Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of viscose fabric modification on the mechanical and water absorption properties of composites prepared through vacuum infusion

Viscose fabric-reinforced unsaturated polyester composites were successfully prepared through vacuum infusion process. Unidirectional viscose fabric was modified by two different organosilane coupling agents and by acetylation treatment. The main objective was to study the influence of fabric treatment on the mechanical and water absorption properties of the composites. Flexural, tensile and impact properties of composites were studied. The results from mechanical testing of composites pointed out that 3-aminopropyltriethoxy silane treatment increased the flexural and impact strengths of the composites with respect to untreated fabric composite. The impact strength of 3-aminopropyltriethoxy silane-treated fabric composites almost doubled compared to the value of untreated fabric composite. Among all the composites under study, those with fabrics treated by 2 vol% 3-aminopropyltriethoxy silane in ethanol/water (95:5) solution exhibited significant improvement in water uptake resistance. An unsaturated polyester gelcoat and topcoat were applied as the outer surface on the composites with untreated fabric. This was done in order to investigate the visual surface appearance and evaluate the gelcoat and topcoat effect on water absorption after accelerated water immersion test. The regenerated cellulose fibre as reinforcement shows high potential to be used as an alternative for natural bast fibres, especially, when toughness of material matters. Chemical treatment of regenerated cellulose fibres could result in improvement in properties of polymer composites, considering that the appropriate treatment method is selected for the corresponding fibre–matrix system.
Integrated analysis of SNP, CNV and gene expression data in genetic association studies

Integrative approaches that combine multiple forms of data can more accurately capture pathway associations and so provide a comprehensive understanding of the molecular mechanisms that cause complex diseases. Association analyses based on single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotypes, copy number variant (CNV) genotypes, and gene expression profiles are the 3 most common paradigms used for gene set/pathway enrichment analyses. Many work has been done to leverage information from 2 types of data from these 3 paradigms. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no work done before to integrate the 3 paradigms all together. In this article, we present an integrated analysis that combine SNP, CNV, and gene expression data to generate a single gene list. We present different methods to compare this gene list with the other 3 possible lists that result from the combinations of the following pairs of data: SNP genotype with gene expression, CNV genotype with gene expression, and SNP genotype with CNV genotype. The comparison is done using 3 different cancer datasets and 2 different methods of comparison. Our results show that integrating SNP, CNV, and gene expression data give better association results than integrating any pair of 3 data.
Accuracy of interleukin-27 assay for the diagnosis of tuberculous pleurisy

Background: The concentration of interleukin-27 (IL-27) in pleural effusions was found to be increased in tuberculous pleurisy and several studies have investigated the diagnostic value of IL-27 for tuberculous pleural effusions (TPEs), but the results varied a lot. We conducted the present study to comprehensively evaluate the diagnostic value of IL-27 for TPE. Methods: Primary diagnostic test studies of IL-27 for TPE was searched and identified from databases. The pooled sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio, negative likelihood ration, diagnostic odds ratio, and receiver operating characteristic curves (SROCs) were computed or pooled to summarize the overall test performance. Results: Nine studies with a total number of 1226 patients were identified in our research. The main pooled estimates were as follows: sensitivity 0.92 [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.90–0.95], specificity 0.90 (95% CI, 088–0.92), and area under the SROC 0.97. No evidence of publication bias was detected. Conclusion: Our research suggested the good diagnostic value of IL-27 for TPE and it could be used as a diagnostic biomarker.
Brain Impairment in Chronic Schizophrenia Patients with Depressive Symptoms Differs from Brain Impairment in Chronic Depression Patients with Psychotic Symptoms

