Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Therapeutic Potential of Plants as Anti-microbials for Drug Discovery

The uses of traditional medicinal plants for primary health care have steadily increased worldwide in recent years. Scientists are in search of new phytochemicals that could be developed as useful anti-microbials for treatment of infectious diseases. Currently, out of 80% of pharmaceuticals derived from plants, very few are now being used as anti-microbials. Plants are rich in a wide variety of secondary metabolites that have found anti-microbial properties. This review highlights the current status of traditional medicine, its contribution to modern medicine, recent trends in the evaluation of anti-microbials with a special emphasis upon some tribal medicine, in vitro and in vivo experimental design for screening, and therapeutic efficacy in safety and human clinical trails for commercial outlet. Many of these commercially available compounds are crude preparations administered without performing human clinical trials. Recent methods are useful to standardize the extraction for scientific investigation of new phytochemicals and anti-microbials of traditionally used plants. It is concluded that once the local ethnomedical preparations of traditional sources are scientifically evaluated before dispensing they should replace existing drugs commonly used for the therapeutic treatment of infection. This method should be put into practice for future investigations in the field of ethnopharmacology, phytochemistry, ethnobotany and other biological fields for drug discovery.
Bigger, Faster?: Associations Between Hospital Thrombolysis Volume and Speed of Thrombolysis Administration in Acute Ischemic Stroke

Background and Purpose— There is evidence that high-volume hospitals may produce better patient outcomes. We aimed to identify whether there were any associations between hospital thrombolysis volume and speed of thrombolysis (tissue-type plasminogen activator [tPA]) administration in patients with ischemic stroke. Methods— Data were drawn from 2 national clinical audits in England: the Stroke Improvement National Audit Program and the 2012 Sentinel Stroke Audit. Hospitals were categorized into 3 groups based on the annualized volume of thrombolysis: 0 to 24, 25 to 49, and ≥50 cases per annum. Arrival-brain scan, onset-tPA, and arrival-tPA times were compared across groups and stratified by onset-arrival time. Multilevel logistic models were used to estimate the odds of receiving tPA within 60 minutes of arrival. Results— Of the 42 024 patients with acute ischemic stroke admitted to 80 hospitals, 4347 received tPA (10.3%). Patients admitted to hospitals with an annual thrombolysis volume of ≥50 cases per annum had median arrival-tPA times that were 28 and 22 minutes shorter than patients admitted to hospitals with volumes of 0 to 24 and 25 to 49, respectively. Onset-tPA times were shorter by 24 to 32 minutes across strata of onset-arrival times. In multivariable analysis, patients admitted to hospitals with a volume of ≥50 cases per annum had 4.33 (2.21–8.50; P<0.0001) the odds of receiving tPA within 60 minutes of arrival. No differences in safety outcomes were observed, with similar 30-day mortality and complication rates across the groups. Conclusions— Hospitals with higher volumes of thrombolysis activity achieve statistically and clinically significant shorter delays in administering tPA to patients after arrival in hospital.
High‐Efficiency Deep‐Blue Light‐Emitting Diodes Based on Phenylquinoline/Carbazole‐Based Compounds

Highly efficient deep‐blue fluorescent materials based on phenylquinoline–carbazole derivatives (PhQ‐CVz, MeO‐PhQ‐CVz, and CN‐PhQ‐CVz) are synthesized for organic light‐emitting diodes (OLEDs). The materials form high‐quality amorphous thin films by thermal evaporation and the energy levels can be easily adjusted by the introduction of different electron‐donating and electron‐withdrawing groups on carbazoylphenylquinoline. Non‐doped deep‐blue OLEDs that use PhQ‐CVz as the emitter show bright emission (Commission Internationale de L'Éclairage (CIE) coordinates, x = 0.156, y = 0.093) with an external quantum efficiency of 2.45%. Furthermore, the material works as an excellent host material for 4,4′‐bis(9‐ethyl‐3‐carbazovinylene)‐1,1′‐biphenyl dopant to get high‐performance OLEDs with excellent deep‐blue CIE coordinates (x = 0.155, y = 0.157), high power efficiency (5.98 lm W−1), and high external quantum efficiency (5.22%).
Competitive assessments of pulmonary embolism: Noninvasiveness versus the golden standard

