Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Suppression of Rapidly Progressive Mouse Glomerulonephritis with the Non-Steroidal Mineralocorticoid Receptor Antagonist BR-4628

Background/Aim Steroidal mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists (MRAs) are effective in the treatment of kidney disease; however, the side effect of hyperkalaemia, particularly in the context of renal impairment, is a major limitation to their clinical use. Recently developed non-steroidal MRAs have distinct characteristics suggesting that they may be superior to steroidal MRAs. Therefore, we explored the benefits of a non-steroidal MRA in a model of rapidly progressive glomerulonephritis. Methods Accelerated anti-glomerular basement membrane (GBM) glomerulonephritis was induced in groups of C57BL/6J mice which received no treatment, vehicle or a non-steroidal MRA (BR-4628, 5mg/kg/bid) from day 0 until being killed on day 15 of disease. Mice were examined for renal injury. Results Mice with anti-GBM glomerulonephritis which received no treatment or vehicle developed similar disease with severe albuminuria, impaired renal function, glomerular tuft damage and crescents in 40% of glomeruli. In comparison, mice which received BR-4628 displayed similar albuminuria, but had improved renal function, reduced severity of glomerular tuft lesions and a 50% reduction in crescents. The protection seen in BR-4628 treated mice was associated with a marked reduction in glomerular macrophages and T-cells and reduced kidney gene expression of proinflammatory (CCL2, TNF-α, IFN-γ) and profibrotic molecules (collagen I, fibronectin). In addition, treatment with BR-4626 did not cause hyperkalaemia or increase urine Na+/K+ excretion (a marker of tubular dysfunction). Conclusions The non-steroidal MRA (BR-4628) provided substantial suppression of mouse crescentic glomerulonephritis without causing tubular dysfunction. This finding warrants further investigation of non-steroidal MRAs as a therapy for inflammatory kidney diseases.
Tracing vs. partial evaluation: comparing meta-compilation approaches for self-optimizing interpreters

Tracing and partial evaluation have been proposed as meta-compilation techniques for interpreters to make just-in-time compilation language-independent. They promise that programs executing on simple interpreters can reach performance of the same order of magnitude as if they would be executed on state-of-the-art virtual machines with highly optimizing just-in-time compilers built for a specific language. Tracing and partial evaluation approach this meta-compilation from two ends of a spectrum, resulting in different sets of tradeoffs. This study investigates both approaches in the context of self-optimizing interpreters, a technique for building fast abstract-syntax-tree interpreters. Based on RPython for tracing and Truffle for partial evaluation, we assess the two approaches by comparing the impact of various optimizations on the performance of an interpreter for SOM, an object-oriented dynamically-typed language. The goal is to determine whether either approach yields clear performance or engineering benefits. We find that tracing and partial evaluation both reach roughly the same level of performance. SOM based on meta-tracing is on average 3x slower than Java, while SOM based on partial evaluation is on average 2.3x slower than Java. With respect to the engineering, tracing has however significant benefits, because it requires language implementers to apply fewer optimizations to reach the same level of performance.
Essential self-adjointness for magnetic Schrödinger operators on non-compact manifolds

We give a condition of essential self-adjointness for magnetic Schrödinger operators on non-compact Riemannian manifolds with a given positive smooth measure which is fixed independently of the metric. This condition is related to the classical completeness of a related classical hamiltonian without magnetic field. The main result generalizes the result by I. Oleinik [46, 47, 48], a shorter and more transparent proof of which was provided by the author in [59]. The main idea, as in [59], consists in an explicit use of the Lipschitz analysis on the Riemannian manifold and also by additional geometrization arguments which include a use of a metric which is conformal to the original one with a factor depending on the minorant of the electric potential. We also prove a magnetic version of the A. Povzner theorem [49] on essential self-adjointness of semi-bounded Schrödinger operators, as well as its generalization to manifolds.
Integrated analysis of molecular and clinical prognostic factors in stage II/III colon cancer.

