Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Glial Fibrillary Tangles and JAK/STAT-Mediated Glial and Neuronal Cell Death in a Drosophila Model of Glial Tauopathy

A subset of neurodegenerative tauopathies is characterized by abundant filamentous inclusions of hyperphosphorylated tau in both neurons and glia. Although the contribution of neuronal tau to behavioral changes and neuronal loss in neurodegenerative diseases has been studied extensively, the functional consequences of tau deposition in glial cells have been less well characterized. To investigate the role of abnormal tau accumulation and aggregation in glial cells, we created a Drosophila model of glial tauopathy by expressing human wild-type tau in adult fly glial cells. Glial expression of tau resulted in robust aggregation of phosphorylated tau into fibrillary inclusions similar to human glial tangles. Tangle formation was accompanied by shortened lifespan and age-dependent apoptotic cell death of both glia and neurons. Genetic manipulation of Janus kinase/signal transducer and activator of transcription (JAK/STAT) signaling modified toxicity of glial tau. We also identified a synergistic interaction of combined tau expression in neurons and glial cells. In summary, we present a genetically tractable model of glial fibrillary tau tangle formation and identify JAK/STAT signaling as mediating the death of both glia and neurons in this model.
Reprogrammed gene expression in a somatic cell‐free extract

We have developed a somatic cell‐free system that remodels chromatin and activates gene expression in heterologous differentiated nuclei. Extracts of stimulated human T cells elicit chromatin binding of transcriptional activators of the interleukin‐2 (IL‐2) gene, anchoring and activity of a chromatin‐remodeling complex and hyperacetylation of the IL‐2 promoter in purified exogenous resting T‐cell nuclei. The normally repressed IL‐2 gene is transcribed in nuclei from quiescent human T cells and from various non‐T‐cell lines. This demonstrates that somatic cell extracts can be used to reprogram gene expression in differentiated nuclei. In vitro reprogramming may be useful for investigating regulation of gene expression and for producing replacement cells for the treatment of a wide variety of diseases.
Respiratory symptoms among Swedish soldiers after military service abroad: association with time spent in a desert environment

ABSTRACT Introduction: The aim of this paper was to study whether Swedish soldiers who have served abroad had a higher prevalence of respiratory symptoms than the general population and, if this was the case, also to study whether this was associated with time spent in a desert environment. Methods:The prevalence of respiratory symptoms among 1,080 veterans from Kosovo and Afghanistan was compared with that in almost 27,000 subjects from a general population sample, using propensity score matching and logistic regression. Results:The prevalence of wheeze (16.3 vs. 12.3%), wheeze without a cold (11.1 vs. 8.0%), nocturnal coughing (26.6 vs. 20.1%) and chronic bronchitis (12.3 vs. 6.8%) was significantly higher among soldiers than controls (p < 0.05). A dose-response-related association was found between time spent in a desert environment and wheeze, wheeze with breathlessness and wheeze when not having a cold. Having been exposed to desert storms was related to nocturnal cough and chronic bronchitis. Conclusion:Swedish soldiers who had served abroad had a higher prevalence of wheeze and cough than a control group from the general population. The association between being exposed to a desert environment and respiratory symptoms indicates that further protective measures should be introduced for military personnel serving in a desert environment.
Is your prescription of distance running shoes evidence-based?

Objectives: To determine whether the current practice of prescribing distance running shoes featuring elevated cushioned heels and pronation control systems tailored to the individual’s foot type is evidence-based. Data sources: MEDLINE (1950–May 2007), CINAHL (1982–May 2007), EMBASE (1980–May 2007), PsychInfo (1806–May 2007), Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (2nd Quarter 2007), Cochrane Central Register of Controlled trials (2nd Quarter 2007), SPORTSDiscus (1985–May 2007) and AMED (1985–May 2007). Review methods: English language articles were identified via keyword and medical subject headings (MeSH) searches of the above electronic databases. With these searches and the subsequent review process, controlled trials or systematic reviews were sought in which the study population included adult recreational or competitive distance runners, the exposure was distance running, the intervention evaluated was a running shoe with an elevated cushioned heel and pronation control systems individualised to the wearer’s foot type, and the outcome measures included either running injury rates, distance running performance, osteoarthritis risk, physical activity levels, or overall health and wellbeing. The quality of these studies and their findings were then evaluated. Results: No original research that met the study criteria was identified either directly or via the findings of the six systematic reviews identified. Conclusion: The prescription of this shoe type to distance runners is not evidence-based.
Novel compounds for the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy: emerging therapeutic agents

