Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multicentre European study of thalamic stimulation in parkinsonian and essential tremor

OBJECTIVES Thalamic stimulation has been proposed to treat disabling tremor. The aims of this multicentre study were to evaluate the efficacy and the morbidity of thalamic stimulation in a large number of patients with parkinsonian or essential tremor. METHODS One hundred and eleven patients were included in the study and 110 were implanted either unilaterally or bilaterally. Patients were evaluated with clinical scales, before and up to 12 months after surgery. RESULTS Upper and lower limb tremor scores were reduced in both groups. Eighty five per cent of the electrodes satisfied the arbitrary criteria of two point reduction in rest tremor reduction in the parkinsonian tremor group and 89% for postural tremor reduction in the essential tremor group. In the parkinsonian tremor group, limb akinesia and limb rigidity scores were moderately but significantly reduced. Axial scores were unchanged. In the essential tremor group, head tremor was significantly reduced only at 3 months and voice tremor was non-significantly reduced. Activities of daily living were improved in both groups. Changes in medication were moderate. Adverse effects related to the surgery were mild and reversible. CONCLUSIONS Thalamic stimulation was shown to be an effective and relatively safe treatment for disabling tremor. This procedure initially applied in a very limited number of centres has been successfully used in 13 participating centres.
Interface mutation: assessing testing quality at interprocedural level

Software testing is one of the hardest and most expensive activities in software development. The need for test adequacy criteria is widely recognized. Several of them, together with software tools to support them, have been proposed. However, in most cases such criteria and tools aim at unit testing only. Other testing phases, like integration testing have few automated aids. Interface mutation is a new criterion for interprocedural test quality assessment based on mutations. This paper focuses on a testing tool named PROTEUM/IM that supports interface mutation for C programs.
THE FINE STRUCTURE OF THE DNP COMPONENT OF THE NUCLEUS

In the present investigation, the sites of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) synthesis and the fate of labeled deoxyribonucleoprotein (DNP) were studied in autoradiographs of ultrathin sections viewed with the electron microscope. Tritiated thymidine was employed as a label for DNA in the nuclei of proliferating cells of regenerating salamander limbs. In the autoradiographic method reported here, dilute NaOH was used to remove the gelatin of the emulsion after exposure and development. The exposed silver grains are not displaced by this treatment and the resolution of fine structure in the underlying section is greatly improved. Our observations suggest that the DNP component is a meshwork of interconnected filaments 50 to 75 A in diameter, which may be cross-linked to form what Frey-Wyssling would term a "reticular gel. " The filamentous DNP meshwork is dispersed throughout the interphase nucleus during DNA synthesis, whereas in chromosomes, which are relatively inert metabolically, the meshwork is denser and is aggregated into compact masses. Dense chromatin centers in interphase nuclei are similar in fine structure to chromosomes and are also inert with respect to DNA synthesis. In the Discussion, the structure of the filamentous meshwork in chromatin is compared with that in chromosomes, and speculations are made as to the functional significance of the variations in DNP fine structure observed.
How Large the Huddled Masses? The Causes and Consequences of Public Misperceptions about Immigrant Populations

The public is prone to overestimate the size of minority group populations. Does providing information about the actual size of populations affect attitudes towards those groups? We investigate innumeracy about immigrant populations. As in previous studies, we find that people tend to overestimate the size of the foreign-born population, and that these estimates are associated with an individual’s formal education and with the number of immigrants in the surrounding context. Then, in two different survey experiments, we test whether information about immigrants affects attitudes—either by correcting these overestimates or by priming the annual level of immigration. In both experiments, the information influenced attitudes very little. We conclude by noting the potential limits of “information effects” on mass attitudes.
Single-organ vasculitis

