Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Major Histocompatibility Complex Class I Molecules Mediate Association of SV 40 with Caveolae

Simian virus 40 (SV40) has been shown to enter mammalian cells via uncoated plasma membrane invaginations. Viral particles subsequently appear within the endoplasmic reticulum. In the present study, we have examined the surface binding and internalization of SV40 by immunoelectron microscopy. We show that SV40 associates with surface pits which have the characteristics of caveolae and are labeled with antibodies to the caveolar marker protein, caveolin-1. SV40 is believed to use major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I molecules as cell surface receptors. Using a number of MHC class I-specific monoclonal antibodies, we found that both viral infection and association of virus with caveolae were strongly reduced by preincubation with anti-MHC class I antibodies. Because binding of SV40 to MHC class I molecules may induce clustering, we investigated whether antibody cross-linked class I molecules also redistributed to caveolae. Clusters of MHC class I molecules were indeed shown to be specifically associated with caveolin-labeled surface pits. Taken together, the results suggest that SV40 may make use of MHC class I molecule clustering and the caveolae pathway to enter mammalian cells.
Lymphoma in Two Siblings: A Plausible Case of Familial Lymphoma?

We repot two cases of lymphoma manifesting in siblings, one is Hodgkin’s lymphoma (HL) and the other is Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) in a nuclear family. Each presented a year apart. The patients were well and alive as at the time of this report and did not show any signs of the disease. There was no history of tuberculosis (TB) or contact with any one with TB. Other common lymphadenopathy associated conditions were excluded and histology of excised lymph nodes was confirmatory of the lymphomas. We were constrained by facilities on the demonstration of Ebstein Barr Viruses (EBV) or genetic associations. This is the first plausible case of reported familial lymphoma in Nigeria.
Prognostic and aetiological factors in chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension

Several prognostic variables have previously been identified in patients with chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH). Specific medical conditions have also been associated with the development and prognosis of CTEPH. Using a national registry, the current authors have assessed the prognostic value of a larger number of variables and have also attempted to validate the clinical importance of previously identified aetiological factors. Baseline information for all 469 CTEPH patients diagnosed in the UK pulmonary hypertension service between January 2001 and June 2006 was collected from hospital records. Although univariate analysis confirmed the prognostic importance of pulmonary resistance, in multivariate analysis gas transfer and exercise capacity predicted pulmonary endarterectomy perioperative mortality. Cardiac index and exercise capacity independently predicted outcome in patients with nonoperable disease. Previous splenectomy was noted in 6.7% of patients, being significantly more common in patients with nonoperable than operable disease (13.7 versus 3.6%). Medical risk factors were not found to predict mortality. In a large national cohort, predictors of outcome in patients with both operable and nonoperable chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension have been identified. These may be useful in planning treatment. The aetiological importance of previously identified medical risk factors has been confirmed, although the current authors were unable to validate their prognostic strength.
GENOME-WIDE ANALYSIS OF LONG NON-CODING RNA (LNCRNA) OF AUTOIMMUNE THYROID DISEASES USING BIOINFORMATICS APPROACHES

Objective: Long non-coding RNA’s (lncRNA’s) have a crucial role in cancer biology. In this study, the genome sequence analysis of lncRNA expression in autoimmune thyroid disease is done to identify novel targets for further study of the disease. Methods: All the data were collected from Disgenet and Ensemble genome browser. Gene ontology and network analysis were performed using the standard enrichment annotation method. Association of lncRNA and their targeted mRNA were analyzed by GENEMANIA. Results: Of the all 334 lncRNA transcripts identified, only four had coding potential. LncRNA’stranscripts ENST00000462973, ENST00000555326 were involved in autoimmune thyroid disease pathway which corresponds to thyroid peroxidase (TPO) and thyroid-stimulating hormone receptor (TSHR), and this could provide better insights to therapeutics. Conclusion: Our current study on the potential link between lncRNAs and autoimmune thyroid disease presents a novel area for further investigations into the target genes of such lncRNAs, leading to therapeutic strategies for the disease. Keywords: lncRNA, Autoimmune thyroid disease, GENEMANIA
Convergent ecosystem responses to 23‐year ambient and manipulated warming link advancing snowmelt and shrub encroachment to transient and long‐term climate–soil carbon feedback