BACKGROUND The prognostic potential of individual clinical and molecular parameters in stage II/III colon cancer has been investigated, but a thorough multivariable assessment of their relative impact is missing. METHODS Tumors from patients (N = 1404) in the PETACC3 adjuvant chemotherapy trial were examined for BRAF and KRAS mutations, microsatellite instability (MSI), chromosome 18q loss of heterozygosity (18qLOH), and SMAD4 expression. Their importance in predicting relapse-free survival (RFS) and overall survival (OS) was assessed by Kaplan-Meier analyses, Cox regression models, and recursive partitioning trees. All statistical tests were two-sided. RESULTS MSI-high status and SMAD4 focal loss of expression were identified as independent prognostic factors with better RFS (hazard ratio [HR] of recurrence = 0.54, 95% CI = 0.37 to 0.81, P = .003) and OS (HR of death = 0.43, 95% CI = 0.27 to 0.70, P = .001) for MSI-high status and worse RFS (HR = 1.47, 95% CI = 1.19 to 1.81, P < .001) and OS (HR = 1.58, 95% CI = 1.23 to 2.01, P < .001) for SMAD4 loss. 18qLOH did not have any prognostic value in RFS or OS. Recursive partitioning identified refinements of TNM into new clinically interesting prognostic subgroups. Notably, T3N1 tumors with MSI-high status and retained SMAD4 expression had outcomes similar to stage II disease. CONCLUSIONS Concomitant assessment of molecular and clinical markers in multivariable analysis is essential to confirm or refute their independent prognostic value. Including molecular markers with independent prognostic value might allow more accurate prediction of prognosis than TNM staging alone.
Low-level cadmium exposure and effects on kidney function

Objectives The nephrotoxicity of cadmium at low levels of exposure, measured by urinary cadmium, has recently been questioned since co-excretion of cadmium and proteins may have causes other than cadmium toxicity. The aim of this study was to explore the relation between kidney function and low or moderate cadmium levels, measured directly in kidney biopsies. Methods We analysed cadmium in kidney biopsies (K-Cd), blood (B-Cd) and urine (U-Cd) from 109 living kidney donors in a cross-sectional study. We measured glomerular filtration rate (GFR), cystatin C in serum, albumin, β-2-microglobulin (B2M), retinol-binding protein (RBP), α-1-microglobulin (A1M), N-acetyl-β-d-glucosaminidase and kidney injury molecule 1 (KIM-1) in 24 h and overnight urine. Results We found significant positive associations between A1M excretion and K-Cd in multiple regression models including age, sex, weight, smoking and urinary flow rate. This association was also present in never-smokers. A1M was also positively associated with B-Cd and U-Cd. GFR and the other biomarkers of kidney function were not associated with K-Cd. GFR estimated from serum cystatin C showed a very poor correlation with measured GFR. KIM-1, RBP and possibly albumin were positively associated with U-Cd, but only in overnight urine. No associations were found with B2M. Conclusions Our results suggest that A1M in urine is a sensitive biomarker for effects of low-level cadmium exposure. A few associations between other renal biomarkers and U-Cd, but not K-Cd, were probably caused by physiological co-excretion or chance.
A pilot randomized study of smokeless tobacco use among smokers not interested in quitting: changes in smoking behavior and readiness to quit.

