Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risk-Taking and Impulsivity: The Role of Mood States and Interoception

Objectives: The consequences of impulsive decisions and actions represent a major source of concern to the health and well-being of individuals and society. It is, therefore, crucial to understand the factors which contribute to impulsive behaviors. Here, we examined how personality traits of behavioral tendencies, interoceptive sensibility as well as transient mood states predict behavioral performance on impulsivity and risk-taking tasks. Method: 574 (121 males; age 18–45) individuals completed self-report personality measures of impulsivity, reward sensitivity, punishment avoidance as well as interoceptive sensibility, undertook a mood assessment and performed a set of cognitive tasks: delay discounting (temporal impulsivity), probability discounting (risk-taking), and reflection impulsivity task. Data were interrogated using principal component analysis, correlations and regression analyses to test mutual relationships between personality traits, interoceptive sensibility, mood state and impulsive behaviors. Results: We observed a clear separation of measures used, both trait and behavioral. Namely, sensation-seeking, reward sensitivity and probability discounting reflected risk-taking. These were separate from measures associated with impulsivity, both trait (negative and positive urgency, premeditation, perseverance) and behavioral (delayed discounting and reflection impulsivity). This separation was further highlighted by their relationship with the current emotional state: positive affect was associated with increased risk-taking tendencies and risky decision-making, while negative emotions were related to heightened impulsivity measures. Interoceptive sensibility was only associated with negative emotions component. Conclusion: Our findings support the proposal that risk-taking and impulsivity represent distinct constructs that are differentially affected by current mood states. This novel insight enhances our understanding of impulsive behaviors.
Chemical Reactivity Properties, pKa Values, AGEs Inhibitor Abilities and Bioactivity Scores of the Mirabamides A–H Peptides of Marine Origin Studied by Means of Conceptual DFT

The MN12SX density functional, in connection with the Def2TZVP basis set, was assessed, together with the SMD solvation model (Solvation Model based on the Density), for calculation of the molecular properties and structure of a group of peptides of marine origin named Mirabamides A–H. All the chemical reactivity descriptors for the systems were calculated via Conceptual Density Functional Theory (CDFT). The active sites suitable for nucleophilic, electrophilic, and radical attacks were chosen by linking them with the Fukui function indices, nucleophilic and electrophilic Parr functions, and condensed Dual Descriptor Δf(r), respectively. Additionally, the pKa values for the different peptides are predicted with great accuracy as well as the ability of the studied molecule in acting as an efficient inhibitor of the formation of Advanced Glycation Endproducts (AGEs), which constitutes a useful knowledge for the development of drugs for fighting Diabetes, Alzheimer and Parkinson diseases. Finally, the bioactivity scores for the Mirabamides A–H are predicted through different methodologies.
The Toxic Effects of Aflatoxin B1 and Aflatoxin M1 on Kidney through Regulating L-Proline and Downstream Apoptosis

The toxic effects and potential mechanisms of aflatoxin B1 (AFB1), aflatoxin M1 (AFM1), and AFB1+AFM1 in the kidney were studied and compared in HEK 293 cells model and CD-1 mice model. The 35-day subacute toxicity mice model was constructed, biochemical indicators and kidney pathological staining were detected, kidney metabonomics detection was performed, and the metabolites were analyzed, and then the related toxicity mechanism was validated. Results showed that AFB1 (0.5 mg/kg), AFM1 (3.5 mg/kg), and AFB1 (0.5 mg/kg)+AFM1 (3.5 mg/kg) activated oxidative stress and caused renal damage. The relative concentration of the metabolite L-proline was found to be lower in aflatoxins treatment groups when compared with the control (P < 0.05). Moreover, with the treatment of aflatoxins, proline dehydrogenase (PRODH) and proapoptotic factors (Bax, Caspase-3) were upregulated, while the inhibitor of apoptosis Bcl-2 was downregulated, at both the mRNA and the protein levels, comparing with the control (P < 0.05). In addition, the combined effect of AFB1 and AFM1 was validated, for the toxicity of the combination was stronger than the other two groups. In conclusion, AFB1 and AFM1 caused kidney toxicity by activating oxidative stress through altering expression of PRODH and L-proline levels, which then induced downstream apoptosis.
Culture-Confirmed Tuberculosis in South African Infants Younger Than 3 Months of Age: Clinical Presentation and Management of Respiratory Complications.

