Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mediterranean Diet and Prevention of Chronic Diseases

A large body of research data suggests that traditional dietary habits and lifestyle unique to the Mediterranean region (Mediterranean diet, MD) lower the incidence of chronic diseases and improve longevity. These data contrast with troubling statistics in the United States and other high income countries pointing to an increase in the incidence of chronic diseases and the projected explosion in cost of medical care associated with an aging population. In 2013, the MD was inscribed by UNESCO in the “Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. ” The 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans included the MD as a healthy dietary pattern. Therefore, specific objectives of this article are to provide an overview of the nutritional basis of this healthful diet, its metabolic benefits, and its role in multiple aspects of disease prevention and healthy aging. Whereas recommendations about the MD often focus on specific foods or bioactive compounds, we suggest that the eating pattern as a whole likely contributes to the health promoting effects of the MD.
Hydrogen peroxide mediates FK506-induced cytotoxicity in renal cells.

BACKGROUND The nephrotoxicity induced by immunosuppressant FK506 remains a serious clinical problem, and the underlying mechanism has not been completely understood. The present study was undertaken to determine the role of hydrogen peroxide in FK506-mediated cytotoxicity in a porcine renal proximal tubular cell line, LLC-PK1 cells, and human embryonic kidney (HEK293) cells. METHODS Cytotoxicity was estimated by crystal violet and lactate dehydrogenase release assays. The activity of reactive oxygen species (ROS) was detected by flow cytometry. FK506-induced cell death was examined in the presence of the hydrogen peroxide scavenger, catalase, or a scavenger of hydroxyl radicals, sodium benzoate. As a control, FK506-induced cell death was also measured in the presence of superoxide anion inhibitor, 4,5-dihydroxy-1,2-benzene disulfonic acid (Tiron), TEMPO, or overexpressed human manganese superoxide dismutase (MnSOD). Catalase was also used in tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha)-induced cell injury to determine whether the enzyme specifically protected cells against FK506-mediated cytotoxicity. RESULTS FK506 induced cell death in a dose-dependent manner and coincided with a dose-dependent increase in ROS activity. Abrogation of FK506-mediated ROS by catalase and N-acetylcysteine blunted FK506-induced cell death. Furthermore, overexpression of catalase, sodium benzoate, and deferoxamine inhibited the cytotoxic effect of FK506. In contrast, Tiron, TEMPO, or overexpression of human MnSOD failed to show cytoprotection. In fact, TEMPO or expression of MnSOD enhanced the effect of FK506. Catalase did not significantly affect TNF-alpha-induced cell injury. CONCLUSION Catalase is uniquely required in cellular protection against FK506 cytotoxicity, which suggests an important role for hydrogen peroxide in the cellular actions of FK506.
Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Polarimetry of the Gravitational Lens FSC 10214+4724

We present imaging polarimetry of the extremely luminous, redshift 2.3 IRAS source FSC 10214+4724. The observations were obtained with HST's Faint Object Camera in the F437M filter, which is free of strong emission lines. The 0. ″7 long arc is unresolved to 0. ″04 FWHM in the transverse direction and has an integrated polarization of 28% ± 3%, in good agreement with ground-based observations. The polarization position angle varies along the arc by up to 35°. The overall position angle is 62° ± 3° east of north. No counterimage is detected to B = 27.5 mag (3 σ), giving an observed arc to counterimage flux ratio greater than 250, considerably greater than the flux ratio of 100 measured previously in the I band. This implies that the configuration of the object in the source plane at the B band is different from that at I band and/or that the lensing galaxy is dusty.
An Interferon Response Gene Signature Is Associated with the Therapeutic Response of Hepatitis C Patients

