Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Human Salivary Protein Histatin 5 Has Potent Bactericidal Activity against ESKAPE Pathogens

ESKAPE (Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumanni, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacter species) pathogens have characteristic multiple-drug resistance and cause an increasing number of nosocomial infections worldwide. Peptide-based therapeutics to treat ESKAPE infections might be an alternative to conventional antibiotics. Histatin 5 (Hst 5) is a salivary cationic histidine-rich peptide produced only in humans and higher primates. It has high antifungal activity against Candida albicans through an energy-dependent, non-lytic process; but its bactericidal effects are less known. We found Hst 5 has bactericidal activity against S. aureus (60–70% killing) and A. baumannii (85–90% killing) in 10 and 100 mM sodium phosphate buffer (NaPB), while killing of >99% of P. aeruginosa, 60–80% E. cloacae and 20–60% of E. faecium was found in 10 mM NaPB. Hst 5 killed 60% of biofilm cells of P. aeruginosa, but had reduced activity against biofilms of S. aureus and A. baumannii. Hst 5 killed 20% of K. pneumonia biofilm cells but not planktonic cells. Binding and uptake studies using FITC-labeled Hst 5 showed E. faecium and E. cloacae killing required Hst 5 internalization and was energy dependent, while bactericidal activity was rapid against P. aeruginosa and A. baumannii suggesting membrane disruption. Hst 5-mediated killing of S. aureus was both non-lytic and energy independent. Additionally, we found that spermidine conjugated Hst 5 (Hst5-Spd) had improved killing activity against E. faecium, E. cloacae, and A. baumannii. Hst 5 or its derivative has antibacterial activity against five out of six ESKAPE pathogens and may be an alternative treatment for these infections.
The Effects of Anxiety on Affective Learning and Serial Position Recall

Sixty-five college-aged adults participated in a study that examined the effects of trait and state anxiety on learning positive and negative emotional words from the Affective Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AAVL). Self-reported state and trait anxiety were measured via Speilberger's State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). Each participant completed the five learning trials and delayed recall trial of the positive and negative word lists; order of administration for the word lists was counterbalanced across participants. Using ANOVA, initial analyses revealed significant effects for order of administration of the positive and negative word lists. ANCOVAs (using state and trait anxiety as covariates) yielded a significant interaction involving serial position, trial, and state anxiety as well as an interaction involving serial position, trial, and trait anxiety. Post hoc analyses did not support a priori hypotheses. However, state anxiety was associated with decreased word recall on the first learning trial. The results of this study indicate that state anxiety is initially associated with decreased performance when learning emotional words. However, these initial effects dissipate with subsequent learning trials. Implications for task performance are discussed.
Atrio-Esophageal Fistula: A Case Series and Literature Review

Case series Patient: Male, 72 • Male, 29 • Male, 75 Final Diagnosis: Atrio-esophageal fistula Symptoms: Altered mental state • chest pain • fever • melena Medication: — Clinical Procedure: — Specialty: Critical Care Medicine Objective: Rare disease Background: Percutaneous catheter radiofrequency ablation (RFA) and cryoablation of the left atrium and pulmonary vein ostia have become successful therapeutic modalities in the management of atrial fibrillation. Atrio-esophageal fistula is a rare complication. Awareness of complication risk is imperative because without prompt diagnosis and urgent surgical intervention, the outcome is often fatal. We present 3 cases of atrio-esophageal fistula following percutaneous catheter radiofrequency ablation (RFA). Case Reports: Case 1: A 72-year old white male presented 27 days after percutaneous RFA for atrial fibrillation with fever, altered mental status, and melena. Esophagogastroduodenoscopy (EGD) revealed a 1-cm defect in the mid-esophagus. Upon thoracotomy, severe hemorrhage ensued from a concomitant injury to the left atrium. Multiple attempts to repair the left atrial perforation were unsuccessful and the patient died. Case 2: A 71-year old white male presented 29 days after percutaneous RFA for atrial fibrillation with fever and tonic-clonic seizure. Recognition of possible atrio-esophageal fistula was considered and confirmed on thoracotomy. Surgical fixation of the left atria and esophagus were performed. The patient survived and was discharged to a skilled care facility. Case 3: A 75-year old white male presented 24 days after percutaneous RFA for atrial fibrillation with chest pain. An echocardiogram revealed a large pericardial effusion and pericardiocentesis was performed. Despite aggressive measures, the patient died. The autopsy demonstrated a communicating esophageal fistula with the right pulmonary vein. Conclusions: Clinicians tending to patients who have recently undergone atrial ablation need to be aware of atrio-esophageal fistula as a rare but highly fatal complication.
Blocking the formation of radiation–induced breast cancer stem cells

