Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Parsing the life-shortening effects of dietary protein: effects of individual amino acids

High-protein diets shorten lifespan in many organisms. Is it because protein digestion is energetically costly or because the final products (the amino acids) are harmful? To answer this question while circumventing the life-history trade-off between reproduction and longevity, we fed sterile ant workers on diets based on whole proteins or free amino acids. We found that (i) free amino acids shortened lifespan even more than proteins; (ii) the higher the amino acid-to-carbohydrate ratio, the shorter ants lived and the lower their lipid reserves; (iii) for the same amino acid-to-carbohydrate ratio, ants eating free amino acids had more lipid reserves than those eating whole proteins; and (iv) on whole protein diets, ants seem to regulate food intake by prioritizing sugar, while on free amino acid diets, they seem to prioritize amino acids. To test the effect of the amino acid profile, we tested diets containing proportions of each amino acid that matched the ant's exome; surprisingly, longevity was unaffected by this change. We further tested diets with all amino acids under-represented except one, finding that methionine, serine, threonine and phenylalanine are especially harmful. All together, our results show certain amino acids are key elements behind the high-protein diet reduction in lifespan.
Detection of the Quarantine Species Thrips palmi by Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification

Thrips palmi (from the order Thysanoptera) is a serious insect pest of various crops, including vegetables, fruits and ornamental plants, causing significant economic losses. Its presence constitutes a double threat; not only does T. palmi feed on the plants, it is also a vector for several plant viruses. T. palmi originated in Asia, but has spread to North and Central America, Africa, Oceania and the Caribbean in recent decades. This species has been sporadically noted in Europe and is under quarantine regulation in the European Union. For non-specialists its larval stages are indistinguishable morphologically from another widespread and serious insect pest Frankliniella occidentalis (a non-quarantine species in the European Union) as well as other frequently occurring thrips. In this study, we have developed a loop-mediated isothermal amplification protocol to amplify rDNA regions of T. palmi. The results were consistent whether isolated DNA or crushed insects were used as template, indicating that the DNA isolation step could be omitted. The described method is species-specific and sensitive and provides a rapid diagnostic tool to detect T. palmi in the field.
Phytochemical Screening of Gloriosa superba L. - from different Geographical Positions

Gloriosa superba Linn. is one of the important medicinal plant now in endangered list. This plant is widely used for several ethano-medicinal purposes by tribal peoples and traditional practitioners. Seeds and tubers contain valuale alkaloids viz., colchine and colchicoside as the major constituents, which are used an antidote for snake bites, gout and rheumatism. Present study was to evaluate the phytochemicals present in leaves, flowers, seeds and tuber samples were collected from four different places of Dharmapuri District. Preliminary phytochemical analyses were carried out by standard procedures. Methanol extract of all samples were evaluated for protein, starch, total sugar and total phenol. The screening tests also were performed for the presence of the following secondary metabolites such as alkaloid, flavonoids, glycosides, phenols, saponins, steroids, tannin and terpenoids. The results were revealed the presence of various classes of compounds in different parts of the plant. Among the five different geographically collected plant samples, the Hoganekkal Hills sample showed the maximum amount of bioactive compounds than the other samples. The result of the extract from the tuber and seed samples were yields high amount of various biologically active compounds than the leaves and flowers. These compounds could serve as potential source for traditional medicines. Further research on this plant for the specific part could be used for isolation and characterization in large scale production.
The prosecutor in transnational perspective

