Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Variations in the OM/OC ratio of urban organic aerosol next to a major roadway

Understanding the organic matter/organic carbon (OM/OC) ratio in ambient particulate matter (PM) is critical to achieve mass closure in routine PM measurements, to assess the sources of and the degree of chemical processing organic aerosol particles have undergone, and to relate ambient pollutant concentrations to health effects. Of particular interest is how the OM/OC ratio varies in the urban environment, where strong spatial and temporal gradients in source emissions are common. We provide results of near-roadway high-time-resolution PM1 OM concentration and OM/OC ratio observations during January 2008 at Fyfe Elementary School in Las Vegas, NV, 18 m from the U.S. 95 freeway soundwall, measured with an Aerodyne high-resolution time-of-flight aerosol mass spectrometer (HR-AMS). The average OM/OC ratio was 1.54 (± 0.20 standard deviation), typical of environments with a low amount of secondary aerosol formation. The 2-min average OM/OC ratios varied between 1.17 and 2.67, and daily average OM/OC ratios varied between 1.44 and 1.73. The ratios were highest during periods of low OM concentrations and generally low during periods of high OM concentrations. OM/OC ratios were low (1.52 ± 0.14, on average) during the morning rush hour (average OM = 2.4 µg/m3), when vehicular emissions dominate this near-road measurement site. The ratios were slightly lower (1.46 ± 0.10) in the evening (average OM = 6.3 µg/m3), when a combination of vehicular and fresh residential biomass burning emissions was typically present during times with temperature inversions. The hourly averaged OM/OC ratio peaked at 1.66 at midday. OM concentrations were similar, regardless of whether the monitoring site was downwind or upwind of the adjacent freeway throughout the day, though they were higher during stagnant conditions (wind speed < 0.5 m/sec). The OM/OC ratio generally varied more with time of day than with wind direction and speed. Implications: Day-to-day variability in the fine particle OM/OC ratio is quite large, suggesting that using a fixed OM/OC value in PM mass closure calculations, even one that changes seasonally, may be insufficient to achieve accurate mass closure on individual days. Health studies that rely on OC measurements may under- or overestimate exposure to OM, and converting OC to OM with a fixed OM/OC ratio represents a significant source of uncertainty; thus, air quality managers may not have sufficient information about the importance of OM contributions to PM2.5 to make optimal regulatory decisions. Supplemental Materials: Supplemental materials are available for this paper. Go to the publisher's online edition of the Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association.
Antibody–Drug Conjugates for Cancer Therapy

Antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs) are novel drugs that exploit the specificity of a monoclonal antibody (mAb) to reach target antigens expressed on cancer cells for the delivery of a potent cytotoxic payload. ADCs provide a unique opportunity to deliver drugs to tumor cells while minimizing toxicity to normal tissue, achieving wider therapeutic windows and enhanced pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic properties. To date, nine ADCs have been approved by the FDA and more than 80 ADCs are under clinical development worldwide. In this paper, we provide an overview of the biology and chemistry of each component of ADC design. We briefly discuss the clinical experience with approved ADCs and the various pathways involved in ADC resistance. We conclude with perspectives about the future development of the next generations of ADCs, including the role of molecular imaging in drug development.
Policy Making to Build Relationships: A Grounded Theory Analysis of Interviews and Documents Relating to H1N1, Ebola, and the U.S. Public Health Preparedness Network

In the last five years, the American public health emergency preparedness and response system has been tested by two significant threats, H1N1 and Ebola. While neither proved as dangerous as initially feared, these viruses highlighted on-going issues with collaborations in the field of public health and health care. Strengths were identified within the network, but also challenges that must be resolved before the U.S. faces a major pandemic. Employing interview data from public health emergency response practitioners and documentary evidence from the H1N1 and Ebola responses, this qualitative analysis uses the grounded theory approach to identify key areas for collaborative improvement. The grounded theory developed calls for a stronger policy framework at the federal level to facilitate more collaboration between U.S. agencies and facilitate more collaboration at the state and local level.
Retinal vessel metrics: normative data and their use in systemic hypertension results from the Gutenberg Health Study

