Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Increased hepatocarcinogenic potential of hepatitis B virus genotype A in Bantu‐speaking sub‐saharan Africans

Genotypes A, D, and E of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) circulate in southern Africa, with genotype A predominating. Their hepatocarcinogenic potential in Bantu‐speaking sub‐saharan Africans is, however, unknown. Using a case/control format, we investigated the hepatocarcinogenic potential of these genotypes and subgenotype A1 of genotype A, which accounts for the great majority of genotype A isolates. HBV isolates from 111 unselected Bantu‐speaking sub‐saharan Africans with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and 111 matched asymptomatic chronic carriers, serving as controls, were genotyped using the method of [Lindh et al. (1997): J Infect Dis 175:1285–1293]. Subgenotypes of genotype A were determined using an in‐house restriction fragment length polymorphism assay. Genotype A was present in 96 (86.5%) of patients with HCC and 76 (68.5%) of the carriers, giving a 4.5‐fold (95% confidence limits: 1.86, 10.90) increased risk of HCC in carriers infected with genotype A compared with those infected with non‐A genotypes. HCC patients infected with genotype A were significantly younger than those infected with non‐A genotypes (P = 0.02). The distributions between these two groups according to sex, geographic background, and tribe were not significantly different. Subgenotype A1 was present in all of the 77 cancer patients and 69 of 70 carriers analyzed, yielding a relative risk of 4.21 (95% confidence limits: 1.73,10.23) of HCC in those infected with subgenotype A1 compared with those infected with non‐A genotypes. Genotype A has a greater hepatocarcinogenic potential than non‐A genotypes in Bantu‐speaking sub‐saharan Africans and this is entirely attributable to subgenotype A1. J. Med. Virol. 75:513–521, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Interaction of the Bacillus stearothermophilus ribosomal protein S15 with 16 S rRNA: II. Specificity determinants of RNA-protein recognition.

S15 is a primary ribosomal protein that interacts specifically with a three-way junction in the central domain of 16 S rRNA, whose binding induces a conformational change in the RNA. In the accompanying paper, we demonstrated that S15 binds with high affinity to a 61 nucleotide RNA corresponding to the minimal rRNA binding site. Here, the sequence and structural determinants for the RNA in the Bacillus stearothermophilus S15-rRNA interaction have been probed using site-directed mutagenesis, chemical modification interference, and iodine footprinting of phosphorothioate RNA. Mutations and RNA modifications that interfere with protein binding cluster in two distinct regions, one containing an internal loop and the other containing a three-way junction. The internal loop, defined by two A.G base-pairs and a bulged guanosine, is not important for the specific interaction, however, BS15 interacts with a phylogenetically conserved G.U base-pair above this internal loop. Near the three-way junction in helix 22, a bulged adenosine and two base-pairs adjacent to the junction also provide important determinants for BS15 binding. Chemical modification interference also suggests that four highly phylogenetically conserved nucleotides in the three-way junction may form non-canonical G.G and U.A base-pairs that are required for the BS15-rRNA interaction. Ethylation modification interference suggests that BS15 binding is accompanied by a conformational change in the RNA involving orientation of helices 20 and 22 at an acute angle with respect to one another. Projection of the data provided by mutagenesis, chemical modification interference analysis, and iodine footprinting onto a three-dimensional model illustrates that BS15 is likely to interact with the minor groove along an extended face of helix 22.
Interaction of Mycobacterium avium with environmental amoebae enhances virulence

Environmental mycobacteria are a common cause of human infections. Recently, contaminated domestic water supplies have been suggested as a potential environmental source of several mycobacterial diseases. Since many of these mycobacterial species replicate best intracellularly, environmental hosts have been sought. In the present study, we examined the interaction of Mycobacterium avium with a potential protozoan host, the water-borne amoeba Acanthamoeba castellanii. We found that M. avium enters and replicates in A. castellanii. In addition, similar to that shown for mycobacteria within macrophages, M. avium inhibits lysosomal fusion and replicates in vacuoles that are tightly juxtaposed to the bacterial surfaces within amoebae. In order to determine whether growth of M. avium in amoebae plays a role in human infections, we tested the effects of this growth condition on virulence. We found that growth of M. avium in amoebae enhances both entry and intracellular replication compared to growth of bacteria in broth. Furthermore, amoeba-grown M. avium was also more virulent in the beige mouse model of infection. These data suggest a role for protozoa present in water environments as hosts for pathogenic mycobacteria, particularly M. avium.
AN APPLICATION OF INTERPOLATING GAIN-SCHEDULING CONTROL

