Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EGCG: Potential application as a protective agent against grass carp reovirus in aquaculture.

Grass carp reovirus (GCRV) is the primary cause of grass carp haemorrhagic disease. The major catechin in green tea, (-)-epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), has been found to have anti-GCRV activity in the C. idellus kidney cell line (CIK). The aim of this study was to test the potential application of EGCG as an anti-GCRV agent in aquaculture. Here, we demonstrate that various concentrations (99%, 50% and 35%) of EGCG could inhibit GCRV infectivity. EGCG (50%) + GCRV treatment significantly reduced the number of dead fish at 1-, 2-, 3-, 4 -and 5-day post-challenge compared with the negative control (GCRV challenge without EGCG treatment). The safety of EGCG compound products on cell survival was studied using four fish cell lines; we did not detect a significant change in cell viability within 24 hours of EGCG incubation. We also evaluated toxicity and concentrations of malondialdehyde (MDA), glutathione (GSH) and lysozyme (LZM) in the grass carp, and the results showed that even a high dose of EGCG did not induce toxicity. Following EGCG compound injection, the concentration of MDA decreased and the concentration of GSH and LZM increased compared with the control groups. We also detected EGCG concentration in grass carp plasma and kidney using HPLC with electrochemical detection after intraperitoneal injection at a dose of 150 mg/kg. The concentration of EGCG in the plasma and kidney reached the highest levels (20 μg/ml and 1.5 μg/ml) about 12 hr after injection and then decreased. Overall, EGCG is a safe, effective product that could inhibit GCRV infection and improve immunoactivity in aquaculture.
Computerised working memory‐based cognitive remediation therapy does not affect Reading the Mind in The Eyes test performance or neural activity during a Facial Emotion Recognition test in psychosis

Working memory‐based cognitive remediation therapy (CT) for psychosis has recently been associated with broad improvements in performance on untrained tasks measuring working memory, episodic memory and IQ, and changes in associated brain regions. However, it is unclear whether these improvements transfer to the domain of social cognition and neural activity related to performance on social cognitive tasks. We examined performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test (Eyes test) in a large sample of participants with psychosis who underwent working memory‐based CT (N = 43) compared to a control group of participants with psychosis (N = 35). In a subset of this sample, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine changes in neural activity during a facial emotion recognition task in participants who underwent CT (N = 15) compared to a control group (N = 15). No significant effects of CT were observed on Eyes test performance or on neural activity during facial emotion recognition, either at p < 0.05 family‐wise error or at a p < 0.001 uncorrected threshold, within a priori social cognitive regions of interest. This study suggests that working memory‐based CT does not significantly impact an aspect of social cognition which was measured behaviourally and neurally. It provides further evidence that deficits in the ability to decode mental state from facial expressions are dissociable from working memory deficits, and suggests that future CT programmes should target social cognition in addition to working memory for the purposes of further enhancing social function.
Modafinil effects on cognitive function in HIV+ patients treated for fatigue: A placebo controlled study

Both mild cognitive impairment and fatigue are common among people with HIV/AIDS. This study examined the efficacy of modafinil for HIV+ patients who sought treatment for fatigue in a placebo-controlled double-blind 4‐week trial. A battery of standard neuropsychological tests was administered at study entry and Week 4, and change in performance was compared for 59 patients receiving modafinil versus 44 patients receiving placebo. A significant effect on fatigue was observed. In addition, cognitive performance, as measured by a global change score, improved more in the modafinil than in the placebo group although the effect was not specific to any cognitive domain.
Distributing Complexity: A New Approach to Antenna Selection for Distributed Massive MIMO

Antenna selection in massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication systems enables reduction of complexity, cost, and power while keeping the channel capacity high and retaining the diversity, interference reduction, spatial multiplexity, and array gains of massive MIMO. We investigate the possibility of decentralized antenna selection both to parallelize the optimization process and put the environment awareness to use. Results of experiments with two different power control rules and varying number of users show that a simple and computationally inexpensive algorithm can be used in real time. The algorithm we propose draws its foundations from self-organization, environment awareness, and randomness.
The effects of propranolol on heart rate variability and quantitative, mechanistic, pain profiling: a randomized placebo-controlled crossover study

