Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coping with stress, control of emotions and biochemical markers as a common protective element in the inflammatory response to stress.

OBJECTIVES Based on a comprehensive approach to the problem of stress, we have decided to evaluate all components of a stress response - immunological (IL-1, IL-2, IL-6, IL-10, CRP, TNF-alpha) and hormonal one (CRH, ACTH), as well as to evaluate the psychological indicators of stress, coping with stress, and controlling emotional reactions as psychological markers that predispose to the most beneficial adaption in relation to stressors affecting flight personnel taking part in peace missions abroad. METHODS The research studies being the subject matter of the project were conducted among 113 antiterrorists and 123 representatives of aircrew (236 respondents in total) who participated in peace missions outside Poland. The study was conducted both before departure and during the missions. The study included a biochemical evaluation (IL-1, IL-2, IL-6, IL-10, CRP, TNF-alpha, CRH, ACTH) as well as a psychological assessment based on the Perceived Stress Scale by S. Cohen (PSS-10) and the Courtauld Emotional Control Scale (CECS) by M. Watson and S. Greer, and the COPE Inventory by J. Corver. RESULTS Based on a statistical analysis of the variables, a relationship between the level of perceived stress and the methods of coping with it as well as between the selected methods of emotion control and inflammatory response indicators, was found. CONCLUSIONS In difficult situations, accompanied by an increase in the variables responsible for the biochemical inflammatory response of an organism, the effective model of coping with difficult situations and emotioncontrol increases, while the subjective level of perceived stress drops.
Molecular diversification of regulatory T cells in nonlymphoid tissues

Different tissue microenvironments differentially refine Treg cell transcriptional regulatory modules already primed in lymphoid organs. Mapping Treg regulomes Technological advances are allowing immunologists to study rare populations of immune cells that take residence in various tissues including adipose tissue, skin, and the lung. Here, DiSpirito et al. have generated transcriptomes and chromatin accessibility maps of mouse regulatory T cells (Tregs) that reside in visceral adipose tissue, muscle, and the colon and compared them with the profiles generated from splenic Tregs. They have used these data sets to define transcriptional networks that are shared by all these populations and to identify networks that are unique to one or more tissue-resident Treg populations. Foxp3+CD4+ regulatory T cells (Tregs) accumulate in certain nonlymphoid tissues, where they control diverse aspects of organ homeostasis. Populations of tissue Tregs, as they have been termed, have transcriptomes distinct from those of their counterparts in lymphoid organs and other nonlymphoid tissues. We examined the diversification of Tregs in visceral adipose tissue, skeletal muscle, and the colon vis-à-vis lymphoid organs from the same individuals. The unique transcriptomes of the various tissue Treg populations resulted from layering of tissue-restricted open chromatin regions over regions already open in the spleen, the latter tagged by super-enhancers and particular histone marks. The binding motifs for a small number of transcription factor (TF) families were repeatedly enriched within the accessible chromatin stretches of Tregs in the three nonlymphoid tissues. However, a bioinformatically and experimentally validated transcriptional network, constructed by integrating chromatin accessibility and single-cell transcriptomic data, predicted reliance on different TF family members in the different tissues. The network analysis also revealed that tissue-restricted and broadly acting TFs were integrated into feed-forward loops to enforce tissue-specific gene expression in nonlymphoid-tissue Tregs. Overall, this study provides a framework for understanding the epigenetic dynamics of T cells operating in nonlymphoid tissues, which should inform strategies for specifically targeting them.
Amikacin Liposome Inhalation Suspension for Treatment‐Refractory Lung Disease Caused by Mycobacterium avium Complex (CONVERT). A Prospective, Open‐Label, Randomized Study

