Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Romiplostim (Nplate®) as an effective radiation countermeasure to improve survival and platelet recovery in mice

Abstract Purpose: Rapid depletion of white blood cells, platelets, and reticulocytes are hallmarks of hematopoietic injury of acute radiation syndrome (H-ARS) and, if left untreated, can lead to severe health consequences including death. While the granulocyte colony stimulating factors (G-CSF) filgrastim (Neupogen®), pegfilgrastim (Neulasta®), and sargramostim (Leukine®) are approved to increase survival in patients exposed to a myelosuppressive dose of radiation, no medical countermeasure is currently available for treatment of the thrombocytopenia that also results following radiation exposure. Romiplostim (Nplate®), a thrombopoietin receptor agonist, is the first FDA-approved thrombopoiesis-stimulating protein for the treatment of low platelet (PLT) counts in adults with chronic immune thrombocytopenia. Herein, we present the results of an analysis in mice of romiplostim as a medical countermeasure to improve survival and PLT recovery following acute radiation. Materials and methods: Male and female C57BL/6J mice (11 − 12 weeks of age, n = 21/sex/group) were total body irradiated (TBI) with 6.8 Gy X-rays that reduces 30-day survival to 30% (LD70/30). Vehicle, romiplostim, and/or pegfilgrastim were administered subcutaneously beginning 24 h after TBI for 1–5 days. Evaluation parameters included 30-day survival, pharmacokinetics, and hematology. Results: Full or maximal efficacy with an ∼40% increase in survival was achieved after a single 30 µg/kg dose of romiplostim. No further survival benefit was seen with higher (100 µg/kg) or more frequent dosing (3 or 5 once daily doses at 30 µg/kg) of romiplostim or combined treatment with pegfilgrastim. Pharmacodynamic analysis revealed that the platelet nadir was not as low and recovery was faster in the irradiated mice treated with romiplostim when compared with irradiated control animals (Day 8 versus 10 nadir; Day 22 versus 29 recovery to near baseline). Platelet volume also increased more rapidly after romiplostim injection. Kinetic profiles of other hematology parameters were similar between TBI romiplostim-treated and control mice. Peak serum levels of romiplostim in TBI mice occurred 4 − 24 h (Tmax) after injection with a t1/2 of ∼24 h. Cmax values were at ∼6 ng/ml after 30 µg/kg ± TBI and ∼200 ng/ml after 300 µg/kg. A 10-fold higher romiplostim dose increased the AUClast values by ∼35-fold. Conclusion: A single injection of romiplostim administered 24 h after TBI is a promising radiation medical countermeasure that dramatically increased survival, with or without pegfilgrastim, and hastened PLT recovery in mice.
Adiabatic SRAM with a large margin of VT variation by controlling the cell-power-line and word-line voltage

An adiabatic 1-kb SRAM circuit was designed, which enables gradual charging during writing and reading while maintaining a large VDD so that the problems of VT variation and electromigration in the nanocircuit can be resolved. In the writing mode, the voltage of the memory cell power line is reduced to ground gradually using a high-resistivity nMOSFET, and we turn off the nMOSFET so that the memory cell power line is set in a high-impedance state. Then, we can write data easily by inputting adiabatic signal from one bit line, while the other bit line is set to ground. For reading, a verifying operation is proposed for resolving the electromigration problem. The word line voltage is changed stepwise while the voltages of the bit lines are verified. The reading method enables a gradual current flow in the memory cell. We designed the cell layout and found that there is no area penalty. In addition, a new charge recycle circuit with tank capacitors is proposed.
Firing Frequency of Leaky Integrate-and-fire Neurons with Synaptic Current Dynamics