Numerous studies have identified many specific structural alterations in the brains of patients with schizophrenia and depression. Schizophrenia is associated with gray matter volume (GMV) impairment in certain key brain regions, which progresses in the first 2–3 years after the first episode of schizophrenic symptoms. [1] Schizophrenia has also been shown to be associated with concurrent white matter (WM) alterations. The fasciculus uncinatus and arcuate fasciculus have been proposed to be a part of the quality index for schizophrenia. [2] Similar to schizophrenia, major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with a GMV reduction and aberrant WM. GMV reductions in the bilateral middle temporal gyrus left ventral medial prefrontal gyrus, left lingual gyrus, and dorsal medial prefrontal gyrus have been correlated with the severity of the depressive symptoms. Schizophrenic and depressive symptoms usually coexist in schizophrenia and MDD. In this pilot study, we compared the GMV and WM differences in the brains of chronic schizophrenia patients with depressive symptoms with those of chronic depression patients with psychotic symptoms. [1,2]
Micromechanical Modeling of Viscoelastic Properties of Carbon Nanotube-Reinforced Polymer Composites

A micromechanics model is developed for predicting the linearly viscoelastic properties of carbon nanotube-reinforced polymer composites. By employing the Correspondence Principle in viscoelasticity, the Mori-Tanaka method is extended to the Carson domain. The inversion of the creep compliances from the Carson (transformed) domain to the time (physical) domain is accomplished numerically by using a recently developed multi-precision algorithm. The new micromechanics model is validated by comparing with existing experimental data. By applying the presently developed model, a parametric study for the creep behavior of carbon nanotube-reinforced polymer composites is conducted, with testing temperature, nanotube aspect ratio, nanotube volume fraction and nanotube orientation as the controlling parameters. For composites having unidirectionally aligned nanotubes, numerical results indicate that the increase of the nanotube aspect ratio significantly enhances their axial creep resistance but has insignificant influences on their transverse, shear and plane strain bulk creep compliances. Also, the random orientation of nanotubes provides more effective plane strain bulk creep resistance but less effective axial creep resistance than the aligned orientation does. In addition, the effect of the nanotube orientation on the shear compliances is negligibly small. Furthermore, for composites with aligned or randomly oriented nanotubes, all the compliances are found to decrease monotonically with the increase of the nanotube volume fraction. Finally, the influences of testing temperature on the composite creep compliances (except for the bulk strain compliance) are similar to those on the compliance of the matrix.
Widespread metabolic potential for nitrite and nitrate assimilation among Prochlorococcus ecotypes

The marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus is the most abundant photosynthetic organism in oligotrophic regions of the oceans. The inability to assimilate nitrate is considered an important factor underlying the distribution of Prochlorococcus, and thought to explain, in part, low abundance of Prochlorococcus in coastal, temperate, and upwelling zones. Here, we describe the widespread occurrence of a genomic island containing nitrite and nitrate assimilation genes in uncultured Prochlorococcus cells from marine surface waters. These genes are characterized by low GC content, form a separate phylogenetic clade most closely related to marine Synechococcus, and are located in a different genomic region compared with an orthologous cluster found in marine Synechococcus strains. This sequence distinction suggests that these genes were not transferred recently from Synechococcus. We demonstrate that the nitrogen assimilation genes encode functional proteins and are expressed in the ocean. Also, we find that their relative occurrence is higher in the Caribbean Sea and Indian Ocean compared with the Sargasso Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean, which may be related to the nitrogen availability in each region. Our data suggest that the ability to assimilate nitrite and nitrate is associated with microdiverse lineages within high- and low-light (LL) adapted Prochlorococcus ecotypes. It challenges 2 long-held assumptions that (i) Prochlorococcus cannot assimilate nitrate, and (ii) only LL adapted ecotypes can use nitrite. The potential for previously unrecognized productivity by Prochlorococcus in the presence of oxidized nitrogen species has implications for understanding the biogeography of Prochlorococcus and its role in the oceanic carbon and nitrogen cycles.
Collective Entity Disambiguation with Structured Gradient Tree Boosting

