Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Protective Role of Phyllanthus niruri Extract against Thioacetamide-Induced Liver Cirrhosis in Rat Model

A preclinical study was performed to determine if the extract from Phyllanthus niruri (PN) plays a protective role against liver cirrhosis induced by thioacetamide (TAA) in rats. Initially, acute toxicity was tested and the results showed that the extract was benign when applied to healthy rats. Next, the therapeutic effect of the extract was investigated using five groups of rats: control, TAA, silymarin, and PN high dose and low dose groups. Significant differences were observed between the TAA group and the other groups regarding body and liver weights, liver biochemical parameters, total antioxidant capacity, lipid peroxidation, and oxidative stress enzyme levels. Gross visualization indicated coarse granules on the surface of the hepatotoxic rats' livers, in contrast to the smoother surface in the livers of the silymarin and PN-treated rats. Histopathological analysis revealed necrosis, lymphocytes infiltration in the centrilobular region, and fibrous connective tissue proliferation in the livers of the hepatotoxic rats. But, the livers of the treated rats had comparatively minimal inflammation and normal lobular architecture. Silymarin and PN treatments effectively restored these measurements closer to their normal levels. Progression of liver cirrhosis induced by TAA in rats can be intervened using the PN extract and these effects are comparable to those of silymarin.
User Association for Energy-Load Tradeoffs in HetNets With Renewable Energy Supply

A user association algorithm is proposed for energy consumption and traffic load balancing tradeoffs among heterogeneous base stations in heterogeneous networks with renewable energy supply. The concept of topology potential is introduced to represent the attraction between base stations and users, which takes the traffic load of users and the available renewable energy of base stations into consideration for energy-load tradeoffs. Then the user association optimization problem is formulated for base station utility proportional fairness. The proposed algorithm is proved to converge to the global optimum of the formulated optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in achieving load balancing as well as in making the best use of renewable energy harvested by base stations.
Effects of arginine vasopressin on cell volume regulation in brain astrocyte in culture

Sarfaraz, Darya, and Cosmo L. Fraser. Effects of arginine vasopressin on cell volume regulation in brain astrocyte in culture. Am. J. Physiol. 276 (Endocrinol. Metab. 39): E596–E601, 1999. —Astrocytes initially swell when exposed to hypotonic medium but rapidly return to normal volume by the process of regulatory volume decrease (RVD). The role that arginine vasopressin (AVP) plays in hypotonically mediated RVD in astrocytes is unknown. This study was therefore designed to determine whether AVP might play a role in astrocyte RVD. With the use of 3-O-[3H]methyl-Dglucose to determine water space, AVP treatment resulted in significantly increased 3-O-methyl-D-glucose water space within 30 s of hypotonic exposure (P 5 0.0001) and remained significantly elevated above baseline (1.75 μl/mg protein) at 5 min (P , 0.021). In contrast, in untreated cells, complete RVD was achieved by 5 min. At 30 s, cell volume with AVP treatment was 37% greater than in cells that received no treatment (2.9 vs. 2.26 μl/mg protein, respectively; P , 0.006). The rate of cell volume increase (dV/dt) over 30 s was highly significant (0.038 vs. 0.019 μl ·mg protein21 ·s21 in the AVP-treated vs. untreated group; P 5 0.0004 by regression analysis). Additionally, the rate of cell volume decrease over the next 4.5 min was also significantly greater with vasopressin treatment (2dV/dt 5 0.0027 vs. 0.0013 μl ·mg protein21 · s21; P 5 0.0306). The effect of AVP was concentration dependent with EC50 5 3.5 nM. To determine whether AVP action was receptor mediated, we performed RVD studies in the presence of the V1-receptor antagonists benzamil and ethylisopropryl amiloride and the V2-receptor agonist 1-desamino8-D-arginine vasopressin (DDAVP). Both V1-receptor antagonists significantly inhibited AVP-mediated volume increase by 40–47% (P , 0.005), whereas DDAVP had no stimulatory effects above control. Taken together, these data suggest that AVP treatment of brain astrocytes in culture appears to increase 3-O-methyl-D-glucose water space during RVD through V1 receptor-mediated mechanisms. The significance of these findings is presently unclear.
Dichloroacetate (DCA) sensitizes both wild‐type and over expressing Bcl‐2 prostate cancer cells in vitro to radiation

