Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transcriptional Activation by the Mouse Ah Receptor.

The aromatic hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) is a ligand-dependent transcription factor that mediates cellular responses to the environmental contaminant 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD). We cloned AhR cDNA from C57BL/6 mouse liver and verified by transfection that it encodes a functional protein. Analyses of deletion mutants indicate that the carboxyl half of AhR contains several types of transactivation domain, which function independently of domains that mediate TCDD recognition, DNA binding, and heterodimerization with the Ah receptor nuclear translocator (Arnt) protein. The transactivation domains function independently of each other, display different levels of activity, and act synergistically when linked. In addition, AhR contains an 82-amino acid domain that inhibits transactivation. The inhibitory domain displays specificity, in that it blocks the transactivating functions of AhR and Arnt, but not that of the herpes simplex protein VP16. The inhibitory activity depends upon the cell type in which AhR is expressed, implying that a cell-specific protein mediates the effect.
Glycogen and glycogen-hydrolysing lysosomal enzyme activity in mouse liver: effects of fasting, adrenoceptor antagonism and insulin-induced hypoglycaemia.

Whereas the phosphorolytic breakdown of liver glycogen is known to be of great physiological importance, the functional role of the hydrolytic glycogenolysis in the lysosomal system is less well understood. In the present study the effects of fasting, alpha- and beta-adrenoceptor antagonism and insulin-induced hypoglycaemia on liver lysosomal glycogen-hydrolysing enzyme activity were investigated in mice. In freely fed mice the glycogen-hydrolysing activity (acid amyloglucosidase) was only 50% of the maltose-hydrolysing activity (acid maltase). Starvation for 24 h reduced the acid amyloglucosidase activity by approximately 30% (P less than 0.001), whereas the activities of acid maltase, acid phosphatase and beta-glucuronidase appeared unaffected. N-acetyl-beta-D-glucosaminidase activity was moderately (20%; P less than 0.01) enhanced by fasting. Thus, liver lysosomal enzyme activities may change independently of each other during fasting. Further, during short-term hypoglycaemic conditions (45 min) induced by endogenous or exogenous insulin, the activity of liver acid amyloglucosidase was found to be moderately reduced (15-20%). Blockade of alpha- and beta-adrenoceptors by phentolamine and propranolol did not result in any apparent influence on acid amyloglucosidase activity except for the indirect effect exerted by the phentolamine-induced hypoglycaemia. A moderate negative correlation (r = -0.51; P less than 0.001) between total liver glycogen concentration and acid amyloglucosidase activity was observed in a series of 43 freely fed NMRI mice. Our data show that in mouse liver the acid maltase activity predominates over the acid amyloglucosidase activity. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Detection of wind farm using the relative phase of compact polarimetry SAR

This paper discusses the potential for automatic ocean surveillance using compact linear polarization (CL-pol) SAR, with large area coverage, including high sea state conditions. Here, the target is a wind farm in the North Sea. The relative phase derived from CL-pol SAR is employed for detection of the wind turbines, apart from the wind turbines' wakes, based on fine mode quad-polarization (quad-pol) RADARSAT-2 (RS-2) images. The relative phase of CL-pol measurements improves the contrast between the wind turbines and their wakes, because its sign is opposite for these two entities. Therefore, the relative phase of CL-pol SAR provides new light on the problem of operational auto-detection of man-made targets, under high sea state conditions, over large areas.
You've Got Hypertext

