Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coactivation of M1 Muscarinic and α1 Adrenergic Receptors Stimulates Extracellular Signal-Regulated Protein Kinase and Induces Long-Term Depression at CA3–CA1 Synapses in Rat Hippocampus

Intact cholinergic innervation from the medial septum and noradrenergic innervation from the locus ceruleus are required for hippocampal-dependent learning and memory. However, much remains unclear about the precise roles of acetylcholine (ACh) and norepinephrine (NE) in hippocampal function, particularly in terms of how interactions between these two transmitter systems might play an important role in synaptic plasticity. Previously, we reported that activation of either muscarinic M1 or adrenergic α1 receptors induces activity- and NMDA receptor-dependent long-term depression (LTD) at CA3–CA1 synapses in acute hippocampal slices, referred to as muscarinic LTD (mLTD) and norepinephrine LTD (NE LTD), respectively. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that mLTD and NE LTD are independent forms of LTD, yet require activation of a common Gαq-coupled signaling pathway for their induction, and investigated the net effect of coactivation of M1 and α1 receptors on the magnitude of LTD induced. We find that neither mLTD nor NE LTD requires phospholipase C activation, but both plasticities are prevented by inhibiting the Src kinase family and extracellular signal-regulated protein kinase (ERK) activation. Interestingly, LTD can be induced when M1 and α1 agonists are coapplied at concentrations too low to induce LTD when applied separately, via a summed increase in ERK activation. Thus, because ACh and NE levels in vivo covary, especially during periods of memory encoding and consolidation, cooperative signaling through M1 and α1 receptors could function to induce long-term changes in synaptic function important for cognition.
Neural Priming in Human Frontal Cortex: Multiple Forms of Learning Reduce Demands on the Prefrontal Executive System

Abstract Past experience is hypothesized to reduce computational demands in PFC by providing bottom–up predictive information that informs subsequent stimulus-action mapping. The present fMRI study measured cortical activity reductions (“neural priming”/“repetition suppression”) during repeated stimulus classification to investigate the mechanisms through which learning from the past decreases demands on the prefrontal executive system. Manipulation of learning at three levels of representation—stimulus, decision, and response—revealed dissociable neural priming effects in distinct frontotemporal regions, supporting a multiprocess model of neural priming. Critically, three distinct patterns of neural priming were identified in lateral frontal cortex, indicating that frontal computational demands are reduced by three forms of learning: (a) cortical tuning of stimulus-specific representations, (b) retrieval of learned stimulus-decision mappings, and (c) retrieval of learned stimulus-response mappings. The topographic distribution of these neural priming effects suggests a rostrocaudal organization of executive function in lateral frontal cortex.
Energy Cost of Resistance Exercises: an Uptade

Energy Cost of Resistance Exercises: an Uptade The use of resistance exercises and of typical strength training methods have been progressively used to control body mass and to promote fat mass loss. The difficulties involved in the energy cost calculation during strength training are associated with the large amount of exercises and their several variations. Mean values between ≈3 and 30 kcal·min-1 are typically reported but our studies indicate that it may attain values as high as 40 kcal·min-1 in exercises which involve a large body mass. Therefore, in our opinion, the next step in research must be the isolated study of each of the main resistance exercises. Since the literature is scarce and that we do consider that the majority of the studies present severe limitations, the aim of this paper is to present a critical analysis of the energy cost estimation methods and provide some insights that may help to improve knowledge on resistance exercise. It seems necessary to rely on the expired O2 measurements to quantify aerobic energy. However, it is warranted further attention on how this measure is performed during resistance exercises. In example, studies on the O2 on-kinetics at various conditions are warranted (i.e. as a function of intensity, duration and movement speed). As for anaerobic lactic energy, it is our opinion that both the accumulated oxygen deficit and the blood lactate energy equivalent deserve further studies; analyzing variations of each method as an attempt to establish which is more valid for resistance exercise. The quantification of alactic anaerobic energy should be complemented by accurate studies on the muscle mass involved in the different resistance exercises. From the above, it is concluded that knowledge on the energy cost in resistance exercises is in its early days and that much research is warranted before appropriate reference values may be proposed.
Social Media influence on viewer engagement

Society is being reshaped through Social Media. The case of Social Media integration into the London 2012 Olympics mainstream media coverage is used to demonstrate this. Social Media has modified television viewing from a passive to an active activity. It has also allowed opinions to be shared more quickly and broadly. Analysis of practical examples through the theoretical lens of sociomateriality demonstrates that greater use of the components in the ‘Theoretical Framework of Member Needs’ reflect the presence of viewers who are more active. This paper discusses the inability to separate the use of technology from its social context, the power of Social Media and the impact of this on business use of Social Media. It also demonstrates a novel method for evaluating the benefits of emerging technologies in society.
A facile fabrication of Cu2O nanowire arrays on Cu substrates

