Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Infant statistical-learning ability is related to real-time language processing*

Abstract Infants are adept at learning statistical regularities in artificial language materials, suggesting that the ability to learn statistical structure may support language development. Indeed, infants who perform better on statistical learning tasks tend to be more advanced in parental reports of infants’ language skills. Work with adults suggests that one way statistical learning ability affects language proficiency is by facilitating real-time language processing. Here we tested whether 15-month-olds’ ability to learn sequential statistical structure in artificial language materials is related to their ability to encode and interpret native-language speech. Specifically, we tested their ability to learn sequential structure among syllables (Experiment 1) and words (Experiment 2), as well as their ability to encode familiar English words in sentences. The results suggest that infants' ability to learn sequential structure among syllables is related to their lexical-processing efficiency, providing continuity with findings from children and adults, though effects were modest.
Bleeding Risk of Tirofiban, a Nonpeptide GPIIb/IIIa Platelet Receptor Antagonist in Progressive Stroke: An Open Pilot Study

Background:Glycoprotein (gp) IIb/IIIa-receptor antagonists are highly effective antiplatelet agents with proven efficacy in the treatment of acute coronary and experimental cerebral ischemia. In this study we examined the rate of hemorrhagic transformation and major bleedings in patients with acute stroke treated with tirofiban, a nonpeptide gpIIb/IIIa antagonist. Methods: Eighteen patients with progressively deteriorating acute ischemic stroke were treated with body-weight adjusted intravenous tirofiban for a mean period of 46 h and compared with a matched group of 17 acute ischemic clinically stable stroke patients. Cerebral hemorrhage was assessed by cranial imaging 6–10 days after symptom onset. Results: No major intracranial hemorrhage was observed in either group. Clinically asymptomatic hemorrhagic infarctions type I/II/III were detected in 4/2/0 controls and in 4/1/1 patients of the tirofiban group, respectively (OR = 0.92; 95% CI 0.4–2.5). Clinical outcome scores were not different in both groups (p = 0.18). Conclusions: Tirofiban was not associated with a significantly increased cerebral bleeding rate in acute ischemic stroke. Randomized multicenter studies are needed to further evaluate the safety and efficacy of tirofiban in the treatment of acute stroke.
[Association between SCN1A rs3812718 polymorphism and generalized epilepsy with febrile seizures plus].

OBJECTIVE To investigate the association between SCN1A rs3812718 polymorphism and generalized epilepsy with febrile seizures plus (GEFS+), and to provide potential molecular targets for the diagnosis and treatment of GEFS+. METHODS The iPLEX technique in the MassARRAY system was used to determine SCN1A rs3812718 polymorphism, genotype frequency, and allele frequency in 50 patients with GEFS+ and 50 healthy controls. RESULTS As for the frequencies of CC, CT, and TT genotypes in SCN1A rs3812718, there was a significant difference in the frequency of TT genotype between the GEFS+ group and the control group (P<0.05). There was also a significant difference in the frequency of T allele between the two groups (P<0.05). Compared with those carrying CC genotype or C allele, the individuals with CT genotype , TT genotype or T allele had a higher risk of developing GEFS+ (CT/CC: OR=4.05, 95%CI: 1.04-15.69; TT/CC: OR=30.60, 95%CI: 6.46-144.85; T/C: OR=4.64, 95%CI: 2.54-8.48). CONCLUSIONS SCN1A rs3812718 polymorphism is a risk factor for GEFS+, and the population carrying T allele may have an increased risk of GEFS.
Associations Between Posttransplantation Diabetes Mellitus and Renal Graft Survival