Purpose of review: In-vivo measurement of retinal vascular calibers may be used as a tool to study the pathophysiology and clinical status of the microvasculature of the retina. The aim of this study was to generate normative data for retinal vessel parameters, and to evaluate the clinical relevance in systemic hypertension. Methods: Fundus photographs from 4309 participants of the Gutenberg Health Study were assessed using the ‘retinal vessel analyzer’ software (IMEDOS). We generated age and sex-specific nomograms in a disease-free subpopulation of 890 participants for determining the central retinal arteriolar equivalent (CRAE), the central retinal venular equivalent, and the arteriovenous ratio (AVR). Results: Women had higher values of CRAE, central retinal venular equivalent, and AVR than men, and the decrease in measures with increasing age was less steep in women than in men. Systemic hypertension was associated with lower values [odds ratio (OR), 95% confidence interval (CI) referring to area below the 5% percentile] of AVR (men: OR 2.41, 95% CI 1.669–3.490, P < 0.001; women: OR 3.01, 95% CI 2.126–4.268, P < 0.001) and CRAE (men: OR 2.60, 95% CI 1.563–4.326, P < 0.001, women: OR 3.00, 95% CI 2.004–4.487, P < 0.001). Both median CRAE and AVR were lower in participants with uncontrolled hypertension (172.28, range 83.05–251.04; and 0.81, range 0.56–1.04) versus those with screening-detected hypertension (175.72, range 101.23–222.09, P < 0.001; and 0.82, range 0.64–1.05, P = 0.001), and versus those with controlled (179.10, range 108.19–221.92, P < 0.001; and 0.84, range 0.60–1.08, P < 0.001) hypertension. Conclusion: The study provides sex and age-specific normative data for retinal vasculature. Persons with untreated or insufficiently treated hypertension are more likely to have retinal vessel equivalents outside the reference range.
Flame height correlation and upward flame spread modelling

Previous work has demonstrated that flame height is one of the two most important parameters determining the rate of vertical flame spread on a wall. Flame spread models rely on empirical flame height correlations of the form Xf=KQ̇′n, but there have been no carefully controlled experiments designed to establish the validity of such correlations and there are no data for values of Q̇′< c.25 kW/m. Two new sets of data are presented here, one based on experiments with 6 mm thick PMMA slabs (heights 25–250 mm, width 50–150 mm) as the fire source, measuring Q̇′ and Xf simultaneously. This set relates to the early stages of a wall fire when Q̇′< 30 kW/m. The other set of data was obtained with a vertical gas‐fired panel which consisted of an array of 14 independent burners arranged to allow the aspect ratio of the burning surface to be varied. The data confirm that the flame height correlates with Q̇′, but reveal (inter alia) that there are two regions, for values of Q̇′ greater than and less than c. 20 kW/m.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) The semiparametric Bernstein-von Mises theorem

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Censoring of HIV Viremia Data of Reincarcerated Individuals: A Response to Wohl et al.