Abstract Background and aims The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is capable of modulating pain. Aberrations in heart rate variability (HRV), reflective of ANS activity, are associated with experimental pain sensitivity, chronic pain, and more recently, pain modulatory mechanisms but the underlying mechanisms are still unclear. HRV is lowered during experimental pain as well as in chronic pain conditions and HRV can be increased by propranolol, which is a non-selective β-blocker. Sensitization of central pain pathways have been observed in several chronic pain conditions and human mechanistic pain biomarkers for these central pain pathways include temporal summation of pain (TSP) and conditioned pain modulation (CPM). The current study aimed to investigate the effect of the β-blocker propranolol, and subsequently assessing the response to standardized, quantitative, mechanistic pain biomarkers. Methods In this placebo-controlled, double-blinded, randomized crossover study, 25 healthy male volunteers (mean age 25.6 years) were randomized to receive 40 mg propranolol and 40 mg placebo. Heart rate, blood pressure, and HRV were assessed before and during experimental pain tests. Cuff pressure pain stimulation was used for assessment of pain detection (cPDTs) and pain tolerance (cPTTs) thresholds, TSP, and CPM. Offset analgesia (OA) was assessed using heat stimulation. Results Propranolol significantly reduced heart rate (p<0.001), blood pressure (p<0.02) and increased HRV (p<0.01) compared with placebo. No significant differences were found comparing cPDT (p>0.70), cPTT (p>0.93), TSP (p>0.70), OA-effect (p>0.87) or CPM (p>0.65) between propranolol and placebo. Conclusions The current study demonstrated that propranolol increased HRV, but did not affect pressure pain sensitivity or any pain facilitatory or modulatory outcomes. Implications Analgesic effects of propranolol have been reported in clinical pain populations and the results from the current study could indicate that increased HRV from propranolol is not associated with peripheral and central pain pathways in healthy male subjects.
Ratio Matching MMD Nets: Low dimensional projections for effective deep generative models

Deep generative models can learn to generate realistic-looking images on several natural image datasets, but many of the most effective methods are adversarial methods, which require careful balancing of training between a generator network and a discriminator network. Maximum mean discrepancy networks (MMD-nets) avoid this issue using the kernel trick, but unfortunately they have not on their own been able to match the performance of adversarial training. We present a new method of training MMD-nets, based on learning a mapping of samples from the data and from the model into a lower dimensional space, in which MMD training can be more effective. We call these networks ratio matching MMD networks (RMMMDnets). We train the mapping to preserve density ratios between the densities over the low-dimensional space and the original space. This ensures that matching the model distribution to the data in the low-dimensional space will also match the original distributions. We show that RM-MMDnets have better performance and better stability than recent adversarial methods for training MMD-nets.
Age- and Sex-Related Differences in Motor Performance During Sustained Maximal Voluntary Contraction of the First Dorsal Interosseous

