Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Obese mice exhibit an altered behavioural and inflammatory response to lipopolysaccharide

SUMMARY Obesity is associated with an increase in the prevalence and severity of infections. Genetic animal models of obesity (ob/ob and db/db mice) display altered centrally-mediated sickness behaviour in response to acute inflammatory stimuli such as lipopolysaccharide (LPS). However, the effect of diet-induced obesity (DIO) on the anorectic and febrile response to LPS in mice is unknown. This study therefore determined how DIO and ob/ob mice respond to a systemic inflammatory challenge. C57BL/6 DIO and ob/ob mice, and their respective controls, were given an intraperitoneal (i.p.) injection of LPS. Compared with controls, DIO and ob/ob mice exhibited an altered febrile response to LPS (100 μg/kg) over 8 hours. LPS caused a greater and more prolonged anorexic effect in DIO compared with control mice and, in ob/ob mice, LPS induced a reduction in food intake and body weight earlier than it did in controls. These effects of LPS in obese mice were also seen after a fixed dose of LPS (5 μg). LPS (100 μg/kg) induced Fos protein expression in several brain nuclei of control mice, with fewer Fos-positive cells observed in the brains of obese mice. An altered inflammatory response to LPS was also observed in obese mice compared with controls: changes in cytokine expression and release were detected in the plasma, spleen, liver and peritoneal macrophages in obese mice. In summary, DIO and ob/ob mice displayed an altered behavioural response and cytokine release to systemic inflammatory challenge. These findings could help explain why obese humans show increased sensitivity to infections.
Activation of Ca2+-Dependent K+ Channels Contributes to Rhythmic Firing of Action Potentials in Mouse Pancreatic β Cells

We have applied the perforated patch whole-cell technique to β cells within intact pancreatic islets to identify the current underlying the glucose-induced rhythmic firing of action potentials. Trains of depolarizations (to simulate glucose-induced electrical activity) resulted in the gradual (time constant: 2.3 s) development of a small (<0.8 nS) K+ conductance. The current was dependent on Ca2+ influx but unaffected by apamin and charybdotoxin, two blockers of Ca2+-activated K+ channels, and was insensitive to tolbutamide (a blocker of ATP-regulated K+ channels) but partially (>60%) blocked by high (10–20 mM) concentrations of tetraethylammonium. Upon cessation of electrical stimulation, the current deactivated exponentially with a time constant of 6.5 s. This is similar to the interval between two successive bursts of action potentials. We propose that this Ca2+-activated K+ current plays an important role in the generation of oscillatory electrical activity in the β cell.
ECOLOGICAL AND GENETIC ASSOCIATIONS IN AN IRIS HYBRID ZONE

Chloroplast DNA (cpDNA) markers and 12 nuclear (random amplified polymorphic DNA, or RAPD) markers were used to examine the distribution of genetic variation among individuals and the genetic and ecological associations in a hybrid iris population. Plants in the population occurred at various distances from the edge of a bayou in a relatively undisturbed mixed hardwood forest and in an adjacent pasture dominated by herbaceous perennials with interspersed oak and cypress trees. The majority of plants sampled possessed combinations of markers from the different Iris species. Genetic markers diagnostic for Iris fulva and I. brevicaulis occurred at high frequencies, whereas markers diagnostic for I. hexagona were infrequent. For the majority of the nuclear markers, significant levels of cytonuclear disequilibria existed because of intraspecific associations among the markers in both the pasture and the forest. The distribution of nuclear markers among individuals was bimodal; intermediate genotypes were absent and the majority of RAPD markers were associated with their intraspecific cpDNA haplotypes. Strong intraspecific associations existed among RAPD markers in the forest, but associations tended to be weaker in the pasture area. Ecological correlations were detected for all but one of the I. fulva and I. brevicaulis RAPD markers. The ecological associations of hybrids similar to I. brevicaulis resembled associations of I. brevicaulis parental genotypes, suggesting that these hybrid genotypes may be relatively fit in the same habitats. The hybrids similar to I. fulva, however, were distributed in habitats that were unique relative to the parental species. The patterns of genetic and environmental associations along with other available data suggest that (1) only advanced generation hybrids were present in the population; (2) formation of F1 hybrids among Louisiana irises is rare, leading to sporadic formation of hybrid populations; and (3) selection and assortative mating have contributed to the formation of hybrid genotypes that tend to be similar to parental genotypes. The patterns of ecological and genetic associations detected in this population suggest that assortative mating and environmental and viability selection are important in the structuring and maintenance of this hybrid zone.
Next generation M2M cellular networks: challenges and practical considerations