approaches to address missing outcome data in intent-to-treat analyses, including complete case analyses and simple imputation methods, we recognized that in this trial of men and women reentering their communities after incarceration, missing data due to lost to follow-up and re-incarceration would not be trivial. To address this, the primary analysis used multiple imputation to estimate missing outcomes based on 10 major characteristics measured at baseline.1,2 Therefore, all participants contributed data to the primary endpoint of this study, regardless of whether or not the participant was reincarcerated. The multiple imputation modeling, in our view, is preferable to the actual measurement of viral load of those reincarcerated for a number of reasons. Foremost, the overarching aim of our trial was to test an intervention to maintain viral suppression in the community after incarceration to reduce the risk of secondary transmission of the virus. Those who are reincarcerated are no longer in these communities, and therefore, the determination of the efficacy of the intervention to reduce secondary transmission is no longer possible. Our model estimates the rates of viral suppression had these men and women remained in their communities. In addition, the study intervention was designed to encourage and support community HIV care and treatment adherence, and not viral suppression while in a correctional facility. The systems in place to administer and support HIV therapy in prisons and jails are starkly different from those found in the community. Importantly, there is no reason to believe that the inclusion of viral load data from the participants who were reincarcerated would have altered the main findings of our trial. That the study intervention would have led to better or worse odds of viral suppression during reincarceration is highly unlikely, and other interventions should be developed and tested to improve HIV outcomes during incarceration. We do agree with Drobeniuc and Spaulding that there are consequences of mass incarceration, especially among HIV-infected persons, that impede success after prison release. The absence of a significant difference between the study arms in the primary and almost all secondary outcomes suggests to us that there are strong societal forces that our intervention did not address. That a substantial proportion of HIV-infected people in the United States, particularly those living in deep poverty, can only achieve and maintain desirable health outcomes while incarcerated implicates these forces as the main target for change, rather than the behaviors of those they affect.
Treatment of recurrent Clostridium difficile colitis: a narrative review

Abstract Clostridium difficile is a gram-positive, spore-forming, obligate anaerobic bacillus that was originally isolated from the stool of a healthy neonate in 1935. In high-income countries, C. difficile is the most common cause of infectious diarrhoea in hospitalized patients. The incidence of C. difficile infection in the USA has increased markedly since 2000, with hospitalizations for C. difficile infections in non-pregnant adults doubling between 2000 and 2010. Between 20% and 35% of patients with C. difficile infection will fail initial antibiotic treatment and, of these, 40–60% will have a second recurrence. Recurrence of C. difficile infection after initial treatment causes substantial morbidity and is a major burden on health care systems. In this article, current treatments for recurrent C. difficile infection are reviewed and future directions explored. These include the use of antibiotics, probiotics, donor faecal transplants, anion resins, secondary bile acids or anti-toxin antibodies.
Quantitative axial myology in two constricting snakes: Lampropeltis holbrooki and Pantherophis obsoletus

A snake's body represents an extreme degree of elongation with immense muscle complexity. Snakes have approximately 25 different muscles on each side of the body at each vertebra. These muscles serially repeat, overlap, interconnect, and rarely insert parallel to the vertebral column. The angled muscles mean that simple measurements of anatomical cross‐sectional area (ACSA, perpendicular to the long‐axis of the body) serve only as proxies for the primary determinant of muscle force, physiological cross‐sectional area (PCSA, area perpendicular to the muscle fibers). Here, I describe and quantify the musculature of two intraguild constrictors: kingsnakes (Lampropeltis holbrooki) and ratsnakes (Pantherophis obsoletus) whose predation performance varies considerably. Kingsnakes can produce significantly higher constriction pressures compared with ratsnakes of similar size. In both snakes, I provide qualitative descriptions, detail previously undescribed complexity, identify a new lateral muscle, and provide some of the first quantitative measures of individual muscle and whole‐body PCSA. Furthermore, I compare measurements of ACSA with measurements of PCSA. There was no significant difference in PCSA of muscles between kingsnakes and ratsnakes. There is, however, a strong relationship between ACSA and PCSA measurements. I could not identify a significant difference in musculature between kingsnakes and ratsnakes that explains their different levels of constriction performance. Unmeasured components of muscle function, such as endurance and force production, might account for differences in performance between two species with similar muscle structure.
SPARC overexpression in primary tumors correlates with disease recurrence and overall survival in patients with triple negative breast cancer