Infection with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a major cause of chronic liver diseases and hepatocellular carcinoma worldwide, and thus represents a significant public health problem. The type I interferon (IFN), IFNα, has been successful in treating HCV-infected patients, but current IFN-based treatment regimens for HCV have suboptimal efficacy, and relatively little is known about why IFN therapy eliminates the virus in some patients but not in others. Therefore, it is critical to understand the basic mechanisms that underlie the therapeutic resistance to IFN action in HCV-infected individuals, and there is an urgent need to identify those patients most likely to respond to IFN therapy for HCV. To characterize the response of HCV-infected patients to treatment with IFNα, the expression of an IFN-response gene signature comprised of IFN-stimulated genes and genes that play an important role in the innate immune response was examined in liver biopsies from HCV-infected patients enrolled in a clinical trial. In the present study we found that the expression of a subset of IFN-response genes was dysregulated in liver biopsy samples from nonresponsive hepatitis C patients as compared with virologic responders. Based on these findings, a statistical model was developed to help predict the response of patients to IFN therapy, and compared to results obtained to the IL28 mutation model, which is highly predictive of the response to IFN-based therapy in HCV-infected patients. We found that a model incorporating gene expression data can improve predictions of IFN responsiveness compared to IL28 mutation status alone.
Prediction of Location of a Symptomatic Early Gestation Based Solely on Clinical Presentation

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate three strategies for diagnosis of women at risk for ectopic pregnancy based on information collected at initial presentation. METHODS: Strength of association for risk factors, signs, and symptoms obtained at initial presentation of women with pain, bleeding, or both in a first-trimester pregnancy and a nondiagnostic ultrasound examination were calculated using a cohort of 2,026 women. Three models (logistic regression, a numeric scoring system, and a Classification and Regression Tree) were created to predict final outcome and tested on a second cohort of 1,634 women. Accuracy was assessed using 2×2 tables evaluating the decision of send home compared with do not send home (combination of monitor or intervene) and intervene compared with do not intervene (monitor or send home). Sensitivity, specificity, and predictive values were calculated. RESULTS: The ultimate diagnosis of women in the test population was 304 (18.6%) patients with an ectopic pregnancy, 834 (51.0%) with miscarriage, and 494 (30.2%) with an ongoing intrauterine pregnancy. A total of 95.9% of patients with ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage were correctly assigned to the strategy to monitor or intervene upon based on the scoring system, and 97.6% based on the Classification and Regression Tree. The specificity of the decision to send a patient home with a likely intrauterine pregnancy was greater than 95% for all three methods. The sensitivity of all strategies in the decision to intervene for an ectopic pregnancy was greater than 98%. CONCLUSION: A simplified scoring system based on five factors (age, ectopic history, bleeding, prior miscarriage, and human chorionic gonadotropin level) was as effective as a Classification and Regression Tree or logistic regression modes in predicting outcome of women at risk for ectopic pregnancy. Prediction of location of a symptomatic first-trimester pregnancy based on clinical symptoms and risk factors is possible, but must be used in conjunction with outpatient surveillance. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: II
Effect of Broadcast in Mobile Peer-to-Peer Networks

Existing research works on mobile ad-hoc networks consider only one destination for a source. Some works consider more than one destination but unicast mode of communication. In this project we consider multiple recipients for a single source and broadcast communication. We show that using broadcast in a mobile peer-to-peer network improves throughput significantly. We also consider the effect of file desirability on throughput. We try to conjecture on capacity of these networks under broadcast communication scheme and optimal node selection for communication.
antibiotic sensitivity pattern of uropathogens from pregnant women with urinary tract infection in abakaliki , nigeria

License. The full terms of the License are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/. Non-commercial uses of the work are permitted without any further permission from Dove Medical Press Limited, provided the work is properly attributed. Permissions beyond the scope of the License are administered by Dove Medical Press Limited. Information on how to request permission may be found at: http://www.dovepress. com/permissions.php Infection and Drug Resistance 2013:6 225–233 Infection and Drug Resistance Dovepress
Toll-like receptor 4 gene is associated with recurrent spontaneous miscarriage in Uygur and Han women in Xinjiang

Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), a recently identified vertebrate receptor, serves a pivotal role in immune responses. The aim of the present study was to investigate the association between the human TLR4 gene and recurrent spontaneous miscarriage (RSM). A total of 306 RSM patents and 306 age-matched controls were genotyped for four single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of the human TLR4 gene (rs1927914, rs1927911, rs4986790 and rs4986791). Data were analyzed for Uygur and Han women separately using a haplotype-based case-control study. There were significant differences between the distributions of rs1927914, rs1927911 and rs4986790 SNPs between RSM patients and the controls (P=0.001, P<0.001 and P=0.015, respectively) were identified in Uygur women, and significant differences between the distributions of the rs1927914 and rs1927911 SNPs between RSM patients and the controls (P<0.001 and P<0.001, respectively) were identified in Han women. Results of the logistic regression analysis indicated that rs1927914, rs1927911 and rs4986790 SNPs were significantly higher in the RSM patients compared with the control individuals (P=0.012, P=0.024 and P=0.035, respectively) in Uygur women. Furthermore, significantly higher frequency was noted for the A-G-G haplotype (SNP1-SNP2-SNP3) (P=0.016) in RSM patients compared with the controls in Uygur women. The results indicate that rs1927914, rs1927911, rs4986790 and the A-G-G haplotype (SNP1-SNP2-SNP3) of the human TLR4 gene may be genetic markers for RSM in Uygur women, while rs1927914 and rs1927911 SNPs of the human TLR4 gene are most likely associated with RSM in Han women in Xinjiang.
Interleukin‐2 activates nuclear phospholipase‐Cβ by mitogen‐activated protein kinase‐dependent phosphorylation in human natural killer cells

It is not yet clear whether nuclear phospholipase C (PLC) signaling is implicated in the response of primary cells to cytokines or not and, in particular, whether lymphocytes utilize the nuclear phosphoinositides breakdown as a step in the signal transduction generated by cytokine receptor triggering. Therefore, we have studied the repertoire and functional regulation of nuclear PLC, the key enzyme of phosphoinositides turnover, by interleukin‐2 (IL‐2) in primary human natural killer (NK) cells and its effects on the IL‐2‐driven NK cell proliferation. We found that 1) IL‐2 stimulates nuclear PLC activity within 60 min of treatment; 2) NK cells express only the β family of PLCs in the nucleus, and the isoform of this enzyme regulated by IL‐2 is PLCβ1b; 3) IL‐2 induces nuclear translocation of extracellular signal‐related kinase (ERK)‐2, or p42, and to a lesser extent, of ERK‐1, or p44, of mitogen‐activated protein kinase (MAPK), whose specific inhibition prevents the IL‐2‐driven nuclear PLCβ1 activation; 4) PLCβ1b is serine‐phosphorylated after IL‐2, and the phosphorylation is abolished after MAPK inhibition; and 5) inhibition of nuclear PLC activation leads to the inhibition of the IL‐2‐induced proliferation of NK cells. Altogether, our data indicate that nuclear PLC signaling is a downstream target of the ERK/MAPK pathway stimulated by IL‐2 receptor triggering in human primary NK cells, and that the nuclear phosphoinositides turnover is a key step in proliferative response of NK cells to IL‐2.
GreenFS: making enterprise computers greener by protecting them better

Hard disks contain data - frequently an irreplaceable asset of high monetary and non-monetary value. At the same time, hard disks are mechanical devices that consume power, are noisy, and fragile when their platters are rotating. In this paper we demonstrate that hard disks cause different kinds of problems for different types of computer systems and demystify several common misconceptions. We show that solutions developed to date are incapable of solving the power consumption, noise, and data reliability problems without sacrificing hard disk life-time, data reliability, or user convenience. We considered data reliability, recovery, performance, user convenience, and hard disk-caused problems together at the enterprise scale. We have designed GreenFS: a fan-out stackable file system that offers all-time all-data run-time data protection, improves performance under typical user workloads, and allows hard disks to be kept off most of the time. As a result, GreenFS improves enterprise data protection, minimizes disk drive-related power consumption and noise and increases the chances of disk drive survivability in case of unexpected external impacts.
'Fatalism', accident causation and prevention: issues for health promotion from an exploratory study in a Yoruba town, Nigeria.

