Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinical Epidemiology Dovepress Open Access to Scientific and Medical Research Open Access Full Text Article Atrial Fibrillation in Patients with Ischemic Stroke: a Population-based Study

Background: Atrial fibrillation is a major risk factor for ischemic stroke. However, the prognostic impact of atrial fibrillation among patients with stroke is not fully clarified. We compared patient characteristics, including severity of stroke and comorbidity, quality of in-hospital care and outcomes in a cohort of first-time ischemic stroke patients with and without atrial fibrillation. Methods: Based on linkage of public medical databases, we did a population-based follow-up study among 3,849 stroke patients from the County of Aarhus, Denmark admitted in the period of 2003–2007 and prospectively registered in the Danish National Indicator Project. Results: Atrial fibrillation was associated with an adverse prognostic profile but not with an overall poorer quality of in-hospital care. Patients with atrial fibrillation had a longer total length of stay (median: 15 vs 9 days), and were at increased risk of in-hospital medical complications (adjusted relative risk = 1.48, 95% CI: 1.23–1.79) and recurrent stroke (adjusted hazard ratio = 1.30, 95% CI: 0.93–1.82) when compared with patients without atrial fibrillation. The adjusted hazard ratios for 30 days and one year mortality were 1.55 (95% CI: 1.20–2.01) and 1.55 (95% CI: 1.30–1.85), respectively. Patients not eligible to oral anticoagulant treatment had an increased risk of recurrent stroke (adjusted hazard ratio = 1.92, 95% CI: 1.19–3.11). Conclusion: Atrial fibrillation is associated with a poor outcome among patients with ischemic stroke particularly among patients, who are not eligible to oral anticoagulant treatment.
Fold Designability, Distribution, and Disease

Fold designability has been estimated by the number of families contained in that fold. Here, we show that among orthologous proteins, sequence divergence is higher for folds with greater numbers of families. Folds with greater numbers of families also tend to have families that appear more often in the proteome and greater promiscuity (the number of unique “partner” folds that the fold is found with within the same protein). We also find that many disease-related proteins have folds with relatively few families. In particular, a number of these proteins are associated with diseases occurring at high frequency. These results suggest that family counts reflect how certain structures are distributed in nature and is an important characteristic associated with many human diseases.
Evaluating dispersal potential of an invasive fish by the use of aerobic scope and osmoregulation capacity

Non-indigenous species (NIS) can impact marine biodiversity and ecosystem structure and function. Once introduced into a new region, secondary dispersal is limited by the physiology of the organism in relation to the ambient environment and by complex interactions between a suite of ecological factors such as presence of predators, competitors, and parasites. Early prediction of dispersal potential and future ‘area of impact’ is challenging, but also a great asset in taking appropriate management actions. Aerobic scope (AS) in fish has been linked to various fitness-related parameters, and may be valuable in determining dispersal potential of aquatic invasive species in novel environments. Round goby, Neogobius melanostomus, one of the most wide-ranging invasive fish species in Europe and North America, currently thrives in brackish and fresh water, but its ability to survive in high salinity waters is unknown to date. We show that AS in round goby is reduced by 30% and blood plasma osmolality increased (indicating reduced capacity for osmoregulation) at salinities approaching oceanic conditions, following slow ramping (5 PSU per week) and subsequent long-term acclimation to salinities ranging between 0 and 30 PSU (8 days at final treatment salinities before blood plasma osmolality measurements, 12–20 additional days before respirometry). Survival was also reduced at the highest salinities yet a significant proportion (61%) of the fish survived at 30 PSU. Reduced physiological performance at the highest salinities may affect growth and competitive ability under oceanic conditions, but to what extent reduced AS and osmoregulatory capacity will slow the current 30 km year-1 rate of advance of the species through the steep salinity gradient from the brackish Baltic Sea and into the oceanic North Sea remains speculative. An unintended natural experiment is in progress to test whether the rate of advance slows down. At the current rate of advance the species will reach the oceanic North Sea by 2018/2019, therefore time for taking preventative action is short.
Circumcision does not have effect on premature ejaculation: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

We attempted to evaluate whether circumcision has an effect on premature ejaculation. We searched three databases: PubMed, EMBASE and Google scholar on 1 May 2016 for eligible studies that referred to male sexual function after circumcision. No language restrictions were imposed. The Cochrane Collaboration's RevMan 5.2 software was employed for data analysis, and the fixed or the random‐effect model was selected depending on the heterogeneity. Twelve studies were included in the meta‐analysis, containing a total of 10019 circumcised and 11570 uncircumcised men. All studies were divided into five subgroups by types of study design to evaluate the effect of circumcision on premature ejaculation (PE). Intravaginal ejaculation latency time (IELT), difficulty of orgasm, erectile dysfunction (ED) and pain during intercourse were also assessed because PE was usually discussed along with these subjects. There were no significant differences in PE (odds ratio [OR], 0.90; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.72‐1.13; p = . 37) and orgasm (OR, 1.04; 95% CI, 0.89‐1.21; p = .65) between circumcised and uncircumcised group. However, IELT (OR, 0.72; 95% CI, 0.60‐0.83; p < .00001), ED (OR, 0.42;95% CI, 0.22‐0.78; p = .40) and pain during intercourse (OR, 0.36; 95% CI, 0.17‐0.76; p = .007) favoured circumcised group. Based on these findings, circumcision does not have effect on PE.
An Unusual Ingestion in an Older Person: Dentures