Diagnosis of suspected pulmonary embolism (PE) is crucial as undiagnosed and over-diagnosis can both lead to serious consequences. Contemporary diagnostic approach of PE is a sequential combination assessment beginning with clinical assessment, validated with D-dimer measurement and confirmed with pulmonary angiography or imaging. Since the invasive pulmonary angiography is risky and costly, imaging is a warranted tool in the diagnosis procedure. CT pulmonary angiography is a less-invasive method with general availability, studies provide favorable evidences for CT pulmonary angiography as a stand-alone test for excluding PE, and it has become the first choice of tests in emergency department for suspected PE in most centers. Ventilation/perfusion single-photon emission CT signifies a new era in nuclear medicine. It has excellent sensitivity and specificity, fast procedure, low radiation exposure, few complications and contradictions. Besides, MR angiography is another possible and promising approach for diagnosis of suspected PE with much safer contrast agents than CT and no ionizing radiation. With wide availability and less invasive effects, imaging becomes a firsthand tool to obtain optimal accuracy in the diagnosis work up in clinic nowadays. This review summarizes the current methods in diagnosing PE and the update of imaging assessments of the disease.
Efficacy of the monoclonal antibody EGFR inhibitors for the treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer

Two anti-epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) monoclonal antibodies (MoAbs) have been approved in Canada for the treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) – cetuximab, a mouse-human chimeric MoAb, and panitumumab, a fully human MoAb. This paper reviews the efficacy of the anti-EGFR monoclonal antibodies cetuximab and panitumumab – both as monotherapy and in combination with cytotoxic chemotherapy – in the treatment of mCRC. Both cetuximab and panitumumab have demonstrated clinical efficacy in monotherapy in patients with mCRC, an advantage that has recently been found to be limited largely to those with wild-type KRAS tumors. Advantages of using these agents in monotherapy include reduced cost and toxicity. While the addition of cetuximab to irinotecan has shown superior progression-free survival and response compared with cetuximab monotherapy, there is currently no evidence for a benefit of panitumumab in combination with irinotecan.
Dynamic Human Surface Reconstruction Using a Single Kinect

This paper presents a system for robust dynamic human surface reconstruction using a single Kinect. The single Kinect provides a self-occluded and noisy RGBD data. Thus it is challenging to track the whole human surface robustly. To overcome both incompleteness and data noise, we adopt a template to confine the shape in the un-seen part, and propose a two-stage tracking pipeline. The first stage tracks the articulated motion of the human, which improves robustness of tracking by introducing more constraints between the surface points. The second stage tracks movements of non-articulated motion. For long sequences, we stabilize the human surface in the un-seen part by directly warping the surface from the first frame to the current frame according to sequentially tracked correspondences, preventing surface from collapsing caused by error accumulation. We demonstrate our method by several real captured RGBD data, containing complex human motion. The reconstruction results show the effectiveness and robustness of our method.
Do behavioural health intentions engender health behaviour change? A study on the moderating role of self-affirmation on actual fruit intake versus vegetable intake.

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this persuasion research was to show that self-affirmation (SA) increases intentions in the advocated direction and that these intentions predict actual health behaviour change. That is, these intentions not only serve the function of short-term relief of the threat caused by the persuasive message. We proposed that the effect of SA depends on the level of value-involvement. DESIGN Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions (no SA vs. SA) of a between-subjects design. After the SA manipulation, all participants read a threatening health text about the consequences of insufficient fruit and vegetable intake. At pre-test, value-involvement was determined. METHODS Participants included were undergraduate students. The SA manipulation consisted of a writing exercise. After reading the health message, participants reported their intention to eat sufficient fruit and vegetables (N= 537). After 1 week (N= 293) and 4 weeks (N= 261), participants completed self-reports of fruit and vegetable intake. RESULTS No main effect was found for SA on any outcome measure. We did find that involvement moderated the effect of SA on cooked vegetables consumption. This effect was not present for raw vegetables/salad consumption or for fruit consumption. The moderated effect on cooked vegetable consumption was most evident after 1 week and the effect was mediated by the immediate intentions of participants. CONCLUSIONS SA can lead to genuine intentions that predict actual behaviour, but the effect of SA depends on the type of behaviour and people's value-involvement.
Towards characterizing cloud backend workloads: insights from Google compute clusters