As countries experience the 'epidemiological transition' with a relative decline in infectious diseases, accident rates tend to increase, particularly road traffic accidents. The health promotion interventions intended to prevent or minimize the consequences of accidents have been developed in predominantly Western, industrialized countries. Although some of these solutions have been applied with success to less developed countries, there are also good reasons why such solutions are ineffective when tried in a different context. Health promotion as developed in the West has a particular ideological bias, being framed within a secular, individualist and rationalist culture. Different cosmologies exist outside this culture, often described as 'fatalist' by Western commentators and as obstructing change. Changing these cosmologies or worldviews may not fit with the ethic of paying due respect to the cultural traditions of the 'target group'. Health promotion is therefore faced with a dilemma. In addition to different worldviews, the different levels of development also mean that solutions formulated in richer countries do not suit poorer countries. This paper uses a small exploratory study in a Yoruba town in Nigeria to examine these points. Interviews with key informants were held in March 1994 in Igbo-Ora and data were extracted from hospital records. Levels of accidents from available records are noted and people's ideas about accident prevention are discussed. Recommendations as to the way forward are then proposed.
Lateness probability of a retransmission scheme for error control on a two-state Markov channel

In this paper, we study the performance of a simple retransmission-based error-control strategy for delay-constrained data communications over a bursty channel. Correlated errors are modeled as a two state Markov process. A retransmission algorithm is used to correct errors, and the probability that a packet is not successfully delivered within D slots of its arrival is computed. In the presence of a smoothing buffer at the receiver, this is the probability that the jitter experienced by a packet is too large to be absorbed by the buffer itself. The cases of zero and nonzero roundtrip delay are studied separately, as are the conditions of perfect and imperfect feedback. Our results relate the achievable quality of service and the amount of traffic that can be served to the packet-error process parameters, which in turn are induced by the physical layer specifications. This relationship between the traffic and the channel parameters can be useful in making admission control decisions and in assessing the effect of physical layer design on the performance of higher layer protocols.
Speech Enhancement in Multiple-Noise Conditions Using Deep Neural Networks

In this paper we consider the problem of speech enhancement in real-world like conditions where multiple noises can simultaneously corrupt speech. Most of the current literature on speech enhancement focus primarily on presence of single noise in corrupted speech which is far from real-world environments. Specifically, we deal with improving speech quality in office environment where multiple stationary as well as non-stationary noises can be simultaneously present in speech. We propose several strategies based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN) for speech enhancement in these scenarios. We also investigate a DNN training strategy based on psychoacoustic models from speech coding for enhancement of noisy speech
The Structuring of Political Attitudes among Liberal and Conservative Protestants

Twenty years ago Johnson (1967) found that conservative Protestant clergy took less consistent stands than their liberal Protestant counterparts on a variety of political issues. Later research, however, suggests that members of conservative Protestant denominations may have become a politicized mass public. We approach this question by comparing conservative and liberal Protestants on their level of abstract political conceptualization and political belief system consistency. Using data from the 1972, 1980, and 1984 American National Election Studies, we find that conservative Protestants continue to show somewhat lower levels of political sophistication, attitude consistency, and consensus on issues. The results show that the conservative Protestant mass public remains less likely to link issues to the left/right political ideology in which political conflicts are framed and suggest a somewhat lower level of psychological involvement with politics among conservative Protestants.
Active-transductive learning with label-adapted kernels

