Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficacy of Organic Acids in Hand Cleansers for Prevention of Rhinovirus Infections

ABSTRACT Direct hand-to-hand contact is an important mechanism of transmission of rhinovirus infection. The rhinoviruses are inactivated at a low pH. A survey of organic acids in vitro revealed that these compounds have antirhinoviral activity that persists for at least 3 h after application to the skin. In additional studies of salicylic acid (SA) and pyroglutamic acid (PGA), the hands of volunteers were contaminated with rhinovirus at defined times after application of the acid, and then volunteers attempted to inoculate the nasal mucosa with one hand and quantitative viral cultures were done on the other hand. In one study, 3.5% SA or 1% SA with 3.5% PGA was compared with controls 15 min after application to assess the efficacy of the inactivation of virus and prevention of infection. Virus was recovered from the hands of 28 out of 31 (90%) of the volunteers in the control group compared to 4 out of 27 (15%) and 0 out of 27 in the groups administered 3.5 and 1% SA, respectively (P < 0.05). Rhinovirus infection occurred in 10 out of 31 (32%) of the controls and 2 out of 27 (7%) of volunteers in both treatment groups (P < 0.05 compared with control). In a second study, the efficacy of 4% PGA was evaluated 15 min, 1 h, and 3 h after application. Significantly fewer volunteers had positive hand cultures at all time points compared with the control group, but the proportion that developed rhinovirus infection was not significantly reduced. These results suggest the feasibility of the prevention of rhinovirus transmission by hand treatments that are virucidal on contact and have activity that persists after application.
Cell Cycle Regulation by the PRMT6 Arginine Methyltransferase through Repression of Cyclin-Dependent Kinase Inhibitors

PRMT6 belongs to the family of Protein Arginine Methyltransferase (PRMT) enzymes that catalyze the methylation of guanidino nitrogens of arginine residues. PRMT6 has been shown to modify the tail of histone H3, but the in vivo function of PRMT6 is largely unknown. Here, we show that PRMT6 regulates cell cycle progression. Knockdown of PRMT6 expression in the human osteosarcoma cell line U2OS results in an accumulation of cells at the G2 checkpoint. Loss of PRMT6 coincides with upregulation of p21 and p27, two members of the CIP/KIP family of cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) inhibitors. Gene expression and promoter analysis show that p21 and p27 are direct targets of PRMT6, which involves methylation of arginine-2 of histone H3. Our findings imply arginine methylation of histones by PRMT6 in cell cycle regulation.
Requirement of BAX for Efficient Adenovirus-Induced Apoptosis

ABSTRACT Infection of human epithelial cells with adenoviruses induces an apoptosis paradigm that is efficiently suppressed by the expression of viral E1B-19K protein, which is a functional homolog of the cellular antiapoptosis protein BCL-2. The mechanisms of adenovirus (Ad)-induced apoptosis appear to involve the cellular BCL-2 family proapoptotic proteins. Recent genetic studies with fibroblasts derived from mutant mouse embryos indicate that a class of the BCL-2 family proapoptotic proteins (designated BH-123 or multidomain proteins) such as BAX and BAK constitutes an essential component of the core apoptosis machinery in animal cells. We have examined the role of BAX in Ad-induced apoptosis in human epithelial cells using two colon cancer cell lines, HCT116Bax (Bax+/−) and HCT116BaxKO (Bax−/−) (L. Zhang, J. Yu, B. H. Park, K. W. Kinzler, and B. Vogelstein, Science 290:989-992, 2000). Infection of Bax+/− cells with an Ad type 2 mutant (dl250) defective in expression of the E1B-19K protein resulted in enhanced cytopathic effect, large plaques on cell monolayers, fragmentation of cellular DNA, and enhanced cell death. These mutant phenotypes were not efficiently expressed in Bax−/− cells, suggesting that BAX is essential for Ad-induced apoptosis. Infection of Bax+/− cells with dl250 induced increased levels of an N-terminally processed form of BAX. Cells infected with the 19K mutant also contained enhanced levels of truncated BAX in membrane-inserted form. Our results suggest that at least a part of the mechanism utilized by E1B-19K to suppress apoptosis during Ad infection may involve modulation of the activities of BAX.
Underdetermined convolutive blind source separation using a novel mixing matrix estimation and MMSE-based source estimation

This paper considers underdetermined blind source separation of super-Gaussian signals that are convolutively mixed. The separation is performed in three stages. In the first stage, the mixing matrix in each frequency bin is estimated by the proposed single source detection and clustering (SSDC) algorithm. In the second stage, by assuming complex-valued super-Gaussian distribution, the sources are estimated by minimizing a mean-square-error (MSE) criterion. Special consideration is given to reduce computational load without compromising accuracy. In the last stage, the estimated sources in each frequency bin are aligned for recovery. In our simulations, the proposed algorithm outperformed conventional algorithm in terms of the mixing-error-ratio and the signal-to-distortion ratio.
Hybrid Monitors for Concurrent Noninterference

