Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Promoting endothelial function by S-nitrosoglutathione through the HIF-1α/VEGF pathway stimulates neurorepair and functional recovery following experimental stroke in rats

Background For stroke patients, stimulating neurorepair mechanisms is necessary to reduce morbidity and disability. Our previous studies on brain and spinal cord trauma show that exogenous treatment with the S-nitrosylating agent S-nitrosoglutathione (GSNO) – a nitric oxide and glutathione metabolite of the human body – stimulates neurorepair and aids functional recovery. Using a rat model of cerebral ischemia and reperfusion (IR) in this study, we tested the hypothesis that GSNO invokes the neurorepair process and improves neurobehavioral functions through the angiogenic HIF-1α/VEGF pathway. Methods Stroke was induced by middle cerebral artery occlusion for 60 minutes followed by reperfusion in adult male rats. The injured animals were treated with saline (IR group, n=7), GSNO (0.25 mg/kg, GSNO group, n=7), and GSNO plus the HIF-1α inhibitor 2-methoxyestra-diol (2-ME) (0.25 mg/kg GSNO + 5.0 mg/kg 2-ME, GSNO + 2-ME group, n=7). The groups were studied for either 7 or 14 days to determine neurorepair mediators and functional recovery. Brain capillary endothelial cells were used to show that GSNO promotes angiogenesis and that GSNO-mediated induction of VEGF and the stimulation of angiogenesis are dependent on HIF-1α activity. Results IR injury increased the expression of neurorepair mediators HIF-1α, VEGF, and PECAM-1 and vessel markers to a limited degree that correlate well with significantly compromised neurobehavioral functions compared with sham animals. GSNO treatment of IR not only remarkably enhanced further the expression of HIF-1α, VEGF, and PECAM-1 but also improved functioning compared with IR. The GSNO group also had a higher degree of vessel density than the IR group. Increased expression of VEGF and the degree of tube formation (angiogenesis) by GSNO were reduced after the inhibition of HIF-1α by 2-ME in an endothelial cell culture model. 2-ME treatment of the GSNO group also blocked not only GSNO’s effect of reduced infarct volume, decreased neuronal loss, and enhanced expression of PECAM-1 (P<0.001), but also its improvement of motor and neurological functions (P<0.001). Conclusion GSNO stimulates the process of neurorepair, promotes angiogenesis, and aids functional recovery through the HIF-1α-dependent pathway, showing therapeutic and translational promise for stroke.
A Question Answering System for the Operation of Software Applications

Reflecting the rapid growth of information technology, the configuration of software applications, such as word processors and spreadsheets, is both sophisticated and complicated. It is often difficult for users to identify the relevant functions in an online manual of a target application. In this paper, we propose a question answering system that finds functions related to a user's request. To enhance our system, we addressed two "mismatch" problems. The first problem is associated with mismatch in vocabulary, in which the same concept is represented by different words in the manual and in the user's question. The second problem is associated with mismatch in function. Although a user may have a hypothetical function for their purpose in mind, the purpose can sometimes be accomplished by other functions. To resolve these mismatch problems, we use the World Wide Web to extract related terms for software functions, so that a user's question can be matched to the relevant function with a high accuracy. We show the effectiveness of our system experimentally.
The Russian threat and the consolidation of the West: How populism and EU-skepticism shape party support for Ukraine

Support for Ukraine against Russian aggression has been strong across Europe, but it is far from uniform. An expert survey of the positions taken by political parties in 29 countries conducted mid-2023 reveals that 97 of 269 parties reject one or more of the following: providing weapons, hosting refugees, supporting Ukraine's path to European Union membership, or accepting higher energy costs. Where the perceived threat from Russia is most severe, we find the greatest levels of support for Ukraine. However, ideology appears to be far more influential. The level of a party's populist rhetoric and its European Union skepticism explain the bulk of variation in support for Ukraine despite our finding that many strongly populist and European Union-skeptical parties take moderate pro-Ukraine positions when in government.
SPARCoC: A New Framework for Molecular Pattern Discovery and Cancer Gene Identification

