Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Maternal Pre- and Postnatal Mental Health and Infant Development in War Conditions: The Gaza Infant Study

Objective: Women and their infants need special protection in war context, as traumatic events can risk maternal mental and obstetric health and compromise infant development. This prospective study examined, first, how exposure to war trauma is associated with maternal mental health in pregnancy and postpartum, obstetric and newborn health, and infant development. Second, it tested the role of maternal mental health and obstetric risks in mediating between war trauma and infant development. Method: Palestinian women (N = 511) from the Gaza strip participated during pregnancy (T1) and at 4 (T2) and 12 (T3) months postpartum. They reported PTSD, depressive, anxiety, and dissociative symptoms, as well as pregnancy complications, newborn health risks such as prematurity, and infant sensorimotor and language development. Results: First, exposure to war trauma was associated with high levels of maternal mental health and complications at pregnancy, and with increased postpartum mental health symptoms, but exposure was not directly associated with newborn health risks or problems in infant development. Second, maternal mental health both in pregnancy and postpartum, but not pregnancy complications or newborn health, mediated the negative impact of war trauma on infant sensorimotor and language development at 12 months. Conclusion: Interventions to protect early child development in war conditions should be tailored to support maternal mental health.
Microbiological quality of ready-to-eat foods of Tehran province

Recontamination of ready-to-eat (RTE) products during post-processing may be the cause of outbreaks of food-borne disease. In this study, a total of 150 RTE samples were obtained for bacteriological examination (coliforms, Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella, Bacillus cereus, Psychrotrophic bacteria and Psychrophilic bacteria). Various types of RTE food products that contained frozen (cooked and semi-cooked) and refrigerated (cooked) poultry meat foods, were purchased randomly periodically in January and March, 2012. 65% of cooked samples and 62% of semi cooked samples contain more than 102 CFU/g coliform, while S. aureus was more than 102 CFU/g in 35 and 40% of samples, respectively. Also 28% of cooked samples and 44% of semi cooked samples contained E. coli. 14% of all samples were contaminated by Salmonella. The results for enumeration of B. cereus, psychrophilic and psychrotrophic microorganisms were: 2/96 ± 0/09 log CFU/g, 5/02 ± 1/77 log CFU/g and 3/05±0/04 log CFU/g, respectively. Key words: Foodborne pathogens, coliforms, Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella, Bacillus cereus, psychrotrophic bacteria, psychrophilic bacteria, cooked, semi-cooked.
Secondary central nervous system lymphoma: spectrum of morphological MRI appearances

Background Secondary central nervous system lymphoma (SCNSL) is a rare and aggressive disease, which is defined as secondary central nervous system (CNS) involvement in patients with systemic lymphoma. According to previous reports, SCNSL presents mostly with leptomeningeal spread; however, our experience differs. In the present study, we demonstrate the diversity of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) patterns in SCNSL. Patients and methods Initial morphological MRI findings in 21 patients (10 women and 11 men with mean age 62.3±16.2 years) with SCNSL were retrospectively evaluated. All patients suffered from neurological symptoms and underwent MRI, and all cases were histologically verified. Twelve patients were treated by corticosteroids at the time of the initial MRI. Results Parenchymal lesions were present in 18 of 21 cases (85.7%), solitary meningeal infiltration was present in 1 patient (4.8%), leptomeningeal infiltration in combination with hypophyseal involvement in 1 patient (4.8%), and solitary involvement of the sixth cranial nerve (CN) was found in 1 patient (4.8%). Multiple lesions were present in 11 of 21 cases (52.4%). Diffusion restriction in all or part of the lesion was detected in 14 of 18 cases (77.8%). All parenchymal lesions had an infiltrative appearance and most enhanced homogenously (11 of 17 cases; 64.7%). A combination of parenchymal and meningeal involvement was found in 10 of 21 cases (47.6%). Infiltration of the CNs, basal ganglia, corpus callosum, and ependyma was present in 8 of 21 cases (38.1%) for each of the abovementioned structures; hypothalamic–hypophyseal axis was affected in 7 of 21 cases (33.3%). Conclusion In contrast to previous reports, SCNSL presented as parenchymal disease. MRI is not sufficient for differentiation between primary and secondary CNS lymphoma.
The Symbiosis between Lophelia pertusa and Eunice norvegica Stimulates Coral Calcification and Worm Assimilation