Ecosystem responses to climate change can exert positive or negative feedbacks on climate, mediated in part by slow‐moving factors such as shifts in vegetation community composition. Long‐term experimental manipulations can be used to examine such ecosystem responses, but they also present another opportunity: inferring the extent to which contemporary climate change is responsible for slow changes in ecosystems under ambient conditions. Here, using 23 years of data, we document a shift from nonwoody to woody vegetation and a loss of soil carbon in ambient plots and show that these changes track previously shown similar but faster changes under experimental warming. This allows us to infer that climate change is the cause of the observed shifts in ambient vegetation and soil carbon and that the vegetation responses mediate the observed changes in soil carbon. Our findings demonstrate the realism of an experimental manipulation, allow attribution of a climate cause to observed ambient ecosystem changes, and demonstrate how a combination of long‐term study of ambient and experimental responses to warming can identify mechanistic drivers needed for realistic predictions of the conditions under which ecosystems are likely to become carbon sources or sinks over varying timescales.
Selection of learning experts

The contextual bandits can be viewed as a generalization of online classification models, where only the chosen class is observed. The selection of learning experts allows to find the best parametrization of an expert during its learning, within a set of predefined parameters, and reduces the bias of the hypothesis space, and hence improves the performances. As the contextual bandits learn, their performances tend to increase during time, and hence the choice of the best one implies to solve a non-stationary problem. We provide a theoretical framework to solve this difficult problem. A first approach to handle the selection of learning experts problem is to reduce it to stochastic problems: the experts are learned in parallel during a first phase, then they are explored and exploited in a second phase. A second approach models the selection of learning experts as an adversarial problem with a finite budget of contaminated rewards. We call this setting adversarial bandits with budget. Here, experts are learned, selected and exploited at the same time. When the budget of contaminated rewards is known, we propose and analyze a randomized variant of the algorithm Successive Elimination. When this budget is unknown, we analyze the algorithm EXP 3 for the proposed setting. We illustrate both approaches in the case where the learning experts are based on Bandit Forests initialized with different sets of parameters.
Medical Malpractice Reform, the Supply of Physicians, and Adverse Selection

Malpractice reforms tend to reduce physicians' liability for harming patients. Because these reforms are passed at the state level, the costs of harming patients vary widely by geographic location. In this paper, I test whether malpractice reforms affect where physicians choose to practice and whether physicians who relocate in response to reforms are particularly prone to commit malpractice. Because a state’s own reforms cannot separately distinguish moral hazard from adverse selection, and because those reforms are likely to have direct effects on measures of malpractice via the legal market, I focus attention on neighboring states’ reforms. I find that when a state’s neighbor passes a cap on noneconomic damages, both the physician-to-population ratio and the malpractice rate fall. This suggests that physicians who relocate in response to noneconomic damages caps are more likely to commit malpractice.
Two-Band Excitation for HMM-Based Speech Synthesis

This letter describes a two-band excitation model for HMM-based speech synthesis. The HMM-based speech synthesis system generates speech from the HMM training data of the spectral and excitation parameters. Synthesized speech has a typical quality of "vocoded sound" mostly because of the simple excitation model with the voiced/unvoiced selection. In this letter, two-band excitation based on the harmonic plus noise speech model is proposed for generating the mixed excitation source. With this model, we can generate the mixed excitation more accurately and reduce the memory for the trained excitation data as well.
High‐resolution 360 Video Foveated Stitching for Real‐time VR

