Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Frequency-dependent changes in sensorimotor and pain affective systems induced by empathy for pain

Background Empathy for pain helps us to understand the pain of others indirectly. To better comprehend the processing of empathic pain, we report the frequency-dependent modulation of cortical oscillations induced by watching movies depicting pain using high-density electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and motor evoked potentials (MEP). Methods Event-related desynchronization of EEG and MEG was assessed while participants viewed videos of painful (needle) or neutral (cotton swab) situations. The amplitudes of MEPs were also compared between the needle and cotton swab conditions. Results The degree of suppression in α/β band power was significantly increased, whereas that of γ band power was significantly decreased, in the needle condition compared with the cotton swab condition. EEG revealed that significant differences in α/β band were distributed in the right frontocentral and left parietooccipital regions, whereas significant γ band differences were distributed predominantly over the right hemisphere, which were confirmed by source estimation using MEG. There was a significant positive correlation between the difference in γ power of the two conditions and the visual analog scale subjective rating of aversion, but not in the α/β band. The amplitude of MEPs decreased in the needle condition, which confirmed the inhibition of the primary motor cortex. Conclusion MEP suppression supports that modulation of cortical oscillations by viewing movies depicting pain involves sensorimotor processing. Our results suggest that α/β oscillations underlie the sensory qualities of others’ pain, whereas the γ band reflects the cognitive aspect. Therefore, α/β and γ band oscillations are differentially involved in empathic pain processing under the condition of motor cortical suppression.
Lung cancer risk and consumption of vegetables and fruit: an evaluation based on a systematic review of epidemiological evidence from Japan.

OBJECTIVE Clinical trials of β-carotene supplementation and recent large-scale prospective studies have called into question the protective effects of vegetable and fruit consumption against lung cancer. To re-assess this issue, we reviewed data from Japanese epidemiological studies. METHODS Original data were obtained from searches of MEDLINE and the Japana Centra Revuo Medicina (Ichushi) database. The associations were assessed based on their magnitude and the strength of the evidence, together with their biological plausibility as previously evaluated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. RESULTS We identified six cohort studies and four case-control studies on the consumption of vegetables and/or fruit. We focused on fruit and green-yellow vegetables as food items, as they were included in more of the studies, and insufficient data were available on other types of vegetables. Among the three cohort and two case-control studies that reported on green-yellow vegetables, only one of each study type showed a weak inverse association between lung cancer risk and their consumption. Two of the four cohort studies and one (or possibly two) of the four case-control studies demonstrated a weak inverse correlation between lung cancer risk and fruit consumption. Meta-analysis for fruit consumption revealed a summary relative risk that was significantly smaller than unity. CONCLUSIONS Our analysis of the Japanese epidemiological data showed that fruit consumption possibly decreased the risk of lung cancer, but found insufficient evidence of a link with vegetable consumption. Further prospective studies should assess the effects of consuming these food groups.
A Digital Test for Pelvic Muscle Strength in Women with Urinary Incontinence

This article reports further experience with a Version 2 digital test performed on 208 community-residing women, 25 to 87 years old. Test-retest (n = 208) and interrater reliability (n = 36) scores for pressure, displacement, and duration were r = . 54, . 51, and . 53 and r = . 67, . 73, and . 55, respectively. Interrater reliability percentage agreement figures were exact for 94% of the women on pressure and 67% on displacement. With duration permitted to vary by 1 second, agreement was 75%. Validity was tested using vaginal electromyography score with correlation coefficients ranging from . 37 to . 63. A weak but significant correlation was found between the digital score and the stand-up test pad gain (r = -.12). No significant relationship was found between the digital test and a history of being able to stop the urine stream or other leakage measures. To address limitations in Version 2, a third version of the digital scale is proposed.
Photon-Induced Spin-Orbit Coupling in Ultracold Atoms inside Optical Cavity

We consider an atom inside a ring cavity, where a plane-wave cavity field together with an external coherent laser beam induces a two-photon Raman transition between two hyperfine ground states of the atom. This cavity-assisted Raman transition induces effective coupling between atom's internal degrees of freedom and its center-of-mass motion. In~the meantime, atomic dynamics exerts a back-action to cavity photons. We investigate the properties of this system by adopting a mean-field and a full quantum approach, and show that the interplay between the atomic dynamics and the cavity field gives rise to intriguing nonlinear phenomena.
Do Behavioral Biases Adversely Affect the Macro-Economy?