In this article we present the major challenges of future machine-to-machine (M2M) cellular networks such as spectrum scarcity, and support for a large number of low-power, lowcost devices. As an integral part of the future Internet-of-Things (IoT), the true vision of M2M communications cannot be reached with conventional solutions that are typically cost inefficient. The cognitive radio concept has emerged to address spectrum under-utilization and scarcity. The heterogeneous network model is another alternative to relax the number of covered users. To this extent, we present a complete fundamental understanding and the engineering details of cognitive radios, the heterogeneous network model, and power and cost challenges in the context of future M2M cellular networks.
Identification of New Prognosis Factors from the Clinical and Epidemiologic Analysis of a Registry of 229 Diamond-Blackfan Anemia Patients

Diamond-Blackfan anemia (DBA) is a constitutional disease characterized by a specific maturation defect in cells of erythroid lineage. We have assembled a registry of 229 DBA patients, which includes 151 patients from France, 70 from Germany, and eight from other countries. Presence of malformations was significantly and independently associated with familial history of DBA, short stature at presentation (before any steroid therapy), and absence of hypotrophy at birth. Two hundred twenty-two patients were available for long-term follow-up analysis (median, 111.5 mo). Of these individuals, 62.6% initially responded to steroid therapy. Initial steroid responsiveness was found significantly and independently associated with older age at presentation, familial history of DBA, and a normal platelet count at the time of diagnosis. Severe evolution of the disease (transfusion dependence or death) was significantly and independently associated with a younger age at presentation and with a history of premature birth. In contrast, patients with a familial history of the disease experienced a better outcome. Outcome analysis revealed the benefit of reassessing steroid responsiveness during the course of the disease for initially nonresponsive patients. Bone marrow transplantation was successful in 11/13 cases; HLA typing of probands and siblings should be performed early if patients are transfusion dependent, and cord blood should be preserved. Incidence of DBA (assessed for France over a 13-y period) is 7.3 cases per million live births without effect of seasonality on incidence of the disease or on malformative status. Similarly, no parental imprinting effect or anticipation phenomenon could be documented in families with dominant inheritance.
Analysis of Laminated Anisotropic Tubes Under Combined Loading

Using Donnell's approximations, the analysis of a laminated anisotropic tube under combined tension or compression, internal pressure, and torque is presented. Results show that a tube clamped at one end while free to rotate at the opposite end can be used to completely characterize the mechanical properties of a fiber re inforced composite material.
Robot: Have I done something wrong? — Analysis of prosodic features of speech commands under the robot's unintended behavior

When controlling a mobile robot using speech commands, the user's mistake or the recognizer's mis-recognition causes the robot to move in an unintended way, which can be dangerous. Therefore, we aim to develop a method for the robot to know if the robot's behavior matches the user's intention or not from the features of the speech commands. To this end, we investigated prosodic features in the command utterance given to a mobile robot when the robot does an intended or unintended behavior. As a result, we found that speaking rate of the speech under the robot's unintended behavior becomes slower, and the F0 becomes higher. In addition, we investigate if fatigue or experience affects the prosodic features, and we found that the F0 and intensity under the robot's unintended behavior were significantly different at the beginning of the experiment.
Metagenomic analysis of diarrheal stool samples of HIV infected individual and HIV-uninfected individual using 16SrDNA sequencing.

