Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Isolation and Characterization of a Novel Betacoronavirus Subgroup A Coronavirus, Rabbit Coronavirus HKU14, from Domestic Rabbits

ABSTRACT We describe the isolation and characterization of a novel Betacoronavirus subgroup A coronavirus, rabbit coronavirus HKU14 (RbCoV HKU14), from domestic rabbits. The virus was detected in 11 (8.1%) of 136 rabbit fecal samples by reverse transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR), with a viral load of up to 108 copies/ml. RbCoV HKU14 was able to replicate in HRT-18G and RK13 cells with cytopathic effects. Northern blotting confirmed the production of subgenomic mRNAs coding for the HE, S, NS5a, E, M, and N proteins. Subgenomic mRNA analysis revealed a transcription regulatory sequence, 5′-UCUAAAC-3′. Phylogenetic analysis showed that RbCoV HKU14 formed a distinct branch among Betacoronavirus subgroup A coronaviruses, being most closely related to but separate from the species Betacoronavirus 1. A comparison of the conserved replicase domains showed that RbCoV HKU14 possessed <90% amino acid identities to most members of Betacoronavirus 1 in ADP-ribose 1″-phosphatase (ADRP) and nidoviral uridylate-specific endoribonuclease (NendoU), indicating that RbCoV HKU14 should represent a separate species. RbCoV HKU14 also possessed genomic features distinct from those of other Betacoronavirus subgroup A coronaviruses, including a unique NS2a region with a variable number of small open reading frames (ORFs). Recombination analysis revealed possible recombination events during the evolution of RbCoV HKU14 and members of Betacoronavirus 1, which may have occurred during cross-species transmission. Molecular clock analysis using RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) genes dated the most recent common ancestor of RbCoV HKU14 to around 2002, suggesting that this virus has emerged relatively recently. Antibody against RbCoV was detected in 20 (67%) of 30 rabbit sera tested by an N-protein-based Western blot assay, whereas neutralizing antibody was detected in 1 of these 20 rabbits.
Implementation of Coordinated Complex Dynamic Behaviors in Multirobot Systems

Decentralized control strategies for multirobot systems have been extensively studied over the past few years. Typically, these strategies aim at exploiting local interaction rules to regulate the overall state of the multirobot system toward a desired configuration, thus generating some desired coordinated behaviors, such as synchronization, swarming, deployment, or formation control. However, when considering the real-world application of multirobot systems, more complex cooperative dynamic behaviors are desirable. Along these lines, in this paper, we propose a methodology to control a multirobot system for cooperatively tracking arbitrarily defined periodic setpoint trajectories. This objective is fulfilled partitioning the multirobot system into independent robots (that can provide control inputs) and dependent robots (that are controlled through local interaction). The motion of the independent robots is then defined in such a way that, exploiting local interactions, the dependent robots are controlled to track the desired trajectories. The proposed control strategy is validated by means of simulations and experiments on real robots.
An optimality analysis of sensor-target geometries for signal strength based localization

In this paper we characterize the bounds on localization accuracy in signal strength based localization. In particular, we provide a novel and rigorous analysis of the relative receiver-transmitter geometry and the effect of this geometry on the potential localization performance. We show that uniformly spacing sensors around the target is not optimal if the sensortarget ranges are not identical and is not necessary in any case. Indeed, we show that in general the optimal sensor-target geometry for signal strength based localization is not unique.
The Pricing of Stripped Mortgage-Backed Securities

Interest only (IO) and principal only (PO) stripped mortgage-backed securities (MBS) are derivative securities which pay out only the interest component (IO) or principal component (PO) of the cash ows from the underlying mortgages. Their often extreme and nonlinear response to interest rate movements has led to many dramatic losses by traders in these securities, and makes it vital to specify correctly any model used to value or hedge them. This paper uses a large sample of market prices of IO and PO securities, with a wide range of coupon rates over the period June 1990{January 1995 to understand the main properties of IO/PO prices, and to determine the important features that any realistic prepayment and valuation model must capture. We t a rational mortgage valuation model to the data, and use nonparametric techniques to explore the model's ability to match the behavior of both prices and prepayment over the sample period, leading to several potentially fruitful directions for future research. Stern School of Business, NYU; Stern School of Business, NYU; Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley; and Stern School of Business, NYU.
Oxidative Stress Parameters and Erythrocyte Membrane Adenosine Triphosphatase Activities in Streptozotocin-induced Diabetic Rats Administered Aqueous Preparation of Kalanchoe Pinnata Leaves