This study investigates whether the adverse effects of investors' behavioral biases extend beyond the domain of financial markets to the broad macro-economy. We focus on the risk sharing (or income smoothing) role of financial markets and demonstrate that risk sharing levels are higher in U.S. states in which investors have higher cognitive abilities and exhibit weaker behavioral biases. Further, states with better risk sharing opportunities achieve higher levels of risk sharing if investors in those states exhibit greater financial sophistication. Among the various determinants of risk sharing, behavioral factors have the strongest effects. The average level of risk sharing in states with unsophisticated investors (= 0.121) is less than half of the average risk sharing level in states with financially sophisticated investors (= 0.308). Collectively, our evidence indicates that the high risk sharing potential of financial markets is not fully realized because the aggregate behavioral biases of individual investors impede state-level risk sharing.
The continuum of personalized cardiovascular medicine: a position paper of the European Society of Cardiology

There is strong need to develop the current stratified practice of CVD management into a better personalized cardiovascular medicine, within a broad framework of global patient care. Clinical information obtained from history and physical examination, functional and imaging studies, biochemical biomarkers, genetic/epigenetic data, and pathophysiological insights into disease-driving processes need to be integrated into a new taxonomy of CVDs to allow personalized disease management. This has the potential for major health benefits for the population suffering from cardiovascular diseases.
Recognizing Insufficiently Supported Arguments in Argumentative Essays

In this paper, we propose a new task for assessing the quality of natural language arguments. The premises of a well-reasoned argument should provide enough evidence for accepting or rejecting its claim. Although this criterion, known as sufficiency, is widely adopted in argumentation theory, there are no empirical studies on its applicability to real arguments. In this work, we show that human annotators substantially agree on the sufficiency criterion and introduce a novel annotated corpus. Furthermore, we experiment with feature-rich SVMs and Convolutional Neural Networks and achieve 84% accuracy for automatically identifying insufficiently supported arguments. The final corpus as well as the annotation guideline are freely available for encouraging future research on argument quality.
Which patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease benefit from the addition of an inhaled corticosteroid to their bronchodilator? A cluster analysis

Objective To identify subsets of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients who are more protected from exacerbations with the use of an inhaled corticosteroid/long-acting β2 agonist (ICS/LABA) combination, compared with the use of LABA monotherapy. Design Post hoc cluster analysis of patients from two randomised clinical trials of salmeterol/fluticasone propionate (SFC) and salmeterol (SAL) that had primary endpoints of moderate/severe exacerbation rates. Setting Centres in North America. Participants 1543 COPD patients were studied. Interventions SFC 50/250 µg or SAL 50 µg, twice daily. Primary and secondary outcome measures The analysis identified clusters of COPD patients more responsive to SFC versus SAL with respect to the annual rate of moderate/severe exacerbations and compared their baseline clinical characteristics. Results Overall, SFC significantly reduced the annual rate of moderate/severe exacerbations as compared with SAL alone (rate ratio (RR)=0.701, p<0.001). Three-patient clusters were identified: COPD patients receiving diuretics (RR=0.56, p<0.001); patients not receiving diuretics but with forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1) reversibility ≥12% (RR=0.67, p<0.001) exhibited a substantial reduction in the annual rate of moderate/severe exacerbations relative to SAL. A third cluster, consisting of patients not receiving diuretics and without FEV1 reversibility, demonstrated no difference for SFC versus SAL. Patients receiving diuretics had a significantly higher prevalence of comorbid cardiovascular disease. Conclusions COPD patients receiving diuretics and those not receiving diuretics but with FEV1 reversibility >12% at baseline were significantly more likely to experience a reduction in COPD-associated exacerbations with SFC versus SAL alone. Trial registration NCT00115492, NCT00144911
In-Depth Investigation of the Soybean Seed-Filling Proteome and Comparison with a Parallel Study of Rapeseed1[W][OA]

