Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Structure and Evolution of Mediterranean Forest Research: A Science Mapping Approach

This study aims at conducting the first science mapping analysis of the Mediterranean forest research in order to elucidate its research structure and evolution. We applied a science mapping approach based on co-term and citation analyses to a set of scientific publications retrieved from the Elsevier’s Scopus database over the period 1980–2014. The Scopus search retrieved 2,698 research papers and reviews published by 159 peer-reviewed journals. The total number of publications was around 1% (N = 17) during the period 1980–1989 and they reached 3% (N = 69) in the time slice 1990–1994. Since 1995, the number of publications increased exponentially, thus reaching 55% (N = 1,476) during the period 2010–2014. Within the thirty-four years considered, the retrieved publications were published by 88 countries. Among them, Spain was the most productive country, publishing 44% (N = 1,178) of total publications followed by Italy (18%, N = 482) and France (12%, N = 336). These countries also host the ten most productive scientific institutions in terms of number of publications in Mediterranean forest subjects. Forest Ecology and Management and Annals of Forest Science were the most active journals in publishing research in Mediterranean forest. During the period 1980–1994, the research topics were poorly characterized, but they become better defined during the time slice 1995–1999. Since 2000s, the clusters become well defined by research topics. Current status of Mediterranean forest research (20092014) was represented by four clusters, in which different research topics such as biodiversity and conservation, land-use and degradation, climate change effects on ecophysiological responses and soil were identified. Basic research in Mediterranean forest ecosystems is mainly conducted by ecophysiological research. Applied research was mainly represented by land-use and degradation, biodiversity and conservation and fire research topics. The citation analyses revealed highly cited terms in the Mediterranean forest research as they were represented by fire, biodiversity, carbon sequestration, climate change and global warming. Finally, our analysis also revealed the multidisciplinary role of climate change research. This study provides a first holistic view of the Mediterranean forest research that could be useful for researchers and policy makers as they may evaluate and analyze its historical evolution, as well as its structure and scientific production. We concluded that Mediterranean forest research represents an active scientific field.
Joint Symbol and Chip Synchronization for a Burst-Mode-Communication Superregenerative MSK Receiver

In this paper we describe a superregenerative (SR) MSK receiver able to operate in a burst-mode framework where synchronization is required for each packet. The receiver is based on an SR oscillator which provides samples of the incoming instantaneous phase trajectories. We develop a simple yet effective technique to achieve joint chip and symbol synchronization within the time limits of a suitable preamble. We develop some general results and focus on the case of the IEEE 802.15. 4 MSK physical layer. We provide details on a VHDL implementation on an FPGA where the most complex digital processing block is an accumulator. Simulation and experimental results are provided to validate the described technique.
Does Disability Insurance Receipt Discourage Work? Using Examiner Assignment to Estimate Causal Effects of SSDI Receipt

We present the first causal estimates of the effect of Social Security Disability Insurance benefit receipt on labor supply using all program applicants. We use new administrative data to match applications to disability examiners, and exploit variation in examiners’ allowance rates as an instrument for benefit receipt. We find that among the estimated 23% of applicants on the margin of program entry, employment would have been 28 percentage points higher had they not received benefits. The effect is heterogeneous, ranging from no effect for those with more severe impairments to 50 percentage points for entrants with relatively less severe impairments.
Dynamics of Protein Turnover, a Missing Dimension in Proteomics*