no statistically significant differences in plasma total bilirubin levels between individuals with AD (n = 143) and cognitively healthy controls (n = 1,553), although another study found significantly lower plasma bilirubin levels in individuals with AD (n = 101; 0.6 0.2 mg/ dL) than in cognitively healthy controls (n = 101; 0.9 0.2 mg/dL) (P < .001), and a third study found that of CSF bilirubin levels were significantly higher (P < .001) in individuals with AD than in controls. Mean CSF unconjugated bilirubin level was not significantly different between the groups. Additional larger prospective studies are needed to evaluate the role of plasma bilirubin as a biomarker in individuals with AD.
Control yourself or just eat what you like? Weight gain over a year is predicted by an interactive effect of response inhibition and implicit preference for snack foods.

OBJECTIVE Previous research showed a strong relation between response inhibition, overeating and overweight. It was shown that people with ineffective response inhibition are more susceptible to the temptations of palatable food, eat more and are more often overweight or obese. In addition the results of several studies suggest that what needs to be inhibited may be an affect-driven motivation for food. In the present longitudinal study, we therefore investigated the interplay of response inhibition and implicit preferences for snack foods in predicting weight gain. DESIGN In a sample of predominantly normal weight undergraduate female students, implicit preference for food, response inhibition, and body mass index (BMI) were measured. After 1 year, BMI was measured again. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Weight gain of the participants over a 1-year period. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS The results strongly confirmed our expectations: participants with strong implicit preferences for snack foods and low inhibitory capacity gained the most weight. These findings imply that ineffective response inhibition may render people vulnerable to excessive or impulsive behavior in general, but that the manifestation thereof is determined by domain-specific preferences or needs.
Deep learning for malicious flow detection

Cyber security has grown up to be a hot issue in recent years. How to identify potential malware becomes a challenging task. To tackle this challenge, we adopt deep learning approaches and perform flow detection on real data. However, real data often encounters an issue of imbalanced data distribution which will lead to a gradient dilution issue. When training a neural network, this problem will not only result in a bias toward the majority class but show the inability to learn from the minority classes. In this paper, we propose a Tree-Shaped Deep Neural Network (TSDNN) which classifies the data in a layer-wise manner. To better learn from the minority classes, we propose a Quantity Dependent Backpropagation (QDBP) algorithm which incorporates the knowledge of the disparity between classes. We evaluate our method on an imbalanced data set. Experimental result demonstrates that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and justifies that the proposed method is able to overcome the difficulty of imbalanced learning. We also conduct a partial flow experiment which shows the feasibility of realtime detection and a zero-shot learning experiment which justifies the generalization capability of deep learning in cyber security.
ComX-Induced Exoproteases Degrade ComX in Bacillus subtilis PS-216

Gram-positive bacteria use peptides as auto-inducing (AI) signals to regulate the production of extracellular enzymes (e.g., proteases). ComX is an AI peptide, mostly known for its role in the regulation of bacterial competence and surfactant production in Bacillus subtilis. These two traits are regulated accordingly to the bacterial population size, thus classifying ComX as a quorum sensing signal. ComX also indirectly regulates exoprotease production through the intermediate transcriptional regulator DegQ. We here use this peptide-based AI system (the ComQXPA system) as a model to address exoprotease regulation by ComX in biofilms. We also investigate the potential of ComX regulated proteases to degrade the ComX AI peptide. Results indicate that ComX indeed induces the expression of aprE, the gene for the major serine protease subtilisin, and stimulates overall exoprotease production in biofilms of B. subtilis PS-216 and several other B. subtilis soil isolates. We also provide evidence that these exoproteases can degrade ComX. The ComX biological activity decay is reduced in the spent media of floating biofilms with low proteolytic activity found in the comP and degQ mutants. ComX biological activity decay can be restored by the addition of subtilisin to such media. In contrast, inhibition of metalloproteases by EDTA reduces ComX biological activity decay. This suggests that both serine and metalloproteases, which are induced by ComX, are ultimately capable of degrading this signaling peptide. This work brings novel information on regulation of exoproteases in B. subtilis floating biofilms and reveals that these proteolytic enzymes degrade the AI signaling peptide ComX, which is also a major determinant of their expression in biofilms.
Linear Maximum Margin Classifier for Learning from Uncertain Data

