Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
dFatp regulates nutrient distribution and long-term physiology in Drosophila

Nutrient allocation and usage plays an important part in regulating the onset and progression of age‐related functional declines. Here, we describe a heterozygous mutation in Drosophila (dFatp) that alters nutrient distribution and multiple aspects of physiology. dFatp mutants have increased lifespan and stress resistance, altered feeding behavior and fat storage, and increased mobility. Concurrently, mutants experience impairment of cardiac function. We show that endurance exercise reverses increased lipid storage in the myocardium and the deleterious cardiac function conferred by dFatp mutation. These findings establish a novel conserved genetic target for regulating lifespan and physiology in aging animals. These findings also highlight the importance of varying exercise conditions in assessing aging functions of model organisms.
Differential evolution with self adaptive local search

The performance of a memetic algorithm (MA) largely depends on the synergy between its global and local search counterparts. The amount of global exploration and local exploitation to be carried out, for optimal performance, varies with problem type. Therefore, an algorithm should intelligently allocate its computational efforts between genetic search and local search. In this work we propose an adaptive local search method that adjusts the effort for local tuning of individuals, taking feedback from the search. We implemented an MA hybridizing this adaptive local search method with differential evolution algorithm. Experimenting with a standard benchmark suite it was found that the proposed MA can utilize its global and local search components adaptively. The proposed algorithm also exhibited very competitive performance with other existing algorithms.
Comparing Methods for Twitter Sentiment Analysis

This work extends the set of works which deal with the popular problem of sentiment analysis in Twitter. It investigates the most popular document ("tweet") representation methods which feed sentiment evaluation mechanisms. In particular, we study the bag-of-words, n-grams and n-gram graphs approaches and for each of them we evaluate the performance of a lexicon-based and 7 learning-based classification algorithms (namely SVM, Na\"ive Bayesian Networks, Logistic Regression, Multilayer Perceptrons, Best-First Trees, Functional Trees and C4.5) as well as their combinations, using a set of 4451 manually annotated tweets. The results demonstrate the superiority of learning-based methods and in particular of n-gram graphs approaches for predicting the sentiment of tweets. They also show that the combinatory approach has impressive effects on n-grams, raising the confidence up to 83.15% on the 5-Grams, using majority vote and a balanced dataset (equal number of positive, negative and neutral tweets for training). In the n-gram graph cases the improvement was small to none, reaching 94.52% on the 4-gram graphs, using Orthodromic distance and a threshold of 0.001.
The Modified Romberg Balance Test: Normative Data in U.S. Adults

Objective: To generate normative values for performance on the modified Romberg Test of Standing Balance on Firm and Compliant Support Surfaces stratified by age, sex, and race/ethnicity and to determine fall risk associated with different levels of performance. Study Design: National cross-sectional survey. Setting: Ambulatory examination centers. Patients: U.S. adults 40 years and older who participated in the 2001-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (n = 5,086). Interventions: Time to failure on the modified Romberg Test of Standing Balance on Firm and Compliant Support Surfaces. Main Outcome Measures: History of falling in the previous 12 months. Results: We observed that the time to failure decreased with increasing age across all sex and race/ethnicity categories. We found that once individuals went below a time to failure of 20 seconds, there was a significant greater than 3-fold increase in the odds of falling. In general, participants crossed the 20-second threshold at the age of 60 to 69 years. Conclusion: We established nationally representative normative values for performance on the modified Romberg test and noted differences in the rates of change across demographic groups. In addition, we demonstrated the fall risk associated with different levels of performance. These data will aid the clinician in interpreting and risk stratifying their patient's performance on this postural test.
Correction of chronic granulomatous disease after second unrelated‐donor umbilical cord blood transplantation

Allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is curative for chronic granulomatous disease (CGD), but many patients lack a suitably matched related donor. We report successful outcomes after mismatched, unrelated‐donor umbilical cord blood transplantation (uUCBT) in two boys with X‐linked CGD. Both patients experienced autologous recovery after first transplants, required second transplants to achieve durable donor engraftment, and are alive 27 and 15 months post‐transplant. Both had invasive fungal disease and received granulocyte transfusions. In conclusion, uUCBT is effective in children with CGD, but immunosuppression in the conditioning regimen may need to be increased to decrease the risk of graft rejection. Pediatr Blood Cancer © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Re-designing an OOP course based on BlueJ

In this paper we present our findings on teaching Object Oriented Programming (OOP) with BlueJ in the context of a one-semester programming course. Specifically, we present the evolution of the course, results from its evaluation and proposals for a more effective teaching of OOP. Our proposals focus on the way that the features of BlueJ, the accompanying textbook and the well-known guidelines for teaching object orientation with Java presented by the team of BlueJ should be used, in order to avoid some underlying pitfalls.
Information Sources as Explanatory Variables for the Belgian Health‐Related Risk Perception of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident

The media play an important role in risk communication, providing information about accidents, both nearby and far away. Each media source has its own presentation style, which could influence how the audience perceives the presented risk. This study investigates the explanatory power of 12 information sources (traditional media, new media, social media, and interpersonal communication) for the perceived risk posed by radiation released from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant on respondents’ own health and that of the population in general. The analysis controlled for attitude toward nuclear energy, gender, education, satisfaction with the media coverage, and duration of attention paid to the coverage. The study uses a large empirical data set from a public opinion survey, which is representative for the Belgian population with respect to six sociodemographic variables. Results show that three information sources are significant regressors of perceived health‐related risk of the nuclear accident: television, interpersonal communication, and the category of miscellaneous online sources. More favorable attitudes toward nuclear power, longer attention to the coverage, and higher satisfaction with the provided information lead to lower risk perception. Taken together, the results suggest that the media can indeed have a modest influence on how the audience perceives a risk.
Intermediate uveitis, posterior uveitis, and panuveitis in the Mid-Atlantic USA

Background The purpose of this study was to identify the causes, clinical features, and outcomes of intermediate uveitis, posterior uveitis, and panuveitis in patients managed in a mid-Atlantic tertiary care center. Methods This was a retrospective observational study of intermediate uveitis, posterior uveitis, and panuveitis patients seen at the University of Virginia from 1984 to 2014. Results One hundred and fifty-nine intermediate uveitis, posterior uveitis, and panuveitis patients (237 eyes) were identified. The patient population was 54.72% female; 67.30% of patients were Caucasian, and 22.01% were African–American. Mean age at diagnosis was 45.5 years. Mean duration of follow-up was 3.95 years. Mean number of visits to the clinic was 10.35. Of 491 uveitis patients, 26 (5.30%) had intermediate uveitis, 62 (12.60%) had posterior uveitis, and 71 (14.50%) had panuveitis. The leading diagnoses in the intermediate uveitis group were pars planitis (73.08%) and sarcoidosis (11.54%); toxoplasma uveitis (17.74%), multifocal choroiditis (14.52%), undifferentiated posterior uveitis (14.52%), and birdshot chorioretinitis (11.29%) in the posterior uveitis group; and undifferentiated panuveitis (29.58%), post-surgical panuveitis (18.31%), sarcoidosis (12.68%), acute retinal necrosis (12.68%), and toxoplasma uveitis (4.23%) in the panuveitis group. The most common treatment modalities included local steroids (57.23%) and systemic steroids (42.14%). Ocular hypertension was found in 38 patients (23.90%). Glaucoma surgery was performed in 18.24% of patients and cataract surgery in 21.38%. Mean best-corrected visual acuity was 0.66 logMAR at baseline across all anatomical locations and 0.57 logMAR at final follow-up. Best-corrected visual acuity improved or remained stable during follow-up in all groups. Conclusion The most common diagnoses in our series by anatomical location were pars planitis (intermediate uveitis), toxoplasmosis (posterior uveitis), and undifferentiated uveitis (panuveitis). Panuveitis had significantly worse visual outcomes and higher rates of complications than did intermediate or posterior uveitis, a finding that confirms earlier reports. In this series, unilateral disease, regardless of anatomical location, was associated with poorer visual outcome, in contrast with the findings of other reports.
Ion-current-based Proteomic Profiling of the Retina in a Rat Model of Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome*

Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome (SLOS) is one of the most common recessive human disorders and is characterized by multiple congenital malformations as well as neurosensory and cognitive abnormalities. A rat model of SLOS has been developed that exhibits progressive retinal degeneration and visual dysfunction; however, the molecular events underlying the degeneration and dysfunction remain poorly understood. Here, we employed a well-controlled, ion-current-based approach to compare retinas from the SLOS rat model to retinas from age- and sex-matched control rats (n = 5/group). Retinas were subjected to detergent extraction and subsequent precipitation and on-pellet-digestion procedures and then were analyzed on a long, heated column (75 cm, with small particles) with a 7-h gradient. The high analytical reproducibility of the overall proteomics procedure enabled reliable expression profiling. In total, 1,259 unique protein groups, ∼40% of which were membrane proteins, were quantified under highly stringent criteria, including a peptide false discovery rate of 0.4%, with high quality ion-current data (e.g. signal-to-noise ratio ≥ 10) obtained independently from at least two unique peptides for each protein. The ion-current-based strategy showed greater quantitative accuracy and reproducibility over a parallel spectral counting analysis. Statistically significant alterations of 101 proteins were observed; these proteins are implicated in a variety of biological processes, including lipid metabolism, oxidative stress, cell death, proteolysis, visual transduction, and vesicular/membrane transport, consistent with the features of the associated retinal degeneration in the SLOS model. Selected targets were further validated by Western blot analysis and correlative immunohistochemistry. Importantly, although photoreceptor cell death was validated by TUNEL analysis, Western blot and immunohistochemical analyses suggested a caspase-3-independent pathway. In total, these results provide compelling new evidence implicating molecular changes beyond the initial defect in cholesterol biosynthesis in this retinal degeneration model, and they might have broader implications with respect to the pathobiological mechanism underlying SLOS.
Combination of auditory attention features with phone posteriors for better automatic phoneme segmentation

Segmentation of speech into phonemes is beneﬁcial for many spoken language processing applications. Previously, a novel method which employs auditory attention features for detecting phoneme boundaries from acoustic signal was proposed in [1] outperforming [2, 3]. In this paper, we propose to use phone posterior features, which are obtained from a Deep Belief Network (DBN) based phoneme recognition system, along with attention features since they provide complementary information. When evaluated on TIMIT corpus, the proposed method is shown to successfully predict phoneme boundaries and out-perform the recently published text-independent phoneme segmentation methods. Also, the combination of attention features with posterior features yield more than 30% relative improvement in F-measure over the system which used only attention features.
Dynamic Anisotropic Viscoelastic Properties of the Aorta in Living Dogs

The purpose of this paper is to describe the incremental dynamic anisotropic viscoelastic properties of the middle descending thoracic aorta in ten living dogs. A segment of the middle descending thoracic aorta was isolated in situ and connected to a reservoir filled with oxygenated blood. The height of the reservoir could be adjusted to impress a known pressure on the segment. In addition, a sinusoidal fluid displacement pump was connected to this assembly to superimpose small sinusoidal pressures at various frequencies (0–5 Hz); in another phase of the experiment small sinusoidal changes in length were also imposed on the segment. The pressure, the longitudinal force, and the length of the segment were monitored continuously with specially designed transducers. From these data, the incremental elastic (E′) and the viscous (E″) moduli in the circumferential (&thetas;), longitudinal (z), and radial (γ) directions were calculated around a given state of strain in the physiological range. In general, the viscoelastic moduli were functions of the initial stretches, indicating the nonlinear nature of the arterial wall. Within the physiological range of pressure, Ez′ > E&thetas;′ > Eγ′ (P < 0.01) and Ez″ > Eγ″ > E&thetas;″ (P < 0.01). These results indicated that the vessel wall was anisotropic, having its largest values of elastic and viscous moduli in the longitudinal direction. The ratio of E′ /E′ < 0.123 at 2 Hz, indicating a small viscous component relative to its elastic counterpart. The elastic moduli increased markedly from 0–2 Hz and then settled down to a relatively constant value; this finding was consistent with previously published data. The values of Ez′ and Ez″ from the in vivo experiments were higher than those from the in vitro experiments, and the difference was attributed to the vascular tethering present in the in vivo state.
Intact visual imagery and impaired visual perception in a patient with visual agnosia.