BACKGROUND Little is known about the course and management of perinatal tuberculosis (TB). We describe the presentation, medical and surgical management of culture-confirmed TB in infants younger than 3 months of age. METHODS We conducted a retrospective study including all infants younger than 3 months of age with culture-confirmed TB admitted to Tygerberg Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa from March 2003 through June 2015. RESULTS During the study period, 106 of 2017 (5%) children younger than 13 years of age with culture-confirmed TB were infants younger than 3 months of age. The median age on admission was 67 days (IQR 40-79). Intrathoracic TB was present in 101 (95%) infants; of these, 34 (32%) had extrathoracic TB (ETTB). Two (2%) infants had ETTB only, while 3 (3%) infants were asymptomatic and diagnosed as having TB infection only. Forty (38%) infants were HIV-exposed and 14 (13%) were HIV-infected. The mother was identified as the source case in 53 (50%) infants. Mycobacterium tuberculosis was cultured in a median of 2 (IQR 1-7) specimens per infant; 9 (9%) had drug-resistant TB. Bronchoscopy was done in 37 (35%) infants and 27 (26%) underwent intrathoracic lymph node decompression. Twelve (11%) infants died during admission, 81(76%) were clinically stable on transfer or discharge from hospital and outcome was not documented in 13 (12%) infants. CONCLUSIONS TB in young infants often presents with severe intrathoracic disease, including airway compression. Bronchoscopy may aid the confirmation of the diagnosis and management; decompression of intrathoracic lymph nodes was common. Mortality in this age group remains high.
Comparative analysis of whole flower transcriptomes in the Zingiberales

The advancement of next generation sequencing technologies (NGS) has revolutionized our ability to generate large quantities of data at a genomic scale. Despite great challenges, these new sequencing technologies have empowered scientists to explore various relevant biological questions on non-model organisms, even in the absence of a complete sequenced reference genome. Here, we analyzed whole flower transcriptome libraries from exemplar species across the monocot order Zingiberales, using a comparative approach in order to gain insight into the evolution of the molecular mechanisms underlying flower development in the group. We identified 4,153 coding genes shared by all floral transcriptomes analyzed, and 1,748 genes that are only retrieved in the Zingiberales. We also identified 666 genes that are unique to the ginger lineage, and 2,001 that are only found in the banana group, while in the outgroup species Dichorisandra thyrsiflora J.C. Mikan (Commelinaceae) we retrieved 2,686 unique genes. It is possible that some of these genes underlie lineage-specific molecular mechanisms of floral diversification. We further discuss the nature of these lineage-specific datasets, emphasizing conserved and unique molecular processes with special emphasis in the Zingiberales. We also briefly discuss the strengths and shortcomings of de novo assembly for the study of developmental processes across divergent taxa from a particular order. Although this comparison is based exclusively on coding genes, with particular emphasis in transcription factors, we believe that the careful study of other regulatory mechanisms, such as non-coding RNAs, might reveal new levels of complexity, which were not explored in this work.
What do character-level models learn about morphology? The case of dependency parsing

When parsing morphologically-rich languages with neural models, it is beneficial to model input at the character level, and it has been claimed that this is because character-level models learn morphology. We test these claims by comparing character-level models to an oracle with access to explicit morphological analysis on twelve languages with varying morphological typologies. Our results highlight many strengths of character-level models, but also show that they are poor at disambiguating some words, particularly in the face of case syncretism. We then demonstrate that explicitly modeling morphological case improves our best model, showing that character-level models can benefit from targeted forms of explicit morphological modeling.
A Novel Weighted Doppler Centroid Estimation Approach Based on Electromagnetic Scattering Model for Multichannel in Azimuth HRWS SAR System

Similar to the conventional squint mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging processing, the estimation of Doppler centroid is one key problem for the low-squint-mode (within the range of [−5°, 5°]) multichannel in an azimuth high-resolution and wide-swath (HRWS) SAR system. In this paper, based on the electromagnetic scattering model, a novel weighted Doppler centroid estimation approach is proposed for the multichannel in the azimuth HRWS (MC-HRWS) SAR system. First, Maxwell’s equations are employed to derive the echo model for the multichannel SAR system. Then, an improved backscattering model is presented based on the small perturbation method and the available echo model, which is adopted to produce the weights for Doppler centroid estimation. More importantly, in order to improve the precision of Doppler centroid estimation, a weighted ambiguity-free Doppler centroid estimation approach is proposed, where the range-variant characteristic of Doppler centroid is employed to resolve the ambiguity number of Doppler centroid, and the echoes from different range bins with different signal-to-noise ratios are considered. In addition, the Cramer–Rao low bound of the estimated Doppler centroid is also discussed in this paper. The effectiveness of the proposed Doppler centroid estimation approach is verified via simulated and real measured low-squint-mode MC-HRWS SAR data.
Cognitive Consistency Routing Algorithm of Capsule-network

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are computational models inspired by the central nervous system (especially the brain) of animals and are used to estimate or generate unknown approximation functions relied on large amounts of inputs. Capsule Neural Network (Sabour S, et al.[2017]) is a novel structure of Convolutional Neural Networks which simulates the visual processing system of human brain. In this paper, we introduce psychological theories which called Cognitive Consistency to optimize the routing algorithm of Capsnet to make it more close to the work pattern of human brain. It has been shown in the experiment that a progress had been made compared with the baseline.
Card-660: Cambridge Rare Word Dataset - a Reliable Benchmark for Infrequent Word Representation Models