In this paper we consider possible “future everyday hypertext systems. ” To ground our discussion, we look first at the functional and conceptual definitions of hypertext that have evolved in the hypertext research community. We then consider these definitions against the Web, the best known current everyday hypertext, but one that the hypertext community has regarded as only partially a hypertext system at best. We propose, however, that a full, rich hypertext is alive and well and living in an equally successful everyday system, and that that system is email. We look at how email meets the criteria, both functionally and conceptually for rich hypertext. We then use email-as-hypertext as our touchstone for assessing future hypertext systems. In particular, we consider the newest system on the Web event horizon, the Semantic Web, and show how the potential hypertextness of the Semantic Web has been anticipated by pre- and co-Web hypertext research systems. We consider how, if informed by the attributes of our email model, the Semantic Web may be able to break away from the limited hypertext model of the Web to become a rich, everyday hypertext system like email. We present three current hypertext research efforts that use the Semantic Web platform to show how these may be seen to embody such email-like hypertext qualities.
Australian Physiological and Pharmacological Society Symposium Muscle : From Metabolism to Molecules SKELETAL MUSCLE METABOLISM DURING EXERCISE IN HUMANS

1. Contracting skeletal muscle is able to use a number of intraand extramuscular substrates to generate ATP during exercise. These include creatine phosphate (CP), muscle glycogen, blood-borne glucose, lactate and free fatty acids (FFA), derived from either adipose tissue or intramuscular triglyceride stores. 2. During high-intensity short-duration exercise, CP degradation and the breakdown of muscle glycogen to lactate are the major energy yielding pathways, although oxidative metabolism can make a significant contribution. The ‘anaerobic’ substrates are also important fuels during the transition from rest to steady state exercise. 3. The oxidative metabolism of carbohydrate and lipid supplies most, if not all, of the ATP during prolonged submaximal exercise. Muscle glycogen, blood glucose and FFA are the key fuels. The relative importance of the various substrates for exercise metabolism is primarily determined by exercise intensity and duration, although training status, dietary manipulation and environmental factors can modify the metabolic response to exercise.
Relationship between glycolytic potential and technological quality of meat and dry-cured Parma ham in the Italian heavy pig.

The glycolytic potential (GP) was determined at 1 hour post mortem on Biceps femoris (BF) muscle collected from the carcasses of 158 commercial hybrid pigs and 349 Duroc x (Landrace x Large White) crossbreeds. The pH and pHu values were measured in the Biceps femoris (BF), semimembranosus (SM), and Longissimus thoracis (LT) muscles. Drip and cooking losses were evaluated on the LT muscle. The technological losses during the first salting phase and at the end of curing were calculated in hams processed as dry-cured Parma ham. The glycolytic potential averaged 128.6 μmol/g in commercial hybrid pigs and 138.9 μmol/g in crossbreeds. The percentage of carcasses with a GP value exceeding 180 μmol/g, considered as threshold value for identifying carriers of the RN allele of the RN gene, were 1.9% and 9.8%, respectively. The correlation coefficients between pHu and GP were between -0.22 and -0.44 (P<0.01) while the coefficients between the GP and the losses due to first salting and curing varied between +0.22 and +0.39 (P<0.01). On the whole, the results obtained point to the need to check the meat glycolytic potential in Italian heavy pig since an increase could have a negative influence on the production of Parma ham due to increase in weight loss during the curing process.
Macrolide treatment for Mycobacterium abscessus and Mycobacterium massiliense infection and inducible resistance.

RATIONALE Macrolides, such as clarithromycin (CLR) and azithromycin (AZM), are frequently the only oral antibiotics that are active against Mycobacterium abscessus and M. massiliense infections. OBJECTIVES To compare the activity of CLR and AZM in experimental models. METHODS We compared the treatment efficacies of CLR and AZM and determined the correlation between efficacy and induced erythromycin ribosome methyltransferase gene (erm)(41) expression in experimental models of M. abscessus and M. massiliense infections. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS In all tested M. abscessus isolates, a high level of inducible CLR resistance developed (minimal inhibitory concentration [MIC] on Day 3 versus Day 14; P < 0.001). Whereas the AZM MIC increased on Day 14 (P < 0.01 versus Day 3), the level was significantly lower than the CLR MIC on Day 14 (P < 0.001). However, the MICs of CLR and AZM for the M. massiliense isolates did not change. Compared with CLR, AZM presented greater antibiotic activity against M. abscessus in vitro, ex vivo, and in vivo (P < 0.05), whereas both macrolides were comparably effective against M. massiliense. In M. abscessus infection, the level of erm(41) expression was higher after exposure to CLR than after exposure to AZM (P < 0.001). Experiments using an erm(41)-knockout M. abscessus mutant and an M. massiliense transformant expressing M. abscessus erm(41) confirmed that erm(41) was responsible for inducible CLR resistance. CONCLUSIONS CLR induces greater erm(41) expression and thus higher macrolide resistance than AZM in M. abscessus infection. AZM may be more effective against M. abscessus, whereas both macrolides appear to be equally effective against M. massiliense.
Activation Systems for Latent Matrix Metalloproteinase-2 are Upregulated Immediately after Focal Cerebral Ischemia