The identification of dystrophin and the causative role of mutations in this gene in Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophies (D/BMD) was expected to lead to timely development of effective therapies. Despite over 20 years of research, corticosteroids remain the only available pharmacological treatment for DMD, although significant benefits and extended life have resulted from advances in the clinical care and management of DMD individuals. Effective treatment of DMD will require dystrophin restitution in skeletal, cardiac, and smooth muscles and nonmuscle tissues; however, modulation of muscle loss and regeneration has the potential to play an important role in altering the natural history of DMD, particularly in combination with other treatments. Emerging biological, molecular, and small molecule therapeutics are showing promise in ameliorating this devastating disease, and it is anticipated that regulatory environments will need to display some flexibility in order to accommodate the new treatment paradigms.
M1 and M2 Monocytes in Rheumatoid Arthritis: A Contribution of Imbalance of M1/M2 Monocytes to Osteoclastogenesis

Objectives We investigated the relationships among M1 monocytes, M2 monocytes, osteoclast (OC) differentiation ability, and clinical characteristics in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Methods Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) were isolated from RA patients and healthy donors, and we then investigated the number of M1 monocytes or M2 monocytes by fluorescence-activated cell sorting. We also obtained and cultured CD14-positive cells from PBMCs from RA patients and healthy donors to investigate OC differentiation in vitro. Results Forty RA patients and 20 healthy donors were included. Twenty-two patients (55%) were anticitrullinated protein antibody (ACPA) positive. The median M1/M2 ratio was 0.59 (0.31–1.11, interquartile range). There were no significant differences between the RA patients and healthy donors. There was a positive correlation between the M1/M2 ratio and the differentiated OC number in vitro in RA patients (ρ = 0.81, p < 0.001). The ACPA-positive patients had significantly higher M1/M2 ratios in vivo (p = 0.028) and significantly greater numbers of OCs in vitro (p = 0.005) than the ACPA-negative patients. Multivariable regression analysis revealed that the M1/M2 ratio was the sole significant contribution factor to in vitro osteoclastogenesis. RA patients with M1/M2 ratios >1 (having relatively more M1 monocytes) had higher C-reactive protein and erythrocyte sedimentation rates than RA patients with M1/M2 ratios ≤1. M1-dominant monocytes in vitro produced higher concentrations of interleukin-6 upon stimulation with lipopolysaccharide than M2 monocytes. Conclusion M1/M2 monocytes imbalance strongly contributes to osteoclastogenesis of RA patients. Our findings cast M1 and M2 monocyte subsets in a new light as a new target of treatments for RA to prevent progression of osteoclastic bone destruction.
An SMT-LIB Format for Sequences and Regular Expressions

Strings are ubiquitous in software. Tools for verication and testing of software rely in various degrees on reasoning about strings. Web applications are particularly important in this context since they tend to be string-heavy and have large number security errors attributable to improper string sanitzation and manipulations. In recent years, many string solvers have been implemented to address the analysis needs of verication, testing and security tools aimed at string-heavy applications. These solvers support a basic representation of strings, functions such as concatenation, extraction, and predicates such as equality and membership in regular expressions. However, the syntax and semantics supported by the current crop of string solvers are mutually incompatible. Hence, there is an acute need for a standardized theory of strings (i.e., SMT-LIBization of a theory of strings) that supports a core set of functions, predicates and string representations. This paper presents a proposal for exactly such a standardization eort, i.e., an SMTLIBization of strings and regular expressions. It introduces a theory of sequences generalizing strings, and builds a theory of regular expressions on top of sequences. The proposed logic QF BVRE is designed to capture a common substrate among existing tools for string constraint solving.
Web ontology segmentation: analysis, classification and use