In virtual reality (VR) applications, the contents are usually generated by creating a 360° Video panorama of a real‐world scene. Although many capture devices are being released, getting high‐resolution panoramas and displaying a virtual world in real‐time remains challenging due to its computationally demanding nature. In this paper, we propose a real‐time 360° Video foveated stitching framework, that renders the entire scene in different level of detail, aiming to create a high‐resolution panoramic Video in real‐time that can be streamed directly to the client. Our foveated stitching algorithm takes Videos from multiple cameras as input, combined with measurements of human visual attention (i.e. the acuity map and the saliency map), can greatly reduce the number of pixels to be processed. We further parallelize the algorithm using GPU to achieve a responsive interface and validate our results via a user study. Our system accelerates graphics computation by a factor of 6 on a Google Cardboard display.
Gastro-oesophageal reflux and cows’ milk protein allergy

Editor,—In their very stimulating paper, Cavataio et al reported their experience concerning gastro-oesophageal reflux (GOR) associated with cows’ milk protein allergy (CMPA). 1 In a series of 47 cases of GOR, they found a very high prevalence of CMPA: 14 cases (30%); they also stressed the possibility of recognising these cases from characteristic ‘phasic’ pH tracing. We evaluated a series of 112 infants (65 boys and 47 girls; median age 3.7 months) with GOR confirmed by oesophageal 24 hour pH monitoring. Using the results of an elimination diet followed by an open challenge test, we found CMPA dependent GOR in 18 patients (16%), a rate significantly lower than that found by Cavataio et al , but similar to that of other authors.2Moreover, we failed to find any characteristic oesophageal pH-metric pattern distinguishing patients with GOR plus …
Driving-Induced Stress in Urban College Students

Urban college student commuters (N = 407) were surveyed about their experiences with stress induced by driving. Of the participants 23.6% reported becoming angry at another driver more than once per day. They rated stress from other drivers as equal to the stress experienced during a college examination but gave slightly lower ratings to traffic congestion, road construction, and finding a parking place as sources of stress. Slow drivers, a child not restrained, and a vehicle following too closely were the highest rated annoying situations. Of participants, 21.6% had reported another driver to the police; nearly 22% said they carried a weapon for protection from other drivers (5.4% said a gun). Men were more than twice as likely as women to carry a weapon and three times as likely to carry a gun. Of the total sample, 19.1% feared being shot by another driver. Most participants (75.8%) said drivers were more aggressive and dangerous than they were five years ago.
Usage of Chitosan in Thai Pharmaceutical and Cosmetic Industries

Chitosan has varieties of applications in both pharmaceutical and cosmetic products. To explore the situation of chitosan awareness and usage in Thailand is an essential information for product development from chitosan. Entrepreneurs or their representatives from GMP certified pharmaceutical and cosmetic manufacturers were interviewed during June 2007 to February 2008. One hundred and five from 225 factories (47%) participated in this study. Product awareness was very high (93.3%). For pharmaceutical industry, the most familiar applications of chitosan were anti-obesity and cholesterol lowering agent. In cosmetic industry, value of chitosan was perceived as moisturising agent, emollient, and film former. Current usage of chitosan was found in 41.4% of cosmetic industry, mainly for skin care products and 8% of pharmaceutical industry used chitosan mainly for anti-obesity food supplement. Although chitosan use was highly perceived, actual usage was moderate and low in cosmetic industry and pharmaceutical industry, respectively. Key Words: Chitosan; Cosmetic manufacturer; Pharmaceutical manufacturer
Long-term consequences of high incubation temperature in a wild bird population

Because incubation by birds is energetically costly, parents frequently trade off investment in incubation against self-maintenance. This can be manifested by a reduction in incubation temperature, which comes at high somatic costs for nestlings. The extent to which these costs constrain fitness is poorly understood. We incubated wild blue tit clutches at three biologically relevant temperatures and subsequently recorded winter survival and survival to the breeding season. Fledglings from the coldest treatment (35.0°C) survived less well than other fledglings, but the proportion of winter and breeding survivors did not differ significantly between treatments. However, survival probability in both seasons increased with body mass at fledging in birds from low and mid incubation temperatures, but decreased with fledging body mass in the high-temperature treatment. Mid-temperature nestlings were heavier as adults, weighing 7% more than low- and high-temperature survivors. Thus, high incubation temperature can be beneficial in the short term, but costs of accelerated embryonic development may equal those of protracted development in the long term. Such hidden consequences of faster development could maintain natural selection for average incubation temperature.
Pathogenesis, Natural History, and Treatment of Unruptured Intracranial Aneurysms