INTRODUCTION Several prior studies suggest that smokeless tobacco use results in less carcinogenic risk than does cigarette smoking. Whether smokers will use smokeless tobacco is unclear, as is the impact of such use on long-term smoking behavior and cessation. It is equally plausible that smokeless tobacco use among smokers could either (a) increase total tobacco exposure and undermine motivation to quit or (b) decrease overall tobacco exposure, motivate smokers to quit, and enhance cessation. Either outcome is of major public health significance. METHODS In this small (N = 31), short-term (2 week) pilot study, smokers uninterested in quitting were randomized to (a) receive Ariva or Stonewall (both spitless and smokeless tobacco lozenges) or (b) continue smoking conventional cigarettes. RESULTS Ariva/Stonewall use led to a significant reduction (40%, 95% CI: 24%-55%) in cigarettes per day, no significant increases in total tobacco use (cigarettes + Ariva/Stonewall; p > .05), and significant increases in two measures of readiness to quit, either in the next month (p < .001) or within the next 6 months (p = .04), as well as significant increases in self-efficacy to quit smoking (p < .001). No such changes were found among smokers maintained on conventional cigarettes. DISCUSSION These results suggest no deleterious effect on short-term smoking and quitting behavior among smokers who use smokeless tobacco. More broadly, this study suggests a strong need for a large prospective randomized clinical trial to more accurately assess the long-term viability of smokeless tobacco use as a method for cessation induction among unmotivated smokers.
Short-term exposure of arsenite disrupted thyroid endocrine system and altered gene transcription in the HPT axis in zebra fi sh

Arsenic (As) pollution in aquatic environment may adversely impact fish health by disrupting their thyroid hormone homeostasis. In this study, we explored the effect of short-term exposure of arsenite (AsIII) on thyroid endocrine system in zebrafish. We measured As concentrations, As speciation, and thyroid hormone thyroxine levels in whole zebrafish, oxidative stress (H2O2) and damage (MDA) in the liver, and gene transcription in hypothalamicepituitaryethyroid (HPT) axis in the brain and liver tissues of zebrafish after exposing to different AsIII concentrations for 48 h. Result indicated that exposure to AsIII increased inorganic As in zebrafish to 0.46e0. 72 mg kg 1, induced oxidative stress with H2O2 being increased by 1.4e2. 5 times and caused oxidative damage with MDA being augmented by 1.6 times. AsIII exposure increased thyroxine levels by 1.3e1. 4 times and modulated gene transcription in HPT axis. Our study showed AsIII caused oxidative damage, affected thyroid endocrine system and altered gene transcription in HPT axis in zebrafish. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Domain Adaptation by Constraining Inter-Domain Variability of Latent Feature Representation

We consider a semi-supervised setting for domain adaptation where only unlabeled data is available for the target domain. One way to tackle this problem is to train a generative model with latent variables on the mixture of data from the source and target domains. Such a model would cluster features in both domains and ensure that at least some of the latent variables are predictive of the label on the source domain. The danger is that these predictive clusters will consist of features specific to the source domain only and, consequently, a classifier relying on such clusters would perform badly on the target domain. We introduce a constraint enforcing that marginal distributions of each cluster (i.e., each latent variable) do not vary significantly across domains. We show that this constraint is effective on the sentiment classification task (Pang et al., 2002), resulting in scores similar to the ones obtained by the structural correspondence methods (Blitzer et al., 2007) without the need to engineer auxiliary tasks.
Emission Assessment of Rice Husk Combustion for Power Production

Rice husk is one of the alternative fuels for Thailand because of its high potential and environmental benefits. Nonetheless, the environmental profile of the electricity production from rice husk must be assessed to ensure reduced environmental damage. A 10 MW pilot plant using rice husk as feedstock is the study site. The environmental impacts from rice husk power plant are evaluated by using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. Energy, material and carbon balances have been determined for tracing the system flow. Carbon closure has been used for describing of the net amount of CO2 released from the system in relation to the amount being recycled between the power plant and the CO2 adsorbed by rice husk. The transportation of rice husk to the power plant has significant on global warming, but not on acidification and photo-oxidant formation. The results showed that the impact potentials from rice husk power plant are lesser than the conventional plants for most of the categories considered; except the photo-oxidant formation potential from CO. The high CO from rice husk power plant may be due to low boiler efficiency and high moisture content in rice husk. The performance of the study site can be enhanced by improving the combustion efficiency. Keywords—Environmental impact, Fossil fuels, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Renewable energy, Rice husk I. INTRODUCTION HAILAND's energy supply comes mostly from fossil fuels, a large percentage of which are imported from other countries causing concern for energy security. Moreover, fossil fuels combustion is associated with emissions of CO2, SO2 and NOX leading to environmental impacts. The proposed solution for these problems is using renewable energy sources instead of conventional (fossil) energy sources (1, 2). The Energy Conservation Promotion Fund committee (ENCON Fund) authorized the Energy Policy and Planning Office (EPPO) to subsidize the Small Power Producers (SPP) producing electricity from biomass for selling to the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) (3). This paper is focused on rice husk power plant because it is one major energy sources from the agro-industrial sector. Rice husk is considered to be an environmentally friendly fuel
Sensor Network Localization on the Group of Three-Dimensional Displacements

