Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Core body temperature is not a valid parameter to follow the reproductive cycle in female marmoset monkey (Callithrix jacchus)

Marmosets represent an attractive and widely used animal species in biomedical research, and the routine monitoring of female reproductive cycles is often mandatory in the fields of reproductive biology and stem cell research. Today, the established method for the reliable detection of ovulation is the determination of progesterone concentrations from blood samples. This method is based on relatively frequent handling and blood collections; therefore, less invasive alternatives would help to reduce stress on the animals. Here, we investigated whether the core body temperature of marmosets would show a correlation with cycle-dependent hormonal fluctuations, as has been described for humans and other primate species. In particular, the objective was to investigate whether the telemetric recording of core body temperature could replace progesterone measurements as a reliable, less invasive method for the detection of ovulation in these animals. Here we show that the core body temperature parameters in female marmosets were characterized by frequent variations, but they were not related to particular days or phases during the reproductive cycle. Therefore, the recording of core body temperature in our controlled standard experimental setting is not an appropriate method to monitor the reproductive cycle in female marmosets, and cannot replace serum progesterone measurement as a state-of-the-art method.
Influence of dietary starch and cellulose levels on the metabolic profile and apparent digestibility in penaeoid shrimp

The present study compared the effect of different starch/cellulose ratios (30/0, 20/10, 10/20, 0/30) on the metabolic response and apparent digestibility in two species of penaeoids: Artemesia longinaris and Pleoticus muelleri. Adult animals were used in order to obtain sufficient quantities of haemolymph and faecal material for analysis. No significant differences were found in levels of plasma metabolites in P. muelleri, but in A. longinaris, a significant increase was observed in glucose, total protein, and cholesterol in correlation with increased dietary starch. The apparent digestibility coefficients decreased from 83.7% to 51.2% (A. longinaris) and from 71.9% to 7.6% (P. muelleri) as the dietary starch levels increased. The ratio of amylase activity to protease activity (A/P ratio) declined in A. longinaris when the percentage of dietary starch increased. In contrast, the A/P ratio for P. muelleri increased with higher starch concentrations. These results demonstrated a close relationship between the feeding habits and digestive physiology of the two species studied; they also suggest a more herbivorous behavior for A. longinaris and more omnivorous habits for P. muelleri.
Biogas production from meat and pulp and paper industry by-products

Bayr, Suvi Biogas production from meat and pulp and paper industry by-products Jyvaskyla: University of Jyvaskyla, 2014, 88 p. (Jyvaskyla Studies in Biological and Environmental Science ISSN 1456-9701; 280) ISBN 978-951-39-5679-0 (nid.) ISBN 978-951-39-5680-6 (PDF) Yhteenveto: Biokaasun tuotanto lihaja selluja paperiteollisuuden sivutuotteista Diss. In this thesis, the anaerobic digestion of industrial by-products from meat and pulp and paper industry were studied. These materials, which are treated mainly like wastes, were seen to be potential substrates for anaerobic digestion. Methane yields of ca. 700 dm3 kg volatile solids (VS)added-1 were obtained for slaughterhouse wastes, alone and in co-digestion with rendering wastes. On the other hand, methane yields of 190–240 dm3 kgVSadded-1 were obtained in the monodigestion of pulp and paper industry primary sludge, and 150–170 dm3 kgVSadded-1 in the co-digestion of primary sludge with secondary sludge. In the digestion of slaughterhouse and rendering wastes, mesophilic conditions were more stable, and the feasible organic loading rates (OLRs) were 1–1.5 kgVS m-3 d-1 and hydraulic retention times (HRTs) were 50 d. For pulp and paper mill wastewater sludge, thermophilic conditions were more stable with the feasible OLRs of 1–2 kgVS m-3 d-1 and the HRTs of 14–32 d. The digestion processes of these industrial by-products can easily turn unstable. In the digestion of slaughterhouse and rendering wastes, process imbalance may occur due to inhibition from intermediate products like volatile fatty acids, long-chain fatty acids and ammonia. On the contrary, in the digestion of pulp and paper mill wastewater sludge, the low nitrogen content and low pH may cause problems. It was observed that the more stable digestion process of slaughterhouse waste is achieved by additive of Co, Ni, Se, W, Fe and HCl. In addition, in pulp and paper mill secondary sludge digestion, hydrothermal pretreatment, among the studied 12 single or combined pre-treatments, increased the methane yield by 19–31 %. In conclusion, the digestion of two different kinds of industrial by-products was seen to be feasible, although operational conditions should be optimised and possibly enhancement methods used to ensure the stable digestion processes of these vulnerable organic materials.
Multigenerational socioeconomic attainments and mortality among older men: An adjacent generations approach

