Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Capromorelin increases food consumption, body weight, growth hormone, and sustained insulin‐like growth factor 1 concentrations when administered to healthy adult Beagle dogs

This study's objective was to determine the effects in dogs of oral capromorelin, a ghrelin agonist, at different doses for 7 days on food consumption, body weight and serum concentrations of growth hormone (GH), insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), and cortisol. Adult Beagles (n = 6) were dosed with placebo BID, capromorelin at 3.0 mg/kg SID, 4.5 mg/kg SID, or 3.0 mg/kg BID. Food consumption, body weight, serum capromorelin, GH, IGF-1, and cortisol were measured at intervals on days 1, 4, 7, and 9. Capromorelin increased food consumption and body weight compared to placebo and caused increased serum GH, which returned to the baseline by 8 h postdose. The magnitude of the GH increase was less on days 4 and 7 compared to Day 1. IGF-1 concentrations increased on Day 1 in capromorelin-treated dogs and this increase was sustained through Day 7. Serum cortisol increased postdosing and returned to the baseline concentrations by 8 h. The magnitude of the increase was less on days 4 and 7 compared to Day 1. A dose of 3 mg/kg was chosen for further study in dogs based on this dose causing increased food consumption and sustained IGF-1 serum concentrations that may increase lean muscle mass when administered over extended periods.
Evaluations in vitro des restaurations en composite de classes I & II : revue de la littérature et proposition pour une classification hiérarchisée des protocoles de laboratoire non destructifs

Les restaurations adhesives posterieures sont une procedure de base de la Medecine Dentaire. Cependant, ce traitement est actuellement peu standardise en raison du large eventail d'options cliniques. Des hypotheses experimentales correspondant a des combinaisons presque illimitees entre les techniques de preparation, les systemes adhesifs et de restauration ainsi que les differents materiaux ont ete soumis a de nombreux protocoles in-vitro. Une strategie de recherche a ete fondee sur la revue des restaurations adhesives de classe I & II et des protocoles in vitro non-destructifs utilisant la base de donnees Pubmed/Medline pour une periode comprise de «1995 a 2010». Certaines de ces hypotheses ont ete evaluees de maniere exhaustive, amenant a des conclusions consensuelles alors que beaucoup d'autres options doivent encore etre validees par de nouvelles recherche in-vitro ou par des essais cliniques.
Intraindividual Analysis of Signal Intensity Changes in the Dentate Nucleus After Consecutive Serial Applications of Linear and Macrocyclic Gadolinium-Based Contrast Agents

PurposeRecent studies reported an increase in the dentate nucleus (DN)-to-pons signal intensity (SI) ratio (DN-pons SI ratio) on unenhanced T1-weighted images in patients who received consecutive serial injections of linear gadolinium-based contrast agents (GBCAs). In contrast, most studies found no increase in the DN-pons SI ratio when patients were treated with consecutive serial injections of macrocyclic GBCAs. However, the potential difference between macrocyclic and linear GBCAs has never been assessed in individuals who received subsequent applications of both contrast agents. In this retrospective study, we assessed the evolution of the DN-pons SI ratio change in patients that were treated with a comparable number of serial consecutive injections of the linear GBCA gadopentetate dimeglumine and subsequent serial injections of the macrocyclic GBCAs gadobutrol and gadoterate meglumine. Materials and MethodsData of 36 patients was analyzed. All patients underwent at least 5 consecutive administrations of the linear GBCA gadopentetate dimeglumine followed by an equal number of consecutive administrations of the macrocyclic GBCA gadobutrol. In 12 of the 36 patients, 5 or more final consecutive injections of the macrocyclic GBCA gadoterate meglumine were analyzed additionally. The difference of DN-pons SI ratios on unenhanced T1-weighted images was calculated by subtracting the ratio at the first examination from the ratio at the last examination in each of the 3 periods. ResultsThe mean DN-pons SI ratio difference in the gadopentetate dimeglumine period was significantly greater than 0 (mean ± SD, 0.0448 ± 0.0345; P < 0.001), whereas the mean DN-pons SI ratio difference in the subsequent gadobutrol and gadoterate meglumine period was significantly smaller than 0 (gadobutrol: −0.0178 ± 0.0459, P = 0.026; gadoterate meglumine: −0.0250 ± 0.0284, P = 0.011). ConclusionsIn this observational study, the application of the linear GBCA gadopentetate dimeglumine was associated with a DN-pons SI ratio increase, whereas subsequent applications of the macrocyclic GBCAs gadobutrol or gadoterate meglumine in the same patients were not. Rather, the current data tentatively suggest a decrease in preexisting hyperintensities over time when linear GBCAs are changed to macrocyclic GBCAs, potentially indicating a washout effect or precipitation of gadolinium. Future patient studies need to include control groups to replicate the present results, and additional animal studies should be conducted to clarify the underlying mechanism of the proposed SI decrease.
A new recombinant cell bioassay for ultrasensitive determination of serum estrogenic bioactivity in children.