We consider the problem of estimating relative configurations of nodes in a sensor network based on noisy measurements. By exploiting the cyclic constraints induced by the sensing topology to the network, we derive a constrained optimization on $SE(3)^n$. For the case of a network with a single cyclic constraint, we present a closed-form solution. We show that, in certain cases, namely restriction to pure rotation and pure translation, this solution is independent of the particular representation of the constraint function and is the unique, constrained minimizer of an appropriate cost. For sensing topologies represented by a general, weakly connected digraph, we present a solution method which is based on the limits of the solution curves of a continuous-time ordinary differential equation. We show that solutions obtained by our method satisfy all semicycle (generalized cycle) constraints induced by the sensing topology of the network. Further, we show through numerical simulation that for “Gaussian-like.
Engraftment of Mouse Embryonic Stem Cells Differentiated by Default Leads to Neuroprotection, Behaviour Revival and Astrogliosis in Parkinsonian Rats

We report here protection against rotenone-induced behavioural dysfunction, striatal dopamine depletion and nigral neuronal loss, following intra-striatal transplantation of neurons differentiated from murine embryonic stem cells (mES). mES maintained in serum free medium exhibited increase in neuronal, and decrease in stem cell markers by 7th and 10th days as revealed by RT-PCR and immunoblot analyses. Tyrosine hydroxylase, NURR1, PITX3, LMX1b and c-RET mRNA showed a significant higher expression in differentiated cells than in mES. Dopamine level was increased by 3-fold on 10th day as compared to 7 days differentiated cells. Severity of rotenone-induced striatal dopamine loss was attenuated, and amphetamine-induced unilateral rotations were significantly reduced in animals transplanted with 7 days differentiated cells, but not in animals that received undifferentiated ES transplant. However, the ratio of contralateral to ipsilateral swings in elevated body swing test was significantly reduced in both the transplanted groups, as compared to control. Striatal grafts exhibited the presence of tyrosine hydroxylase positive cells, and the percentage of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra was also found to be higher in the ipsilateral side of 7 days and mES grafted animals. Increased expression of CD11b and IBA-1, suggested a significant contribution of these microglia-derived factors in controlling the limited survival of the grafted cells. Astrocytosis in the grafted striatum, and significant increase in the levels of glial cell line derived neurotrophic factor may have contributed to the recovery observed in the hemiparkinsonian rats following transplantation.
Phonological reduction in maternal speech in northern Australian English: change over time*

ABSTRACT Segmental variation in maternal speech to children changes over time. This study investigated variation in non-citation speech processes in a longitudinal, 26-hour corpus of maternal northern Australian English. Recordings were naturalistic parent–child interactions when children (N=4) were 1;6, 2;0, and 2;6. The mothers' speech was phonetically transcribed and analyzed. Based on previous sociophonetic research showing proportional changes in speech variants in maternal speech as children get older, it was predicted that deletion of word-initial /h/ and word-final /v/, processes common in non-citation speech, would increase over time. Instead results showed a non-linear change in deletion within a stable set of lexical items. Deletion proportionately increased between 1;6 and 2;0 and decreased between 2;0 and 2;6. Further analysis indicated increased deletion was not accounted for by changes in speech rate, which only marginally increased over time. Findings suggest mothers fine-tune differentially over time as children's receptive and productive language knowledge develops.
Assessing the fate of benzotriazoles in recycled water treated for groundwater replenishment and their phytoremediation using an optimised LC-MS methodology

