Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Four Bleaching Regimens on Color Changes and Microhardness of Dental Nanofilled Composite

Objective. The purpose of this study was to compare the color changes and microhardness of a nanocomposite after four bleaching regimens. Materials. Twenty-five specimens (n = 25) were made with a nanocomposite resin (Filtek Supreme XT). The specimens were divided into five groups equally (n = 5): bleaching groups and control group, as follows: G1: artificial saliva at 37°C; (control) G2: hydrogen peroxide (HP) at 7%; G3: hydrogen peroxide (HP) at 35%; G4: carbamide peroxide (CP) at 10%; G5: carbamide peroxide (CP) 35%. Color measurements were made with spectrophotometer using CIELAB color scale. The Vickers hardness (VHN) measurements were performed at the top surface. The data were analyzed with two-way Analysis of Variance. Results. ΔE and VHN mean values into the groups were not statistically different, however, the VHN mean values before and after storage and bleaching showed statistically significant differences. Conclusion. Nanocomposite samples showed no significant alteration (color and microhardness) after bleaching. Thus, no replacement of restorations is required after bleaching.
A New Methodology for Measuring Liquidity-Induced Transaction Costs

This paper introduces a parsimonious methodology for measuring liquidity costs by parameterizing the relationship between price and order flow. Unlike the effective spread, our liquidity measure does not assume the midpoint of the spread equals the true price. We find that the marginal price impact of order flow declines rapidly and more liquid firms do not necessarily have lower liquidity costs. In comparison to our measure, the effective spread significantly over-estimates realized liquidity costs, especially for less liquid firms. Our empirical study also reveals that NYSE specialists strive to obtain a profit in dollars rather than as a percentage of the transaction.
Performance improvement of a transmitter diversity scheme for TDS-OFDM system

To increase the performance of time domain synchronous-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (TDS-OFDM) system in the frequency selective fading channels, an improved transmitter diversity design is introduced in this paper. This scheme can achieve both space and frequency diversity gains, so the performance is better than that of conventional space time block coded OFDM (STBC-OFDM) systems with the same antennas. Moreover, the computational complexity for the transmitter is greatly reduced comparing with the existing schemes. Simulations show that the introduced scheme can effectively improve the performance over typical terrestrial broadcasting channels.
Attenuating effect of N-acetyl-L-cysteine against acute cocaine toxicity in rat C6 astroglial cells

Astroglial cells are one of the most abundant cell types in the mammalian brain functioning in neuronal survival and in maintenance of fundamental patterns of circuitry. To date, no study has been conducted regarding the short-term impact of cocaine on these cells in cultures. The present study aimed to investigate acute cocaine (1 h) treatment on cell viability in rat C6 astroglial cells. In addition, the potential effect of N-acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC) against cocaine-induced toxicity was studied. It was observed that 1 h of acute cocaine exposure at 2, 3 and 4 mM caused a dose-dependent decrease in cell viability with an LC50 of 2.857 mM. Furthermore, cocaine treatment caused a decrease in glutathione (GSH) levels in the cells. It was found that cocaine did not exhibit pro-oxidant activity during its exposure to cells. Acute cocaine exposure did not induce nitric oxide (NO) release in the cells. A 5-point (1–5 mM) dose-response curve of NAC clearly indicated no adverse effect on astroglial cell viability. Pretreatment of cells with 5 mM NAC for 30 min, followed by its discard, and exposure to cocaine (2–4 mM) for 1 h protected cells against cytotoxicity by 90%. Treatment of cells with NAC-cocaine mixture rendered 100% protection. Further investigations revealed that the protection by NAC was through the increased GSH levels in the cells. Our results indicate that decreased GSH levels may represent one of the underlying pathologies of cell death and that antioxidant compounds which increase the GSH production could protect against cocaine-induced toxicity by promoting a pro-survival role in astroglial cells.
Diffraction Structural Biology Synchrotron Radiation Purine Nucleoside Phosphorylase from Schistosoma Mansoni in Complex with Ribose-1-phosphate

