Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Synchrotron radiation from ultra-high energy protons and the Fermi observations of GRB 080916C

Fermi gamma-ray telescope data of GRB 080916C with ~1e55 erg in apparent isotropic gamma-ray energy, show a several second delay between the rise of 100 MeV - GeV radiation compared with keV - MeV radiation. Here we show that synchrotron radiation from cosmic ray protons accelerated in GRBs, delayed by the proton synchrotron cooling timescale in a jet of magnetically-dominated shocked plasma moving at highly relativistic speeds with bulk Lorentz factor Gamma ~ 500, could explain this result. A second generation electron synchrotron component from attenuated proton synchrotron radiation makes enhanced soft X-ray to MeV gamma-ray emission. Long GRBs with narrow, energetic jets accelerating particles to ultra-high energies could explain the Auger observations of UHE cosmic rays from sources within 100 Mpc for nano-Gauss intergalactic magnetic fields. The total energy requirements in a proton synchrotron model are proportional to Gamma^(16/3). This model for GRB 080916C is only plausible if Gamma ~< 500 and the jet opening angle is ~ 1 degree.
Vascular endothelial growth factor gene polymorphism and acute respiratory distress syndrome

Background: Non-cardiogenic pulmonary oedema is a characteristic feature of the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). The properties of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) as a potent vascular permogen and mitogen have led to investigation of its potential role in this condition. Lower VEGF plasma levels have been linked to the presence of the T allele in the +936 CT polymorphism. We hypothesised that the presence of the T allele would be associated with the development and severity of ARDS. Methods: A cohort of 137 normal subjects, 117 ventilated patients with ARDS, and 103 “at risk” of ARDS were genotyped for the VEGF+936 CT polymorphism. The severity of physiological disturbance and mortality was determined in the ventilated cohorts. Results: The CT and TT genotype frequencies were increased in ARDS patients compared with both normal subjects (OR 2.01, 95% CI 1.13 to 3.58, p = 0.02) and those “at risk” (OR 2.05, 95% CI 1.02 to 2.20, p = 0.03). In patients with ARDS but not those “at risk”, CT and TT genotypes were associated with a higher mean APACHE III score (80.9 (4.3) v 69.3 (2.9), p<0.05). Conclusion: These data support a role for VEGF in the pathogenesis of ARDS and its associated physiological derangement.
Expression and function of phosphodiesterases in nitrofen‐induced congenital diaphragmatic hernia in rats

Congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) is an anomaly associated with pulmonary hypoplasia and pulmonary hypertension (PH). The limited efficacy of current approaches to treat PH in CDH, including inhaled nitric oxide (NO), drives the search for other therapies. Phosphodiesterases (PDEs) degrade cyclic nucleotide second messenger cAMP and cGMP downstream of NO thereby limiting the vasodilatory response to NO.
Adjusting for multiple testing in studies is less important than other concerns

EDITOR—In a paper in the American Journal of Public Health Aickin stated that “there is substantial debate… concerning when (if ever) adjustment for multiple testing is warranted. ”1 I am glad that he has joined the debate in the BMJ over Bonferroni adjustments but find his arguments unconvincing.2 Yes, “researchers who adjust P values almost always present them for their individual hypotheses,” as he says. This is why they should not worry about unrelated tests and renounce a statistical technique that focuses …
Use of Pagers With an Alarm Escalation System to Reduce Cardiac Monitor Alarm Signals

Alarm fatigue desensitizes nurses to alarm signals and presents potential for patient harm. This project describes an innovative method of communicating cardiac monitor alarms to pagers using an alarm escalation algorithm. This innovation was tested on 2 surgical progressive care units over a 6-month period. There was a significant decrease in mean frequency and duration of high-priority monitor alarms and improvement in nurses' perception of alarm response time, using this method of alarm communication.
Bottom-up object segmentation for visual recognition

