Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lycopene Pretreatment Ameliorates Acute Ethanol Induced NAD+ Depletion in Human Astroglial Cells

Excessive alcohol consumption is associated with reduced brain volume and cognition. While the mechanisms by which ethanol induces these deleterious effects in vivo are varied most are associated with increased inflammatory and oxidative processes. In order to further characterise the effect of acute ethanol exposure on oxidative damage and NAD+ levels in the brain, human U251 astroglioma cells were exposed to physiologically relevant doses of ethanol (11 mM, 22 mM, 65 mM, and 100 mM) for ≤ 30 minutes. Ethanol exposure resulted in a dose dependent increase in both ROS and poly(ADP-ribose) polymer production. Significant decreases in total NAD(H) and sirtuin 1 activity were also observed at concentrations ≥ 22 mM. Similar to U251 cells, exposure to ethanol (≥22 mM) decreased levels of NAD(H) in primary human astrocytes. NAD(H) depletion in primary astrocytes was prevented by pretreatment with 1 μM of lycopene for 3.5 hours. Unexpectedly, in U251 cells lycopene treatment at concentrations ≥ 5 μM resulted in significant reductions in [NAD(H)]. This study suggests that exposure of the brain to alcohol at commonly observed blood concentrations may cause transitory oxidative damage which may be at least partly ameliorated by lycopene.
Raffinose in chloroplasts is synthesized in the cytosol and transported across the chloroplast envelope.

In chloroplasts, several water-soluble carbohydrates have been suggested to act as stress protectants. The trisaccharide raffinose (alpha-1,6-galactosyl sucrose) is such a carbohydrate but has received little attention. We here demonstrate by compartmentation analysis of leaf mesophyll protoplasts that raffinose is clearly (to about 20%) present in chloroplasts of cold-treated common bugle (Ajuga reptans L.), spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.) and Arabidopsis [Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) Heynh. ] plants. The two dedicated enzymes needed for raffinose synthesis, galactinol synthase and raffinose synthase, were found to be extra-chloroplastic (probably cytosolic) in location, suggesting that the chloroplast envelope contains a raffinose transporter. Uptake experiments with isolated Ajuga and Arabidopsis chloroplasts clearly demonstrated that raffinose is indeed transported across the chloroplast envelope by a raffinose transporter, probably actively. Raffinose uptake into Ajuga chloroplasts was a saturable process with apparent K(m) and v(max) values of 27.8 mM and 3.3 micromol mg(-1) Chl min(-1), respectively.
Mathematik in den Naturwissenschaften Leipzig Consensus and synchronization in discrete-time networks of multi-agents with stochastically switching topologies and time delays by

We analyze stability of consensus algorithms in networks of multi-agents with time-varying topologies and delays. The topology and delays are modeled as induced by an adapted process and are rather general, including i.i. d. topology processes, asynchronous consensus algorithms, and Markovian jumping switching. In case the self-links are instantaneous, we prove that the network reaches consensus for all bounded delays if the graph corresponding to the conditional expectation of the coupling matrix sum across a finite time interval has a spanning tree almost surely. Moreover, when self-links are also delayed and when the delays satisfy certain integer patterns, we observe and prove that the algorithm may not reach consensus but instead synchronize at a periodic trajectory, whose period depends on the delay pattern. We also give a brief discussion on the dynamics in the absence of self-links.
The Default Mode Network and Altered Consciousness in Epilepsy

