Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Augmented Cardiac Hypertrophy in Response to Pressure Overload in Mice Lacking the Prostaglandin I2 Receptor

Background—In the heart, the expressions of several types of prostanoid receptors have been reported. However, their roles in cardiac hypertrophy in vivo remain unknown. We intended to clarify the roles of these receptors in pressure overload–induced cardiac hypertrophy using mice lacking each of their receptors. Methods and Results—We used a model of pressure overload–induced cardiac hypertrophy produced by banding of the transverse aorta in female mice. In wild-type mice subjected to the banding, cardiac hypertrophy developed during the observation period of 8 weeks. In mice lacking the prostaglandin (PG) I2 receptor (IP−/−), however, cardiac hypertrophy and cardiomyocyte hypertrophy were significantly greater than in wild-type mice at 2 and 4 weeks but not at 8 weeks, whereas there was no such augmentation in mice lacking the prostanoid receptors other than IP. In addition, cardiac fibrosis observed in wild-type hearts was augmented in IP−/− hearts, which persisted for up to 8 weeks. In IP−/− hearts, the expression level of mRNA for atrial natriuretic peptide, a representative marker of cardiac hypertrophy, was significantly higher than in wild-type hearts. In vitro, cicaprost, an IP agonist, reduced platelet-derived growth factor–induced proliferation of wild-type noncardiomyocytes, although it could not inhibit cardiotrophin-1–induced hypertrophy of cardiomyocytes. Accordingly, cicaprost increased cAMP concentration efficiently in noncardiomyocytes. Conclusions—IP plays a suppressive role in the development of pressure overload–induced cardiac hypertrophy via the inhibition of both cardiomyocyte hypertrophy and cardiac fibrosis. Both effects have been suggested as originating from the action on noncardiomyocytes rather than cardiomyocytes.
Keeping in Touch with One's Self: Multisensory Mechanisms of Self-Consciousness

Background The spatial unity between self and body can be disrupted by employing conflicting visual-somatosensory bodily input, thereby bringing neurological observations on bodily self-consciousness under scientific scrutiny. Here we designed a novel paradigm linking the study of bodily self-consciousness to the spatial representation of visuo-tactile stimuli by measuring crossmodal congruency effects (CCEs) for the full body. Methodology/Principal Findings We measured full body CCEs by attaching four vibrator-light pairs to the trunks (backs) of subjects who viewed their bodies from behind via a camera and a head mounted display (HMD). Subjects made speeded elevation (up/down) judgments of the tactile stimuli while ignoring light stimuli. To modulate self-identification for the seen body subjects were stroked on their backs with a stick and the felt stroking was either synchronous or asynchronous with the stroking that could be seen via the HMD. We found that (1) tactile stimuli were mislocalized towards the seen body (2) CCEs were modulated systematically during visual-somatosensory conflict when subjects viewed their body but not when they viewed a body-sized object, i.e. CCEs were larger during synchronous than during asynchronous stroking of the body and (3) these changes in the mapping of tactile stimuli were induced in the same experimental condition in which predictable changes in bodily self-consciousness occurred. Conclusions/Significance These data reveal that systematic alterations in the mapping of tactile stimuli occur in a full body illusion and thus establish CCE magnitude as an online performance proxy for subjective changes in global bodily self-consciousness.
ILDR1 deficiency causes degeneration of cochlear outer hair cells and disrupts the structure of the organ of Corti: a mouse model for human DFNB42

Immunoglobulin-like domain containing receptor 1 (ILDR1) is a poorly characterized gene that was first identified in lymphoma cells. Mutations in ILDR1 are responsible for DFNB42, but the pathogenesis of hearing loss caused by ILDR1 mutations remains to be elucidated. To explore the role of ILDR1 in hearing, we created Ildr1 knockout mice. In heterozygous mice, ILDR1 expression was found in outer hair cells (OHCs) and inner hair cells (IHCs) of the organ of Corti. ILDR1-deficient mice are profoundly deaf by postnatal day 21 (P21). No significant difference was observed in the supporting cells and IHCs of ILDR1-deficient mice, but progressive degeneration of OHCs occurred at P15 and disruption of the tunnel running through the organ of Corti was noticeable at P21. By P28, there were no OHCs visible in any of the turns of the organ of Corti, and the tunnel of the organ of Corti was entirely destroyed. ILDR1 deficiency affects expression of tricellulin in vivo, and this provides a possible explanation to hearing loss. To further elucidate the mechanism of deafness related to ILDR1 deficiency, we pursued a differential proteomic approach to comprehensively assess differential protein expression in the cochleae of Ildr1+/− and Ildr1−/− mice at P21. Altogether, 708 proteins were up-regulated (fold change >1.5) and 114 proteins were down-regulated (fold change <0.5) in the Ildr1−/− mice compared with Ildr1+/− mice. Gene ontology classification indicated that a number of differentially expressed proteins are involved in cell adhesion, protein and vesicle-mediated transport, cell death, membrane organization, and cellular homeostasis. A few of these proteins are closely related to hearing development. Taken together, our data suggest that ILDR1 is important for the survival of OHCs and provide novel insights into the pathogenesis of human deafness DFNB42 deafness.
Genome bias influences amino acid choices: analysis of amino acid substitution and re-compilation of substitution matrices exclusive to an AT-biased genome