We present a gradient-tree-boosting-based structured learning model for jointly disambiguating named entities in a document. Gradient tree boosting is a widely used machine learning algorithm that underlies many top-performing natural language processing systems. Surprisingly, most works limit the use of gradient tree boosting as a tool for regular classification or regression problems, despite the structured nature of language. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first one that employs the structured gradient tree boosting (SGTB) algorithm for collective entity disambiguation. By defining global features over previous disambiguation decisions and jointly modeling them with local features, our system is able to produce globally optimized entity assignments for mentions in a document. Exact inference is prohibitively expensive for our globally normalized model. To solve this problem, we propose Bidirectional Beam Search with Gold path (BiBSG), an approximate inference algorithm that is a variant of the standard beam search algorithm. BiBSG makes use of global information from both past and future to perform better local search. Experiments on standard benchmark datasets show that SGTB significantly improves upon published results. Specifically, SGTB outperforms the previous state-of-the-art neural system by near 1% absolute accuracy on the popular AIDA-CoNLL dataset.
Trustless Machine Learning Contracts; Evaluating and Exchanging Machine Learning Models on the Ethereum Blockchain

Using blockchain technology, it is possible to create contracts that offer a reward in exchange for a trained machine learning model for a particular data set. This would allow users to train machine learning models for a reward in a trustless manner. The smart contract will use the blockchain to automatically validate the solution, so there would be no debate about whether the solution was correct or not. Users who submit the solutions won't have counterparty risk that they won't get paid for their work. Contracts can be created easily by anyone with a dataset, even programmatically by software agents. This creates a market where parties who are good at solving machine learning problems can directly monetize their skillset, and where any organization or software agent that has a problem to solve with AI can solicit solutions from all over the world. This will incentivize the creation of better machine learning models, and make AI more accessible to companies and software agents.
The Myosin Va Head Domain Binds to the Neurofilament-L Rod and Modulates Endoplasmic Reticulum (ER) Content and Distribution within Axons

The neurofilament light subunit (NF-L) binds to myosin Va (Myo Va) in neurons but the sites of interaction and functional significance are not clear. We show by deletion analysis that motor domain of Myo Va binds to the NF-L rod domain that forms the NF backbone. Loss of NF-L and Myo Va binding from axons significantly reduces the axonal content of ER, and redistributes ER to the periphery of axon. Our data are consistent with a novel function for NFs as a scaffold in axons for maintaining the content and proper distribution of vesicular organelles, mediated in part by Myo Va. Based on observations that the Myo Va motor domain binds to intermediate filament (IF) proteins of several classes, Myo Va interactions with IFs may serve similar roles in organizing organelle topography in different cell types.
Biomedical event trigger detection based on bidirectional LSTM and CRF

Trigger detection plays a key role in the extraction of biomedical events, so it will influence the results of biomedical events extraction directly. The traditional biomedical event trigger recognition method is based on artificial design features and construct feature vectors; Not only does it consume great amounts of manpower, it also lacks system generalization ability. Most of methods of trigger detection are based on the convolutional neural network that identify each word in the text, and regard it as a multi-classification task. However for the multi-word composed of the trigger, there is no useful recognition effect. In this paper, we will use the IBO format and consider the trigger detection as a task of sequence annotation, a solution that improves the recognition accuracy of multi-word triggers by bidirectional LSTM and CRF.
Physical restraint: experiences, attitudes and opinions of adult intensive care unit nurses.