The default mode network has been hypothesized based on the observation that specific regions of the brain are consistently activated during the resting state and deactivated during engagement with task. The primary nodes of this network, which typically include the precuneus/posterior cingulate, the medial frontal and lateral parietal cortices, are thought to be involved in introspective and social cognitive functions. Interestingly, this same network has been shown to be selectively impaired during epileptic seizures associated with loss of consciousness. Using a wide range of neuroimaging and electrophysiological modalities, decreased activity in the default mode network has been confirmed during complex partial, generalized tonic-clonic, and absence seizures. In this review we will discuss these three seizure types and will focus on possible mechanisms by which decreased default mode network activity occurs. Although the specific mechanisms of onset and propagation differ considerably across these seizure types, we propose that the resulting loss of consciousness in all three types of seizures is due to active inhibition of subcortical arousal systems that normally maintain default mode network activity in the awake state. Further, we suggest that these findings support a general “network inhibition hypothesis”, by which active inhibition of arousal systems by seizures in certain cortical regions leads to cortical deactivation in other cortical areas. This may represent a push-pull mechanism similar to that seen operating between cortical networks under normal conditions.
Sparing of tissue by using micro-slit-beam radiation therapy reduces neurotoxicity compared with broad-beam radiation therapy

Micro-slit-beam radiation therapy (MRT) using synchrotron-generated X-ray beams allows for extremely high-dose irradiation. However, the toxicity of MRT in central nervous system (CNS) use is still unknown. To gather baseline toxicological data, we evaluated mortality in normal mice following CNS-targeted MRT. Male C57BL/6 J mice were head-fixed in a stereotaxic frame. Synchrotron X-ray-beam radiation was provided by the SPring-8 BL28B2 beam-line. For MRT, radiation was delivered to groups of mice in a 10 × 12 mm unidirectional array consisting of 25-μm-wide beams spaced 100, 200 or 300 μm apart; another group of mice received the equivalent broad-beam radiation therapy (BRT) for comparison. Peak and valley dose rates of the MRT were 120 and 0.7 Gy/s, respectively. Delivered doses were 96–960 Gy for MRT, and 24–120 Gy for BRT. Mortality was monitored for 90 days post-irradiation. Brain tissue was stained using hematoxylin and eosin to evaluate neural structure. Demyelination was evaluated by Klüver–Barrera staining. The LD50 and LD100 when using MRT were 600 Gy and 720 Gy, respectively, and when using BRT they were 80 Gy and 96 Gy, respectively. In MRT, mortality decreased as the center-to-center beam spacing increased from 100 μm to 300 μm. Cortical architecture was well preserved in MRT, whereas BRT induced various degrees of cerebral hemorrhage and demyelination. MRT was able to deliver extremely high doses of radiation, while still minimizing neuronal death. The valley doses, influenced by beam spacing and irradiated dose, could represent important survival factors for MRT.
Tropical Water Vapor and Cloud Feedbacks in Climate Models: A Further Assessment Using Coupled Simulations

By comparing the response of clouds and water vapor to ENSO forcing in nature with that in Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP) simulations by some leading climate models, an earlier evaluation of tropical cloud and water vapor feedbacks has revealed the following two common biases in the models: 1) an underestimate of the strength of the negative cloud albedo feedback and 2) an overestimate of the positive feedback from the greenhouse effect of water vapor. Extending the same analysis to the fully coupled simulations of these models as well as other Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) coupled models, it is found that these two biases persist. Relative to the earlier estimates from AMIP simulations, the overestimate of the positive feedback from water vapor is alleviated somewhat for most of the coupled simulations. Improvements in the simulation of the cloud albedo feedback are only found in the models whose AMIP runs suggest either a positive or nearly positive cloud albedo feedback. The strength of the negative cloud albedo feedback in all other models is found to be substantially weaker than that estimated from the corresponding AMIP simulations. Consequently, although additional models are found to have a cloud albedo feedback in their AMIP simulations that is as strong as in the observations, all coupled simulations analyzed in this study have a weaker negative feedback from the cloud albedo and therefore a weaker negative feedback from the net surface heating than that indicated in observations. The weakening in the cloud albedo feedback is apparently linked to a reduced response of deep convection over the equatorial Pacific, which is in turn linked to the excessive cold tongue in the mean climate of these models. The results highlight that the feedbacks of water vapor and clouds—the cloud albedo feedback in particular—may depend on the mean intensity of the hydrological cycle. Whether the intermodel variations in the feedback from cloud albedo (water vapor) in the ENSO variability are correlated with the intermodel variations of the feedback from cloud albedo (water vapor) in global warming has also been examined. While a weak positive correlation between the intermodel variations in the feedback of water vapor during ENSO and the intermodel variations in the water vapor feedback during global warming was found, there is no significant correlation found between the intermodel variations in the cloud albedo feedback during ENSO and the intermodel variations in the cloud albedo feedback during global warming. The results suggest that the two common biases revealed in the simulated ENSO variability may not necessarily be carried over to the simulated global warming. These biases, however, highlight the continuing difficulty that models have in simulating accurately the feedbacks of water vapor and clouds on a time scale of the observations available.
Functions of the Primate Temporal Review Lobe Cortical Visual Areas in Invariant Visual Object and Face