Background Previous reports indicate that posttransplantation diabetes mellitus (PTDM) is associated with overall renal graft loss, but not death-censored graft loss. Methods In this single-center retrospective cohort study of 2749 adult Norwegian renal transplant recipients, transplanted between 1999 and 2011, we estimated overall and death-censored renal graft loss hazard ratios in patients diagnosed with PTDM, impaired glucose tolerance and diabetes before transplantation, using multivariable Cox proportional hazard regression analysis. Results A total of 893 renal grafts were lost during the study period, either due to recipient death (n = 540) or death-censored graft loss (n = 353). When the observational time started at time of transplantation, diabetes before transplantation was associated with both overall and death-censored graft loss. Pretransplantation diabetes was also associated with a steeper decline in renal graft function, a higher risk of acute rejections and more renal grafts lost due to acute rejection. In patients with a functional renal graft 1 year after transplantation, PTDM was associated with overall graft loss (hazard ratio, 1.46; 95% confidence interval, 1.13-1.88; P < 0.001), but not death-censored graft loss (hazard ratio, 1.25; 95% confidence interval, 0.80-1.96; P = 0.33). We found no significant associations between PTDM and change in renal function during the first 5 years or acute rejection risk during the first year after renal transplantation. Impaired glucose tolerance was not associated with either overall or death-censored graft loss. Conclusions The present study confirms previous findings of an increased risk of overall but not death-censored renal graft loss in renal transplant recipients with PTDM. Longstanding diabetes might increase the risk of acute rejections.
Determinants of dissatisfaction with dentures: a multiple regression analysis.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between satisfaction with complete dentures and several causal factors. One hundred thirty patients who received new dentures were investigated during their treatment. The results showed that 33% of the variance in satisfaction with dentures could be clarified by (1) the attitude toward dentures, (2) the quality of the dentures, (3), the oral conditions (opposite of what was expected), and (4) the number of previous dentures worn. Thus the patient's attitude toward dentures, measured by a questionnaire administered prior to his or her receiving new dentures, and the number of previous dentures worn, are prospective indicators for satisfaction with new dentures. The oral condition and the patient's personality seem to be unimportant factors, as measured by a neurotic lability scale and by a "health locus of control scale. " Only 33% of the variance in satisfaction could be clarified by means of the variables used in the study. Thus satisfaction with dentures for most patients is individually determined and, for dentist and patient, is often unpredictable.
Defining Benchmarks in Liver Transplantation: A Multicenter Outcome Analysis Determining Best Achievable Results

&NA; This multicentric study of 17 high-volume centers presents 12 benchmark values for liver transplantation. Those values, mostly targeting markers of morbidity, were gathered from 2024 “low risk” cases, and may serve as reference to assess outcome of single or any groups of patients. Objective: To propose benchmark outcome values in liver transplantation, serving as reference for assessing individual patients or any other patient groups. Background: Best achievable results in liver transplantation, that is, benchmarks, are unknown. Consequently, outcome comparisons within or across centers over time remain speculative. Methods: Out of 7492 liver transplantation performed in 17 international centers from 3 continents, we identified 2024 low risk adult cases with a laboratory model for end-stage liver disease score ⩽20 points, a balance of risk score ⩽9, and receiving a primary graft by donation after brain death. We chose clinically relevant endpoints covering intra- and postoperative course, with a focus on complications graded by severity including the complication comprehensive index (CCI®). Respective benchmarks were derived from the median value in each center, and the 75 percentile was considered the benchmark cutoff. Results: Benchmark cases represented 8% to 49% of cases per center. One-year patient-survival was 91.6% with 3.5% retransplantations. Eighty-two percent of patients developed at least 1 complication during 1-year follow-up. Biliary complications occurred in one-fifth of the patients up to 6 months after surgery. Benchmark cutoffs were ⩽4 days for ICU stay, ⩽18 days for hospital stay, ⩽59% for patients with severe complications (≥ Grade III) and ⩽42.1 for 1-year CCI®. Comparisons with the next higher risk group (model for end stage liver disease 21–30) disclosed an increase in morbidity but within benchmark cutoffs for most, but not all indicators, while in patients receiving a second graft from 1 center (n = 50) outcome values were all outside of benchmark values. Conclusions: Despite excellent 1-year survival, morbidity in benchmark cases remains high with half of patients developing severe complications during 1-year follow-up. Benchmark cutoffs targeting morbidity parameters offer a valid tool to assess higher risk groups.
Positive and negative curvatures nested in antiresonant hollow-core ﬁber

We propose a negative-curvature hollow-core ﬁber that has an elliptical nested element in the antiresonant tubes. The additional elliptical element effectively adds two curvatures, namely a positive and a negative curvature. Our numerical study shows that it enhances the conﬁnement of the light in the core. More-over, the nested elements provide an extra degree of freedom that can be exploited for suppressing higher-order modes through the change of the ellipticity. The resulting low conﬁnement loss and single-mode guidance properties of the proposed ﬁber make it a suitable candidate for applications in ultrashort pulse delivery and gas-based nonlinear systems. We propose a negative-curvature hollow-core ﬁber that has an elliptical nested element in the antiresonant tubes. The additional elliptical element effectively adds two curvatures, namely a positive and a negative curvature. Our numerical study shows that it enhances the conﬁnement of the light in the core. More-over, the nested elements provide an extra degree of freedom that can be exploited for suppressing higher-order modes through the change of the ellipticity. The resulting low conﬁnement loss and single-mode guidance properties of the proposed ﬁber make it a suitable candidate for applications in ultrashort pulse delivery and gas-based nonlinear systems.
The apportionment of tooth size and its implications in Australopithecus sediba versus other Plio-pleistocene and recent African hominins.