BACKGROUND Patients within the adult intensive care unit have the potential to develop delirium and agitation. This can result in the patient displaying unwanted behaviours such as attempting to remove the medical devices to which they are attached. Some adult intensive care units within the UK are starting to adopt physical restraint as a method of managing unwanted behaviours. AIM To determine the experiences, attitudes and opinions of adult intensive care nurses in relation to the application of physical restraint. DESIGN Questionnaire survey. METHODS A postal questionnaire was distributed to all nurses (n = 192) within two purposefully selected large adult intensive care units in the UK. RESULTS Data were collected between November 2012 and February 2013. The questionnaire was completed by 38·9% (n = 75) of the nurses contacted. All believed that physical restraint had a place, with the majority of the view that the reason for its application was to maintain patient safety. Some expressed discomfort about the use of physical restraint. Nurses were happy to discuss the use of restraint with families. There was a perceived need for training and support for nursing staff as well as the need for medical staff to support the decision-making process. CONCLUSION Nurses require more support and evidence to base their decision-making upon. They require guidance from professional bodies as well as support from medical colleagues. The findings have limited generalizability as they can only be applied to the units accessed and the response rate was poor. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE Alternative approaches such as pain management, sleep promotion and the involvement of relatives need to be explored before physical restraint policy can be written. Further research is required into the safety of physical restraint, alternative methods of managing the risk of agitation and identifying predisposing factors to accidental device removal.
Clinical and Magnetic Resonance Imaging Findings of Neurotoxocariasis

Human toxocariasis is one of the most prevalent helminthiases worldwide. Toxocara canis larvae can cross the blood–brain barrier leading to the neurotoxocariasis. The clinical presentation consists of a wide spectrum of neurological manifestations, but asymptomatic infection is probably common. Neurotoxocariasis is not a frequent diagnosis probably due to the non-specific nature of its symptoms as well as the lack of confirmatory diagnostic tests. Diagnosis of neurotoxocariasis is based on the presence of a high titer of anti-Toxocara antibody in the cerebrospinal fluid or in the serum, presence of eosinophilia in the serum or cerebrospinal fluid, and clinical and radiological improvement after anthelmintic therapy; however, universally accepted diagnostic criteria are lacking. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) findings include single or multiple, subcortical, cortical or white matter hyperintense lesions, best visualized on FLAIR and T2-weighted imaging, and usually isointense or hypointense on T1. These imaging findings are suggestive but not specific to neurotoxocariasis. Definitive diagnosis is made by histological confirmation, but it is rarely followed. This review provides an overview of the clinical manifestations, management options, and MRI findings of neurotoxocariasis.
Urokinase‐derived peptides regulate vascular smooth muscle contraction in vitro and in vivo

We examined the effect of urokinase (uPA) and its fragments on vascular smooth muscle cell contraction. Single‐chain uPA inhibits phenylepherine (PE) ‐induced contraction of rat aortic rings, whereas two‐chain uPA exerts the opposite effect. Two independent epitopes mediating these opposing activities were identified. Å6, a capped peptide corresponding to amino acids 136‐143 (KPSSPPEE) of uPA, increased the EC50 of PE‐induced vascular contraction sevenfold by inhibiting the release of calcium from intracellular stores. Å6 activity was abolished by deleting the carboxyl‐terminal Glu or by mutating the Ser corresponding to position 138 in uPA to Glu. A single‐chain uPA variant lacking amino acids 136‐143 did not induce vasorelaxation. A second epitope within the kringle of uPA potentiated PE‐induced vasoconstriction. This epitope was exposed when single‐chain uPA was converted to a two‐chain molecule by plasmin. The isolated uPA kringle augmented vasoconstriction, whereas uPA variant lacking the kringle had no procontractile activity. These studies reveal previously undescribed vasoactive domains within urokinase and its naturally derived fragments. —Haj‐Yehia, A. , Nassar, T. , Sachais, B. S. , Kuo, A. , Bdeir, K. , Al‐Mehdi, A. B. , Mazar, A. , Cines, D. B. , Higazi, A. A. Urokinase‐derived peptides regulate vascular smooth muscle contraction in vitro and in vivo. FASEB J. 14, 1411–1422 (2000)
CoMP in the Sky: UAV Placement and Movement Optimization for Multi-User Communications

