Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Heterogenic Final Cell Cycle by Chicken Retinal Lim1 Horizontal Progenitor Cells Leads to Heteroploid Cells with a Remaining Replicated Genome

Retinal progenitor cells undergo apical mitoses during the process of interkinetic nuclear migration and newly generated post-mitotic neurons migrate to their prospective retinal layer. Whereas this is valid for most types of retinal neurons, chicken horizontal cells are generated by delayed non-apical mitoses from dedicated progenitors. The regulation of such final cell cycle is not well understood and we have studied how Lim1 expressing horizontal progenitor cells (HPCs) exit the cell cycle. We have used markers for S- and G2/M-phase in combination with markers for cell cycle regulators Rb1, cyclin B1, cdc25C and p27Kip1 to characterise the final cell cycle of HPCs. The results show that Lim1+ HPCs are heterogenic with regards to when and during what phase they leave the final cell cycle. Not all horizontal cells were generated by a non-apical (basal) mitosis; instead, the HPCs exhibited three different behaviours during the final cell cycle. Thirty-five percent of the Lim1+ horizontal cells was estimated to be generated by non-apical mitoses. The other horizontal cells were either generated by an interkinetic nuclear migration with an apical mitosis or by a cell cycle with an S-phase that was not followed by any mitosis. Such cells remain with replicated DNA and may be regarded as somatic heteroploids. The observed heterogeneity of the final cell cycle was also seen in the expression of Rb1, cyclin B1, cdc25C and p27Kip1. Phosphorylated Rb1-Ser608 was restricted to the Lim1+ cells that entered S-phase while cyclin B1 and cdc25C were exclusively expressed in HPCs having a basal mitosis. Only HPCs that leave the cell cycle after an apical mitosis expressed p27Kip1. We speculate that the cell cycle heterogeneity with formation of heteroploid cells may present a cellular context that contributes to the suggested propensity of these cells to generate cancer when the retinoblastoma gene is mutated.
TGF-β2 is specifically expressed in human dermal papilla cells and modulates hair folliculogenesis

Dermal papilla cells (DPCs) in the mammalian hair follicle have been shown to develop hair follicles through epithelial–mesenchymal interactions. A cell therapy to regenerate human hair is theoretically possible by expanding autologous human DPCs (hDPCs) and transplanting them into bald skin, though much remains to be overcome before clinical success. In this study, we compared gene signatures of hDPCs at different passages and human dermal fibroblasts, and found transforming growth factor (TGF)‐β2 to be highly expressed in cultured hDPCs. Keratinocyte conditioned medium, which is known to help preserve the hair‐inducing capacity of hDPCs, up‐regulated TGF‐β2 expression of hDPCs and also enhanced their alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity, a known index for hair‐inductive capacity. Through screening of components secreted from keratinocytes, the vitamin D3 analogue was found to promote TGF‐β2 expression and ALP activity of hDPCs. In animal hair folliculogenesis models using rat epidermis and expanded hDPCs, inhibition of TGF‐β2 signalling at the ligand or receptor level significantly impaired hair folliculogenesis and maturation. These results suggest an important role for TGF‐β2 in hair follicle morphogenesis and provide insights into the establishment of future cell therapies for hair regrowth by transplanting expanded DPCs.
Meat consumption and cancer risk : an epidemiological analysis from multiple perspectives

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A Computer-Aided Diagnostic System using a Global Data Grid Repository for the Evaluation of Ultrasound Carotid Images

A computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) method of calculating lumen and wall thickness of carotid vessels is presented. The CAD is able to measure the geometry of the lumen and plaque surfaces in ultrasound carotid images using a least-square fitting of the active contours obtained automatically from the vessels border. To evaluate the approach, ultrasound image sequences from 30 patients were submitted to the procedure. The images were stored on an international data grid repository that consists of three international sites: IPI Laboratory at University of Southern California, USA; Heart Institute at University Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. The three chosen sites are connected with high speed international networks including the Internet, and the Brazilian 'National Research and Education Network (RNP2). The Data Grid was used to store, backup, and share the ultrasound images and analysis results, which provided a large-scale and a virtual data system.
Improving the performance of perfectly matched layers by means of hp‐adaptivity