Functional genomic experiments frequently involve a comparison of the levels of gene expression between two or more genetic, developmental, or physiological states. Such comparisons can be carried out at either the RNA (transcriptome) or protein (proteome) level, but there is often a lack of congruence between parallel analyses using these two approaches. To fully interpret protein abundance data from proteomic experiments, it is necessary to understand the contributions made by the opposing processes of synthesis and degradation to the transition between the states compared. Thus, there is a need for reliable methods to determine the rates of turnover of individual proteins at amounts comparable to those obtained in proteomic experiments. Here, we show that stable isotope-labeled amino acids can be used to define the rate of breakdown of individual proteins by inspection of mass shifts in tryptic fragments. The approach has been applied to an analysis of abundant proteins in glucose-limited yeast cells grown in aerobic chemostat culture at steady state. The average rate of degradation of 50 proteins was 2.2%/h, although some proteins were turned over at imperceptible rates, and others had degradation rates of almost 10%/h. This range of values suggests that protein turnover is a significant missing dimension in proteomic experiments and needs to be considered when assessing protein abundance data and comparing it to the relative abundance of cognate mRNA species.
Transparent Checkpoint-Restart for Hardware-Accelerated 3D Graphics

Providing fault-tolerance for long-running GPU-intensive jobs requires application-specific solutions, and often involves saving the state of complex data structures spread among many graphics libraries. This work describes a mechanism for transparent GPU-independent checkpoint-restart of 3D graphics. The approach is based on a record-prune-replay paradigm: all OpenGL calls relevant to the graphics driver state are recorded; calls not relevant to the internal driver state as of the last graphics frame prior to checkpoint are discarded; and the remaining calls are replayed on restart. A previous approach for OpenGL 1.5, based on a shadow device driver, required more than 78,000 lines of OpenGL-specific code. In contrast, the new approach, based on record-prune-replay, is used to implement the same case in just 4,500 lines of code. The speed of this approach varies between 80 per cent and nearly 100 per cent of the speed of the native hardware acceleration for OpenGL 1.5, as measured when running the ioquake3 game under Linux. This approach has also been extended to demonstrate checkpointing of OpenGL 3.0 for the first time, with a demonstration for PyMol, for molecular visualization.
Abuse of Amphetamines and Structural Abnormalities in the Brain

We review evidence that structural brain abnormalities are associated with abuse of amphetamines. A brief history of amphetamine use/abuse and evidence for toxicity is followed by a summary of findings from structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies of human subjects who had abused amphetamines and children who were exposed to amphetamines in utero. Evidence comes from studies that used a variety of techniques including manual tracing, pattern matching, voxel‐based, tensor‐based, or cortical thickness mapping, quantification of white matter signal hyperintensities, and diffusion tensor imaging. Ten studies compared controls to individuals who were exposed to methamphetamine. Three studies assessed individuals exposed to 3–4‐methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA). Brain structural abnormalities were consistently reported in amphetamine abusers, as compared to control subjects. These included lower cortical gray matter volume and higher striatal volume than control subjects. These differences might reflect brain features that could predispose to substance dependence. High striatal volumes might also reflect compensation for toxicity in the dopamine‐rich basal ganglia. Prenatal exposure was associated with striatal volume that was below control values, suggesting that such compensation might not occur in utero. Several forms of white matter abnormality are also common and may involve gliosis. Many of the limitations and inconsistencies in the literature relate to techniques and cross‐sectional designs, which cannot infer causality. Potential confounding influences include effects of pre existing risk/protective factors, development, gender, severity of amphetamine abuse, abuse of other drugs, abstinence, and differences in lifestyle. Longitudinal designs in which multimodal datasets are acquired and are subjected to multivariate analyses would enhance our ability to provide general conclusions regarding the associations between amphetamine abuse and brain structure.
Troponin T percentiles from a random population sample, emergency room patients and patients with myocardial infarction.