Preface Section I Section Introduction: The Prosecutor as Policymaker, Case-Manager, and Investigator Erik Luna and Marianne Wade Prosecution Guidelines in the United States Ellen S. Podgor Procedural Justice, Collateral Consequences and the Adjudication of Misdemeanors in the United States John D. King Is the Journey from the In-Box to the Out-Box a Straight Line? The Drive for Efficiency and the Prosecution of Low-Level Criminality in Germany Shawn Boyne The Interaction and Relationship Between Prosecutors and Police Officers in the United States, and How This Affects Police Reform Efforts David A. Harris Prosecutorial Control of Investigations in Europe: A Call for Judicial Oversight Stefan Braum Section II Section Introduction: Plea Bargaining and Other "Consensual Procedures" Erik Luna and Marianne Wade The Prosecutor's Role: Plea Bargaining and Evidentiary Exclusion Craig Bradley Prosecutors and Bargaining in Weak Cases: A Comparative View Jenia Iontcheva Turner Guilty Pleas and the Changing Role of the Prosecutor in French Criminal Justice Jacqueline Hodgson The Dutch Prosecutor: A Prosecuting and Sentencing Officer Peter J.P. Tak The Penal Order: Prosecutorial Sentencing as a Model for Comparative Criminal Justice Reform? Stephen C. Thaman Section III Section Introduction: Adversarial and Inquisitorial Systems - Distinctive Aspects and Convergent Trends Erik Luna and Marianne Wade A Perfect Storm: Prosecutorial Discretion in the United States William T. Pizzi American Prosecutors' Powers and Obligations in the Era of Plea Bargaining Darryl K. Brown The Evolving Role of the English Crown Prosecution Service Chris Lewis Prosecutorial Powers and Policymaking in Sweden and the Other Nordic Countries Josef Zila The Italian Public Prosecutor: An Inquisitorial Figure in Adversarial Proceedings? Michele Caianiello Obsolete Procedural Actors? Polish Prosecutors and Their Evidence Gathering Duty Before and During Trial in an Inquisitorial Environment Antoni Bojanczyk Section IV Section Introduction: Prosecution in Exceptional Contexts and Non-Domestic Fora Erik Luna and Marianne Wade Prosecuting Terrorism: Models for Confronting Organized Violence Wayne McCormack Prosecuting in the Military Timothy C. MacDonnell Obtaining Guilty Pleas for International Crimes: Prosecutorial Difficulties Nancy Amoury Combs Murder by Any Other Name: Genocide and the Prosecutorial Challenges John Winterdyk Section 5 Section Introduction: Overview and Outlook - Toward Comparative Prosecution Studies Erik Luna and Marianne Wade A Judge by Another Name? Comparative Perspectives on the Role of the Public Prosecutor Thomas Weigend Reporting for Duty: The Universal Prosecutorial Accountability Puzzle and an Experimental Transparency Alternative Marc L. Miller and Ronald F. Wright Failures of the Prosecutor's Duty to "Do Justice" in Extraordinary and Ordinary Miscarriages of Justice Robert P. Mosteller Looking Back and at the Challenges Ahead Erik Luna and Marianne Wade
Understanding Solow Residuals in Latin America

This paper presents a series of development accounting exercises for Latin America using novel databases and methods to investigate the robustness and policy implications of its results. While the residual – often interpreted as total factor productivity or aggregate efficiency –appears to be the most important driver of output per worker gaps in Latin America and the Caribbean using the traditional development accounting approach, this result depends on the functional forms, adjustments for the quality of human capital and alternative benchmarks. Two factors are important, in the sense that, if explicitly modeled, the fraction of Latin American output per worker differentials with respect to the US explained by the remaining residual falls from 52 to, respectively, 42 and 34 percentage points: first, differences in the quality of education, empirically modeled here as a function of standardized test scores; second, differences in the relevant production possibilities frontier. The paper also highlights the heterogeneity among countries in the region and discusses alternative ways to link macroeconomic benchmarking exercises to policies.
A reasonable Semantic Web

The realization of Semantic Web reasoning is central to substantiating the Semantic Web vision. However, current mainstream research on this topic faces serious challenges, which forces us to question established lines of research and to rethink the underlying approaches. We argue that reasoning for the Semantic Web should be understood as “shared inference,” which is not necessarily based on deductive methods. Model-theoretic semantics (and sound and complete reasoning based on it) functions as a gold standard, but applications dealing with large-scale and noisy data usually cannot afford the required runtimes. Approximate methods, including deductive ones, but also approaches based on entirely different methods like machine learning or nature-inspired computing need to be investigated, while quality assurance needs to be done in terms of precision and recall values (as in information retrieval) and not necessarily in terms of soundness and completeness of the underlying algorithms.
The immunology of virus infection in asthma

The respiratory tract is commonly infected by a range of viruses with overlapping pathologies. The majority of episodic exacerbations of asthma are associated with viral infection, in particular with rhinovirus infections. Experimental rhinovirus infection in human volunteers provides a useful model of natural virus-induced asthma. The asthmatic airway is characterized by an infiltrate of eosinophils and T-lymphocytes expressing the type 2 cytokines interleukin (IL)-4, IL-5 and IL-13. An effective antiviral immune response requires early viral clearance and appropriate termination of the immune response to minimize associated immunopathology and tissue damage. The antiviral immune response is made up of innate (nonspecific) and specific components, and requires the coordinated actions of many different cell types including neutrophils, macrophages, eosinophils, dendritic cells, epithelial cells, mast cells, natural killer cells and B- and T-lymphocytes. Coordination of this response involves numerous cytokines and chemokines. T-lymphocytes expressing type 1 cytokines including interferon-γ play a key role. Pre-existing asthmatic inflammation in the lower airway may modify the immune response to viral infection by altering the balance of T-cell cytokine expression from type 1 towards a type 2 in what is always a mixed response. The consequence is delayed viral clearance, persistent virus-induced inflammation and amplification of the allergic inflammation.
Feature-Preserving Mesh Simplification: A Greedy Vertex Cover