We consider a model of an integrate-and-fire neuron with synaptic current dynamics, in which the synaptic time constant t' is much smaller than the membrane time constant t. We calculate analytically the firing frequency of such a neuron for inputs described by a random Gaussian process. We find that the first order correction to the frequency due to t' is proportional to the square root of the ratio between these time constants, zt'/t. This implies that the correction is important even when the synaptic time constant is small compared with that of the potential. The frequency of a neuron with t'q 0 can be reduced to that of the basic IF neuron (corresponding to t'=0) using an ‘‘effective’’ threshold which has a linear dependence on zt'/t. Numerical simulations show a very good agreement with the analytical result, and permit an extrapolation of the ‘‘effective’’ threshold to higher orders in zt'/t. The obtained frequency agrees with simulation data for a wide range of parameters. 7 1998 Academic Press
Cellular Seismology Analysis of the Western United States: Comparing and Contrasting the San Andreas Transform Zone, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the Western Intraplate Hinterland Region

The western United States (WUS) is an area of high seismic activity. The Juan de Fuca, Pacific, and North American plates all meet in this area, resulting in zones of subduction and strike-slip faulting, as well as other styles of faulting, all of which make it prone to frequent, as well as large magnitude earthquakes. In this study the WUS encompasses the area between 30° to 52°N and 110° to 131°W. The diverse seismicity and tectonics of the area makes the study of seismo-tectonic processes in the WUS important not only in terms of basic geoscience, but also in terms of earthquake hazards. Understanding earthquake processes in this region is critical because of the potential for devastating earthquakes to occur along the Pacific-Juan de Fuca-North American plate boundary system. Large WUS earthquakes do not, however, only occur along these plate boundaries. They can also happen in intraplate environments within the WUS. The WUS includes three distinct tectonic regions for which this study compares and contrasts characteristics of seismic activity: the Cascadia subduction region, the San Andreas strike-slip region, and a continental extension/intraplate region to the east of the major plate boundaries referred to here as the “Western Intraplate Hinterland Region”. To help make these comparisons, the method of “Cellular Seismology” (CS; Kafka, 2002, 2007), is used here to investigate similarities and differences in the extent to which past earthquakes delineate zones where future earthquakes are likely to occur in the WUS and its various tectonic sub-regions. The results of this study show that while there seems to be a “signal” of CS predictability being dependent on tectonic region, that signal is subtle in most cases, meaning that there is not a significant difference in the level of CS predictability between the regions stated here. This means we can apply CS predictability studies widely across different regions, however, it also counterintuitively suggests that tectonic understanding of a region does not necessarily elucidate how well past seismicity predicts spatial patterns of earthquakes in a region.
The Opioid-Sparing Effect of Perioperative Dexmedetomidine Plus Sufentanil Infusion during Neurosurgery: A Retrospective Study