Abstract This work investigates an application of interpolating gain-scheduling control for a structural acoustic problem. The dynamics of the system under consideration are highly sensitive to variation in the temperature. Therefore, linear time invariant ℋ 2 output feedback controllers are designed for different temperature conditions. Afterwards, these controllers are interpolated to provide a global discrete-time linear parameter-varying controller. The closed-loop stability is a posteriori guaranteed using recent less conservative analyses that consider bounds on the rate of variation of the temperature.
Uplink Achievable Rate for Massive MIMO Systems With Low-Resolution ADC

In this letter, we derive an approximate analytical expression for the uplink achievable rate of a massive multiinput multioutput (MIMO) antenna system when finite precision analog-digital converters (ADCs) and the common maximal-ratio combining technique are used at the receivers. To obtain this expression, we treat quantization noise as an additive quantization noise model. Considering the obtained expression, we show that low-resolution ADCs lead to a decrease in the achievable rate but the performance loss can be compensated by increasing the number of receiving antennas. In addition, we investigate the relation between the number of antennas and the ADC resolution, as well as the power-scaling law. These discussions support the feasibility of equipping highly economical ADCs with low resolution in practical massive MIMO systems.
New supply chain network in Brazil's house construction industry

Brazil’s house construction industry is currently undergoing changes in its structure due to the new competitive environment. In Sao Paulo, among other states, production is passing from an in-house type to a subcontracted type. Finding an effective way to manage the supply chain is crucial for the success of this new situation. With the main focus on the Brazilian supply management in this industry, this paper seeks to identify and discuss the principal key factors the supply chain management has to be aware of in order to facilitate the implementation of lean production in construction projects in this country. From a brief review of literature that exists on supply chain management, four key factors can be identified to improve supply chain performance: lean designs, system reliability, supplier co-ordination and supplier development. Based on a description of the supply chain and current management procedures in this country, the relevance given to these key factors is discussed.
Long-Term Outcomes of Acute Ischemic Stroke in Patients Aged 80 Years and Older

Purpose Short life expectancy influences decision-making when treating very old patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS). We investigated mortality and survival duration in very old AIS patients (≥ 80 years) who received hospital care. Patients and Methods Mortality data were obtained from medical records, structured telephone inquiries, death certificates from the Korean National Statistical Office, and social security data 5 ± 1.9 years after stroke onset. Age, gender, vascular risk factors, and functional outcomes from modified Rankin scales (MRS) at discharge were analyzed as predictors of mortality. Results Among 134 patients, 92 (68.7%) died. On Kaplan-Meier analysis, duration of survival of patients aged 80 - 84 years was longer than those aged 85 - 89 or 90 - 94 (24 ± 6.4, 8 ± 7.3, 7 ± 2.0 months, respectively, p = 0.002). Duration of survival of patients discharged in a state of MRS 0 - 1 was longer than the remaining groups at 47 ± 4.8 months (p < 0.001). In Cox proportional hazard analysis, age and MRS at discharge were independent predictors of mortality. Conclusion Long-term outcomes of very old patients with AIS are not uniformly grave, therefore predictors of mortality and estimated duration of survival should be considered during decision- making for treatment.
Body Joint Guided 3-D Deep Convolutional Descriptors for Action Recognition

3-D convolutional neural networks (3-D CNNs) have been established as a powerful tool to simultaneously learn features from both spatial and temporal dimensions, which is suitable to be applied to video-based action recognition. In this paper, we propose not to directly use the activations of fully connected layers of a 3-D CNN as the video feature, but to use selective convolutional layer activations to form a discriminative descriptor for video. It pools the feature on the convolutional layers under the guidance of body joint positions. Two schemes of mapping body joints into convolutional feature maps for pooling are discussed. The body joint positions can be obtained from any off-the-shelf skeleton estimation algorithm. The helpfulness of the body joint guided feature pooling with inaccurate skeleton estimation is systematically evaluated. To make it end-to-end and do not rely on any sophisticated body joint detection algorithm, we further propose a two-stream bilinear model which can learn the guidance from the body joints and capture the spatio-temporal features simultaneously. In this model, the body joint guided feature pooling is conveniently formulated as a bilinear product operation. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of body joint guided pooling which achieves promising performance.
Optoelectronic properties of InP AlGaInP quantum dot laser diodes