We investigated the interactions between the cold-water coral Lophelia pertusa and its associated polychaete Eunice norvegica by quantifying carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) budgets of tissue assimilation, food partitioning, calcification and respiration using 13C and 15N enriched algae and zooplankton as food sources. During incubations both species were kept either together or in separate chambers to study the net outcome of their interaction on the above mentioned processes. The stable isotope approach also allowed us to follow metabolically derived tracer C further into the coral skeleton and therefore estimate the effect of the interaction on coral calcification. Results showed that food assimilation by the coral was not significantly elevated in presence of E. norvegica but food assimilation by the polychaete was up to 2 to 4 times higher in the presence of the coral. The corals kept assimilation constant by increasing the consumption of smaller algae particles less favored by the polychaete while the assimilation of Artemia was unaffected by the interaction. Total respiration of tracer C did not differ among incubations, although E. norvegica enhanced coral calcification up to 4 times. These results together with the reported high abundance of E. norvegica in cold-water coral reefs, indicate that the interactions between L. pertusa and E. norvegica can be of high importance for ecosystem functioning.
Almost There

Lawyers’ professional (ethical) behaviour is under challenge as a result of major public disclosures in recent years. In an effort to deal with such challenges, a focus on ethical fundamentals is called for. It is not unreasonable to assume that lawyers’ moral reasoning might play some role in the decisions that are made in everyday legal practice, especially those that lead to subsequent criticism. However, until now there has been a dearth of research into ethical responses of Australian lawyers or law students. A longitudinal study exploring the relationships between values and ethical behaviour for early-career legal practitioners has been concluded. This study situated participants within hypothetical contexts that provided for ethical dilemmas and comprised a representative Australian cohort of final year law students, tracking them through their first two years of employment or further study. Of particular interest in the conclusions reached in this study was the effect of gender, clinical experience and prior ethics education on changing responses. Findings suggested that there were significant differences over time in responses to ethical dilemmas, particularly for females and participants who experienced clinical and ethics-focused subjects during their law degree. Like females, participants who had completed a clinical placement and ethics course were more likely to exhibit significant changes in responses across the three years of the study. The direction of change could be said to be largely in the direction of better ethical conduct. This could be a consequence of greater exposure to ethical dilemmas and scenarios during clinical placement experiences and ethics courses. The implications of results are discussed in the contexts of ethics education in a tertiary educational environment, and postadmission to legal practice.
Chronic hepatitis C virus infection and subsequent HIV viral load among women with HIV initiating antiretroviral therapy

Objectives: One in four persons living with HIV is coinfected with hepatitis C virus (HCV). Biological and behavioral mechanisms may increase HIV viral load among coinfected persons. Therefore, we estimated the longitudinal effect of chronic HCV on HIV suppression after ART initiation among women with HIV (WWH). Design: HIV RNA was measured every 6 months among 441 WWH in the Women's Interagency HIV Study who initiated ART from 2000 to 2015. Methods: Log-binomial regression models were used to compare the proportion of study visits with detectable HIV RNA between women with and without chronic HCV. Robust sandwich variance estimators accounted for within-person correlation induced by repeated HIV RNA measurements during follow-up. We controlled for confounding and selection bias (because of loss to follow-up and death) using inverse probability-of-exposure-and-censoring weights. Results: One hundred and fourteen women (25%) had chronic HCV before ART initiation. Overall, the proportion of visits with detectable HIV RNA was similar among women with and without chronic HCV [relative risk (RR) 1.19 (95% CI 0.72, 1.95)]. Six months after ART initiation, the proportion of visits with detectable HIV RNA among women with chronic HCV was 1.88 (95% CI 1.41–2.51) times that among women without HCV, at 2 years, the ratio was 1.60 (95% CI 1.17–2.19), and by 6 years there was no difference (1.03; 95% CI 0.60–1.79). Conclusion: Chronic HCV may negatively impact early HIV viral response to ART. These findings reaffirm the need to test persons with HIV for HCV infection, and increase engagement in HIV care and access to HCV treatment among persons with HIV/HCV coinfection.
Chelator-Free Radiolabeling of SERRS Nanoparticles for Whole-Body PET and Intraoperative Raman Imaging

A single contrast agent that offers whole-body non-invasive imaging along with the superior sensitivity and spatial resolution of surface-enhanced resonance Raman scattering (SERRS) imaging would allow both pre-operative mapping and intraoperative imaging and thus be highly desirable. We hypothesized that labeling our recently reported ultrabright SERRS nanoparticles with a suitable radiotracer would enable pre-operative identification of regions of interest with whole body imaging that can be rapidly corroborated with a Raman imaging device or handheld Raman scanner in order to provide high precision guidance during surgical procedures. Here we present a straightforward new method that produces radiolabeled SERRS nanoparticles for combined positron emission tomography (PET)-SERRS tumor imaging without requiring the attachment of molecular chelators. We demonstrate the utility of these PET-SERRS nanoparticles in several proof-of-concept studies including lymph node (LN) tracking, intraoperative guidance for LN resection, and cancer imaging after intravenous injection. We anticipate that the radiolabeling method presented herein can be applied generally to nanoparticle substrates of various materials by first coating them with a silica shell and then applying the chelator-free protocol.
All-pass based robust low complexity structures for implementing recursive digital filters