divided on the basis of cytoarchitecture, myeloarchitec-ture, and afferent input into areas TEa, TEm, TE3, TE2, and TE1. In addition there is a set of different areas in United Kingdom latter areas, TPO receives inputs from temporal, parietal, and occipital cortex; PGa and IPa from parietal and temporal cortex; and TS and TAa primarily from auditory areas (Seltzer and Pandya, 1978). There is now good evidence that neural systems in tem-There is considerable specialization of function in poral cortical visual areas process information about these architectonically defined areas (Baylis et al., 1987). faces. Because a large number of neurons are devoted Areas TPO, PGa, and IPa are multimodal, with neurons to this class of stimuli, these systems have proved ame-that respond to visual, auditory, and/or somatosensory nable to experimental analysis. Face recognition and inputs. The more ventral areas in the inferior temporal the identification of face expression are important in gyrus (areas TE3, TE2, TE1, TEa, and TEm) are primarily primate social behavior, and analysis of the neural sys-unimodal visual areas. Areas in the cortex in the anterior tems involved is important for understanding the effects and dorsal part of the superior temporal sulcus (e.g., of damage to these systems in humans. Damage to TPO, IPa, and IPg) have neurons specialized for the these or related systems can lead to prosopagnosia, an analysis of moving visual stimuli. Neurons responsive impairment in recognizing individuals from the sight of primarily to faces are found more frequently in areas their faces, or to difficulty in identifying the expression TPO, TEa, and TEm, where they comprise ‫%02ف‬ of on a face. It turns out that the temporal cortical visual the visual neurons responsive to stationary stimuli, in areas also have similar neuronal populations that code contrast to the other temporal cortical areas, where they for objects, and study of both sets of neurons is helping comprise 4%–10%. The stimuli that activate other cells to unravel the enormous computational problem of in-in these TE regions include simple visual patterns such variant visual object recognition. The neurophysiologi-as gratings and combinations of simple stimulus fea-cal recordings are made mainly in the macaque, a spe-tures (Gross et al., 1985; Tanaka et al., 1990). Due to cies of nonhuman primate, first because the temporal the fact that face-selective neurons have a wide distribu-lobe, in which this processing occurs, is much more tion, it might be expected that only large …
Clustering-based revision debug in regression verification

Modern digital systems are growing in size and complexity, introducing significant organizational and verification challenges in the design cycle. Verification today takes as much as 70% of the design time with debugging being responsible for half of this effort. Automation has mitigated part of the resource-intensive nature of rectifying erroneous designs. Nevertheless, most tools target failures in isolation. Since regression verification can discover myriads of failures in one run, automation is also required to guide an engineer to rank them and expedite debugging. To address this growing regression pain, this paper presents a framework that utilizes traditional machine learning techniques along with historical data in version control systems and the results of functional debugging. Its aim is to rank revisions based on their likelihood of being responsible for a particular failure. Ranking prioritizes revisions that ought to be targeted first, and therefore it speeds-up the localization of the error source. This effectively reduces the number of debug iterations. Experiments on industrial designs demonstrate a 68% improvement in the ranking of actual erroneous revisions versus the ranking obtained through existing industrial methodologies. This benefit arrives with negligible run-time overhead.
Long surface wave instability in dense granular flows

