Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Fertilizer Type and Harvest Date on Yield and Quality Traits of Brachiaria Hybrid Mulato II Grass ( Brachiaria Ruziziensis ) in Highlands of Ethiopia

: The experiment was conducted with the objective of assessing the effects of fertilizer type, and harvesting date on plant growth traits, dry matter (DM) yield and nutritional values of Brachiaria hybrid Mulato II grass. A two-factor factorial experiment was used based on a randomized complete block design (RCBD) with three replications. The fertilizer type had three levels: chemical fertilizer, manure, and control (without fertilizer) while the three harvesting dates were: 45, 75, and 105 days of plant age. The spacing between rows and plants within rows was 0.3 m and 0.5 m, respectively. All plots were harvested and a sample was taken from each plot for measurement of quality traits. The result of the analysis of variance showed significant effects of harvest date and fertilizer type on all the traits, with the exception of crude protein (CP) in fertilizers. The harvesting date and the fertilizer interaction effects were significant for plant height, leaf to stem ratio (LSR), root number, CP, Ash and neutral detergent fiber (NDF). All morphological traits except LSR were increased by increasing harvesting date. For LSR, the higher value was obtained in early cutting. For quality traits; the Ash and CP values decreased and NDF, ADF and ADL values increased as the plant age increased, indicating that forage quality was decreased in late cutting (105 day). In comparisons between fertilizer levels, the higher values of all morphological traits except LSR were obtained by the application of manure fertilizer followed by chemical fertilizer. The higher mean values of CP and LSR were obtained by the application of chemical fertilizer and without fertilizer, respectively. The results of this study showed that most of the morphological traits of the grass were less affected by the interaction between fertilizer type and harvesting days. BMII grass harvested from 105 days using manure fertilizer had greater DM yield than the application of chemical fertilizer and without fertilizer which would be more beneficial to get high quantity yields and considered as an option to solve the shortage of feed.
Heterozygous Inactivation of the Na/Ca Exchanger Increases Glucose-Induced Insulin Release, β-Cell Proliferation, and Mass

OBJECTIVE We have previously shown that overexpression of the Na-Ca exchanger (NCX1), a protein responsible for Ca2+ extrusion from cells, increases β-cell programmed cell death (apoptosis) and reduces β-cell proliferation. To further characterize the role of NCX1 in β-cells under in vivo conditions, we developed and characterized mice deficient for NCX1. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Biologic and morphologic methods (Ca2+ imaging, Ca2+ uptake, glucose metabolism, insulin release, and point counting morphometry) were used to assess β-cell function in vitro. Blood glucose and insulin levels were measured to assess glucose metabolism and insulin sensitivity in vivo. Islets were transplanted under the kidney capsule to assess their performance to revert diabetes in alloxan-diabetic mice. RESULTS Heterozygous inactivation of Ncx1 in mice induced an increase in glucose-induced insulin release, with a major enhancement of its first and second phase. This was paralleled by an increase in β-cell proliferation and mass. The mutation also increased β-cell insulin content, proinsulin immunostaining, glucose-induced Ca2+ uptake, and β-cell resistance to hypoxia. In addition, Ncx1+/− islets showed a two- to four-times higher rate of diabetes cure than Ncx1+/+ islets when transplanted into diabetic animals. CONCLUSIONS Downregulation of the Na/Ca exchanger leads to an increase in β-cell function, proliferation, mass, and resistance to physiologic stress, namely to various changes in β-cell function that are opposite to the major abnormalities seen in type 2 diabetes. This provides a unique model for the prevention and treatment of β-cell dysfunction in type 2 diabetes and after islet transplantation.
Factors related to participation in a cervical cancer screening programme in urban Sweden

Fifty-six per cent of invited women aged 25–60 attended the Population-based Cervical Cancer Screening Programme (PCCSP) in Stockholm, Sweden in 1994–1996. The objective of this study was to explore factors related to participation in this PCCSP. Registry data on all women aged 25–60 invited to the PCCSP from 1994 to 1996 (n=307 552) was matched with a national longitudinal population database. Women in the youngest age group (25–29 years old) were found to be less likely to participate in the PCCSP than women in older age groups. Married women or widows attended the programme more often (OR 1.32, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.29–1.34 and OR 1.36, 95% CI 1.27–1.45, respectively) than did single women. Women in the labour force were more likely to participate than those who were not in the labour force (OR 1.82, 95% CI 1.78–1.87). The participation rate was not lower for immigrant women from developing countries than for those born in Sweden. We found that age, marital status and being in the labour force or not are factors associated with participation in the cervical cancer screening programme.
Phase I to III Trials of Anti–B Cell Therapy in Non–Hodgkin's Lymphoma