Controlling confidential information in concurrent systems is difficult, due to covert channels resulting from interaction between threads. This problem is exacerbated if threads share resources at fine granularity. In this work, we propose a novel monitoring framework to enforce strong information security in concurrent programs. Our monitors are hybrid, combining dynamic and static program analysis to enforce security in a sound and rather precise fashion. In our framework, each thread is guarded by its own local monitor, and there is a single global monitor. We instantiate our monitoring framework to support rely-guarantee style reasoning about the use of shared resources, at the granularity of individual memory locations, and then specialize local monitors further to enforce flow-sensitive progress-sensitive information-flow control. Our local monitors exploit rely-guarantee-style reasoning about shared memory to achieve high precision. Soundness of rely-guarantee-style reasoning is guaranteed by all monitors cooperatively. The global monitor is invoked only when threads synchronize, and so does not needlessly restrict concurrency. We prove that our hybrid monitoring approach enforces a knowledge-based progress-sensitive non-interference security condition.
Immobilization and stability of a Rhizopus oryzae lipase expressed in Pichia pastoris: Comparison between native and recombinant variants

The stability of a soluble extract containing a recombinant lipase from Rhizopus oryzae (Cursive) lipase (rROL) produced by Pichia pastoris (Cursive), as well as that for the commercial extract containing the lipase produced by the native organism (nROL), was investigated. The results showed higher residual activity values of the commercial protein compared with the recombinant one. Moreover, two different kinds of support, the polypropylene powder EP100 and Eupergit®C, were tested to immobilize the enzymes. The residual activity of the immobilizated derivatives was also tested to determine whether their stability was enhanced. The results showed a slight improvement in rROL using both supports but a decrease in nROL using Eupergit®C. The study of the residual activity of soluble and immobilized enzymes was performed by means of a central composite rotatable experiment design. In addition, EP100 adsorption isotherms were determined. © 2011 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Biotechnol. Prog. , 2011
Young Victims Telling their Stories of Sexual Abuse in the Emergency Department

Among young children, child sexual abuse is a common type of maltreatment. Child sexual abuse (CSA) is an important national public health problem that has a devastating impact on the emotional and psychological makeup of the child, family, and society. The purpose of this analysis is to explore the young victim's own stories of disclosure of child sexual abuse and is an exploratory case study using reported assault histories of victims of CSA between the ages of 6 and 14, taken in the immediate wake of the assault. The data were extracted from the hospital records of child victims treated in an emergency department between 2006 and 2010. This qualitative research, using thematic analysis, explored the stories of sexual abuse for children as told by them. Two themes emerged regarding the experience of sex abuse and the immediate outcomes on the children: (1) Abuse Circumstances, which included the child's level of awareness of child sexual abuse, predisposing factors, and the perpetrator's preparation (physical, behavioral, and verbal tactics), and (2) Physical/Psychological Suffering associated with disclosure. These have important implications for all service and health care providers.
Pulsed electrode deposition of superhard coatings on steel substrates: microstructural and chemical study

Abstract Titanium carbide (TiC) coatings have been deposited on steel using the pulsed electrode deposition (PES) technique. Different experimental parametric conditions were used in the deposition process. Microstructural and chemical characterisations of the coatings were performed using electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction techniques. Pulsed electrode technique produced hard coatings, which are commonly defect and crack free. Small TiC and Fe3C particles were randomly distributed in a Fe matrix without any preferred crystallographic orientation. The relationships between the microstructural properties and the deposition processing conditions were also explored.
Mechanism of the Zn(II)Phthalocyanines’ Photochemical Reactions Depending on the Number of Substituents and Geometry

In this work, the synthesis and the nonlinear absorption and population dynamics investigation of a series of zinc phthalocyanines (ZnPcs) dissolved in chloroform are reported. In order to determine the relevant spectroscopic parameters, such as absorption cross-sections of singlet and triplet excited states, fluorescence relaxation times, intersystem crossing, radiative decay and internal conversion, different optical and spectroscopic techniques were used. By single pulse and pulse train Z-scan techniques, respectively, singlet and triplet excited states‘ absorption cross-section were determined at 532 nm. Furthermore, the intersystem crossing time was obtained by using both techniques combined with the fluorescence lifetime determined by time-resolved fluorescence. The radiative and internal conversion rates were determined from the fluorescence quantum yield of the samples. Such spectroscopy parameters are fundamental for selecting photosensitizers used in photodynamic therapy, as well as for many other applications.
Learning from Multiple Partially Observed Views - an Application to Multilingual Text Categorization