The advent of cloud computing promises highly available, efficient, and flexible computing services for applications such as web search, email, voice over IP, and web search alerts. Our experience at Google is that realizing the promises of cloud computing requires an extremely scalable backend consisting of many large compute clusters that are shared by application tasks with diverse service level requirements for throughput, latency, and jitter. These considerations impact (a) capacity planning to determine which machine resources must grow and by how much and (b) task scheduling to achieve high machine utilization and to meet service level objectives. Both capacity planning and task scheduling require a good understanding of task resource consumption (e.g., CPU and memory usage). This in turn demands simple and accurate approaches to workload classification-determining how to form groups of tasks (workloads) with similar resource demands. One approach to workload classification is to make each task its own workload. However, this approach scales poorly since tens of thousands of tasks execute daily on Google compute clusters. Another approach to workload classification is to view all tasks as belonging to a single workload. Unfortunately, applying such a coarse-grain workload classification to the diversity of tasks running on Google compute clusters results in large variances in predicted resource consumptions. This paper describes an approach to workload classification and its application to the Google Cloud Backend, arguably the largest cloud backend on the planet. Our methodology for workload classification consists of: (1) identifying the workload dimensions; (2) constructing task classes using an off-the-shelf algorithm such as k-means; (3) determining the break points for qualitative coordinates within the workload dimensions; and (4) merging adjacent task classes to reduce the number of workloads. We use the foregoing, especially the notion of qualitative coordinates, to glean several insights about the Google Cloud Backend: (a) the duration of task executions is bimodal in that tasks either have a short duration or a long duration; (b) most tasks have short durations; and (c) most resources are consumed by a few tasks with long duration that have large demands for CPU and memory.
Degradation of epoxy resin by partial discharges

Epoxy resins are used in the production of high-voltage insulation components. Partial discharges, inherent in high-voltage installations, degenerate the resinous material and cause degradation of the insulation thus reducing the working life of the component, An understanding of the nature of the chemical changes taking place under partial discharge stressing should allow the production of improved insulation systems and/or identification of diagnostic methods for monitoring the state of existing equipment. Attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) microspectroscopy is used to determine the chemical changes to the surface of a bisphenol-A based epoxy resin resulting from partial discharge stressing in an air environment. Differences in stressed resin surface chemistry are found to be dependent upon the humidity of the stressed air. The variation in degradation products occurring in dry and in moist air are discussed and possible reactions to explain these differences are presented.
NMDA Receptor Subunit NR2A Is Required for Rapidly Acquired Spatial Working Memory But Not Incremental Spatial Reference Memory