The aim of this thesis is to understand and optimise the optoelectronic properties of InP quantum dot laser diodes which operate in the range around 730nm required for various application such as the photodynamic therapy. The properties of wafers with two barrier widths, 8 and 6nm, each grown at different temperatures, 690, 710, 730 and 750T, and consisting of 5 layers of dots forms from different quantity of deposited material, 2, 2.5 and 3ML, are described and investigated. The laser and multisection devices of these structures are used to determine threshold current density, lasing wavelength, modal absorption, modal gain and spontaneous emission spectra. The modal absorption spectra show three different dot size distributions, small, large and very large dots. Their variation with growth temperature results in a blue shift accompanied by an increasing number of states while the variation with quantity of deposited material shows only an increase to the number of states. The lasing wavelength variation with growth temperature covers a range between 715–745nm. The threshold current density as a function of temperature for 2000/m long laser devices grown at temperature of 750°C exhibits a distinctive dependence on the operating temperature and becomes less pronounced when the growth temperature reduces. This is explained in terms of the carrier distributions in the quantum dot and quantum well states without invoking an effect from Auger recombination. The optimisation of threshold current density can be reached by using structures with higher barrier width grown at low temperature and deposited with high quantity of quantum dot material to minimise both the affect of the very large dot, which contain a number of defects associated with them, and carrier leakage from quantum dot to quantum well states. This reduces the room temperature threshold current density to ISO A/cm 2 for 2mm long lasers with uncoated facets.
The impact of communication on a human-agent shared mental model and team performance

There is a growing interest in the use of heterogeneous teams comprised of humans and Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs). Human teamwork studies have provided cumulative knowledge about team features and performance; however, transfer of this knowledge to human-IVA teams is challenging. Novelly, this paper investigates the impact of multiple communication channels on the development and maintenance of a Shared Mental Model (SMM) between humans and IVAs. The results from two studies involving a collaborative activity show a significant positive relationship between the IVA's verbal and non-verbal communication and the development of a SMM related to taskwork and teamwork as perceived by the human teammate. Moreover, the results indicate that a SMM tends to improve overall team performance.
False positive staining in the TUNEL assay to detect apoptosis in liver and intestine is caused by endogenous nucleases and inhibited by diethyl pyrocarbonate.

BACKGROUND: The terminal transferase uridyl nick end labelling (TUNEL) assay allows the easy demonstration of cell death as a result of apoptosis. However, when this assay is applied to liver tissue, the number of TUNEL positive cells is dependent on the time of incubation with proteinase K. AIM: To test whether false positive results are the result of the release of endogenous endonucleases by proteinase K and can be abolished by pretreatment with diethyl pyrocarbonate (DEPC). METHODS: Involution of hyperplastic ductules in bile duct ligated rats after biliary decompression by Roux-en-Y anastomosis and acute CCl4 intoxication were studied as models of apoptosis and necrosis, respectively. A standard TUNEL assay was applied to formalin fixed tissue sections mounted with cement. To inhibit putative endogenous endonucleases, tissue slides were pre-incubated with DEPC. RESULTS: In the standard TUNEL assay, the number of positive nuclei was highly dependent upon the length of time that sections were incubated with proteinase K. After pretreatment with DEPC, only cells that also exhibited morphological features of apoptosis stained positive. DEPC pretreatment abolished false positive staining in CCl4 induced hepatocyte necrosis and blocked interference by endogenous alkaline phosphatase in intestine. The method of gluing the tissue section to the glass slide was found to be of utmost importance because the effect of DEPC was abolished on silanised slides. CONCLUSIONS: False positive staining in the TUNEL assay in the liver is caused by the release of endogenous endonucleases as a result of proteinase treatment. This can be abolished by pretreatment of tissue slides with DEPC.
Evaluation of lower leg swelling using EMG measured with voltage divider

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the lower leg swelling using EMG measured with our new voltage divider technology, by which the internal impedance of lower leg can be estimated. The amplitude of EMG measured without voltage divider was compared to it with voltage divider. Eleven healthy subjects (24.3±5.1 y.o.) participated in this study. Six female (swelling group) were asked to work at desk for six hours, and five male (control group) were asked to work a regular day. The internal impedance was calculated and calf circumference was measured before and after desk work. Results show that internal impedance in swelling group significantly decreased with increase in calf circumference, and our new evaluation method was proved to be effective for the evaluation of lower leg swelling.
Optimal Reconfiguration of Formation Flying Spacecraft ---a Decentralized Approach