Bcl‐2 protects cells from apoptosis and provides a survival advantage to cells over‐expressing this oncogene. In addition, over expression of Bcl‐2 renders cell resistant to radiation therapy. Recently, dichloroacetate (DCA) was proven to potentiate the apoptotic machinery by interacting with Bcl‐2. In this study, we investigated whether treating human prostate cancer cells with DCA could modulate Bcl‐2 expression and if the modulation in Bcl‐2 expression could render the Bcl‐2 over expressing cells more susceptible to cytotoxicity effects of radiation.
Effects of Anesthetics and Terminal Procedures on Biochemical and Hormonal Measurements in Polychlorinated Biphenyl Treated Rats

This investigation reports the effects of various terminal procedures, and how they modified the responses to a toxicant (polychlorinated biphenyls [A1254], 130 mg/kg/day × 5 days) administered by gavage to Sprague-Dawley male rats. Terminal procedures included exsanguination via the abdominal aorta under anesthesia (isoflurane inhalation or Equithesin injection), decapitation with or without anesthesia, or narcosis induced by carbon dioxide inhalation. Effects of repeated anesthesia were also tested. Terminal procedures induced confounding stress responses, particularly when Equithesin was used. The terminal procedures modified the conclusions about effects of A1254 on the concentrations of corticosterone, insulin, glucagon, glucose, alkaline phosphatase, lactate dehydrogenase, uric acid, and blood urea nitrogen, from nonstatistically significant to significant changes, and in the case of luteinizing hormone from a statistically significant increase to a significant decrease. Investigations of effects of toxicants should be designed and interpreted considering potential changes induced by the selection of a terminal procedure.
No risk of myocardial infarction associated with initial antiretroviral treatment containing abacavir: short and long-term results from ACTG A5001/ALLRT.

BACKGROUND Observational and retrospective clinical trial cohorts have reported conflicting results for the association of abacavir use with risk of myocardial infarction (MI), possibly related to issues that may bias estimation of treatment effects, such as time-varying confounders, informative dropout, and cohort loss due to competing events. METHODS We analyzed data from 5056 individuals initiating randomized antiretroviral treatment (ART) in AIDS Clinical Trials Group studies; 1704 started abacavir therapy. An intent-to-treat analysis adjusted for pretreatment covariates and weighting for informative censoring was used to estimate the hazard ratio (HR) of MIs after initiation of a regimen with or without abacavir. RESULTS Through 6 years after ART initiation, 36 MI events were observed in 17,404 person-years of follow-up. No evidence of an increased hazard of MI in subjects using abacavir versus no abacavir was seen (over a 1-year period: P=.50; HR, 0.7 [95% confidence interval {CI}, 0.2-2.4]); over a 6-year period: P=. 24; HR, 0.6 [95% CI, 0.3-1.4]); these results were robust over as-treated and sensitivity analyses. Although the risk of MI decreased over time, there was no evidence to suggest a time-dependent abacavir effect. Classic cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors were the strongest predictors of MI. CONCLUSION We find no evidence to suggest that initial ART containing abacavir increases MI risk over short-term and long-term periods in this population with relatively low MI risk. Traditional CVD risk factors should be the main focus in assessing CVD risk in individuals with human immunodeficiency virus infection.
Comment on “Litter Size, Emotionality, and Avoidance Learning”

