systems. The SSF pigs had a higher growth rate for the finishing period (P < .01), but this was a smaller improvement in performance than in previous studies, probably due to less mixing in this study. Clinical signs were hardly seen in the SSF group, but aggression after mixing caused ear lesions in the control group. Pigs that were not mixed had a higher response 12 and 18 h after an intradermal injection of phytohemagglutinin (P < .001) compared to the control pigs. At 1 d ad 1 mo after mixing the control pigs, more agonistic interactions were seen in these pigs compared with the SSF pigs (P < .05 and P < .01, respectively). In conclusion, health, welfare, and production performance of pigs are improved when pigs are kept in an SSF housing system where they are not mixed or transported.
Mitochondrial Localized STAT3 Is Involved in NGF Induced Neurite Outgrowth

Background Signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) plays critical roles in neural development and is increasingly recognized as a major mediator of injury response in the nervous system. Cytokines and growth factors are known to phosphorylate STAT3 at tyrosine705 with or without the concomitant phosphorylation at serine727, resulting in the nuclear localization of STAT3 and subsequent transcriptional activation of genes. Recent evidence suggests that STAT3 may control cell function via alternative mechanisms independent of its transcriptional activity. Currently, the involvement of STAT3 mono-phosphorylated at residue serine727 (P-Ser-STAT3) in neurite outgrowth and the underlying mechanism is largely unknown. Principal Findings In this study, we investigated the role of nerve growth factor (NGF) induced P-Ser-STAT3 in mediating neurite outgrowth. NGF induced the phosphorylation of residue serine727 but not tyrosine705 of STAT3 in PC12 and primary cortical neuronal cells. In PC12 cells, serine but not tyrosine dominant negative mutant of STAT3 was found to impair NGF induced neurite outgrowth. Unexpectedly, NGF induced P-Ser-STAT3 was localized to the mitochondria but not in the nucleus. Mitochondrial STAT3 was further found to be intimately involved in NGF induced neurite outgrowth and the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Conclusion Taken together, the findings herein demonstrated a hitherto unrecognized novel transcription independent mechanism whereby the mitochondria localized P-Ser-STAT3 is involved in NGF induced neurite outgrowth.
Less Effort, More Outcomes: Optimising Debt Recovery with Decision Trees

This paper presents a real-world application of data mining techniques to optimise debt recovery in social security. The traditional method of contacting a customer for the purpose of putting in place a debt recovery schedule has been an out-bound phone call, and by and large, customers are chosen at random. This obsolete and inefficient method of selecting customers for debt recovery purposes has existed for years and in order to improve this process, decision trees were built to model debt recovery and predict the response of customers if contacted by phone. Test results on historical data show that, the built model is effective to rank customers in their likelihood of entering into a successful debt recovery repayment schedule. If contacting the top 20 per cent of customers in debt, instead of contacting all of them, approximately 50 per cent of repayments would be received.
Bayesian Inference for Dynamic Models with Dirichlet Process Mixtures

Using Kalman techniques, it is possible to perform optimal estimation in linear Gaussian state-space models. We address here the case where the noise probability density functions are of unknown functional form. A flexible Bayesian nonparametric noise model based on mixture of Dirichlet processes is introduced. Efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo and sequential Monte Carlo methods are then developed to perform optimal estimation in such contexts
Auditory Processing Deficits in Children With Friedreich Ataxia

Friedreich ataxia is a neurodegenerative disease with an average age of onset of 10 years. The authors sought to investigate the presence and functional consequences of auditory neuropathy in a group of affected children and to evaluate the ability of personal FM-listening systems to improve perception. Nineteen school-aged individuals with Friedreich ataxia and a cohort of matched control subjects underwent a battery of auditory function tests. Sound detection was relatively normal, but auditory temporal processing and speech understanding in noise were severely impaired, with children with Friedreich ataxia typically able to access less than 40% of the information available to controls. Use of FM-listening devices did, however, improve the speech perception performance of those with Friedreich ataxia to the level of their unaffected peers in conditions designed to replicate the listening environment of the average school classroom.
Outlier Detection Using Random Walks