To better understand the metabolic processes of seed filling in soybean (Glycine max), two complementary proteomic approaches, two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DGE) and semicontinuous multidimensional protein identification technology (Sec-MudPIT) coupled with liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, were employed to analyze whole seed proteins at five developmental stages. 2-DGE and Sec-MudPIT analyses collectively identified 478 nonredundant proteins with only 70 proteins common to both datasets. 2-DGE data revealed that 38% of identified proteins were represented by multiple 2-DGE species. Identified proteins belonged to 13 (2-DGE) and 15 (Sec-MudPIT) functional classes. Proteins involved in metabolism, protein destination and storage, and energy were highly represented, collectively accounting for 61.1% (2-DGE) and 42.2% (Sec-MudPIT) of total identified proteins. Membrane proteins, based upon transmembrane predictions, were 3-fold more prominent in Sec-MudPIT than 2-DGE. Data were integrated into an existing soybean proteome database (www.oilseedproteomics.missouri.edu). The integrated quantitative soybean database was compared to a parallel study of rapeseed (Brassica napus) to further understand the regulation of intermediary metabolism in protein-rich versus oil-rich seeds. Comparative analyses revealed (1) up to 3-fold higher expression of fatty acid biosynthetic proteins during seed filling in rapeseed compared to soybean; and (2) approximately a 48% higher number of protein species and a net 80% higher protein abundance for carbon assimilatory and glycolytic pathways leading to fatty acid synthesis in rapeseed versus soybean. Increased expression of glycolytic and fatty acid biosynthetic proteins in rapeseed compared to soybean suggests that a possible mechanistic basis for higher oil in rapeseed involves the concerted commitment of hexoses to glycolysis and eventual de novo fatty acid synthesis pathways.
Net Increase? Cross-Lingual Linking in the Blogosphere

This research analyzes linguistic barriers and cross-lingual interaction through link analysis of more than 100,000 blogs discussing the 2010 Haitian earthquake in English, Spanish, and Japanese. In addition, cross-lingual hyperlinks are qualitatively coded. This study finds English-language blogs are significantly less likely to link cross-lingually than Spanish or Japanese blogs. However, bloggers' awareness of foreign language content increases over time. Personal blogs contain most cross-lingual links, and these links point to (primarily English-language) media. Finally, most cross-lingual links in the dataset signal a citation or reference relationship while a smaller number of cross-lingual links signal a translation. Although most bloggers link to other blogs in the same language, the dataset reveals a surprising level of human translation in the blogosphere. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A Conserved Cysteine Motif Is Critical for Rice Ceramide Kinase Activity and Function

Background Ceramide kinase (CERK) is a key regulator of cell survival in dicotyledonous plants and animals. Much less is known about the roles of CERK and ceramides in mediating cellular processes in monocot plants. Here, we report the characterization of a ceramide kinase, OsCERK, from rice (Oryza sativa spp. Japonica cv. Nipponbare) and investigate the effects of ceramides on rice cell viability. Principal Findings OsCERK can complement the Arabidopsis CERK mutant acd5. Recombinant OsCERK has ceramide kinase activity with Michaelis-Menten kinetics and optimal activity at 7.0 pH and 40°C. Mg2+ activates OsCERK in a concentration-dependent manner. Importantly, a CXXXCXXC motif, conserved in all ceramide kinases and important for the activity of the human enzyme, is critical for OsCERK enzyme activity and in planta function. In a rice protoplast system, inhibition of CERK leads to cell death and the ratio of added ceramide and ceramide-1-phosphate, CERK's substrate and product, respectively, influences cell survival. Ceramide-induced rice cell death has apoptotic features and is an active process that requires both de novo protein synthesis and phosphorylation, respectively. Finally, mitochondria membrane potential loss previously associated with ceramide-induced cell death in Arabidopsis was also found in rice, but it occurred with different timing. Conclusions OsCERK is a bona fide ceramide kinase with a functionally and evolutionarily conserved Cys-rich motif that plays an important role in modulating cell fate in plants. The vital function of the conserved motif in both human and rice CERKs suggests that the biochemical mechanism of CERKs is similar in animals and plants. Furthermore, ceramides induce cell death with similar features in monocot and dicot plants.
General stability conditions in wireless broadcast channels