It is challenging to cluster cancer patients of a certain histopathological type into molecular subtypes of clinical importance and identify gene signatures directly relevant to the subtypes. Current clustering approaches have inherent limitations, which prevent them from gauging the subtle heterogeneity of the molecular subtypes. In this paper we present a new framework: SPARCoC (Sparse-CoClust), which is based on a novel Common-background and Sparse-foreground Decomposition (CSD) model and the Maximum Block Improvement (MBI) co-clustering technique. SPARCoC has clear advantages compared with widely-used alternative approaches: hierarchical clustering (Hclust) and nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). We apply SPARCoC to the study of lung adenocarcinoma (ADCA), an extremely heterogeneous histological type, and a significant challenge for molecular subtyping. For testing and verification, we use high quality gene expression profiling data of lung ADCA patients, and identify prognostic gene signatures which could cluster patients into subgroups that are significantly different in their overall survival (with p-values < 0.05). Our results are only based on gene expression profiling data analysis, without incorporating any other feature selection or clinical information; we are able to replicate our findings with completely independent datasets. SPARCoC is broadly applicable to large-scale genomic data to empower pattern discovery and cancer gene identification.
Mass Addition at Mount St. Helens, Washington, Inferred From Repeated Gravity Surveys

Relative gravity measurements were made at 12 sites on Mount St. Helens and 4 sites far afield during the summers of 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016. Positive residual gravity changes of 0.05–0.06 ± 0.01 mGal from 2010 to 2016—a sign of mass addition—remain at proximal sites after accounting for the effects of changes in Crater Glacier shape and mass. Modeling of the 2010–2016 monitoring data indicates mass addition in the volcano magma reservoir, the volcano conduit, and/or the shallow hydrothermal aquifer. Magma intrusion in the volcano's known reservoir is suggested by the joint inversion of GPS and gravity data (d = 5800 ± 710 m below sea level, ΔVm = 49.8 ± 8.6 × 106m3, ρ = 1930 ± 300 kg/m3); the modeled depth and location are consistent with that of the reservoir that fed the 2004–2008 eruption, and its mass change can explain up to 19% of the residual gravity. The other two potential sources—the conduit and shallow aquifer—are not well constrained. Magma addition along the volcano conduit can explain up to 62% of the residual gravity (ΔVm ≅ 31 × 106m3, ρm ≅ 2, 300 kg/m3). However, such an intrusion should have produced a measurable surface deformation, which is not observed in the GPS time series. Changes in the level of the volcano's shallow hydrothermal system (ρw = 1, 000 kg/m3) can explain 17% (ΔVrecharge ≅ 9 × 106m3) to 61% (ΔVrecharge ≅ 30 × 106m3) of the residual gravity. It would therefore seem that the bulk of the mass change measured at Mount St. Helens during 2010–2016 was caused by shallow accumulation of water beneath the floor of the crater.
The FAOSTAT database of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture, including crop and livestock production, forestry and associated land use changes, are responsible for a significant fraction of anthropogenic emissions, up to 30% according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet while emissions from fossil fuels are updated yearly and by multiple sources—including national-level statistics from the International Energy Agency (IEA)—no comparable efforts for reporting global statistics for agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU) emissions exist: the latest complete assessment was the 2007 IPCC report, based on 2005 emission data. This gap is critical for several reasons. First, potentially large climate funding could be linked in coming decades to more precise estimates of emissions and mitigation potentials. For many developing countries, and especially the least developed ones, this requires improved assessments of AFOLU emissions. Second, growth in global emissions from fossil fuels has outpaced that from AFOLU during every decade of the period 1961–2010, so the relative contribution of the latter to total climate forcing has diminished over time, with a need for regular updates. We present results from a new GHG database developed at FAO, providing a complete and coherent time series of emission statistics over a reference period 1961–2010, at country level, based on FAOSTAT activity data and IPCC Tier 1 methodology. We discuss results at global and regional level, focusing on trends in the agriculture sector and net deforestation. Our results complement those available from the IPCC, extending trend analysis to a longer historical period and, critically, beyond 2005 to more recent years. In particular, from 2000 to 2010, we find that agricultural emissions increased by 1.1% annually, reaching 4.6 Gt CO2 yr−1 in 2010 (up to 5.4–5.8 Gt CO2 yr−1 with emissions from biomass burning and organic soils included). Over the same decade 2000–2010, the ratio of agriculture to fossil fuel emissions has decreased, from 17.2% to 13.7%, and the decrease is even greater for the ratio of net deforestation to fossil fuel emissions: from 19.1% to 10.1%. In fact, in the year 2000, emissions from agriculture have been consistently larger—about 1.2 Gt CO2 yr−1 in 2010—than those from net deforestation.
Sulphur and zinc abundances in Galactic halo stars revisited