We address the problem of learning classifiers when observations have multiple views, some of which may not be observed for all examples. We assume the existence of view generating functions which may complete the missing views in an approximate way. This situation corresponds for example to learning text classifiers from multilingual collections where documents are not available in all languages. In that case, Machine Translation (MT) systems may be used to translate each document in the missing languages. We derive a generalization error bound for classifiers learned on examples with multiple artificially created views. Our result uncovers a trade-off between the size of the training set, the number of views, and the quality of the view generating functions. As a consequence, we identify situations where it is more interesting to use multiple views for learning instead of classical single view learning. An extension of this framework is a natural way to leverage unlabeled multi-view data in semi-supervised learning. Experimental results on a subset of the Reuters RCV1/RCV2 collections support our findings by showing that additional views obtained from MT may significantly improve the classification performance in the cases identified by our trade-off.
PrORAM: Dynamic prefetcher for Oblivious RAM

Oblivious RAM (ORAM) is an established technique to hide the access pattern to an untrusted storage system. With ORAM, a curious adversary cannot tell what address the user is accessing when observing the bits moving between the user and the storage system. All existing ORAM schemes achieve obliviousness by adding redundancy to the storage system, i.e., each access is turned into multiple random accesses. Such redundancy incurs a large performance overhead.Although traditional data prefetching techniques successfully hide memory latency in DRAM based systems, it turns out that they do not work well for ORAM because ORAM does not have enough memory bandwidth available for issuing prefetch requests. In this paper, we exploit ORAM locality by taking advantage of the ORAM internal structures. While it might seem apparent that obliviousness and locality are two contradictory concepts, we challenge this intuition by exploiting data locality in ORAM without sacrificing security. In particular, we propose a dynamic ORAM prefetching technique called PrORAM (Dynamic Prefetcher for ORAM) and comprehensively explore its design space. PrORAM detects data locality in programs at runtime, and exploits the locality without leaking any information on the access pattern. Our simulation results show that with PrORAM, the performance of ORA M can be significantly improved. PrORAM achieves an average performance gain of 20% over the baseline ORA M for memory intensive benchmarks among Splash2 and 5.5% for SP EC06 workloads. The peiformance gain for YCSB and TPCC in DBMS benchmarks is 23.6% and 5% respectively. On average, PrORAM offers twice the performance gain than that offered by a static super block scheme.
Effect of biochar application on soil water availability and hydraulic conductivity

Biochar has been widely promoted as a means to improve a range of soil properties including water holding capacity and infiltration. In this study we investigated the effect of applying 47 Mg ha -1 Acacia green waste biochar to a sandy loam texture contrast soil in a commercial apple production system. Thirty one months after incorporation the biochar amended soil had significantly lower bulk density, higher saturated water content and higher near saturated hydraulic conductivity compared to the unamended control. However, biochar application had no significant effect on water holding capacity, field capacity, permanent wilting point, aggregate stability or infiltration at matric potentials below -0.05 kPa. This study casts doubt on the widely cited belief that biochar generally improves soil water movement and soil water holding capacity.
Motion Field Estimation for Temporal Textures

This paper presents a novel approach for estimating the flow fields of dynamic temporal textures whose motion differs radically from that of rigid bod- ies. Our approach is based on a local flow probability distribution function at each pixel using the STAR model and the data from a spatio-temporal neighborhood. The peak of this density function can be regarded as the estimated local flow vec- tor. Our complete algorithm exploits a two-stage process. The first stage of the algorithm applies a simple tensor method to estimate the direction of the optical flow at each pixel in the texture. In the second stage, the flow probability function is used to perform a one-dimensional search along the flow direction to obtain the magnitude. Performance analysis and experiments with real video sequences show that our methods can successfully estimate flow fields.
Severe Perineal Lacerations in Obstetric Practice: The Effect of Institutional Practice Guidelines on Repair Failures in a Single Centre

Background. There is a high incidence of failure after repair of severe perineal lacerations (SPLs). A tertiary referral hospital in the Caribbean introduced guidelines in an attempt to improve outcomes. We performed an audit of SPL repairs at this centre in an attempt to determine the effect on repair failure. Methods. All patients with SPL repairs between November 1, 2007, and December 30, 2012, were identified. The primary aim was to determine the incidence of failed repairs (wound dehiscence, anal sphincter disruption, rectovaginal fistula, and/or faecal incontinence). The Cleveland Clinic Incontinence Score (CCIS) was used to assess continence at discharge and 24 weeks after repair. Data were analyzed with SPSS version 12. Results. There were 8108 vaginal deliveries, 23 third-degree injuries, and 3 fourth-degree injuries. Three patients experienced a repair failure. Notably, 69% of surgeons chose an inappropriate suture for sphincter repair. Conclusions. Experienced operators are performing repairs, but there is a high prevalence of inappropriate suture choice for repairs. A targeted educational campaign may be necessary to remind clinicians of the best practice in repair techniques.
Statistical electrical and failure analysis of electromigration in advanced CMOS nodes for accurate design rules checker