The evaluation of estrogenic status is necessary for many physiological and pathological conditions in pediatric as well as adult endocrinology. Because current immunoassays exclusively measure E2--and with a sensitivity that is insufficient for prepubertal children--we developed a new recombinant cell bioassay for ultrasensitive determination of serum estrogenic bioactivity. This assay is based on human uterine cervix carcinoma cells, HeLa cells, that do not naturally express E2 receptor. These cells were transfected with plasmids encoding the human ERalpha or beta, along with an estrogen-responsive promoter fused to the luciferase gene, and called HELNalpha and HELNbeta for HeLa estrogen-responsive element luciferase neomycin alpha and beta. HELNalpha and HELNbeta are able to respond to estrogens and various compounds having estrogenic activity but, because of the importance of ERalpha in the reproductive function, we chose to work with the HELNalpha cell line. The luciferase activity we obtained was compared with an E2 standard curve specific for each serum sample and established with stripped serum. The estrogenic bioactivity was expressed in picograms of E2 equivalents, and the detection limit was < 1 pg x ml(-1) E2 equivalents. The intra and interassay error was lower than 10% and 20%, respectively. We measured estrogenic bioactivity in 18 normal prepubertal boys (age = 9.7 +/- 2.4 yr), 18 normal prepubertal girls (age = 9.2 +/- 1.7 yr) and 18 normal pubertal girls (age = 13.6 +/- 1.8 yr). The estrogenic bioactivity in the prepubertal girls was significantly higher than in the boys, i.e. 3.53 +/- 2.23 pg x ml(-1) vs. 1.44 +/- 0.87 pg x ml(-1) (P < 0.01). A significant difference was found between the pre- and pubertal girls, i.e. 3.53 +/- 2.23 pg x ml(-1) vs. 26.77 +/- 18.32 pg x ml(-1) (P < 0.01). This ultrasensitive bioassay measures total estrogenic bioactivity of serum with very high sensitivity. It has numerous potential applications in pediatric and adult endocrinology. In addition, this assay may help to evaluate excess estrogenic activity related to aromatase overexpression or contamination by environmental chemicals.
Pleasant emotional induction broadens the visual world of young children

These experiments aimed at studying the influence of emotional context on global/local visual processing in children. Children 5 years old, known to present an immature global visual bias, and 8 years old, known to pay attention predominantly to global information, were placed in either a neutral or pleasant emotional context and subsequently presented with a global/local visual judgement task. As with previous findings for adults, both age groups presented a pronounced perceptual bias toward global information following exposure to emotionally pleasant pictures. Interestingly, younger children, who do not present a global bias during the neutral exposure, presented the same preference for global information as older children when exposed to the pleasant context. These findings indicate that emotion may strongly affect visual perception in children, with important implications for educational practice and models of cognition.
Topology of fine-scale motions in turbulent channel flow