The genomic era has seen a remarkable increase in the number of genomes being sequenced and annotated. Nonetheless, annotation remains a serious challenge for compositionally biased genomes. For the preliminary annotation, popular nucleotide and protein comparison methods such as BLAST are widely employed. These methods make use of matrices to score alignments such as the amino acid substitution matrices. Since a nucleotide bias leads to an overall bias in the amino acid composition of proteins, it is possible that a genome with nucleotide bias may have introduced atypical amino acid substitutions in its proteome. Consequently, standard matrices fail to perform well in sequence analysis of these genomes. To address this issue, we examined the amino acid substitution in the AT-rich genome of Plasmodium falciparum, chosen as a reference and reconstituted a substitution matrix in the genome's context. The matrix was used to generate protein sequence alignments for the parasite proteins that improved across the functional regions. We attribute this to the consistency that may have been achieved amid the target and background frequencies calculated exclusively in our study. This study has important implications on annotation of proteins that are of experimental interest but give poor sequence alignments with standard conventional matrices.
Haar–Fisz estimation of evolutionary wavelet spectra

Summary. We propose a new ‘Haar–Fisz’ technique for estimating the time‐varying, piecewise constant local variance of a locally stationary Gaussian time series. We apply our technique to the estimation of the spectral structure in the locally stationary wavelet model. Our method combines Haar wavelets and the variance stabilizing Fisz transform. The resulting estimator is mean square consistent, rapidly computable and easy to implement, and performs well in practice. We also introduce the ‘Haar–Fisz transform’, a device for stabilizing the variance of scaled χ2‐data and bringing their distribution close to Gaussianity.
Shadow Elimination and Blinding Light Suppression for Interactive Projected Displays

A major problem with interactive displays based on front projection is that users cast undesirable shadows on the display surface. This paper demonstrates that shadows can be muted by redundantly illuminating the display surface using multiple projectors, all mounted at different locations. However, this technique alone does not eliminate shadows: Multiple projectors create multiple dark regions on the surface (penumbral occlusions) and cast undesirable light onto the users. These problems can be solved by eliminating shadows and suppressing the light that falls on occluding users by actively modifying the projected output. This paper categorizes various methods that can be used to achieve redundant illumination, shadow elimination, and blinding light suppression and evaluates their performance.
Definition of mortality for trauma center performance evaluation: A comparative study*

Objective:Mortality is widely used as a performance indicator to evaluate the quality of trauma care, but there is no consensus on the most appropriate definition. Our objective was to evaluate the influence of the definition of mortality in terms of the place (in-hospital or postdischarge) and time (30 days and 3, 6, and 12 months) of death on the results of trauma center performance evaluations according to the patients' ages. Design:Multicenter retrospective cohort study. Setting:Inclusive Canadian provincial trauma system. Patients:Adults admitted between 1999 and 2006 with a maximum abbreviated injury severity score ≥3 (n = 47,261). Interventions:None. Measurements and Main Results:Trauma registry data were linked to vital statistics data to obtain mortality up to 12 months postadmission. Observed mortality was compared to that expected according to provincial population mortality rates. Trauma center performance was evaluated with risk-adjusted mortality estimates. Agreement between performance results based on different definitions of mortality was evaluated with correlation coefficients; >. 9 was considered acceptable. Analyses were stratified by predefined age categories (16–64, 65–84, and ≥85 yrs). A total of 3,338 patients (7%) died in-hospital, and 1,794 patients (4%) died postdischarge. Among patients 16–64 yrs old, 30-day hospital mortality represented 83% of all deaths and correlation coefficients across all definitions of mortality were >. 9. In patients 65–84 yrs old, 30-day hospital mortality represented 52% of all deaths, observed mortality reached expected rates at around 6 months, and agreement across mortality definitions was low. Conclusions:We observed an important variation in performance evaluation results across definitions of mortality, specifically in patients aged ≥65 yrs. Half of the deaths among elders occurred later than 30 days following admission, including a significant number postdischarge. Results suggest that if performance evaluations include elderly patients, data on postdischarge mortality up to 6 months following admission are required.
Missed diagnosis of prehospital status epilepticus