Purpose of reviewTo provide a critical analysis of a rare disorder, single-organ vasculitis, emphasizing those organs in which the excision of the vasculitic lesion can be curative. To recommend a rational approach to diagnosis, longitudinal follow-up and treatment. Recent findingsPatients with focal single-organ vasculitis affecting abdominal and genitourinary organs, breast and aorta have been reported as individual cases and small series. Single-organ vasculitis differs from systemic forms of vasculitis in disease expression and prognosis. Occasionally, what appears to be a localized process evolves into a systemic disease. Depending on the organ affected, some clinical, serological and histopathologic features may be helpful in predicting the extent of the vasculitic process. With the exception of severe ischemic or hemorrhagic complications affecting the abdominal organs and dissection or rupture of the aortic arch, the prognosis of focal single-organ vasculitis tends to be excellent. Resection of the inflammatory lesion may be curative. SummaryThe diagnosis of focal single-organ vasculitis is always presumptive and requires exclusion of systemic illness at the time of diagnosis as well as throughout the period of continued care. Clues from clinical symptoms, laboratory tests and histopathologic features at the time of diagnosis may assist in devising surveillance strategies.
Transcriptional regulation of the cardiac-specific MLC2 gene during Xenopus embryonic development

The mechanisms by which transcription factors, which are not themselves tissue restricted, establish cardiomyocyte-specific patterns of transcription in vivo are unknown. Nor do we understand how positional cues are integrated to provide regionally distinct domains of gene expression within the developing heart. We describe regulation of the Xenopus XMLC2 gene, which encodes a regulatory myosin light chain of the contractile apparatus in cardiac muscle. This gene is expressed from the onset of cardiac differentiation in the frog embryo and is expressed throughout all the myocardium, both before and after heart chamber formation. Using transgenesis in frog embryos, we have identified an 82 bp enhancer within the proximal promoter region of the gene that is necessary and sufficient for heart-specific expression of an XMLC2 transgene. This enhancer is composed of two GATA sites and a composite YY1/CArG-like site. We show that the low-affinity SRF site is essential for transgene expression and that cardiac-specific expression also requires the presence of at least one adjacent GATA site. The overlapping YY1 site within the enhancer appears to act primarily as a repressor of ectopic expression, although it may also have a positive role. Finally, we show that the frog MLC2 promoter drives pan myocardial expression of a transgene in mice, despite the more restricted patterns of expression of murine MLC2 genes. We speculate that a common regulatory mechanism may be responsible for pan-myocardial expression of XMLC2 in both the frog and mouse, modulation of which could have given rise to more restricted patterns of expression within the heart of higher vertebrates.
Factors Affecting the Choice of Adaptation Measures To Climate Change: The Case of Famers In the Sudano-Sahelian Area of Cameroon

There is widespread interest on the impacts of climate change on agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa, and on the most effective investments to assist farmers strengthen factors influencing their choice of adaptation measures. The purpose of this study is to analyse the determinants affecting Cameroonian farmers’ choice of adaptation measures to climate change using a multinomial logit model. Estimating the model across 303 farmers in 10 villages of the Sudano-Sahelian Area (SSA) of Cameroon, the analysis indicate that 71.4 percent of the investigated farmers have adapted to climate change, whereas 28.6 percent have not adapted to climate change. This analysis also shows that farmers prefer changing the varieties and the seed/harvest time in order to adapt to climate change. Experienceof the head of household, land tenure, farm household income, and extensional education are factors influencing choice of adaptation.
Promoter elements associated with RNA Pol II stalling in the Drosophila embryo

RNA Polymerase II (Pol II) is bound to the promoter regions of many or most developmental control genes before their activation during Drosophila embryogenesis. It has been suggested that Pol II stalling is used to produce dynamic and rapid responses of developmental patterning genes to transient cues such as extracellular signaling molecules. Here, we present a combined computational and experimental analysis of stalled promoters to determine how they come to bind Pol II in the early Drosophila embryo. At least one-fourth of the stalled promoters contain a shared sequence motif, the “pause button” (PB): KCGRWCG. The PB motif is sometimes located in the position of the DPE, and over one-fifth of the stalled promoters contain the following arrangement of core elements: GAGA, Inr, PB, and/or DPE. This arrangement was used to identify additional stalled promoters in the Drosophila genome, and permanganate footprint assays were used to confirm that the segmentation gene engrailed contains paused Pol II as seen for heat-shock genes. We discuss different models for Pol II binding and gene activation in the early embryo.
Modeling Temporal Interactions with Interval Temporal Bayesian Networks for Complex Activity Recognition