NMDA receptors (NMDARs) containing NR2A (ε1) subunits are key contributors to hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP) induction in adult animals and have therefore been widely implicated in hippocampus-dependent spatial learning. Here we show that mice lacking the NR2A subunit or its C-terminal intracellular domain exhibit impaired spatial working memory (SWM) but normal spatial reference memory (SRM). Both NR2A mutants acquired the SRM version of the water maze task, and the SRM component of the radial maze, as well as controls. They were, however, impaired on a non-matching-to-place T-maze task, and on the SWM component of the radial maze. In addition, NR2A knock-out mice displayed a diminished spatial novelty preference in a spontaneous exploration Y-maze task, and were impaired on a T-maze task in which distinctive inserts present on the floor of the maze determined which goal arm contained the reward, but only if there was a discontiguity between the conditional cue and the place at which the reward was delivered. This dissociation of spatial memory into distinctive components is strikingly similar to results obtained with mice lacking glutamate receptor-A (GluR-A)-containing AMPA receptors, which support long-term potentiation expression. These results identify a specific role for a NMDAR-dependent signaling pathway that leads to the activation of a GluR-A-dependent expression mechanism in a rapidly acquired, flexible form of spatial memory. This mechanism depends on the C-terminal intracellular domain of the NR2A subunit. In contrast, the ability to associate a particular spatial location with the water maze escape platform or food reward is NR2A independent, as well as GluR-A independent.
A Review of Childhood Abuse Questionnaires and Suggested Treatment Approaches

The focus of this chapter is on providing a review of childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse and combined abuse assessment questionnaires. Prevalence rates of childhood abuse in the United States will also be provided along with symptom and diagnostic correlates found to be associated with a childhood history of abuse. The following seven abuse screens are reviewed. (1) The Rape Aftermath Symptom Test; (2) The Scarlett O’Hara v. MMPI Configuration; (3) The Child Abuse and Trauma Scale; (4) The Childhood Trauma Questionnaire; (5) The Trauma Symptom Checklist; (6) The Trauma Symptom Inventory; and (7) The Binghamton Abuse Screen. Finally, a brief discussion of two recommended adult childhood abuse survivor treatment approaches, cognitive behavior therapy and prolonged exposure techniques will be provided.
Revisiting bacterial phylogeny

Current methods used for phylogenetic classification of prokaryotes largely rely on the sequences of 16S rRNA genes that are ubiquitously present in the cell. Theoretical basis of this methodology is based on the assumption that 16S rRNA genes are only vertically inherited and are thus indigenous to each species. However, microbial genomic analysis has revealed the existence of prokaryotic species containing two types of rRNA (rrn) operons of seemingly different origins. It has also been reported that some bacteria contain 16S rRNA that are mosaics of sequences from multiple species. This suggests that horizontal gene transfer (HGT) occurred for 16S rRNA genes. In addition, a recent HGT experiment mimicking the natural HGT process has shown that a wide range of foreign 16S rRNA genes can be transferred into Escherichia coli, including those from different phylogenetic classes (with a minimum sequence identity of 80.9% to the Escherichia coli 16S rRNA gene). Thus, in contrast to the complexity hypothesis that states informational genes are rarely horizontally transferred between species, 16S rRNA is occasionally amenable to HGT. Results of the current method for rapid identification and classification of prokaryotes based on the 16S rRNA gene should thus be carefully analyzed and interpreted.
Reading Differences and Brain: Cortical Integration of Speech and Print in Sentence Processing Varies With Reader Skill

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the impact of literacy skills in young adults on the distribution of cerebral activity during comprehension of sentences in spoken and printed form. The aim was to discover where speech and print streams merge, and whether their convergence is affected by the level of reading skill. The results from different analyses all point to the conclusion that neural integration of sentence processing across speech and print varies positively with the reader's skill. Further, they identify the inferior frontal region as the principal site of speech–print integration and a major focus of reading comprehension differences. The findings provide new evidence of the role of the inferior frontal region in supporting supramodal systems of linguistic representation.
Using a pseudo-stochastic approach for multiple-parts scheduling on an unreliable machine

Abstract In this paper we follow previous “pseudo-stochastic” approaches that solve stochastic control problems by using deterministic optimal control methods. In a similar manner to the certainty equivalence principle, the suggested model maximizes a given profit function of the expected system outcome. However, unlike the certainty equivalence principle, we model the expected influences of all future events (including those that are expected beyond the planning horizon), as encapsulated by their density functions and not only by their mean values. The model is applied to the optimal scheduling of multiple part-types on a single machine that is subject to random failures and repairs. The objective of the scheduler is to maximize the profit function of the produced multiple-part mix. A numerical study is performed to evaluate the suggested pseudo-stochastic solutions under various conditions. These solutions are compared to a profit upper bound of the stochastic optimal control solutions.
Factors controlling the resistance of Ohmic contacts to n-InGaAs