OBJECTIVES Australopithecus sediba is characterized further by providing formerly unpublished and refined mesiodistal and buccolingual crown measurements in the MH1 and MH2 specimens. After size correction, these data were compared with those in other fossil and recent samples to facilitate additional insight into diachronic hominin affinities. MATERIALS AND METHODS Six comparative samples consist of fossil species: A. africanus, A. afarensis, Homo habilis, Paranthropus robustus, P. boisei, and H. erectus. Others comprise H. sapiens and Pan troglodytes. Re-estimates of "actual" dimensions in damaged A. sediba teeth were effected through repeated measurements by independent observers. X-ray synchrotron microtomography allowed measurement of crowns obscured by matrix and noneruption. Tooth size apportionment analysis, an established technique for intraspecific comparisons, was then applied at this interspecific level to assess phenetic affinities using both within- and among-group data. RESULTS Comparison of these highly heritable dimensions identified a general trend for smaller posterior relative to larger anterior teeth (not including canines), contra Paranthropus, that allies A. sediba with other australopiths and Homo; however, specific reductions and/or shape variation in the species' canines, third premolars, and anterior molars relative to the other teeth mirror the patterning characteristic of Homo. DISCUSSSION Of all samples, including east African australopiths, A. sediba appears most like H. habilis, H. erectus and H. sapiens regarding how crown size is apportioned along the tooth rows. These findings parallel those in prior studies of dental and other skeletal data, including several that suggest A. sediba is a close relative of, if not ancestral to, Homo.
Defective HIV-1 proviruses produce novel protein-coding RNA species in HIV-infected patients on combination antiretroviral therapy

Significance The presence of “defective” HIV-1 proviruses in HIV-infected patients has been well documented. The current consensus view of the “defective” proviruses is that these are dead-end products that do not give rise to progeny virus and thus collectively represent a “graveyard” of viruses. We describe the presence of defective HIV-1 proviruses capable of transcribing novel unspliced HIV-RNA species in HIV-infected patients on combination antiretroviral therapy. We propose that the proviruses persistently present in combination antiretroviral therapy-treated patients are not defective in a conventional sense, but rather represent incomplete forms of proviruses encoding translationally competent HIV-RNA transcripts. Strategies directed toward curing HIV-1 infection and eliminating the state of persistent immune activation need to include approaches designed to eliminate cells harboring such proviruses. Despite years of plasma HIV-RNA levels <40 copies per milliliter during combination antiretroviral therapy (cART), the majority of HIV-infected patients exhibit persistent seropositivity to HIV-1 and evidence of immune activation. These patients also show persistence of proviruses of HIV-1 in circulating peripheral blood mononuclear cells. Many of these proviruses have been characterized as defective and thus thought to contribute little to HIV-1 pathogenesis. By combining 5′LTR-to-3′LTR single-genome amplification and direct amplicon sequencing, we have identified the presence of “defective” proviruses capable of transcribing novel unspliced HIV-RNA (usHIV-RNA) species in patients at all stages of HIV-1 infection. Although these novel usHIV-RNA transcripts had exon structures that were different from those of the known spliced HIV-RNA variants, they maintained translationally competent ORFs, involving elements of gag, pol, env, rev, and nef to encode a series of novel HIV-1 chimeric proteins. These novel usHIV-RNAs were detected in five of five patients, including four of four patients with prolonged viral suppression of HIV-RNA levels <40 copies per milliliter for more than 6 y. Our findings suggest that the persistent defective proviruses of HIV-1 are not “silent,” but rather may contribute to HIV-1 pathogenesis by stimulating host-defense pathways that target foreign nucleic acids and proteins.
Three levels of neural reuse in embodied agents

The brain in conjunction with the body is able to adapt to new environments and perform multiple behaviors through reuse of neural resources and transfer of existing behavioral traits. Although mechanisms that underlie this ability are not well known, they are largely attributed to neuromodulation. In this work, we demonstrate that an agent can be multifunctional using the same sensory and motor systems across behaviors, in the absence of modulatory mechanisms. Further, we lay out the different levels at which neural reuse can occur through a dynamical filtering of the brain-body-environment system’s operation: structural network, autonomous dynamics, and transient dynamics. Notably, transient dynamics reuse could only be explained by studying the brain-body-environment system as a whole and not just the brain. The multifunctional agent we present here demonstrates neural reuse at all three levels.
Deceiving End-to-End Deep Learning Malware Detectors using Adversarial Examples