Broadhurst and Levine (1963) have recently published a short note in this Journal in which rats that were reared in small-sized litters ( 2 or 3 pups each) or large-sized litters ( 5 to 9 pups each) were compared on open-field behavior and avoidance learning. They failed to find significmt differences between these two groups on any of the dependent variables, although they did note that ". the small litters' lower defecation and higher ambulation, when taken together, might suggest a reduction in emotionality" (P . 41) . In discussing these resulcs the authors point out that their findings are inconsistent with those reported by Seitz (1954), Amsel and Penick (1962), and Denenberg ( 1961). They then go on to state that "It should be noted, however, that in all the srudies cited large litter sizes of 12 or more were used and it seems likely that with respect to adult emotionality there may exist an optimal litter size, increases beyond which result in increased emotionality in adulthood. " That sentence contains an error. In my 1961 paper I reported that we had used litters of size 4 or 8 and had found that rats from litters of size 8 were significantly more emotional than rats from litters of size 4. There was no mention of any litters of size 12, and we have never used such sized litters in our research. W e manipulated the litter size variable because Seitz (1954) had reported finding that rats reared in littcrs of 12 were significantly more emotional than rats reared in litters of 6. Our results both confirm and extend Seitz' original finding and make dubious the hypothesis that there may exist an optimal litter size, increases beyond which result in increased emotionalilv in adulthood. A more reasonable hypothesis appears to be that strain differences are of major importance with respect to litter size and emotionality. Seitz and we have both used rats derived from Wistar stock, while the animals used by Broadhurst and Levine come from the Maudsley Reactive and Ncnreactive strains. Other evidence favoring the strain difference hypothesis comes from a study by Ottinger, Denenberg, and Stephens (1963) who found a significant postnatal maternal effect when offspring of highand low-emotional Purdue-Wistar mothers were uoss-fostered at birth and later tested for emotional behavior. Broadhurst (1961), however, failed to obtain evidence of a significant maternal effect when using highand low-emotional Maudsley strain Ss.
Social Comparison and Informal Group Influence

Little is known about the basis on which an individual selects and is influenced by specific reference groups. An attempt is made to explain consumer susceptibility to informal group influence by Festinger's theory of social comparison. The results of the study support hypotheses derived from the theory and offer insight into the determination of reference group influence. Marketing implications of this theory are discussed.
Purification and characterization of prolyl endopeptidase from the Pacific herring, Clupea pallasi, and its role in the activation of sperm motility

Protease activities with specificity toward synthetic substrates, Suc‐Gly‐Pro‐Leu‐Gly‐Pro‐MCA for prolyl endopeptidase or collagenase‐like peptidase, and Suc‐Ala‐Ala‐Pro‐Phe‐MCA for chymotrypsin were identified in the detergent‐soluble fraction of herring spermatozoa. The enzyme activities increased in the presence of herring sperm‐activating protein (HSAP). Among them a prolyl endopeptidase [EC. 3. 4. 21. 26] was purified to near homogeneity from herring testis. The molecular mass of the enzyme was 79 kDa and the properties of the enzyme were quite similar to prolyl endopeptidase from other tissues or cells. Both the enzyme activation and the sperm motility activation by HSAP were inhibited by benzyloxycarbonyl‐L‐thioproline‐thioprolinal, a specific inhibitor for prolyl endopeptidase. Furthermore, the motility activation by HSAP was inhibited by substrates of the prolyl endopeptidase. Western blotting with mouse anti‐prolyl endopeptidase serum revealed the presence of 79 kDa prolyl endopeptidase in the tail fraction of herring sperm. These results suggest that prolyl endopeptidase exists on the surface of the sperm tail and interacts with the HSAP.
Human T-Lymphotropic Virus Type I (HTLV-1) Infection among Iranian Blood Donors: First Case-Control Study on the Risk Factors