Led by the anti-CD20 antibody rituximab, therapeutic monoclonal antibodies have dramatically altered the treatment of patients with non–Hodgkin's lymphoma. As the understanding of the biology of this novel therapy improves, so does the potential for further progress. There are currently four monoclonal antibodies approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of B-cell malignancies and dozens more are in various stages of development. The indications for the currently available antibodies, both labeled and unlabeled, are being expanded to include first-line treatment, maintenance strategies, and combinations with chemotherapy. Newer agents are being engineered to target novel antigens, and to interact more specifically with the host immune system. These promising therapeutics face a significant challenge in evaluation and integration in the post-rituximab world.
Hamilton Depression Scale in dementia

INTRODUCTION : Wide variations in frequency of depression in primary degenerative dementia (PDD) and in vascular dementia (VD) have been reported. This may perhaps be due to inadequacy of common diagnostic tools in detecting depression in the face of cognitive decline. We evaluated here the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) in demented patients with PDD and VD. METHODS : We examined 50 consecutive patients with PDD and 50 consecutive patients with VD. All patients underwent neurological examination and their depression was evaluated using DSM-III-R criteria and the HDRS. The data obtained were analysed for distribution of depression and pattern of responses obtained in the HDRS. Sensitivity, specificity and Youden's J-indices for different cut-off scores of the HDRS in its ability to detect depression in this population were calculated. RESULTS : Dementia was associated with depression in 38% of the patients (DSM-III-R criteria). HDRS scores were higher in depressed patients (z= -5.7, P < 0.0001) with an HDRS cut-off score of 10 being indicative of depression in demented patients. Symptoms related to 'affective' components of the HDRS (such as depressive mood and anxiety) were strongly associated with the diagnosis of depression (Mann-Whitney tests, P < 0.0001). CONCLUSION : Depression is frequent in demented patients. The HDRS has good criterion validity in the evaluation of depression in demented patients. (Int J Psych Clin Pract 2002; 6: 91-94)
Dental Staff Doses with Handheld Dental Intraoral X-Ray Units

A handheld portable dental intraoral x-ray system is available in the United States and elsewhere. The system is designed to minimize the user's radiation dose. It includes specially designed shielding of the x-ray tube housing and an integral radiation shield to minimize backscatter. Personnel radiation dose records were obtained from 18 dental facilities using both the handheld system and a wall mounted dental x-ray system, providing 661 individual dose measurements. Dental staff doses were also compared for the handheld and conventional systems using both film and digital imaging for the same facilities and staff members. The results indicate that the doses for the handheld systems are significantly less than for wall-mounted systems. The average monthly dose for the handheld systems was 0.28 &mgr;Sv vs. 7.86 &mgr;Sv (deep dose equivalent) for the wall-mounted systems, a difference that is statistically significant at the p = 0.01 level. Consequently, there should be no concern about the use of this handheld dental intraoral x-ray system. Additional shielding efforts, (e.g., wearing a lead apron) will not provide significant benefit nor reduce staff radiation dose.
Differentiation of umbilical cord blood-derived multilineage progenitor cells into respiratory epithelial cells.

BACKGROUND Umbilical cord blood (UCB) has been examined for the presence of stem cells capable of differentiating into cell types of all three embryonic layers (i.e. endo-, ecto- and mesoderm). The few groups reporting success have typically confirmed endodermal potential using hepatic differentiation. We report differentiation of human UCB-derived multipotent stem cells, termed multilineage progenitor cells (MLPC), into respiratory epithelial cells (i.e. type II alveolar cells). METHODS Using a cell separation medium (PrepaCyte-MLPC; BioE Inc.) and plastic adherence, MLPC were isolated from four of 16 UCB units (American Red Cross) and expanded. Cultures were grown to 80% confluence in mesenchymal stromal cell growth medium (MSCGM; Cambrex BioScience) prior to addition of small airway growth medium (SAGM; Cambrex BioScience), an airway maintenance medium. Following a 3-8-day culture, cells were characterized by light microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, immunofluorescence and reverse transcriptase (RT)-PCR. RESULTS MLPC were successfully differentiated into type II alveolar cells (four of four mixed lines; two of two clonal lines). Differentiated cells were characterized by epithelioid morphology with lamellar bodies. Both immunofluorescence and RT-PCR confirmed the presence of surfactant protein C, a protein highly specific for type II cells. DISCUSSION MLPC were isolated, expanded and then differentiated into respiratory epithelial cells using an off-the-shelf medium designed for maintenance of fully differentiated respiratory epithelial cells. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time human non-embryonic multipotent stem cells have been differentiated into type II alveolar cells. Further studies to evaluate the possibilities for both research and therapeutic applications are necessary.
Bentonite as an adsorbent of arsenic and lead in the digestive tract of cattle: an in vitro study

