Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Changes in Cry1Ac Bt Transgenic Cotton in Response to Two Environmental Factors: Temperature and Insect Damage

Abstract The efficacy of Cry1Ac Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton plants against field populations of Helicoverpa armigera (Hübner) has been inconsistent over the growing season. Any reduction in efficacy (where efficacy is the capacity of the plant to affect the survival of the insect) increases the opportunities for H. armigera to evolve resistance to Bt toxin. Changes in efficacy could be due to changes at the level of gene expression and/or in the physiological makeup of the plant and may be induced by environmental conditions. Two environmental factors, temperature and insect damage, were investigated. Temperature was found to affect efficacy, whether plants were grown at different temperatures continuously or were exposed to a change in temperature for a short period. Damage caused by chewing insects (H. armigera larvae) produced a dramatic increase in the efficacy of presquare Bt cotton. In contrast, damage by sucking insects (aphids) did not induce changes in efficacy. Changes in efficacy seemed to be mediated through modification of the physiological background of the plant rather than changes in the level of cry1Ac expression or in the concentration of the Bt toxin. The impact of the non-Bt responses of plants on strains of H. armigera should be evaluated. It is possible that by enhancing existing defensive mechanisms of plants, the rate of evolution of resistance to Bt toxins could be retarded by increasing the plants overall toxicity through the additive effects of the toxins and plant defenses.
Encountering Romanitas: Characterising the Role of Agricultural Communities in Roman Britain

Abstract There has been a hesitancy in academic discussion of Roman Britain to address the potential significance of the identity and agency of rural communities in shaping the provincial landscape. This article seeks to address the reasons for this before delineating some avenues by which we might better investigate this issue. Through two case studies the importance of kinship, agricultural peers and occupational identity (being farmers) are recognised as potential drivers for the course of rural life in Roman Britain. In so doing the extent to which ‘being Roman’ was really a central concern of many agricultural communities is questioned.
Management strategies following microsurgical flap failure

Although increasingly rare, failed microsurgical flaps are a complicated clinical problem when they occur. Review of reports of management following microsurgical flap failure offers an outline of options. A substantial number of breast and extremity patients elect abandonment of reconstruction. The majority of head and neck, breast, and extremity patients proceed to nonmicrosurgical reconstructive options. Head and neck patients (38%) and 35% of extremity patients elect to have second microsurgical flaps, and 84% of these procedures were successful.Patient management following microsurgical flap failure includes strategic abandonment of reconstruction in some cases, use of conventional procedures in a majority of cases, and further microsurgical procedures in one‐third of cases. The reconstructive surgeon should have this range of possibilities available for these difficult cases. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc. Microsurgery, 2010.
Do two and three year old children use an incremental first-NP-as-agent bias to process active transitive and passive sentences?: A permutation analysis

We used eye-tracking to investigate if and when children show an incremental bias to assume that the first noun phrase in a sentence is the agent (first-NP-as-agent bias) while processing the meaning of English active and passive transitive sentences. We also investigated whether children can override this bias to successfully distinguish active from passive sentences, after processing the remainder of the sentence frame. For this second question we used eye-tracking (Study 1) and forced-choice pointing (Study 2). For both studies, we used a paradigm in which participants simultaneously saw two novel actions with reversed agent-patient relations while listening to active and passive sentences. We compared English-speaking 25-month-olds and 41-month-olds in between-subjects sentence structure conditions (Active Transitive Condition vs. Passive Condition). A permutation analysis found that both age groups showed a bias to incrementally map the first noun in a sentence onto an agent role. Regarding the second question, 25-month-olds showed some evidence of distinguishing the two structures in the eye-tracking study. However, the 25-month-olds did not distinguish active from passive sentences in the forced choice pointing task. In contrast, the 41-month-old children did reanalyse their initial first-NP-as-agent bias to the extent that they clearly distinguished between active and passive sentences both in the eye-tracking data and in the pointing task. The results are discussed in relation to the development of syntactic (re)parsing.
Teichoic acids: antigenic determinants, chain separation, and their location in the cell wall.