Age and sex affect the neuromuscular system including performance fatigability. Data on performance fatigability and underlying mechanisms in hand muscles are scarce. Therefore, we determined the effects of age and sex on force decline, and the mechanisms contributing to force decline, during a sustained isometric maximal voluntary contraction (MVC) with the index finger abductor (first dorsal interosseous, FDI). Subjects (n = 51, age range: 19–77 years, 25 females) performed brief and a 2-min sustained MVC with the right FDI. Abduction force and root mean squared electromyographic activity (rms-EMG) were recorded in both hands. Double-pulse stimulation was applied to the ulnar nerve during (superimposed twitch) and after (doublet-force) the brief and sustained MVCs. Compared to females, males were stronger (134%, p < 0.001) and exhibited a greater decline in voluntary (difference: 8%, p = 0.010) and evoked (doublet) force (difference: 12%, p = 0.010) during and after the sustained MVC. Age did not affect MVC, force decline and superimposed twitch. The ratio between the doublet- and MVC-force was greater in females (0.33, p = 0.007) and in older (0.38, p = 0.06) individuals than in males (0.30) and younger (0.30) individuals; after the sustained MVC this ratio increased with age and the increase was larger for females compared to males (p = 0.04). The inadvertent contralateral, left force and rms-EMG activity increased over time (2.7–13.6% MVC and 5.4–17.7% MVC, respectively). Males had higher contralateral forces than females (p = 0.012) and contralateral force was higher at the start of the contralateral contraction in older compared with young subjects (difference: 29%, p = 0.008). In conclusion, our results suggest that the observed sex-differences in performance fatigability were mainly due to differences in peripheral muscle properties. Yet the reduced amount of contralateral activity and the larger difference in evoked versus voluntary force in female subjects indicate that sex-differences in voluntary activation should not be overlooked. These data obtained in neurological healthy adults provides a framework and help the interpretation and referencing of neurophysiological measures in patients suffering from neuromuscular diseases, who often present with symptoms of performance fatigability.
L-Arginine Enhances Protein Synthesis by Phosphorylating mTOR (Thr 2446) in a Nitric Oxide-Dependent Manner in C2C12 Cells

Muscle atrophy may arise from many factors such as inactivity, malnutrition, and inflammation. In the present study, we investigated the stimulatory effect of nitric oxide (NO) on muscle protein synthesis. Primarily, C2C12 cells were supplied with extra L-arginine (L-Arg) in the culture media. L-Arg supplementation increased the activity of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS), the rate of protein synthesis, and the phosphorylation of mTOR (Thr 2446) and p70S6K (Thr 389). L-NAME, an NOS inhibitor, decreased NO concentrations within cells and abolished the stimulatory effect of L-Arg on protein synthesis and the phosphorylation of mTOR and p70S6K. In contrast, SNP (sodium nitroprusside), an NO donor, increased NO concentrations, enhanced protein synthesis, and upregulated mTOR and p70S6K phosphorylation, regardless of L-NAME treatment. Blocking mTOR with rapamycin abolished the stimulatory effect of both L-Arg and SNP on protein synthesis and p70S6K phosphorylation. These results indicate that L-Arg stimulates protein synthesis via the activation of the mTOR (Thr 2446)/p70S6K signaling pathway in an NO-dependent manner.
Coenzyme A, protein CoAlation and redox regulation in mammalian cells

In a diverse family of cellular cofactors, coenzyme A (CoA) has a unique design to function in various biochemical processes. The presence of a highly reactive thiol group and a nucleotide moiety offers a diversity of chemical reactions and regulatory interactions. CoA employs them to activate carbonyl-containing molecules and to produce various thioester derivatives (e.g. acetyl CoA, malonyl CoA and 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl CoA), which have well-established roles in cellular metabolism, production of neurotransmitters and the regulation of gene expression. A novel unconventional function of CoA in redox regulation, involving covalent attachment of this coenzyme to cellular proteins in response to oxidative and metabolic stress, has been recently discovered and termed protein CoAlation (S-thiolation by CoA or CoAthiolation). A diverse range of proteins was found to be CoAlated in mammalian cells and tissues under various experimental conditions. Protein CoAlation alters the molecular mass, charge and activity of modified proteins, and prevents them from irreversible sulfhydryl overoxidation. This review highlights the role of a key metabolic integrator CoA in redox regulation in mammalian cells and provides a perspective of the current status and future directions of the emerging field of protein CoAlation.
Color Aspect of Monolithic Zirconia Restorations: A Review of the Literature