This work was supported by grants from Pro‐Reitoria de Pesquisa e Pós‐Graduação (PROPPG) of Universidade Estadual de Londrina. This work was part of the M.Sc. dissertation of L.V. P. Gomes, which received studentship from Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior‐CAPES. We thank Dr. A. Leyva for English editing of the manuscript and Ediel Clementino da Costa for technical support. L.V. P.G. : Contributed in all methodological activities and, analysis and interpretation of data; A.T. M. and J.D. C: Nucleotide sequence analysis, primer design, analysis and interpretation of data; J.P.S. and C.F. O: Samples collection and isolates identification; L.M. Y. and M.R. E.P: Critical revision for important intellectual content. S.F. Y.O. : Conception, design, analysis and interpretation of data.
Influence of Cleats-Surface Interaction on the Performance and Risk of Injury in Soccer: A Systematic Review

Objective To review the influence of cleats-surface interaction on the performance and risk of injury in soccer athletes. Design Systematic review. Data Sources Scopus, Web of science, PubMed, and B-on. Eligibility Criteria Full experimental and original papers, written in English that studied the influence of soccer cleats on sports performance and injury risk in artificial or natural grass. Results Twenty-three articles were included in this review: nine related to performance and fourteen to injury risk. On artificial grass, the soft ground model on dry and wet conditions and the turf model in wet conditions are related to worse performance. Compared to rounded studs, bladed ones improve performance during changes of directions in both natural and synthetic grass. Cleat models presenting better traction on the stance leg improve ball velocity while those presenting a homogeneous pressure across the foot promote better kicking accuracy. Bladed studs can be considered less secure by increasing plantar pressure on lateral border. The turf model decrease peak plantar pressure compared to other studded models. Conclusion The soft ground model provides lower performance especially on artificial grass, while the turf model provides a high protective effect in both fields.
On metric embedding for boosting semantic similarity computations

Computing pairwise word semantic similarity is widely used and serves as a building block in many tasks in NLP. In this paper, we explore the embedding of the shortest-path metrics from a knowledge base (Wordnet) into the Hamming hypercube, in order to enhance the computation performance. We show that, although an isometric embedding is untractable, it is possible to achieve good non-isometric embeddings. We report a speedup of three orders of magnitude for the task of computing Leacock and Chodorow (LCH) similarity while keeping strong correlations (r = .819, ρ = .826).
Two-sided Facility Location

Recent years have witnessed the rise of many successful e-commerce marketplace platforms like the Amazon marketplace, AirBnB, Uber/Lyft, and Upwork, where a central platform mediates economic transactions between buyers and sellers. Motivated by these platforms, we formulate a set of facility location problems that we term Two-sided Facility location. In our model, agents arrive at nodes in an underlying metric space, where the metric distance between any buyer and seller captures the quality of the corresponding match. The platform posts prices and wages at the nodes, and opens a set of "virtual markets" or facilities to route the agents to. The agents at any facility are assumed to be matched. The platform ensures high match quality by imposing a distance constraint between a node and the facilities it is routed to. It ensures high service availability by ensuring flow to the facility is at least a pre-specified lower bound. Subject to these constraints, the goal of the platform is to maximize the social surplus subject to weak budget balance, i.e., profit being non-negative. We present an approximation algorithm for this problem that yields a $(1 + \epsilon)$ approximation to surplus for any constant $\epsilon > 0$, while relaxing the match quality (i.e., maximum distance of any match) by a constant factor. We use an LP rounding framework that easily extends to other objectives such as maximizing volume of trade or profit. We justify our models by considering a dynamic marketplace setting where agents arrive according to a stochastic process and have finite patience (or deadlines) for being matched. We perform queueing analysis to show that for policies that route agents to virtual markets and match them, ensuring a low abandonment probability of agents reduces to ensuring sufficient flow arrives at each virtual market.
Comparison of DNA Sequencing and a Line Probe Assay for Detection of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Drug Resistance Mutations in Patients Failing Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy

ABSTRACT The resistance of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) to drugs is a major cause of antiretroviral treatment failure. We have compared direct sequencing to a line probe assay (LiPA) for the detection of drug resistance-related mutations in 197 clinical samples, and we have investigated the sequential appearance of mutations under drug pressure. For 26 patients with virological failure despite the use of two nucleoside analogues and one protease inhibitor (indinavir [n = 6], ritonavir [n = 10], and saquinavir [n = 10]), genotypic resistance assays were carried out retrospectively every 3 months for up to 2 years by using direct sequencing (TruGene; Visible Genetics) and a LiPA for detection of mutations in the reverse transcriptase (INNO-LiPA HIV-1 RT; Innogenetics) and the protease (INNO-LiPA HIV Protease, prototype version; Innogenetics) genes. Comparison of the results from both assays found rare major discrepancies (<1% of codons analyzed). INNO-LiPA detected more wild-type–mutant mixtures than sequencing but suffered from a high rate of codon hybridization failures for the reverse transcriptase. LiPA detected earlier and more frequently than sequencing the transient mixed virus population that contained I84V, which appears before V82A in the protease sequence. Mutations M461, G48V, and L90M were often transient and drug pressure related. In conclusion, direct sequencing and LiPAs give concordant results for most clinical isolates. LiPAs are more sensitive for the detection of mixed virus populations. Mutation I84V appears in minor populations in the early steps of the pathways of resistance to indinavir and ritonavir. The fact that some mutations can be found only transiently and in minor virus populations highlights the importance of a low detection limit for resistance assays.
Surface modification of aramid fibers by atmospheric pressure plasma-enhanced vapor deposition

Recent research results have indicated positive influences of inter-yarn friction on ballistic performance of woven fabrics and panels made from such fibers. The current investigation explores the effect of coating by means of atmospheric pressure plasma-enhanced vapor deposition with organic chemical (CH3)2Cl2Si on the inter-yarn friction. The scanning electron microscopy observations indicated that as the treatment time increases, more particles have been deposited on the surface of the fibers. The Fourier transform infrared spectra supported the existence of Si-O-Si vibration, which can be attributed to the chemical deposition. Energy-dispersive X-ray analysis further supported the deposition of the chemical compound. Experiments were carried out to evaluate the coefficients of static and kinetic frictions between the yarns and the results showed that the inter-yarn coefficient of static friction was increased from 0.1617 to 0.2969 and that of the kinetic friction increased from 0.1554 to 0.2436, as the treatment time increased to 4 minutes. In addition, there is evidence that the mechanical properties of the treated yarns were not negatively affected by the treatment.
Confidence intervals for intraclass correlation coefficients in variance components models

Confidence intervals for intraclass correlation coefficients in agreement studies with continuous outcomes are model-specific and no generic approach exists. This paper provides two generic approaches for intraclass correlation coefficients of the form ∑ q = 1 Q σ q 2 / ( ∑ q = 1 Q σ q 2 + ∑ p = Q + 1 P σ p 2 ) . The first approach uses Satterthwaite’s approximation and an F-distribution. The second approach uses the first and second moments of the intraclass correlation coefficient estimate in combination with a Beta distribution. Both approaches are based on the restricted maximum likelihood estimates for the variance components involved. Simulation studies are conducted to examine the coverage probabilities of the confidence intervals for agreement studies with a mix of small sample sizes. Two different three-way variance components models and balanced and unbalanced one-way random effects models are investigated. The proposed approaches are compared with other approaches developed for these specific models. The approach based on the F-distribution provides acceptable coverage probabilities, but the approach based on the Beta distribution results in accurate coverages for most settings in both balanced and unbalanced designs. A real agreement study is provided to illustrate the approaches.
From HTML documents to web tables and rules