In this paper we present an experimental study of the long surface wave instability that can develop when a granular material flows down a rough inclined plane. The threshold and the dispersion relation of the instability are precisely measured by imposing a controlled perturbation at the entrance of the flow and measuring its evolution along the slope. The results are compared with the prediction of a linear stability analysis conducted in the framework of the depth-averaged or Saint-Venant equations. We show that when the friction law proposed in Pouliquen (1999a) is introduced in the Saint-Venant equations, the theory is able to predict quantitatively the stability threshold and the phase velocity of the waves but fails in predicting the observed cutoff frequency. The instability is shown to be of the same nature as the long wave instability observed in classical fluids but with characteristics that can dramatically differ due to the specificity of the granular rheology.
The deafness problems and solutions in wireless ad hoc networks using directional antennas

This paper addresses the issue of deafness in directional antennas for wireless ad hoc networks. Deafness is caused when a node X repeatedly attempts to communicate with node Y but is unsuccessful, because Y is presently tuned to some other antenna beam. In this paper, we first outline the different factors which contribute to such deafness in directional antennas and its significant impact on network performance. We then propose two schemes to overcome deafness scenarios which are transparent to the underlying directional MAC protocol in use. In addition, we also claim that IEEE 802.11 short retry limit (SRL) needs a special handling in directional environment because of the presence of deafness. We have done a detailed performance evaluation of our schemes with different directional MAC protocols running over switched beam antennas and the initial results are found to be very promising.
Adaptive Web Sites: Automatically Synthesizing Web Pages

The creation of a complex web site is a thorny problem in user interface design. In IJCAI '97, we challenged the AI community to address this problem by creating adaptive web sites: sites that automatically improve their organization and presentation by mining visitor access data collected in Web server logs. In this paper we introduce our own approach to this broad challenge. Specifically, we investigate the problem of index page synthesis -- the automatic creation of pages that facilitate a visitor's navigation of a Web site.First, we formalize this problem as a clustering problem and introduce a novel approach to clustering, which we call cluster mining: Instead of attempting to partition the entire data space into disjoint clusters, we search for a small number of cohesive (and possibly overlapping) clusters. Next, we present PageGather, a cluster mining algorithm that takes Web server logs as input and outputs the contents of candidate index pages. Finally, we show experimentally that PageGather is both faster (by a factor of three) and more effective than traditional clustering algorithms on this task. Our experiment relies on access logs collected over a month from an actual web site.
Effects of Histamine on Cultured Interstitial Cells of Cajal in Murine Small Intestine

Interstitial cells of Cajal (ICCs) are the pacemaker cells in the gastrointestinal tract, and histamine is known to regulate neuronal activity, control vascular tone, alter endothelial permeability, and modulate gastric acid secretion. However, the action mechanisms of histamine in mouse small intestinal ICCs have not been previously investigated, and thus, in the present study, we investigated the effects of histamine on mouse small intestinal ICCs, and sought to identify the receptors involved. Enzymatic digestions were used to dissociate ICCs from small intestines, and the whole-cell patch-clamp configuration was used to record potentials (in current clamp mode) from cultured ICCs. Histamine was found to depolarize resting membrane potentials concentration dependently, and whereas 2-PEA (a selective H1 receptor agonist) induced membrane depolarizations, Dimaprit (a selective H2-agonist), R-alpha-methylhistamine (R-alpha-MeHa; a selective H3-agonist), and 4-methylhistamine (4-MH; a selective H4-agonist) did not. Pretreatment with Ca2+-free solution or thapsigargin (a Ca2+-ATPase inhibitor in endoplasmic reticulum) abolished the generation of pacemaker potentials and suppressed histamine-induced membrane depolarization. Furthermore, treatments with U-73122 (a phospholipase C inhibitor) or 5-fluoro-2-indolyl des-chlorohalopemide (FIPI; a phospholipase D inhibitor) blocked histamine-induced membrane depolarizations in ICCs. On the other hand, KT5720 (a protein kinase A inhibitor) did not block histamine-induced membrane depolarization. These results suggest that histamine modulates pacemaker potentials through H1 receptor-mediated pathways via external Ca2+ influx and Ca2+ release from internal stores in a PLC and PLD dependent manner.
Joint deprojection of Sunyaev–Zeldovich and X-ray images of galaxy clusters