BACKGROUND High-sensitivity cardiac troponin T (cTnT) assays detect small clinically important myocardial infarctions (MI) but also yield higher rates of false-positive results owing to increased concentrations sometimes present in patients without MI. Better understanding is needed of factors influencing the 99th percentile of cTnT concentrations across populations and the frequency of changes in cTnT concentrations >20% often used in combination with increased cTnT concentrations for diagnosis of MI. METHODS cTnT percentiles were determined by use of the Elecsys® hscTnT immunoassay (Modular® Analytics E170) in a random population sample, in emergency room (ER) patients, and in patients with non-ST-elevation MI (NSTEMI). Changes in cTnT concentrations were determined in hospitalized patients without MI. RESULTS The 99th cTnT percentile in a random population sample (median age, 65 years) was 24 ng/L. In ER patients <65 years old without obvious conditions that increase cTnT, the 99th cTnT percentile was 12 ng/L with little age dependence, whereas in those >65 years old it was 82 ng/L and highly age dependent. In hospitalized patients without MI the 97.5th percentile for change in the cTnT concentration was 51%-67%. cTnT remained below the 99th percentile (12 ng/L) in 1% of patients with NSTEMI until 8.5 h after symptom onset and 6 h after ER arrival. CONCLUSIONS Age >65 years was the dominant factor associated with increased cTnT in ER patients. This age association was more prominent in ER patients than in a random population sample. Changes in serial cTnT concentrations >20% were common in hospitalized patients without MI.
On the convergence of massive MIMO systems

In this paper we examine convergence properties of massive MIMO systems with the aim of determining the number of antennas required for massive MIMO gains. We consider three characteristics of a channel matrix and study their asymptotic behaviour. Furthermore, we derive ZF SNR and MF SINR for a scenario of unequal receive powers. In our results we include the effects of spatial correlation. We show that the rate of convergence of channel metrics is much slower than that of the ZF/MF precoder properties.
Power-efficient sensor placement and transmission structure for data gathering under distortion constraints

We consider the joint optimization of sensor placement and transmission structure for data gathering, where a given number of nodes need to be placed in a field such that the sensed data can be reconstructed at a sink within specified distortion bounds while minimizing the energy consumed for communication. We assume that the nodes use joint entropy coding based on explicit communication between sensor nodes, and consider both maximum and average distortion bounds. The optimization is complex since it involves an interplay between the spaces of possible transmission structures given radio reachability limitations, and feasible placements satisfying distortion bounds. We address this problem by first looking at the simplified problem of optimal placement in the one-dimensional case. An analytical solution is derived for the case when there is a simple aggregation scheme, and numerical results are provided for the cases when joint entropy encoding is used. We use the insight from our 1-D analysis to extend our results to the 2-D case, and show that our algorithm for two-dimensional placement and transmission structure provides significant power benefit over a commonly used combination of uniformly random placement and shortest path trees.
H5N1 and 1918 Pandemic Influenza Virus Infection Results in Early and Excessive Infiltration of Macrophages and Neutrophils in the Lungs of Mice

Fatal human respiratory disease associated with the 1918 pandemic influenza virus and potentially pandemic H5N1 viruses is characterized by severe lung pathology, including pulmonary edema and extensive inflammatory infiltrate. Here, we quantified the cellular immune response to infection in the mouse lung by flow cytometry and demonstrate that mice infected with highly pathogenic (HP) H1N1 and H5N1 influenza viruses exhibit significantly high numbers of macrophages and neutrophils in the lungs compared to mice infected with low pathogenic (LP) viruses. Mice infected with the 1918 pandemic virus and a recent H5N1 human isolate show considerable similarities in overall lung cellularity, lung immune cell sub-population composition and cellular immune temporal dynamics. Interestingly, while these similarities were observed, the HP H5N1 virus consistently elicited significantly higher levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines in whole lungs and primary human macrophages, revealing a potentially critical difference in the pathogenesis of H5N1 infections. These results together show that infection with HP influenza viruses such as H5N1 and the 1918 pandemic virus leads to a rapid cell recruitment of macrophages and neutrophils into the lungs, suggesting that these cells play a role in acute lung inflammation associated with HP influenza virus infection. In addition, primary macrophages and dendritic cells were also susceptible to 1918 and H5N1 influenza virus infection in vitro and in infected mouse lung tissue.
Full-sphere simulations of a circulation-dominated solar dynamo: Exploring the parity issue

