Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Amelioration of accelerated diabetic mesangial expansion by treatment with a PKC β inhibitor in diabetic db/db mice, a rodent model for type 2 diabetes

Activation of protein kinase C (PKC) is implicated as an important mechanism by which diabetes causes vascular complications. We have recently shown that a PKC β inhibitor ameliorates not only early diabetes‐induced glomerular dysfunction such as glomerular hyperfiltration and albuminuria, but also overexpression of glomerular mRNA for transforming growth factor β1 (TGF‐βΙ) and extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins in streptozoto‐cin‐induced diabetic rats, a model for type 1 diabetes. In this study, we examined the long‐term effects of a PKC β inhibitor on glomerular histology as well as on biochemical and functional abnormalities in glomeruli of db/db mice, a model for type 2 diabetes. Administration of a PKC β inhibitor reduced urinary albumin excretion rates and inhibited glo‐merular PKC activation in diabetic db/db mice. Administration of a PKC β inhibitor also prevented the mesangial expansion observed in diabetic db/db mice, possibly through attenuation of glomerular expression of TGF‐β and ECM proteins such as fibronectin and type IV collagen. These findings provide the first in vivo evidence that the long‐term inhibition of PKC activation in the renal glomeruli can ameliorate glomerular pathologies in diabetic state, and thus suggest that a PKC β inhibitor might be an useful therapeutic strategy for the treatment of diabetic nephropathy. —Koya, D. , Haneda, M. , Nakagawa, H. , Isshiki, K. , Sato, H. , Maeda, S. , Sugimoto, T. , Yasuda, H. , Kashiwagi, A. , Ways, D. K. , King, G. L. , Kikkawa, R. Amelioration of accelerated diabetic mesangial expansion by treatment with A PKC b inhibitor in diabetic db/db mice, a rodent model for type 2 diabetes. FASEB J. 14, 439–447 (2000)
Hippocampal GABAergic Synapses Possess the Molecular Machinery for Retrograde Nitric Oxide Signaling

Nitric oxide (NO) plays an important role in synaptic plasticity as a retrograde messenger at glutamatergic synapses. Here we describe that, in hippocampal pyramidal cells, neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) is also associated with the postsynaptic active zones of GABAergic symmetrical synapses terminating on their somata, dendrites, and axon initial segments in both mice and rats. The NO receptor nitric oxide-sensitive guanylyl cyclase (NOsGC) is present in the brain in two functional subunit compositions: α1β1 and α2β1. The β1 subunit is expressed in both pyramidal cells and interneurons in the hippocampus. Using immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization methods, we describe that the α1 subunit is detectable only in interneurons, which are always positive for β1 subunit as well; however, pyramidal cells are labeled only for β1 and α2 subunits. With double-immunofluorescent staining, we also found that most cholecystokinin- and parvalbumin-positive and smaller proportion of the somatostatin- and nNOS-positive interneurons are α1 subunit positive. We also found that the α1 subunit is present in parvalbumin- and cholecystokinin-positive interneuron terminals that establish synapses on somata, dendrites, or axon initial segments. Our results demonstrate that NOsGC, composed of α1β1 subunits, is selectively expressed in different types of interneurons and is present in their presynaptic GABAergic terminals, in which it may serve as a receptor for NO produced postsynaptically by nNOS in the very same synapse.
A Measurement of the Primordial Power Spectrum from Maxima and Boomerang Data