This paper introduces a hierarchical, decentralized, and parallelizable method for dealing with optimization problems with many agents. It is theoretically based on a hierarchical optimization theorem that establishes the equivalence of two forms of the problem, and this idea is implemented using DMOC (discrete mechanics and optimal control). The result is a method that is scalable to certain optimization problems for large numbers of agents, whereas the usual "monolithic" approach can only deal with systems with a rather small number of degrees of freedom. The method is illustrated with the example of deployment of spacecraft, motivated by the Darwin (ESA) and terrestrial planet finder (NASA) missions
The Cramer-Rao bound on frequency estimates of signals closely spaced in frequency

This paper examines the Cramer-Rao (CR) lower bound on the variance of frequency estimates for the problem of n signals closely spaced in frequency. The main results presented are simple analytic expressions for the CR bound in terms of the maximum frequency separation, delta omega , SNR, and the number of data vectors, N, that are valid for small delta omega . The results are applicable to the conditional (deterministic) signal model. The results show that the CR bound on frequency estimates is proportional to ( delta omega )/sup -2(n-1)//N*SNR. Therefore, the bound increases rapidly as the signal separation is reduced. Examples indicate that the expressions closely approximate the exact CR bounds whenever the signal separation is smaller than one resolution cell. Based upon the results, it is argued that the threshold SNR at which an unbiased estimator can resolve n closely spaced signals is at least proportional to ( delta omega )/sup -2n//N. The results are quite general and apply to many different types of temporal and spatial sampling grids. >
Mirror neuron system: basic findings and clinical applications

In primates, ventral premotor and rostral inferior parietal neurons fire during the execution of hand and mouth actions. Some cells (called mirror neurons) also fire when hand and mouth actions are just observed. Mirror neurons provide a simple neural mechanism for understanding the actions of others. In humans, posterior inferior frontal and rostral inferior parietal areas have mirror properties. These human areas are relevant to imitative learning and social behavior. Indeed, the socially isolating condition of autism is associated with a deficit in mirror neuron areas. Strategies inspired by mirror neuron research recently have been used in the treatment of autism and in motor rehabilitation after stroke. Ann Neurol 2007
Mixed epithelial stromal tumor of the kidney

In recent years, a rare distinctive kidney tumor composed of a mixture of stroma and epithelium with solid and cystic architecture has been recognized, which has to be distinguished from other renal neoplasms. The term mixed epithelial and stromal tumor was first introduced by Michal and Syrucek in 1998. [1] The vast majority of cases show a benign course without tumor recurrence. Here, we present a case of this entity, found incidentally.
TransA: An Adaptive Approach for Knowledge Graph Embedding

Knowledge representation is a major topic in AI, and many studies attempt to represent entities and relations of knowledge base in a continuous vector space. Among these attempts, translation-based methods build entity and relation vectors by minimizing the translation loss from a head entity to a tail one. In spite of the success of these methods, translation-based methods also suffer from the oversimplified loss metric, and are not competitive enough to model various and complex entities/relations in knowledge bases. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{TransA}, an adaptive metric approach for embedding, utilizing the metric learning ideas to provide a more flexible embedding method. Experiments are conducted on the benchmark datasets and our proposed method makes significant and consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art baselines.
High-Sensitive Hydrogen Sensor Based on Photonic Crystal Fiber Model Interferometer

A new in-line mode coupling interferometer based on photonic crystal fiber (PCF) was designed for hydrogen sensing. The external surface of the PCF was coated with Pd-WO3 hydrogen-sensitive film using the sol–gel scheme. Pd-WO3 film refractive index and volume changing influenced the model of the PCF interferometer while the hydrogen concentration was changing, which caused the output spectrum to shift. Therefore, the relationship between the wavelength shift and the hydrogen concentration was established. In the experiment, the wavelength shift showed good linearity as the hydrogen concentration changed from 0% to 1%, while the sensitivity was 1.09 nm/% and the detection resolution was 0.3 perthousand. The sensor showed good repeatability and the wavelength error was less than 40 pm in 30 min. In addition, the sensor was not affected by external temperature fluctuations, which indicates good practical development prospects.
The Bradykinin B 1 Receptor Regulates A b Deposition and Neuroin fl ammation in Tg-SwDI Mice

Address correspondence to Giselle F. Passos, Ph.D., Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders, University of California, Irvine, 1226 Gillespie Neuroscience Research Facility, Irvine, CA 92697-4540; or David H. Cribbs, Ph.D., Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders and the Department of Neurology, Neuropathology Core, Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, University of California, Irvine, 1111 Gillespie Neuroscience Research Facility, Irvine, CA 92697-4540. E-mail: gf.passos@uci.edu or cribbs@uci.edu.