Schistosomes are blood flukes which cause schistosomiasis, a disease affecting approximately 200 million people worldwide. Along with several other important human parasites including trypanosomes and Plasmodium, schisto-somes lack the de novo pathway for purine synthesis and depend exclusively on the salvage pathway for their purine requirements, making the latter an attractive target for drug development. Part of the pathway involves the conversion of inosine (or guanosine) into hypoxanthine (or guanine) together with ribose-1-phosphate (R1P) or vice versa. This inter-conversion is undertaken by the enzyme purine nucleoside phosphorylase (PNP) which has been used as the basis for the development of novel anti-malarials, conceptually validating this approach. It has been suggested that, during the reverse reaction, R1P binding to the enzyme would occur only as a consequence of conformational changes induced by hypoxanthine, thus making a binary PNP–R1P complex unlikely. Contradictory to this statement, a crystal structure of just such a binary complex involving the Schistosoma mansoni enzyme has been successfully obtained. The ligand shows an intricate hydrogen-bonding network in the phosphate and ribose binding sites and adds a further chapter to our knowledge which could be of value in the future development of selective inhibitors.
VEGFR-2 conformational switch in response to ligand binding

VEGFR-2 is the primary regulator of angiogenesis, the development of new blood vessels from pre-existing ones. VEGFR-2 has been hypothesized to be monomeric in the absence of bound ligand, and to undergo dimerization and activation only upon ligand binding. Using quantitative FRET and biochemical analysis, we show that VEGFR-2 forms dimers also in the absence of ligand when expressed at physiological levels, and that these dimers are phosphorylated. Ligand binding leads to a change in the TM domain conformation, resulting in increased kinase domain phosphorylation. Inter-receptor contacts within the extracellular and TM domains are critical for the establishment of the unliganded dimer structure, and for the transition to the ligand-bound active conformation. We further show that the pathogenic C482R VEGFR-2 mutant, linked to infantile hemangioma, promotes ligand-independent signaling by mimicking the structure of the ligand-bound wild-type VEGFR-2 dimer. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.13876. 001
The JNM1 gene in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is required for nuclear migration and spindle orientation during the mitotic cell cycle

JNM1, a novel gene on chromosome XIII in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is required for proper nuclear migration. jnm1 null mutants have a temperature-dependent defect in nuclear migration and an accompanying alteration in astral microtubules. At 30 degrees C, a significant proportion of the mitotic spindles is not properly located at the neck between the mother cell and the bud. This defect is more severe at low temperature. At 11 degrees C, 60% of the cells accumulate with large buds, most of which have two DAPI staining regions in the mother cell. Although mitosis is delayed and nuclear migration is defective in jnm1 mutant, we rarely observe more than two nuclei in a cell, nor do we frequently observe anuclear cells. No loss of viability is observed at 11 degrees C and cells continue to grow exponentially with increased doubling time. At low temperature the large budded cells of jnm1 mutants exhibit extremely long astral microtubules that often wind around the periphery of the cell. jnm1 mutants are not defective in chromosome segregation during mitosis, as assayed by the rate of chromosome loss, or nuclear migration during conjugation, as assayed by the rate of mating and cytoduction. The phenotype of a jnm1 mutant is strikingly similar to that for mutants in the dynein heavy chain gene (Eshel, D., L. A. Urrestarazu, S. Vissers, J.-C. Jauniaux, J. C. van Vliet-Reedijk, R. J. Plants, and I. R. Gibbons. 1993. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 90:11172-11176; Li, Y. Y., E. Yeh, T. Hays, and K. Bloom. 1993. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 90:10096-10100). The JNM1 gene product is predicted to encode a 44-kD protein containing three coiled coil domains. A JNM1:lacZ gene fusion is able to complement the cold sensitivity and microtubule phenotype of a jnm1 deletion strain. This hybrid protein localizes to a single spot in the cell, most often near the spindle pole body in unbudded cells and in the bud in large budded cells. Together these results point to a specific role for Jnm1p in spindle migration, possibly as a subunit or accessory protein for yeast dynein.
Independent and Personal SMS Spam Filtering