Aims. Based on a new set of sulphur abundances in very metal-poor stars and an improved analysis of previous data, we aim at resolving current discrepancies on the trend of S/Fe vs. Fe/H and thereby gain better insight into the nucleosynthesis of sulphur. The trends of Zn/Fe and S/Zn will also be studied. Methods. High resolution VLT/UVES spectra of 40 main-sequence stars with −3.3 < [Fe/H] < −1.0 are used to derive S abundances from the weak λ8694. 6S i line and the stronger λλ9212. 9, 9237. 5p air of Si lines. For one star, the S abundance is also derived from the S i triplet at 1.046 µm recently observed with the VLT infrared echelle spectrograph CRIRES. Fe and Zn abundances are derived from lines in the blue part of the UVES spectra, and effective temperatures are obtained from the profile of the Hβ line. Results. Comparison of sulphur abundances from the weak and strong S i lines provides important constraints on non-LTE effects. The high sulphur abundances reported by others for some metal-poor stars are not confirmed; instead, when taking non-LTE corrections into account, the Galactic halo stars distribute around a plateau at [S/Fe] ∼ +0.2 dex with a scatter of 0.07 dex only. [Zn/Fe] is close to zero for metallicities in the range −2.0 < [Fe/H] < −1.0 but increases to a level of [Zn/Fe] ∼ +0. 1t o+0.2 dex in the range −2.7 < [Fe/H] < −2.0. At still lower metallicities [Zn/Fe] rises steeply to a value of [Zn/Fe] ∼ +0. 5d ex at [Fe/H] = −3.2. Conclusions. The trend of S/Fe vs. Fe/H corresponds to the trends of Mg/Fe, Si/Fe, and Ca/Fe and indicates that sulphur in Galactic halo stars has been made by α-capture processes in massive SNe. The observed scatter in S/Fe is much smaller than predicted from current stochastic models of the chemical evolution of the early Galaxy, suggesting that either the models or the calculated yields of massive SNe should be revised. We also examine the behaviour of S/Zn and find that departures from the solar ratio are significantly reduced at all metallicities if non-LTE corrections to the abundances of these two elements are adopted. This effect, if confirmed, would reduce the usefulness of the S/Zn ratio as a diagnostic of past star-formation activity, but would bring closer together the values measured in damped Lyman-alpha systems and in Galactic stars.
Selected antioxidants and risk of hormone receptor-defined invasive breast cancers among postmenopausal women in the Women's Health Initiative Observational Study.

