Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inhibition of endothelin-converting enzyme attenuates transplant vasculopathy and rejection in rat cardiac allografts.

BACKGROUND Transplant vasculopathy in kidney and heart allografts is associated with marked elevation of endothelin-1 (ET-1), but a role for ET-1 in the pathogenesis of transplant vasculopathy and chronic rejection has not been established. We, therefore, tested whether inhibition of ET-1-converting enzyme by phosphoramidon (PA) would attenuate rejection in a rat model of chronic cardiac allograft rejection (Lewis [LEW] to F344). METHODS Donor LEW rats were pretreated 24 hr before transplantation with a bolus injection of vehicle (water) or PA. Twenty- four hour after transplantation, water or PA was continuously administered through an osmotic mini-pump. Plasma ET-1 levels in Fisher 344 (F344) recipients were 0.8+/-0.1 pg/ml in water-treated rats and 0.2+/-0.2 pg/ml (P<0.01) in PA-treated rats, demonstrating that the PA treatment protocol effectively lowered ET-1 biosynthesis. RESULTS LEW cardiac allografts treated with water survived (i.e., palpable heart beat) for 16.0+/-0.5 days (n=6). Inhibition of ET-1 secretion by PA improved allograft survival to 28.8+/-3.3 days (P<0.01, n=8). An analysis of cardiac arteries demonstrated that PA treatment attenuated transplant vasculopathy. A morphometric scale of neointima formation (0-5) was 1.4+/-0.2 and 3.6+/-0.2 in PA- or water-treated rats, respectively (P<0.01). The percent of luminal occlusion, as measured by microscopic image analysis, was 19+/-6% in PA-treated animals and 38+/-6% (P<0.01) in animals treated with water. PA treatment also reduced infiltration of ED-1-positive monocytes/macrophages into the vascular neointima. CONCLUSIONS We conclude that, even in the absence of concomitant immunosuppression, inhibition of ET-1 biosynthesis significantly attenuates transplant vasculopathy and improves survival of LEW to F344 cardiac allografts.
Tiny web services: design and implementation of interoperable and evolvable sensor networks

We present a web service based approach to enable an evolutionary sensornet system where additional sensor nodes may be added after the initial deployment. The functionality and data provided by the new nodes is exposed in a structured manner, so that multiple applications may access them. The result is a highly inter-operable system where multiple applications can share a common evolving sensor substrate. A key challenge in using web services on resource constrained sensor nodes is the energy and bandwidth overhead of the structured data formats used in web services. Our work provides a detailed evaluation of the overheads and presents an implementation on a representative sensor platform with 48k of ROM, 10k of RAM and a 802.15. 4 radio. We identify design choices that optimize the web service operation on resource constrained sensor nodes, including support for low latency messaging and sleep modes, quantifying trade-offs between the design generality and resource efficiency. We also prototyped an example application, for home energy management, demonstrating how evolutionary sensor networks can be supported with our approach.
High-Level Language Production in Parkinson's Disease: A Review

This paper discusses impairments of high-level, complex language production in Parkinson's disease (PD), defined as sentence and discourse production, and situates these impairments within the framework of current psycholinguistic theories of language production. The paper comprises three major sections, an overview of the effects of PD on the brain and cognition, a review of the literature on language production in PD, and a discussion of the stages of the language production process that are impaired in PD. Overall, the literature converges on a few common characteristics of language production in PD: reduced information content, impaired grammaticality, disrupted fluency, and reduced syntactic complexity. Many studies also document the strong impact of differences in cognitive ability on language production. Based on the data, PD affects all stages of language production including conceptualization and functional and positional processing. Furthermore, impairments at all stages appear to be exacerbated by impairments in cognitive abilities.
Increased seroprevalence of human herpes virus-8 in renal transplant recipients in Saudi Arabia.

BACKGROUND Human herpes virus-8 (HHV-8) is a herpes virus that is always associated with Kaposi's sarcoma. Previous studies suggested a high rate of Kaposi's sarcoma in renal transplant patients in Saudi Arabia. The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of HHV-8 in Saudi renal transplant recipients and healthy controls. METHODS An immunofluorescence technique was used to detect antibodies to the latent nuclear antigen (LANA) of HHV-8 in renal transplant patients, members of a family affected with Kaposi sarcoma, as well as healthy controls. RESULTS A significantly higher HHV-8 seroprevalence was detected in renal transplant recipients from Saudi Arabia (27 out of 150; 18%) and in members of a family affected with Kaposi sarcoma (seven out of 10; 70%) relative to the seroprevalence in healthy controls (10 out of 577; 1.7%). Seropositivity for HHV-8 in these transplant patients was not significantly influenced by: the existence of relatives with kidney failure, the donors' country of origin, the recipients' home region within Saudi Arabia, the haemodialysis centre, the time that elapsed since the renal transplantation operation and the immunosuppressive regimen used. CONCLUSION The present results provide some explanation for the previously noted high incidence of Kaposi's sarcoma in Saudi transplant patients.
Attitudes Toward Medical and Mental Health Care Delivered Via Telehealth Applications Among Rural and Urban Primary Care Patients