Automatic recognition and segmentation of objects in images is a central open problem in computer vision. Most previous approaches have pursued either sliding-window object detection or dense classification of overlapping local image patches. Differently, the framework introduced in this thesis attempts to identify the spatial extent of objects prior to recognition, using bottom-up computational processes and mid-level selection cues. After a set of plausible object hypotheses is identified, a sequential recognition process is executed, based on continuous estimates of the spatial overlap between the image segment hypotheses and each putative class. The object hypotheses are represented as figure-ground segmentations, and are extracted automatically, without prior knowledge of the properties of individual object classes, by solving a sequence of constrained parametric min-cut problems (CPMC) on a regular image grid. It is show that CPMC significantly outperforms the state of the art for low-level segmentation in the PASCAL VOC 2009 and 2010 datasets. Results beyond the current state of the art for image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation are also demonstrated in a number of challenging datasets including Caltech-101, ETHZ-Shape as well as PASCAL VOC 2009-11. These results suggest that a greater emphasis on grouping and image organization may be valuable for making progress in high-level tasks such as object recognition and scene understanding. 22nd December 2012 13:01 i
Internal DLA and the Gaussian free field

In previous works, we showed that the internal DLA cluster on \Z^d with t particles is a.s. spherical up to a maximal error of O(\log t) if d=2 and O(\sqrt{\log t}) if d > 2. This paper addresses "average error": in a certain sense, the average deviation of internal DLA from its mean shape is of constant order when d=2 and of order r^{1-d/2} (for a radius r cluster) in general. Appropriately normalized, the fluctuations (taken over time and space) scale to a variant of the Gaussian free field.
Effect of Sulphate and Acid on Self-Compacting Concrete Containing Corn Cob Ash

Self-compacting concrete requires high powder content which implies increased cost and increased CO2 emission into the environment; hence, the need for the inculcation of a supplementary cementitious material (SCM) to the concrete mix such as corn cob ash (CCA) which is obtained by drying, grinding and burning the corn cobs. The chemical composition of the corn cob ash showed that it was pozzolanic as it conformed to the requirements stated in ASTM C618. Replacement of cement with CCA was carried out at levels of 0% (control), 5%, 10%, 15% and 20% and workability test was conducted at each replacement levels. The curing of the cubes was conducted for 7, 14 and 28 days in 3 mediums; water, hydrochloric acid (HCl) and magnesium sulphate (MgSo4). The cubes were weighed and crushed from which it was observed that 5% replacement showed better compressive strength, proving to be the optimum result. Results from 15% and above were unable to attain close enough values to the required strength but showed better resistance when submerged in the sulphate and acid solution. It was also observed that increasing CCA content, reduced the strength deterioration factor (SDF) of the concrete, indicating improved durability and the possible use of CCA for partial replacement of cement in SCC. However, replacement levels from 15% and above require longer curing period to attain better strengths as increase in CCA levels decreases the compressive strength of the concrete.
Imagine that: Self-imagination improves prospective memory in memory-impaired individuals with neurological damage

Recent research has demonstrated that “self-imagination” – a mnemonic strategy developed by Grilli and Glisky (2010) – enhances episodic memory in memory-impaired individuals with neurological damage more than traditional cognitive strategies, including semantic elaboration and visual imagery. The present study investigated the effect of self-imagination on prospective memory in individuals with neurologically based memory deficits. In two separate sessions, 12 patients with memory impairment took part in a computerised general knowledge test that required them to answer multiple choice questions (i.e., ongoing task) and press the “1” key when a target word appeared in a question (i.e., prospective memory task). Prior to the start of the general knowledge test in each session, participants attempted to encode the prospective memory task with one of two strategies: self-imagination or rote-rehearsal. The findings revealed a “self-imagination effect (SIE)” in prospective memory as self-imagining resulted in better prospective memory performance than rote-rehearsal. These results demonstrate that the mnemonic advantage of self-imagination extends to prospective memory in memory-impaired individuals with neurological damage and suggest that self-imagination has potential in cognitive rehabilitation.
Vibrio cholerae VttRA and VttRB Regulatory Influences Extend beyond the Type 3 Secretion System Genomic Island