An investigation of topological features of the velocity gradient field of turbulent channel flow has been carried out using results from a direct numerical simulation for which the Reynolds number based on the channel half-width and the centreline velocity was 7860. Plots of the joint probability density functions of the invariants of the rate of strain and velocity gradient tensors indicated that away from the wall region, the fine-scale motions in the flow have many characteristics in common with a variety of other turbulent and transitional flows: the intermediate principal strain rate tended to be positive at sites of high viscous dissipation of kinetic energy, while the invariants of the velocity gradient tensor showed that a preference existed for stable focus/stretching and unstable node/saddle/saddle topologies. Visualization of regions in the flow with stable focus/stretching topologies revealed arrays of discrete downstream-leaning flow structures which originated near the wall and penetrated into the outer region of the flow. In all regions of the flow, there was a strong preference for the vorticity to be aligned with the intermediate principal strain rate direction, with the effect increasing near the walls in response to boundary conditions.
Concurrent Methane Production and Oxidation in Surface Sediment from Aarhus Bay, Denmark

Marine surface sediments, which are replete with sulfate, are typically considered to be devoid of endogenous methanogenesis. Yet, methanogenic archaea are present in those sediments, suggesting a potential for methanogenesis. We used an isotope dilution method based on sediment bag incubation and spiking with 13C-CH4 to quantify CH4 turnover rates in sediment from Aarhus Bay, Denmark. In two independent experiments, highest CH4 production and oxidation rates (>200 pmol cm-3 d-1) were found in the top 0–2 cm, below which rates dropped below 100 pmol cm-3 d-1 in all other segments down to 16 cm. This drop in overall methane turnover with depth was accompanied by decreasing rates of organic matter mineralization with depth. Molecular analyses based on quantitative PCR and MiSeq sequencing of archaeal 16S rRNA genes showed that the abundance of methanogenic archaea also peaked in the top 0–2 cm segment. Based on the community profiling, hydrogenotrophic and methylotrophic methanogens dominated among the methanogenic archaea in general, suggesting that methanogenesis in surface sediment could be driven by both CO2 reduction and fermentation of methylated compounds. Our results show the existence of elevated methanogenic activity and a dynamic recycling of CH4 at low concentration in sulfate-rich marine surface sediment. Considering the common environmental conditions found in other coastal systems, we speculate that such a cryptic methane cycling can be ubiquitous.
Knowledge Sourcing Effectiveness

Much of the knowledge management (KM) literature focuses on ways to increase the volume of knowledge available to employees, ensure its quality, and improve its accessibility. Such supply-side arguments are limited to the extent that they do not address the demand for knowledge within organizations. This paper takes a novel approach to understanding how access to others' knowledge produces benefits by studying the extent to which individuals intentionally access each other's expertise, experience, insights, and opinions, which we termknowledge sourcing. A general model of knowledge sourcing, including contextual and dispositional antecedents and learning outcomes, is proposed and validated using survey data from a global organization. Knowledge sourcing explains a significant proportion of individuals' learning outcomes, but the strength of this effect is moderated both by the strength of individuals' learning orientations and the degree to which they find their jobs to be intellectually demanding. For researchers, this study extends existing knowledge by proposing, testing, and validating a new way to understand an important KM issue in organizations. Practitioners can use these findings to evaluate existing KM efforts and better target future KM interventions towards those individuals most likely to benefit.
Motivational Versus Metabolic Effects of Carbohydrates on Self-Control

Self-control is critical for achievement and well-being. However, people’s capacity for self-control is limited and becomes depleted through use. One prominent explanation for this depletion posits that self-control consumes energy through carbohydrate metabolization, which further suggests that ingesting carbohydrates improves self-control. Some evidence has supported this energy model, but because of its broad implications for efforts to improve self-control, we reevaluated the role of carbohydrates in self-control processes. In four experiments, we found that (a) exerting self-control did not increase carbohydrate metabolization, as assessed with highly precise measurements of blood glucose levels under carefully standardized conditions; (b) rinsing one’s mouth with, but not ingesting, carbohydrate solutions immediately bolstered self-control; and (c) carbohydrate rinsing did not increase blood glucose. These findings challenge metabolic explanations for the role of carbohydrates in self-control depletion; we therefore propose an alternative motivational model for these and other previously observed effects of carbohydrates on self-control.
Achievable degrees of freedom of MIMO multiway relaying with pairwise data exchange