We present two non-parametric deprojection methods aimed at recovering the three-dimensional density and temperature profiles of galaxy clusters from spatially resolved thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) and X-ray surface brightness maps, thus avoiding the use of X-ray spectroscopic data. In both methods, the cluster is assumed spherically symmetric and modelled with an onion-skin structure. The first method follows a direct geometrical approach, in which the deprojection is performed independently for the tSZ and X-ray images, and the resulting profiles are then combined in order to extract density and temperature. The second method is based on the maximization of a single joint (tSZ and X-ray) likelihood function. This allows us to simultaneously fit the two signals by following a Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) approach. These techniques are tested against both an idealized spherical β-model cluster and a set of clusters extracted from cosmological hydrodynamical simulations with and without instrumental noise. In the first case, the quality of reconstruction is excellent and demonstrates that such methods do not suffer from any intrinsic bias. As for the application to simulations, we projected each cluster along the three orthogonal directions defined by the principal axes of the momentum of inertia tensor. This enables us to check any bias in the deprojection associated to the cluster elongation along the line of sight. After averaging over all the three projection directions, we find an overall good reconstruction, with a small (≤10 per cent) overestimate of the gas density profile. This turns into a comparable overestimate of the gas mass within the virial radius, which we ascribe to the presence of residual gas clumping. Apart from this small bias, the reconstruction has an intrinsic scatter of about 5 per cent, which is dominated by gas clumpiness. Cluster elongation along the line of sight biases the deprojected temperature profile upwards at r < 0.2r vir and downwards at larger radii. A comparable bias is also found in the deprojected temperature profile. Overall, this turns into a systematic underestimate of the gas mass, up to 10 per cent. We point out that our recovered temperature profiles are much closer to the mass-weighted profiles than those obtained from the X-ray spectroscopic-like temperature. These results confirm the potentiality of combining tSZ and X-ray imaging observations to the study of the thermal structure of the intra-cluster medium out to large cluster-centric distances.
HUMAN FACE DETECTION AND EYE LOCALIZATION IN VIDEO USING

HUMAN FACE DETECTION AND EYE LOCALIZATION IN VIDEO USING WAVELETS Mehmet Türkan M.Sc. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ahmet Enis Çetin December, 2006 Human face detection and eye localization problems have received significant attention during the past several years because of wide range of commercial and law enforcement applications. In this thesis, wavelet domain based human face detection and eye localization algorithms are developed. After determining all possible face candidate regions using color information in a given still image or video frame, each region is filtered by a high-pass filter of a wavelet transform. In this way, edge-highlighted caricature-like representations of candidate regions are obtained. Horizontal, vertical and filter-like edge projections of the candidate regions are used as feature signals for classification with dynamic programming (DP) and support vector machines (SVMs). It turns out that the proposed feature extraction method provides good detection rates with SVM based classifiers. Furthermore, the positions of eyes can be localized successfully using horizontal projections and profiles of horizontaland vertical-crop edge image regions. After an approximate horizontal level detection, each eye is first localized horizontally using horizontal projections of associated edge regions. Horizontal edge profiles are then calculated on the estimated horizontal levels. After determining eye candidate points by pairing up the local maximum point locations in the horizontal profiles with the associated horizontal levels, the verification is also carried out by an SVM based classifier. The localization results show that the proposed algorithm is not affected by both illumination and scale changes.