Status epilepticus (SE) represents one of the most frequent neurologic emergencies, with potentially severe morbidity and mortality.1 Considerable attention has been directed towards implementation of treatment protocols,2 and recently of anesthetic treatment,3,4 but prognostic studies focused on early recognition of SE by emergency medical services (EMS) are lacking.
The joint Simon effect depends on perceived agency, but not intentionality, of the alternative action

A co-actor's intentionality has been suggested to be a key modulating factor for joint action effects like the joint Simon effect (JSE). However, in previous studies intentionality has often been confounded with agency defined as perceiving the initiator of an action as being the causal source of the action. The aim of the present study was to disentangle the role of agency and intentionality as modulating factors of the JSE. In Experiment 1, participants performed a joint go/nogo Simon task next to a co-actor who either intentionally controlled a response button with own finger movements (agency+/intentionality+) or who passively placed the hand on a response button that moved up and down on its own as triggered by computer signals (agency−/intentionality−). In Experiment 2, we included a condition in which participants believed that the co-actor intentionally controlled the response button with a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) while placing the response finger clearly besides the response button, so that the causal relationship between agent and action effect was perceptually disrupted (agency−/intentionality+). As a control condition, the response button was computer controlled while the co-actor placed the response finger besides the response button (agency−/intentionality−). Experiment 1 showed that the JSE is present with an intentional co-actor and causality between co-actor and action effect, but absent with an unintentional co-actor and a lack of causality between co-actor and action effect. Experiment 2 showed that the JSE is absent with an intentional co-actor, but no causality between co-actor and action effect. Our findings indicate an important role of the co-actor's agency for the JSE. They also suggest that the attribution of agency has a strong perceptual basis.
Fuzzy based trust management for wireless ad hoc networks

Ad hoc networks are infrastructure less, self organizing networks. They do not have a Central Authority (CA) for managing the network. Nodes here act as a router, client and server and rely on each other to keep the network connected. Because of the architecture of wireless networks physical security is tough to achieve. Wireless links makes MANETs more susceptible to attacks. Towards securing the network an approach based on fuzzy logic is proposed in the paper. It is used to evaluate the trust level of a node which is used for making the routing decision. The proposed fuzzy system is trained using MATLAB. The results generated prove that the overall performance of calculating the trust level of a node can be improved.
Audiological monitoring for ototoxic tuberculosis, human immunodeficiency virus and cancer therapies in a developing world setting

Abstract Ototoxic drugs are widely used in the developing world, without audiological monitoring. Epidemiological data on ototoxic deafness are lacking for developing countries. The public health aspect of ototoxicity is often overlooked, to the detriment of the individual patient. This paper reviews ototoxic hearing loss, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, and also assesses the impact of treatments for tuberculosis, cancer and human immunodeficiency virus (the latter including highly active antiretroviral therapy) on ototoxic hearing loss. The paper also discusses obstacles to audiological monitoring for ototoxicity in the developing world, and the potential of audiology screening using applications for mobile devices.
Optimization of cooperative spectrum sensing and implementation on software defined radios

Reliable detection of primary user activity by spectrum sensing is a crucial issue of cognitive radio systems. The objective of cooperative spectrum sensing is to combine the detection results of multiple cognitive radios in order to maximize the probability of detecting unused spectrum while meeting a required reliability of detecting primary user activity. In this paper, a Kullback-Leibler distance-based optimization approach for the local decision thresholds of cooperative spectrum sensing is proposed. It is both computationally efficient and scalable with the number of cognitive radios. To validate the concept, real spectrum sensing results are used. The employed practical setup is based on software defined radio and detects a WiMAX-like OFDM signal. The presented numerical results illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach.
Ecology and Conservation of Lynx in the United States

Once found throughout the Rocky Mountains and forests of the northern states, the lynx now hides in pockets of its former range while feeding mostly on small animals like snowshoe hares. A team of government and university scientists review the newest scientific knowledge of this unique cat's history, distribution, and ecology. The chapters on this web site provide information for current scientific and public debates regarding the fate of the lynx in the United States. Chapters look at the relationships among lynx, its habitat, and its prey. The attributes of northern versus southern lynx populations are compared and contrasted. The authors caution against making decisions without enough knowledge and show where we lack information. While the authors present the latest preliminary research results on lynx and offer some qualified insights into lynx management, the book's intent is to assess the current state of knowledge regarding lynx.
Modeling and Simulations of TCP MANET Worms