Adequate health care services are often not available in rural and remote areas, and this problem is expected to grow worse in the near future. “Telehealth” interventions represent a strategy for addressing access to care problems. We examined and compared attitudes toward medical and mental health care delivered via telehealth applications among adult rural (n = 112) and urban (n = 78) primary care patients. We also examined attitudes toward telehealth applications among a subset of patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—a group likely in need of specialized services. Both urban and rural patients were receptive to receiving medical and psychiatric services via telehealth. There were few meaningful differences across variables between urban and rural patients, and there were no meaningful differences by PTSD status. These findings support the feasibility of telehealth applications, particularly for rural patients who may not otherwise receive needed services.
Adjusting Windows: Balancing Information Awareness with Intrusion

The World Wide Web has quickly become a primary source of information for a variety of real-time topics, such as news headlines, stock market data, sports scores, and weather forecasts. However, achieving a high degree of awareness for this real-time information is particularly challenging as users are often performing other necessary tasks. As a result, techniques for notifying users of new or updated information must do so in a manner that is both timely and non-intrusive to their current task. In this paper we propose a new awareness technique, called Adjusting Windows, suitable for informing users of updated information on real-time information sites. The technique has been fully implemented within a new web browser application. We conducted a small user study in order to compare Adjusting Windows against two other awareness techniques in terms of awareness time, awareness strategy, and overall preference. Analysis of the data demonstrated that Adjusting Windows provided the best balance of information awareness with intrusion, and was preferred by many of the users.
Safety of Theta Burst Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Theta burst stimulation (TBS) protocols have recently emerged as a method to transiently alter cortical excitability in the human brain through repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation. TBS involves applying short trains of stimuli at high frequency repeated at intervals of 200 milliseconds. Because repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation is known to carry a risk of seizures, safety guidelines have been established. TBS has the theoretical potential of conferring an even higher risk of seizure than other repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation protocols because it delivers high-frequency bursts. In light of the recent report of a seizure induced by TBS, the safety of this new protocol deserves consideration. We performed an English language literature search and reviewed all studies published from May 2004 to December 2009 in which TBS was applied. The adverse events were documented, and crude risk was calculated. The majority of adverse events attributed to TBS were mild and occurred in 5% of subjects. Based on this review, TBS seems to be a safe and efficacious technique. However, given its novelty, it should be applied with caution. Additionally, this review highlights the need for rigorous documentation of adverse events associated with TBS and intensity dosing studies to assess the seizure risk associated with various stimulation parameters (e.g., frequency, intensity, and location).
Mappings between vocal tract area functions, vocal tract resonances and speech formants for multiple speakers

This study looks at mappings between vocal tract area functions (obtained from MRI scans), vocal tract resonances, and speech formants for five New Zealand English (NZE) speakers. All eleven NZE monophthongs were investigated, for each speaker. Principal component (PC) analysis on the area functions of both the individual speakers and combined speaker set is performed. In all cases the first two PC account for most the variances in the data. The first two PCs of the vocal tract area accounted for between 71-86% of the variance across the data for the individual speakers, and each was highly correlated between speakers. Across the combined speaker set the first two PCs accounted for 60.5% of the variance, and remained related to phonetic height and backness. This can clearly be seen when the transformed area function data is compared to the first two vocal tract resonances and speech formants.
FastCDC: a Fast and Efficient Content-Defined Chunking Approach for Data Deduplication

Content-Defined Chunking (CDC) has been playing a key role in data deduplication systems in the past 15 years or so due to its high redundancy detection ability. However, existing CDC-based approaches introduce heavy CPU overhead because they declare the chunk cutpoints by computing and judging the rolling hashes of the data stream byte by byte. In this paper, we propose FastCDC, a Fast and efficient CDC approach, that builds and improves on the latest Gear-based CDC approach, one of the fastest CDC methods to our knowledge. The key idea behind FastCDC is the combined use of three key techniques, namely, simplifying and enhancing the hash judgment to address our observed challenges facing Gear-based CDC, skipping sub-minimum chunk cut-point to further speed up CDC, and normalizing the chunk-size distribution in a small specified region to address the problem of the decreased deduplication ratio stemming from the cut-point skipping. Our evaluation results show that, by using a combination of the three techniques, FastCDC is about 10× faster than the best of open-source Rabin-based CDC, and about 3× faster than the state-of-the-art Gear- and AE-based CDC, while achieving nearly the same deduplication ratio as the classic Rabin-based approach.
Changes in retinal sensitivity in geographic atrophy progression as measured by microperimetry.