In this paper, we propose a maximum margin classifier that deals with uncertainty in data input. More specifically, we reformulate the SVM framework such that each training example can be modeled by a multi-dimensional Gaussian distribution described by its mean vector and its covariance matrix—the latter modeling the uncertainty. We address the classification problem and define a cost function that is the expected value of the classical SVM cost when data samples are drawn from the multi-dimensional Gaussian distributions that form the set of the training examples. Our formulation approximates the classical SVM formulation when the training examples are isotropic Gaussians with variance tending to zero. We arrive at a convex optimization problem, which we solve efficiently in the primal form using a stochastic gradient descent approach. The resulting classifier, which we name SVM with Gaussian Sample Uncertainty (SVM-GSU), is tested on synthetic data and five publicly available and popular datasets; namely, the MNIST, WDBC, DEAP, TV News Channel Commercial Detection, and TRECVID MED datasets. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Metabolic effects of sleep disruption, links to obesity and diabetes

Purpose of review To highlight the adverse metabolic effects of sleep disruption and to open ground for research aimed at preventive measures. This area of research is especially relevant given the increasing prevalence of voluntary sleep curtailment, sleep disorders, diabetes, and obesity. Recent findings Epidemiological studies have established an association between decreased self-reported sleep duration and an increased incidence of type 2 diabetes (T2D), obesity, and cardiovascular disease. Experimental laboratory studies have demonstrated that decreasing either the amount or quality of sleep decreases insulin sensitivity and decreases glucose tolerance. Experimental sleep restriction also causes physiological and behavioral changes that promote a positive energy balance. Although sleep restriction increases energy expenditure because of increased wakefulness, it can lead to a disproportionate increase in food intake, decrease in physical activity, and weight gain. Summary Sleep disruption has detrimental effects on metabolic health. These insights may help in the development of new preventive and therapeutic approaches against obesity and T2D based on increasing the quality and/or quantity of sleep. Video abstract http://links.lww. com/COE/A6
Combustion Characteristics of Fallen Fall Leaves from Ornamental Trees in City and Forest Parks

Combustion characteristics of leaves fallen off ornamental trees in city and forest parks were evaluated. The moisture content of the leaves at the time of falling was between Wr = 36.1 and 46.9%. The average contents of the individual elements in the combustible material were Cdaf = 48.1%, Hdaf = 6.1%, Ndaf = 1.2%, Sdaf = 0.1%, and Odaf = 44.6%. The resulting ash from the dry leaves varied between Ad = 4.8 and 13.1%. The heat of combustion of the dry leaves was between Qs = 16,046 and 20,247 kJ.kg-1, and the lower heating value was between Qn = 13,479 and 19,120 kJ.kg-1. The results were compared with dry firewood of hard deciduous trees. The higher heating value of the dry leaves was 11.7% lower and the lower heating value was also lower by 15.1%. The decline of these basic combustion characteristics is caused mostly by its high ash content and to a smaller extent by the increased nitrogen content.
Influence of host resistance on viral adaptation : hepatitis C virus as a case study

License. The full terms of the License are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/. Non-commercial uses of the work are permitted without any further permission from Dove Medical Press Limited, provided the work is properly attributed. Permissions beyond the scope of the License are administered by Dove Medical Press Limited. Information on how to request permission may be found at: http://www.dovepress. com/permissions.php Infection and Drug Resistance 2015:8 63–74 Infection and Drug Resistance Dovepress
Structure-function covariation with nonfeeding ecological variables influences evolution of feeding specialization in Carnivora

Biomechanical analyses across Carnivora indicate nondietary influences on skull shape and evolution of feeding adaptations. Skull shape convergence is pervasive among vertebrates. Although this is frequently inferred to indicate similar functional underpinnings, neither the specific structure-function linkages nor the selective environments in which the supposed functional adaptations arose are commonly identified and tested. We demonstrate that nonfeeding factors relating to sexual maturity and precipitation-related arboreality also can generate structure-function relationships in the skulls of carnivorans (dogs, cats, seals, and relatives) through covariation with masticatory performance. We estimated measures of masticatory performance related to ecological variables that covary with cranial shape in the mammalian order Carnivora, integrating geometric morphometrics and finite element analyses. Even after accounting for phylogenetic autocorrelation, cranial shapes are significantly correlated to both feeding and nonfeeding ecological variables, and covariation with both variable types generated significant masticatory performance gradients. This suggests that mechanisms of obligate shape covariation with nonfeeding variables can produce performance changes resembling those arising from feeding adaptations in Carnivora.
Online Active Learning in Data Stream Regression Using Uncertainty Sampling Based on Evolving Generalized Fuzzy Models