SPARC/osteonectin expression is reportedly altered in various malignancies. However, little is known regarding to the prognostic value of SPARC in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) patients. In this study, immunohistochemistry and immunoreactive scores (IRSs) were used to evaluate SPARC protein expression in primary tumors from 211 TNBC patients with up to 10 years of clinical follow-up data. High SPARC expression (IRS ≥3) was detected in 52.1% of primary tumors. Patients expressing high SPARC levels had worse disease-free survival (DFS) (HR=1.58, 95% CI: 1.01-2.47, P=0.044) and overall survival (OS) (HR=1.74, 95% CI: 1.06-2.85, P=0.029) than patients with lower SPARC levels. Furthermore, high SPARC expression was an independent prognostic factor for both DFS (HR=1.73, 95% CI: 1.10-2.73, P=0.018) and OS (HR=1.90, 95% CI: 1.14-3.16, P=0.014) in TNBC patients. These results suggest that increased SPARC expression may be an indicator of greater aggressiveness, and may serve as a prognostic factor for triple-negative breast cancer.
Endurance exercise prevents high-fat-diet induced heart and mobility premature aging and dsir2 expression decline in aging Drosophila

High-Fat-Diet (HFD)-induced obesity is a major contributor to heart and mobility premature aging and mortality in both Drosophila and humans. The dSir2 genes are closely related to aging, but there are few directed reports showing that whether HFD could inhibit the expression dSir2 genes. Endurance exercise can prevent fat accumulation and reverse HFD-induced cardiac dysfunction. Endurance also delays age-relate functional decline. It is unclear whether lifetime endurance exercise can combat lifetime HFD-induced heart and mobility premature aging, and relieve the harmful HFD-induced influence on the dSir2 gene and lifespan yet. In this study, flies are fed a HFD and trained from when they are 1 week old until they are 5 weeks old. Then, triacylglycerol levels, climbing index, cardiac function, lifespan, and dSir2 mRNA expressions are measured. We show that endurance exercise improves climbing capacity, cardiac contraction, and dSir2 expression, and it reduces body and heart triacylglycerol levels, heart fibrillation, and mortality in both HFD and aging flies. So, lifelong endurance exercise delays HFD-induced accelerated age-related locomotor impairment, cardiac dysfunction, death, and dSir2 expression decline, and prevents HFD-induced premature aging in Drosophila.
Motivation to Avoid Loss Improves Implicit Skill Performance

Implicit learning reflects learning from experience that occurs without intention or awareness of the information acquired and is hypothesized to contribute to skill acquisition by improving performance with practice. The role of motivation has not been examined because this kind of memory is represented outside awareness. We manipulated motivation (approach/avoidance) and type of feedback (positive/negative) to measure how these affected a well-studied task of implicit sequence learning. Across 2 experiments, we found a consistent effect that motivation to avoid loss led to much higher levels of sequence-specific task performance. When the motivation manipulation was removed, performance fell to typical levels, indicating that motivation enhanced knowledge expression through performance, not learning. Even though implicit skill knowledge is represented outside awareness, our ability to apply this knowledge is enhanced when motivated by fear of loss, potentially providing insight into the value of coaching/training practices that motivate performers in this manner.
Cooperative Adaptive Output Regulation for Second-Order Nonlinear Multiagent Systems With Jointly Connected Switching Networks

This paper studies the cooperative global robust output regulation problem for a class of heterogeneous second-order nonlinear uncertain multiagent systems with jointly connected switching networks. The main contributions consist of the following three aspects. First, we generalize the result of the adaptive distributed observer from undirected jointly connected switching networks to directed jointly connected switching networks. Second, by performing a new coordinate and input transformation, we convert our problem into the cooperative global robust stabilization problem of a more complex augmented system via the distributed internal model principle. Third, we solve the stabilization problem by a distributed state feedback control law. Our result is illustrated by the leader-following consensus problem for a group of Van der Pol oscillators.
Identification of Two Distinct Working Memory-Related Brain Networks in Healthy Young Adults

Abstract Working memory (WM) is an important cognitive domain for everyday life functioning and is often disturbed in neuropsychiatric disorders. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in humans show that distributed brain areas typically described as fronto-parietal regions are implicated in WM tasks. Based on data from a large sample of healthy young adults (N = 1369), we applied independent component analysis (ICA) to the WM-fMRI signal and identified two distinct networks that were relevant for differences in individual WM task performance. A parietally-centered network was particularly relevant for individual differences in task measures related to WM performance (“WM dependent”) and a frontally-centered network was relevant for differences in attention-dependent task performance. Importantly, frontal areas that are typically considered as key regions for WM were either involved in both WM-dependent and attention-dependent performance, or in attention-dependent performance only. The networks identified here are provided as publicly available datasets. These networks can be applied in future studies to derive a low-dimensional representation of the overall WM brain activation.
Deletion of a Long-Range Dlx5 Enhancer Disrupts Inner Ear Development in Mice