Objective. To determine the recommended dose of bentonite as a chelator of arsenic (As) and lead (Pb) in the rumen, abomasal and duodenal environment by means of an in vitro system, considering the variables of ruminal fermentation and the adsorbent effect of As and Pb. Materials and Methods. Vials were prepared with 50 mL of anaerobic medium and 0.5 g of alfalfa as substrate. The culture media were added with 1.01 and 1.95 ppm of As and Pb, respectively. The treatments consisted of different levels of bentonite (B) added to the medium, B-0%, B-1.5%, B-3.0% and B-4.5%. The media were incubated for 24 h, and pH, volatile fatty acid (VFA) and N-NH 3 production, in vitro DM digestibility (IVDMD) and chelating effect of bentonite were measured, simulating rumen, abomasum and duodenum conditions. A completely randomised design and orthogonal contrasts were used. Results. Bentonite did not modify the pH (p>0.05) and the molar proportion of VFAs, but the total VFA concentration presented a negative linear effect with increasing bentonite levels. Likewise, the N-NH 3 level decreased (p<0.05) with increasing inclusion levels of bentonite. The IVDMD was reduced with B-3% and B-4.5% (52.36 b and 49.74 b %) in comparison to B-0% and B-1.5% (62.30 a and 61.98 a %). Treatments B-1.5% and B-4.5% improved (p<0.05) As and Pb adsorption in the rumen, abomasal and duodenal environments. Conclusions. The recommended level of bentonite as chelator of As and Pb is 1.5%; doses of 4.5% affect IVDMD and, consequently, animal productivity.
NetTCR-2.0 enables accurate prediction of TCR-peptide binding by using paired TCR and sequence data

Prediction of T-cell receptor (TCR) interactions with MHC-peptide complexes remains highly challenging. This challenge is primarily due to three dominant factors: data accuracy, data scarceness, and problem complexity. Here, we showcase that “ shallow ” convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures are adequate to deal with the problem complexity imposed by the length variations of TCRs. We demonstrate that current public bulk CDR3 β -pMHC binding data overall is of low quality and that the development of accurate prediction models is contingent on paired α / β TCR sequence data corresponding to at least 150 distinct pairs for each investigated pMHC. In comparison, models trained on CDR3 α or CDR3 β data alone demonstrated a variable and pMHC speci ﬁ c relative performance drop. Together these ﬁ ndings support that T-cell speci ﬁ city is predictable given the availability of accurate and suf ﬁ cient paired TCR sequence data. NetTCR-2.0 is publicly available at https:// services.healthtech. dtu.dk/service.php? NetTCR-2.0.
Development of the appendicularian Oikopleura dioica: Culture, genome, and cell lineages

Appendicularians are planktonic tunicates (urochordates), and retain a swimming tadpole shape throughout their life. Together with ascidians, they are the closest relatives of the vertebrates. Oikopleura dioica is characterized by its simplified life habit and anatomical organization. It has a tiny genome, the smallest ever found in a chordate. Its life cycle is extremely short – about 5 days – and it can be maintained in the laboratory over many generations. Embryos and adults are transparent and consist of a small number of cells. The anatomy of juveniles and adults has been described in detail. Cleavage pattern, cell lineages, and morphogenetic movements during embryogenesis have also been comprehensively documented. A draft genome sequence is now available. These features make this organism a suitable experimental model animal in which genetic manipulations would be feasible, as in Drosophila and Caenorhabditis elegans. In this review, I summarize a hundred years’ knowledge on the development throughout the life cycle of this organism. Oikopleura is an attractive organism for developmental and evolutionary studies of chordates. It offers considerable promise for future genetic approaches.
An efficient multiple hypothesis filter for bearing-only SLAM

This paper presents a multiple hypothesis approach to solve the simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) problem with a bearing-only sensor. The main contribution of the paper is to provide a remedy for the landmark initialisation problem that occurs due to the absence of range information, in a computationally efficient manner. Each landmark is initialised in the form of multiple hypotheses distributed along the direction of the bearing measurement. Using subsequent measurements, the validity of the hypotheses is evaluated based on the sequential probability ratio test (SPRT). Consequently, the best approximation to the landmark location is maintained. This approach enables an extended Kalman filler (EKF) to be used for bearing-only SLAM providing a computational efficient solution. Simulation and experimental results, from using a camera as the bearing-only sensor mounted on a Pioneer robot are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.
The LEAR submission at Thumos 2014

We describe the submission of the INRIA LEAR team to the THU-MOS workshop in conjunction with ECCV 2014. Our system is based on Fisher vector (FV) encoding of dense trajectory features (DTF), which we also used in our 2013 submission. This year's submission additionally incorporates static-image features (SIFT, Color, and CNN) and audio features (ASR and MFCC) for the classification task. For the detection task, we combine scores from the clas-sification task with FV-DTF features extracted from video slices. We found that these additional visual and audio feature significantly improve the classification results. For localization we found that using the classification scores as a contex-tual feature besides local motion features leads to significant improvements.
Influence and sharp-threshold theorems for monotonic measures

