Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Taurine supplementation abates cirrhosis-associated locomotor dysfunction

Aim of the study Hepatic encephalopathy and hyperammonemia is a clinical complication associated with liver cirrhosis. The brain is the target organ for ammonia toxicity. Ammonia-induced brain injury is related to oxidative stress, locomotor activity dysfunction, and cognitive deficit, which could lead to permanent brain injury, coma and death if not appropriately managed. There is no promising pharmacological intervention against cirrhosis-associated brain injury. Taurine (TAU) is one of the most abundant amino acids in the human body. Several physiological and pharmacological roles have been attributed to TAU. TAU may act as an antioxidant and is an excellent neuroprotective agent. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of TAU supplementation on cirrhosis-associated locomotor activity disturbances and oxidative stress in the brain. Material and methods Rats underwent bile duct ligation (BDL) surgery, and plasma and brain ammonia level, plasma biochemical parameters, and rats’ locomotor function were monitored. Furthermore, brain tissue markers of oxidative stress were assessed. Results It was found that plasma and brain ammonia was increased, and markers of liver injury were significantly elevated in the cirrhotic group. Impaired locomotor activity was also evident in BDL rats. Moreover, an increase in brain tissue markers of oxidative stress was detected in the brain of cirrhotic animals. It was found that TAU supplementation (50, 100, and 200 mg/kg, gavage) alleviated brain tissue markers of oxidative stress and improved animals’ locomotor activity. Conclusions These data suggest that TAU is a potential protective agent against cirrhosis-associated brain injury.
Preparing ocean governance for species on the move

Policy must anticipate conflict over geographic shifts The ocean is a critical source of nutrition for billions of people, with potential to yield further food, profits, and employment in the future (1). But fisheries face a serious new challenge as climate change drives the ocean to conditions not experienced historically. Local, national, regional, and international fisheries are substantially underprepared for geographic shifts in marine animals driven by climate change over the coming decades. Fish and other animals have already shifted into new territory at a rate averaging 70 km per decade (2), and these shifts are expected to continue or accelerate (3). We show here that many species will likely shift across national and other political boundaries in the coming decades, creating the potential for conflict over newly shared resources.
Combined value of exhaled nitric oxide and blood eosinophils in chronic airway disease: the Copenhagen General Population Study

We investigated whether the combination of increased exhaled nitric oxide fraction (FeNO) level and blood eosinophil count had an additive value in chronic airway disease in the general population. We included 4677 individuals aged 20–100 years from the Copenhagen General Population Study. Based on pre- and post-bronchodilator spirometry, self-reported asthma and smoking history, participants were subdivided into healthy never-smokers (n=1649), healthy ever-smokers (n=1581), asthma (n=449), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) (n=404), asthma–COPD overlap (ACO) (n=138) and nonspecific airflow limitation (n=456). Compared to individuals with FeNO <25 ppb and blood eosinophils <0.3×109 cells·L−1, age- and sex-adjusted odds ratios (95% CI) for wheezing were 1.54 (1.29–1.84) for individuals with FeNO ≥25 ppb or blood eosinophils ≥0.3×109 cells·L−1 and 2.14 (1.47–3.10) for individuals with FeNO ≥25 ppb and blood eosinophils ≥0.3×109 cells·L−1. Corresponding odds ratios were 1.13 (0.91–1.41) and 1.83 (1.20–2.79) for sputum production, 1.54 (1.22–1.94) and 3.26 (2.16–4.94) for asthma, 1.03 (0.80–1.32) and 0.67 (0.36–1.27) for COPD and 1.32 (0.88–1.96) and 2.14 (1.05–4.36) for ACO. Among individuals reporting respiratory symptoms, predicting the type of chronic airway disease did not differ between the two biomarkers and did not improve by combining them. Combination of FeNO and blood eosinophils may have an additive value in characterising chronic airway disease in the general population but still needs to be investigated further with regard to clinical application. Combination of exhaled nitric oxide and blood eosinophils may have an additive value in chronic airway disease http://ow.ly/jUmj30kod8B
Stacking symmetry governed second harmonic generation in graphene trilayers