Teichoic acids are linear polymers of glycerophosphate or ribitolphosphate carrying sugar or D-alanine substituents.1 Their chain length varies between 8 and 50 units and is dependent upon the isolation technique. Some occur in bacterial cell walls where they can make up between 8 and 50 per cent of the wall's dry weight; some, the so-called "intracellular" ones, in an ill-defined area between cell wall and cell membranes. From the of their discovery they were known to be anti-genic.2 the group antigens of the streptococcal group D3 and the type antigens of Staphylococcus aureus were to be teichoic acids.4 Antisera, could be obtained only with whole cells, cell walls, or crude extracts; or they were probably a consequence of previous infections as was the case for human sera against Staphylococcus aureus.5 Pure teichoic acid preparations do not act as im-munogens.6' I that precipitation and the preparation of a particulate suspension of teichoic acids render them immunogenic. Antisera thus obtained were used to elucidate the antigenic determinants of several teichoic acids. Furthermore, they tool answer the following questions:
Platinum plus bortezomib for the treatment of pediatric renal medullary carcinoma: Two cases

Renal medullary carcinoma (RMC) was first described over two decades ago as the seventh sickle nephropathy. Survival after diagnosis with metastatic disease still rarely extends beyond 1 year, with recent reports of median overall survival in patients treated with platinum therapy being just 10 months. We describe our experience using platinum‐based chemotherapy plus the proteasome inhibitor bortezomib to treat metastatic RMC in two pediatric patients who had complete responses. One patient passed away 7 years after diagnosis, while another remains disease free nearly 2 years from diagnosis.
Fermentation of Resistant Starches: Influence of In Vitro Models on Colon Carcinogenesis

Abstract: Resistant starch type 2 (RS2) and type 3 (RS3) containing preparations were digested using a batch (a) and a dynamic in vitro model (b). Furthermore, in vivo obtained indigestible fractions from ileostomy patients were used (c). Subsequently these samples were fermented with human feces with a batch and a dynamic in vitro method. The fermentation supernatants were used to treat CACO2 cells. Cytotoxicity, anti-genotoxicity against hydrogen peroxide (comet assay) and the effect on barrier function measured by trans-epithelial electrical resistance were determined. Dynamically fermented samples led to high cytotoxic activity, probably due to additional compounds added during in vitro fermentation. As a consequence only batch fermented samples were investigated further. Batch fermentation of RS resulted in an anti-genotoxic activity ranging from 9–30% decrease in DNA damage for all the samples, except for RS2-b. It is assumed that the changes in RS2 structures due to dynamic digestion resulted in a different fermentation profile not leading to any anti-genotoxic effect. Additionally, in vitro batch fermentation of RS caused an improvement in integrity across the intestinal barrier by approximately 22% for all the samples. We have demonstrated that batch in vitro fermentation of RS2 and RS3 preparations differently pre-digested are capable of inhibiting the initiation and promotion stage in colon carcinogenesis in vitro.
Domain adaptation for social localisation-based SMT: a case study using the Trommons platform

Social localisation is a kind of community action, which matches communities and the content they need, and supports their localisation efforts. The goal of social localisation-based statistical machine translation (SL-SMT) is to support and bridge global communities exchanging any type of digital content across different languages and cultures. Trommons is an open platform maintained by The Rosetta Foundation to connect non-profit translation projects and organisations with the skills and interests of volunteer translators, where they can translate, post-edit or proofread different types of documents. Using Trommons as the experimental platform, this paper focuses on domain adaptation techniques to augment SL-SMT to facilitate translators/post-editors. Specifically, the Cross Entropy Difference algorithm is used to adapt Europarl data to the social localisation data. Experimental results on English–Spanish show that the domain adaptation techniques can significantly improve translation performance by 6.82 absolute BLEU points and 5.99 absolute TER points compared to the baseline.
Clinical Correlates ofDissociative Tendencies inMale Soldiers withConversionDisorder