In computer graphics rendering algorithms like ray tracing, the complexity of meshes decreases the performance of these algorithms. Therefore, the need arises for reduced mesh complexity with considerably good quality and at the same time preserving the salient features of the shape. Mesh simplification problem in some cases can be considered as an initial value problem where the quality of the simplified mesh heavily depends on the initial selection of vertices for contraction. In this short paper, we present an ongoing work in mesh simplification that uses a greedy algorithm for vertex cover problem in order to select vertex contraction pairs to preserve salient features in the simplified mesh. Initial experiments show promising results with preserved salient features.
The Retirement-Consumption Puzzle: Actual Spending Change in Panel Data

The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires that consumption be continuous over retirement; yet prior research based on partial measures of consumption or on synthetic panels indicates that spending drops at retirement, a result that has been called the retirement-consumption puzzle. Using panel data on total spending, nondurable spending and food spending, the authors find that spending declines at small rates over retirement, at rates that could be explained by mechanisms such as the cessation of work-related expenses, unexpected retirement due to a health shock or by the substitution of time for spending. In the low-wealth population where spending did decline at higher rates, the main explanation for the decline appears to be a high rate of early retirement due to poor health. They conclude that at the population level there is no retirement-consumption puzzle in their data, and that in subpopulations where there were substantial declines, conventional economic theory can provide the main explanation.
The Contribution of Linguistic Factors to the Intelligibility of Closely Related Languages

The three mainland Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) are so closely related that the speakers mostly communicate in their own languages (semicommunication). Even though the three West Germanic languages Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans are also closely related, semicommunication is not usual between these languages. In the present investigation, results from intelligibility tests measuring the mutual intelligibility of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish were compared with results of similar tests of mutual intelligibility between speakers of Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans. The results show that there are large differences in the level of intelligibility depending on test group and test language. Correlations between the intelligibility scores and linguistic distance scores showed that intelligibility can to a large extent be predicted by phonetic distances, while intelligibility is less predictable on the basis of lexical distances.
Speculation and Negation Scope Detection via Convolutional Neural Networks

Speculation and negation are important information to identify text factuality. In this paper, we propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based model with probabilistic weighted average pooling to address speculation and negation scope detection. In particular, our CNN-based model extracts those meaningful features from various syntactic paths be-tween the cues and the candidate tokens in both constituency and dependency parse trees. Evaluation on BioScope shows that our CNN-based model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art systems on Abstracts, a sub-corpus in BioScope, and achieves comparable performances on Clinical Records, another sub-corpus in BioScope.
The Presence of Variety Reduces Perceived Quantity

Against common intuition, we find that variety in an assortment reduces its perceived quantity. Two studies show that people provide larger quantity estimates when shown random patterns of identical colored dots or geometric shapes than when those patterns contain variety. The difference in perceived quantity does not grow as the number of different types increases beyond two, and it disappears if the overall area occupied by the set is made salient through context. We attribute the results to the natural consolidation of identical items into a single Gestalt whole that makes the set seem larger. Two additional studies show that this perceptual influence also causes people to pour more when using varied items to match a sample of food. The article closes with a discussion of the potential implications of these findings for variety research and portion control.
Effect of visual distortion on postural balance in a full immersion stereoscopic environment

This study attempted to determine the influence of non-linear visual movements on our capacity to maintain postural control. An 8x8x8 foot CAVE immersive virtual environment was used. Body sway recordings were obtained for both head and lower back (lumbar 2-3) positions. The subjects were presented with visual stimuli for periods of 62.5 seconds. Subjects were asked to stand still on one foot while viewing stimuli consisting of multiplied sine waves generating movement undulation of a textured surface (waves moving in checkerboard pattern). Three wave amplitudes were tested: 4 feet, 2 feet, and 1 foot. Two viewing conditions were also used; observers looking at 36 inches in front of their feet; observers looking at a distance near the horizon. The results were compiled using an instability index and the data showed a profound and consistent effect of visual disturbances on postural balance in particular for the x (side-to-side) movement. We have demonstrated that non-linear visual distortions similar to those generated by progressive ophthalmic lenses of the kind used for presbyopia corrections, can generate significant postural instability. This instability is particularly evident for the side-to-side body movement and is most evident for the near viewing condition.
Genetic Influences on Metabolite Levels: A Comparison across Metabolomic Platforms