Stability has become an important performance measure for wireless communication systems. In this paper general conditions for stability in broadcast channels are derived. It is shown that for any mean arrival rate inside the ergodic capacity region the system is stable when the applied scheduling policy complies with the conditions presented in the main results. In this case the policy is so-called throughput-optimal and the results in the paper provide a convenient way either to design or to verify the throughput-optimal policies. The applicability of the results is shown along with some examples.
Microbial Forensics: Predicting Phenotypic Characteristics and Environmental Conditions from Large-Scale Gene Expression Profiles

A tantalizing question in cellular physiology is whether the cellular state and environmental conditions can be inferred by the expression signature of an organism. To investigate this relationship, we created an extensive normalized gene expression compendium for the bacterium Escherichia coli that was further enriched with meta-information through an iterative learning procedure. We then constructed an ensemble method to predict environmental and cellular state, including strain, growth phase, medium, oxygen level, antibiotic and carbon source presence. Results show that gene expression is an excellent predictor of environmental structure, with multi-class ensemble models achieving balanced accuracy between 70.0% (±3.5%) to 98.3% (±2.3%) for the various characteristics. Interestingly, this performance can be significantly boosted when environmental and strain characteristics are simultaneously considered, as a composite classifier that captures the inter-dependencies of three characteristics (medium, phase and strain) achieved 10.6% (±1.0%) higher performance than any individual models. Contrary to expectations, only 59% of the top informative genes were also identified as differentially expressed under the respective conditions. Functional analysis of the respective genetic signatures implicates a wide spectrum of Gene Ontology terms and KEGG pathways with condition-specific information content, including iron transport, transferases, and enterobactin synthesis. Further experimental phenotypic-to-genotypic mapping that we conducted for knock-out mutants argues for the information content of top-ranked genes. This work demonstrates the degree at which genome-scale transcriptional information can be predictive of latent, heterogeneous and seemingly disparate phenotypic and environmental characteristics, with far-reaching applications.
A Single Divergent Exon Inhibits Ankyrin-B Association with the Plasma Membrane

Background: Ankyrin-B is intracellular, whereas ankyrin-G associates with plasma membranes. Results: An ankyrin-B-specific linker between the ANK repeat domain and the ZU52-UPA module inhibits ankyrin-B binding to membrane protein partners and localization to plasma membranes of epithelial cells and neurons. Conclusion: The linker region contributes to functional differences between ankyrins. Significance: This work explains the distinct behavior of ankyrins regarding plasma membrane localization. Vertebrate ankyrin-B and ankyrin-G exhibit divergent subcellular localization and function despite their high sequence and structural similarity and common origin from a single ancestral gene at the onset of chordate evolution. Previous studies of ankyrin family diversity have focused on the C-terminal regulatory domain. Here, we identify an ankyrin-B-specific linker peptide connecting the ankyrin repeat domain to the ZU52-UPA module that inhibits binding of ankyrin-B to membrane protein partners E-cadherin and neurofascin 186 and prevents association of ankyrin-B with epithelial lateral membranes as well as neuronal plasma membranes. The residues of the ankyrin-B linker required for autoinhibition are encoded by a small exon that is highly divergent between ankyrin family members but conserved in the ankyrin-B lineage. We show that the ankyrin-B linker suppresses activity of the ANK repeat domain through an intramolecular interaction, likely with a groove on the surface of the ANK repeat solenoid, thereby regulating the affinities between ankyrin-B and its binding partners. These results provide a simple evolutionary explanation for how ankyrin-B and ankyrin-G have acquired striking differences in their plasma membrane association while maintaining overall high levels of sequence similarity.
Degradation of gallic acid and hydrolysable polyphenols is constitutively activated in the freshwater plant-associated bacterium Matsuebacter sp. FB25

