Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Haptoglobin binding stabilizes hemoglobin ferryl iron and the globin radical on tyrosine β145.

AIM Hemoglobin (Hb) becomes toxic when released from the erythrocyte. The acute phase protein haptoglobin (Hp) binds avidly to Hb and decreases oxidative damage to Hb itself and to the surrounding proteins and lipids. However, the molecular mechanism underpinning Hp protection is to date unclear. The aim of this study was to use electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy, stopped flow optical spectrophotometry, and site-directed mutagenesis to explore the mechanism and specifically the role of specific tyrosine residues in this protection. RESULTS Following peroxide challenge Hb produces reactive oxidative intermediates in the form of ferryl heme and globin free radicals. Hp binding increases the steady state level of ferryl formation during Hb-catalyzed lipid peroxidation, while at the same time dramatically inhibiting the overall reaction rate. This enhanced ferryl stability is also seen in the absence of lipids and in the presence of external reductants. Hp binding is not accompanied by a decrease in the pK of ferryl protonation; the protonated ferryl species still forms, but is intrinsically less reactive. Ferryl stabilization is accompanied by a significant increase in the concentration of the peroxide-induced tyrosine free radical. EPR spectral parameters and mutagenesis studies suggest that this radical is located on tyrosine 145, the penultimate C-terminal amino acid on the beta Hb subunit. INNOVATION Hp binding decreases both the ferryl iron and free radical reactivity of Hb. CONCLUSION Hp protects against Hb-induced damage in the vasculature, not by preventing the primary reactivity of heme oxidants, but by rendering the resultant protein products less damaging.
Identity-based remote data possession checking in public clouds

Checking remote data possession is of crucial importance in public cloud storage. It enables the users to check whether their outsourced data have been kept intact without downloading the original data. The existing remote data possession checking (RDPC) protocols have been designed in the PKI (public key infrastructure) setting. The cloud server has to validate the users' certificates before storing the data uploaded by the users in order to prevent spam. This incurs considerable costs since numerous users may frequently upload data to the cloud server. This study addresses this problem with a new model of identity-based RDPC (ID-RDPC) protocols. The authors present the first ID-RDPC protocol proven to be secure assuming the hardness of the standard computational Diffie-Hellman problem. In addition to the structural advantage of elimination of certificate management and verification, the authors ID-RDPC protocol also outperforms the existing RDPC protocols in the PKI setting in terms of computation and communication.
Trust Development in Negotiation: Proposed Actions and a Research Agenda

Negotiation is a type of decision-making in the larger sense of social, psychological, and economic processes. A negotiation can be defined as a situation where multiple, interdependent parties with non-identical preferences make decisions that result in the allocation of resources (Neale and Northcraft, 1991). Early negotiation studies often used sim ple gaming scenarios like the Prisoner's Dilemma to test hypotheses, but these simple games are a poor proxy for real-world negotiations. Most early negotiation research studies presented problems to parties as isolated, decontextualized events. In contrast, real-world negotia tions usually occur in the context of an existing relationship between the parties, where there is an important and relevant past and a future (Oliver, Balakrishnan, and Barry, 1994). When negotiators have a rela tionship with one another, the dynamics of the negotiation process are altered (Austin, 1980; Corfman and Lehman, 1993; Kimmel et al., 1980; Polzer et al, 1993; Pruitt and Carnevale, 1993; Sheppard, 1995; Valley et al, 1995; Wall and Blum, 1991); parties temper their objectives,
Activation of Mitochondria and Release of Mitochondrial Apoptogenic Factors by Betulinic Acid*