Background: Diabetes mellitus is a chronic metabolic disease that according to the World Health Organization affects more than 382 million people. The rise in diabetes mellitus coupled with the lack of an effective treatment has led many to investigate medicinal plants to identify a viable alternative. Objective: To evaluate red blood cell (RBC) membrane adenosine triphosphatase (ATPase) activities and antioxidant levels in streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats administered aqueous preparation of Kalanchoe pinnata leaves. Materials and Methods: Diabetes mellitus was induced in rats by a single administration of streptozotocin (60 mg/kg). Diabetic rats were then treated with aqueous K. pinnata preparation (three mature leaves ~ 9.96 g/70 kg body weight or about 0.14 g/kg body weight/day) for 30 days. Serum glucose, RBC membrane ATPase activities, and antioxidant levels were determined. Results: We noted weight loss and reduced food consumption in the treated diabetic group. Serum glucose levels were reduced in the treated diabetic group compared to the other groups. Superoxide dismutase activity and glutathione levels were not significantly elevated in the treated group compared to the diabetic group. However, serum catalase activity was significantly (P < 0.05) increased in the treated diabetic group compared to the other groups. Serum thiobarbituric acid reactive substances were not significantly altered among the groups. There was a significant (P < 0.05) increase in Mg2+ ATPase activity and a nonsignificant increase in Na+/K+ ATPase activity in the RBC membrane of the treated diabetic group compared to the diabetic group. Conclusion: The consumption of aqueous preparation of K. pinnata may accrue benefits in the management of diabetes by lowering oxidative stress often associated with the disease and improving the availability of cellular magnesium through an increase in the magnesium ATPase pump in the RBC membrane for increased cellular metabolism of glucose through the glycolytic pathway.
PRESIDENTIAL GUEST LECTURE: Anatomy of the Dysplastic Hip and Consequences for Total Hip Arthroplasty

Total hip arthroplasty in dysplastic hips is challenging because of the modified anatomy of the proximal femur and acetabulum. We studied three-dimensional anatomic parameters in 247 dysplastic hips from 218 adult patients using radiographs and computed tomography, and analyzed the consequences for total hip arthroplasty. A cohort of 310 primary osteoarthritic hips was used as a control group. According to the classification of Crowe et al, 78 of the dislocated hips were graded Class I, 26 as Class II, 20 as Class III or IV, and 169 dysplastic hips had no subluxation. Compared with primary osteoarthritis, the intramedullary femoral canal had reduced mediolateral and anteroposterior dimensions. With high grade subluxations the femoral neck shaft angle decreased but with low grades, especially in Class II, the neck shaft angle increased. The proximal femur had more anteversion with individual variations ranging from 1° to 80°. The true acetabulum had a reduced anteroposterior diameter. The large individual morphologic variability across all levels of dysplastic hips suggests the femoral prosthesis cannot be chosen on the basis of the severity of the subluxation alone.
The Atmospheres of the Terrestrial Planets: Clues to the Origins and Early Evolution of Venus, Earth, and Mars