Complex activities typically consist of multiple primitive events happening in parallel or sequentially over a period of time. Understanding such activities requires recognizing not only each individual event but, more importantly, capturing their spatiotemporal dependencies over different time intervals. Most of the current graphical model-based approaches have several limitations. First, time--sliced graphical models such as hidden Markov models (HMMs) and dynamic Bayesian networks are typically based on points of time and they hence can only capture three temporal relations: precedes, follows, and equals. Second, HMMs are probabilistic finite-state machines that grow exponentially as the number of parallel events increases. Third, other approaches such as syntactic and description-based methods, while rich in modeling temporal relationships, do not have the expressive power to capture uncertainties. To address these issues, we introduce the interval temporal Bayesian network (ITBN), a novel graphical model that combines the Bayesian Network with the interval algebra to explicitly model the temporal dependencies over time intervals. Advanced machine learning methods are introduced to learn the ITBN model structure and parameters. Experimental results show that by reasoning with spatiotemporal dependencies, the proposed model leads to a significantly improved performance when modeling and recognizing complex activities involving both parallel and sequential events.
Processing capacity defined by relational complexity: implications for comparative, developmental, and cognitive psychology.

Working memory limits are best defined in terms of the complexity of the relations that can be processed in parallel. Complexity is defined as the number of related dimensions or sources of variation. A binary relation has one argument and one source of variation; its argument can be instantiated in only one way at a time. A binary relation has two arguments, two sources of variation, and two instantiations, and so on. Dimensionality is related to the number of chunks, because both attributes on dimensions and chunks are independent units of information of arbitrary size. Studies of working memory limits suggest that there is a soft limit corresponding to the parallel processing of one quaternary relation. More complex concepts are processed by "segmentation" or "conceptual chunking. " In segmentation, tasks are broken into components that do not exceed processing capacity and can be processed serially. In conceptual chunking, representations are "collapsed" to reduce their dimensionality and hence their processing load, but at the cost of making some relational information inaccessible. Neural net models of relational representations show that relations with more arguments have a higher computational cost that coincides with experimental findings on higher processing loads in humans. Relational complexity is related to processing load in reasoning and sentence comprehension and can distinguish between the capacities of higher species. The complexity of relations processed by children increases with age. Implications for neural net models and theories of cognition and cognitive development are discussed.
Increased Generation of HIV-1 gp120-Reactive CD8+ T Cells by a DNA Vaccine Construct Encoding the Chemokine CCL3

DNA vaccines based on subunits from pathogens have several advantages over other vaccine strategies. DNA vaccines can easily be modified, they show good safety profiles, are stable and inexpensive to produce, and the immune response can be focused to the antigen of interest. However, the immunogenicity of DNA vaccines which is generally quite low needs to be improved. Electroporation and co-delivery of genetically encoded immune adjuvants are two strategies aiming at increasing the efficacy of DNA vaccines. Here, we have examined whether targeting to antigen-presenting cells (APC) could increase the immune response to surface envelope glycoprotein (Env) gp120 from Human Immunodeficiency Virus type 1 (HIV-1). To target APC, we utilized a homodimeric vaccine format denoted vaccibody, which enables covalent fusion of gp120 to molecules that can target APC. Two molecules were tested for their efficiency as targeting units: the antibody-derived single chain Fragment variable (scFv) specific for the major histocompatilibility complex (MHC) class II I-E molecules, and the CC chemokine ligand 3 (CCL3). The vaccines were delivered as DNA into muscle of mice with or without electroporation. Targeting of gp120 to MHC class II molecules induced antibodies that neutralized HIV-1 and that persisted for more than a year after one single immunization with electroporation. Targeting by CCL3 significantly increased the number of HIV-1 gp120-reactive CD8+ T cells compared to non-targeted vaccines and gp120 delivered alone in the absence of electroporation. The data suggest that chemokines are promising molecular adjuvants because small amounts can attract immune cells and promote immune responses without advanced equipment such as electroporation.
Hippocampal volume is decreased in adults with hypothyroidism.