The amount of Short Message Service (SMS) spam is increasing. SMS spam should be put into the spam folder, not the inbox. Some solutions have been proposed that for the most part use Text Classification techniques. However, they need another computer system to create the filtering system using a large amount of SMS data in advance and install the filtering system into the mobile phone to filter incoming SMS. This kind of solution reduces independence because the user has to store received SMS into computer to train or update the filtering system or data and user can get the filtering system. Storing SMS, which may consist of private data especially SMS ham, leads to privacy problem. Obviously, it also increases hardware cost and increases communication cost between mobile phone and computer system. Thus, we propose an independent filtering system that does not need computer system support. The training, filtering and updating processes were done on mobile phone. Our proposed approach filters SMS spam on an independent mobile phone while obtaining reasonable accuracy, minimum storage consumption and acceptable processing time.
Prenatal Smoke Exposure and Genomic DNA Methylation in a Multiethnic Birth Cohort

Background: Exposure to prenatal tobacco smoke (PTS) has been associated with a number of health outcomes in the offspring, including some childhood cancers. Lower levels of genomic DNA methylation have also been associated with several types of cancers. We investigated whether PTS was associated with global DNA methylation levels in the offspring. Methods: Our sample was drawn from a birth cohort of women born between 1959 and 1963 in New York City (n = 90). We measured methylation of repetitive elements (Sat2, Alu, LINE-1) from peripheral blood granulocytes. We combined prospectively collected data on PTS with adult epidemiologic data and blood samples collected in 2001 to 2007 (mean age, 43 years). We used linear regression to assess the association between PTS and repetitive element methylation. Results: Thirty-six percent of mothers smoked during pregnancy. We observed an inverse association between PTS and Sat2 methylation. This inverse association remained even after adjustment for potential mediators including child environmental tobacco smoke exposure, birth size, postnatal weight and height changes, and adult smoking status and alcohol intake (β = −0.22, 95% confidence interval = −0.40 to −0.03 for ever exposed to PTS vs. never exposed using models of log-transformed methylation levels). PTS exposure was not statistically significantly associated with LINE-1 or Alu methylation. Conclusions: PTS exposure, measured at the time of pregnancy and not retrospectively reported, was associated with a decrease in Sat2 methylation but not LINE-1 or Alu methylation. Impact: If replicated in larger studies, this study supports a persistent effect of PTS on DNA methylation levels, as measured by Sat2, in adulthood. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 20(12); 2518–23. ©2011 AACR.
Re-presenting a Story by Emotional Factors using Sentiment Analysis Method

Remembering an event is affected by personal emotional status. We examined the psychological status and personal factors; depression (Center for Epidemiological Studies - Depression, Radloff, 1977), present affective (Positive Affective and Negative Affective Schedule, Watson et al., 1988), life orient (Life Orient Test, Scheier & Carver, 1985), self-awareness (Core Self Evaluation Scale, Judge et al., 2003), and social factor (Social Support, Sarason et al., 1983) of undergraduate students (N=64) and got summaries of a story, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1981) from them. We implement a sentimental analysis model based on convolutional neural network (LeCun & Bengio, 1995) to evaluate each summary. From the same vein used for transfer learning (Pan & Yang, 2010), we collected 38,265 movie review data to train the model and then use them to score summaries of each student. The results of CES-D and PANAS show the relationship between emotion and memory retrieval as follows: depressed people have shown a tendency of representing a story more negatively, and they seemed less expressive. People with full of emotion - high in PANAS - have retrieved their memory more expressively than others, using more negative words then others. The contributions of this study can be summarized as follows: First, lightening the relationship between emotion and its effect during times of storing or retrieving a memory. Second, suggesting objective methods to evaluate the intensity of emotion in natural language format, using a sentimental analysis model.
Efficacy of the If current inhibitor ivabradine in patients with chronic stable angina receiving beta-blocker therapy: a 4-month, randomized, placebo-controlled trial