We present a browser-extending Semantic Web extraction system that maps HTML documents to tables and, where possible, to rules. First, the basic data extractor ViPER distills and reorganizes semi-structured information into a tabular data structure, which can again be browsed and/or submitted to further machine processing. Second, exemplifying the latter, the extended knowledge extractor Rex ViPER mines the resulting tables for structural properties and functional dependencies. Rules are generated to obtain a more compact and manageable, often also enriched, knowledge representation. The resulting fully structured information, RuleML-serialized facts and rules, can be stored along with the orginal documents, queried by rule engines such as OO jDREW and FLORID, and interchanged between Web Services. Thus Rex ViPER contributes to automating the construction of a machine-processable Semantic Web.
Using Species Distribution Model to Estimate the Wintering Population Size of the Endangered Scaly-Sided Merganser in China

Scaly-sided Merganser is a globally endangered species restricted to eastern Asia. Estimating its population is difficult and considerable gap exists between populations at its breeding grounds and wintering sites. In this study, we built a species distribution model (SDM) using Maxent with presence-only data to predict the potential wintering habitat for Scaly-sided Merganser in China. Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) method suggests high predictive power of the model (training and testing AUC were 0.97 and 0.96 respectively). The most significant environmental variables included annual mean temperature, mean temperature of coldest quarter, minimum temperature of coldest month and precipitation of driest quarter. Suitable conditions for Scaly-sided Merganser are predicted in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, especially in Jiangxi, Hunan and Hubei Provinces. The predicted suitable habitat embraces 6,984 km of river. Based on survey results from three consecutive winters (2010–2012) and previous studies, we estimated that the entire wintering population of Scaly-sided Merganser in China to be 3,561 ± 478 individuals, which is consistent with estimate in its breeding ground.
Electron back-scattering patterns—A new technique for obtaining crystallographic information in the scanning electron microscope

Abstract It is shown that the angular distribution of back-scattered electrons can be observed in a scanning electron microscope, and that the patterns observed can be used to obtain crystallographic information about the specimen. The patterns are termed electron back-scattering patterns (E.B.S.P.). The use of these patterns as a crystallographic techniques is shown to have several significant advantages over two other techniques currently in use in scanning electron microscopes.
Diagnosing Diabetic Foot Osteomyelitis in Patients Without Signs of Soft Tissue Infection by Coupling Hybrid 67Ga SPECT/CT With Bedside Percutaneous Bone Puncture

OBJECTIVE Successful treatment of osteomyelitis is more likely with accurate diagnosis and identification of the causative pathogens. This typically requires obtaining a specimen of bone, usually by image-guided biopsy. We sought to develop a simpler bedside method for definitively diagnosing osteomyelitis. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Over 2 years, we enrolled consecutive patients presenting to our diabetic foot clinic with a foot ulcer and clinically suspected osteomyelitis but without soft tissue infection. Each underwent hybrid 67Ga single-photon emission computed tomography and X-ray computed tomography (SPECT/CT) imaging; those with a positive scan underwent bedside percutaneous bone puncture. Patients with a positive bone culture received culture-guided antibiotic therapy. Patients with negative 67Ga SPECT/CT imaging or with positive imaging but negative bone culture were not treated with antibiotics. All patients were followed up for ≥1 year. RESULTS Among 55 patients who underwent 67Ga SPECT/CT imaging, 13 had negative results and all of their foot ulcers resolved without antibiotic therapy. Among 42 with positive imaging, 2 were excluded (for recent antibiotic therapy) and 40 had bone punctures (3 punctured twice): 19 had negative results, 3 of which were likely false negatives, and 24 had positive results (all gram-positive cocci). At follow-up, 3 patients had died, 3 had undergone amputation, and 47 had no evidence of foot infection. The sensitivity and specificity of this combined method were 88.0 and 93.6%, respectively, and the positive and negative predictive values were 91.7 and 90.7%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS Coupling of 67Ga SPECT/CT imaging and bedside percutaneous bone puncture appears to be accurate and safe for diagnosing diabetic foot osteomyelitis in patients without signs of soft tissue infection, obviating the need for antibiotic treatment in 55% of suspected cases.