We improve the performance of the Perfectly Matched Layer (PML) by using an automatic hp‐adaptive discretization. By means of hp‐adaptivity, we obtain a sequence of discrete solutions that converges exponentially to the continuum solution. Asymptotically, we thus recover the property of the PML of having a zero reflection coefficient for all angles of incidence and all frequencies on the continuum level. This allows us to minimize the reflections from the discrete PML to an arbitrary level of accuracy while retaining optimal computational efficiency. Since our hp‐adaptive scheme is automatic, no interaction with the user is required. This renders tedious parameter tuning of the PML obsolete. We demonstrate the improvement of the PML performance by hp‐adaptivity through numerical results for acoustic, elastodynamic, and electromagnetic wave‐propagation problems in the frequency domain and in different systems of coordinates. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 23: 832–858, 2007
Perceptions of Technological Literacy among Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Leaders

The use of the term literacy has a deep history within the United States as it relates to improving people’s abilities to listen, read, and write using the English language. Literacy movements have employed formal and informal educational strategies with the express intent to help individuals build the core knowledge and skills of communication which help them achieve the full rights and benefits of citizenship. Over time, the term has been appropriated by numerous communities to describe a broader range of human qualities related to sociocultural phenomena (e.g., cultural literacy), technological innovations (e.g., media, computer, and digital literacy), workplace skills, competency domains (e.g., Microsoft-literate), and curricular goals. As early as the 1950s, the term scientific literacy was used in discussions of science in general education when Paul DeHart Hurd drew connections between society and scientific and technological innovation (Bybee, 1997). The term
Global Energy Security and American Hegemony

This analysis of the United States and energy security examines the close relationship between US military supremacy in oil-rich regions and America's maintenance of global power. Energy security generally evokes thoughts of American intervention in the Middle East to protect US interests in that region's oil-rich fields. Doug Stokes and Sam Raphael move beyond that framework to consider US actions in Latin America, Central Asia, and Africa. Drawing on State and Defense Department records and other primary sources and previous scholarship, they show how US foreign policy since World War II has sought to maintain a global energy security regime that supports the nation's allies while maintaining American hegemony. Stokes and Raphael explain how US intervention in energy-rich states insulates and stabilizes those nations' transnationally oriented actors and political economies and why American oil diversification strategy strengthens the country's position against rivals in the global capitalist system. They argue that counterinsurgency aid and other types of coercive US statecraft protect the recipient states from an array of potentially revolutionary armed and unarmed internal social forces, thereby securing the energy supplies of nations deemed strategically important to the United States or its allies. Clear and accessible, this cutting-edge contemporary policy analysis will engage scholars of US foreign policy and international relations as well as policymakers grappling with the importance of energy security in today's world.
Impact of cortical input on subthalamic activity during deep brain stimulation

Cortical afferences (e.g., primary motor cortex M1, and supplementary motor area SMA) are believed to play a role in the generation of abnormal oscillatory activity in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in Parkinson's disease (PD). Using a computational model, we investigate how cortical inputs impact STN activity during deep brain stimulation (DBS). When cortical input to the STN is constant, high-frequency DBS is able to suppress pathological, low-frequency STN oscillations. On the contrary, when cortical input to the STN is oscillatory, DBS capacity to suppress STN abnormal oscillations is compromised. We propose that DBS induces a functional decoupling between cortex and STN. This functional decoupling may originate from spike cancellation following antidromic activation of cortical afferences.
Perceiving Musical Time Author ( s ) :

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Three experiments are described that investigate listeners' perceptions of the segmentation of a piece of atonal piano music, the location of segments extracted from the piece, and the duration and structural qualities of each segment. The experiments showed that listeners segmented the music in broad agreement with the grouping principles proposed by Ler-dahl and Jackendoff (1983) and perceived the location of randomly presented segments of the music in a strongly veridical manner. Listeners' location judgments did, however, show systematic departures from ve-ridicality, segments towards the beginning and end of the piece appearing to be located closer to the center of the piece than was actually the case. Judgments of the duration of extracted segments also were strongly ve-ridical and were unaffected by concurrent ratings of structural properties of the segments. In order to assess possible effects of the unfamiliar musical style, the same three experiments were carried out on a piece of tonal piano music of comparable length, yielding essentially identical results. It is argued that the pattern of departures from veridicality in the location judgments for both pieces may indicate systematic changes in attention in the course of listening to the music, linked to large-scale properties of musical structure that are found in music from a variety of styles and periods. The independence of the segmental duration judgments from structural properties of the music may be a consequence of the performance skills of the musically trained listeners used in this study (a sense of absolute tempo is one of the abilities that a performer must acquire) and/ or the particular methods used in the experiments.
Bypass information-theoretic shape similarity from non-rigid points-based alignment