BACKGROUND Few studies have evaluated carotenoids and vitamins C and E in association with the risk of breast cancers defined by estrogen receptor (ER) and progesterone receptor (PR) status. OBJECTIVE We examined the associations between dietary and supplemental intakes of these nutrients and risk of breast cancers jointly defined by both ER and PR status among postmenopausal women. DESIGN Our investigation was conducted in the Women's Health Initiative Observational Study. After following 84 805 women for an average of 7.6 y, 2879 incident invasive breast cancer cases had been ascertained, of whom 2509 had receptor data. We used Cox proportional hazards models to assess the associations of interest. RESULTS Dietary alpha-carotene (highest versus lowest quintile: RR = 0.83; 95% CL = 0.70, 0.99; P for trend = 0.019), beta-carotene (highest versus lowest quintile: RR = 0.78; 95% CL = 0.66, 0.94; P for trend = 0.021), and lycopene (highest versus lowest quintile: RR = 0.85; 95% CL = 0.73, 1.00; P for trend = 0.064) were inversely associated with risk of ER+PR+breast cancer, but not with other breast cancer groups jointly defined by ER and PR status. Total or supplemental beta-carotene and dietary intakes of lutein+zeaxanthin and beta-cryptoxanthin were not associated with breast cancers defined by ER and PR status. Vitamin E (regardless of source) and dietary vitamin C were not associated with breast cancer. However, total and supplemental vitamin C intake had weak positive associations with breast cancer overall. CONCLUSION Dietary intake of certain carotenoids might be differentially associated with risk of invasive breast cancers jointly defined by ER and PR status among postmenopausal women.
The risk of fractures in postmenopausal women with primary hyperparathyroidism.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the prevalence of vertebral (vFr) and non-vertebral (nvFr) fractures in postmenopausal women with primary hyperparathyroidism (PHPT). MATERIALS AND METHODS We studied 98 patients with PHPT, divided into 'mild' (M, n = 25) and 'non-mild' (NM, n = 73) sub-groups, according to recently published guidelines (2002), and 89 healthy women (C) matched for age, years since menopause and body mass index. vFr was evaluated according to a visual semiquantitative method; bone mineral density (BMD) at the lumbar spine (LS), and femoral sites (femoral neck, FN and total femur, FT) was measured by dual energy X-ray absorptiometry. Volumetric BMD of the third lumbar vertebra (vBMDL3) was also calculated. RESULTS The prevalence of vFr was significantly higher (P < 0.001) in both M and NM PHPT patients compared with C; this prevalence did not differ between M and NM patients. BMD was significantly lower (P < 0.05) in NM patients compared with both C and M patients. BMD at LS in M patients was also significantly higher with respect to C. Similar results were also obtained for vBMDL3; in M patients, vBMDL3 was also significantly higher compared to C. When M and NM patients were subdivided according to the presence or lack of vFr, no difference was found between fractured and unfractured patients for either BMD or vBMDL3 values. CONCLUSIONS The risk of vFr is higher in postmenopausal patients with mild PHPT even if BMD appears well preserved. This finding suggests that other factors, such as bone quality, seem to be relevant in determining fracture risk, especially when gonadal function is lacking.
Choosing and Using a Plant DNA Barcode

The main aim of DNA barcoding is to establish a shared community resource of DNA sequences that can be used for organismal identification and taxonomic clarification. This approach was successfully pioneered in animals using a portion of the cytochrome oxidase 1 (CO1) mitochondrial gene. In plants, establishing a standardized DNA barcoding system has been more challenging. In this paper, we review the process of selecting and refining a plant barcode; evaluate the factors which influence the discriminatory power of the approach; describe some early applications of plant barcoding and summarise major emerging projects; and outline tool development that will be necessary for plant DNA barcoding to advance.
Distributed Learning based on 1-Bit Gradient Coding in the Presence of Stragglers

This paper considers the problem of distributed learning (DL) in the presence of stragglers. For this problem, DL methods based on gradient coding have been widely investigated, which redundantly distribute the training data to the workers to guarantee convergence when some workers are stragglers. However, these methods require the workers to transmit real-valued vectors during the process of learning, which induces very high communication burden. To overcome this drawback, we propose a novel DL method based on 1-bit gradient coding (1-bit GCDL), where 1-bit data encoded from the locally computed gradients are transmitted by the workers to reduce the communication overhead. We theoretically provide the convergence guarantees of the proposed method for both the convex loss functions and nonconvex loss functions. It is shown empirically that 1-bit GC-DL outperforms the baseline methods, which attains better learning performance under the same communication overhead.
Geographical Variation in the Acclimation Responses of Drosophila to Temperature Extremes