The goal of adjuvant (post-surgery) radiation therapy (RT) for breast cancer (BC) is to eliminate residual cancer cells, leading to better local tumor control and thus improving patient survival. However, radioresistance increases the risk of tumor recurrence and negatively affects survival. Recent evidence shows that breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs) are radiation-resistant and that relatively differentiated BC cells can be reprogrammed into induced BCSCs (iBCSCs) via radiation-induced re-expression of the stemness genes. Here we show that in irradiation (IR)-treated mice bearing syngeneic mammary tumors, IR-induced stemness correlated with increased spontaneous lung metastasis (51.7%). However, IR-induced stemness was blocked by targeting the NF-κB- stemness gene pathway with disulfiram (DSF)and Copper (Cu2+). DSF is an inhibitor of aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) and an FDA-approved drug for treating alcoholism. DSF binds to Cu2+ to form DSF-Cu complexes (DSF/Cu), which act as a potent apoptosis inducer and an effective proteasome inhibitor, which, in turn, inhibits NF-κB activation. Treatment of mice with RT and DSF significantly inhibited mammary primary tumor growth (79.4%) and spontaneous lung metastasis (89.6%) compared to vehicle treated mice. This anti-tumor efficacy was associated with decreased stem cell properties (or stemness) in tumors. We expect that these results will spark clinical investigation of RT and DSF as a novel combinatorial treatment for breast cancer.
The Development of Non-Spatial Working Memory Capacity During Childhood and Adolescence and the Role of Interference Control: An N-Back Task Study

To investigate the role of interference control on the development of working memory (WM) capacity, 6–12-year-old children and adults performed an N-Back task with differing WM-load and interference control demands. Correlation analyses between flanker interference scores and WM-load levels showed that interference control was only required in the 2-back condition. While WM maintenance (1-back task) reached adult accuracy levels at age 10–12, the ability to maintain information in WM during distraction (2-back-task) displayed protracted maturation into adolescence. This is suggested to reflect yet immature connections between prefrontal and posterior association areas, respectively involved in interference control and WM storage.
Effects of Air Quality Regulations on Polluting Industries

This paper examines unintended effects of air quality regulation, using plant data for 1963–92. A key regulatory tool since 1978 is the annual designation of county air quality attainment status. Nonattainment status triggers specific equipment requirements, with the severity and enforcement of regulations rising with plant size. The differential in regulation favors attainment areas, reducing births for polluting industries in nonattainment areas by 26–45 percent. Industries and sectors with bigger plants are affected the most, shifting industrial structure toward less regulated single‐plant firms. Large preregulation plants do benefit from grand‐fathering provisions, but both grandfathering and shifts to small‐scale new plants contribute to environmental degradation.
Software visualization

This half-day tutorial gives an overview of the current state-of-the-art in software visualization. Software visualization encompasses the development and evaluation of methods for graphically representing different aspects of software, including its structure, its execution, and its evolution. In contrast to visual programming and diagramming for software design, software visualization is not so much concerned with the construction, but with the analysis of programs and their development process. Software visualization combines techniques from areas like software engineering, programming languages, data mining, computer graphics, information visualization and human-computer interaction. Topics covered in this tutorial include static program visualization, algorithm animation, visual debugging, as well as the visualization of the evolution of software. In particular we identify common principles illustrated by many examples and give pointers to tools available today.
Improved Thermoelectric Performance of Silver Nanoparticles‐Dispersed Bi2Te3 Composites Deriving from Hierarchical Two‐Phased Heterostructure

A practical and feasible bottom‐up chemistry approach is demonstrated to dramatically enhance thermoelectric properties of the Bi2Te3 matrix by means of exotically introducing silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) for constructing thermoelectric composites with the hierarchical two‐phased heterostructure. By regulating the content of AgNPs and fine‐tuning the architecture of nanostructured thermoelectric materials, more heat‐carrying phonons covering the broad phonon mean free path distribution range can be scattered. The results show that the uniformly dispersed AgNPs not only effectively suppress the growth of Bi2Te3 grains, but also introduce nanoscale precipitates and form new interfaces with the Bi2Te3 matrix, resulting in a hierarchical two‐phased heterostructure, which causes intense scattering of phonons with multiscale mean free paths, and therefore significantly reduce the lattice thermal conductivity. Meanwhile, the improved power factor is maintained due to low‐energy electron filtering and excellent electrical transport property of Ag itself. Consequently, the maximum ZT is amazingly found to be enhanced by 304% arising from the hierarchical heterostructure when the AgNPs content reaches 2.0 vol%. This study offers an easily scalable and low‐cost route to construct a wide range of multiscale hierarchically heterostructured bulk composites with significant enhancement of thermoelectric performance.
Modeling Argument Strength in Student Essays