Background: Approximately 60% of patients experience moderate-to-severe pain after neurosurgery, which primarily occurs in the first 24–72 h. Despite this, improved postoperative analgesia solutions after neurosurgery have not yet been devised. This retrospective study was conducted to evaluate the effect of intra- and post-operative infusions of dexmedetomidine (DEX) plus sufentanil on the quality of postoperative analgesia in patients undergoing neurosurgery. Methods: One hundred and sixty-three post-neurosurgery patients were divided into two groups: Group D (DEX infusion at 0.5 μg·kg−1 for 10 min, then adjusted to 0.3 μg·kg−1·h−1 until incision suturing) and Group ND (no DEX infusion during surgery). Patient-controlled analgesia was administered for 72 h after surgery (Group D: sufentanil 0.02 μg·kg−1·h−1 plus DEX 0.02 μg·kg−1·h−1, Group ND: sufentanil 0.02 μg·kg−1·h−1) in this retrospective study. The primary outcome measure was postoperative sufentanil consumption. Hemodynamics, requirement of narcotic, and vasoactive drugs, recovery time and the incidence of concerning adverse effects were recorded. Pain intensity [Visual Analogue Scale (VAS)], Ramsay sedation scale (RSS) and Bruggemann comfort scale (BCS) were also evaluated at 1, 4, 8, 12, 24, 48, and 72 h after surgery. Results: Postoperative sufentanil consumption was significantly lower in Group D during the first 72 h after surgery (P < 0.05). Compared with Group ND, heart rate (HR) in Group D was significantly decreased from intubation to 20 min after arriving at post anesthesia care unit (PACU), while mean arterial pressure (MAP) in Group D was significantly decreased from intubation to 5 min after arriving at PACU (P < 0.05). The intraoperative requirements for sevoflurane, remifentanil, and fentanyl were approximately 35% less in Group D compared with Group ND. VAS at rest at 1, 4, and 8 h and with cough at 12, 24, 48, and 72 h after surgery were significantly lower in Group D (P < 0.05). Compared with Group ND, patients in Group D showed lower levels of overall incidence of tachycardia, hypertension, nausea, and vomiting (P < 0.05). There were no significant differences between the two groups in terms of baseline clinical characteristics, recovery time, RSS, and BCS (P > 0.05). Conclusions: DEX (0.02 μg·kg−1·h−1) plus sufentanil (0.02 μg·kg−1·h−1) could reduce postoperative opioid consumption and concerning adverse adverse effects, while improving pain scores. However, it did not influence RSS and BCS during the first 72 h after neurosurgery.
Performance of microbolometer focal plane arrays under varying pressure

In this letter, we present a study of imaging using a 128/spl times/128-pixel microbolometer focal plane array (FPA) under varying pressure conditions from 10/sup -5/ torr to the ambient. We have employed bulk micromachining in the fabrication of FPA to reduce the thermal conduction through the air-gap between the membrane and the substrate of the microbolometers. It was found that an image of a soldering iron (200/spl deg/C) was clearly visible even at the ambient pressure. However, at ambient pressure, the increased in thermal conductance resulted in a reduction of contrast of the image compared to the ones obtained at low pressure. The results suggest the possibility of operation of uncooled FPA's under ambient pressure by proper design of the microbolometer structure.
Stayability of beef-cross-dairy breeding cows to six years of age

The use of dairy-beef crosses is widespread throughout the New Zealand beef industry. Cattle originating from dairy herds make up 50 – 55% of New Zealand beef exports by weight (Morris & Kenyon 2014). However, there is little information available regarding the use of beef-cross-dairy cows as breeding cows in terms of reproductive success and stayability in the herd. A study was conducted to investigate the pattern of cow culling and stayability from eight months of age until marking of the fifth calf of straight-bred Angus and Angus-cross-Friesian, Angus-cross-Jersey and Angus-cross-Kiwicross cows. The results showed that the stayability of these breeding cows was low, however, there were no differences in the stayability of straight-bred Angus or beefcross-dairy cows.
Reactions of Persons with Dementia to Caregivers Singing in Morning Care Situations

’Music therapeutic caregiving’, when caregivers sing for or together with persons with severe dementia during care situations, has been suggested as a way to reduce problematic behaviors in dementia care. The present study implemented this technique as an intervention in dementia care. Six caregivers participated in group interviews about their experiences of morning care situations without and with’Music therapeutic caregiving’. Through a qualitative content analysis two themes emerged. ’Being in a different reality’ was based on’usual’ morning care situations. The caregivers’ experienced the persons with dementia as absent-minded; communication and cooperation were difficult. The second theme,’Being present’, was based on morning care situations with the intervention. The caregivers described communication as enhanced; the persons with dementia expressed themselves more appropriately, making cooperation possible. The results indicate that’Music therapeutic caregiving’ might lead to a more positive experience of the person with dementia and seems to increase receptivity to caregiving.
Unsupervised pattern discovery for multimedia sequences