Aims To evaluate the anti-anginal and anti-ischaemic efficacy of the selective If current inhibitor ivabradine in patients with chronic stable angina pectoris receiving beta-blocker therapy. Methods and results In this double-blinded trial, 889 patients with stable angina receiving atenolol 50 mg/day were randomized to receive ivabradine 5 mg b.i. d. for 2 months, increased to 7.5 mg b.i. d. for a further 2 months, or placebo. Patients underwent treadmill exercise tests at the trough of drug activity using the standard Bruce protocol for randomization and at 2 and 4 months. Total exercise duration at 4 months increased by 24.3 ± 65.3 s in the ivabradine group, compared with 7.7 ± 63.8 s with placebo (P < 0.001). Ivabradine was superior to placebo for all exercise test criteria at 4 months (P < 0.001 for all) and 2 months (P-values between <0.001 and 0.018). Ivabradine in combination with atenolol was well tolerated. Only 1.1% of patients withdrew owing to sinus bradycardia in the ivabradine group. Conclusion The combination of ivabradine 7.5 mg b.i. d. and atenolol at the commonly used dosage in clinical practice in patients with chronic stable angina pectoris produced additional efficacy with no untoward effect on safety or tolerability.
Suboptimal larval habitats modulate oviposition of the malaria vector mosquito Anopheles gambiae

Selection of oviposition sites by gravid females is a critical behavioural preference in the reproductive cycle of Anopheles gambiae, the principal Afrotropical malaria vector mosquito. Several studies suggest this decision is mediated by semiochemicals associated with potential oviposition sites. To better understand the chemosensory basis of this behaviour and identify compounds that can modulate oviposition, we examined the generally held hypothesis that suboptimal larval habitats give rise to semiochemicals that negatively influence the oviposition preference of gravid females. Dual-choice bioassays indicated that oviposition sites conditioned in this manner do indeed foster significant and concentration dependent aversive effects on the oviposition site selection of gravid females. Headspace analyses derived from aversive habitats consistently noted the presence of dimethyl disulphide (DMDS), dimethyl trisulphide (DMTS) and 6-methyl-5-hepten-2-one (sulcatone) each of which unitarily affected An. gambiae oviposition preference. Electrophysiological assays across the antennae, maxillary palp, and labellum of gravid An. gambiae revealed differential responses to these semiochemicals. Taken together, these findings validate the hypothesis in question and suggest that suboptimal environments for An. gambiae larval development results in the release of DMDS, DMTS and sulcatone that impact the response valence of gravid females to directly modulate the chemical ecology of oviposition site selection.
Understanding the Mechanisms of Motor Learning in the Vestibulo-ocular Reflex

The vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) is a simple reflex that stabilizes gaze by moving the eyes in the opposite direction to the head. The gain of the VOR (ratio of head to eye velocity) can be increased or decreased during motor learning. It is thought that the memory for learned changes in the VOR gain is initially encoded within the cerebellar flocculus. Furthermore, these learned gain changes can be disrupted or consolidated into a long-term memory. In this thesis we describe novel results that show that consolidation of the VOR can take place rapidly, within 1 hour after learning has stopped. Furthermore, we demonstrated that unlike learning, which has been shown to have frequency selectivity, disruption and rapid consolidation generalize across the range of frequencies. We suggest that disruption and rapid consolidation in the VOR are local mechanisms within the cerebellar cortex, and do not require new learning. This thesis also provides additional evidence for the idea that learned gain increases and decreases are the result of separate mechanisms, most likely long-term depression and potentiation respectively, at the parallel fibre-Purkinje cell synapses. We demonstrate that learned gain increases, but not decreases, require the activation of type 1 metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluR1) and B type γ-aminobutyric acid (GABAB) receptors. Blocking one or both of these receptors with an
High‐redshift Fanaroff–Riley type II radio sources: large‐scale X‐ray environment