Model-independent measurements of the primordial power spectrum of matter density fluctuations provide a unique probe of physics in the very early universe, and can provide powerful constraints on inflationary models. We parametrize the primordial power spectrum A2s(k) as an arbitrary function, and measure its binned amplitude from the cosmic microwave background radiation anisotropy (CMB) data from Maxima and Boomerang. We find that for a flat universe with A2s(k) = 1 (scale-invariant) for scales k < 0.001 h/Mpc, the primordial power spectrum deviates significantly from a scale-invariant HarrisonZeldovich spectrum. It has a drop in power at 0.001 h/Mpc < ∼ k < ∼ 0.01 h/Mpc, and a rise in power at 0.01 h/Mpc < ∼ k < ∼ 0.1 h/Mpc, with the general trend of less power on small scales compared to a scale-invariant power spectrum. Our results are consistent with large scale structure data, and seem to suggest that unusual physics may have occurred in the very early universe. At the dawn of the new millennium, the inflationary paradigm appears the most plausible solution to the problems of the standard cosmology, and consistent with all current observational data. However, we are still far from establishing a definitive model of inflation. There currently exists a broad range of inflationary models (Kolb 1997, Turner 1997), many of which appear consistent with observational data. Model-independent measurements of the primordial power spectrum of matter density fluctuations can provide unique and powerful constraints on inflationary models. Although it has been conventional to take the primordial power spectrum to be a featureless power law in analyzing cosmological data, there are both theoretical and observational reasons to allow the primordial power spectrum to be a free function.
Predicting High-level Music Semantics Using Social Tags via Ontology-based Reasoning

High-level semantics such as “mood” and “usage” are very useful in music retrieval and recommendation but they are normally hard to acquire. Can we predict them from a cloud of social tags? We propose a semantic identification and reasoning method: Given a music taxonomy system, we map it to an ontology’s terminology, map its finite set of terms to the ontology’s assertional axioms, and then map tags to the closest conceptual level of the referenced terms in WordNet to enrich the knowledge base, then we predict richer high-level semantic information with a set of reasoning rules. We find this method predicts mood annotations for music with higher accuracy, as well as giving richer semantic association information, than alternative SVM-based methods do.
Multiple Password Interference in Text and Click-Based Graphical Passwords

People have difficulty remembering multiple passwords. This results in reduced security as users reuse the same password for different systems or reveal other passwords as they try to log in. It can also lead to reduced privacy, as users may rely on centralized services to manage their passwords. In this paper, we report on a laboratory study comparing recall of multiple ordinary text passwords with recall of multiple click-based graphical passwords. We found that participants in the graphical password condition coped significantly better than those in the text password condition. In particular, they made fewer errors when recalling their passwords, did not resort to creating passwords directly related to account names, and did not use similar passwords across multiple accounts. We suggest that this is due to memory cues offered by graphical passwords which help users to recall their passwords without resorting to insecure coping strategies.
Auditor Quality and Debt Covenants

This study examines the impact of auditor quality on debt covenants. We conjecture that high-quality auditors have two related effects on debt covenants: (i) they encourage fewer and less restrictive covenants by providing assurance to lenders at contract inception and, consequently, (ii) they ensure a lower probability of eventual covenant violations. Consistent with the conjectures, we find that auditor quality is negatively associated with the intensity and tightness of covenants when debt contracts are initiated. Additionally, we find that auditor quality is negatively associated with the likelihood of covenant violations. In an ancillary test, we provide evidence that high-quality auditors mitigate the detrimental effect of covenant violations on the cost of borrowing. Together, these findings highlight the important role of auditors in debt contracting.
SDF-1/CXCR4 Signaling Maintains Stemness Signature in Mouse Neural Stem/Progenitor Cells

SDF-1 and its primary receptor, CXCR4, are highly expressed in the embryonic central nervous system (CNS) and play a crucial role in brain architecture. Loss of SDF-1/CXCR4 signaling causes abnormal development of neural stem/progenitor cells (NSCs/NPCs) in the cerebellum, hippocampus, and cortex. However, the mechanism of SDF-1/CXCR4 axis in NSCs/NPCs regulation remains unknown. In this study, we found that elimination of SDF-1/CXCR4 transduction caused NSCs/NPCs to lose their stemness characteristics and to encounter neurogenic differentiation. Moreover, Notch and RE1 silencing transcription factor (REST) both play an essential role in NSCs/NPCs maintenance and neuronal differentiation and were dramatically downregulated following SDF-1/CXCR4 cascade inhibition. Finally, we demonstrated that the expression of achaete-scute homolog 1 (Ascl1), a proneural gene, and p27, an antiproliferative gene, were significantly increased after genetic elimination of SDF-1 alleles. Our results support that the loss of functional SDF-1/CXCR4 signaling pathway in NSCs/NPCs induces exit of cell cycle and promotes premature neural differentiation.
Analysing vulnerability reproducibility for Firefox browser