In recent years, deep learning has shown performance breakthroughs in many applications, such as image detection, image segmentation, pose estimation, and speech recognition. However, this comes with a major concern: deep networks have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. Adversarial examples are slightly modified inputs that are intentionally designed to cause a misclassification by the model. In the domains of images and speech, the modifications are so small that they are not seen or heard by humans, but nevertheless greatly affect the classification of the model. Deep learning models have been successfully applied to malware detection. In this domain, generating adversarial examples is not straightforward, as small modifications to the bytes of the file could lead to significant changes in its functionality and validity. We introduce a novel loss function for generating adversarial examples specifically tailored for discrete input sets, such as executable bytes. We modify malicious binaries so that they would be detected as benign, while preserving their original functionality, by injecting a small sequence of bytes (payload) in the binary file. We applied this approach to an end-to-end convolutional deep learning malware detection model and show a high rate of detection evasion. Moreover, we show that our generated payload is robust enough to be transferable within different locations of the same file and across different files, and that its entropy is low and similar to that of benign data sections.
A Study of AI Population Dynamics with Million-agent Reinforcement Learning

We conduct an empirical study on discovering the ordered collective dynamics obtained by a population of intelligence agents, driven by million-agent reinforcement learning. Our intention is to put intelligent agents into a simulated natural context and verify if the principles developed in the real world could also be used in understanding an artificially-created intelligent population. To achieve this, we simulate a large-scale predator-prey world, where the laws of the world are designed by only the findings or logical equivalence that have been discovered in nature. We endow the agents with the intelligence based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). In order to scale the population size up to millions agents, a large-scale DRL training platform with redesigned experience buffer is proposed. Our results show that the population dynamics of AI agents, driven only by each agent's individual self-interest, reveals an ordered pattern that is similar to the Lotka-Volterra model studied in population biology. We further discover the emergent behaviors of collective adaptations in studying how the agents' grouping behaviors will change with the environmental resources. Both of the two findings could be explained by the self-organization theory in nature.
Embedding Learning Through Multilingual Concept Induction

We present a new method for estimating vector space representations of words: embedding learning by concept induction. We test this method on a highly parallel corpus and learn semantic representations of words in 1259 different languages in a single common space. An extensive experimental evaluation on crosslingual word similarity and sentiment analysis indicates that concept-based multilingual embedding learning performs better than previous approaches.
Accelerating growth of HFC-227ea (1,1,1,2,3,3,3-heptafluoropropane) in the atmosphere

We report the first measurements of 1,1,1,2,3,3,3-heptafluoropropane (HFC-227ea), a substitute for ozone depleting compounds, in air samples originating from remote regions of the atmosphere and present evidence for its accelerating growth. Observed mixing ratios ranged from below 0.01 ppt in deep firn air to 0.59 ppt in the current northern mid-latitudinal upper troposphere. Firn air samples collected in Greenland were used to reconstruct a history of atmospheric abundance. Year-on-year increases were deduced, with acceleration in the growth rate from 0.029 ppt per year in 2000 to 0.056 ppt per year in 2007. Upper tropospheric air samples provide evidence for a continuing growth until late 2009. Furthermore we calculated a stratospheric lifetime of 370 years from measurements of air samples collected on board high altitude aircraft and balloons. Emission estimates were determined from the reconstructed atmospheric trend and suggest that current "bottom-up" estimates of global emissions for 2005 are too high by a factor of three.
Pregnancy outcomes and infant growth among babies with in utero exposure to tenofovir-based pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV prevention.

BACKGROUND Global guidelines recommend pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) use by women at risk for HIV, including during pregnancy, a period with heightened HIV risk. However, data to support safety of PrEP use during pregnancy are limited, particularly from women using PrEP throughout pregnancy. METHODS In an open-label delivery study of PrEP integrated with ART for high risk HIV serodiscordant couples in Kenya and Uganda (the Partners Demonstration Project), women who became pregnant while using PrEP were offered the option to continue PrEP throughout pregnancy. We compared pregnancy outcomes and one-year infant growth from pregnancies with exposure to PrEP throughout pregnancy to those without any exposure, with data from the placebo arm of a prior efficacy trial of PrEP conducted in the same setting. RESULTS Outcomes from 30 women who elected to continue PrEP throughout pregnancy were compared to those from 96 pregnancies among PrEP-unexposed women. There were small non-significant decreases in the frequency of pregnancy loss (16.7% PrEP-exposed versus 23.5% PrEP-unexposed, adjusted odds ratio [aOR] = 0.59, p = 0.4) and preterm delivery (0 versus 7.7%, [aOR] = 0.54, exact p = 0.6). No congenital anomalies occurred among PrEP-exposed infants. PrEP-exposed infants had slightly lower adjusted mean z-scores for length (-1.73 versus -0.79, p = 0.05) and head circumference (0.24 versus 1.07, p = 0.04) one month after birth but were comparable to PrEP-unexposed infants in these measurements one year after birth. CONCLUSIONS This first evaluation among women using PrEP throughout pregnancy indicates no greater frequency of adverse pregnancy outcomes or restricted infant growth; these findings support recommendations permitting PrEP use during pregnancy.