A simplified version of a recently developed structure is derived for all-pass filters. The proposed structure possesses 4N non-trivial multipliers and 2N adders used for computing one output sample of an Nth order all-pass filter. It is shown that such a structure yields a roundoff noise gain of 4N, compared with that of (N +1)2 for the classical minimum roundoff noise realizations that have in general (N+1)2 multipliers and N(N + 1) adders. The proposed structure is applied to a class of all-pass based filters. The performance of such a filter is analyzed in terms of sensitivity measure and roundoff noise gain. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the excellent properties of the proposed structure in terms of robustness against quantization errors and reducing implementation complexity.
Fig extract drying: The relationship between the main operating parameters of a pilot‐scale spray dryer and product specifications

Abstract This study aims to optimize extraction and drying conditions of fig syrup. Drying was done in a pilot scale two‐fluid nozzle spray dryer. A total of 27 experiments were conducted with varying inlet air temperatures, air flow rates, and also a maltodextrin (MD)‐ low methoxyl pectin (LMP) ratios. While feed rate, feed temperature, and compressed air flow rate of the atomizer were kept constant. The results of differential scanning calorimetry revealed that high levels of glucose and fructose in the extract resulted in a low glass transition temperature of fig syrup. By an increase in the inlet air temperature, the powder bulk density decreased. However, the MD:LMP ratio and the air flow rate were not significantly effective (p < 0/05) in changing the bulk density. SEM micrographs of spray‐dried particles and particle size distribution analysis showed that particles were largely in a range of 5 to 50 μm. The best powders were obtained at an inlet air temperature of 170°C.
Orbit/CLASP Is Required for Germline Cyst Formation through Its Developmental Control of Fusomes and Ring Canals in Drosophila Males

Orbit, a Drosophila ortholog of microtubule plus-end enriched protein CLASP, plays an important role in many developmental processes involved in microtubule dynamics. Previous studies have shown that Orbit is required for asymmetric stem cell division and cystocyte divisions in germline cysts and for the development of microtubule networks that interconnect oocyte and nurse cells during oogenesis. Here, we examined the cellular localization of Orbit and its role in cyst formation during spermatogenesis. In male germline stem cells, distinct localization of Orbit was first observed on the spectrosome, which is a spherical precursor of the germline-specific cytoskeleton known as the fusome. In dividing stem cells and spermatogonia, Orbit was localized around centrosomes and on kinetochores and spindle microtubules. After cytokinesis, Orbit remained localized on ring canals, which are cytoplasmic bridges between the cells. Thereafter, it was found along fusomes, extending through the ring canal toward all spermatogonia in a cyst. Fusome localization of Orbit was not affected by microtubule depolymerization. Instead, our fluorescence resonance energy transfer experiments suggested that Orbit is closely associated with F-actin, which is abundantly found in fusomes. Surprisingly, F-actin depolymerization influenced neither fusome organization nor Orbit localization on the germline-specific cytoskeleton. We revealed that two conserved regions of Orbit are required for fusome localization. Using orbit hypomorphic mutants, we showed that the protein is required for ring canal formation and for fusome elongation mediated by the interaction of newly generated fusome plugs with the pre-existing fusome. The orbit mutation also disrupted ring canal clustering, which is essential for folding of the spermatogonia after cytokinesis. Orbit accumulates around centrosomes at the onset of spermatogonial mitosis and is required for the capture of one of the duplicated centrosomes onto the fusome. Moreover, Orbit is involved in the proper orientation of spindles towards fusomes during synchronous mitosis of spermatogonial cysts.
Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video

We propose a self-supervised approach for learning representations and robotic behaviors entirely from unlabeled videos recorded from multiple viewpoints, and study how this representation can be used in two robotic imitation settings: imitating object interactions from videos of humans, and imitating human poses. Imitation of human behavior requires a viewpoint-invariant representation that captures the relationships between end-effectors (hands or robot grippers) and the environment, object attributes, and body pose. We train our representations using a triplet loss, where multiple simultaneous viewpoints of the same observation are attracted in the embedding space, while being repelled from temporal neighbors which are often visually similar but functionally different. This signal causes our model to discover attributes that do not change across viewpoint, but do change across time, while ignoring nuisance variables such as occlusions, motion blur, lighting and background. We demonstrate that this representation can be used by a robot to directly mimic human poses without an explicit correspondence, and that it can be used as a reward function within a reinforcement learning algorithm. While representations are learned from an unlabeled collection of task-related videos, robot behaviors such as pouring are learned by watching a single 3rd-person demonstration by a human. Reward functions obtained by following the human demonstrations under the learned representation enable efficient reinforcement learning that is practical for real-world robotic systems. Video results, open-source code and dataset are available at sermanet.github. io/imitate
Differential effects of the computer-tailored FATaintPHAT programme on dietary behaviours according to sociodemographic, cognitive and home environmental factors