We explore a two-dimensional kinematic solar dynamo model in a full sphere, based on the helioseismically determined solar rotation profile and with an α effect concentrated near the solar surface, which captures the Babcock-Leighton idea that the poloidal field is created from the decay of tilted bipolar active regions. The meridional circulation, assumed to penetrate slightly below the tachocline, plays an important role. Some doubts have recently been raised regarding the ability of such a model to reproduce olar-like dipolar parity. We specifically address the parity issue and show that the dipolar mode is preferred when certain reasonable conditions are satisfied, the most important condition being the requirement that the poloidal field should diffuse efficiently to get coupled across the equator. Our model is shown to reproduce various aspects of observational data, including the phase relation between sunspots and the weak, diffuse field.
Inhibition of Lung Tumorigenesis by Metformin Is Associated with Decreased Plasma IGF-I and Diminished Receptor Tyrosine Kinase Signaling

Metformin is the most commonly prescribed drug for type II diabetes and is associated with decreased cancer risk. Previously, we showed that metformin prevented tobacco carcinogen (NNK)–induced lung tumorigenesis in a non-diabetic mouse model, which was associated with decreased IGF-I/insulin receptor signaling but not activation of AMPK in lung tissues, as well as decreased circulating levels of IGF-I and insulin. Here, we used liver IGF-I–deficient (LID) mice to determine the importance of IGF-I in NNK-induced lung tumorigenesis and chemoprevention by metformin. LID mice had decreased lung tumor multiplicity and burden compared with wild-type (WT) mice. Metformin further decreased lung tumorigenesis in LID mice without affecting IGF-I levels, suggesting that metformin can act through IGF-I–independent mechanisms. In lung tissues, metformin decreased phosphorylation of multiple receptor tyrosine kinases (RTK) as well as levels of GTP-bound Ras independently of AMPK. Metformin also diminished plasma levels of several cognate ligands for these RTKs. Tissue distribution studies using [14C]-metformin showed that uptake of metformin was high in liver but four-fold lower in lungs, suggesting that the suppression of RTK activation by metformin occurs predominantly via systemic, indirect effects. Systemic inhibition of circulating growth factors and local RTK signaling are new AMPK-independent mechanisms of action of metformin that could underlie its ability to prevent tobacco carcinogen–induced lung tumorigenesis. Cancer Prev Res; 6(8); 801–10. ©2013 AACR.
Flowing Performance, Microstructures, and Fracture Toughness of Dynamically Vulcanized PP/EPDM Blends

The fracture behavior of polypropylene/ethylene—propylene— diene terpolymer (100/8) blends with different microstructure was investigated using the essential work of fracture approach. Ethylene—propylene—diene terpolymer and dicumyl peroxide were mixed in a single-screw extruder at 140°C, and the crosslinking reaction had hardly taken place at this temperature. Then the reactive extrusion of ethylene—propylene—diene terpolymer and polypropylene was performed on a twin-screw extruder at a temperature range of 160—210°C and ethylene—propylene—diene terpolymer was crosslinked in this process. Various crosslinking density of ethylene—propylene—diene terpolymer in polypropylene/ethylene—propylene—diene terpolymer (100/8) blends was obtained by varying the concentration of dicumyl peroxide. With increasing dicumyl peroxide concentration, melt flow rate of the blends gradually increased but the increasing trend was slowed up. The degradation reaction of polypropylene was markedly restrained by adopting such a processing method. From the result of scanning electron microscopy, the size of ethylene—propylene—diene terpolymer particles was reduced and a more uniform particle size distribution was obtained. The existence of polypropylene/ ethylene—propylene—diene terpolymer graft copolymer was demonstrated by differential scanning calorimetry and the negative effect of the graft copolymer on the crystalline rate of polypropylene macromolecules which were grafted onto ethylene—propylene—diene terpolymer chains was validated. The specific essential work of fracture (we) increased markedly with increasing dicumyl peroxide concentration for the blends prepared. When the concentration of dicumyl peroxide was 0.3 wt% of ethylene—propylene—diene terpolymer content, the value of we of the dynamic vulcanized blends was about 165% as that of polypropylene/ethylene—propylene—diene terpolymer simple blends or polypropylene, while the specific plastic work (βwp) was still larger than that of polypropylene.
Exploring Prospective Predictors of Illicit Drug-Toxicity Deaths: Evidence From the General Social Survey