Rationale: Improved therapeutic options are needed for patients with treatment‐refractory nontuberculous mycobacterial lung disease caused by Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC). Objectives: To evaluate the efficacy and safety of daily amikacin liposome inhalation suspension (ALIS) added to standard guideline‐based therapy (GBT) in patients with refractory MAC lung disease. Methods: Adults with amikacin‐susceptible MAC lung disease and MAC‐positive sputum cultures despite at least 6 months of stable GBT were randomly assigned (2:1) to receive ALIS with GBT (ALIS + GBT) or GBT alone. Once‐daily ALIS was supplied in single‐use vials delivering 590 mg amikacin to the nebulizer. The primary endpoint was culture conversion, defined as three consecutive monthly MAC‐negative sputum cultures by Month 6. Measurements and Main Results: Enrolled patients (ALIS + GBT, n = 224; GBT‐alone, n = 112) were a mean 64.7 years old and 69.3% female. Most had underlying bronchiectasis (62.5%), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (14.3%), or both (11.9%). Culture conversion was achieved by 65 of 224 patients (29.0%) with ALIS + GBT and 10 of 112 (8.9%) with GBT alone (odds ratio, 4.22; 95% confidence interval, 2.08‐8.57; P < 0.001). Patients in the ALIS + GBT arm versus GBT alone were more likely to achieve conversion (hazard ratio, 3.90; 95% confidence interval, 2.00‐7.60). Respiratory adverse events (primarily dysphonia, cough, and dyspnea) were reported in 87.4% of patients receiving ALIS + GBT and 50.0% receiving GBT alone; serious treatment‐emergent adverse events occurred in 20.2% and 17.9% of patients, respectively. Conclusions: Addition of ALIS to GBT for treatment‐refractory MAC lung disease achieved significantly greater culture conversion by Month 6 than GBT alone, with comparable rates of serious adverse events. Clinical trial registered with www.clinicaltrials. gov (NCT02344004).
The Effect of Organized Versus Supervised Recess on Elementary School Children's Participation, Physical Activity, Play, and Social Behavior: A Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial.

BACKGROUND Recess strategies that increase children's physical activity and contribute to the daily 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) are recommended. METHODS A cluster randomized trial was conducted to examine the effect of supervised versus organized recess on children's participation, physical activity, play, and social behavior. In supervised recess, children were free to play, and physical education (PE) teachers ensured safety. In organized recess, PE teachers provided challenging tasks. Data were collected using systematic observation. Children (N = 281; 8-10 y) from 14 schools received a 6-day parkour unit in PE and three opportunities to participate in a 20-minute parkour recess. Schools were randomized over a supervised and organized parkour recess condition. RESULTS The majority of children participated in parkour recess (range = 56%-85%), with more boys participating in all 3 organized versus supervised recess sessions (57% vs 35%, P = .01). Boys spent more time in MVPA during organized recess (79% vs 71%, P = .02). Boys and girls spent more time in activity games during organized recess (59% vs 46%, P = .01; 59% vs 47%, P = .001). CONCLUSION Organized recess attracted more children and made the largest contribution to daily MVPA.
Potential of Photochemical Reflectance Index for Indicating Photochemistry and Light Use Efficiency in Leaves of European Beech and Norway Spruce Trees

Hyperspectral reflectance is becoming more frequently used for measuring the functions and productivity of ecosystems. The purpose of this study was to re-evaluate the potential of the photochemical reflectance index (PRI) for evaluating physiological status of plants. This is needed because the reasons for variation in PRI and its relationships to physiological traits remain poorly understood. We examined the relationships between PRI and photosynthetic parameters in evergreen Norway spruce and deciduous European beech grown in controlled conditions during several consecutive periods of 10–12 days between which the irradiance and air temperature were changed stepwise. These regime changes induced significant changes in foliar biochemistry and physiology. The responses of PRI corresponded particularly to alterations in the actual quantum yield of photosystem II photochemistry (ΦPSII). Acclimation responses of both species led to loss of PRI sensitivity to light use efficiency (LUE). The procedure of measuring PRI at multiple irradiance-temperature conditions has been designed also for testing accuracy of ΔPRI in estimating LUE. A correction mechanism of subtracting daily measured PRI from early morning PRI has been performed to account for differences in photosynthetic pigments between irradiance-temperature regimes. Introducing ΔPRI, which provided a better estimate of non-photochemical quenching (NPQ) compared to PRI, also improved the accuracy of LUE estimation. Furthermore, ΔPRI was able to detect the effect of drought, which is poorly observable from PRI.
Differential Potentiation of Retinoic Acid Effects against Human Breast Cancer Cells by Unsaturated Fatty Acids