In this paper we present several information-theoretic similiarity measures for shape retrieval in combination with non-rigid registration processes. The challenging property of these measures is that they are bypass divergences, that is, do not require the estimation of the probability density function for each shape. After presenting the dissimilarities and proposing some new ones, we analyze their performance in terms of average recall for a very difficult database (GatorBait) with many classes, few examples and high degree of intra-class variability. We also test these measures in a subset of the the well known MPEG7 part B database. Our experiments show that the Henze-Penrose divergence outperforms the other ones in 2D shape retrieval. We uncover also very competitive and more efficient measures in both cases.
Army ants dynamically adjust living bridges in response to a cost–benefit trade-off

Significance Complex systems, from ant colonies to stock markets, share a common property: sophisticated group-level structure emerges from simple individual-level behaviors. Using simple interaction rules, Eciton army ants construct complex bridges from their own bodies to span forest-floor gaps. These living bridges are uniquely complex in both their dynamic properties and the number of animals involved and so are of considerable interest for understanding emergent structures in complex systems. In field experiments, we show that construction interacts with traffic rate and environmental geometry, causing bridges to lengthen, widen, and migrate. Bridges provide a shortcut for foraging ants, at the cost of sequestering workers. We show that bridge location represents a cost–benefit trade-off, with potential implications for human engineered self-assembling systems. The ability of individual animals to create functional structures by joining together is rare and confined to the social insects. Army ants (Eciton) form collective assemblages out of their own bodies to perform a variety of functions that benefit the entire colony. Here we examine ‟bridges” of linked individuals that are constructed to span gaps in the colony’s foraging trail. How these living structures adjust themselves to varied and changing conditions remains poorly understood. Our field experiments show that the ants continuously modify their bridges, such that these structures lengthen, widen, and change position in response to traffic levels and environmental geometry. Ants initiate bridges where their path deviates from their incoming direction and move the bridges over time to create shortcuts over large gaps. The final position of the structure depended on the intensity of the traffic and the extent of path deviation and was influenced by a cost–benefit trade-off at the colony level, where the benefit of increased foraging trail efficiency was balanced by the cost of removing workers from the foraging pool to form the structure. To examine this trade-off, we quantified the geometric relationship between costs and benefits revealed by our experiments. We then constructed a model to determine the bridge location that maximized foraging rate, which qualitatively matched the observed movement of bridges. Our results highlight how animal self-assemblages can be dynamically modified in response to a group-level cost–benefit trade-off, without any individual unit’s having information on global benefits or costs.
A NUMERICAL METHOD FOR PRICING AMERICAN-STYLE ASIAN OPTIONS UNDER GARCH MODEL

This article develops a numerical method to price American-style Asian option in the context of the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) asset return process. The development is based on dynamic programming coupled with the replacement of the normally distributed variable with a binomial one and the whole procedure is under the locally risk-neutral valuation relationship (LRNVR). We investigate the computational and implementation issues of this method and compare them with those of a candidate procedure which involves piecewise-polynomial approximation of the value function. Complexity analysis and computational results suggest that our method is superior to the candidate one and the generated GARCH option prices are capable of reflecting the changes in the conditional volatility of underlying asset.
An optimal systolic inequality for CAT(0) metrics in genus two

We prove an optimal systolic inequality for CAT(0) metrics on a genus 2 surface. We use a Voronoi cell technique, introduced by C. Bavard in the hyperbolic context. The equality is saturated by a flat singular metric in the conformal class defined by the smooth completion of the curve y2 = x5 - x. Thus, among all CAT(0) metrics, the one with the best systolic ratio is composed of six flat regular octagons centered at the Weierstrass points of the Bolza surface.
Interference Effects in Learning Similar Sequences of Discrete Movements

ABSTRACT Three experiments were conducted to examine proactive and retroactive interference effects in learning 2 similar sequences of discrete movements. In each experiment, the participants in the experimental group practiced 2 movement sequences on consecutive days (1 on each day, order counterbalanced across participants) followed by retention tests on the third day. In all, 2 out of 8 target locations differed between the 2 sequences. Experiment 1 established the nature of the interference effects in the present setup. Clear evidence was found for button-specific proactive and retroactive interference effects. Experiments 2 and 3 further probed the mechanisms underlying those effects, by varying the numbers of repetitions (50 or 250) of the 1st and 2nd sequence (Experiment 2) and the hand, dominant or nondominant, with which the sequences were practiced (Experiment 3). Experiment 2 showed that after a mere 50 repetitions, the representation of the movement structure was strong enough to evoke the effects observed in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 revealed that learning with the dominant hand did not result in more pronounced interference effects compared with learning with the nondominant hand. In combination, these results suggest that changes in the representation of the movement structure are primarily responsible for the observed interference effects.
Logi-thermal simulation of digital CMOS ICs with emphasis on dynamic power dissipation