Fixing some security failures are difficult because they cannot be easily reproduced. To address Hardly Reproducible Vulnerabilities (HRVs), security experts spend a significant amount of time, effort, and budget. Sometimes they do not succeed in the reproduction step and ignore some security failures. The exploitation of a vulnerability due to its irreproducibility may cause severe consequences. An efficient solution is to explore the behaviour of both hardly and easily reproducible security issues at the code level. We use linear regression techniques to build models based on the classical software complexity metrics and a set of attributes related to the environment of the system. The results show that the considered metrics and the vulnerability types do not have significant linear correlations with each other. Also, predicting the HRV-prone parts of large systems is a great help for security experts to focus their effort on the top-ranked vulnerable files. After identifying the suitable indicators based on linear regression, different machine learning techniques such as Random Forest, Logistic Regression, C4.5 Decision Tree, and Naive Bayes are employed to build HRV prediction models. The Random Forest technique achieves the precision of 82% and recall of 84% to classify vulnerable files into HRV-prone or non HRV-prone files. We believe that the results encourage the use of software metrics for vulnerability prediction in some projects.
Insular Cortical Projections to Functional Regions of the Striatum Correlate with Cortical Cytoarchitectonic Organization in the Primate

We examined the striatal projections from different cytoarchitectonic regions of the insular cortex using anterograde and retrograde techniques. The shell and medial ventral striatum receive inputs primarily from the agranular and ventral dysgranular insula. The central ventral striatum receives inputs primarily from the dorsal agranular and dysgranular insula. Projections to the central ventral striatum originate from more posterior and dorsal insular regions than projections to the medial ventral striatum. The dorsolateral striatum receives projections primarily from the dorsal dysgranular and granular insula. These results show that cytoarchitectonically less differentiated (agranular) insular regions project to the ventromedial “limbic” part of the ventral striatum, whereas more differentiated (granular) insular regions project to the dorsolateral “sensorimotor” part of the striatum. The finding that the ventral “limbic” striatum receives inputs from less differentiated regions of the insula is consistent with the general principle that less differentiated cortical regions project primarily to the “limbic” striatum. Functionally, the ventral striatum receives insular projections primarily related to integrating feeding behavior with rewards and memory, whereas the dorsolateral striatum receives insular inputs related to the somatosensation. Information regarding food acquisition in the insula may be sent to the intermediate area of the striatum.
A robust detection method of vehicle queue and dissipation during evening rush hour

By vehicle presence detection and movement analysis on the monitored region based on video processing technology, a real-time robust detection method of vehicle queue and dissipation is proposed in this paper. With a duplex flexible window fused with the Haar feature based AdaBoost cascade classifiers, the method can efficiently track the position changes of the tail and head of a vehicle queue at intersection during evening rush hour, which accurately describes the formation and dissipation of the queue. Then, the queue length and stop delay of vehicles can be calculated. Experiments showed that our method can real-time track the formation and dissipation of the queue during the evening rush hour when the illumination varies greatly from light to dark, and that the accuracy rate is about 91.54%. Therefore, this method can be further applied to traffic congestion monitoring and traffic signal controlling.
Essays on oil price shocks and financial markets