Although it is now well accepted that visual mental imagery and visual perception share common underlying mechanisms, there are several reports in which they are dissociated. Evidence for the separability of these processes is provided by a patient, C.K. , who has a profound visual object recognition deficit attributable to an impairment in grouping or segmenting visual images. Despite this perceptual deficit, C.K. was able to draw objects in considerable detail from memory, and his knowledge of the visual appearance of objects was preserved on a variety of mental imagery tasks. Together with previous cases, these findings confirm the double dissociation between object recognition and perception. Interestingly, C.K. could also recognize newly constructed objects in his internal imagery. To accommodate these results, we propose a model in which imagery and perception are strongly associated but are also functionally specialized.
Assessment of Ammonia Adsorption onto Teflon and LDPE Tubing Used in Pollutant Stream Conveyance

The adsorption of ammonia onto polymer tubing used in pollutant stream conveyance was assessed for possible systematic losses. An experimental design with three replications of 32 trials was completed to investigate the adsorption of ammonia based on two nominal temperatures (25 and 37 oC), two nominal tubing lengths (15 and 46 meters), six nominal inlet concentrations (2, 5, 10, 15, 25, and 35 parts per million), and two tubing materials, (Teflon and low density polyethylene,LDPE). For a given length, mean ammonia adsorption on Teflon tubing was found to be statistically less than that from LDPE. The effect of tubing length on ammonia adsorption was not significant for Teflon, but was significant for LDPE. There were significant differences between inlet and outlet concentrations of LDPE at nominal inlet concentrations of 5 and 15 ppm (α=0.05). Overall, ammonia adsorption to Teflon was approximately 1 ppm regardless of the magnitude of inlet concentration. This loss on to the Teflon surface was well within the measurement sensitivity of the ammonia analyzer. Ammonia adsorption onto LDPE tubing increased with increasing inlet concentration, temperature and length of the tubing.
The role of fibrinolysis in the era of primary percutaneous coronary intervention

Most cases of acute myocardial infarction are caused by disruption of an atherosclerotic plaque followed by coronary thrombosis (1). In ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), the thrombus occludes a major epicardial coronary artery. Such an occlusion is an emergency situation, and flow in the occluded vessel should be restored as fast as possible. Various strategies for reperfusion are available, namely pharmacological reperfusion by fibrinolytic therapy or mechanical reperfusion by primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Primary PCI has been established as the preferred reperfusion strategy today (2). The percentage of STEMI-patients treated with primary PCI is steadily increasing, and in most European countries, primary PCI is the leading reperfusion strategy (3). In this era of primary PCI, one might wonder whether fibrinolytic therapy should remain a part of the therapeutic armamentarium of acute STEMI. In this overview, we will briefly present the evidence for the benefit of fibrinolytic therapy in STEMI and discuss the role of fibrinolysis in this era of primary PCI. Benefit of fibrinolytic therapy
Rectal Cancer - Staging and Surgical Approach

Worldwide, colorectal cancer is a major health problem. More than 1 million patients are diagnosed annually. It is the 3rd most common cancer type and about half a million people die of the disease each year. Incidence is higher in more developed than less developed regions suggesting that lifestyle, dietary habits and environmental exposures, beyond genetic background, are responsible for the disease in the industrialized world. In recent years significant knowledge has been acquired and applied in everyday clinical practice as far as rectal cancer is concerned. The treatment of rectal cancer has changed over the last two decades as far as surgical techniques, chemotherapy and radiotherapy are concerned. Effective surgery and modern radiotherapy combined with cytotoxic chemotherapy have improved survival rates (Nicholls & Tekkis, 2008; Carlsen et al., 1998).
Effects of Group Drumming Interventions on Anxiety, Depression, Social Resilience and Inflammatory Immune Response among Mental Health Service Users