A novel optical second harmonic generation arises from the stacking order of three centrosymmetric graphene monolayer sheets. Crystal symmetry plays a central role in governing a wide range of fundamental physical phenomena. One example is nonlinear optical second harmonic generation (SHG), which requires inversion symmetry breaking. We report a unique stacking-induced SHG in graphene trilayers, whose individual monolayer sheet is centrosymmetric. Depending on layer stacking sequence, we observe a strong optical SHG in a Bernal ABA–stacked non-centrosymmetric trilayer, while it vanishes in a rhombohedral ABC–stacked one, which preserves inversion symmetry. This highly contrasting SHG due to the distinct stacking symmetry enables us to map out the ABA and ABC crystal domains in an otherwise homogeneous graphene trilayer. The extracted second-order nonlinear susceptibility of the ABA trilayer is surprisingly large, comparable to the best known two-dimensional semiconductors enhanced by excitonic resonance. Our results reveal a novel stacking order–induced nonlinear optical effect, as well as unleash the opportunity for studying intriguing physical phenomena predicted for stacking-dependent ABA and ABC graphene trilayers.
SMHD: a Large-Scale Resource for Exploring Online Language Usage for Multiple Mental Health Conditions

Mental health is a significant and growing public health concern. As language usage can be leveraged to obtain crucial insights into mental health conditions, there is a need for large-scale, labeled, mental health-related datasets of users who have been diagnosed with one or more of such conditions. In this paper, we investigate the creation of high-precision patterns to identify self-reported diagnoses of nine different mental health conditions, and obtain high-quality labeled data without the need for manual labelling. We introduce the SMHD (Self-reported Mental Health Diagnoses) dataset and make it available. SMHD is a novel large dataset of social media posts from users with one or multiple mental health conditions along with matched control users. We examine distinctions in users’ language, as measured by linguistic and psychological variables. We further explore text classification methods to identify individuals with mental conditions through their language.
Chromosomally integrated human herpesvirus 6 in the Japanese population

The objectives of the work are to elucidate the incidence and virological findings of chromosomally integrated human herpesvirus 6 (ciHHV‐6) in Japanese population and to analyze an association between ciHHV‐6 and the clinical manifestation of exanthema subitum (ES). Real‐time polymerase chain reaction was performed to determine HHV‐6 DNA loads in 2347 cord blood samples from healthy neonates (cohort A), febrile children less than 5 years old (cohort B), and hematopoietic cell transplant recipients (cohort C). CiHHV‐6 was confirmed by detection of high copy numbers of viral DNA in somatic cells. The integration site was determined by fluorescent in situ hybridization analysis. In the ciHHV‐6 subjects of cohorts A and B, HHV‐6 antibody titers were measured, the history of ES was obtained, and the incidence of ES was compared with non–ciHHV‐6 children without primary HHV‐6B infection in the cohort B. CiHHV‐6 was detected in 14 (0.60%) of the 2347 samples: A (6/1006, 0.60%), B (6/790, 0.76%), and C (2/551, 0.36%). The integration sites were on chromosome 22q in seven cases, Yp in two cases, and 17q and Xp in one case. No past history of ES was observed in 11 of the 12 subjects. Nine children with ciHHV‐6 underwent serological analysis and were found to be positive for HHV‐6 IgG antibodies. Incidence of ES was statistically higher in the control subjects than the ciHHV‐6 subjects (P = 0.0039). In Japan, the frequency of ciHHV‐6 was 0.60%. A high incidence of ciHHV‐6A, specifically in chromosome 22, is a characteristic finding among the Japanese. CiHHV‐6 may interfere with the clinical symptoms of primary HHV‐6B infection.
Examining Brain Structures Associated With Emotional Intelligence and the Mediated Effect on Trait Creativity in Young Adults