Unruptured intracranial aneurysms (UIAs) are a major public health issue. These lesions have become increasingly recognized in recent years with the advent of advanced cerebral imaging techniques. Epidemiological evidence from multiple sources suggests that most intracranial aneurysms do not rupture. Therefore, it is desirable to identify which UIAs are at greatest risk of rupture when considering which to repair. It is important to compare size-, site-, and group-specific natural history rates with size-, site-, and age-specific morbidity and mortality associated with UIA repair because increased natural history risk often is associated with increased risk of aneurysm repair. Patient age is crucial in decision making because of its major effect on operative morbidity and mortality; however, it does not substantially affect natural history. The effect of age is most notable in patients about 50 years of age and older for open surgery and about 70 years of age and older for endovascular procedures. In general, rupture risk is lowest for patients in asymptomatic group 1 (no history of subarachnoid hemorrhage) with UIAs less than 7 mm in diameter in the anterior circulation. Surgical morbidity and mortality are most favorable for asymptomatic patients younger than 50 years who have UIAs less than 24 mm in diameter in the anterior circulation and no history of ischemic cerebrovascular disease. Endovascular morbidity and mortality may be less age dependent, and this could favor endovascular procedures, particularly in patients aged 50 to 70 years. An important issue is determining immediate vs long-term risk regarding treatment effectiveness and durability. This issue emphasizes the importance of long-term follow-up in patients after surgical and endovascular procedures.
Characteristics of apple (Malus x domestica Borkh.) cultivars grown in Žrnovnica area

The variations between night and day temperatures in Žrnovnica, as well as other agroecological conditions make it adequate for apple (Malus x domestica Borkh.) growing. The aim of this research was to characterize pomologically and chemically apple cultivars grown in this area and to estimate the potential of the cultivar ‘Žrnovska’. The weight, length and width of fruit, dry matter content, total acidity, starch, maturity index, pH, potassium content, polyphenols and flavonoids were determined on fruit samples of 'Idared', 'Gloster', 'Golden Delicious', 'Red Delicious' and 'Žrnovska' cultivar. The cultivar ‘Red Delicious’ had the highest fruit weight (192,30g), ‘Žrnovska’ cultivar the minimum while no differences were observed between other Mira Radunić i sur. : Karakteristike sorata jabuka (Malus x domestica Borkh.) uzgajanih na području Žrnovnice 12 cultivars. Fruits of ‘Žrnovska’ cultivar, in comparison with other cultivars, had the highest firmness as well as total polyphenol and flavonoid content. According to these results it is necessary to conserve and to promote ‘Žrnovska’ cultivar as a locally recognized product.
Trabajos recientes en Xcaret, Quintana Roo

Hace ya mas de dos decadas que el ahora estado de Quintana Roo, como parte de la politica economica del pais, ha venido desarrollandose turisticamente en forma acelerada, especialmente en la franja costera norte y centro del estado, convirtiendo a1 Caribe mexicano en uno de los principales polos turisticos a nivel nacional e internacional. Este crecimiento se tradujo en la construccion masiva de obras de infraestructura turistica, principalmente, que generaron cambios significativos en la estructura economica, social y cultural de la comunidad lugarena. Asimismo, la alteracion a1 medio natural tanto terrestre como marino es en muchos casos irreversible. Este proyecto arque1ogico, como la mayoria de los realizados por arqueologos mexicanos en los ultimos anos, responde a estas transformaciones y a la inminente necesidad de recuperar la mayor cantidad de datos arqueo1ogicos que desaparecen dia con dia. Si bien es cierto que por una parte estas obras permiten en algunos casos la obtencion de fondos para la investigacion, por otra, las zonas arqueologicas quedan en su mayoria "cautivas" dentro de las instalaciones turisticas como son los jardines de un hotel o un campo de golf. Esto lleva en ocasiones a pensar si en lugar de que un adoratorio maya quede en el hoyo 10 de un campo de golf, no seria mas digno que sucumbiera bajo el peso de un trascabo.
Parkinsonism–dementia complex of Guam