BACKGROUND Thyroid hormones are important for the adult brain, particularly regions of the hippocampus including the dentate gyrus and CA1 and CA3 regions. The hippocampus is a thyroid hormone receptor-rich region of the brain involved in learning and memory. Consequently, alterations in thyroid hormone levels have been reported to impair hippocampal-associated learning and memory, synaptic plasticity, and neurogenesis. While these effects have been shown primarily in developing rats, as well as in adult rats, little is known about the effects in adult humans. There are currently no data regarding structural changes in the hippocampus as a result of adult-onset hypothyroidism. We aimed to establish whether hippocampal volume was reduced in patients with untreated adult-onset hypothyroidism compared to age-matched healthy controls. METHODS High-resolution magnetization-prepared rapid acquisition with gradient echo (MPRAGE) scans were performed on 11 untreated hypothyroid adults and 9 age-matched control subjects. Hypothyroidism was diagnosed based on increased levels of thyrotropin (TSH) and reduced levels of free thyroxine (fT4). RESULTS Volumetric analysis of the right and left hippocampal regions, using functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain (FMRIB) integrated registration and segmentation tool (FIRST), demonstrated significant volume reduction in the right hippocampus in the hypothyroid patients relative to the control group. CONCLUSIONS These findings provide preliminary evidence that hypothyroidism results in structural deficits in the adult human brain. Decreases in volume in the right hippocampus were evident in patients with adult-onset overt hypothyroidism, supporting some of the findings in animal models.
Reproduction of Donax trunculus in the littoral of Huelva (southern Atlantic Spain): is there any difference with the Mediterranean population from the Andalusian coast?

The reproductive cycle of D. trunculus L. , 1758 was studied using histology and changes in flesh dry weight, in the littoral of Huelva (southern Atlantic Spain) from June 1990 to May 1991. The spawning period is essentially synchronic, and extends from February to August, with different individual intensity. Three peaks of spawning have been recorded, April, June and July. The resting period ranges from September to December, with the whole population in cytolized stage in October. The favourable environmental variables, such as high levels of chlorophyll a and relatively mild seawater temperatures allow this extensive reproductive period. This cycle shows a diphase of the spawning period with the Mediterranean population from Málaga, which should imply a different close season for each population.
One-year record of organic and elemental carbon in fine particles in downtown Beijing and Shanghai

Abstract. Weekly PM2.5 samples were collected for one year (1999-2000) in Beijing and Shanghai and the carbonaceous species analyzed to investigate and compare their time series patterns and possible sources in the two biggest cities of China. Weekly carbonaceous concentrations varied in wide ranges with 8.6-59µg m-3 for OC and 1.5-25. 4µg m-3 for EC in Beijing, and with 5.1-38. 4µg m-3 for OC and 2.3-13. 0µg m-3 for EC in Shanghai. Similar weekly and seasonal variations of OC and EC concentrations were found in each city though major combustion sources presented source-dependent emission characteristics and seasonal differences in emission amount for carbonaceous species. Both OC and EC maintained much higher concentrations in late fall through winter, probably due to enhanced emissions coupled with unfavorable meteorological conditions. In Beijing, the 14C analysis of limited samples suggested there was a significant contribution (33-48%) of modern carbon to the total fine carbonaceous PM burden with higher fractions in the harvest seasons. The high mass ratios of excessive potassium to EC in both Beijing and Shanghai also indicated that biomass burning had important contribution to fine carbonaceous particles.
Interleukin 10 (IL-10) inhibits human lymphocyte interferon gamma- production by suppressing natural killer cell stimulatory factor/IL-12 synthesis in accessory cells