While recent years have seen a surge of interest in automated essay grading, including work on grading essays with respect to particular dimensions such as prompt adherence, coherence, and technical quality, there has been relatively little work on grading the essay dimension of argument strength, which is arguably the most important aspect of argumentative essays. We introduce a new corpus of argumentative student essays annotated with argument strength scores and propose a supervised, feature-rich approach to automatically scoring the essays along this dimension. Our approach significantly outperforms a baseline that relies solely on heuristically applied sentence argument function labels by up to 16.1%.
Contribution of T Cells and Neutrophils in Protection of Young Susceptible Rats from Fatal Experimental Malaria1

In human malaria, children suffer very high rates of morbidity and mortality. To analyze the mechanisms involved in age-dependent protection against malaria, we developed an experimental model of infection in rats, where young rats are susceptible to Plasmodium berghei and adult rats control blood parasites and survive thereafter. In this study, we showed that protection of young rats could be achievable by adoptive transfer of spleen cells from adult protected rats, among which T cells could transfer partial protection. Transcriptome analysis of spleen cells transferring immunity revealed the overexpression of genes mainly expressed by eosinophils and neutrophils. Evaluation of the role of neutrophils showed that these cells were able to transfer partial protection to young rats. This antiparasitic effect was shown to be mediated, at least in part, through the neutrophil protein-1 defensin. Further adoptive transfer experiments indicated an efficient cooperation between neutrophils and T cells in protecting all young recipients. These observations, together with those from in vitro studies in human malaria, suggest that the failure of children to control infection could be related not only to an immaturity of their adaptive immunity but also to a lack in an adequate innate immune response.
Face Verification with Gabor Representation and Support Vector Machines

This paper investigates the intrinsic ability of Gabor representation and support vector machines (SVM) in capturing discriminatory content for face verification task. The idea is to decompose a face image into different spatial frequencies (scales) and orientations where salient discriminant features may appear. Dimensionality reduction is adopted to create low dimensional feature vectors for more convenient processing. SVM is used to extract relevant information from this low dimensional training data in order to construct a robust client-specific classifier. This method has been tested with publicly available AT&T and BANCA datasets. In the BANCA experiments, it was observed that method consistently yields the lowest error rates in comparison with other methods for all seven test configurations. An equal error rate (EER) of 6.19% on the G configuration of BANCA dataset has been achieved
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation in Design Critique

Paid crowdsourcing platforms, which harness the extrinsic motivation of monetary compensation, are seeing increased usage for design feedback tasks, but the low quality of design feedback from crowdsourced workers continues to be a problem for designers. Intrinsic motivation has the potential to increase the quality of worker responses, but is difficult to elicit in paid workers. In this paper, we present the results of a study performed on the paid crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk in which we investigate the effect of introducing intrinsic motivation on the quality and character of workers’ responses to a design feedback task. Workers were assigned to either an intrinsic condition, where they were allowed to choose the topic of the design they would give feedback on, or an extrinsic condition where they were assigned a topic randomly. Analysis of results showed that giving workers a choice of topic did not affect the quality of their responses but did cause them to write more, more efficiently, and more confidently than workers in the extrinsic condition.
Induction of IL-10-Producing CD1dhighCD5+ Regulatory B Cells following Babesia microti-Infection

Background Understanding the induction of immune regulatory cells upon helminth infection is important for understanding the control of autoimmunity and allergic inflammation in helminth infection. Babesia microti, an intraerythrocytic protozoan of the genus Babesia, is a major cause of the emerging human disease babesiosis, an asymptomatic malaria-like disease. We examined the influence of acute B. microti infection on the development of regulatory B cells together with regulatory T cells. Principal Findings Our data demonstrate that B cells stimulated in vitro with B. microti produce interleukin (IL)-10. This cytokine is also secreted by B cells isolated from B. microti-infected mice in response to lipopolysaccharide stimulation. In addition, high levels of IL-10 were detected in the serum of mice after infection with B. microti. The frequency of IL-10-producing CD1dhighCD5+ regulatory B cells (Bregs) and CD4+CD25+FoxP3+ T cells increased during the course of B. microti infection. Furthermore, adoptive transfer of IL-10-producing B cells induced by B. microti infection led to increased susceptibility of recipient mice to infection with B. microti. In contrast, experiments with B cell-deficient (µMT) mice demonstrated that lack of B cells enhances susceptibility to B. microti infection. Conclusions This study is the first demonstration of the expansion of Bregs following infection by an intraerythrocytic protozoan parasite. These data suggest that B. microti infection in mice provides an excellent model for studying Breg-mediated immune responses and begins to elucidate the mechanism by which helminth infection regulates autoimmunity and allergic inflammation.
Discharge to a Skilled Nursing Facility and Subsequent Clinical Outcomes Among Older Patients Hospitalized for Heart Failure