Abstract #1929. Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston.Allegre C. J. and Schneider S. H. (1994.) The evolution of the Earth. Sci. Am. , 271, 66–75.Arvidson R. E. , Bell J. F. III, Bellutta P., et al. (2010) Spirit Mars Rover mission: Overview and selected results from the north-ern Home Plate winter haven to the side of Scamander Crater. J. Geophys. Res., 115, E7, DOI: 10.1029/2010JE003633.Atreya S. K. , Mahaffy P. R. , Niemann H. B. , Wong M. H. , and Owen T. C. (2003) Composition and origin of the atmosphere of Jupiter: An update, and implications for extrasolar giant planets. Planet. Space Sci . , 51, 105–112. Atreya S. K. , Adams E. Y. , Niemann H. B. , Demick-Montelara J. E. , Owen T. C. , Fulchignoni M. , Ferri F. , and Wilson E. (2006) Titan’s methane cycle. Planet. Space Sci., 54, 1177–1187.Atreya S. K. , Mahaffy P. R. , and Wong A. -S. (2007) Methane and related trace species on Mars: Origin, loss, implications for life, and habitability. Planet. Space Sci., 55, 358–369 . Atreya S. K. , Witasse O. , Chevrier V. F. , Forget F. , Mahaffy P. R. , Price P. B. , Webster C. R. , and Zurek R. W. (2011) Methane on Mars: Current observations, interpretation, and future plans.
Rapid Development of Knowledge-Based Conversational Recommender Applications with Advisor Suite

Knowledge-based recommender systems are Web-based applications that exploit deep domain knowledge for generating buying proposals that match the individual needs and requirements of an online user. As in many domains the detailed customer requirements have to be elicited in an interactive dialog before the recommendation can be made, the development and in particular also the maintenance of the dynamic Web pages that form this personalized dialog are critical tasks, mostly because of the typically strong interdependencies between the recommendation and personalization knowledge. In this paper, we present ADVISOR SUITE, an integrated, domain-independent environment for the development of highly-interactive, personalized recommender applications. The main pillars of the presented system are a) an integrated, model-driven approach for designing all the required recommendation-, personalization- and interaction knowledge, and b) a mechanism that allows for the automatic generation of Web applications, which is of particular importance in prototyping-based, evolutionary development approaches. On the basis of the experiences we have made with the system in several industrial projects, we finally summarize key criteria and best practices of how to efficiently develop high-quality recommender applications with ADVISOR SUITE.
Robustness analysis of structures based on plastic limit analysis with uncertain loads

This paper presents a method for computing an info-gap robustness function of structures, which is regarded as one measure of structural robustness, under uncertainties associated with the limit load factor. We assume that the external load in the plastic limit analysis is uncertain around its nominal value. Various uncertainties are considered for the live, dead, and reference disturbance loads based on the nonstochastic info-gap uncertainty model. Although the robustness function is originally defined by using the optimization problem with infinitely many constraints, we show that the robustness function is obtained as an optimal value of a linear programming (LP) problem. Hence, we can easily compute the info-gap robustness function associated with the limit load factor by solving an LP problem. As the second contribution, we show that the robust structural optimization problems of trusses and frames can also be reduced to LP problems. In numerical examples, the robustness functions, as well as the robust optimal designs, are computed for trusses and framed structures by solving LP problems.
Hepatotoxicity associated with isoniazid preventive therapy: a 7-year survey from a public health tuberculosis clinic.

CONTEXT Isoniazid preventive therapy for latent tuberculosis (TB) infection has been debated because of the risk of hepatotoxicity. The frequency of hepatotoxicity was 0.5% to 2.0% in early studies but may have changed with new criteria for diagnosis and patient selection. OBJECTIVE To determine the rate of isoniazid hepatotoxicity in patients managed according to current guidelines and practice standards. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. SETTING A public health clinic operated by the TB control program of a city-county public health agency. PATIENTS A total of 11141 consecutive patients who started a regimen of isoniazid preventive therapy for latent TB infection from January 1989 through December 1995. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The rate of developing symptoms and signs of hepatotoxicity among all persons starting isoniazid preventive therapy, among all those completing therapy, and by age, sex, and race. RESULTS Eleven patients (0.10% of those starting, and 0.15% of those completing treatment) had hepatotoxic reactions to isoniazid during preventive treatment. The rate of hepatotoxicity in persons receiving preventive therapy increased with increasing age (chi2 for linear trend = 5.22, P=.02) and there were trends toward increased rates in women (odds ratio [OR], 3.30; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.87-12.45; chi2 = 3.28; P=.07) and in whites (OR, 2.60; 95% CI, 0.75-8.95; chi2 = 3.08; P=.08). CONCLUSIONS The rate of isoniazid hepatotoxicity during clinically monitored preventive therapy was lower than has been reported previously. Clinicians should have greater confidence in the safety of isoniazid preventive therapy.
Solving the Phoneme Conflict in Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion Using a Two-Stage Neural Network-Based Approach