This thesis investigates the problem of discovering patterns from multimedia sequences. The problem is of interest as capturing and storing large amounts of multimedia data has become commonplace, yet our capability to process, interpret, and use these rich corpora has notably lagged behind. Patterns refer to the recurrent and statistically consistent units in a data collection, their recurrence and consistency provide useful bases for organizing large corpra. Unsupervised pattern discovery is important, as it is desirable to adapt to diverse media collections without extensive annotation. Moreover, the patterns should be meaningful, since meanings are what we humans perceive from multimedia. The goal of this thesis is to devise a general framework for finding multi-modal temporal patterns from a collection of multimedia sequences, using the self-similarity in both the appearance and the temporal progression of the content. There, we have addressed three sub-problems: learning temporal pattern models, associating meanings with patterns, and finding patterns in multimodality. We propose novel models for the discovery of multimedia temporal patterns. We construct dynamic graphical models for capturing the multi-level dependency between the audio-visual observations and the events. We propose a stochastic search scheme for finding the optimal model size and topology, as well as unsupervised feature grouping for selecting relevant descriptors for temporal streams. We present novel approaches towards automatically explaining and evaluating the patterns in multimedia streams. Such approaches link the computational representations of the patterns with words in the video stream. The linking between the representation of audio-visual patterns, such as those acquired by a dynamic graphical model and the metadata, is achieved by statistical association. We develop solutions for finding patterns that reside across multiple modalities. This is realized with layered dynamic mixture model, and we address the modeling problems of intea-modality temporal dependency and inter-modality asynchrony in different parts of the model structure. With unsupervised pattern discovery, we are able to discover from baseball and soccer programs the common semantic states, play and break, with accuracies comparable to their supervised counterparts. On large broadcast news corpus we find that multimedia patterns have good correspondence with news topics that have salient audio-visual cues. These findings demonstrate the potential of our framework of mining multi-level temporal patterns from multimodal streams, and it has broad outlook in adapting to new content domains and extending to other applications such as event detection and information retrieval.
A comparison of the effects of El Niño and El Niño Modoki on subdaily extreme precipitation occurrences across the contiguous United States

Intense precipitation over a short duration is a major cause of flash floods. Using hourly rainfall data from the North America Land Data Assimilation System Phase 2 from 1979 to 2013, we compared the differences in the response of the subdaily extreme precipitation occurrences across the contiguous U.S. to strong anomalous warming over the eastern equatorial Pacific known as El Niño and over the central equatorial Pacific known as El Niño Modoki. For both types of anomalous equatorial Pacific warming, the teleconnection is much stronger in the cold season (November through April) than warm season (May through October). During the warm season, while both types correspond to an increase in subdaily extreme precipitation in areas of Texas and a decrease in some areas of the northern Plains, El Niño is associated with a significant increase in the northern Rockies and El Niño Modoki is associated with a decrease in the Intermountain West. During the cold season, the overall patterns are similar between the two types, with positive anomalies over much of the southern and negative anomalies over the northern U.S. However, large regional differences exist, with El Niño exerting a much stronger influence on subdaily extreme precipitation in the Atlantic and Gulf states as well as California, while the influence of El Niño Modoki is slightly broader over the Midwest. These differences can be largely explained by the vertical velocity, moisture convergence, and jet stream patterns induced by El Niño and El Niño Modoki episodes.
Communication optimizations for parallel C programs

This paper presents algorithms for reducing the communication overhead for parallel C programs that use dynamically-allocated data structures. The framework consists of an analysis phase called possible-placement analysis, and a transformation phase called communication selection.The fundamental idea of possible-placement analysis is to find all possible points for insertion of remote memory operations. Remote reads are propagated upwards, whereas remote writes are propagated downwards. Based on the results of the possible-placement analysis, the communication selection transformation selects the "best" place for inserting the communication, and determines if pipelining or blocking of communication should be performed.The framework has been implemented in the EARTH-McCAT optimizing/parallelizing C compiler, and experimental results are presented for five pointer-intensive benchmarks running on the EARTH-MANNA distributed-memory parallel architecture. These experiments show that the communication optimization can provide performance improvements of up to 16% over the unoptimized benchmarks.
Frequency-Dependent and Correlational Selection Pressures Have Conflicting Consequences for Assortative Mating in a Color-Polymorphic Lizard, Uta stansburiana