Different classes of anticancer drugs may trigger apoptosis by acting on different subcellular targets and by activating distinct signaling pathways. Here, we report that betulinic acid (BetA) is a prototype cytotoxic agent that triggers apoptosis by a direct effect on mitochondria. In isolated mitochondria, BetA directly induces loss of transmembrane potential independent of a benzyloxycarbonyl-Val-Ala-Asp-fluoromethyl ketone-inhibitable caspase. This is inhibited by bongkrekic acid, an agent that stabilizes the permeability transition pore complex. Mitochondria undergoing BetA-induced permeability transition mediate cleavage of caspase-8 (FLICE/MACH/Mch5) and caspase-3 (CPP32/Yama) in a cell-free system. Soluble factors such as cytochrome c or apoptosis-inducing factor released from BetA-treated mitochondria are sufficient for cleavage of caspases and nuclear fragmentation. Addition of cytochromec to cytosolic extracts results in cleavage of caspase-3, but not of caspase-8. However, supernatants of mitochondria, which have undergone permeability transition, and partially purified apoptosis-inducing factor activate both caspase-8 and caspase-3 in cytosolic extracts and suffice to activate recombinant caspase-8. These findings show that induction of mitochondrial permeability transition alone is sufficient to trigger the full apoptosis program and that some cytotoxic drugs such as BetA may induce apoptosis via a direct effect on mitochondria.
Amplification of FGFR2 Gene in Patients with Advanced Gastric Cancer Receiving Chemotherapy: Prevalence and Prognostic Significance.

BACKGROUND Fibroblast growth factors and their receptors regulate key cellular functions, such as proliferation, differentiation and survival. Herein, we studied the prevalence and prognostic role of fibroblast growth factor receptor 2 (FGFR2) amplification in patients with advanced gastric cancer (AGC) who received systemic chemotherapy. PATIENTS AND METHODS The gene copy number of FGFR2 was investigated in 80 patients with AGC who received systemic chemotherapy. FGFR2 gene status was assessed by dual-color fluorescence in-situ hybridization. RESULTS Among 80 patients, FGFR2 amplification was observed in seven cases (11.5%). Patients with FGFR2 amplification had significantly shorter overall survival (OS) than did those without FGFR2 amplification (9.1 vs. 16.5 months; p=0.037). In multivariate analysis, disease status and number of metastatic sites were associated with worse OS (p=0.015 and p=0.009, respectively). FGFR2 amplification tended to be correlated with a poorer outcome (p=0.080). CONCLUSION FGFR2 amplification tended to result in a shorter survival period compared to cases without amplification.
The extended arm of health professionals? Relatives' experiences of patient's recovery in a fast-track programme.

AIM To report a study of the lived experience of being a close relative to a patient with colon cancer participating in a fast-track programme. BACKGROUND Studies have documented that postoperative recovery can be accelerated and that hospitalization can be reduced through fast-track programmes. Due to the early discharge and the increasing demands on patients for self-care, patients' relatives seem to play a pivotal role in fast-track programmes. However, research is limited into how patients' close relatives are affected by and involved in the postoperative recovery process. DESIGN A descriptive phenomenological approach using Reflective Lifeworld Research. METHODS The study was carried out within the descriptive phenomenological framework of Reflective Lifeworld Research. Data were collected in 2008 from in-depth interviews with twelve relatives. FINDINGS Relatives experienced a huge responsibility for both the patient's well-being and for the patient's compliance with the daily regimen. Relatives were caught in a conflicting double role. They were the extended arm of the health professionals but also the caring, supporting partner. A tension arose between relatives' desire to help the patient by taking an active part in the recovery process and the feelings of not always having the resources needed. CONCLUSION Relatives seem to suffer in silence as they bear the burden of the patient's diagnosis, the disruption of life, and the taken-for-granted responsibility for the patient's recovery process. From an existential perspective, this caring responsibility can be understood as ethical pain. Relatives should be seen as a distinct group with special caring needs of their own.
Client identified significant events in a successful therapy case: The link between the significant events and outcome