Nanomaterials play an important role in modern science and engineering. The ability to fabricate nanomaterials with high quality and low cost is a primary stage for further discovering their applications. This research article presents a facile fabrication of Cu2O nanowires on Cu substrate. It was found that simply heating Cu in air leads to the growth of Cu2O nanowires. The Cu2O nanowires are aligned in one direction and vertically grown on the Cu substrate. The growth process of nanowires was tracked by SEM and the root at the initial stage was observed by HRTEM. The access to oxygen is critical to the growth of Cu2O nanowires and the patterned nanowire arrays can be readily fabricated by using a mask. The method reported here offers a great potential route toward a large scale manufacture of Cu2O nanowires.
An experimental analysis of BGP convergence time

The border gateway protocol (BGP) is the routing protocol used to maintain connectivity between autonomous systems in the Internet. Empirical measurements have shown that there can be considerable delay in BGP convergence after routing changes. One contributing factor in this delay is a BGP-specific timer used to limit the rate at which routing messages are transmitted. We use the SSFNet simulator to explore the relationship between convergence time and the configuration of this timer. For each simple network topology simulated, we observe that there is an optimal value for the rate-limiting timer that minimizes convergence time.
Appwrapping Providing Fine-Grained Security Policy Enforcement Per Method Unit in Android

Enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution is widely used to securely protect confidential information stored on an individual's smartphone, while increasing the efficiency because of BYOD policy. The application wrapping (Appwrapping) technology is one way to be applied EMM solutions, by modifying binary applications without the original source code. In the past, Appwrapping was performed to control permissions or APIs to protect privacy on Android. This method is applied collectively to the whole section, not a specific section of the app, so it is difficult to control the section (flow) desired by the user or the manager. In addition, system overhead can occur because the control is applied to the whole section of the app. In this paper, we propose a method to insert an additional security policy code at a certain interval position in the intermediate code of a binary app, so that it can be controlled at a specific interval rather than the whole interval of the app. The proposed method extracts and saves the security policy intermediate code and the related file in advance and then adds the security policy code to the specific method on the intermediate code of the specific activity acquired by decompiling the target app. Finally, the additional security policy code is modified to avoid errors caused by the additional code. We create an automation tool for performance verification, experiment with five commercial office apps, and confirm that the apps work properly with the added EMM security functions.
Activation of Vinculin Induced by Cholinergic Stimulation Regulates Contraction of Tracheal Smooth Muscle Tissue*

Vinculin localizes to membrane adhesion junctions where it links actin filaments to the extracellular matrix by binding to the integrin-binding protein talin at its head domain (Vh) and to actin filaments at its tail domain (Vt). Vinculin can assume an inactive (closed) conformation in which Vh and Vt bind to each other, masking the binding sites for actin and talin, and an active (open) conformation in which the binding sites for talin and actin are exposed. We hypothesized that the contractile activation of smooth muscle tissues might regulate the activation of vinculin and thereby contribute to the regulation of contractile tension. Stimulation of tracheal smooth muscle tissues with acetylcholine (ACh) induced the recruitment of vinculin to cell membrane and its interaction with talin and increased the phosphorylation of membrane-localized vinculin at the C-terminal Tyr-1065. Expression of recombinant vinculin head domain peptide (Vh) in smooth muscle tissues, but not the talin-binding deficient mutant head domain, VhA50I, inhibited the ACh-induced recruitment of endogenous vinculin to the membrane and the interaction of vinculin with talin and also inhibited vinculin phosphorylation. Expression of Vh peptide also inhibited ACh-induced smooth muscle contraction and inhibited ACh-induced actin polymerization; however, it did not affect myosin light chain phosphorylation, which is necessary for cross-bridge cycling. Inactivation of RhoA inhibited vinculin activation in response to ACh. We conclude that ACh stimulation regulates vinculin activation in tracheal smooth muscle via RhoA and that vinculin activation contributes to the regulation of active tension by facilitating connections between actin filaments and talin-integrin adhesion complexes and by mediating the initiation of actin polymerization.
Design of a rectenna for wireless low-power transmission

Disclaimer This document contains a student thesis (bachelor's or master's), as authored by a student at Eindhoven University of Technology. Student theses are made available in the TU/e repository upon obtaining the required degree. The grade received is not published on the document as presented in the repository. The required complexity or quality of research of student theses may vary by program, and the required minimum study period may vary in duration.
Reducing loss of image quality because of the attenuation artifact in uncorrected PET whole-body images.