Ontologies are at the heart of the semantic web. They define the concepts and relationships that make global interoperability possible. However, as these ontologies grow in size they become more and more difficult to create, use, understand, maintain, transform and classify. We present and evaluate several algorithms for extracting relevant segments out of large description logic ontologies for the purposes of increasing tractability for both humans and computers. The segments are not mere fragments, but stand alone as ontologies in their own right. This technique takes advantage of the detailed semantics captured within an OWL ontology to produce highly relevant segments. The research was evaluated using the GALEN ontology of medical terms and procedures.
Hiding communication latency in reconfigurable message-passing environments

Communication overhead is one of the most important factors affecting the performance of message passing multicomputers. We present evidence (through the analysis of several parallel benchmarks) that there exists communications locality, and that this locality is "structured". We have devised a number of heuristics that can "predict" the target of subsequent communication requests. This technique, can be applied to reconfigurable interconnects to hide the communications latency by reconfiguring the interconnect concurrently to the computation. By comparing the inter-communication computation times of a number of parallel benchmarks with some specific reconfiguration times, we argue that the computation interval can be used to hide the concurrent reconfiguration of the interconnect, and present the performance enhancements of the proposed heuristics.
Variance of time-of-flight distribution is sensitive to cerebral blood flow as demonstrated by ICG bolus-tracking measurements in adult pigs

Variance of time-of-flight distributions have been shown to be more sensitive to cerebral blood flow (CBF) during dynamic-contrast enhanced monitoring of neurotrauma patients than attenuation. What is unknown is the degree to which variance is affected by changes in extracerebral blood flow. Furthermore, the importance of acquiring the arterial input function (AIF) on quantitative analysis of the data is not yet clear. This animal study confirms that variance is both sensitive and specific to changes occurring in the brain when measurements are acquired on the surface of the scalp. Furthermore, when the variance data along with the measured AIF is analyzed using a nonparametric deconvolution method, the recovered change in CBF is in good agreement with CT perfusion values.
Nonmalarial Infant Deaths and DDT Use for Malaria Control

Although dichlorodiphenyl trichloroethane (DDT) is being banned worldwide, countries in sub-Saharan Africa have sought exemptions for malaria control. Few studies show illness in children from the use of DDT, and the possibility of risks to them from DDT use has been minimized. However, plausible if inconclusive studies associate DDT with more preterm births and shorter duration of lactation, which raise the possibility that DDT does indeed have such toxicity. Assuming that these associations are causal, we estimated the increase in infant deaths that might result from DDT spraying. The estimated increases are of the same order of magnitude as the decreases from effective malaria control. Unintended consequences of DDT use need to be part of the discussion of modern vector control policy.
Ciprofloxacin susceptibility reduction of Salmonella strains isolated from outbreaks

The antimicrobial susceptibility of 212 Salmonella strains isolated from patients and foods was evaluated and 45% were found to be resistant to nalidixic acid. Nalidixic acid resistant strains showed a higher minimal inhibitory concentration for ciprofloxacin than sensitive strains. During the study an increase of strains with reduced susceptibility to ciprofloxacin was also observed.
Improved stride prefetching using extrinsic stream characteristics