Significant events research represents a specific approach to studying client-identified important moments in the therapy process. Significant events studies in some instances look at the relationship of the prevalent type of events and therapy outcome. However, they normally do not link significant events with the progress achieved in therapy. This study addresses the issue of whether therapeutic change in a successful therapy case is visible in helpful significant events throughout the course of therapy. For that purpose, 59 client identified helpful significant events from one therapy case were analysed, namely the session transcripts and transcripts from subsequent post-session interviews wherein the client and the therapist reflected on the events. The qualitative analysis of the discussed content, the therapeutic interaction within the events and the helpful impact in the events resulted in a taxonomy of 14 mutually exclusive types of events. Significant events were focused either on the building of the therapeutic relationship or on in-session changes potentially contributing to the outcome. Some of the events which contributed to the building of therapeutic relationship also provided corrective interpersonal and emotional experience. The therapeutic benefits reported by the client in post-session interviews seemed to conceptually fit client improvement as observed in the client stated presenting issues and the changes reported in the post-therapy interview.
Who killed my relative? police officers' ability to detect real-life high-stake lies

Abstract The present experiment examined the ability of fifty-two uniformed police officers to detect deception. The experiment differed from previous experiments into detecting deceit because of its high stake lies scenario. The judges were exposed to videotaped press conferences of people who were asking the general public for help in finding their relatives or the murderers of their relatives. They all lied during these press conferences and they all have been found guilty of killing their own relatives. The judges did not perform better than could be expected by chance. Additional analyses showed that accuracy was unrelated to confidence, age, years of job experience in the police force, or level of experience in interviewing suspects. There was, however, a significant positive correlation between having experience in interviewing suspects and being confident in detecting deception. Finally, men were better at detecting deception than women.
We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University

Never before have so many scholars produced so much work--and never before have they seemed to have so little to say to one another, or to the public at large. This is the dilemma of the modern university, which today sets the pattern for virtually all scholarship. In his eloquent book, David Damrosch offers a lucid, often troubling assessment of the state of scholarship in our academic institutions, a look at how these institutions acquired their present complexion, and a proposal for reforms that can promote scholarly communication and so, perhaps, broader, more relevant scholarship. "We Scholars" explores an academic culture in which disciplines are vigorously isolated and then further divided into specialized fields, making for a heady mix of scholarly alienation and disciplinary territorialism, a wealth of specialized inquiry and a poverty of general discussion. This pattern, however, is not necessary and immutable; rather, it stems from decisions made a century ago, when the American university assumed its modern form. Damrosch traces the political and economic assumptions behind these decisions and reveals their persisting effects on academic structures despite dramatic changes in the larger society. "We Scholars" makes a compelling case for a scholarly community more reflective of and attuned to today's needs. The author's call for cooperation as the basis for intellectual endeavor, both within and outside the academy, will resonate for anyone concerned with the present complexities and future possibilities of academic work.
Enforced Standards Versus Evolution by General Acceptance: A Comparative Study of E-Commerce Privacy Disclosure and Practice in the U.S. And the U.K.

We present data on privacy practices in e-commerce under the European Union's (EU's) formal regulatory regime prevailing in the United Kingdom (U.K.), and compare it to the data from a previous study of United States (U.S.) practices that evolved in the absence of government laws or enforcement. The codification by the EU law, and the enforcement by the U.K. government, improves neither the disclosure nor the practice of e-commerce privacy relative to the U.S. Regulation in the U.K. also appears to stifle development of a market for web assurance services. Both U.S. and U.K. consumers continue to be vulnerable to a small number of e-commerce websites who spam their customers, ignoring the latter's expressed or implied preferences. These results raise important questions about finding a balance between enforced standards and conventions in the domain of financial reporting. In the second half of the twentieth century, financial reporting has been characterized by a preference for legislated standards, and a lack of faith in its evolution as a body of social conventions. Evidence on whether this faith in standards over conventions is justified remains to be marshaled.
Laser energy limitation for buried metal cuts

Redundancy by laser cutting of polysilicon fuses has been used by the memory industry for many years. As the levels of metallization increase, it becomes more difficult and expensive to delete deeply buried polysilicon lines. Ideally, metal fuses will be cut exclusively. However, to achieve reliable metal line cutting, a wide process window has to be found that can cut buried metal lines. The upper energy limit has previously been thought to result from excess laser energy absorbed by the substrate. We show that another failure mode exists at energies below the threshold to cause substrate damage directly. The same laser pulse which ejects the passivation and removes the metal is also likely to crack the dielectric material below the metal. Molten metal then fills the crack and maintains an electrical short circuit, preventing the line from being disconnected.
More varieties of hybrid inflation.