The discovery of objects with exceptional behavior is an important challenge from a knowledge discovery standpoint and has attracted much attention recently. In this paper, we present a stochastic graph-based algorithm, called OutRank, for detecting outlying objects. In our method, a matrix is constructed using the similarity between objects and used as the adjacency matrix of the graph representation. The heart of this approach is the Markov model that is built upon this graph, which assigns an outlier score to each object. Using this framework, we show that our algorithm is more powerful than the existing outlier detection schemes and can effectively address the inherent problems of such schemes. Empirical studies conducted on both real and synthetic data sets show that significant improvements in detection rate and a lower false alarm rate are achieved using our proposed framework
Entry Liberalization and Inequality in Industrial Performance

Industrial delicensing, which began in 1985 in India marked a discrete break from a past of centrally planned industrial development. Similar liberalization episodes are taking place across the globe. We develop a simple Schumpeterian growth model to understand how firms respond to the entry threat imposed by liberalization. The model emphasizes that firm responses, even within the same industrial sector, are likely to be heterogeneous leading to an increase in within industry inequality. Technologically advanced firms and those located in regions with pro-business institutions are more likely to respond to the threat of entry by investing in new technologies and production processes. Empirical analysis using a panel of three-digit stateindustry data from India for the period 1980–1997 confirms that delicensing led to an increase in within industry inequality in industrial performance. (JEL: F14, 012, 031)
Effects of apolipoprotein E genotype on outcome after ischaemic stroke, intracerebral haemorrhage and subarachnoid haemorrhage

Background: Rodent models of acute ischaemic stroke and head injury suggest that apolipoprotein E (APOE) genotype influences neuronal repair, regeneration and survival after brain injury. Possession of an APOE ε4 allele is associated with poor outcome after head injury in clinical studies. APOE might therefore influence outcome after acute stroke in humans. Objective and methods: To comprehensively search, identify, assess and carry out meta-analyses of studies reporting on the association between APOE and the combined outcome of death or dependency, or death alone, several months after ischaemic stroke, intracerebral haemorrhage (ICH) or subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH). Results: Main analyses included data from nine studies on 2262 patients (1453 with ischaemic stroke, 199 with ICH and 610 with SAH). Overall, ε4+ genotypes were not significantly associated with risk of death or dependency several months after stroke. However, there was significant heterogeneity between studies, and between the three pathological types of stroke. ε4+ genotypes were associated with increased death or dependency after SAH (relative risk (RR) 1.40, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.06 to 1.84), with a trend towards a similar association with ICH (RR 1.38, 95% CI 0.99 to 1.92), but not with ischaemic stroke (RR 0.98, 95% CI 0.85 to 1.12). Results were similar for death alone. Conclusions: APOE may differentially affect outcome after the three main pathological types of stroke. Further, large studies are needed to confirm or refute these findings, and to assess the possibility of an interaction between the effects of APOE and age.
Do emotions matter in creative design?

A wealth of research has suggested that emotions play a significant role in creative problem solving, but less work has focused on investigating their roles in design. This is surprising given that creative problem solving lies at the heart of the design process. In an exploratory study we interviewed 9 expert designers about their emotions during the design process. We identified several relevant emotions and extended Wallas model of creative problem solving with emotional components for each of its stages. We also identified ways in which expert designers regulate their emotions and concluded with a discussion of the contributions of our work for design methods and tools, design thinking and design expertise.
Hippocampal neuron and glial cell numbers in Parkinson's disease—A stereological study

Hippocampal atrophy and neuron loss are early and reproducible findings in Alzheimer's disease, and recent magnetic resonance imaging studies indicate that hippocampal atrophy may also be present in Parkinson's disease (PD). To determine whether or not cell loss occurs in PD, we estimated the total neuron and glial cell numbers as well as the total volume unilaterally in the hippocampi of eight demented PD patients and eight control subjects. Cell numbers were estimated in the neuron‐containing layers of CA1, CA2‐(3), CA4, the dentate gyrus, and subiculum using the optical‐fractionator technique. The Cavalieri method was used to estimate the volume of the total hippocampus and its subregions. We did not find significant differences in cell numbers or volumes in PD brains when compared with control subjects. Our results thus indicate that hippocampal atrophy and cell loss are not necessarily involved in the memory impairment and dementia observed in PD. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Exploring information seeking behaviour in a digital museum context