Genetically determined polymorphisms incorporating multiple traits can persist in nature under chronic, fluctuating, and sometimes conflicting selection pressures. Balancing selection among morphs preserves equilibrium frequencies, while correlational selection maintains favorable trait combinations within each morph. Under negative frequency-dependent selection, females should mate (often disassortatively) with rare male morphotypes to produce conditionally fit offspring. Conversely, under correlational selection, females should mate assortatively to preserve coadapted gene complexes and avoid ontogenetic conflict. Using controlled breeding designs, we evaluated consequences of assortative mating patterns in color-polymorphic side-blotched lizards (Uta stansburiana), to identify conflict between these sources of selection. Females who mated disassortatively, and to conditionally high-quality males in the context of frequency-dependent selection, experienced highest fertility rates. In contrast, assortatively mated females experienced higher fetal viability rates. The trade-off between fertility and egg viability resulted in no overall fitness benefit to either assortative or disassortative mating patterns. These results suggest that ongoing conflict between correlational and frequency dependent selection in polymorphic populations may generate a trade-off between rare-morph advantage and phenotypic integration and between assortative and disassortative mating decisions. More generally, interactions among multiple sources of diversity-promoting selection can alter adaptations and dynamics predicted to arise under any of these regimes alone.
Habitat use and movement of proboscis monkeys (Nasalis larvatus) in a degraded and human-modified forest landscape

Proboscis monkeys (Nasalis larvatus) are endemic to Borneo and live in habitats threatened by land clearance for agriculture, aquaculture and timber. This thesis examines the roles of structural and landscape characteristics on both short- and long-term habitat use through the first application of GPS tags to proboscis monkeys. In a comparison of four home range estimators, biased random bridges provided the best home range estimates given the GPS-collar dataset and landscape characteristics (Chapter 3). Differences in long-term ranging patterns of 10 individuals across a range of forest-block sizes and disturbance levels were examined, as well as daily and seasonal variation in movement and sleeping site selection. Using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) structural metrics of the forest, as well as landscape characteristics, forest with taller canopies, forests in close proximity to river edges were found to be of particular importance to proboscis monkeys, and plantation edges were avoided (Chapter 4). Changes in daily and monthly movements were associated with seasonal changes in rainfall and potential food availability. Movement patterns also changed near forest edges, with faster, more direct movements near agricultural boundaries. Less rainfall, higher temperatures and brighter moon phases correlated with selection of sleeping sites in the forest interior (Chapter 5). By understanding the ranging requirements of proboscis monkeys, drone and GPS collar data were combined to inform conservation policy (Chapter 6). This thesis provides the most in-depth examination of proboscis monkey ecology to date. They appeared more generalist in their home range use and structural habitat requirements than previously realised, suggesting a higher degree of versatility and resilience to habitat loss and degradation. This study provides increased understanding of potential consequences of human-mediated disturbances and can be used to assist in the protection of this charismatic species and the management of degraded landscapes.
The Wall-Following Controller for the Mobile Robot Using Spiking Neurons

Autonomous mobile robot is a hot research topic and attracts many interests due to that mobile robot has been or will be employed in various fields, such as space exploration, under water survey, industrial and military industries, service and medical applications, and so on. Wall-following strategy can help the mobile robot to avoid deadlock caused by local minim and fulfill the given task effectively. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), the third generation of the neural networks, is suitable in the design of mobile robot behavior's controller. In this paper, a wall-following controller based on SNNs for mobile robot is presented. Pulse frequency codes and pulse temporal coincidence detection codes are used in the proposed SNN controller. The designed controller can not only control the robot to follow the wall successfully, but also can be easily implemented.