The influence theorem for product measures on the discrete space (0, 1} N may be extended to probability measures with the property of monotonicity (which is equivalent to "strong positive association"). Corresponding results are valid for probability measures on the cube [0, 1] N that are absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure. These results lead to a sharp-threshold theorem for measures of random-cluster type, and this may be applied to box crossings in the two-dimensional random-cluster model.
Economic evaluation of neonatal screening for phenylketonuria and congenital hypothyroidism

Objective: To evaluate the costs and benefits of neonatal screening for phenylketonuria (PKU) and congenital hypothyroidism (CH). Neonatal screening for PKU and CH is common throughout the developed world. It represents a model of preventive care in that the screening procedure is simple and intellectual disability is otherwise irreversible. Changes in treatment and care, and in particular the advent of maternal PKU, require regular evaluation of a programme that also impacts on a large healthy population.
Principled Parallel Mean-Field Inference for Discrete Random Fields

Mean-field variational inference is one of the most popular approaches to inference in discrete random fields. Standard mean-field optimization is based on coordinate descent and in many situations can be impractical. Thus, in practice, various parallel techniques are used, which either rely on ad hoc smoothing with heuristically set parameters, or put strong constraints on the type of models. In this paper, we propose a novel proximal gradient-based approach to optimizing the variational objective. It is naturally parallelizable and easy to implement. We prove its convergence, and demonstrate that, in practice, it yields faster convergence and often finds better optima than more traditional mean-field optimization techniques. Moreover, our method is less sensitive to the choice of parameters.
Synaptic Depression and Cortical Gain Control

Cortical neurons receive synaptic inputs from thousands of afferents that fire action potentials at rates ranging from less than 1 hertz to more than 200 hertz. Both the number of afferents and their large dynamic range can mask changes in the spatial and temporal pattern of synaptic activity, limiting the ability of a cortical neuron to respond to its inputs. Modeling work based on experimental measurements indicates that short-term depression of intracortical synapses provides a dynamic gain-control mechanism that allows equal percentage rate changes on rapidly and slowly firing afferents to produce equal postsynaptic responses. Unlike inhibitory and adaptive mechanisms that reduce responsiveness to all inputs, synaptic depression is input-specific, leading to a dramatic increase in the sensitivity of a neuron to subtle changes in the firing patterns of its afferents.
Interfaces for timeline-based mobile video browsing

Browsing video on mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs requires new interface designs and interaction concepts because of their small screen sizes. In this paper, we present four different interfaces which enable users to skim video at different replay speed levels: An interface supporting flicking similar to text browsing on an iPhone™, an elastic slider, and two variations which also allow for interactive speed manipulation. Based on a heuristic evaluation with all four designs, revised versions of the two most promising ones have been implemented. A comparative user study proved the usefulness of the proposed designs. Both interfaces showed the same performance (measured in time needed to solve typical browsing tasks) but achieved different results in subjective user assessments.
Thalamic relay nuclei for cerebellar and certain related fiber systems in the cat

Anterograde labeling techniques were used to define the terminal distributions in the thalamus of afferents arising in the deep cerebellar nuclei, entopeduncular nucleus and substantia nigra. Anterograde and retrograde labeling methods were then used to determine the extent of the cortical projections of the cerebellar relay nuclei. The cerebellar projection to the contralateral ventral nuclei of the thalamus terminates in a zone which is separate from that receiving pallido‐ and nigrothalamic fibers. None of the zones of termination of these fiber systems corresponds to commonly recognized cytoarchitectonic divisions. Instead, they include parts of the ventroanterior (VA), ventrolateral (VL) and principal ventromedial (VMp) nuclei.
Psychophysical and Physiological Evidence for Fast Binaural Processing

The mammalian auditory system is the temporally most precise sensory modality: To localize low-frequency sounds in space, the binaural system can resolve time differences between the ears with microsecond precision. In contrast, the binaural system appears sluggish in tracking changing interaural time differences as they arise from a low-frequency sound source moving along the horizontal plane. For a combined psychophysical and electrophysiological approach, we created a binaural stimulus, called “Phasewarp,” that can transmit rapid changes in interaural timing. Using this stimulus, the binaural performance in humans is significantly better than reported previously and comparable with the monaural performance revealed with amplitude-modulated stimuli. Parallel, electrophysiological recordings of binaural brainstem neurons in the gerbil show fast temporal processing of monaural and different types of binaural modulations. In a refined electrophysiological approach that was matched to the psychophysics, the seemingly faster binaural processing of the Phasewarp was confirmed. The current data provide both psychophysical and physiological evidence against a general, hard-wired binaural sluggishness and reconcile previous contradictions of electrophysiological and psychophysical estimates of temporal binaural performance.