This thesis is composed of three chapters, which can be read independently. The rst chapter investigates how oil price volatility a¤ects the investment decisions for a panel of Japanese rms. The model is estimated using a system generalized method of moments technique for panel data. The results are presented to show that there is a U-shaped relationship between oil price volatility and Japanese rm investment. The results from subsamples of these data indicate that this U-shaped relationship is more signi cant for oil-intensive rms and small rms. The second chapter aims to examine the underlying causes of changes in real oil price and their transmission mechanisms in the Japanese stock market. I decompose real oil price changes into three components; namely, oil supply shock, aggregate demand shock and oil-speci c demand shock, and then estimate the dynamic e¤ects of each component on stock returns using a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model. I nd that the responses of aggregate Japanese real stock returns di¤er substantially with di¤erent underlying causes of oil price changes. In the long run, oil shocks account for 43% of the variation in the Japanese real stock returns. The response of Japanese real stock returns to oil price shocks can be attributed in its entirety to the cash ow variations. The third chapter tests the robustness of SVAR and investigates the impact of oil price shocks on the di¤erent U.S. stock indices. I nd that the responses of real stock returns of alternate stock indices di¤er substantially depending on the underlying causes of the oil price increase. However, the magnitude and length of the e¤ect depends on the rm size. The response of U.S. stock returns to oil price shocks can be attributed to the variations of expected discount rates and expected cash ows.
Enzymes Enhance Biofilm Removal Efficiency of Cleaners

ABSTRACT Efficient removal of biofilms from medical devices is a big challenge in health care to avoid hospital-acquired infections, especially from delicate devices like flexible endoscopes, which cannot be reprocessed using harsh chemicals or high temperatures. Therefore, milder solutions such as enzymatic cleaners have to be used, which need to be carefully developed to ensure efficacious performance. In vitro biofilm in a 96-well-plate system was used to select and optimize the formulation of novel enzymatic cleaners. Removal of the biofilm was quantified by crystal violet staining, while the disinfecting properties were evaluated by a BacTiter-Glo assay. The biofilm removal efficacy of the selected cleaner was further tested by using European standard (EN) for endoscope cleaning EN ISO 15883, and removal of artificial blood soil was investigated by treating TOSI (Test Object Surgical Instrument) cleaning indicators. Using the process described here, a novel enzymatic endoscope cleaner was developed, which removed 95% of Staphylococcus aureus and 90% of Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilms in the 96-well plate system. With a >99% reduction of CFU and a >90% reduction of extracellular polymeric substances, this cleaner enabled subsequent complete disinfection and fulfilled acceptance criteria of EN ISO 15883. Furthermore, it efficiently removed blood soil and significantly outperformed comparable commercial products. The cleaning performance was stable even after storage of the cleaner for 6 months. It was demonstrated that incorporation of appropriate enzymes into the cleaner enhanced performance significantly.
Flexibility and Geometry Small Immune Complexes: A Role for Hinge Mutants, IgM, IgE, and IgA2, to Form Comparisons of the Ability of Human IgG3

Various native and hinge-modiﬁed forms of Ig with identical Ids were reacted with an anti-Id mAb, and the resultant immune complexes were analyzed by negative stain immunoelectron microscopy. Complexes were scored for their geometry (linear versus ring complexes) and size (dimer, trimer, etc.). Ring dimers are the thermodynamically most favorable conﬁguration, unless inhibited by steric and/or ﬂexibility constraints. We found ring dimerization to correlate with the length of the upper, but not middle or lower, hinge. In contrast, the geometry and size of complexes of those molecules lacking formal hinges were unpre-dictable. A hingeless IgG mutant and native IgE readily formed ring dimers. Remarkably, monomeric IgM formed more ring dimers than any of the other Igs tested, including IgG3. We also tagged the Fab arms and measured the mean Fab-Fab angles and the degree of angular variation for each type of Ig. Surprisingly, IgM proved the most ﬂexible by this assay. In hinged Igs, there was a correlation between length of the upper hinge and Fab-Fab ﬂexibility. In contrast, we found no correlation between the mean Fab-Fab angle in uncomplexed Igs and their ability to dimerize with anti-Id mAb. These data suggest that the physicochemical methods typically used to evaluate molecular ﬂexibility are often of low predictive value when tested in a functional assay. The Journal of Immunology, 1998, 161: 4083–4090.
Hominin cognitive evolution: identifying patterns and processes in the fossil and archaeological record