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are used for emergency situations like disaster-relief, military applications, and emergency medical situations. These applications make MANETs attractive targets for cyberattacks and make the development of counter-measures paramount. The study of worm behavior is critical to the design of effective counter measures in MANET environments. This paper studies the behavior of TCP based worms in MANETs. We develop analytical models for the spread of TCP worms in the MANET environment that account for payload-size, bandwidth-sharing, radio range, nodal density, packet discards and several other parameters specific to MANETs. We present numerical solutions for the models and verify the results using high fidelity packet-level simulations. The results show that the analytical model developed here matches the results of the packet-level simulation in all cases except when topologies result in a high probability of disconnected clusters. Our simulation studies show that under many cases, due to the resource constrained nature of the MANET and its underlying wireless layers, the TCP-based worms rapidly become self-throttling. This may benefit the design of effective mitigation technologies in these critical networking environments.
Prevention of Skin Tumorigenesis and Impairment of Epidermal Cell Proliferation by Targeted Aquaporin-3 Gene Disruption

ABSTRACT Aquaporin-3 (AQP3) is a water/glycerol-transporting protein expressed strongly at the plasma membranes of basal epidermal cells in skin. We found that human skin squamous cell carcinoma strongly overexpresses AQP3. A novel role for AQP3 in skin tumorigenesis was discovered using mice with targeted AQP3 gene disruption. We found that AQP3-null mice were remarkably resistant to the development of skin tumors following exposure to a tumor initiator and phorbol ester promoter. Though tumor initiator challenge produced comparable apoptotic responses in wild-type and AQP3-null mice, promoter-induced cell proliferation was greatly impaired in the AQP3-null epidermis. Reductions of epidermal cell glycerol, its metabolite glycerol-3-phosphate, and ATP were found in AQP3 deficiency without impairment of mitochondrial function. Glycerol supplementation corrected the reduced proliferation and ATP content in AQP3 deficiency, with cellular glycerol, ATP, and proliferative ability being closely correlated. Our data suggest involvement of AQP3-facilitated glycerol transport in epidermal cell proliferation and tumorigenesis by a novel mechanism implicating cellular glycerol as a key determinant of cellular ATP energy. AQP3 may thus be an important determinant in skin tumorigenesis and hence a novel target for tumor prevention and therapy.
Carlos Vázquez of thermal runaway in valley glaciers Temperature-dependent shear flow and the absence

References ml#ref-list-1 http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing. org/content/466/2114/363.full. ht This article cites 18 articles, 1 of which can be accessed free Subject collections (8 articles) glaciology  Articles on similar topics can be found in the following collections Email alerting service here the box at the top right-hand corner of the article or click Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article sign up in
The utility of inflammatory markers to predict readmissions and mortality in COPD cases with or without eosinophilia

Background COPD exacerbations requiring hospitalization increase morbidity and mortality. Although most COPD exacerbations are neutrophilic, approximately 10%–25% of exacerbations are eosinophilic. Aim We aimed to evaluate mortality and outcomes of eosinophilic and non-eosinophilic COPD exacerbations and identify new biomarkers that predict survival. Methods A retrospective observational cohort study was carried out in a tertiary teaching hospital from January 1, 2014 to November 1, 2014. All COPD patients hospitalized with exacerbations were enrolled in the study at their initial hospitalization and followed-up for 6 months after discharge. Electronic data were collected from the hospital database. Subjects’ characteristics, hemogram parameters, CRP levels, neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), platelet-to-mean platelet volume ratio on admission and discharge, length of hospital stay (days), readmissions, and mortality were recorded. Patients were grouped according to peripheral blood eosinophil (PBE) levels: Group 1, >2% PBE, eosinophilic; Group 2, non-eosinophilic ≤2%. Patient survival after hospital discharge was evaluated by Kaplan–Meier survival analysis. Results A total of 1,704 patients hospitalized with COPD exacerbation were included. Approximately 20% were classified as eosinophilic. Six-month mortality was similar in eosinophilic and non-eosinophilic groups (14.2% and 15.2%, respectively); however, the hospital stay length and readmission rate were longer and higher in the non-eosinophilic group (P<0.001 and P<0.01, respectively). CRP and NLR were significantly higher in the non-eosinophilic group (both P<0.01). The platelet-to-mean platelet volume ratio was not different between the two groups. Cox regression analysis showed that survival was negatively influenced by elevated CRP (P<0.035) and NLR (P<0.001) in the non-eosinophilic group. Conclusion Non-eosinophilic patients with COPD exacerbations with high CRP and NLR values had worse outcomes than eosinophilic patients. PBE and NLR can be helpful markers to guide treatment decisions.