Metabolomic profiling is a powerful approach to characterize human metabolism and help understand common disease risk. Although multiple high-throughput technologies have been developed to assay the human metabolome, no technique is capable of capturing the entire human metabolism. Large-scale metabolomics data are being generated in multiple cohorts, but the datasets are typically profiled using different metabolomics platforms. Here, we compared analyses across two of the most frequently used metabolomic platforms, Biocrates and Metabolon, with the aim of assessing how complimentary metabolite profiles are across platforms. We profiled serum samples from 1,001 twins using both targeted (Biocrates, n = 160 metabolites) and non-targeted (Metabolon, n = 488 metabolites) mass spectrometry platforms. We compared metabolite distributions and performed genome-wide association analyses to identify shared genetic influences on metabolites across platforms. Comparison of 43 metabolites named for the same compound on both platforms indicated strong positive correlations, with few exceptions. Genome-wide association scans with high-throughput metabolic profiles were performed for each dataset and identified genetic variants at 7 loci associated with 16 unique metabolites on both platforms. The 16 metabolites showed consistent genetic associations and appear to be robustly measured across platforms. These included both metabolites named for the same compound across platforms as well as unique metabolites, of which 2 (nonanoylcarnitine (C9) [Biocrates]/Unknown metabolite X-13431 [Metabolon] and PC aa C28:1 [Biocrates]/1-stearoylglycerol [Metabolon]) are likely to represent the same or related biochemical entities. The results demonstrate the complementary nature of both platforms, and can be informative for future studies of comparative and integrative metabolomics analyses in samples profiled on different platforms.
Identification of Genome-Wide Copy Number Variations among Diverse Pig Breeds Using SNP Genotyping Arrays

Copy number variations (CNVs) are important forms of genetic variation complementary to SNPs, and can be considered as promising markers for some phenotypic and economically important traits or diseases susceptibility in domestic animals. In the present study, we performed a genome-wide CNV identification in 14 individuals selected from diverse populations, including six types of Chinese indigenous breeds, one Asian wild boar population, as well as three modern commercial foreign breeds. We identified 63 CNVRs in total, which covered 9.98 Mb of polymorphic sequence and corresponded to 0.36% of the genome sequence. The length of these CNVRs ranged from 3.20 to 827.21 kb, with an average of 158.37 kb and a median of 97.85 kb. Functional annotation revealed these identified CNVR have important molecular function, and may play an important role in exploring the genetic basis of phenotypic variability and disease susceptibility among pigs. Additionally, to confirm these potential CNVRs, we performed qPCR for 12 randomly selected CNVRs and 8 of them (66.67%) were confirmed successfully. CNVs detected in diverse populations herein are essential complementary to the CNV map in the pig genome, which provide an important resource for studies of genomic variation and the association between various economically important traits and CNVs.
Two-dimensional speckle-tracking strain echocardiography in long-term heart transplant patients: a study comparing deformation parameters and ejection fraction derived from echocardiography and multislice computed tomography.

AIMS Longitudinal strain determined by speckle tracking is a sensitive parameter to detect systolic left ventricular dysfunction. In this study, we assessed regional and global longitudinal strain values in long-term heart transplants and compared deformation indices with ejection fraction as determined by transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) and multislice computed tomographic coronary angiography (MSCTA). METHODS AND RESULTS TTE and MSCTA were prospectively performed in 31 transplant patients (10.6 years post-transplantation) and in 42 control subjects. Grey-scale apical views were recorded for speckle tracking (EchoPAC 7.0, GE) of the 16 segments of the left ventricle. The presence of coronary artery disease (CAD) was assessed by MSCTA. Strain analysis was performed in 1168 segments [496 in transplant patients (42.5%), 672 in control subjects (57.7%)]. Global longitudinal peak systolic strain was significantly lower in the transplant recipients than in the healthy population (-13.9 ± 4.2 vs. -17.4 ± 5.8%, P< 0.01). This was still the case after exclusion of the nine transplant patients with CAD (-14.1 ± 4.4 vs. -17.4 ± 5.8%, P=0.03). Transplant patients exhibited significantly lower regional strain values in 9 of the 16 segments. Left ventricular ejection fraction (%) (MSCTA/Simpsons method) was 60.7 ± 10.1%/60.2 ± 6.7% in transplant recipients vs. 64.7 ± 6.4%/63.0 ± 6.2% in the healthy population, P=ns. CONCLUSION Even though 'healthy' heart transplants without CAD exhibit normal ejection fraction, deformation indices are reduced in this population when compared with control subjects. Our findings suggests that strain analysis is more sensitive than assessment of ejection fraction for the detection of abnormalities of systolic function.