Human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1) infection is an endemic condition in Northeast Iran and, as such, identification of risk factors associated with the infection in this region seems to be a necessity. All the possible risk factors for HTLV-1 seropositivity among first-time blood donors were evaluated in Mashhad, Iran, during the period of 2011–2012. Blood donation volunteers were interviewed for demographic data, medical history, and behavioral characteristics and the frequencies of risk factors were compared between HTLV-1 positive (case) and HTLV-1 negative (control) donors. The data was analyzed using Chi square and t-tests. Logistic regression analysis was performed to identify independent risk factors for the infection. Assessments were carried out on 246 cases aged 17–60 and 776 controls aged 17–59, who were matched based on their ages, gender, and date and center of donation. Logistic analysis showed low income (OR = 1.53, p = 0.035), low educational level (OR = 1.64, p = 0.049), being born in the cities of either Mashhad (OR = 2.47, p = 0.001) or Neyshabour (OR = 4.30, p < 0001), and a history of blood transfusion (OR = 3.17, p = 0.007) or non-IV drug abuse (OR = 3.77, p < 0.0001) were significant predictors for infection with HTLV-1. Lack of variability or small sample size could be reasons of failure to detect some well-known risk factors for HTLV-1 infection, such as prolonged breastfeeding and sexual promiscuity. Pre-donation screening of possible risk factors for transfusion-transmissible infections should also be considered as an important issue, however, a revision of the screening criteria such as a history of transfusion for more than one year prior to donation is strongly recommended.
Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology Estimation of Return on Investment in Share Market through Ann

The stock market is one of the most popular investing places because of its expected high profit. Traditionally, technical analysis approach, that predicts stock prices based on historical prices and volume, basic concepts of trends, price patterns and oscillators, is commonly used by stock investors to aid investment decisions. Advanced intelligent techniques, ranging from pure mathematical models and expert systems to fuzzy logic networks, have also been used by many financial trading systems for investing and predicting stock prices. In recent years, most of the researchers have been concentrating their research work on the future prediction of share market prices by using Neural Networks. But, in this paper we newly propose a methodology inwhich the neural network is applied to the investor's financial decision making to invest all type of shares irrespective of the high / low index value of the scripts, in a continuous time frame work and further it is further extended to obtain the expected return on investment through the Neural Networks and finally it is compared with the actual value. The proposed network has been tested with stock data obtained from the Indian Share Market BSE Index. Finally, the design, implementation and performance of the proposed neural network are described. 1 INTRODUCTION From the beginning of time it has been man's common goal to make his life easier. The prevailing notion in society is that wealth brings comfort and luxury, so it is not surprising that there has been so much work done on ways to predict the markets to increase such wealth. Various technical, fundamental, and statistical indicators have been proposed and used with varying results. However, no one technique or combination of techniques has been successful enough to consistently "beat the market". Traditionally, technical analysis approach [4, 16, 17, 18], that predicts stock prices based on historical prices and volume, the Dow Theory, basic concepts of trends, price patterns and oscillators, is commonly used by stock investors to aid investment decisions. Advanced intelligent techniques ranging from pure mathematical models and expert systems [5, 7]
Search-Based Refactoring Using Recorded Code Changes

Over the past decades, many techniques and tools have been developed to record the sequence of applied refactoring to improve design quality. We start from the observation that these recorded code changes can be used to propose new refactoring solutions in similar contexts. In addition, this knowledge can be combined with structural and semantic information, used by existing work, to improve the automation of refactoring. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective optimization approach to find the best sequence of refactorings that maximizes the use of refactoring applied in the past to similar contexts, minimizes semantic errors and minimizes the number of defects (improve code quality). To this end, we use the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to find the best trade-off between these three objectives. We report the results of our experiments on different open source java projects.
Cefamandole, a Cephalosporin Antibiotic with an Unusually Wide Spectrum of Activity

The in vitro activity of cefamandole, 7-d-mandelamido-3-(1 methyl-1H-tetrazol-5 yethiomethyl)-3-cephem-4 carboxylic acid, was investigated. The majority of streptococci and pneumococci were inhibited by 0.1 μg/ml. Activity against Staphylococcus aureus was below that of cephalothin, but most strains were inhibited by 0.4 μg/ml. Enterococci were not inhibited by less than 25 μg/ml. Cefamandole was very active against most members of the Enterobacteriaceae, with 70% of Escherichia coli, 86% of Klebsiella pneumoniae, and 88% of Proteus mirabilis inhibited by 1.6 μg/ml. A number of Enterobacter aerogenes, Proteus vulgaris, and Serratia marcescens strains were inhibited by less than 25 μg/ml. Pseudomonas species were resistant. Cefamandole was more active than cephalothin, cephaloridine, or cephalexin against members of the Enterobacteriaceae. Inoculum size and type of medium had variable effects on the minimal inhibitory concentration, depending upon the particular strain tested. Strains of Enterobacter, Serratia, indole-positive Proteus species showed the greatest inoculum effect. Similarly, these species showed a several-fold difference of bactericidal and inhibitory levels. Resistance of cefamandole to hydrolysis by gram-negative beta-lactamase played a partial role in its activity, but some strains that hydrolyzed the agent were susceptible.
Regional variation of microtubule flux reveals microtubule organization in the metaphase meiotic spindle