Populations may adapt to climatic stresses by nonplastic or plastic changes in stress resistance. Plastic changes include a range of different acclimation mechanisms. A few previous studies with Drosophila suggest interspecific variation in plastic responses to climatic stresses, but there is not much evidence for variation within species. Tropical and temperate populations of Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila sirnulans were compared for plastic responses to cold and heat stress. Tropical populations tended to be less resistant to cold stress than temper- ate populations. -In contrast, D. melanogaster populations showed similar acclimation responses to cold stress following different acclimation treatments, which included keeping adults at low temperatures for a few hours or several days and culturing larvae at a low temperature. Popula- tions of D. simulans also showed similar plastic responses to cold stress after adults were acclimated at a low temperature for several days. In the heat resistance experiments, there was no evidence for population differences in acclimation response in either D. melanogaster or D. sitnulans when adults were exposed to high and low temperatures for a few days. Genetic variation for acclimation response may therefore be mainly restricted to the interspecific level, although larger experiments are required to detect small quantitative differences between popu- lations.
An Approach for Arabic Text Categorization Using Association Rule Mining

Text Categorization (TC) has become one of the major techniques for organizing and managing online information. Several studies proposed the so-called associative classification for databases and few of these studies are proposed to classify text documents into predefined categories based on their contents. In this paper a new approach is proposed for Arabic text categorization. The approach facilitates the discovery of association rules for building a classification model for Arabic text categorization. An apriori based algorithm is employed for association rule mining. To validate the proposed approach, several experiments were applied on a collection of Arabic documents. Three classification methods using association rules were compared in terms of their classification accuracy; the methods are: ordered decision list, weighted rules, and majority voting. The results showed that the majority voting method is the best in most of experiments achieving an accuracy of up to 87%. On the other hand, the weigh.
Incidence of cutaneous sebaceous carcinoma and risk of associated neoplasms

Sebaceous tumors of the skin occurring in association with an internal malignancy characterize Muir‐Torre syndrome (MTS), a variant of hereditary nonpolyposis colon cancer (Lynch syndrome). To the authors' knowledge, only limited information exists regarding incidence patterns of sebaceous carcinoma (SC), and no prior study has quantified risks of associated cancers.
MODELLING OF WAVE DRIVEN SEDIMENT TRANSPORT OVER A PARTIALLY BURIED CYLINDER

A numerical wave tank (NWT), solving Fully Nonlinear Poten- tial Flow equations, is used to drive Navier-Stokes (NS) simulations of wave- induced flow and sediment transport (both bed- and suspended load) around partially buried obstacles. Turbulence is represented in the NS model by Large Eddy Simulation (LES). The NS-LES model domain is initialized with the ve- locity fields computed in the NWT. For later time, the NS-LES model is driven by the NWT pressure gradient fields. Incident waves specified in the NWT can be arbitrary; here, only cases with periodic waves are presented. We discuss wave induced boundary-layer flows simulated in the coupled model. Examples of flow and sediment transport around partially buried cylinders are presented.
Manifold Embeddings for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning of Neurostimulation Policies

Real-world reinforcement learning problems often exhibit nonlinear, continuous-valued, noisy, partially-observable state-spaces that are prohibitively expensive to explore. The formal reinforcement learning framework, unfortunately, has not been successfully demonstrated in a real-world domain having all of these constraints. We approach this domain with a two-part solution. First, we overcome continuous-valued, partially observable statespaces by constructing manifold embeddings of the system’s underlying dynamics, which substitute as a complete state-space representation. We then define a generative model over this manifold to learn a policy off-line. The model-based approach is preferred because it enables simplification of the learning problem by domain knowledge. In this work we formally integrate manifold embeddings into the reinforcement learning framework, summarize a spectral method for estimating embedding parameters, and demonstrate the model-based approach in a complex domain—adaptive seizure suppression of an epileptic neural system.
Nord Pool: A Power Market Without Market Power

Regulatory reform in the Nordic electricity-supply markets has resulted in a single integrated Nordic electricity market. This paper performs an econometric study of market power in the spot market of Nord Pool, the joint Nordic power exchange. I use a dynamic extension of the Bresnahan-Lau model, and weekly data for the period from 1996 through April 1999. To my knowledge, this is the first study of power markets that is not able to reject the hypothesis of perfect competition. The most likely reason for this absence of market power is the low ownership concentration in generation in the integrated Nordic electricity market.