During focal cerebral ischemia, matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2) can contribute to the loss of microvessel integrity within ischemic regions by degrading the basal lamina. MMP-2 is secreted in latent form (pro-MMP-2), but the activation of pro-MMP-2 in the ischemic territory has not been shown. Immunohistochemical and in situ hybridization studies of the expression of the direct activators of MMP-2, MT1-MMP and MT3-MMP, and the indirect activation system tissue plasminogen activator, urokinase (u-PA), its receptor (u-PAR), and its inhibitor PAI-1 after middle cerebral artery occlusion/reperfusion were undertaken in basal ganglia samples from 26 adolescent male baboons. The expressions of all three MMPs, u-PA, u-PAR, and PA1-1, but not tissue plasminogen activator, were increased from 1 hour after middle cerebral artery occlusion in the ischemic core. mRNA transcripts confirmed the increases in latent MMP-2, u-PA, u-PAR, and PAI-1 antigen very early after middle cerebral artery occlusion. The expression patterns are consistent with secretion of pro-MMP-2 and its activators in the ischemic core, perhaps from separate cell compartments. The rapid and coordinate appearance of pro-MMP-2 and its activation apparatus suggest that in the primate striatum this protease may participate in matrix injury during focal cerebral ischemia.
A Semi-Supervised Learning Approach for Acoustic-Prosodic Personality Perception in Under-Resourced Domains

Automatic personality analysis has gained attention in the last years as a fundamental dimension in human-to-human and human-to-machine interaction. However, it still suffers from limited number and size of speech corpora for speciﬁc domains, such as the assessment of children’s personality. This paper investigates a semi-supervised training approach to tackle this scenario. We devise an experimental setup with age and language mismatch and two training sets: a small labeled training set from the Interspeech 2012 Personality Sub-challenge, containing French adult speech labeled with personality OCEAN traits, and a large unlabeled training set of Portuguese children’s speech. As test set, a corpus of Portuguese children’s speech labeled with OCEAN traits is used. Based on this setting, we investigate a weak supervision approach that iteratively reﬁnes an initial model trained with the labeled data-set using the unlabeled data-set. We also investigate knowledge-based features, which leverage expert knowledge in acoustic-prosodic cues and thus need no extra data. Results show that, despite the large mismatch imposed by language and age differences, it is possible to attain improvements with these techniques, pointing both to the beneﬁts of using a weak supervision and expert-based acoustic-prosodic features across age and language.
Variation of Respiratory Syncytial Virus and the Relation With Meteorological Factors in Different Winter Seasons