Continuous poleward movement of tubulin is a hallmark of metaphase spindle dynamics in higher eukaryotic cells and is essential for stable spindle architecture and reliable chromosome segregation. We use quantitative fluorescent speckle microscopy to map with high resolution the spatial organization of microtubule flux in Xenopus laevis egg extract meiotic spindles. We find that the flux velocity decreases near spindle poles by ∼20%. The regional variation is independent of functional kinetochores and centrosomes and is suppressed by inhibition of dynein/dynactin, kinesin-5, or both. Statistical analysis reveals that tubulin flows in two distinct velocity modes. We propose an association of these modes with two architecturally distinct yet spatially overlapping and dynamically cross-linked arrays of microtubules: focused polar microtubule arrays of a uniform polarity and slower flux velocities are interconnected by a dense barrel-like microtubule array of antiparallel polarities and faster flux velocities.
Reducing the Misinformation Effect Through Initial Testing: Take Two Tests and Recall Me in the Morning?

Summary Initial retrieval of an event can reduce people's susceptibility to misinformation. We explored whether protective effects of initial testing could be obtained on final free recall and source‐monitoring tests. After studying six household scenes (e.g., a bathroom), participants attempted to recall items from the scenes zero, one, or two times. Immediately or after a 48‐hour delay, non‐presented items (e.g., soap and toothbrush) were exposed zero, one, or four times through a social contagion manipulation in which participants reviewed sets of recall tests ostensibly provided by other participants. A protective effect of testing emerged on a final free recall test following the delay and on a final source‐memory test regardless of delay. Taking two initial tests did not increase these protective effects. Determining whether initial testing will have protective (versus harmful) effects on memory has important practical implications for interviewing eyewitnesses. © 2015 The Authors. Applied Cognitive Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Great expectations - introspective vs. perceptual prominence ratings and their acoustic correlates

In order to gain knowledge about the interaction between topdown expectations of listeners concerning prosodic prominence and its acoustic correlates, two exploratory empirical studies were carried out. First, native and nonnative subjects rated prominences of speech read at normal and very fast —prosodically very different — speech. Later, these ratings were compared with introspective prominence ratings of different listeners. First results indicate a major influence of the introspection on prominence ratings, especially if acoustic cues are difficult to interpret, as it is the case in very fast speech. Compared to native subjects, nonnatives rely less on their introspection and more on the acoustics.
Race to the top or bottom? Corporate governance, freedom of reincorporation and competition in law

SummaryThis paper investigates the governance structure choices of firms when there is competition between legal systems. We study the impact of the allocation of control over choice of governance and reincorporation on firms’ technologies and technological specialization of countries in the context of a model of the firm in which there are agency conflicts between shareholders and managers. We show that the allocation of control over firms’ reincorporation decisions determines the corporate governance choice ex ante and the outcome of the competition between legal regimes ex post. When managers have control over reincorporation then competitive deregulation and “runs to the bottom” ensue. When shareholders have partial or full control then there is diversity in governance structures. Runs to the bottom are not necessarily socially undesirable but they have a feedback effect on firms’ choices of technologies that may make the party in control worse off ex ante. We show that it is impossible for any country to achieve social welfare maximization of its existing and new enterprises. With competition between legal regimes, start-up and mature companies incorporate in different jurisdictions even when reincorporation is correctly anticipated.