We study achievable degrees of freedom (DoF) of a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) multiway relay channel (mRC) where K users, each equipped with M antennas, exchange messages in a pairwise manner with the help of a single TV-antenna relay node. A novel and systematic way of designing beamforming vectors and matrices at the user and at the relay is proposed to realize signal alignment and to implement physical-layer network coding (PNC). It is shown that, for the considered mRC with K = 3 users, the proposed beamforming design achieves the DoF capacity for any (M, N) setups. For the scenarios with K > 3, we show that the proposed scheme can be improved by disabling a portion of relay antennas so as to align signals more efficiently. Our analysis reveals that the obtained achievable DoF is always piecewise linear, and is bounded either by the number of user antennas M or by the number of relay antennas N. Asymptotic DoF as K → ∞ is also derived based on the proposed signal alignment scheme.
Application of Ethernet Powerlink for Communication in a Linux RTAI Open CNC system

In computerized numerical control (CNC) systems, the communication bus between the controller and axis servo drives must offer high bandwidth, noise immunity, and time determinism. More and more CNC systems use real-time Ethernet protocols such as Ethernet Powerlink (EPL). Many modern controllers are closed costly hardware-based solutions. In this paper, the implementation of EPL communication bus in a PC-based CNC system is presented. The CNC system includes a PC, a software CNC controller running under Linux Real-Time Application Interface real-time operating system and servo drives communicating via EPL. The EPL stack was implemented as a real-time kernel module. Due to software-only implementation, this system is a cost-effective solution for a broad range of applications in machine control. All software systems are based on GNU General Public License or Berkeley Software Distribution licenses. Necessary modifications to the EPL stack, Linux configurations, computer basic input/output system, and motherboard configurations were presented. Experimental results of EPL communication cycle jitter on three different PCs were presented. The results confirm good performance of the presented system.
Enhancing the Motivational Affordance of Information Systems: The Effects of Real-Time Performance Feedback and Goal Setting in Group Collaboration Environments

Increasing globalization has created tremendous opportunities and challenges for organizations and societies. Consequently, a broad range of information technologies to better support the collaboration of diverse, and increasingly distributed, sets of participants is ever more utilized. Arguably, the success of such technology-mediated collaboration is dependent upon the quality of each individual's contributions; however, although individuals' motivations to do their best could be significantly influenced by the design of a system's human--computer interface, this area has received little attention within the context of group collaboration environments. We fill this gap by integrating research from human--computer interaction, motivation, and technology-supported group work to theoretically derive mechanisms for increasing each individual's motivation within a collective setting. Specifically, we manipulate the interface of a computer-mediated idea generation system (a widely used collaboration tool) to enhance the system's motivational affordance, i.e., the system's properties that fulfill users' motivational needs. Results from two studies demonstrate that by embedding the theoretically derived mechanisms “providing feedback” and “designing for optimal challenge” into the collaboration environment, significant performance gains were realized. The results suggest that even slight manipulations of the human--computer interface can contribute significantly to the successful design of a wide variety of group collaboration environments.
‘Your Heart Forecast’: a new approach for describing and communicating cardiovascular risk?