Abstract Objective To explore whether the effects on dietary behaviours of a computer-tailored intervention aimed to prevent excessive weight gain among adolescents, FATaintPHAT, were moderated by sociodemographic, cognitive and home environmental factors. Design A two-group cluster randomized trial. Potential moderation of the outcome measures (consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, snacks, fruits and vegetables) was studied by gender, education level, ethnicity, awareness of risk behaviour, intention and home availability. Setting Twenty schools in the Netherlands. Subjects Students (n 883) aged 12–13 years. Results Of the twenty-four interactions tested, only three were significant. The intervention effect on sugar-sweetened beverages was moderated by level of education (P = 0·009); intervention effects were found only among academic preparatory students. The intervention effects on fruit and vegetable intake were moderated by awareness of fruit intake (P < 0·001) and home availability of vegetables (P = 0·007); an effect on fruit intake was found only among students who were aware of their low fruit intake at baseline and an effect on vegetable consumption was found only among students who reported that vegetables were always available at their home. Conclusions The effects of the intervention generally did not differ between sociodemographic subgroups. The moderation by home availability illustrates that the environment may influence the effects of educational interventions.
Differences in caregivers' psychological distress and associated factors by care recipients' gender and kinship

Objectives: In this study, we examined the level of psychological distress of Japanese caregivers according to various combinations of the gender of care recipients and the kinship of caregivers (spouse, son, daughter, or daughter-in-law). Furthermore, we explored the associated factors that could exacerbate or alleviate psychological distress. Methods: We utilized a cross-sectional descriptive design and implemented a self-administered questionnaire survey with a two-stage stratified sample of community-dwelling caregivers of frail elderly persons throughout Japan. We surveyed 1279 caregiving families, and 1020 questionnaires were completed by primary caregivers (response rate: 79.8%), with 945 respondents providing data on the Japanese version of the Kessler 6 psychological distress scale (K6). Results: Caregivers' K6 scores varied significantly by care recipients' gender and their relationship with the caregiver. K6 scores were significantly higher among daughters-in-law caring for fathers-in-law than among daughters-in-law caring for mothers-in-law, wives caring for husbands, or daughters or sons caring for mothers. ‘Negative influence of caregiving’ and ‘anxious about continuing caregiving’ were factors that commonly exacerbated caregivers' psychological distress. Further analyses involving interactions indicated that the effects of ‘anxious about continuing caregiving’ and ‘personal growth through caregiving’ on the psychological distress of daughters-in-law varied by care recipients' gender as did the effects of an alleviating factor, ‘keeping their own pace’, on daughters. Conclusions: Psychological distress levels among family caregivers, as well as exacerbating and alleviating factors, varied depending on the gender and kinship of care recipients.
Advanced and traditional electrocardiographic risk factors in pulmonary arterial hypertension: the significance of ventricular late potentials.

BACKGROUND Whether non-invasive electrocardiographic parameters may be of similar relevance in pulmonary arterial hy-pertension (PAH) as in left ventricular heart failure (LVHF) remains unclear. AIM To examine a profile of electrocardiographic parameters in PAH and to determine their prognostic significance. Com-parison of profile in patients with pulmonary hypertension secondary to left ventricular dysfunction was planned in order to put PAH group results into context. METHODS We included 41 patients with type 1.1/1.4. 4 (according to the European Society of Cardiology) PAH and 31 patients with LVHF and type 2.1 pulmonary hypertension. All patients underwent 24-h ambulatory electrocardiography monitoring. RESULTS Among heart rate variability parameters, only RMSSD was different (mean, 75 ms [PAH] vs. 112 ms [LVHF], p = 0.016). In PAH, fewer patients had ventricular tachycardia (15% vs. 48%, p = 0.004), abnormal deceleration capacity (54% vs. 84%, p = 0.011), positive heart rate turbulence (11% vs. 48%, p = 0.003), severe autonomic failure (10% vs. 39%, p = 0.005), and ventricular late potentials (LP) (19% vs. 62%, p = 0.001). In PAH, four deaths occurred in 42 months. In univariate analysis, the risk factors for death were: LP (hazard ratio 13.55, 95% confidence interval 1.41-130.72; p = 0.024), age, N-terminal prohormone of B-type natriuretic peptide, while the protective factors were minimal and mean heart rate, as well as the six-minute walk test (6MWT) distance. In multivariate analysis, the influence of LP and the 6MWT distance remained significant. CONCLUSIONS Ventricular LP were present in 19% of PAH patients and were the most powerful risk factor of mortality .