Background— Heart failure (HF) is the leading cause of hospitalization among older Americans. Subsequent discharge to skilled nursing facilities (SNF) is not well described. Methods and Results— We performed an observational analysis of Medicare beneficiaries ≥65 years of age, discharged alive to SNF or home after ≥3-day hospitalization for HF in 2005 and 2006 within the Get With The Guidelines–HF Program. Among 15 459 patients from 149 hospitals, 24.1% were discharged to an SNF, 22.3% to home with home health service, and 53.6% to home with self-care. SNF use varied significantly among hospitals (median, 10.2% versus 33.9% in low versus high tertiles), with rates highest in the Northeast. Patient factors associated with discharge to SNF included longer length of stay, advanced age, female sex, hypotension, higher ejection fraction, absence of ischemic heart disease, and a variety of comorbidities. Performance measures were modestly lower for patients discharged to SNF. Unadjusted absolute event rates were higher at 30 days (death, 14.4% versus 4.1%; rehospitalization, 27.0% versus 23.5%) and 1 year (death, 53.5% versus 29.1%; rehospitalization, 76.1% versus 72.2%) after discharge to SNF versus home, respectively (P<0.0001 for all). After adjustment for measured patient characteristics, discharge to SNF remained associated with increased death (hazard ratio, 1.76; 95% confidence interval, 1.66 to 1.87) and rehospitalization (hazard ratio, 1.08; 95% confidence interval, 1.03 to 1.14). Conclusions— Discharge to SNF is common among Medicare patients hospitalized for HF, and these patients face substantial risk for adverse events, with more than half dead within 1 year. These findings highlight the need to better characterize this unique patient population and understand the SNF care they receive.
Quantitative Assessment of Finger Motor Impairment in Multiple Sclerosis

Objective To address the disability impact on fine hand motor functions in patients with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) by quantitatively measuring finger opposition movements, with the aim of providing a new “score” integrating current methods for disability assessment. Methods 40 MS patients (Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS): 0–7) and 80 healthy controls (HC) performed a repetitive finger-to-thumb opposition sequence with their dominant hand at spontaneous and maximal velocity, and uni- and bi-manually metronome-paced. A sensor-engineered glove was used to measure finger motor performance. Twenty-seven HC were tested twice, one month apart, to assess test-retest reliability. Results The motor parameters showed a good reproducibility in HC and demonstrated significantly worse performance in MS patients with respect to HC. A multivariate model revealed that rate of movement in the spontaneous velocity condition and inter-hand interval (IHI), indicating bimanual coordination, contributed independently to differentiate the two groups. A finger motor impairment score based on these two parameters was able to discriminate HC from MS patients with very low EDSS scores (p<0.001): a significant difference was already evident for patients with EDSS = 0. Further, in the MS group, some motor performance parameters correlated with the clinical scores. In particular, significant correlations were found between IHI and EDSS (r = 0.56; p<0.0001), MS Functional Composite (r = −0.40; p = 0.01), Paced Auditory Serial Addition (r = −0.38; p = 0.02). No motor performance parameter correlated with Timed 25-Foot Walk. Conclusions A simple, quantitative, objective method measuring finger motor performance could be used to define a score discriminating healthy controls and MS patients, even with very low disability. This sensitivity might be of crucial importance for monitoring the disease course and the treatment effects in early MS patients, when changes in the EDSS are small or absent.
Obesity: assessment and management in primary care.

Obesity is a complex, multifactorial condition in which excess body fat may put a person at health risk. National data indicate that the prevalence of obesity in the United States is increasing in children and adults. Reversing these trends requires changes in individual behavior and the elimination of societal barriers to healthy lifestyle choices. Basic treatment of overweight and obese patients requires a comprehensive approach involving diet and nutrition, regular physical activity, and behavioral change, with an emphasis on long-term weight management rather than short-term extreme weight reduction. Physicians and other health professionals have an important role in promoting preventive measures and encouraging positive lifestyle behaviors, as well as identifying and treating obesity-related comorbidities. Health professionals also have a role in counseling patients about safe and effective weight loss and weight maintenance programs. Recent evidence-based guidelines from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, as well as recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists/American College of Endocrinology, American Obesity Association, U.S. Clinical Preventive Services Task Force, Institute of Medicine, and World Health Organization can be consulted for information and guidance on the identification and management of overweight and obese patients.
Dynamic threshold method for scene change detection

In general, the scene change for video indexing could be detected by using an appropriate threshold. However, the single fixed threshold value used in previous researches cannot perform well for all videos equally. In this paper, we propose a dynamic threshold method(DTM) in order to improve the performance of the scene change detection. The proposed method utilizes variable parameters obtained from detected cuts and the distribution of cut intervals in order to change the threshold dynamically. In short, the threshold in DTM is lowered in the area where the chance of cut occurrence is high and raised in the area where the chance of cut occurrence is low. Experimental results indicate that the proposed DTM is both computationally low and robust to false alarm.