Driven by the recent advancement in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, this paper proposes a new wireless network architecture of coordinate multipoint (CoMP) in the sky to harness both the benefits of interference mitigation via CoMP and high mobility of UAVs. Specifically, we consider uplink communications in a multi-UAV enabled multi-user system, where each UAV forwards its received signals from all ground users to a central processor (CP) for joint decoding. Moreover, we consider the case where the users may move on the ground, thus the UAVs need to adjust their locations in accordance with the user locations over time to maximize the network throughput. Utilizing random matrix theory, we first characterize, in closed form, a set of approximated upper and lower bounds of the user’s achievable rate in each time epoch under the practical Rician fading channel model, which is shown to be very tight, both analytically and numerically. UAV placement and movement over different epochs are then optimized based on the derived bounds to maximize the minimum of user average achievable rates over all epochs for both cases of full information (of current and future epochs) and current information on the user’s movement. Interestingly, it is shown that the optimized location of each UAV at any particular epoch is the weighted average of the ground user locations at the current epoch as well as its own location at the previous and/or next epoch. Finally, simulation results are provided to validate and compare the performance of the proposed UAV placement and movement designs under different practical application scenarios.
12-Hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acid participates in angiotensin II afferent arteriolar vasoconstriction by activating L-type calcium channels Published, JLR Papers in Press, September 1, 2003. DOI 10.1194/jlr.M300183-JLR200

The lipoxygenase (LO) metabolite, 12(S)-hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acid [12(S)-HETE], constricts renal vessels, contributes to the vascular response to angiotensin, and has been implicated in cardiovascular and renal diseases. The current studies were performed to determine if renal microvascular 12(S)-HETE production is stimulated by angiotensin and the contribution of L-type calcium channels to the vasoconstriction elicited by 12(S)-HETE. Angiotensin increased renal microvascular 12(S)-HETE production by 64%, whereas cyclooxygenase metabolite production was not altered. Renal microvessels also expressed platelet-type 12-LO and leukocyte-type 12-LO. In the juxtamedullary preparation, afferent arteriolar diameter averaged 21 ± 1 μm and 12(S)-HETE caused a graded decrease in vessel caliber. The afferent arteriolar response to 12(S)-HETE was abolished during L-type calcium channel inhibition. Renal microvascular smooth muscle cells were studied using fluorescence microscopy. Renal myocyte [Ca2+]i averaged 93 ± 5 nmol/l. The 12(S)-HETE (5 μmol/l) increased myocyte [Ca2+]i to a peak value of 340 ± 55 nmol/l. The peak [Ca2+]i response following exposure to 12(S)-HETE was greatly attenuated in the absence of extracellular Ca2+ or calcium channel blockade. These results demonstrate that renal microvascular 12(S)-HETE production is increased in response to angiotensin, and activation of L-type calcium channels is an important mechanism responsible for the afferent arteriolar vasoconstriction elicited by 12(S)-HETE.
Capitalizing on opportunistic data for monitoring relative abundances of species

With the internet, a massive amount of information on species abundance can be collected by citizen science programs. However, these data are often difficult to use directly in statistical inference, as their collection is generally opportunistic, and the distribution of the sampling effort is often not known. In this article, we develop a general statistical framework to combine such “opportunistic data” with data collected using schemes characterized by a known sampling effort. Under some structural assumptions regarding the sampling effort and detectability, our approach makes it possible to estimate the relative abundance of several species in different sites. It can be implemented through a simple generalized linear model. We illustrate the framework with typical bird datasets from the Aquitaine region in south‐western France. We show that, under some assumptions, our approach provides estimates that are more precise than the ones obtained from the dataset with a known sampling effort alone. When the opportunistic data are abundant, the gain in precision may be considerable, especially for rare species. We also show that estimates can be obtained even for species recorded only in the opportunistic scheme. Opportunistic data combined with a relatively small amount of data collected with a known effort may thus provide access to accurate and precise estimates of quantitative changes in relative abundance over space and/or time.