Rare word representation has recently enjoyed a surge of interest, owing to the crucial role that effective handling of infrequent words can play in accurate semantic understanding. However, there is a paucity of reliable benchmarks for evaluation and comparison of these techniques. We show in this paper that the only existing benchmark (the Stanford Rare Word dataset) suffers from low-confidence annotations and limited vocabulary; hence, it does not constitute a solid comparison framework. In order to fill this evaluation gap, we propose Cambridge Rare word Dataset (Card-660), an expert-annotated word similarity dataset which provides a highly reliable, yet challenging, benchmark for rare word representation techniques. Through a set of experiments we show that even the best mainstream word embeddings, with millions of words in their vocabularies, are unable to achieve performances higher than 0.43 (Pearson correlation) on the dataset, compared to a human-level upperbound of 0.90. We release the dataset and the annotation materials at https://pilehvar.github. io/card-660/.
Nonlinear Compressed Sensing Based on Kernel Sparse Representation

The validity of the compressed sensing (CS) is premised on the sparsity of the signals. In general, a signal is sparse if it can be linearly represented by few column combinations of a certain basis matrix. However, when signals exhibit some complex structure, or in other words, are difficult or inconvenient to be linearly represented, existing many CS methods may suffer from poor performance. In this paper, by introducing a sample set and the widely used kernel trick to CS, we investigate a sample based nonlinear compressed sensing (SNCS) model. In particular, with the help of kernel trick, our SNCS model can capture the nonlinear sparse structure of signals, and hence leads to a better performance than that of the traditional CS. On the other hand, due to the introduction of sample set, our SNCS model performs again better than a recent emerged kernel trick compressed sensing (KTCS) model. What's more, the optimization problem induced by our SNCS model still keeps concise and is easily solved by traditional CS methods.
Reconfiguration of solar fields by means of forced activation of bypass diodes

This paper proposes a method to recover energy losses occurring in partially shaded solar fields when the MPPT algorithm converge in a local maximum power point in place of the global maximum power point. The method is based on the observation that the distortion of the power voltage curve, and the appearance of multiple maxima, originates from the turning off of bypass diodes when, at increasing voltages, the current delivered by sunny modules becomes comparable with that delivered by shaded ones. Forced bypass of shaded modules smoothes the power voltage curve and allows the MPPT to reach the global maximum power point.
Placenta accreta: importance of a multidisciplinary approach in the Colombian hospital setting

Abstract Introduction: The management of patients with placenta accreta (PA) poses a challenge to health services. Although it may lead to devastating complications, its low incidence limits the development of expertize in all obstetric centers. We evaluated the results obtained from a multidisciplinary approach in patients with PA in a Latin American hospital. Methods: The study included patients with prenatal suspicion or intraoperative diagnosis of PA, before and after initiating a set of interdisciplinary and institutional interventions, with the aim of achieving better outcomes. Results: From December 2011 to December 2017, 62 patients with prenatally or intraoperatively suspected PA underwent surgery. The first 30 women (Group A), admitted until April 2016 and before any changes in the management protocol, had a longer hospital stay and surgery time, higher newborn hospitalization, and greater use of general anesthesia, compared to the 20 patients from Group B, who were admitted during the last 20 months of the observation period. A total of 12 women with late and intraoperative diagnosis, under no institutional protocol, showed greater blood loss and more frequent red blood cell transfusions. Conclusions: The expertize of the multidisciplinary team responsible for managing women with PA is associated with better clinical outcomes.
Implementing and Parallelizing Real-time Lane Detection on Heterogeneous Platforms

Lane detection is a cardinal functionality in state-of-the-art Advanced Driver Assistant Systems (ADAS). However, it is still not straightforward to fulfill the real-time performance demand of processing High Definition (HD) images with high robustness and scalability. To address this problem, we propose an improved lane detection algorithm based on top-view image transformation and two-stage RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) model fitting. By virtue of off-line affine homography matrix adaption to bound an adaptive Region Of Interest (ROI) for subsequent on-line Warp Perspective Mapping (WPM) transformation, the algorithm can analyze arbitrary on-road videos and generate adaptive ROI without priori knowledge about camera parameter. To ensure the scalability, we present a comprehensive parallel design of the application in a heterogeneous system consisting of multi-core CPU, GPU and FPGA. We show in detail how the potentially parallel task loads are implemented and optimized so that they can be mapped to the most suitable processor so as to achieve optimal performance. Experimental results reveal that our improved algorithm can robustly process the video streams with a higher accuracy. Moreover, the heterogeneous executions are capable of processing HD $\mathbf{1920}\times \mathbf{1080}$ images with runtime performance of 81.6 fps and 47.9 fps, respectively, on an AMD FirePro W7100 GPU and a Terasic Arria 10 FPGA.
Maximizing the Survival of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Patients: Current Perspectives