It is pointed out that hybrid inflation can be implemented with the inflaton field rolling away from the origin instead of towards it. This "inverted" hybrid inflation has a spectral index $nl1$, in contrast with ordinary hybrid inflation which has $n\ensuremath{\gtrsim}1$, so a measured value of $n$ substantially different from 1 would distinguish the two. Other generalizations of hybrid inflation are also considered.
Mohawk+T: Efficient Analysis of Administrative Temporal Role-Based Access Control (ATRBAC) Policies

Safety analysis is recognized as a fundamental problem in access control. It has been studied for various access control schemes in the literature. Recent work has proposed an administrative model for Temporal Role-Based Access Control (TRBAC) policies called Administrative TRBAC (ATRBAC). We address ATRBAC-safety. We first identify that the problem is PSPACE-Complete. This is a much tighter identification of the computational complexity of the problem than prior work, which shows only that the problem is decidable. With this result as the basis, we propose an approach that leverages an existing open-source software tool called Mohawk to address ATRBAC-safety. Our approach is to efficiently reduce ATRBAC-safety to ARBAC-safety, and then use Mohawk. We have conducted a thorough empirical assessment. In the course of our assessment, we came up with a "reduction toolkit," which allows us to reduce Mohawk+T input instances to instances that existing tools support. Our results suggest that there are some input classes for which Mohawk+T outperforms existing tools, and others for which existing tools outperform Mohawk+T. The source code for Mohawk+T is available for public download.
Organic nitrogen in aerosols and precipitation at Barbados and Miami: Implications regarding sources, transport and deposition to the western subtropical North Atlantic

The deposition of anthropogenic nitrogen (N) species is believed to have a significant impact on the oligotrophic North Atlantic, but the magnitude of ecological effects remains uncertain because the deposition of water soluble organic N (WSON) is poorly quantified. Here we present measurements of water soluble inorganic N (WSIN) and WSON in aerosol and rain at two subtropical North Atlantic time series sites: Barbados and Miami. WSON total deposition rates ranged from 17.9 mmol m−2 yr−1 to 49.6 mmol m−2 yr−1, contributing on average only 6–14% of total N deposition, less than half the poorly constrained global average which is typically cited as 30%. On an event basis, biomass burning and dust events yielded the largest concentrations of WSON. However, biomass burning was relatively infrequent and highly variable in composition, and much of the organic N associated with dust appeared to be externally adsorbed from pollution sources. Conversely, in Miami pollution made relatively small contributions of WSON on an event basis, but impacts were relatively frequent, making pollution one of the largest sources of WSON during the year. The largest contributor to WSON was volatile basic organic N (VBON) species, which were present at concentrations 1–2 times higher than particulate WSON. Despite VBON inputs, samples associated with pollution-source trajectories yielded much more inorganic N than WSON. Consequently, we would expect that in the future as anthropogenic N emissions increase, inorganic nitrogen will remain the dominant form of N that is deposited to the western North Atlantic.
BDNF reduces the retinal toxicity of verteporfin photodynamic therapy.