Background: This study was based on over 30,000 U.S. respondents who completed General Social Surveys between 1978 and 2002. Aims: We approached these respondents prospectively, comparing and contrasting the responses of those who subsequently died from drug-poisonings (N = 135) with all respondents who were still living, N = 23,559. Method: We employed cross-tabulation and logistic regression analyses to test for statistically significant differences between drug-poisoning death casualties and all living respondents. Results: Consistent with past research findings, younger males were over-represented among drug death casualties. Also consistent with past studies, drug casualties showed evidence of perceiving themselves as socially marginalized in comparison to living respondents: More reported themselves in poorer health, as having been sexual minority members during the last 5 years, as having spent their younger years in homes where parents’ marriages disrupted, with fewer owning homes and feeling less satisfied about their financial situations. Conclusions: These exploratory findings obtained from a general population survey reinforce findings from clinical studies and help advance clinical assessments of potential at-risk individuals who might be identified sooner, lest they succumb to future fatal drug poisonings.
Pharmacophore-Based Screening and Identification of Novel Human Ligase I Inhibitors with Potential Anticancer Activity

Human DNA ligases are enzymes that are indispensable for DNA replication and repair processes. Among the three human ligases, ligase I is attributed to the ligation of thousands of Okazaki fragments that are formed during lagging strand synthesis during DNA replication. Blocking ligation therefore can lead to the accumulation of thousands of single strands and subsequently double strand breaks in the DNA, which is lethal for the cells. The reports of the high expression level of ligase I protein in several cancer cells (versus the low ligase expression level and the low rate of division of most normal cells in the adult body) support the belief that ligase I inhibitors can target cancer cells specifically with minimum side effects to normal cells. Recent publications showing exciting data for a ligase IV inhibitor exhibiting antitumor activity in mouse models also strengthens the argument for ligases as valid antitumor targets. Keeping this in view, we performed a pharmacophore-based screening for potential ligase inhibitors in the Maybridge small molecule library and procured some of the top-ranking compounds for enzyme-based and cell-based in vitro screening. We report here the identification of novel ligase I inhibitors with potential anticancer activity against a colon cancer cell line.
Complementary and alternative medicine use among midlife women for reasons including menopause in the United States: 2002

Objective: The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has been examined previously for midlife women only in regional studies. The purpose of this study was to obtain national estimates of CAM use. Design: Data were obtained from the 2002 National Health Interview Survey, which included a CAM supplementary questionnaire. The response rate was 74%. The analysis included 3,621 female respondents between 45 and 57 years of age who had answered all of the relevant questions. SUDAAN software was used to account for the complex sampling design. Results: Forty-five percent of women 45 to 57 years of age had used some form of CAM within the last 12 months. Approximately 25% used biologics (e.g., herbs) or mind-body (e.g., biofeedback) modalities, whereas only 15% used body work (massage and chiropractic medicine). Use did not vary by age, but white race, higher education, and residence in the West were associated with increased use. Only 45% of CAM users mentioned its use to a medical provider. The most cited reason for using CAM involved treatment of pain, with only 3% mentioning menopause. However, the odds for use of CAM were almost twice as high for women with menopausal symptoms in the past year compared with women with no symptoms (odds ratio: 1.9, 95% CI: 1.6-2.2). Conclusions: CAM use among midlife U.S. women is high, although CAM is not used specifically for menopausal concerns. These data will be useful as a benchmark of the use of CAM as use of conventional menopause therapies are influenced by the Women's Health Initiative results.