Stride-based prefetching mechanisms exploit regular streams of memory accesses to hide memory latency. While these mechanisms are effective, they can be improved by studying the properties of regular streams. As evidence of this, the establishment of metrics to quantify intrinsic characteristics of regular streams has been shown to enable software-based code optimizations. In this paper we extend previously identified regular stream metrics to quantify extrinsic characteristics of regular streams, and show how these new metrics can be employed to improve the efficiency of stride prefetching. The extrinsic metrics we introduce are stream affinity and stream density. Stream affinity enables prefetching for short streams that were previously ignored by stride prefetching mechanisms. Stream density enables a prioritization mechanism that dynamically selects amongst available streams in favor of those that promise more miss coverage, and provides thrashing control amongst several coexisting streams. Finally, we show that using intrinsic and extrinsic stream metrics in combination allows a novel hardware technique for controlling prefetch ahead distance (PAD) which dynamically adjusts the prefetch launch time to better enable timely prefetches while minimizing cache pollution. For a representative set of SPEC2K traces, our techniques consistently outperform our implementation of the closest previously reported stride-based prefetching technique.
Volume reduction rate by surgical ventricular restoration determines late outcome in ischaemic cardiomyopathy

Surgical ventricular restoration (SVR) effectively reduces left ventricular (LV) volume in ischaemic cardiomyopathy (ICM), but the recent Surgical Treatment of Ischemic Heart Failure (STICH) Trial questions its importance. We report 8‐year SVR experience in patients with ICM.
Dose Prediction with U-net: A Feasibility Study for Predicting Dose Distributions from Contours using Deep Learning on Prostate IMRT Patients

With the advancement of treatment modalities in radiation therapy, outcomes haves greatly improved, but at the cost of increased treatment plan complexity and planning time. The accurate prediction of dose distributions would alleviate this issue by guiding clinical plan optimization to save time and maintain high quality plans. We have developed a novel application of the fully convolutional deep network model, U-net, for predicting dose from patient contours. We show that with this model, we are able to accurately predict the dose of prostate cancer patients, where the average dice similarity coefficient is well over 0.9 when comparing the predicted vs. true isodose volumes between 0% and 100% of the prescription dose. The average differences in mean and max dose for all structures were within 2.3% of the prescription dose.
Remote Sensing and Skywave Digital Communication from Antarctica

This paper presents an overview of the research activities undertaken by La Salle and the Ebro Observatory in the field of remote sensing. On 2003 we started a research project with two main objectives: implement a long-haul oblique ionospheric sounder and transmit the data from remote sensors located at the Spanish Antarctic station Juan Carlos I to Spain. The paper focuses on a study of feasibility of two possible physical layer candidates for the skywave link between both points. A DS-SS based solution and an OFDM based solution are considered to achieve a reliable low-power low-rate communication system between Antarctica and Spain.
Self-conscious Emotions: Where Self and Emotion Meet

In so far as a man amounts to anything, stands for anything, is truly an individual, he has an ego about which his passions cluster. We are virtually always in a state of pride or shame. T he centrality of emotion and self to social life is almost axiomatic in the psychological literature. What is less accepted, or at least less frequently discussed, is the essential interconnection between these two domains. Yet, as the quotations above suggest, self and emotion are inextricably linked. The experience of self is shaped by a constant and ever-changing flurry of emotions (i.e., " passions "), and feelings of pride, shame, and other emotions could not exist without perceptions and evaluations of the self (Brown & Marshall, 2001). The traditional disconnect between the self and emotion literatures stems, in part, from their divergent theoretical roots. Emotion researchers have, to a large extent, embraced a biological model of affect. This approach has led to major advances in our understanding of the neural underpinnings and adaptive functions of emotions, their interactions with basic cognitive processes, and their automatically recognized and expressed nonverbal signals also led researchers to neglect psychologically complex emotions, such as pride and shame, which are more closely linked to self-evaluative processes. The disconnect also results from the traditional emphasis in the self literature on cognitive rather than affective processes. When research on self-processes began to flourish in the late 1970s and 1980s, the cognitive perspective was emerging as the dominant paradigm, displacing the previously dominant paradigm of The cognitive approach to studying the self has led to major developments in our understanding of how the self " works " from an information-processing perspective
Psychometric properties of Persian version of the Caring Dimension Inventory (PCDI-25)