ABSTRACT A subset of non-O1/non-O139 serogroup strains of Vibrio cholerae cause disease using type 3 secretion system (T3SS)-mediated mechanisms. An ∼50-kb genomic island carries genes encoding the T3SS structural apparatus, effector proteins, and two transmembrane transcriptional regulators, VttRA and VttRB, which are ToxR homologues. Previous experiments demonstrated that VttRA and VttRB are necessary for colonization in vivo and promote bile-dependent T3SS gene expression in vitro. To better understand the scope of genes that are potential targets of VttRA and VttRB regulation, we performed deep RNA sequencing using O39 serogroup strain AM-19226 and derivatives carrying deletions in vttRA and vttRB grown in bile. Comparison of the transcript profiles from ΔvttRA and ΔvttRB mutant strains to the isogenic parent strain confirmed that VttRA and VttRB regulate expression of some T3SS island genes and provided additional information about relative expression levels and operon organization. Interestingly, the data also suggested that additional genes, located outside the T3SS island and encoding functions involved in motility, chemotaxis, type 6 secretion, transcriptional regulation, and stress responses, may also by regulated by VttRA and VttRB. We verified transcript levels for selected genes by quantitative reverse transcription (RT)-PCR and then focused additional studies on motility and biofilm formation. The results suggest that VttRA and VttRB act as part of a complex transcriptional network that coordinates virulence gene expression with multiple cellular phenotypes. VttRA and VttRB therefore represent horizontally acquired transcriptional regulators with the ability to influence global gene expression in addition to modulating gene expression within the T3SS genomic island.
General Preadaptation of Viral Infectors to Their Hosts

We tested the hypothesis of optimal adaptation of viral infectors to eukaryotic hosts, using (1) correlation in codon and amino acid usage between organisms, and (2) canonical correlation between groups of hosts and infectors. The codon correlations between parasites and hosts vary, being low between swine and African swine fever virus (ASF; r = 0.18), and highest between potato and potato virus X (r = 0.60). The correlations might indicate different stages of evolution toward optimal adaptation of the parasite codon distribution to the host tRNA pools. The amino acid correlations vary from r = 0.71 between pig and ASF, to 0.88 between catfish and its herpesvirus. It was observed that both in virus and hosts, there is a negative correlation between frequency of an amino acid and molecular weight. Therefore, it was advanced that viral infectors might be preadapted to their hosts because of similarities of the tRNA pools of hosts, and that evolution toward optimization would be dependent on the size of the divergence between the codon distributions of infector and host. Preadaptation does not imply origin of the virus by lateral transfer from the present host, since the correlation of the molecular weight of amino acids with their abundance in proteins is a general phenomenon.
SAR image segmentation using generalized pairwise Markov chains

The efficiency of Markov models in the context of SAR image segmentation mainly relies on their spatial regularity constraint. However, a pixel may have a rather different visual aspect when it is located near a boundary or inside a large set of pixels of the same class. According to the classical hypothesis in Hidden Markov Chain (HMC) models, this fact can not be taken into consideration. This is the very reason of the recent Pairwise Markov Chains (PMC) model which relies on the hypothesis that the pairwise process (X,Y) is Markovian and stationary, but not necessarily X. The main interest of the PMC model in SAR image segmentation is to not assume that the speckle is spatially uncorrelated. Hence, it is possible to take into account the difference between two successive pixels that belong to the same region or that overlap a boundary. Both PMC and HMC parameters are learnt from a variant of the Iterative Conditional Estimation method. This allows to apply the Bayesian Maximum Posterior Marginal criterion for the restoration of X in an unsupervised manner. We will compare the PMC model with respect to the HMC one for the unsupervised segmentation of SAR images, for both Gaussian distributions and Pearson system of distributions.
Probability models and computer simulation of landscape evolution