PURPOSE To characterize changes in macular sensitivity during geographic atrophy (GA) progression using microperimetry. METHODS Retinal sensitivity in the macular area was evaluated by microperimetry in 10 patients with bilateral GA, with adequate data obtained in 9 of 10 patients (n = 18 eyes). Patients had been enrolled in an interventional trial in which one eye had been randomized to treatment and the other eye observed. No treatment effect with regard to GA growth and microperimetric measurements was detected, and all eyes were analyzed. Microperimetric assessments of the central 20° of the macula were performed every 6 months over 24 months. Parameters analyzed included number of scotomatous points, mean retinal sensitivity of responding points, and fixation stability. Autofluorescence imaging and fundus photography were also obtained. RESULTS Microperimetric parameters demonstrated statistically significant changes as a function of time. Mean number of scotomatous points increased significantly with time (P = 0.004) at a rate of 4.4 points/year. Mean retinal sensitivities of all points, all responding points, and all perilesional points all decreased significantly with time (P < 0.003), as did fixation quality within the 2° and 4° circles (P < 0.002). The growth of GA lesion area was associated with the changes in the number of scotomatous points (P = 0.01) but not with changes in the other microperimetric parameters. CONCLUSIONS Macular sensitivity and fixation quality undergo progressive change during the GA progression, reflecting alterations in macular function extending beyond the GA lesion proper. Microperimetric measurements may provide useful functional outcome measures for the clinical study of GA.
The Lesser Known Challenge of Climate Change: Thermal Variance and Sex-Reversal in Vertebrates with Temperature-Dependent Sex Determination

Climate change is expected to disrupt biological systems. Particularly susceptible are species with temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD), as in many reptiles. While the potentially devastating effect of rising mean temperatures on sex ratios in TSD species is appreciated, the consequences of increased thermal variance predicted to accompany climate change remain obscure. Surprisingly, no study has tested if the effect of thermal variance around high-temperatures (which are particularly relevant given climate change predictions) has the same or opposite effects as around lower temperatures. Here we show that sex ratios of the painted turtle (Chrysemys picta) were reversed as fluctuations increased around low and high unisexual mean-temperatures. Unexpectedly, the developmental and sexual responses around female-producing temperatures were decoupled in a more complex manner than around male-producing values. Our novel observations are not fully explained by existing ecological models of development and sex determination, and provide strong evidence that thermal fluctuations are critical for shaping the biological outcomes of climate change.
Recurrent Image Captioner: Describing Images with Spatial-Invariant Transformation and Attention Filtering

Along with the prosperity of recurrent neural network in modelling sequential data and the power of attention mechanism in automatically identify salient information, image captioning, a.k. a. , image description, has been remarkably advanced in recent years. Nonetheless, most existing paradigms may suffer from the deficiency of invariance to images with different scaling, rotation, etc.; and effective integration of standalone attention to form a holistic end-to-end system. In this paper, we propose a novel image captioning architecture, termed Recurrent Image Captioner (\textbf{RIC}), which allows visual encoder and language decoder to coherently cooperate in a recurrent manner. Specifically, we first equip CNN-based visual encoder with a differentiable layer to enable spatially invariant transformation of visual signals. Moreover, we deploy an attention filter module (differentiable) between encoder and decoder to dynamically determine salient visual parts. We also employ bidirectional LSTM to preprocess sentences for generating better textual representations. Besides, we propose to exploit variational inference to optimize the whole architecture. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets (i.e., Flickr8k, Flickr30k and MS COCO) demonstrate the superiority of our proposed architecture as compared to most of the state-of-the-art methods.
Optimal Variance Structures and Performance Improvement of Synchronous Assembly Lines

Contemporary management theories such as Just-in-Time and Total Quality Management emphasize variance reduction as a critical step in improving system performance. But little is said about how such efforts should be directed. Suppose a manager has only limited resources for variance reduction efforts. How should she allocate them among a set of competing activities? Which activity should receive the highest priority? We explore such questions in the context of a synchronous assembly line where processing times are variable, incomplete jobs are reworked at the end of the line, and the objective is to minimize the total expected work overload. Our results indicate that the station with the highest variance may not always be the best choice for variance reduction. Identifying the set of stations that should receive variance reduction in an optimal solution is not trivial. Moreover, the variances at these stations may not be reduced by the same amount or to the same level. We establish that the remaining variances among stations that receive variance reduction must conform to one of two preferred structures: equal variance or spike-shaped. Dominance results are presented to identify the set of stations and the amount of reduction in an optimal solution.
Economic Theory and Cognitive Science