Due to technology scaling and increasing power density thermal issues in today's VLSI integrated circuits are of very high importance. Nowadays, more than a half of IC failures is caused by exceeded heating of a semiconductor structure. Therefore, it is necessary to constantly develop accurate methods capable of predicting temperature profile inside the chip structure. We propose a model to obtain variation of temperature in digital CMOS ICs, resulting from dynamic power dissipation. A gate-level logic simulator prepared by authors is coupled with temperature calculation method based on analytical solution of the heat equation. Planar heat sources are represented by a finite area and images method is used to apply proper boundary conditions. Temperature and its influence on propagation delay is calculated in consecutive steps of a simulation. Use of logic simulation instead of circuit-level simulation enables us to save computation time. Moreover, the analytical solution does not have drawbacks specific for numerical methods, e.g. it is not needed to use a mesh. The proposed method let us also observe fast changing temperature variations and propagation delay fluctuations within a small range of time. Ring oscillator circuits were used to show proper operation of implemented software application. Simulations were made for a generic 90nm technology using basic digital circuits.
Comparison of the Direct Effects of Human Adipose- and Bone-Marrow-Derived Stem Cells on Postischemic Cardiomyoblasts in an In Vitro Simulated Ischemia-Reperfusion Model

Regenerative therapies hold a promising and exciting future for the cure of yet untreatable diseases, and mesenchymal stem cells are in the forefront of this approach. However, the relative efficacy and the mechanism of action of different types of mesenchymal stem cells are still incompletely understood. We aimed to evaluate the effects of human adipose- (hASC) and bone-marrow-derived stem cells (hBMSCs) and adipose-derived stem cell conditioned media (ACM) on the viability of cardiomyoblasts in an in vitro ischemia-reperfusion (I-R) model. Flow cytometric viability analysis revealed that both cell treatments led to similarly increased percentages of living cells, while treatment with ACM did not (I-R model: 12.13 ± 0.75%; hASC: 24.66 ± 2.49%; hBMSC: 25.41 ± 1.99%; ACM: 13.94 ± 1.44%). Metabolic activity measurement (I-R model: 0.065 ± 0.033; hASC: 0.652 ± 0.089; hBMSC: 0.607 ± 0.059; ACM: 0.225 ± 0.013; arbitrary units) and lactate dehydrogenase assay (I-R model: 0.225 ± 0.006; hASC: 0.148 ± 0.005; hBMSC: 0.146 ± 0.004; ACM: 0.208 ± 0.009; arbitrary units) confirmed the flow cytometric results while also indicated a slight beneficial effect of ACM. Our results highlight that mesenchymal stem cells have the same efficacy when used directly on postischemic cells, and differences found between them in preclinical and clinical investigations are rather related to other possible causes such as their immunomodulatory or angiogenic properties.
Regulations and productivity growth in banking

This paper examines the relationship between the regulatory and supervision framework and the productivity of banks in 22 countries over the period 1999-2006. We follow a semi-parametric two-step approach that combines Malmquist index estimates with bootstrap regressions. The results indicate that regulations and incentives that promote private monitoring have a positive impact on productivity. Restrictions on banks’ activities relating to their involvement in securities, insurance, real estate and ownership of non-financial firms also have a positive impact. However, regulations relating to the first and second pillars of Basel II, namely capital requirements and official supervisory power do not appear to have a statistically significant impact on productivity.
Population genetic structure and colonization history of short ninespine sticklebacks (Pungitius kaibarae)

The contemporary distribution and genetic structure of a freshwater fish provide insight into its historical geodispersal and geographical isolation following Quaternary climate changes. The short ninespine stickleback, Pungitius kaibarae, is a small gasterosteid fish occurring in freshwater systems on the Korean Peninsula and in southeast Russia. On the Korean Peninsula, P. kaibarae populations are distributed in three geographically separated regions: the NE (northeast coast), SE (southeast coast), and a limited area in the ND (Nakdong River). In this study, we used mitochondrial loci and microsatellites to investigate the evolutionary history of P. kaibarae populations by assessing their pattern of genetic structure. Our analyses revealed a marked level of divergence among three regional populations, suggesting a long history of isolation following colonization, although ND individuals showed relatively higher genetic affinity to populations from SE than those from NE. The populations from NE showed a great degree of interpopulation differentiation, whereas populations from SE exhibited only weak genetic structuring. Upon robust phylogenetic analysis, P. kaibarae formed a monophyletic group with Russian P. sinensis and P. tymensis with strong node confidence values, indicating that P. kaibarae populations on the Korean Peninsula originated from the southward migration of its ancestral lineage around the middle Pleistocene.