Monolithic zirconia restoration is an acceptable treatment option in restorative dentistry and a developing trend in esthetic dentistry. Digital dentistry has simplified fabrication of monolithic zirconia restorations. Zirconia ceramic has introduced an opportunity to achieve both esthetic and mechanical requirements for restorations. This is rarely found for a ceramic in dentistry. Monolithic zirconia restorations represent an acceptable durability, comparable to metal-ceramic restorations, while they are superior to metal-ceramic restorations esthetically; however, difficulties to gain an optimal shade reproduction and a color match with monolithic zirconia restorations still remain. The color of these restorations may be influenced by manufacturing processes, laboratory procedures, and clinical factors. Manufacturing processes determine basic optical properties of zirconia ceramics. Different laboratory procedures may create optical changes in zirconia ceramics. Also clinical factors such as dental background, cement, and zirconia restoration features may affect the resulting color. This literature review aimed to discuss potent factors in the color of monolithic zirconia restorations. An electronic search of the PubMed/Google Scholar database was performed to find related English-language articles published between January 1, 2000, and October 31, 2017. The key terms of background, cement, ceramic, color, esthetics, shade, spectrophotometry, thickness, translucency, and zirconia were used both individually and simultaneously. Also, a manual search was conducted, and five classic articles of color science were added. Thus 192 articles were included. In the last decade, shade reproduction of monolithic zirconia restorations has been highly regarded; however, further improvements are required in the manufacturing process to produce tooth-like zirconia ceramics. An esthetic guideline named background-cement-ceramic color harmony was suggested in this study; however, more clinical practice guidelines should be established for monolithic zirconia restorations on esthetics, and therefore, more studies are required.
How Time Matters: Learning Time-Decay Attention for Contextual Spoken Language Understanding in Dialogues

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is an essential component in conversational systems. Most SLU components treats each utterance independently, and then the following components aggregate the multi-turn information in the separate phases. In order to avoid error propagation and effectively utilize contexts, prior work leveraged history for contextual SLU. However, most previous models only paid attention to the related content in history utterances, ignoring their temporal information. In the dialogues, it is intuitive that the most recent utterances are more important than the least recent ones, in other words, time-aware attention should be in a decaying manner. Therefore, this paper designs and investigates various types of time-decay attention on the sentence-level and speaker-level, and further proposes a flexible universal time-decay attention mechanism. The experiments on the benchmark Dialogue State Tracking Challenge (DSTC4) dataset show that the proposed time-decay attention mechanisms significantly improve the state-of-the-art model for contextual understanding performance.
Microglial transglutaminase-2 drives myelination and myelin repair via GPR56/ADGRG1 in oligodendrocyte precursor cells

In the central nervous system (CNS), myelin formation and repair are regulated by oligodendrocyte (OL) lineage cells, which sense and integrate signals from their environment, including from other glial cells and the extracellular matrix (ECM). The signaling pathways that coordinate this complex communication, however, remain poorly understood. The adhesion G protein-coupled receptor ADGRG1 (also known as GPR56) is an evolutionarily conserved regulator of OL development in humans, mice, and zebrafish, although its activating ligand for OL lineage cells is unknown. Here, we report that microglia-derived transglutaminase-2 (TG2) signals to ADGRG1 on OL precursor cells (OPCs) in the presence of the ECM protein laminin and that TG2/laminin-dependent activation of ADGRG1 promotes OPC proliferation. Signaling by TG2/laminin to ADGRG1 on OPCs additionally improves remyelination in two murine models of demyelination. These findings identify a novel glia-to-glia signaling pathway that promotes myelin formation and repair, and suggest new strategies to enhance remyelination.
Channel Gating Neural Networks

This paper introduces channel gating, a dynamic, fine-grained, and hardware-efficient pruning scheme to reduce the computation cost for convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Channel gating identifies regions in the features that contribute less to the classification result, and skips the computation on a subset of the input channels for these ineffective regions. Unlike static network pruning, channel gating optimizes CNN inference at run-time by exploiting input-specific characteristics, which allows substantially reducing the compute cost with almost no accuracy loss. We experimentally show that applying channel gating in state-of-the-art networks achieves 2.7-8.0$\times$ reduction in floating-point operations (FLOPs) and 2.0-4.4$\times$ reduction in off-chip memory accesses with a minimal accuracy loss on CIFAR-10. Combining our method with knowledge distillation reduces the compute cost of ResNet-18 by 2.6$\times$ without accuracy drop on ImageNet. We further demonstrate that channel gating can be realized in hardware efficiently. Our approach exhibits sparsity patterns that are well-suited to dense systolic arrays with minimal additional hardware. We have designed an accelerator for channel gating networks, which can be implemented using either FPGAs or ASICs. Running a quantized ResNet-18 model for ImageNet, our accelerator achieves an encouraging speedup of 2.4$\times$ on average, with a theoretical FLOP reduction of 2.8$\times$.
Posttraumatic Proximal Radioulnar Synostosis after Closed Reduction for a Radial Neck and Olecranon Fracture