Introduction Some mathematical approaches to landform evolution A random-walk approach to probability modelling Statistical comparison between a theoretical and an actual stream profile An empirical method of profile analysis Applications of probability and stream-gradient index to landform change Base-level fall Base-level stability Three-dimensional simulation The algorithm used in program UDL Uplift Uplift and erosion Results of simulation Uplifted mountain block Plateau edge Mesa and canyon Discussion Summary Computer Program UDL Data and data format References Cited
Albumin Adducts of Naphthalene Metabolites as Biomarkers of Exposure to Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons

We investigated the utility of adducts formed by the reaction of the naphthalene metabolites naphthalene-1,2-oxide, 1,2-naphthoquinone (1,2-NPQ), and 1,4-naphthoquinone (1,4-NPQ) with serum albumin (Alb) as biomarkers of exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Cysteinyl serum Alb adducts of 1,2- and 1,4-NPQ (1,2-NPQ-Alb and 1,4-NPQ-Alb, respectively) but not of naphthalene-1,2-oxide were detected in 28 coke oven workers and 22 controls from the steel industry of northern China. The median level of 1,2-NPQ-Alb in coke oven workers (76.6 pmol/g) was significantly higher than that observed in controls (44.9 pmol/g; P = 0.0027). However, the median level of 1,4-NPQ-Alb in exposed subjects was not significantly different from that of controls (48.6 versus 44.2 pmol/g; P = 0.296). Levels of 1,2-NPQ-Alb were significantly correlated with exposure category (controls, side and bottom workers, and top-of-oven workers) as well as with previously measured levels of urinary naphthalene, 1- and 2-naphthol, and 1-pyrenol in these subjects. Multiple linear regression analysis revealed that 35% of the variation in 1,2-NPQ-Alb could be explained by the work category and age. A negative relationship between 1,2-NPQ-Alb and age was observed, suggesting that cytochrome P450 c metabolism diminished with age at ∼3%/year of life.
Bipolar vulnerability and extreme appraisals of internal states: a computerized ratings study.

A recent integrative cognitive model proposed that multiple, extreme, personalized, positive and negative appraisals of internal states predispose to maintain and exacerbate bipolar symptoms. This study aimed to directly assess conviction in a range of positive and negative appraisals of internal states suggested by the model, by using a laboratory-based computerized task. In a student sample (n = 68), a history of hypomania was associated with more positive and less negative appraisals of internal states, and a history of depression was associated with more negative appraisals and less positive appraisals of internal states. The sample was then split into three groups for comparison: bipolar risk (n = 18), depression risk (n = 20) and controls (n = 30). Relative to controls, the bipolar risk group made more extreme ratings of catastrophic appraisals of low activation states and tended to make more extreme ratings of appraisals of high activation states. The depression risk group scored higher on a range of negative appraisals of low activation states. These findings provide tentative support for the role of both positive and negative, extreme, personalized appraisals of internal states in hypomania and depression.
Charged dilaton black holes with a cosmological constant.

The properties of static spherically symmetric black holes, which are either electrically or magnetically charged, and which are coupled to the dilaton in the presence of a cosmological constant \ensuremath{\Lambda}, are considered. It is shown that such solutions do not exist if \ensuremath{\Lambda}g0 (in arbitrary spacetime dimensions \ensuremath{\ge}4). However, asymptotically anti--de Sitter black hole solutions with a single horizon do exist if \ensuremath{\Lambda}0. These solutions are studied numerically in four dimensions and the thermodynamic properties of the solutions are derived. The extreme solutions are found to have zero entropy and infinite temperature for all nonzero values of the dilaton coupling constant.
Heroin‐related Deaths from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner's Office from 2004 Through 2015

Over the past two decades, prescription and illicit opioid use has led to changes in public health policy to address the increasing number of opioid‐related deaths. The purpose of this study was to review cases from Hennepin County Medical Examiner's Office between 2004 through 2015 where heroin was listed as a significant contributor or as the cause of death. We identified 322 heroin‐related deaths, which were predominantly male (255; 79%). 6‐Monoacetylmorphine (6‐MAM) median (range) concentrations were as follows: blood (n = 7), 0.010 (0.006–0.078) mg/L; urine (n = 30), 0.359 (0.009–1.75) mg/L; and vitreous humor (n = 31), 0.034 (0.004–0.24) mg/L. Free morphine was measurable in 273 cases and the percent free morphine (range), when grouped by COD, was opioid (n = 124), 28% (2.2%–92%), and mixed drug toxicity (n = 135), 35.3% (1.5%–100%); (p < 0.01). Quantitation of 6‐MAM in blood and vitreous humor, along with a free to total morphine ratio >26%, was useful in establishing heroin‐related deaths.
Quantitative subcellular imaging of boron compounds in individual mitotic and interphase human glioblastoma cells with imaging secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS)