Natural killer cell stimulatory factor or interleukin 12 (NKSF/IL-12) is a heterodimeric cytokine produced by monocytes/macrophages, B cells, and possibly other accessory cell types primarily in response to bacteria or bacterial products. NKSF/IL-12 mediates pleiomorphic biological activity on T and NK cells and, alone or in synergy with other inducers, is a powerful stimulator of interferon gamma (IFN- gamma) production. IL-10 is a potent inhibitor of monocyte-macrophage activation, that inhibits production of tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha), IL-1 and also IFN-gamma from lymphocytes acting at the level of accessory cells. Because TNF-alpha and IL-1 are not efficient inducers of IFN-gamma, the mechanism by which IL-10 inhibits IFN-gamma production is not clear. In this paper, we show that IL-10 is a potent inhibitor of NKSF/IL-12 production from human peripheral blood mononuclear cells activated with Staphylococcus aureus or lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Both the production of the free NKSF/IL-12 p40 chain and the biologically active p70 heterodimer are blocked by IL- 10. NKSF/IL-12 p40 chain mRNA accumulation is strongly induced by S. aureus or LPS and downregulated by IL-10, whereas the p35 mRNA is constitutively expressed and only minimally regulated by S. aureus, LPS, or IL-10. Although IL-10 is able to block the production of NKSF/IL-12, a powerful inducer of IFN-gamma both in vitro and in vivo, the mechanism of inhibition of IFN-gamma by IL-10 cannot be explained only on the basis of inhibition of NKSF/IL-12 because IL-10 can partially inhibit IFN-gamma production induced by NKSF/IL-12, and also, the IFN-gamma production in response to various stimuli in the presence of neutralizing antibodies to NKSF/IL-12. Our findings that antibodies against NKSF/IL-12, TNF-alpha, or IL-1 beta can significantly inhibit IFN-gamma production in response to various stimuli and that NKSF/IL-12 and IL-1 beta can overcome the IL-10-mediated inhibition of IFN-gamma, suggest that IL-10 inhibition of IFN-gamma production is primarily due to its blocking production from accessory cells of the IFN-gamma- inducer NKSF/IL-12, as well as the costimulating molecule IL-1 beta.
Evidence of Climate-Induced Range Contractions in Bull Trout Salvelinus confluentus in a Rocky Mountain Watershed, U.S.A

Many freshwater fish species are considered vulnerable to stream temperature warming associated with climate change because they are ectothermic, yet there are surprisingly few studies documenting changes in distributions. Streams and rivers in the U.S. Rocky Mountains have been warming for several decades. At the same time these systems have been experiencing an increase in the severity and frequency of wildfires, which often results in habitat changes including increased water temperatures. We resampled 74 sites across a Rocky Mountain watershed 17 to 20 years after initial samples to determine whether there were trends in bull trout occurrence associated with temperature, wildfire, or other habitat variables. We found that site abandonment probabilities (0.36) were significantly higher than colonization probabilities (0.13), which indicated a reduction in the number of occupied sites. Site abandonment probabilities were greater at low elevations with warm temperatures. Other covariates, such as the presence of wildfire, nonnative brook trout, proximity to areas with many adults, and various stream habitat descriptors, were not associated with changes in probability of occupancy. Higher abandonment probabilities at low elevation for bull trout provide initial evidence validating the predictions made by bioclimatic models that bull trout populations will retreat to higher, cooler thermal refuges as water temperatures increase. The geographic breadth of these declines across the region is unknown but the approach of revisiting historical sites using an occupancy framework provides a useful template for additional assessments.