Growing numbers of mental health organizations are developing community music-making interventions for service users; however, to date there has been little research into their efficacy or mechanisms of effect. This study was an exploratory examination of whether 10 weeks of group drumming could improve depression, anxiety and social resilience among service users compared with a non-music control group (with participants allocated to group by geographical location.) Significant improvements were found in the drumming group but not the control group: by week 6 there were decreases in depression (-2.14 SE 0.50 CI -3.16 to -1.11) and increases in social resilience (7.69 SE 2.00 CI 3.60 to 11.78), and by week 10 these had further improved (depression: -3.41 SE 0.62 CI -4.68 to -2.15; social resilience: 10.59 SE 1.78 CI 6.94 to 14.24) alongside significant improvements in anxiety (-2.21 SE 0.50 CI -3.24 to -1.19) and mental wellbeing (6.14 SE 0.92 CI 4.25 to 8.04). All significant changes were maintained at 3 months follow-up. Furthermore, it is now recognised that many mental health conditions are characterised by underlying inflammatory immune responses. Consequently, participants in the drumming group also provided saliva samples to test for cortisol and the cytokines interleukin (IL) 4, IL6, IL17, tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNFα), and monocyte chemoattractant protein (MCP) 1. Across the 10 weeks there was a shift away from a pro-inflammatory towards an anti-inflammatory immune profile. Consequently, this study demonstrates the psychological benefits of group drumming and also suggests underlying biological effects, supporting its therapeutic potential for mental health. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01906892
Selenium in the treatment of autoimmune thyroiditis

We recently conducted a prospective, placebo‐controlled clinical study, where we could demonstrate, that a substitution of 200 μg sodium selenite for three months in patients with autoimmune thyroiditis reduced thyroid peroxidase antibody (TPO‐Ab) concentrations significantly. Forty‐seven patients from the initially 70 patients agreed to participate in a follow‐up cross‐over study for further six months. One group (n = 13), which initially received selenium continued to take 200 μg sodium selenite (Se‐Se), one group stopped taking selenium (Se‐0) ( n = 9), another group which received placebo started to take 200 μg selenium (n = 14) (Plac‐Se) and the last group was without selenium substitution (Plac‐0) (n = 11). TPO‐Ab concentrations were measured at beginning and the end of the study. In the Se‐Se group, the TPO‐Ab concentrations further significantly p = 0.004) decreased from 625 ± 470 U/ml to 354 ± 321 U/ml, in the Se‐0 group the TPO‐Ab concentrations increased significantly p = 0.017) from 450 ± 335 to 708 ± 313 U/ml. In the placebo group, the TPO‐Ab concentrations in those patients who were followed without selenium substitution were unchanged (1351 ± 940 vs. 1724 ± 1112 U/ml, p = 0.555). In contrast, the patients who received 200 μg sodium selenite after placebo, the TPO‐Ab concentrations decreased significantly (p = 0.029) from 1182 ± 723 to 643 ± 477 U/ml.
Recovering second-order statistics from compressive measurements

This paper focuses on the reconstruction of second order statistics of signals under a compressive sensing framework, which can be useful in many detection problems. More specifically, the focus is on general cyclostationary signals that are compressed using random linear projections, and using those compressive measurements, the cyclic power spectrum is retrieved. Subsequently, this can for instance be used to detect the occupation of specific frequency bands, which has applications in cognitive radio. Surprisingly, if the span of the random linear projections is larger than the period of the cyclostationary signals, the cyclic power spectrum can be recovered without putting any sparsity constraints on it, which allows for simple least squares reconstruction methods. This result indicates that significant compression can be realized by directly reconstructing the second-order statistics rather than the random signals themselves.