Background: Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the most important viral agent causing severe respiratory disease in infants and children. In temperate climates, RSV activity typically peaks during winter. We have described the seasonal variation in RSV activity and investigated which meteorological variables are related to RSV outbreaks for different time lags. Methods: Eleven laboratories in the Netherlands collected data on RSV during the period 1998–2005. Meteorological data were obtained from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. General linear methods were used to determine the relative contribution of meteorological conditions to reported RSV cases in the winter period. Time lags up to 4 weeks were included to assess a possible delayed weather effect in relation to RSV activity. Results: Onset of RSV activity occurred around week 44 and activity peaked around week 52. Timing of peak activity was very consistent over the study period. Relative humidity was positively associated with RSV activity for all time lags, indicating more RSV when relative humidity increased. Minimum temperature was negatively associated with RSV activity and cloud cover was positively related with RSV activity. Interaction (P < 0.06) between minimum temperature and relative humidity was observed for a lag of 0, 1, and 2 weeks, indicating that the combination of low temperature and high humidity contributes more to RSV activity than temperature and humidity alone. Conclusions: Relative humidity, minimum temperature, and cloud cover are important predictors of RSV activity in the Netherlands, with the effect of relative humidity being most consistent.
Functional Quantitative and Qualitative Models for Quality Modeling in a Fused Deposition Modeling Process

Additive manufacturing (AM) enables flexible part geometry and functionality, and reduces product development life cycle by direct layer-wise fabrication from CAD files. In the last decade, great achievements are made on AM materials, machines, processes, etc. However, the quality of the AM parts is still questionable for industrial specifications. On the one hand, AM part quality variables can be either quantitative, such as dimensional accuracy, or qualitative, such as binary indicators for voids, missing features, or surface roughness. On the other hand, both offline process setting variables and functional in situ process variables can be measured and modeled with both quantitative and qualitative (QQ) quality response variables. In this paper, the QQ quality response variables are modeled by offline process setting variables and in situ process variables via functional QQ models. The modeling of these in situ process variables provides the basis for real-time monitoring and control for AM processes. Simulation studies and experimental data from a fused deposition modeling process are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Note to Practitioners—Additive manufacturing (AM) processes have attracted much attention and showed many advantages over the traditional subtractive manufacturing processes. However, the product quality issues make AM intractable for high-quality parts in industrial applications. This paper aims to address the quality issues by modeling both quantitative quality variables, such as dimensional accuracy, and qualitative quality variables, such as the binary (go/no-go) indicator for surface conditions. Both offline process setting variables and in situ process variables are used in the model as predictors. Such a model is important for systematically quality evaluation of AM parts, and provides the basis for future process monitoring and control. The merits of the proposed method are demonstrated with simulation studies and a case study in a fused deposition modeling process.
Seroprevalence of hepatitis B and C in a Merseyside hospital for the mentally handicapped

Summary This study reports the prevalence of antibodies to hepatitis B virus (HBV) and C virus (HCV). and the frequency of potential exposure to these viruses among patients and staff in six long-stay wards of a hospital caring for mentally handicapped adults from the Mersey region. A retrospective survey of risk behaviour among 134 patients and questionnaire survey of 75 nursing staff was performed. Serum samples from both groups were tested for HBV markers and patient sera for antibodies to HCV by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). None of the 102 patients tested had antibodies against HCV. although 17 had detectable antibody to HBV core (anti-HBc). Seven out of the 17 were positive for HBV surface antigen. None was positive for IgM antibody to HBV core. Only 1 out of 61 staff had anti-HBc and none was positive for surface antigen. Twenty-nine of 75 (39%) staff reported bites sufficient to break the skin and 52 (69%) significant other injuries from patients; 25 (31%) of staff had not received HBV vaccination. None of the patients had received HBV vaccine. We conclude that HCV does not appear to be a major hazard in this closed community but the prevalence of HBV markers indicating past exposure among patients is high, vaccine uptake is incomplete and incidents which may allow viral transmission are frequent.
Posttreatment Follow-Up of Brucellosis by PCR Assay