Posttraumatic proximal radioulnar synostosis (PPRUS) is a severe complication of radial head and neck fractures known to occur after severe injury or operative fixation. Cases of PPRUS occurring after minimally displaced, nonoperatively treated radial neck injuries are, by contrast, extremely rare. Here, we present a pediatric case of PPRUS that developed after a nonoperatively treated minimally displaced radial neck fracture with concomitant olecranon fracture. While more cases are needed to establish the association between this pattern of injury and PPRUS, we recommend that when encountering patients with a minimally displaced radial neck fracture and a concomitant elbow injury, the rare possibility of developing proximal radioulnar synostosis should be considered.
Recognition and detection of tea leaf's diseases using support vector machine

Tea is a popular beverage all around the world, and in Bangladesh the cultivation of tea plays a vital role. Many diseases affect the proper growth of tea leaves leading to its reduction, thus hindering of the production of tea. However, if the disease is identified at an early age it would solve all the above mentioned problems through the application of appropriate treatment, or through the pruning of the diseased leaves to prevent further spread of the disease. To solve this problem image processing is the best option to detect and diagnose the disease. The main goal of this research is to develop an image processing system that can identify and classify the two most widespread tea leaf diseases in Bangladesh, namely brown blight disease and the algal leaf disease, from a healthy leaf. Disease identification is the first step; there are many methods that have been used for identifying the leaf disease. In this paper, Support Vector Machine classifier (SVM) is used to recognize the diseases. Eleven features are analyzed during the classification. These features are then used to find the most suitable match for the disease (or normality) every time an image is uploaded into the SVM database. When a new picture is uploaded into the system the most suitable match is found and the disease is recognized. The approach is novel since the number of features compared by the SVM classifier is reduced by three features compared to previous researches, without adversely sacrificing the success rate of the classifier, which retains an accuracy of more than 90%. This also speeds up the identification process, with each leaf image taking 300ms less processing time compared to previous research using SVM, thus ensuring a greater number of leaves can be processed in a given time frame. The proposed solution increases in efficiency of the detection, identification, and classification process will enable the tea industry in Bangladesh to become more competitive globally, by reducing the losses suffered due to diseases of the leaf, and thus increasing the overall tea production rate.
Probiotic supplementation improves reproductive performance of unvaccinated farmed sows infected with porcine epidemic diarrhea virus

Abstract We investigated if probiotic supplementation could improve the health and reproductive performance of unvaccinated lactating sows infected with porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) virus. Twenty unvaccinated pregnant sows were equally allocated to probiotic‐supplemented (P) and control (C) groups. For the experiment, 15 g/day of probiotic compound BIO‐THREE PZ was given to P sows. Reproductive performance was checked daily. The number of neonates fostered by each sow was maintained at eight throughout the experiment. Individual milk production post‐parturition was measured twice. Milk protein and fat ratios were determined by a milk analyzer. Total immunoglobulin (Ig) A and G concentrations were measured by ELISA. At day 7 post‐parturition, the body weight of P sows was 10 kg higher than that of C sows, and at day 3 post‐parturition, P sows produced more milk (+2 kg) and had a higher IgA concentration in whey than did C sows (p < .05). Finally, unlike C sows, P sows tended to return to estrus faster, and had larger piglets at birth with a lower mortality percentage during early days of suckling. In conclusion, probiotic compound BIO‐THREE PZ helped strengthen the immune system of unvaccinated, PED‐infected sows and improved their reproductive performance.