Aims: The aim of this study is to examine the relationship of dissociative tendencies (DT) with conversion subtype, alexithymia, severity of anxiety and depression symptoms in male soldiers with conversion disorder (CD). Methods: Fifty-five male soldiers, patients who met DSM-IV criteria for CD, were included in the study. Subjects were given Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID-I), Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES), Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (Ham-D), Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (Ham-A), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). Results: Those who had motor symptoms or deficits had lower mean DES scores than those who had no motor symptoms or deficits, whereas those who had seizures or convulsions had higher mean DES scores than those who had no seizures or convulsions. DES scores were correlated with psychic subscale of HamA, Ham-D, TAS-20 and both state anxiety and trait anxiety scores of STAI. Trait anxiety score and duration of military service were predictors for DT and they explained 34% of variance. Conclusion: The data suggest that although DT correlated with alexithymia and depression, they are fundamentally different constructs and only trait anxiety and duration of military service predicts DT in soldiers with CD.
Titanium uptake, induction of RANK‐L expression, and enhanced proliferation of human T‐lymphocytes

There is increasing evidence that titanium ions are released from orthopedic implants by biocorrosion. The aim of this study was to investigate titanium uptake by human T‐lymphocytes and its effects on phenotype and proliferation. Freshly isolated human nonadherent peripheral blood mononuclear cells (NA‐PBMC), were exposed to TiCl4 [Ti(IV)]. Bioavailability and distribution of Ti(IV) in T‐lymphocytes was determined by energy‐filtered electron microscopy (EFTEM). The effects of Ti(IV) challenge on nonactivated and PHA‐activated cells were assessed by flow cytometric analysis of surface markers, RANK‐L production, and proliferation assays. EFTEM colocalized Ti(IV) with phosphorus in the nucleus, ribosomes, cytoplasmic membranes, and the surface membrane of T‐lymphocytes. Ti(IV) increased significantly the expression of CD69, CCR4, and RANK‐L in a concentration‐dependent manner. Titanium enters T‐lymphocytes through a currently unknown mechanism and binds to phosphorus‐rich cell structures. Titanium influences phenotype and function of T‐lymphocytes, resulting in activation of a CD69+ and CCR4+ T‐lymphocyte population and secretion of RANK‐L. These results strongly suggest the involvement of titanium ions challenged T‐lymphocytes in the complex pathophysiological mechanisms of aseptic loosening of orthopedic implants. © 2009 Orthopaedic Research Society. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Orthop Res 28:341–347, 2010
MRC trial of treatment of mild hypertension: principal results. Medical Research Council Working Party.

The main aim of the trial was to determine whether drug treatment of mild hypertension (phase V diastolic pressure 90-109 mm Hg) reduced the rates of stroke, of death due to hypertension, and of coronary events in men and women aged 35-64 years. Subsidiary aims were: to compare the course of blood pressure in two groups, one taking bendrofluazide and one taking propranolol, and to compare the incidence of suspected adverse reactions to these two drugs. The study was single blind and based almost entirely in general practices; 17 354 patients were recruited, and 85 572 patient years of observation have accrued. Patients were randomly allocated at entry to take bendrofluazide or propranolol or placebo tablets. The primary results were as follows. The stroke rate was reduced on active treatment: 60 strokes occurred in the treated group and 109 in the placebo group, giving rates of 1.4 and 2.6 per 1000 patient years of observation respectively (p less than 0.01 on sequential analysis). Treatment made no difference, however, to the overall rates of coronary events: 222 events occurred on active treatment and 234 in the placebo group (5.2 and 5.5 per 1000 patient years respectively). The incidence of all cardiovascular events was reduced on active treatment: 286 events occurred in the treated group and 352 in the placebo group, giving rates of 6.7 and 8.2 per 1000 patient years respectively (p less than 0.05 on sequential analysis). For mortality from all causes treatment made no difference to the rates. There were 248 deaths in the treated group and 253 in the placebo group (rates 5.8 and 5.9 per 1000 patient years respectively). Several post hoc analyses of subgroup results were also performed but they require very cautious interpretation. The all cause mortality was reduced in men on active treatment (157 deaths versus 181 in the placebo group; 7.1 and 8.2 per 1000 patient years respectively) but increased in women on active treatment (91 deaths versus 72; 4.4 and 3.5 per 1000 patient years respectively). The difference between the sexes in their response to treatment was significant (p = 0.05). Comparison of the two active drugs showed that the reduction in stroke rate on bendrofluazide was greater than that on propranolol (p = 0.002). The stroke rate was reduced in both smokers and non-smokers taking bendrofluazide but only in non-smokers taking propranolol. This difference between the responses to the two drugs was significant (p = 0.03). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Tools Underfoot: Human Trampling as an Agent of Lithic Artifact Edge Modification