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a neurodegenerative disease that leads to loss of the upper and lower motor neurons. Almost 90% of all cases occur in the sporadic form, with the rest occurring in the familial form. The disease has a poor prognosis, with only two disease-modifying drugs approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The approved drugs for the disease have very limited survival benefits. Edaravone is a new FDA-approved medication that may slow the disease progression by 33% in a selected subgroup of ALS patients. This paper covers the various interventions that may provide survival benefits, such as early diagnosis, medications, gene therapy, stem cell therapy, diet, nutritional supplements, multidisciplinary clinics, and mechanical invasive and noninvasive ventilation. The recent data on masitinib, the role of enteral feeding, gene therapy, and stem cell therapy is discussed.
Paternal Care Impacts Oxytocin Expression in California Mouse Offspring and Basal Testosterone in Female, but Not Male Pups

Natural variations in parenting are associated with differences in expression of several hormones and neuropeptides which may mediate lasting effects on offspring development, like regulation of stress reactivity and social behavior. Using the bi-parental California mouse, we have demonstrated that parenting and aggression are programmed, at least in part, by paternal behavior as adult offspring model the degree of parental behavior received in development and are more territorial following high as compared to low levels of care. Development of these behaviors may be driven by transient increases in testosterone following paternal retrievals and increased adult arginine vasopressin (AVP) immunoreactivity within the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) among high-care (HC) offspring. It remains unclear, however, whether other neuropeptides, such as oxytocin (OT), which is sensitive to gonadal steroids, are similarly impacted by father-offspring interactions. To test this question, we manipulated paternal care (high and low care) and examined differences in adult offspring OT-immunoreactive (OT-ir) within social brain areas as well as basal T and corticosterone (Cort) levels. HC offspring had more OT-ir within the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) and supraoptic nucleus (SON) than low-care (LC) offspring. Additionally, T levels were higher among HC than LC females, but no differences were found in males. There were no differences in Cort indicating that our brief father-pup separations likely had no consequences on stress reactivity. Together with our previous work, our data suggest that social behavior may be programmed by paternal care through lasting influences on the neuroendocrine system.
Psychological and physiological effects of laughter yoga sessions in Japan: A pilot study

The purpose of this pilot study was to examine and evaluate the psychological and physiological effects of multiple sessions of laughter yoga on community members. Participants took part in a 45 min laughter yoga session once per month for 6 months. Before and after all sessions, participants completed the Profile of Mood States-Brief Japanese Version (J-POMS-B) questionnaire to assess their mood, and had blood drawn for the measurement of stress indicators and immune function. Serial changes in J-POMS-B scores were tested by three way analysis of variance, and changes in laboratory results per session were evaluated with a paired t-test. The results showed that repeated sessions of laughter yoga had psychologically beneficial effects, especially on the aspects of tension-anxiety, and vigor. Adrenocorticotropic hormone and cortisol values related to the participants' stress levels were significantly decreased after the fourth laughter yoga session. These results indicated that multiple laughter yoga sessions appeared to be effective in improving the psychological and physiological status of healthy adults.
Endothelial YAP1 in Regenerative Lung Growth through the Angiopoietin‐Tie2 Pathway

Abstract Angiogenesis, the formation of new blood capillaries, plays a key role in organ development and regeneration. Inhibition of lung angiogenesis through the blockade of angiogenic signaling pathways impairs compensatory and regenerative lung growth after unilateral pneumonectomy (PNX). The Hippo signaling transducer, Yes‐associated protein (YAP) 1 binds to TEA domain transcription factor (TEAD) and controls organ size and regeneration. However, the role of endothelial YAP1 in lung vascular and alveolar morphogenesis remains unclear. In this report, we demonstrate that knockdown of YAP1 in endothelial cells (ECs) decreases angiogenic factor receptor Tie2 expression, and inhibits EC sprouting and epithelial cell budding in vitro and vascular and alveolar morphogenesis in the gel implanted on the mouse lung. The expression levels of YAP1, TEAD1, and Tie2 increase in ECs isolated from the remaining mouse lungs after unilateral PNX and vascular formation is stimulated in the post‐PNX mouse lungs. Knockdown of endothelial YAP1 inhibits compensatory lung growth and vascular and alveolar morphogenesis after unilateral PNX. These findings suggest that endothelial YAP1 is required for lung vascular and alveolar regeneration and modulation of YAP1 in ECs may be novel interventions for the improvement of lung regeneration.