Boron measurements at subcellular scale are essential in boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) of cancer as the nuclear localization of boron‐10 atoms can enhance the effectiveness of killing individual tumour cells. Since tumours contain a heterogeneous population of cells in interphase as well as in the M phase (mitotic division) of the cell cycle, it is important to evaluate the subcellular distribution of boron in both phases.
Evaluation of advanced access in the national primary care collaborative.

BACKGROUND An aim of the National Primary Care Collaborative is to improve quality and access for patients in primary care using principles of Advanced Access. AIMS To determine whether Advanced Access led to improved availability of appointments with general practitioners (GPs) and to examine GPs' views of the process. DESIGN Observational study. SETTING Four hundred and sixty-two general practices in England participating in four waves of the collaborative during 2000 and 2001. METHOD Regression analysis of the collaborative's monthly data on the availability of GP appointments for the 352 practices in waves 1-3, and a postal survey of lead GPs in all four waves. The main outcome measures were the change in mean time to the third available appointment with GPs, and the proportion of GPs thinking it worthwhile participating in the collaborative. RESULTS The time to the third available appointment improved from a mean of 3.6 to 1.9 days, difference = 1.7 days, 95% confidence interval (CI)= 1.4 to 2.0 days. It improved in two-thirds of practices (66% [219/331]), remained the same in 16% (53/331), and worsened in 18% (59/331). The majority of GPs in all four waves, 83% (308/371, 95% CI = 79 to 87), felt that it was worthwhile participating in the collaborative, although one in 12 practices would not recommend it. One-fifth of GPs cited a lack of resources as a constraint, and some expressed concerns about the trade-off between immediate access and continuity of care. CONCLUSION Advanced Access helped practices to improve availability of GP appointments, and was well received by the majority of practices.
Amitriptyline in Alzheimer's disease

A 67-year-old woman was in the front seat of a stopped car that was struck from the rear by a truck. She was wearing a seat belt, and it was observed that her head did not strike the windshield. She immediately became amnesic and recovered in 72 hours. It is postulated that the transient amnesia was the result of a whiplash insult to the brain.
Identification of novel HMGA2 fusion sequences in lipoma: Evidence that deletion of let‐7 miRNA consensus binding site 1 in the HMGA2 3′ UTR is not critical for HMGA2 transcriptional upregulation

Lipoma is a benign tumor composed of mature adipocytes and one of the most common mesenchymal tumors seen in adults. Rearrangement of HMGA2 in chromosome band 12q15 has been found in ∼60–70% of ordinary lipomas with cytogenetic abnormalities. Herein, we report two novel HMGA2 fusion sequences in lipomas with chromosome 12 rearrangements. Cytogenetic studies showed 12q abnormalities in both cases, and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) confirmed the involvement of HMGA2 in each instance. Rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE) PCR experiments revealed that one lipoma contained a fusion of the HMGA2 3′ untranslated region (UTR) to a genomic area downstream of the DYRK2 locus on 12q15; the second lipoma showed a fusion of the HMGA2 3′ UTR to a genomic sequence upstream of the DCN locus on 12q21. In both instances the breakpoint on HMGA2 occurred downstream to let‐7 miRNA (microRNA) consensus binding site (CBS) 1. These two and several other previously reported tumors containing HMGA2 3′ UTR rearrangements show breakpoints after let‐7 miRNA CBS 1, which suggests that the elimination of this miRNA binding site is not critical for driving HMGA2 transcriptional upregulation. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.