Hydrolysable polyphenols are present in Myriophyllum spicatum L. at high concentra- tions of up to 25% of dry matter and are also excreted. Bacteria associated with the submerged macrophyte M. spicatum isolated from the surrounding water column and epiphytic biofilm were tested for their ability to degrade polyphenols. Several bacterial isolates were capable of growing with tannic acid as the sole carbon and energy source, among them Matsuebacter sp. FB25, Agrobac- terium vitis EB26 and Pseudomonas sp. FB22. Cell suspensions of Matsuebacter sp. precultured on succinate were capable of degrading gallic acid, while those of A. vitis were not, indicating the con- stitutive presence of gallate-degrading enzymes in the former. When cells were precultured on gal- lic or tannic acid, cell suspensions of both strains exhibited an enhanced degradation rate of gallic acid. M. spicatum-derived hydrolysable polyphenols, which are comparable in structure to tannic acid, resulted in the same enhanced degradation rate of gallic acid or tellimagrandin II, the major M. spicatum polyphenol, by cell suspensions of Matsuebacter sp. FB25. The presence of polyphenol- degrading bacteria in the vicinity of M. spicatum explains the observed fast disappearance of tellima- grandin II and other hydrolysable polyphenols after excretion and has implications for allelochemical interference with competitors, herbivores and potential pathogenic microorganisms. The presence of Matsuebacter sp. and other polyphenol-degrading strains in such environments suggests a suffi- ciently strong effect of M. spicatum exudates to bring about selection in favour of highly specialised bacteria.
Properties of AlN x thin films prepared by DC reactive magnetron sputtering

In this paper, the results of investigation of the influence of cathode current on optical and dielectric AlN x thin-film properties are presented. AlN x films were prepared by pulsed DC reactive magnetron sputtering of Al target on substrates at room temperature. For characterization of fabricated test structures C-V spectroscopy, ellipsometry measurement and atomic force microscopy (AFM) were used.
NEOCORTICAL LAYER 4 AS A PLURIPOTENT FUNCTION

37 38 A highly effective kernel-based strategy used in Machine Learning is to transform the input 39 space into a new “feature” space where nonlinear problems become linear and more readily 40 solvable with efficient linear techniques. We propose that a similar “problem-linearization” 41 strategy is used by the neocortical input layer 4 to reduce the difficulty of learning nonlinear 42 relations between the afferent inputs to a cortical column and its to-be-learned upper-layer 43 outputs. The key to this strategy is the presence of broadly tuned feed-forward inhibition in layer 44 4: it turns local layer 4 domains into functional analogs of Radial Basis Function networks, 45 which are known for their universal function approximation capabilities. Using a computational 46 model of layer 4 with feed-forward inhibition and Hebbian afferent connections, self-organized 47 on natural images to closely match structural and functional properties of layer 4 of the cat 48 primary visual cortex, we show that such layer-4-like networks have a strong intrinsic tendency 49 to perform input transforms that automatically linearize a broad repertoire of potential nonlinear 50 functions over the afferent inputs. This capacity for pluripotent function linearization, which is 51 highly robust to variations in network parameters, suggests that layer 4 might contribute 52 importantly to sensory information processing as a pluripotent function linearizer: performing 53 such a transform of afferent inputs to a cortical column that makes possible for neurons in the 54 upper layers of the column to learn and perform their complex functions using primarily linear 55