A series of eight replication experiments tests the proposition that human trampling of stone flakes can produce edge damage that mimics deliberate retouch. Retouchlike edge damage, breakage, and other forms of macroscopic mechanical damage were observed on large numbers of pieces in all trampled sets. Experiments measured the relative contributions of three variables-raw material, artifact density, and substrate-in generating damage. Results indicate that while all three factors contribute to some degree, substrate plays the most decisive role, and that artifacts are more likely to exhibit damage if trampled on an impenetrable substrate. It was further found that trampling transforms flakes into pseudo-tools that can be classified as formal tools using a standard typology. Many of these are notched and denticulate pieces, indicating that special caution is needed in behavioral interpretations based on these tool types, and that the European Paleolithic Denticulate Mousterian industry requires critical reassessment.
Identification of a Novel Co-regulator Interaction Surface on the Ligand Binding Domain of Nurr1 Using NMR Footprinting*

The nuclear receptor Nurr1 is a transcription factor essential for the development of midbrain dopaminergic neurons in vertebrates. Recent crystal structures of the Nurr1 ligand binding domain (LBD) and the Drosophila orthologue dHR38 revealed that, although these receptors share the classical LBD architecture, they lack a ligand binding cavity. This volume is instead filled with bulky hydrophobic side chains. Furthermore the “canonical” non-polar co-regulator binding groove is filled with polar side chains; thus, the regulation of transcription by this sub-family of nuclear receptor LBDs may be mediated by some other interaction surface on the LBD. We report here the identification of a novel co-regulator interface on the LBD of Nurr1. We used an NMR footprinting strategy that facilitates the identification of an interaction surface without the need of a full assignment. We found that non-polar peptides derived from the co-repressors SMRT and NCoR bind to a hydrophobic patch on the LBD of Nurr1. This binding surface involves a groove between helices 11 and 12. Mutations in this site abolish activation by the Nurr1 LBD. These findings give insight into the unique mechanism of action of this class of nuclear receptors.
Cross Lingual Transfer Learning for POS tagging

Cross lingual embeddings have been gaining a lot of traction in the natural language processing community in recent years. We build upon this success and use them for performing POS tagging in a semi-supervised way. We use a pre-trained tagger in a high resource language to transfer its information to a low resource language by learning a transformation between the word embeddings. This has a lot of potential benefits for low resource languages like Hindi, for which annotated data is not readily available. We additionally use the tags as extra features in auxiliary tasks and obtain significant improvement in performance.
EGF and TGF‐α, the ligands of hyperproduced EGFR in human esophageal carcinoma cells, act as autocrine growth factors

In order to ascertain autocrine growth factors in esophageal carcinomas, we analysed expression of mRNAs and proteins for epidermal growth factor (EGF), transforming growth factor‐α (TGF‐α) and epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) in 6 esophageal carcinoma cell lines. Gene alterations were also examined. All of the esophageal carcinoma cell lines expressed mRNA for EGFR and TGF‐α genes. Interestingly, EGF mRNA of about 5.0 kb was also detected in TE‐1, TE‐2, and TE‐8 cells. Production of protein was also confirmed by binding assay and ELISA on 3 of the 6 cell lines. The cells had a relatively high number of EGFRs and produced TGF‐α and EGF protein at the same time. Furthermore, anti‐EGF (KEM‐10) and anti‐TGF‐α (WA‐3) monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) inhibited spontaneous uptake of tritiated thymidine (3H‐TdR) by TE‐1 cells which expressed EGF, TGF‐α and EGFR mRNA and protein. These results strongly suggest that EGF and/or TGF‐α produced by carcinoma cells function as autocrine growth factors for human esophageal carcinomas.
Field surveys in Western Panama indicate populations of Atelopus varius frogs are persisting in regions where Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis is now enzootic