We investigate the properties of the environment around 20 powerful radio galaxies and quasars at redshifts between 0.45 and 1. Using XMM-Newton and Chandra observations we probe the spatial distribution and the temperature of the cluster gas. We find that more than 60 per cent of powerful radio sources in the redshift range of our sample lie in a cluster of X-ray luminosity greater than 10 44 ergs -1 , and all but one of the narrow-line radio galaxies, for which the emission from the nucleus is obscured by a torus, lie in a cluster environment. For broad-line quasars the X-ray emission from the core dominates and it is more difficult to measure the cluster environment. However, within the statistical uncertainties we find no significant difference in the properties of the environment as a function of the orientation to the line of sight of the radio jet. This is in agreement with unification schemes. Our results have important implications for cluster surveys, as clusters around powerful radio sources tend to be excluded from X-ray and Sunyaev-Zeldovich surveys of galaxy clusters, and thus can introduce an important bias in the cluster luminosity function. Most of the radio sources are found close to pressure balance with the environment in which they lie, but the two low-excitation radio galaxies of the sample are observed to be underpressured. This may be the first observational indication for the presence of non-radiative particles in the lobes of some powerful radio galaxies. We find that the clusters around radio sources in the redshift range of our sample have a steeper entropy-temperature relation than local clusters, and the slope is in agreement with the predictions of self-similar gravitational heating models for cluster gas infall. This suggests that selection by active galactic nucleus (AGN) finds systems less affected by AGN feedback than the local average. We speculate that this is because the AGN in our sample are sufficiently luminous and rare that their AGN activity is too recent to have caused the onset of measurable feedback and increased entropy in the clusters, especially in the cooler ones where locally the effects of feedback are expected to be most evident. If this is confirmed by forthcoming X-ray missions it will improve our understanding of the heating and cooling processes in high-redshift galaxy clusters.
Physiological and molecular characterization of drought responses and identification of candidate tolerance genes in cassava

While the physiological basis of cassava drought tolerance has been characterized, evaluation of the molecular responses to drought stress remains largely unexplored. This study provides an initial characterization of the molecular response of cassava to drought stress resembling field conditions. The candidate drought tolerance genes in cassava identified in this study can be used as expression-based markers of drought tolerance in cassava or be tested in the context of breeding and engineering drought tolerance in transgenics.
InvisiMem: Smart Memory for Trusted Computing

A practically feasible low-overhead secure hardware design that provides strong defenses against memory bus side channels remains elusive. This paper observes that smart memory, memory with compute capability and a packetized interface, can dramatically simplify this problem. InvisiMem expands the trust base to include the logic layer in the smart memory to implement cryptographic primitives, which allows the secure host processor to send encrypted addresses over the untrusted memory bus. This eliminates the need for expensive address obfuscation techniques based on Oblivious RAM (ORAM). In addition, smart memory enables simple and efficient solutions for ensuring freshness using authenticated encryption, and for mitigating memory bus timing channel using constant heart-beat packets. We demonstrate that InvisiMem designs are one to two orders of magnitude lower in performance, space, energy, and memory bandwidth overhead, compared to ORAM-based solutions.
Automatic decomposition for sequential equivalence checking of system level and RTL descriptions

Sequential equivalence checking between system level descriptions of designs and their register transfer level (RTL) implementations is a very challenging and important problem in the context of systems on a chip (SoCs). We propose a technique to alleviate the complexity of the equivalence checking problem, by efficiently decomposing it using compare points. Traditionally, equivalence checking techniques use nominal or functional mapping of latches as compare points. Since we operate at a level where design descriptions are in system level languages or hardware description languages, we leverage the information available to us at this level in deducing sequential compare points. Sequential compare points encapsulate the sequential behavior of designs and are obtained by statically analyzing the design descriptions. We decompose the design using sequential compare points and represent the design behavior at these compare points by symbolic expressions. We use a SAT solver to check the equivalence of the symbolic expressions. In order to demonstrate our technique, we present results on a non-trivial case study. We show an equivalence check between a SystemC description and two different Verilog RTL implementations of a Viterbi decoder, that is a component of the DRM SoC