As only limited insight into behaviour is available from the archaeological record, much of our understanding of historical changes in human cognition is restricted to identifying changes in brain size and architecture. Using both absolute and residual brain size estimates, we show that hominin brain evolution was likely to be the result of a mix of processes; punctuated changes at approximately 100 kya, 1 Mya and 1.8 Mya are supplemented by gradual within-lineage changes in Homo erectus and Homo sapiens sensu lato. While brain size increase in Homo in Africa is a gradual process, migration of hominins into Eurasia is associated with step changes at approximately 400 kya and approximately 100 kya. We then demonstrate that periods of rapid change in hominin brain size are not temporally associated with changes in environmental unpredictability or with long-term palaeoclimate trends. Thus, we argue that commonly used global sea level or Indian Ocean dust palaeoclimate records provide little evidence for either the variability selection or aridity hypotheses explaining changes in hominin brain size. Brain size change at approximately 100 kya is coincident with demographic change and the appearance of fully modern language. However, gaps remain in our understanding of the external pressures driving encephalization, which will only be filled by novel applications of the fossil, palaeoclimatic and archaeological records.
Flagellar elongation and shortening in Chlamydomonas. III. structures attached to the tips of flagellar microtubules and their relationship to the directionality of flagellar microtubule assembly

Two structures on the distal ends of Chlamydomonas flagellar microtubules are described. One of these, the central microbutule cap, attaches the distal ends of the central pair microtubules to the tip of the flagellar membrane. In addition, filaments, called distal filaments, are observed attached to the ends of the A-tubules of the outer doublet microtubules. Inasmuch as earlier studies suggested that flagellar elongation in vivo occurs principally by the distal addition of sublnits and because it has been shown that brain tubulin assembles in vitro primarily onto the distal ends of both central and outer doublet microtubules, the presence of the cap and distal filaments was quantitated during flagellar resorption and elongation. The results showed that the cap remains attached to the central microtubules throughout flagellar resorption and elongation. The cap was also found to block the in vitro assembly of neurotubules onto the distal ends of the central microtubules. Conversely, the distal filaments apparently do not block the assembly of neurotubules onto the ends of the outer doublets. During flagellar elongation, the distal ends of the outer doublets are often found to form sheets of protofilaments similar to those observed on the elongating ends of neurotubules being assembled in vitro. These results suggest that the outer doublet microtubules elongate by the distal addition of subunits, whereas the two central microtubules assemble by the addition of subunits to the proximal ends.
Listening to Teachers of English Language Learners: A Survey of California Teachers’ Challenges, Experiences, and Professional Development Needs

As long as students with limited English language skills have attended California schools a debate has raged among educators and policy-makers regarding how best to educate these children. A major focal point of this debate is bilingual education. That is, the viability, advisability, and effectiveness of using students’ primary language in instruction. However, everyone agrees that English Language Learners (ELs) must learn English, learn it well, and meet rigorous standards. No matter what the method or program of instruction, teachers of English language learners need special skills and training to effectively accomplish this task.
Effects of Inducing Plant Growth on performance and performance Components of Corn (

1. Young researchers club, Urmia Branch, Islamic Azad University 2. Full Professor of Agriculture Department, Faculty of Agriculture Urmia University 3. Asistant Professor of Agriculture Department, Faculty of Agriculture Urmia University 4. Researcher in Agriculture and Natural Resources Research Center of Western Azerbaijan,Urmia-Iran 5. Young researchers club, khoy Branch, Islamic Azad University Corresponding email: Ahmad_karimi@hotmail.com