On Guam and in two other Pacific locales, indigenous residents and immigrants are prone to familial neurodegeneration that manifests as atypical parkinsonism, dementia, motor neuron disease, or a combination of these three phenotypes. This progressive and fatal disease of the Mariana islands, the Kii peninsula of Japan, and the coastal plain of West New Guinea is similar and the pathological features have close affiliation with universal tauopathies, including progressive supranuclear palsy, Alzheimer's disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The Chamorros of Guam call the disease lytico‐bodig, and neuroscientists refer to it as the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis/Parkinsonism–dementia complex. During recent decades, its prevalence has declined progressively, and the age at onset has steadily increased. In 2004, motor neuron disease, once 100 times more common than elsewhere is rare, atypical parkinsonism is declining, and only dementia remains unusually common in elderly females. The cause of this obscure malady remains uncertain, despite 60 years of international research, but its ending implicates environmental influences rather than genetic predisposition. © 2005 Movement Disorder Society
The Influence of Recovery Duration After Heavy Resistance Exercise on Sprint Cycling Performance

Abstract Thatcher, R, Gifford, R, and Howatson, G. The influence of recovery duration after heavy resistance exercise on sprint cycling performance. J Strength Cond Res 26(11): 3089–3094, 2012—The aim of this study was to determine the optimal recovery duration after prior heavy resistance exercise (PHRE) when performing sprint cycling. On 5 occasions, separated by a minimum of 48 hours, 10 healthy male subjects (mean ± SD), age 25.5 ± 7.7 years, body mass 82.1 ± 9.0 kg, stature 182.6 ± 87 cm, deadlift 1-repetition maximum (1RM) 142 ± 19 kg performed a 30-second sprint cycling test. Each trial had either a 5-, 10-, 20-, or 30-minute recovery after a heavy resistance activity (5 deadlift repetitions at 85% 1RM) or a control trial with no PHRE in random order. Sprint cycling performance was assessed by peak power (PP), fatigue index, and mean power output over the first 5 seconds (MPO5), 10 seconds (MPO10), and 30 seconds (MPO30). One-way analysis of variance with repeated measures followed by paired t-tests with a Bonferroni adjustment was used to analyze data. Peak power, MPO5, and MPO10 were all significantly different during the 10-minute recovery trial to that of the control condition with values of 109, 112, and 109% of control, respectively; no difference was found for the MPO30 between trials. This study supports the use of PHRE as a strategy to improve short duration, up to, or around 10-second, sprint activity but not longer duration sprints, and a 10-minute recovery appears to be optimal to maximize performance.
Exocrine insufficiency in acute pancreatitis

Little is known about the exocrine pancreatic function during both the acute stage and during the first weeks after an episode of acute pancreatitis. Impairment of the secretion of pancreatic enzymes in the acute phase of pancreatitis has been suggested, but results from previous studies are not conclusive (1–3). Follow-up studies have shown that a considerably large group of patients may suffer from long-lasting exocrine insufficiency after acute pancreatitis, at least during the first 12–18 months after the acute episode (4–9). During the acute phase of pancreatitis, the secretory insufficiency may possess various effects, such as imposing increased stress on the inflamed pancreas with an increased demand of enzymatic release. It may also lead to atrophy of the gut mucosa as it is deprived of the hypothetic trophic action of the pancreatic enzymes. A more long-lasting exocrine insufficiency may lead to symptoms traditionally associated with chronic pancreatitis, such as malabsorption, steatorrhoea, pain and weight loss. In this review we summarize the literature available on the exocrine function in acute pancreatitis during the acute phase, during the convalescent phase and in follow-up studies, and discuss the potential value of pancreatic enzyme supplementation in acute pancreatitis.