In this study, Don Ross explores the relationship of economics to other branches of behavioral science, asking, in the course of his analysis, under what interpretation economics is a sound empirical science. The book explores the relationships between economic theory and the theoretical foundations of related disciplines that are relevant to the day-to-day work of economics—the cognitive and behavioral sciences. It asks whether the increasingly sophisticated techniques of microeconomic analysis have revealed any deep empirical regularities—whether technical improvement represents improvement in any other sense. Casting Daniel Dennett and Kenneth Binmore as its intellectual heroes, the book proposes a comprehensive model of economic theory that, Ross argues, does not supplant but recovers the core neoclassical insights and counters the caricaturish conception of neoclassicism so derided by advocates of behavioral or evolutionary economics. Because he approaches his topic from the viewpoint of the philosophy of science, Ross devotes one chapter to the philosophical theory and terminology on which his argument depends and another to related philosophical issues. Two chapters provide the theoretical background in economics, one covering developments in neoclassical microeconomics and the other treating behavioral and experimental economics and evolutionary game theory. The three chapters at the heart of the argument then apply theses from the philosophy of cognitive science to foundational problems for economic theory. In these chapters economists will find a genuinely new way of thinking about the implications of cognitive science for economics and cognitive scientists will find in economic behavior a new testing site for the explanations of cognitive science.
Comparison of initiation rates of encephalomyocarditis virus and host protein synthesis in infected cells

The relative initiation rates for encephalomyocarditis virus mRNA and host mRNA's in infected cells were measured using two independent techniques. In both cases the results showed that viral mRNA initiates at a much higher rate than host mRNA'S. This difference was observed midway in the infectious cycle, well before virus-induced cytopathic effects (leakage of low-molecular-weight metabolites, failure to exclude trypan blue) were apparent. These results confirm that encephalomyocarditis viral mRNA is a more efficient initiator than host mRNA's in vivo, as has previously been demonstrated in in vitro experiments.
Heterologous Expression of Candida albicans Cell Wall-Associated Adhesins in Saccharomyces cerevisiae Reveals Differential Specificities in Adherence and Biofilm Formation and in Binding Oral Streptococcus gordonii

ABSTRACT Colonization and infection of the human host by opportunistic pathogen Candida albicans derive from an ability of this fungus to colonize mucosal tissues and prosthetic devices within the polymicrobial communities present. To determine the functions of C. albicans cell wall proteins in interactions with host or bacterial molecules, Saccharomyces cerevisiae was utilized as a surrogate host to express C. albicans cell wall proteins Als3p, Eap1p, Hwp1p, and Rbt1p. Salivary pellicle and fibrinogen were identified as novel substrata for Als3p and Hwp1p, while only Als3p mediated adherence of S. cerevisiae to basement membrane collagen type IV. Parental S. cerevisiae cells failed to form biofilms on salivary pellicle, polystyrene, or silicone, but cells expressing Als3p or Hwp1p exhibited significant attachment to each surface. Virulence factor Rbt1p also conferred lower-level binding to salivary pellicle and polystyrene. S. cerevisiae cells expressing Eap1p formed robust biofilms upon polystyrene surfaces but not salivary pellicle. Proteins Als3p and Eap1p, and to a lesser degree Hwp1p, conferred upon S. cerevisiae the ability to bind cells of the oral primary colonizing bacterium Streptococcus gordonii. These interactions, which occurred independently of amyloid aggregate formation, provide the first examples of specific C. albicans surface proteins serving as receptors for bacterial adhesins. Streptococcus gordonii did not bind parental S. cerevisiae or cells expressing Rbt1p. Taken collectively, these data suggest that a network of cell wall proteins comprising Als3p, Hwp1p, and Eap1p, with complementary adhesive functions, promotes interactions of C. albicans with host and bacterial molecules, thus leading to effective colonization within polymicrobial communities.
Biomarker Evidence of Relatively Stable Community Structure in the Northern South China Sea during the Last Glacial and Holocene

High-resolution molecular abundance records for several marine biomarkers during the last glacial and Holocene have been generated for core MD05-2904 (19°27.32’N, 116°15.15’E, 2066 m water depth) from the northern South China Sea. The UK(subscript k1)37 SST record indicates a 4.4°C cooling during the Last Glacial Maximum for this site, consistent with previous reconstructions. The contents of C37 alkenones, dinosterol, brassicasterol, and C30 alkyl diols are used as productivity proxies for haptophytes, dinoflagellates, diatoms, and eustigmatophytes, respectively. These records reveal that both individual phytoplankton group and total productivity increased by several factors during the LGM compared with those for the Holocene, in response to increased nutrient supply. However, the community structure based on biomarker percentages remained relatively stable during the last glacial-Holocene transition, although there were short-term oscillations.