PURPOSE Verteporfin photodynamic therapy (PDT) is the most effective treatment for age-related macular degeneration, using laser activation of a photosensitizing dye to achieve closure of choroidal neovascularization. Although PDT preferentially affects pathologic vessels, it can also cause collateral damage to the overlying retina. In the current study, it was found that the neuroprotective agent brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) reduces this retinal damage. METHODS Normal adult rats received intravitreal BDNF in one eye and PBS or no injection in the other eye 2 days before PDT. RESULTS Control eyes exhibited choroidal hypofluorescence, moderate to severe photoreceptor loss, and depression of local retinal function measured using multifocal ERG in the laser-treated area. BDNF-injected eyes had more surviving photoreceptors and improved multifocal ERG responses 1 week after PDT. BDNF did not diminish the effect of PDT on the choroidal circulation as assessed by fluorescein angiography, and there was no evidence of retinal toxicity due to BDNF treatment. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that adjunctive neuroprotective therapy may reduce collateral damage to photoreceptors and improve visual outcome after PDT.
[Lys40(Ahx-DTPA-111In)NH2]-Exendin-4 Is a Highly Efficient Radiotherapeutic for Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor–Targeted Therapy for Insulinoma

Purpose: Although metabolic changes make diagnosis of insulinoma relatively easy, surgical removal is hampered by difficulties in locating it, and there is no efficient treatment for malignant insulinoma. We have previously shown that the high density of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptors (GLP-1R) in human insulinoma cells provides an attractive target for molecular imaging and internal radiotherapy. In this study, we investigated the therapeutic potential of [Lys40(Ahx-DTPA-111In)NH2]-Exendin-4, an 111In-labeled agonist of GLP-1, in a transgenic mouse model of human insulinoma. Experimental Design: [Lys40(Ahx-DTPA-111In)NH2]-Exendin-4 was assessed in the Rip1Tag2 mouse model of pancreatic β-cell carcinogenesis, which exhibits a GLP-1R expression comparable with human insulinoma. Mice were injected with 1.1, 5.6, or 28 MBq of the radiopeptide and sacrificed 7 days after injection. Tumor uptake and response, the mechanism of action of the radiopeptide, and therapy toxicity were investigated. Results: Tumor uptake was >200% injected activity per gram, with a dose deposition of 3 Gy/MBq at 40 pmol [Lys40(Ahx-DTPA-111In)NH2]-Exendin-4. Other GLP-1R–positive organs showed ≥30 times lower dose deposition. A single injection of [Lys40(Ahx-DTPA-111In)NH2]-Exendin-4 resulted in a reduction of the tumor volume by up to 94% in a dose-dependent manner without significant acute organ toxicity. The therapeutic effect was due to increased tumor cell apoptosis and necrosis and decreased proliferation. Conclusions: The results suggest that [Lys40(Ahx-DTPA-111In)NH2]-Exendin-4 is a promising radiopeptide capable of selectively targeting insulinoma. Furthermore, Auger-emitting radiopharmaceuticals such as 111In are able to produce a marked therapeutic effect if a high tumor uptake is achieved.
Iclone: towards online social navigation

For a place that gathers millions of people the Web seems pretty lonely at times. This is mainly due to the current predominant browsing scenario; that of an individual participating in an autonomous surfing session. We believe that people should be seen as an integral part of the browsing and searching activity towards a concept known as social navigation. Based on this observation we present iClone (www.iclone.com), a social web browser that is able to raise awareness of other people surfing similar websites at the same time by utilizing temporal correlations of their web history logs and to facilitate online communication and collaboration.
Acquiring the complex English orthography: a triliteracy advantage?

The script-dependence hypothesis was tested through the examination of the impact of Russian and Hebrew literacy on English orthographic knowledge needed for spelling and decoding among fifth graders. We compared the performance of three groups: Russian–Hebrew-speaking emerging triliterates, Russian–Hebrew-speaking emerging biliterates who were not literate in Russian (but only in Hebrew) and Hebrew-speaking emerging biliterates. Based on similarities between Russian and English orthographies, we hypothesised that Russian–Hebrew-speaking emerging triliterates would outperform both other groups on spelling and decoding of short vowels and consonant clusters. Further, we hypothesised that all groups would face similar difficulties with novel orthographic conventions. Russian–Hebrew-speaking emerging triliterates demonstrated advantages for spelling and decoding of short vowels and for decoding of consonant clusters. All three groups experienced difficulty with spelling and decoding the digraph th as well as the split digraph (silent e).