Little is known about the association between emotional intelligence (EI) and trait creativity (TC), and the brain structural bases which involves. This study investigated the neuroanatomical basis of the association between EI and TC which measured by the Schutte self-report EI scale and the Williams creativity aptitude test. First, the voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis was used to explore the brain structures which is closely related to EI in a large young sample (n = 213). The results showed that EI was positively correlated with the regional gray matter volume (rGMV) in the right orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which is regarded as a key region of emotional processing. More importantly, further mediation analysis revealed that rGMV in the right OFC partially mediated the association between EI and TC, which showed the OFC volume could account for the relationship between EI and TC. These findings confirmed the close relationship between EI and TC, and highlighted that the brain volumetric variation in the OFC associated with the top-down processing of emotion regulation, which may play a critical role in the promotion of TC. Together, these findings contributed to sharpening the understanding of the complex relationship between EI and TC from the perspective of brain structural basis.
Defending Against Saddle Point Attack in Byzantine-Robust Distributed Learning

We study robust distributed learning that involves minimizing a non-convex loss function with saddle points. We consider the Byzantine setting where some worker machines have abnormal or even arbitrary and adversarial behavior. In this setting, the Byzantine machines may create fake local minima near a saddle point that is far away from any true local minimum, even when robust gradient estimators are used. We develop ByzantinePGD, a robust first-order algorithm that can provably escape saddle points and fake local minima, and converge to an approximate true local minimizer with low iteration complexity. As a by-product, we give a simpler algorithm and analysis for escaping saddle points in the usual non-Byzantine setting. We further discuss three robust gradient estimators that can be used in ByzantinePGD, including median, trimmed mean, and iterative filtering. We characterize their performance in concrete statistical settings, and argue for their near-optimality in low and high dimensional regimes.
Selfless Sequential Learning

Sequential learning, also called lifelong learning, studies the problem of learning tasks in a sequence with access restricted to only the data of the current task. In this paper we look at a scenario with fixed model capacity, and postulate that the learning process should not be selfish, i.e. it should account for future tasks to be added and thus leave enough capacity for them. To achieve Selfless Sequential Learning we study different regularization strategies and activation functions. We find that imposing sparsity at the level of the representation (i.e.~neuron activations) is more beneficial for sequential learning than encouraging parameter sparsity. In particular, we propose a novel regularizer, that encourages representation sparsity by means of neural inhibition. It results in few active neurons which in turn leaves more free neurons to be utilized by upcoming tasks. As neural inhibition over an entire layer can be too drastic, especially for complex tasks requiring strong representations, our regularizer only inhibits other neurons in a local neighbourhood, inspired by lateral inhibition processes in the brain. We combine our novel regularizer, with state-of-the-art lifelong learning methods that penalize changes to important previously learned parts of the network. We show that our new regularizer leads to increased sparsity which translates in consistent performance improvement %over alternative regularizers we studied on diverse datasets.
POSITIVE GRASSMANNIAN AND POLYHEDRAL SUBDIVISIONS

The nonnegative Grassmannian is a cell complex with rich geometric, algebraic, and combinatorial structures. Its study involves interesting combinatorial objects, such as positroids and plabic graphs. Remarkably, the same combinatorial structures appeared in many other areas of mathematics and physics, e.g., in the study of cluster algebras, scattering amplitudes, and solitons. We discuss new ways to think about these structures. In particular, we identify plabic graphs and more general Grassmannian graphs with polyhedral subdivisions induced by 2-dimensional projections of hypersimplices. This implies a close relationship between the positive Grassmannian and the theory of fiber polytopes and the generalized Baues problem. This suggests natural extensions of objects related to the positive Grassmannian.
Detection and Characteristics of Temporal Encephaloceles in Patients with Refractory Epilepsy