SUMMARY To achieve high quality output speech synthesis systems, data-driven grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion is usually used to generate the phonetic transcription of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. To improve the performance of G2P conversion, this paper deals with the problem of conflicting phonemes, where an input grapheme can, in the same context, produce many possible output phonemes at the same time. To this end, we propose a two-stage neural network-based approach that converts the input text to phoneme sequences in the first stage and then predicts each output phoneme in the second stage using the phonemic information obtained. The first-stage neural network is fundamentally implemented as a many-to-many mapping model for automatic conversion of word to phoneme sequences, while the second stage uses a combination of the obtained phoneme sequences to predict the output phoneme corresponding to each input grapheme in a given word. We evaluate the performance of this approach using the American English words-based pronunciation dictionary known as the auto-aligned CMUDict corpus[1]. In terms of phoneme and word accuracy of the OOV words, on comparison with several proposed baseline approaches, the evaluation results show that our proposed approach improves on the previous one-stage neural network-based approach for G2P conversion. The results of comparison with another existing approach indicate that it provides higher phoneme accuracy but lower word accuracy on a general dataset, and slightly higher phoneme and word accuracy on a selection of words consisting of more than one phoneme
Coupling modes of three filaments in side-by-side arrangement

A viscous flow past three filaments in side-by-side arrangement is studied by a numerical simulation and is accompanied by a previously established linear stability analysis. Other than the coupling modes reported previously, which include the in-phase mode, symmetrical mode, and out-of-phase mode, three additional modes are identified in the nonlinear regime by systematically varying the separation distance between the filaments. These modes are the half-frequency mode, irrational-frequency mode, and erratic flapping state. The dynamic characteristics of each mode at the saturated state is described, including the flapping amplitude, frequency, drag force, and mechanical energy of the filaments. Four typical vortex structures are observed in the wake of the filaments and are described as the coalesced vortices, symmetrical vortices, erratic vortices, and independent vortex streets. The vortex structures are closely related to the coupling modes and the dynamic characteristics of the filaments. As the Rey.
Stability of Gorenstein categories

We show that an iteration of the procedure used to define the Gorenstein projective modules over a commutative ring R yields exactly the Gorenstein projective modules. Specifically, given an exact sequence of Gorenstein projective R‐modules G=⋯→∂2GG1→∂1GG0→∂0G⋯ such that the complexes HomR(G, H) and HomR(H, G) are exact for each Gorenstein projective R‐module H, the module Coker (∂1G) is Gorenstein projective. The proof of this result hinges upon our analysis of Gorenstein subcategories of abelian categories.
NadN and e (P4) Are Essential for Utilization of NAD and Nicotinamide Mononucleotide but Not Nicotinamide Riboside in Haemophilus influenzae