New Zealand was the first country to develop national clinical guidelines recommending that an explicit measure of absolute cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk should be the primary determinant of a decision to initiate blood pressure or lipid-lowering therapy.1 2 To facilitate the assessment of absolute CVD risk, we designed the New Zealand CVD risk charts3 which made it possible for clinicians to rapidly assess and explain a patient's risk. A patient's 5- or 10-year predicted CVD risk (a short-term measure) is now widely recommended internationally as the key clinical information to inform CVD risk-management decisions. However, 15 years after introducing the New Zealand absolute risk-based recommendations, our experience suggests that absolute risk is still not well understood by many practitioners or patients, and we believe this has been a significant barrier to the implementation of absolute CVD risk-based management. In this article, we describe the strengths and weaknesses of ‘short-term absolute CVD risk’ as a clinically useful measure and introduce a new integrated set of measures now being widely tested in New Zealand—the Heart Forecast. These measures retain the strengths of previous absolute risk-based measures while addressing their weaknesses. In our opinion and those of clinicians now using the Heart Forecast, this may represent a significant advance in absolute CVD risk communication. A patient's absolute or ‘global’ CVD risk is typically calculated as their predicted probability of having a symptomatic CVD event during the subsequent 5- or 10-year period. Measures of absolute CVD risk are derived from cohort studies that estimate the simultaneous effect of multiple risk factors on CVD event rates. The main reason for estimating patients' absolute CVD risk is to determine the likely absolute benefit of interventions (eg, the estimated number of people who could be prevented from having a new CVD event over a 5- or …
When Informed Agents Disagree

I analyze the price informativeness of three informed parties’ actions from 1994-2005. Consistent with their disparate environments, I find that insiders are more informative at longer (12-month) versus shorter (6-month) horizons, while analysts and transient institutions are only informative at shorter horizons. When inter-party disagreement exists, a party’s informativeness is not only a function of its own strength, but also the collective weakness of its counterparts. While insider signals are generally most informative, they become uninformative when prior synchronicity is low, consistent with prior impounding of firm-specific information attenuating their advantage. Finally, post Reg-FD, institutions are uninformative, indicating that their ability to inform future prices is reliant upon exclusive insider relationships.
High-Risk Sexual Behavior Among Students of a Minority-Serving University in a Community With a High HIV/AIDS Prevalence

Objective: The authors used a stratified cluster sampling design to inform campus sexually transmitted diseases prevention programs. Participants and Methods: They conducted a cross-sectional study of students (N = 1,130) at a large, urban, minority-serving university in South Florida using the 2004 National College Health Assessment Survey instrument. Results: Of the 1,130 participants, 14.0% reported risky sexual behavior (having more than 1 sexual partner in 1 year and not using a condom the last time they had vaginal intercourse), and 11.9% reported consistent risky sexual behavior (having more than 1 partner in 1 year and not using condoms most or all of the time during the past 30 days). In multivariable analysis, past-month alcohol use had the strongest independent association with both risky and consistent risky sexual behavior. Illicit drug use was marginally significant in both models. Conclusions: Administrators should address the use of alcohol and other drugs on campus in planning interventions to promote safe sexual behavior.
Prognostic value of the immunohistochemical detection of cancer‐associated fibroblasts in oral cancer: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

AIM To perform a meta-analysis to assess whether the presence of cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAF) is a prognostic marker of oral squamous cell carcinomas (OSCC). METHODS Immunohistochemical studies assessing the prognostic relevance of CAF (alpha smooth muscle actin (α-SMA)-positive fibroblasts) in patients with OSCC were systematically reviewed using Cochrane, Lilacs, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases. The outcomes assessed were overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS). The meta-analysis was performed using the random- and fixed-effects model with adjusted hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) as effect measures. The methodological quality of the included studies was assessed using the Meta-Analysis of Statistics Assessment and Review Instrument (MAStARI) tool, and the evidence quality was assessed by the Grading of Recommendation, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) system. RESULTS The presence of high levels of CAF in the stroma of OSCC predicted shortened time to DFS (HR = 3.32, 95% CI: 2.09-5.26, P < .00001) and an overall decrease in survival (HR: 2.16, 95% CI: 1.60-2.92, P < .00001). Moreover, high presence of CAF was frequently reported in association with parameters that worsen the prognosis in OSCC, including advanced disease stage (TNM classification), recurrence, tumor grade, depth of invasion, vascular, lymphatic and neural invasion, and extranodal metastatic spread. CONCLUSION The presence of CAF, as assessed by α-SMA-positive fibroblasts in the stroma, indicates poor prognosis in patients with OSCC.