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Temporal encephaloceles are increasingly visualized during neuroimaging assessment of individuals with refractory temporal lobe epilepsy, and their identification could indicate an intracranial abnormality that may be related to a potential seizure focus. Careful review by an experienced neuroradiologist may yield improved detection of TEs, and other clinical, neurophysiologic, and radiologic findings may predict their presence. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Data were reviewed retrospectively in patients at our institution who were presented at a multidisciplinary conference for refractory epilepsy between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2016. Clinical, neurophysiologic, and imaging data were collected. An expert neuroradiologist reviewed the latest MR imaging of the brain in patients for whom one was available, noting the presence or absence of temporal encephaloceles as well as other associated imaging characteristics. RESULTS: A total of 434 patients were reviewed, 16 of whom were excluded due to unavailable or poor-quality MR imaging. Seven patients had temporal encephaloceles reported on initial imaging, while 52 patients had temporal encephaloceles identified on expert review. MR imaging findings were more often initially normal in patients with temporal encephaloceles (P < .001), and detection of temporal encephaloceles was increased in patients in whom 3T MR imaging was performed (P < .001), the T2 sampling perfection with application-optimized contrasts by using different flip angle evolutions sequence was used (P < .001), or the presence of radiologic findings suggestive of idiopathic intracranial hypertension was noted. Seizure onset by scalp electroencephalogram among patients with temporal encephaloceles was significantly more likely to be temporal compared with patients without temporal encephaloceles (P < .001). A significant correlation between intracranial electroencephalogram seizure onset and patients with temporal encephaloceles compared with patients without temporal encephaloceles was not observed, though there was a trend toward temporal-onset seizures in patients with temporal encephaloceles (P = .06). CONCLUSIONS: Careful review of MR imaging in patients with refractory temporal lobe epilepsy by a board-certified neuroradiologist with special attention paid to a high-resolution T2 sequence can increase the detection of subtle temporal encephaloceles, and certain clinical and neurophysiologic findings should raise the suspicion for their presence.
Copycat CNN: Stealing Knowledge by Persuading Confession with Random Non-Labeled Data

In the past few years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been achieving state-of-the-art performance on a variety of problems. Many companies employ resources and money to generate these models and provide them as an API, therefore it is in their best interest to protect them, i.e., to avoid that someone else copy them. Recent studies revealed that stateof-the-art CNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples attacks, and this weakness indicates that CNNs do not need to operate in the problem domain (PD). Therefore, we hypothesize that they also do not need to be trained with examples of the PD in order to operate in it.Given these facts, in this paper, we investigate if a target blackbox CNN can be copied by persuading it to confess its knowledge through random non-labeled data. The copy is two-fold: i) the target network is queried with random data and its predictions are used to create a fake dataset with the knowledge of the network; and ii) a copycat network is trained with the fake dataset and should be able to achieve similar performance as the target network.This hypothesis was evaluated locally in three problems (facial expression, object, and crosswalk classification) and against a cloud-based API. In the copy attacks, images from both nonproblem domain and PD were used. All copycat networks achieved at least 93.7% of the performance of the original models with non-problem domain data, and at least 98.6% using additional data from the PD. Additionally, the copycat CNN successfully copied at least 97.3% of the performance of the Microsoft Azure Emotion API. Our results show that it is possible to create a copycat CNN by simply querying a target network as black-box with random non-labeled data.
Low plasma renin activity is an independent predictor of near-term incidence of hypertension in Asian populations