The authors report specific contact resistance (ρc) values for Mo-, Ti-, TiW-, Pd-, and Pt-based Ohmic contacts to n+-In0.86Ga0. 14As that are deposited with either collimated sputter or electron-beam deposition. Palladium-based contacts with 5 nm of electron-beam evaporated Pd have a specific contact resistance of 7.6 ± 0.5 × 10−9 Ω cm2, while identical collimated sputter deposited contacts have a specific contact resistance of 4.1 ± 0.4 × 10−9 Ω cm2. Contacts with a very thin evaporated Pd layer (2 nm) or a sputtered Pd/Ti 1/1 nm × 4 multilayer have stable ρc values of 5.4 ± 0.5 × 10−9 and 5.0 ± 0.5 × 10−9 Ω cm2, respectively, after 2 h at 270 °C. The ρc of sputter deposited TiW-based contacts is an order of magnitude lower than for identical evaporated contacts (1.6 ± 0.3 × 10−8 vs 2.6 ± 0.3 × 10−7 Ω cm2) and is stable during annealing, while sputter deposition of Pt-based contacts yields rc values that are half an order of magnitude lower than similar evaporated contacts (4.5 ± 1.0 × 10−9 vs 1.7 ± 0.2 .
Formability and Correlation between Formability Indices of Al-0.9Mg-1.0Si-0.7Cu-0.6Mn Alloy for Automotive Body Sheets

The texture, the formability and the correlation between formability indices of Al-0.9Mg- 1.0Si-0.7Cu-0.6Mn alloy for automotive body sheets subjected to solid solution, T4, annealing treatment and artificial aging at 443k for different time were investigated by orientation distribution functions(ODF) analysis, tensile and cupping test, FLD measurement and regression analysis method. The results showed that the textures of cold rolled alloy sheets consist mainly of copper and brass orientations, which are transformed into the texture mainly containing {001}<310> orientation after recrystallization, and aging treatment has little influence on the recrystallization texture. The formability of alloy sheets subjected to solid solution, T4 and annealing treatment is similar, however, the formability was observably deteriorated after aging at 443k. The correlation between uniform elongation δu and FLD0 is the most remarkable in all the given formability indices, the correlation between strain-hardening exponent n and the FLD0 take second place, while there is no correlation between plastic strain ratio r and FLD0. The correlation between reduction of area ψ and cupping value IE is distinct, while ψ and IE have little correlation with FLD0.
Prevalence, diagnosis, and treatment of ankyloglossia: methodologic review.

OBJECTIVE To review the diagnostic criteria for, the prevalence of, and the effectiveness of frenotomy for treatment of ankyloglossia. DATA SOURCES MEDLINE and CINAHL databases were searched for articles suitable for a methodologic review of studies on various aspects of ankyloglossia. STUDY SELECTION Studies that presented data on patients and addressed ankyloglossia in relation to breastfeeding were selected. Case reports, case series, retrospective studies, prospective controlled studies, and randomized controlled trials were included in the analysis. Opinion pieces, literature reviews, studies without data on patients, studies that did not focus on breastfeeding, position statements, and surveys were excluded. SYNTHESIS There is no well-validated clinical method for establishing a diagnosis of ankyloglossia. Five studies using different diagnostic criteria found a prevalence of ankyloglossia of between 4% and 10%. The results of 6 non-randomized studies and 1 randomized study assessing the effectiveness of frenotomy for improving nipple pain, sucking, latch, and continuation of breastfeeding all suggested frenotomy was beneficial. No serious adverse events were reported. CONCLUSION Diagnostic criteria for ankyloglossia are needed to allow for comparative studies of treatment. Frenotomy is likely an effective treatment, but further randomized controlled trials are needed to confirm this. A reliable frenotomy decision rule is also needed.