This paper introduces for the first time a new test structure for electromigration which allows increased statistics and reliability tests in a testchip under typical High Temperature Operating Life experimental ranges. Following the electrical analysis, a large panel of failure analysis methodologies was suitably used to categorize defects such as size, location, resistance impact, etc. This thorough analysis allows us to confirm that silicon failures are accurately predicted by our electromigration checker, based on reliability design rules.
Division of Labor, Economic Specialization, and the Evolution of Social Stratification

This paper presents a simple mathematical model that shows how economic inequality between social groups can arise and be maintained even when the only adaptive learning process driving cultural evolution increases individuals’ economic gains. The key assumptions are that human populations are structured into groups and that cultural learning is more likely to occur within than between groups. Then, if groups are sufficiently isolated and there are potential gains from specialization and exchange, stable stratification can sometimes result. This model predicts that stratification is favored, ceteris paribus, by (1) greater surplus production, (2) more equitable divisions of the surplus among specialists, (3) greater cultural isolation among subpopulations within a society, and (4) more weight given to economic success by cultural learners.
Bag of Events: An Efficient Probability-Based Feature Extraction Method for AER Image Sensors

Address event representation (AER) image sensors represent the visual information as a sequence of events that denotes the luminance changes of the scene. In this paper, we introduce a feature extraction method for AER image sensors based on the probability theory, namely, bag of events (BOE). The proposed approach represents each object as the joint probability distribution of the concurrent events, and each event corresponds to a unique activated pixel of the AER sensor. The advantages of BOE include: 1) it is a statistical learning method and has a good interpretability in mathematics; 2) BOE can significantly reduce the effort to tune parameters for different data sets, because it only has one hyperparameter and is robust to the value of the parameter; 3) BOE is an online learning algorithm, which does not require the training data to be collected in advance; 4) BOE can achieve competitive results in real time for feature extraction (>275 frames/s and >120 000 events/s); and 5) the implementation complexity of BOE only involves some basic operations, e.g., addition and multiplication. This guarantees the hardware friendliness of our method. The experimental results on three popular AER databases (i.e., MNIST-dynamic vision sensor, Poker Card, and Posture) show that our method is remarkably faster than two recently proposed AER categorization systems while preserving a good classification accuracy.
A free vibration analysis of piezo-electric beams via hierarchical one-dimensional finite elements

In this article, several one-dimensional finite elements for the free vibration analysis of composite beams with piezo-electric layers or patches are presented. The displacement components and the electric potential are approximated above the cross section through Lagrange’s polynomials in a layer-wise sense. Thanks to a Unified Formulation, elements’ stiffness and mass matrices are derived in a general, nuclear form that does not depend upon the approximation order of the displacements and the electric potential over the cross section as well as the number of element nodes along the axial direction. Higher-order, layer-wise theories accounting for non-classical effects can be, therefore, straightforwardly formulated. Beam with full piezo-electric layers or piezo-patches are investigated. Results are given in terms of natural frequencies and electro-mechanical coupling coefficients of the bending and torsional modes. Several mechanical and electrical boundary conditions as well as stacking sequences are investigated. Comparison with three-dimensional finite element models is provided showing that the proposed class of finite elements is able to yield accurate results.
Mutations to sulfonamide resistance in Staphylococcus aureus.

In this paper, Luria and Oakberg reported their findings of studies in which they determined that at least five different mutations affect the sulfonamide resistance of S. aureus. Luria spent the 1945-1946 academic year on leave in Cold Spring Harbor, directing a government research project on bacterial resistance to antibiotics. The research produced several papers, including this one.
Checkpoint-based Fault-tolerance for LEACH Protocol

Most routing protocols designed for wireless sensor networks provide good results in ideal environments. However, their performance degrades dramatically when nodes stop working for various causes such as loss of energy, crushed by animal or climatic conditions. In this paper, we highlight the weaknesses of LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) protocol by evaluating its performance in realistic environments. Then we propose an improved version of this protocol based on checkpoint approach that allows it to become a fault-tolerant protocol. Finally, several simulations were conducted to illustrate the benefits of our contribution.