ABSTRACT Background: Plasma renin activity is involved in the regulation of body salt content and blood pressure. However, there is a paucity of data regarding the association between low or high plasma renin activity and the development of hypertension. Method: We investigated the relation of baseline plasma renin activity to increases in blood pressure and the incidence of hypertension after four years in 2,146 non-hypertensive individuals from a community-based Korean population (mean age, 50 years), 58% of whom were women. We defined an “increase in blood pressure” as an increment of systolic blood-pressure ≥ 10 mmHg or initiation of antihypertensive drugs and defined “hypertension” as a systolic blood pressure of 140 mm Hg or higher, a diastolic blood pressure of 90 mm Hg or higher, or the use of antihypertensive medications. Results: After 4 years, the increase in blood pressure had increased in 27.9% of the participants, and hypertension had developed in 17.9%. After adjustment, the lowest sex-specific tertile of plasma renin activity was an independent risk factor of an elevation in blood pressure (Adjusted Odds Ratio 1.37, 95% confidence interval 1.07–1.74, p = 0.011) and hypertension (Adjusted Odds Ratio 1.84, 95% confidence interval 1.36–2.50, p < 0.001) compared to the highest sex-specific tertile. The associations between the plasma renin activity and blood-pressure outcomes were evident in adults with especially high urine sodium excretion. Conclusion: Low plasma renin activity was associated with the development of hypertension in the middle-aged Asian population, especially in peoples with high sodium intake.
Casein kinase 2 mediated phosphorylation of Spt6 modulates histone dynamics and regulates spurious transcription

Abstract CK2 is an essential protein kinase implicated in various cellular processes. In this study, we address a potential role of this kinase in chromatin modulations associated with transcription. We found that CK2 depletion from yeast cells leads to replication-independent increase of histone H3K56 acetylation and global activation of H3 turnover in coding regions. This suggests a positive role of CK2 in maintenance/recycling of the histone H3/H4 tetramers during transcription. Interestingly, strand-specific RNA-seq analyses show that CK2 inhibits global cryptic promoters driving both sense and antisense transcription. This further indicates a role of CK2 in the modulation of chromatin during transcription. Next, we showed that CK2 interacts with the major histone chaperone Spt6, and phosphorylates it in vivo and in vitro. CK2 phosphorylation of Spt6 is required for its cellular levels, for the suppression of histone H3 turnover and for the inhibition of spurious transcription. Finally, we showed that CK2 and Spt6 phosphorylation sites are important to various transcriptional responses suggesting that cryptic intragenic and antisense transcript production are associated with a defective adaptation to environmental cues. Altogether, our data indicate that CK2 mediated phosphorylation of Spt6 regulates chromatin dynamics associated with transcription, and prevents aberrant transcription.
Dietary Patterns Over Time and Microalbuminuria in Youth and Young Adults With Type 1 Diabetes: The SEARCH Nutrition Ancillary Study

OBJECTIVE We assessed the association between diet quality and microalbuminuria in youth-onset type 1 diabetes using three indices: a modified Mediterranean diet score for children and adolescents (mKIDMED), the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH), and the Healthy Eating Index-2010 (HEI). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Youth and young adults from the SEARCH (SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth) Nutrition Ancillary Study (SNAS) diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2002–2008, who had repeated dietary assessments at baseline and follow-up visits and urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR) measured at the outcome visit (2012–2015) (n = 461), were selected for study. Regression models estimated the association between each longitudinally assessed diet score and UACR and microalbuminuria (UACR ≥30 μg/mg). RESULTS The cohort was 43% female, and at follow-up, mean age was 20 years, disease duration was 108 months, and 7% had microalbuminuria. Adherence to a higher-quality diet was low for the mKIDMED (mean 3.7 of a possible range of −3 to 12) and the DASH (mean 42 of 80) and better, for the HEI (mean 56.3 of 100). A borderline inverse association was observed between the HEI score and microalbuminuria after adjustment for caloric and protein intake and demographic and disease factors (odds ratio [OR]HEI 0.83, P = 0.07), which lost significance with further adjustment for HbA1c and systolic blood pressure (ORHEI 0.86, P = 0.19). Results were similar for continuous UACR. No significant associations were observed for diet quality characterized by the mKIDMED or DASH indices. CONCLUSIONS Greater adherence to the HEI may be beneficial for kidney health in youth and young adults with type 1 diabetes. Low adherence to the mKIDMED and DASH diets may explain the lack of association with microalbuminuria.