UNLABELLED In whole-body PET, it is not unusual to shorten the study time by omitting the transmission scan and to ignore attenuation during reconstruction. If a transmission scan is available, many centers reconstruct the images with, but also without, attenuation correction. Although ignoring attenuation leads to an artifact in the reconstructed images, these images still provide valuable diagnostic information in oncologic applications. Several authors have reported that the attenuation artifact may actually increase the tumor-to-background ratio. In this study, we analyzed the causes of the artifact and proposed a new algorithm to reduce the adverse effects on visual image quality. METHODS We analyzed the causes of the attenuation artifact mathematically and numerically, and we examined its effect on tumor-to-background ratio and on signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, we showed that the attenuation artifact may lead to loss of image detail in conventional maximum-likelihood expectation maximization (MLEM) reconstruction. A new maximum-likelihood algorithm allowing negative reconstruction values (NEG-ML) was derived to reduce this loss. RESULTS The attenuation artifact consists of 2 components. The first component is the well-known scaling effect: The apparent activity is reduced because attenuation decreases the fraction of detected photons. The second component is a relatively smooth negative contribution that is added to attenuated regions surrounded by activity. The second component tends to increase the tumor-to-background ratio. However, a simulation experiment shows that this increase in signal may be entirely offset by an increase in noise. The negative contribution can interfere with the nonnegativity constraint of the MLEM algorithm, leading to loss of image detail in regions of high attenuation. The new NEG-ML algorithm avoids the problem by allowing negative pixel values. The algorithm is similar to MLEM in the suppression of the streak artifact but provides more anatomic information. In our department, it is in routine clinical use for reconstruction of PET whole-body images without attenuation correction. CONCLUSION Ignoring attenuation may increase the tumor-to-background ratio, but this increase does not imply improved tumor detection. The NEG-ML algorithm reduces the adverse effect of the attenuation artifact on visual image quality.
European ACP1*C Allele Has Recessive Deleterious Effects on Early Life Viability

The acid phosphatase locus (ACP1) is a classical polymorphism that has been surveyed in hundreds of human populations worldwide. Among individuals of European ancestry, the ACP1*C allele occurs with an average frequency of approximately 0.05, whereas it is nearly absent in all other human populations. It has been hypothesized that this allele is maintained by overdominant selection among European populations. Here, we analyze ACP1 protein polymorphism data from more than 50,000 individuals previously surveyed in 67 populations across Europe as well as inheritance data from more than 6,000 European parent–offspring pairs to assess the signature of natural selection currently acting on this allele. Although we see a significant excess of ACP1*C heterozygotes relative to Hardy–Weinberg expectations, we find no evidence that natural selection favors ACP1*C heterozygotes. Instead, ACP1*C appears to have a strongly deleterious and recessive fitness effect. We observed only 48.9% of expected homozygous offspring from heterozygous parents and significantly fewer homozygotes than expected within populations. Because parent–offspring pairs indicate a significant deficiency of ACP1*C homozygotes, we infer that viability selection is acting on ACP1*C homozygotes very early in life, perhaps before birth. We estimate that approximately 1.2% of all couples of European ancestry are composed of individuals who both carry the APC1*C allele. As such, selection against ACP1*C homozygotes may represent a nonnegligible contribution to the overall number of spontaneous abortions among women of European ancestry and may cause substantial fertility reductions among some combinations of parental genotypes.
The Impact of Linear Optimization on Promotion Planning

Sales promotions are important in the fast-moving consumer goods FMCG industry due to the significant spending on promotions and the fact that a large proportion of FMCG products are sold on promotion. This paper considers the problem of planning sales promotions for an FMCG product in a grocery retail setting. The category manager has to solve the promotion optimization problem POP for each product, i.e., how to select a posted price for each period in a finite horizon so as to maximize the retailer's profit. Through our collaboration with Oracle Retail, we developed an optimization formulation for the POP that can be used by category managers in a grocery environment. Our formulation incorporates business rules that are relevant, in practice. We propose general classes of demand functions including multiplicative and additive, which incorporate the post-promotion dip effect, and can be estimated from sales data. In general, the POP formulation has a nonlinear objective and is NP-hard. We then propose a linear integer programming IP approximation of the POP. We show that the IP has an integral feasible region, and hence can be solved efficiently as a linear program LP. We develop performance guarantees for the profit of the LP solution relative to the optimal profit. Using sales data from a grocery retailer, we first show that our demand models can be estimated with high accuracy, and then demonstrate that using the LP promotion schedule could potentially increase the profit by 3%, with a potential profit increase of 5% if some business constraints were to be relaxed. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2016. 1573
Development of Tibiofemoral Angle in Korean Children

This study was performed to identify the chronological changes of the knee angle or the tibiofemoral angles in normal healthy Korean children. Full-length anteroposterior view standing radiographs of 818 limbs of 452 Korean children were analyzed. The overall patterns of the chronological changes in the knee angle were similar to those described previously in western or Asian children, but the knee angle development was delayed, i.e., genu varum before 1 yr, neutral at 1.5 yr, increasing genu valgum with maximum a value of 7.8° at 4 yr, followed by a gradual decrease to approximately 5-6° of genu valgum of the adult level at 7 to 8 yr of age. These normative data on chronological changes of knee angles should be taken into consideration when evaluating lower limb alignment in children.
Finite-temperature critical point of a glass transition