Distal enhancers are thought to play important roles in the spatiotemporal regulation of gene expression during embryonic development, but few predicted enhancer elements have been shown to affect transcription of their endogenous genes or to alter phenotypes when disrupted. Here, we demonstrate that a 123.6-kb deletion within the mouse Slc25a13 gene is associated with reduced transcription of Dlx5, a gene located 660 kb away. Mice homozygous for the Slc25a13 deletion mutation [named hyperspin (hspn)] have malformed inner ears and are deaf with balance defects, whereas previously reported Slc25a13 knockout mice showed no phenotypic abnormalities. Inner ears of Slc25a13hspn/hspn mice have malformations similar to those of Dlx5−/− embryos, and Dlx5 expression is severely reduced in the otocyst but not the branchial arches of Slc25a13hspn/hspn embryos, indicating that the Slc25a13hspn deletion affects otic-specific enhancers of Dlx5. In addition, transheterozygous Slc25a13+/hspn Dlx5+/− mice exhibit noncomplementation with inner ear dysmorphologies similar to those of Slc25a13hspn/hspn and Dlx5−/−embryos, verifying a cis-acting effect of the Slc25a13hspn deletion on Dlx5 expression. CRISPR/Cas9-mediated deletions of putative enhancer elements located within the Slc25a13hspn deleted region failed to phenocopy the defects of Slc25a13hspn/hspn mice, suggesting the possibility of multiple enhancers with redundant functions. Our findings in mice suggest that analogous enhancer elements in the human SLC25A13 gene may regulate DLX5 expression and underlie the hearing loss that is associated with split-hand/-foot malformation 1 syndrome. Slc25a13hspn/hspn mice provide a new animal model for studying long-range enhancer effects on Dlx5 expression in the developing inner ear.
Cognitive Composites Domain Scores Related to Neuroimaging Biomarkers within Probable-Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment-Storage Subtype

The probable-amnestic (Pr-a) mild cognitive impairment (MCI)-storage subtype is a phenotype with 8.5 times more risk of conversion to dementia, mainly Alzheimer’s disease (AD), than the possible non-amnestic (Pss-na) MCI. The aim of this study was to find the optimized cognitive composites (CCs) domain scores most related to neuroimaging biomarkers within Pr-aMCI-storage subtype patients. The Fundació ACE (ACE) study with 20 Pr-aMCI-storage subtype subjects (MCI) were analyzed. All subjects underwent a neuropsychological assessment, a structural MRI, FDG-PET, and PIB-PET. The adjusted hippocampal volume (aHV) on MRI, the standard uptake value ratio (SUVR) on FDG-PET and PIB-PET SUVR measures were analyzed. The construction of the CCs domain scores, and the aHV on MRI and FDG-PET SUVR measures, were replicated in the parental AB255 study database (n = 133 MCI). Partial correlations adjusted by age, gender, and education were calculated with the associated p-value among every CC domain score and the neuroimaging biomarkers. The results were replicated in the “MCI due to AD” with memory storage impairments from ADNI. Delayed Recall CC domain score was significantly correlated with PIB-PET SUVR (β= –0.61, p = 0.003) in the ACE study and also with aHV on MRI (β= 0.27, p = 0.01) and FDG-PET SUVR (β= 0.27, p = 0.01) in the AB255 study. After a median survival time of 20.6 months, 85% from the ACE MCI converted to AD. The replication of our results in the ADNI dataset also confirmed our findings. Delayed Recall is the CC domain score best correlated with neuroimaging biomarkers associated with prodromal AD diagnosis.