This paper presents an efficient active-transductive approach for classification. A common approach of active learning algorithms is to focus on querying points near the class boundary in order to refine it. However, for certain data distributions, this approach has been shown to lead to uninformative samples. More recent approaches consider combining data exploration with traditional refinement techniques. These techniques typically require tuning sampling of unexplored regions with refinement of detected class boundaries. They also involve significant computational costs for the exploration of informative query candidates. We present a novel iterative active learning algorithm designed to overcome these shortcomings by using a linear running-time active-transductive learning approach that naturally switches from exploration to refinement. The passive classifier employed in our algorithm builds a random-walk on the data graph based on a modified graph geometry that combines the data distribution with current label hypothesis; while the query component uses the uncertainty of the evolving hypothesis. Our supporting theory draws the link between the spectral properties of our iteration matrix and a solution to the minimal-cut problem for a fused hypothesis-data graph. Experiments demonstrate computational complexity that is orders of magnitude lower than state-of-the-art, and competitive results on benchmark data and real churn prediction data.
Tracing of axonal connections by rhodamine‐dextran‐amine in the rat hippocampal‐entorhinal cortex slice preparation

In order to demonstrate axonal connections preserved in rat temporal cortex slices the authors used rhodamine‐dextran‐amine as a tracer. The slices contained the neocortical areas Te2 and Te3, the medial and lateral entorhinal cortices (MEC and LEC), the subicular regions, and the dentate gyrus and hippocampus proper. Rhodamine‐dextran‐amine crystals were placed by microinjection into a given area. Following this local lesioning the dye was permitted to diffuse and migrate intraaxonally in antero‐and retrograde directions for about 8 hours. The slices were then formaldehyde‐fixed and analyzed by fluorescence microscopy. Most of the known connections within and between the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus and denatate gyrus were preserved in the slice preparation, provided that the slices were cut with a near horizontal orientation corresponding to plates 99–108 in Paxinos and Watson (1986). Only the lateral perforant path between the LEC and the hippocampus could not be followed to its full extent. The authors conclude that most aspects of the intrinsic synaptic organization of the temporal lobe can be reliably studied in hippocampal‐entorhinal cortex slice preparations.
GMM-derived features for effective unsupervised adaptation of deep neural network acoustic models

In this paper we investigate GMM-derived features recently introduced for adaptation of context-dependent deep neural network HMM (CD-DNN-HMM) acoustic models. We improve the previously proposed adaptation algorithm by applying the concept of speaker adaptive training (SAT) to DNNs built on GMM-derived features and by using fMLLR-adapted features for training an auxiliary GMM model. Traditional adaptation algorithms, such as maximum a posteriori adaptation (MAP) and feature space maximum likelihood linear regression (fMLLR) are performed for the auxiliary GMM model used in a SAT procedure for a DNN. Experimental results on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ0) corpus show that the proposed adaptation technique can provide, on average, a 17 – 28% relative word error rate (WER) reduction on different adaptation sets under an unsupervised adaptation setup, compared to speaker independent (SI) DNN-HMM systems built on conventional features. We found that fMLLR adaptation for the SAT DNN trained on GMM-derived features outperforms fMLLR adaptation for the SAT DNN trained on conventional features by up to 14% of relative WER reduction.
Calretinin: a gene for a novel calcium-binding protein expressed principally in neurons [published erratum appears in J Cell Biol 1990 May;110(5):1845]

A novel gene of the calmodulin superfamily, encoding a 29-kD neuronal protein here named "calretinin," has been isolated as a cDNA clone from chick retina. The encoded sequence includes four putative calcium- binding sites and a fusion protein binds calcium. The most similar protein known is the 28-kD intestinal calcium-binding protein, calbindin (58% homology). Both genes date from before the divergence of chicks from mammals. The distribution of calretinin and calbindin mRNAs in chick tissues has been mapped using RNA gel blots and in situ hybridization. RNAs from both genes are abundant in the retina and in many areas of the brain, but calretinin RNA is absent from intestine and other nonneural tissues. Calretinin and calbindin are expressed in different sets of neurons throughout the brain. Calretinin RNA is particularly abundant in auditory neurons with precisely timed discharges.