Benzotriazole compounds (BTs) are an emerging class of environmental pollutants used in a wide range of industrial applications. Benzotriazole (BTri) and 5Methylbenzotriazole (5-MeBT) have recently been detected in water supplies around the world, and are thus attracting the attention of many environmental researchers. The focus of this review is on assessing contemporary methods to detect BTs using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and providing information regarding their occurrence, degradation and toxicity within the environment.
Identification of Novel HelicobacterSpecies in Pig Stomachs by PCR and Partial Sequencing

ABSTRACT Evidence of infection with Helicobacter species in pig stomach was investigated by the use of a PCR withHelicobacter genus-specific primers. Forty pig stomachs, each of four different ulcer lesion grades, 0, 1, 2, and 3 in thepars esophagea area, were collected from a slaughterhouse in Minnesota. Of 160 stomach samples examined, 102 (63.8%) were positive by the PCR assay. The 40 samples each of lesion grades 0, 1, 2, and 3 showed 22.5, 52.5, 85.0, and 95.0% PCR-positive results, respectively. There was a significant trend (P ≤ 0.01) in the proportions of PCR-positive cases relative to severity of the lesion. About 80% of the 16S rRNA gene was amplified, and PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) patterns were analyzed. Of 102 PCR-positive samples, the PCR-RFLP patterns resulted in four different types, 32 samples being classified into type MN 1, 16 samples into type MN 2, 43 samples into type MN 3, and 11 samples into type MN 4. When the sequences of each RFLP type were compared to those reported in databases by using BLAST software, types MN 1, MN 2, MN 3, and MN 4 showed homologies of 97.3, 95.4, 96.7, and 99.5% with the 16S ribosomal DNA of Helicobacter flexispira taxon 3,Helicobacter sp. strains MIT 94-022 and MZ 640285, andHelicobacter suis, respectively. None of the 102 samples positive for the Helicobacter genus were positive with a primer set specific for Helicobacter pylori. Attempts to culture the organisms from selected stomachs in vitro were unsuccessful.
Randomized Similar Triangles Method: A Unifying Framework for Accelerated Randomized Optimization Methods (Coordinate Descent, Directional Search, Derivative-Free Method)

In this paper, we consider smooth convex optimization problems with simple constraints and inexactness in the oracle information such as value, partial or directional derivatives of the objective function. We introduce a unifying framework, which allows to construct different types of accelerated randomized methods for such problems and to prove convergence rate theorems for them. We focus on accelerated random block-coordinate descent, accelerated random directional search, accelerated random derivative-free method and, using our framework, provide their versions for problems with inexact oracle information. Our contribution also includes accelerated random block-coordinate descent with inexact oracle and entropy proximal setup as well as derivative-free version of this method.
Self-organized vascular networks from human pluripotent stem cells in a synthetic matrix

The success of tissue regenerative therapies is contingent on functional and multicellular vasculature within the redeveloping tissue. Although endothelial cells (ECs), which compose the vasculature’s inner lining, are intrinsically able to form nascent networks, these structures regress without the recruitment of pericytes, supporting cells that surround microvessel endothelium. Reconstruction of typical in vivo microvascular architecture traditionally has been done using distinct cell sources of ECs and pericytes within naturally occurring matrices; however, the limited sources of clinically relevant human cells and the inherent chemical and physical properties of natural materials hamper the translational potential of these approaches. Here we derived a bicellular vascular population from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) that undergoes morphogenesis and assembly in a synthetic matrix. We found that hPSCs can be induced to codifferentiate into early vascular cells (EVCs) in a clinically relevant strategy amenable to multiple hPSC lines. These EVCs can mature into ECs and pericytes, and can self-organize to form microvascular networks in an engineered matrix. These engineered human vascular networks survive implantation, integrate with the host vasculature, and establish blood flow. This integrated approach, in which a derived bicellular population is exploited for its intrinsic self-assembly capability to create microvasculature in a deliverable matrix, has vast ramifications for vascular construction and regenerative medicine.