We generalize the simplest kinetically constrained model of a glass-forming liquid by softening kinetic constraints, allowing them to be violated with a small rate. We demonstrate that this model supports a first-order dynamical (space–time) phase transition between active (fluid) and inactive (glass) phases. The first-order phase boundary in this softened model ends in a finite-temperature dynamical critical point, which may be present in natural systems. In this case, the glass phase has a very large but finite relaxation time. We discuss links between the dynamical critical point and quantum phase transitions, showing that dynamical phase transitions in d dimensions map to quantum transitions in the same dimension, and hence to classical thermodynamic phase transitions in d + 1 dimensions.
A large-scale real-time network simulation study using PRIME

We examine the capabilities of conducting network experiments involving a large-scale peer-to-peer web-content distribution network. Our study uses a real-time network simulator, called PRIME, running on EmuLab, which is a shared cluster computing environment designed specifically for network emulation studies. Our study is one of the largest network experiments that involve a real implementation of a peer-to-peer content distribution system under HTTP traffic from a public-domain empirical workload trace and using a realistic large network model. Our experiments demonstrate the potentials of real-time simulation for studying complex behaviors of distributed applications under large-scale network conditions.
Detection of single photons by toad and mouse rods

Significance Amphibian and mammalian rods both detect single photons of light even though mammalian rods are much smaller in diameter. To understand how this is possible, we combined electrical recordings with computations. We show that changes in the rod diameter go hand in hand with changes in the biochemistry to allow for single-photon detection. Amphibian and mammalian rods can both detect single photons of light even though they differ greatly in physical dimensions, mammalian rods being much smaller in diameter than amphibian rods. To understand the changes in physiology and biochemistry required by such large differences in outer segment geometry, we developed a computational approach, taking into account the spatial organization of the outer segment divided into compartments, together with molecular dynamics simulations of the signaling cascade. We generated simulations of the single-photon response together with intrinsic background fluctuations in toad and mouse rods. Combining this computational approach with electrophysiological data from mouse rods, we determined key biochemical parameters. On average around one phosphodiesterase (PDE) molecule is spontaneously active per mouse compartment, similar to the value for toad, which is unexpected due to the much smaller diameter in mouse. A larger number of spontaneously active PDEs decreases dark noise, thereby improving detection of single photons; it also increases cGMP turnover, which accelerates the decay of the light response. These constraints explain the higher PDE density in mammalian compared with amphibian rods that compensates for the much smaller diameter of mammalian disks. We further find that the rate of cGMP hydrolysis by light-activated PDE is diffusion limited, which is not the case for spontaneously activated PDE. As a consequence, in the small outer segment of a mouse rod only a few activated PDEs are sufficient to generate a signal that overcomes noise, which permits a shorter lifetime of activated rhodopsin and greater temporal resolution.
Quadrotor control for RF source localization and tracking

Preliminary results on quadrotor control strategies enabling omnidirectional radio frequency (RF) sensing for source localization and tracking are discussed. The use of a quadrotor for source localization and tracking requires a tight coupling of the attitude control and RF sensing designs. We present a controller for tracking a ramp reference input in yaw (causing rotation of quadrotor) while maintaining a constant altitude hover or translation. The ability to track a ramp in the yaw angle is crucial for RF bearing estimation using received signal strength (RSS) measurements from a directional antenna as it avoids the need for additional gimbaling payload. This bearing or angle of arrival (AOA) estimate is then utilized by a particle filter for source localization and tracking. We report on extensive experiments that suggest that this approach is appropriate even in complex indoor environments where multipath fading effects are difficult to model.
Naproxen for 8 Days Can Prevent Heterotopic Ossification After Hip Arthroplasty

The effect of 1 week of treatment with naproxen on the formation of heterotopic ossification after cemented total hip arthroplasty was studied in a prospective trial. Twenty-seven patients received 500 mg naproxen twice daily for 7 days postoperatively. The medication was started on the morning of the operation. The results were compared with a control group of 23 patients from a previous study who had not received any type of nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drug. All radiographs were mixed randomly, and patient identification was blinded. Three months after the operation, heterotopic ossification had developed in 12 (52%) patients in the control group and in 3 (11%) patients in the naproxen-treated group. One year after the operation, 4 (17%) patients in the naproxen-treated group and 12 (52%) in the control group had heterotopic ossification (p < 0.05). Severe ossification developed in 3 patients in the control group and in none in the naproxen-treated group. The authors conclude that naproxen given for 1 week can decrease the incidence of heterotopic ossification after total hip arthroplasty.