Abstract Retinoic acid (RA) and unsaturated fatty acids (UFA) are proposed as nutritional anticancer agents. Nonetheless, the activity of their combination on human breast cancer needs further study. Our aim was to evaluate this activity on the MCF-7 and ZR-75-1 cell lines treated with 1 µM RA and 50 µM of γ-linoleic (GLA, ω-6), eicosapentaenoic (EPA, ω-3), oleic (OA, ω-9), or eicosatrienoic (ETA, ω-9) acids. The following cellular responses were compared by ANOVA and Fisher test (P < 0.05): fatty acids, E-cadherin, actin (differentiation), conjugated dienes, γ-glutamyltranspeptidase activity (stress), and viability, which were correlated by partial least squares regression. Although both cell lines responded differentially, RA modified unsaturated fatty acids, increased differentiation, reduced γ-glutamyltranspeptidase, and viability. RA differentiating activity on ZR-75-1 was morphologically enhanced by UFA. Stress induction with γ-glutamyltranspeptidase decrease and conjugated dienes was promoted by ETA in MCF-7, and EPA and OA in ZR-75-1. RA-related reduced viability was potentiated by EPA and OA in both lines. GLA was less active. Therefore, unsaturated fatty acids (ω-3/ω-9) potentiated the multitarget retinoic acid activity against these human breast cancer cells.
LncRNA TP73‐AS1 predicts poor prognosis and functions as oncogenic lncRNA in osteosarcoma

TP73 antisense RNA 1 (TP73‐AS1), a novel long noncoding RNA (lncRNA), has been suggested to be deregulated in various human cancers and serve as a tumor suppressor or promoter, depending on tumor types. The role of TP73‐AS1 in osteosarcoma is still unknown. In our results, TP73‐AS1 was highly expressed in osteosarcoma tissue samples and cell lines compared with matching adjacent nontumor tissue specimens and a normal human osteoblast cell line, respectively. Moreover, high expression of TP73‐AS1 was statistically associated with advanced Enneking stage, large tumor size, present distant metastasis, and poor histological grade, while exhibiting no statistical association with age, sex, and tumor site. The survival analyses showed that patients with osteosarcoma with high expression of TP73‐AS1 obviously had lower overall survival than osteosarcoma patients with low expression of TP73‐AS1, and high expression of TP73‐AS1 was an independent poor prognostic factor for osteosarcoma patients. The experiments in vitro indicated that inhibition of TP73‐AS1 expression depressed osteosarcoma cell viability, migration, and invasion, and arrested cell cycle. In conclusion, TP73‐AS1 serves as oncogenic lncRNA participated in osteosarcoma progression.
Developing an intelligent virtual agent to stratify people with cognitive complaints: A comparison of human–patient and intelligent virtual agent–patient interaction

Previous work on interactions in the memory clinic has shown that conversation analysis can be used to differentiate neurodegenerative dementia from functional memory disorder. Based on this work, a screening system was developed that uses a computerised ‘talking head’ (intelligent virtual agent) and a combination of automatic speech recognition and conversation analysis-informed programming. This system can reliably differentiate patients with functional memory disorder from those with neurodegenerative dementia by analysing the way they respond to questions from either a human doctor or the intelligent virtual agent. However, much of this computerised analysis has relied on simplistic, nonlinguistic phonetic features such as the length of pauses between talk by the two parties. To gain confidence in automation of the stratification procedure, this paper investigates whether the patients’ responses to questions asked by the intelligent virtual agent are qualitatively similar to those given in response to a doctor. All the participants in this study have a clear functional memory disorder or neurodegenerative dementia diagnosis. Analyses of patients’ responses to the intelligent virtual agent showed similar, diagnostically relevant sequential features to those found in responses to doctors’ questions. However, since the intelligent virtual agent’s questions are invariant, its use results in more consistent responses across people – regardless of diagnosis – which facilitates automatic speech recognition and makes it easier for a machine to learn patterns. Our analysis also shows why doctors do not always ask the same question in the exact same way to different patients. This sensitivity and adaptation to nuances of conversation may be interactionally helpful; for instance, altering a question may make it easier for patients to understand. While we demonstrate that some of what is said in such interactions is bound to be constructed collaboratively between doctor and patient, doctors could consider ensuring that certain, particularly important and/or relevant questions are asked in as invariant a form as possible to be better able to identify diagnostically relevant differences in patients’ responses.
Anti-Inflammatory and Skin-Moisturizing Effects of a Flavonoid Glycoside Extracted from the Aquatic Plant Nymphoides indica in Human Keratinocytes