In this paper, we propose three criteria for efficient sample selection in case of data stream regression problems within an online active learning context. The selection becomes important whenever the target values, which guide the update of the regressors as well as the implicit model structures, are costly or time-consuming to measure and also in case when very fast models updates are required to cope with stream mining real-time demands. Reducing the selected samples as much as possible while keeping the predictive accuracy of the models on a high level is, thus, a central challenge. This should be ideally achieved in unsupervised and single-pass manner. Our selection criteria rely on three aspects: 1) the extrapolation degree combined with the model's nonlinearity degree , which is measured in terms of a new specific homogeneity criterion among adjacent local approximators; 2) the uncertainty in model outputs, which can be measured in terms of confidence intervals using so-called adaptive local error bars — we integrate a weighted localization of an incremental noise level estimator and propose formulas for online merging of local error bars; 3) the uncertainty in model parameters, which is estimated by the so-called A-optimality criterion, which relies on the Fisher information matrix. The selection criteria are developed in combination with evolving generalized Takagi–Sugeno (TS) fuzzy models (containing rules in arbitrarily rotated position), as it could be shown in previous publications that these outperform conventional evolving TS models (containing axis-parallel rules). The results based on three high-dimensional real-world streaming problems show that a model update based on only 10%–20% selected samples can still achieve similar accumulated model errors over time to the case when performing a full model update on all samples. This can be achieved with a negligible sensitivity on the size of the active learning latency buffer. Random sampling with the same percentages of samples selected, however, achieved much higher error rates. Hence, the intelligence in our sample selection concept leads to an economic balance between model accuracy and measurement as well computational costs for model updates.
Leisure time activities that predict initiation, progression and reduction of cannabis use: a prospective, population-based panel survey.

INTRODUCTION AND AIMS Frequent cannabis consumption can lead to severe physical and mental harm. As cannabis is often consumed in leisure time, this study aimed at identifying differences in leisure time activities that predicted the severity of cannabis use. DESIGN AND METHODS In a prospective population-based survey on cannabis use a cohort of 5025 subjects aged 13-29 years were assessed by telephone interview and followed up 3 years later. Different leisure time activities and the persons (e.g. partner, friend, sibling) the activities were spent with were analysed for the initiation, progression and reduction/cessation of cannabis use over time using multinomial and ordered logistical regression models. RESULTS The persons the leisure time was spent with at baseline led to a higher probability of initiation and progression of cannabis use over time than the type of leisure time activity. There also was a tendency for tobacco use to increase during the progression phase and to remain high after a reduction/cessation of cannabis use. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS The influence of persons the leisure time was spent with was of higher relevance to most phases of cannabis use than the type of leisure time activity.
Environmental Aging Effect on Tensile Properties of GFRP Made of Furfuryl Alcohol Bioresin Compared to Epoxy

AbstractBiocomposites are emerging as a possible sustainable alternative in structural applications, and as a result, a major focus should be on their durability. This study focuses on the environmental aging of bioresin glass fiber–reinforced polymer (GFRP) through immersion in saltwater at elevated temperatures. The resin is furfuryl alcohol based, derived from renewable resources, such as corncobs and sugarcanes. Deterioration was quantified by tensile testing of unidirectional bioresin GFRP coupons at various stages of exposure, and compared to conventional epoxy GFRP coupons under the same conditions. A total of 150 specimens were exposed to three different environments, namely 23°, 40°, and 55°C water with 3% salt concentration, for up to 300 days. It was found that the bioresin GFRP retained 80, 44, and 39% of its original strength at the three temperatures, respectively. On the other hand, the epoxy GFRP exhibited 86, 72, and 61% strength retentions, respectively. No reductions occurred to the You.
Population specific fitness response of Drosophila subobscura to lead pollution

Abstract Differences in heavy metal tolerance among separate populations of the same species have often been interpreted as local adaptation. Persistence of differences after removing the stressor indicates that mechanisms responsible for the increased tolerance were genetically determined. Drosophila subobscura Collin (Diptera: Drosophilidae) populations were sampled from two localities with different history of heavy metal pollution, and reared for eight generations in the laboratory on a standard medium and on media with different concentrations of lead (Pb). To determine whether flies from different natural populations exposed to the Pb‐contaminated media in the laboratory show population specific variability in fitness components over generations, experimental groups with different concentrations of lead were assayed in three generations (F2, F5, and F8) for fecundity, developmental time, and egg‐to‐adult viability. On the contaminated medium, fecundity was reduced in later generations and viability was increased, irrespective of the environmental origin of populations. For both populations, developmental time showed a tendency of slowing down on media with lead. Faster development was observed in later generations. Preadaptation to contamination, meaning higher fecundity, higher viability, and faster egg to adult development in all studied generations, was found in D. subobscura originating from the locality with a higher level of heavy metal pollution.