Background: The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties (validity and reliability) of Persian version of the 25-item Caring Dimension Inventory (CDI-25). Materials and Methods: A psychometric instrument validation study was designed. Content validity, internal consistency, and stability were confirmed. A total of 288 participants (143 nurses and 145 nursing students) were selected based on quota sampling approach. Results: The PCDI-23 showed good test–retest (Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.89 for nursing students and 0.91 for nurses), internal consistency reliability (0.86), and acceptable face and construct validity. However, considering the results of analyses, excluding items 4 and 16 from the Persian version of the CDI is suggested. Conclusion: This instrument can be used to determine caring behaviors and nurses’ perceptions of the importance of caring behaviors among Persian language nurses.
Defective Regulation of Interdomain Interactions Within the Ryanodine Receptor Plays a Key Role in the Pathogenesis of Heart Failure

Background—According to our hypothesis, 2 domains within the ryanodine receptor (RyR) of sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) (N-terminal [0 to 600] and central [2000 to 2500] domains), where many mutations have been found in patients with polymorphic ventricular tachycardia, interact with each other as a regulatory switch for channel gating. Here, we investigated whether the defective FKBP12.6-mediated stabilization of RyR in heart failure is produced by an abnormal interdomain interaction. Methods and Results—SR vesicles were isolated from dog left ventricular muscles, and then the RyR moiety of the SR was fluorescently labeled with methylcoumarin acetate (MCA) using DPc10, a synthetic peptide corresponding to Gly2460-Pro2495 of RyR (one of the mutable domains in polymorphic ventricular tachycardia), as a site-directing carrier; the carrier was removed from the RyR after MCA labeling. Addition of DPc10 induced an unzipped state of the interacting N-terminal and central domains, as evidenced by an increase in the accessibility of the RyR-bound MCA fluorescence to a large fluorescence quencher. Domain unzipping resulted in Ca2+ leak through the RyR and facilitated cAMP-dependent hyperphosphorylation of RyR and FKBP12.6 dissociation from RyR. When DPc10 was introduced into the isolated myocytes, the magnitude of intracellular Ca2+ transient decreased, and its decay time was prolonged. In the SR isolated from pacing-induced dog failing hearts, the domain unzipping has already occurred, together with FKBP12.6 dissociation and Ca2+ leak. Conclusions—The specific domain interaction within the RyR regulates the channel gating property, and the defectiveness in the mode of the interdomain interaction seems to be the initial critical step of the pathogenesis of heart failure.
Associations between renaming schizophrenia and stigma‐related outcomes: A systematic review

Renaming schizophrenia is a potential strategy to reduce the stigma attached to people with schizophrenia. However, the overall associations between renaming schizophrenia and stigma‐related outcomes have not been fully elucidated. We conducted a systematic review of studies that empirically examined the outcomes between new or alternative terms and old or existing terms for schizophrenia. We searched for relevant articles in eight bibliographic databases, conducted a Google search, examined reference lists, and contacted relevant experts. We found a total of 2601 reference records, and 23 articles were included in this review. Overall, in countries where schizophrenia has been renamed, the name changes may be associated with improvements in adults’ attitudes toward people with schizophrenia, and with increased diagnosis announcement. However, studies conducted in countries where schizophrenia has not been renamed report inconsistent findings. In addition, renaming may not influence portrayals of schizophrenia in the media. Most studies included in our review had a risk of bias in their methodology, and we employed a vote‐counting method to synthesize study results; therefore, the impacts of renaming are still inconclusive. Future studies are needed to address the following issues: use of univariate descriptive statistics, adjustment for confounding variables, use of reliable measures, and employing a question that addresses the image of split or multiple personalities. Evidence is limited regarding the associations between renaming and stigma experienced by both people with schizophrenia and their families (e.g., perceived stigma, self‐stigma, discrimination experience, and burden). Further research in these populations is needed to confirm the effects of renaming schizophrenia.