Nymphoides indica, an aquatic plant, is used as folk medicine in some countries. Our previous study demonstrated that the methanol extract of N. indica inhibited the activity of tyrosinases, tyrosine related protein (TRP)1 and TRP2, and microphthalmia-associated transcription factor, as well as the activity of protein kinase A, by effectively inhibiting cyclic adenosine monophosphate. Although the biological activities of N. indica extract have been reported, there are no reports on the skin bioactivity of the main compound(s) on human keratinocytes. This study investigated the anti-inflammatory and moisturizing effects of quercetin 3,7-dimethyl ether 4′-glucoside (QDG) isolated from N. indica. In brief, ultraviolet B irradiated keratinocytes were pretreated with different concentrations of QDG, and the effects of QDG on various inflammatory markers were determined. QDG significantly inhibited inflammation-related cytokines and chemokines and enhanced the activation of skin barrier factors. Additionally, QDG also attenuated phosphorylation inhibition of the upstream cytokines and nuclear factor-κB expression. These results suggest that QDG isolated from N. indica may serve as a potential source of bioactive substances for chronic inflammatory skin diseases.
Unsupervised Deep Feature Learning for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval

Due to the specific characteristics and complicated contents of remote sensing (RS) images, remote sensing image retrieval (RSIR) is always an open and tough research topic in the RS community. There are two basic blocks in RSIR, including feature learning and similarity matching. In this paper, we focus on developing an effective feature learning method for RSIR. With the help of the deep learning technique, the proposed feature learning method is designed under the bag-of-words (BOW) paradigm. Thus, we name the obtained feature deep BOW (DBOW). The learning process consists of two parts, including image descriptor learning and feature construction. First, to explore the complex contents within the RS image, we extract the image descriptor in the image patch level rather than the whole image. In addition, instead of using the handcrafted feature to describe the patches, we propose the deep convolutional auto-encoder (DCAE) model to deeply learn the discriminative descriptor for the RS image. Second, the k-means algorithm is selected to generate the codebook using the obtained deep descriptors. Then, the final histogrammic DBOW features are acquired by counting the frequency of the single code word. When we get the DBOW features from the RS images, the similarities between RS images are measured using L1-norm distance. Then, the retrieval results can be acquired according to the similarity order. The encouraging experimental results counted on four public RS image archives demonstrate that our DBOW feature is effective for the RSIR task. Compared with the existing RS image features, our DBOW can achieve improved behavior on RSIR.
Understanding work enjoyment among older workers: The significance of flexible work options and age discrimination in the workplace

ABSTRACT Although the number of older workers in the U.S. is increasing, there is a gap in knowledge on whether or not they actually enjoy working. This study, based on a conceptual framework focusing on job resources and demands, explored likely workplace determinants of work enjoyment among older workers aged 50 or over. Using the 2012 wave of the Health and Retirement Study, a partial proportional odds model was used to detect determinants of work enjoyment. Results showed that higher levels of work enjoyment were significantly and negatively associated with the level of perceived retirement pressure and promotion preference for younger workers, and positively associated with moving to less demanding positions. Self-employment showed a noticeable enhancement of work enjoyment. This study highlights the significance of flexible work options and age discrimination in the workplace in understanding work enjoyment later in life.
Don't Be Alarmed: Sonifying Autonomous Vehicle Perception to Increase Situation Awareness