This paper describes the preliminary results of a case study of task-based interactive information seeking and retrieval behaviour of virtual museum visitors in context. The research described here is part of a larger study: this paper specifically looks at 1) leisure tasks/interests and derived information needs, and 2) main characteristics of virtual museum visitors' information seeking behaviour. Both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered from written enquiries to the museum, an online questionnaire and a user study of simulated interest tasks combined with retrospective think-aloud sessions. The data collected did not show exploratory behaviour to be predominant as expected. Rather analysis of data indicates a broad coverage of different types of needs. Finally, four main characteristics of virtual museum guests' information seeking behaviour were identified
Implementing capon beamforming on a GPU for real-time cardiac ultrasound imaging

Capon beamforming is associated with a high computational complexity, which limits its use as a real-time method in many applications. In this paper, we present an implementation of the Capon beamformer that exhibits realtime performance when applied in a typical cardiac ultrasound imaging setting. To achieve this performance, we make use of the parallel processing power found in modern graphics processing units (GPUs), combined with beamspace processing to reduce the computational complexity as the number of array elements increases. For a three-dimensional beamspace, we show that processing rates supporting real-time cardiac ultrasound imaging are possible, meaning that images can be processed faster than the image acquisition rate for a wide range of parameters. Image quality is investigated in an in vivo cardiac data set. These results show that Capon beamforming is feasible for cardiac ultrasound imaging, providing images with improved lateral resolution both in element-space and beamspace.
A Size and Boundary Effects Model for Quasi-Brittle Fracture

The fracture behaviors of quasi-brittle materials are commonly specimen size (size effect) and crack size (boundary effect) dependent. In this study, a new failure model is developed for characterizing the size and boundary effects. The derivative of the energy release rate is firstly introduced to predict the nominal strength dominated by the strength mechanism. Combined with the energy criterion for the energy mechanism, an asymptotic model is developed to capture the effect of any crack size on the nominal strength, and its expression for geometrically similar specimens is also established, which is able to characterize the size effect. Detailed comparisons of the proposed model with the size effect law and the boundary effect model are performed, respectively. The nominal strength predictions based on the proposed model are validated with the experimental results of cracked three-point bending beam specimens made of concrete, of limestone and of hardened cement paste and compared with the model predictions given by the size effect law and the boundary effect model.
Morphometry of Corneal Epithelial Cells on Normal Eyes and After Anterior Lamellar Keratoplasty

Purpose: To analyze morphometry of corneal epithelial cells in normal eyes and after anterior lamellar keratoplasty (ALK) using confocal microscopy. Methods: This retrospective comparative case series included 29 eyes of patients who had undergone ALK (ALK group) and 29 subjects before refractive surgery with normal corneas (control group). The Heidelberg Retina Tomograph II with the Cornea Module was used. Images were recorded and analyzed with Image J software. Morphometric parameters used to analyze epithelial cells were cell area, coefficient of variation of cell area, perimeter, circularity, and Feret diameter. Results: Confocal microscopy was performed between 3 and 70 months after surgery. For basal epithelial cells, no significant differences between right eyes and left eyes were found in normal eyes for all morphometric parameters (P < 0.05 and rs > 0.40). The mean epithelial cell area increased during central and vertical migration (migration of epithelial cells from the basal stratum to the outermost layer) (P < 0.001). The mean basal cell area in the central zone was significantly higher (P < 0.001) after ALK in the ALK group than that in the control group. After ALK, the mean basal cell area decreased with postoperative time (rS = -0.78; P < 0.001) and returned to normal 24 months after transplantation (P = 0.27). Comparison of both groups showed significant differences in cell perimeter, circularity, and Feret diameter of basal cells and intermediate cells (P ≤ 0.001). Conclusion: Morphometric analysis of the corneal basal epithelium seems to be a relevant tool to assess the epithelial condition.