ABSTRACT Haemophilus influenzae has an absolute requirement for NAD (factor V) because it lacks almost all the biosynthetic enzymes necessary for the de novo synthesis of that cofactor. Factor V can be provided as either nicotinamide adenosine dinucleotide (NAD), nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN), or nicotinamide riboside (NR) in vitro, but little is known about the source or the mechanism of uptake of these substrates in vivo. As shown by us earlier, at least two gene products are involved in the uptake of NAD, the outer membrane lipoprotein e (P4), which has phosphatase activity and is encoded by hel, and a periplasmic NAD nucleotidase, encoded by nadN. It has also been observed that the latter gene product is essential for H. influenzae growth on media supplemented with NAD. In this report, we describe the functions and substrates of these two proteins as they act together in an NAD utilization pathway. Data are provided which indicate that NadN harbors not only NAD pyrophosphatase but also NMN 5′-nucleotidase activity. Thee (P4) protein is also shown to have NMN 5′-nucleotidase activity, recognizing NMN as a substrate and releasing NR as its product. Insertion mutants of nadN or deletion and site-directed mutants of hel had attenuated growth and a reduced uptake phenotype when NMN served as substrate. Ahel and nadN double mutant was only able to grow in the presence of NR, whereas no uptake of NMN was observed.
Spatial and temporal variations in extreme temperature in Central Asia

Central Asia, a typical arid and semi‐arid area, is very sensitive to climate change and is projected to undergo vigorous warming trend in future. However, it is still unclear how extreme temperatures have changed. Therefore, using the daily maximum and minimum temperatures collected from 108 stations in the study area from 1981 to 2015, the spatial–temporal variations in extreme temperature in Central Asia were analysed on both annual and seasonal scales based on 11 indices from The Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices. Results show that: (1) from 1981 to 2015, all extreme temperature values exhibited increasing trends on an annual scale, but maximum temperature (TMAX) increased faster than the minimum temperature (TMIN), leading to an overall increase in the diurnal temperature range (DTR). Most of the stations in Central Asia, except for those in Xinjiang (China), exhibited an increasing trend in DTR, while most of the stations in Xinjiang (China) exhibited reversely significant decreasing trends. (2) TMAX, TMIN and DTR increased significantly, mainly during spring and summer. The trends of most warm extreme indices (warm days, warm nights and warmest days) indicate that the warming mainly occurred in spring, while most cold extreme indices (cool days, cool nights and coldest nights) exhibited significant warming trends in autumn. Dominant warming during spring and autumn can lead to longer summers, which may further accelerate the frequencies and magnitudes of temperature extremes. (3) Additionally, TMAX, TMIN and the percentile‐based warm indices all exhibited significant increasing trends from southwestern Central Asia (Turkmenistan) to eastern Central Asia (Xinjiang (China)) via the Tianshan Mountains. Although the percentile‐based cold indices showed decreasing trends in this region, they were too minor to offset the overall warming trend. With longer summers, stronger and more prolonged melting seasons were detected in the mountains of Central Asia.
Epitope Specificity and Clonality of EBV-Specific CTLs Used to Treat Posttransplant Lymphoproliferative Disease1

In a recent phase II clinical trial using banked allogeneic CTL lines to treat EBV-associated posttransplant lymphoproliferative disease, a response rate of 52% was recorded 6 mo posttreatment. Tumor response was associated with an increase in both CTL/recipient HLA matches and CD4+ T cells within the infused CTL lines. The present study was undertaken to correlate tumor response with CTL specificity. The majority of CTL lines infused recognized EBV-encoded nuclear Ag-3 proteins, but CTL protein specificity itself did not correlate with tumor response. Specificity in conjunction with donor/recipient functional HLA matching as opposed to HLA matching alone, however, was important for tumor response. CTL receptor TCR β-chain variable gene subfamilies were polyclonal, with no preferential use of a particular family. However, tumor response was improved in those receiving CTL lines with polyclonal vs clonal distribution for subfamilies 2, 3, and 9. Interestingly, in five of six tumors (five Hodgkin’s-like and one Burkitt’s-like posttransplant lymphoproliferative disease) with restricted viral gene expression a complete response was recorded, although in some cases the tumor cells did not express the proteins recognized by the infused CTL. Thus CTL were advantageous when functionally HLA matched but for certain tumor types complete responses occurred in the absence of detectable specific CTL/tumor recognition. We suggest that either the allogenic CTL contained small, undetectable, EBV-specific, HLA-matched T cell populations or perhaps they stimulated nonspecific inflammatory responses in vivo, which were beneficial for tumor regression. These observations should be considered when designing and implementing CTL therapies.