ABSTRACT In order to evaluate the usefulness of a peripheral blood PCR assay in the posttreatment follow-up of brucellosis, a cohort of 30 patients was studied by means of blood cultures, rose Bengal, seroagglutination, Coombs' antibrucella tests, and PCR assay at the time of diagnosis, at the end of treatment, and 2, 4, and 6 months later. Of the 29 patients whose PCR assays were initially positive, 28 (96.5%) were negative at the conclusion of the treatment. PCR was positive for the two patients who had relapses and negative for another four who had suspected but unconfirmed relapses. PCR was negative for 98.3% of the follow-up samples from those patients who had a favorable evolution. In conclusion, PCR appears to be a very useful technique, not only for the initial diagnosis of the disease, but also for posttreatment follow-up and the early detection of relapses.
Markovian Cocycles on Operator Algebras Adapted to a Fock Filtration

Abstract The introduction of a Feller-type condition allows the study of Markovian, cocycles adapted to a Fock filtration to be extended from von Neumann algebras to C *-algebras. It is shown that every such cocycle which, along with its adjoint cocycle, is pointwise strongly continuous and whose associated semigroups are norm continuous, weakly satisfies a quantum stochastic differential equation (QSDE). The matrix of coefficients of this equation may thereby be considered as the generator of the cocycle. The QSDE is satisfied strongly in any of the following cases: when the cocycle is completely positive and contractive, or the driving quantum noise is finite dimensional, or the C *-algebra is finite dimensional and the cocycle generator is bounded. Applying the algebra results to Fock-adapted Markovian cocycles on a Hilbert space we obtain similar characterisations. In particular a contraction cocycle whose Markov semigroup is norm continuous strongly satisfies a QSDE. A representation of cocycles in terms of a family of associated semigroups is central to the present analysis, providing the connection with QSDEs through a parallel work (2000, J. M. Lindsay and S. J. Wills, Probab. Theory Related Fields 116 , 505–543).
Older age, chronic medical conditions and polypharmacy in Himalayan trekkers in Nepal: an epidemiologic survey and case series.

BACKGROUND The number of tourists in Nepal doubled between 2003 and 2013 is nearly 800 000. With the increased popularity of trekking, the number of those with pre-existing medical conditions requiring access to healthcare is likely to increase. We therefore sought to characterize the demographics and health status of trekkers on the Everest Base Camp route in the Solukhumbu Valley. In addition, we report cases that illustrate the potential complications of an ageing and medicated population of trekkers with underlying diseases. METHODS Trekkers over 18 years were enrolled in a larger observational cohort study on blood pressure at high altitude at 2860 m. They answered a questionnaire regarding demographics, medical history and current medications. Acute medical problems relating to medication use that were brought to the attention of investigators were documented and are presented as case reports. RESULTS We enrolled 670 trekkers, 394 (59%) male, with a mean age of 48 years (range 18-76). Pre-existing medical conditions were reported by 223 participants (33%). The most frequent conditions included hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, migraines and thyroid dysfunction. A total of 276 participants (41%) reported taking one or more medications. The most common medications were acetazolamide (79, 12%), antihypertensives (50, 8%) and NSAIDs (47, 7%), with 30 classes of drugs represented. Excluding acetazolamide, older trekkers (age >50 years) were more likely than younger ones to take medications (OR = 2.17; 95% CI 1.57-3.00; P <0.05). Acetazolamide use was not related to age. CONCLUSIONS Our findings illustrate a wide variety of medical conditions present in trekkers in Nepal with wide-ranging potential complications that could pose difficulties in areas where medical care is scarce and evacuation difficult. Our cases illustrate the potential problems polypharmacy poses in trekkers, and the need for local and expedition healthcare workers to be aware of, and prepared for the common medical conditions present.
Microvillus inclusion disease

Microvillus inclusion disease prevents the absorption of nutrients from food during digestion, resulting in malnutrition and dehydration. Affected infants often have difficulty gaining weight and growing at the expected rate (failure to thrive), developmental delay, liver and kidney problems, and thinning of the bones (osteoporosis). Some affected individuals develop cholestasis, which is a reduced ability to produce and release a digestive fluid called bile. Cholestasis leads to irreversible liver disease (cirrhosis).