Lack of trust can arise when people do not know what autonomous vehicles perceive in the environment. To convey this information without causing alarm or compelling people to act, we designed and evaluated a way to sonify an autonomous vehicle's perception of salient driving events using abstract auditory icons, or "earcons. " These are localized in space using an in-car quadraphonic speaker array to correspond with the direction of events. We describe the interaction design for these awareness cues and a validation experiment (N=28) examining the effects of sonified events on drivers' sense of situation awareness, comfort, and trust. Overall, this work suggests that our designed earcons do improve people's awareness of in-simulation events. The effect of the increased situational awareness on trust and comfort is inconclusive. However, post-study design feedback suggests that sounds should have low levels of intensity and dissonance, and a sense of belonging to a common family.
Multi-Year Analyses of Columnar Aerosol Optical and Microphysical Properties in Xi'an, a Megacity in Northwestern China

A thorough understanding of aerosol optical properties and their spatio-temporal variability are required to accurately evaluate aerosol effects in the climate system. In this study, a multi-year study of aerosol optical and microphysical properties was firstly performed in Xi’an based on three years of sun photometer remote sensing measurements from 2012 to 2015. The multi-year average of aerosol optical depth (AOD) at 440 nm was about 0.88 ± 0.24 (mean ± SD), while the averaged Ångström Exponent (AE) between 440 and 870 nm was 1.02 ± 0.15. The mean value of single scattering albedo (SSA) was around 0.89 ± 0.03. Aerosol optical depth and AE showed different seasonal variation patterns. Aerosol optical depth was slightly higher in winter (0.99 ± 0.36) than in other seasons (~0.85 ± 0.20), while AE showed its minimum in spring (0.85 ± 0.05) due to the impact of dust episodes. The seasonal variations of volume particle size distribution, spectral refractive index, SSA, and asymmetry factor were also analyzed to characterize aerosols over this region. Based on the aerosol products derived from sun photometer measurements, the classification of aerosol types was also conducted using two different methods in this region. Results show that the dominant aerosol types are absorbers in all seasons, especially in winter, demonstrating the strong absorptivity of aerosols in Xi’an.
Acute Tissue Mineral Deposition in Response to a Phosphate Pulse in Experimental CKD

Pathogenic accumulation of calcium (Ca) and phosphate (PO4) in vasculature is a sentinel of advancing cardiovascular disease in chronic kidney disease (CKD). This study sought to characterize acute distribution patterns of radiolabeled 33PO4 and 45Ca in cardiovascular tissues of rats with CKD (0.25% dietary adenine). The disposition of 33PO4 and 45Ca was assessed in blood and 36 tissues after a 10‐minute intravenous infusion of one of the following: (i) PO4 pulse + tracer 33PO4; (ii) PO4 pulse + tracer 45Ca; or (iii) saline + tracer 45Ca in CKD and non‐CKD animals. After the infusion, 33PO4 in blood was elevated (2.3× at 10 minutes, 3.5× at 30 minutes, p < 0.05) in CKD compared with non‐CKD. In contrast, there was no difference in clearance of 45Ca from the blood. Compared with controls, CKD rats had a markedly increased 33PO4 incorporation in several tissues (skeletal muscle, 7.8×; heart, 5.5×), but accrual was most pronounced in the vasculature (24.8×). There was a significant, but smaller, increase in 45Ca accrual in the vasculature of CKD rats (1.25×), particularly in the calcified rat, in response to the acute phosphate load. Based on the pattern of tissue uptake of 33PO4 and 45Ca, this study revealed that an increase in circulating PO4 is an important stimulus for the accumulation of these minerals in vascular tissue in CKD. This response is further enhanced when vascular calcification is also present. The finding of enhanced vascular mineral deposition in response to an acute PO4 pulse provides evidence of significant tissue‐specific susceptibility to calcification. © 2018 American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.