1Department of Biology, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, New Mexico 87801, USA 2Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118, USA 3Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA 4El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center, El Valle, PANAMÁ 5Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, Washington D.C., USA 6Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, P.O. Box 0843-03092, Balboa, Ancón, PANAMÁ
Regulation of the UNC-18–Caenorhabditis elegansSyntaxin Complex by UNC-13

The Caenorhabditis elegans unc-13,unc-18, and unc-64 genes are required for normal synaptic transmission. The UNC-18 protein binds to theunc-64 gene product C. elegans syntaxin (Ce syntaxin). However, it is not clear how this protein complex is regulated. We show that UNC-13 transiently interacts with the UNC-18-Ce syntaxin complex, resulting in rapid displacement of UNC-18 from the complex. Genetic and biochemical evidence is presented that UNC-13 contributes to the modulation of the interaction between UNC-18 and Ce syntaxin.
The human gene damage index as a gene-level approach to prioritizing exome variants

Significance The protein-coding exome of a patient with a monogenic disease contains about 20,000 variations, of which only one or two are disease causing. When attempting to select disease-causing candidate mutation(s), a challenge is to filter out as many false-positive (FP) variants as possible. In this study, we describe the gene damage index (GDI), a metric for the nonsynonymous mutational load in each protein-coding gene in the general population. We show that the GDI is an efficient gene-level method for filtering out FP variants in genes that are highly damaged in the general population. The protein-coding exome of a patient with a monogenic disease contains about 20,000 variants, only one or two of which are disease causing. We found that 58% of rare variants in the protein-coding exome of the general population are located in only 2% of the genes. Prompted by this observation, we aimed to develop a gene-level approach for predicting whether a given human protein-coding gene is likely to harbor disease-causing mutations. To this end, we derived the gene damage index (GDI): a genome-wide, gene-level metric of the mutational damage that has accumulated in the general population. We found that the GDI was correlated with selective evolutionary pressure, protein complexity, coding sequence length, and the number of paralogs. We compared GDI with the leading gene-level approaches, genic intolerance, and de novo excess, and demonstrated that GDI performed best for the detection of false positives (i.e., removing exome variants in genes irrelevant to disease), whereas genic intolerance and de novo excess performed better for the detection of true positives (i.e., assessing de novo mutations in genes likely to be disease causing). The GDI server, data, and software are freely available to noncommercial users from lab.rockefeller. edu/casanova/GDI.
Primitive Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia

W ORDS which embody the hopes, the fears, and the values of generations are likely to lose in clarity what they gain in depth. One such word is "democracy," which denoted a form of government and now stands for a way of life. It may not be amiss, therefore, first to make clear in what sense we intend to' use the word before we plunge in medias res. We shall use "democracy" in its classical rather than in its modern sense as denoting a form of government in which internal sovereignty resides in a large proportion of the governed, namely in all free, adult, male citizens without distinction of fortune or class. That sovereignty resides in these citizens implies that major decisions-such as the decision to undertake a war-are made with their consent, that these citizens constitute the supreme judicial authority in the state, and also that rulers and magistrates obtain their positions with and ultimately derive their power from that same consent. By "primitive democracy," furthermore, we understand forms of government which, though they may be considered as falling within the definition of democracy just given, differ from the classical democracies by their more primitive character: the various functions of government are as yet little specialized, the power structure is loose, and the machinery for social co-ordination by means of power is as yet imperfectly developed.