BACKGROUND Recent work in stratification and demography argues for the importance of multiple familial generations in status attainment and other transmission processes. Health disparities research in this area generally assumes that the rewards of attainment are paid forward across generations, meaning grandparent and parent achievements give children a health advantage. However, an emerging literature suggests that mortality risk in old age may be more closely related to the attainments of parents and adult children. OBJECTIVE We develop a new approach to understanding family attainments and mortality in later life and test the multigenerational structure of health disparities suggested by the long arm, personal attainment, and social foreground perspectives. METHODS The analysis uses nearly complete mortality data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Older Men, a representative sample of US men aged 45 to 59 in 1966. RESULTS We find that older men with parents who farmed had a median age of death that was 1.3 years higher than those who had parents with manual occupations, and men with adult 1 University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), USA. Email: jdwolfe@uab.edu. 2 Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. 3 Pennsylvania State University, USA. 4 Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA. Wolfe et al.: Multigenerational socioeconomic attainments and mortality among older men 720 http://www.demographic-research.org children who had 16 or more years of schooling had a median age of death almost 2 years higher than those with children with 12 or fewer years of schooling. CONCLUSIONS We find evidence of a three-generation model in which parent occupation, personal wealth, and adult child attainments are independently associated with older men’s mortality. CONTRIBUTION These findings highlight the relevance of adjacent generations for health and mortality in later life and the importance of historical context for accurately measuring socioeconomic attainments in different generations and cohorts.
The effect of zearalenone mycotoxins at late gestation days on the development and reproductive organs

Abstract. Irnidayanti Y. 2012. The effect of zearalenone mycotoxins administration at late gestation days on the development and reproductive organs of mice. Nusantara Bioscience 4: 1-5. Zearalenone was injected subcutaneously with a dose of 30 mg/kg body weight to pregnant mice on the 13 to 16 days. Control was given only sesame oil. Control and treated mice were killed on day 18 of gestation by cervical dislocation. Observations of maternal body weight, reproductive performance, external and internal malformation were conducted. Histological analysis of fetal ovaries, uterus, and testes was also done. The results revealed that administration of zearalenone to mice at late gestation was not teratogenic. Zearalenone caused a tendency that the primordial follicles and follicular cells relatively decreased in number and the number of the degenerate primordial follicle relatively increased. Effects of zearalenone on the uterus caused a significant increase in the height of lumen epithelial cells and in the thickness of the uterine wall were significant. The lamina propria and myometrium started to differentiate. In the male fetus, zearalenone caused a tendency to decrease in number of the Leydig cells.
Inside-Outside Semantics : A Framework for Neural Models of Semantic Composition

The Recursive Neural Network (RNN) model and its extensions have been shown to be powerful tools for semantic composition with successes in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, in this paper, we argue that the RNN model is restricted to a subset of NLP tasks where semantic compositionality plays a role. We propose an extension called Inside-Outside Semantics. In our framework every node in a parse tree is associated with a pair of representations, the inner representation for representing the content under the node, and the outer representation for representing its surrounding context. We demonstrate how this allows us to develop neural models for a much broader class of NLP tasks and for supervised as well as unsupervised learning. Our neural-net model, Inside-Outside Recursive Neural Network, performs on par with or better than the state-of-the-art (neural) models in word prediction, phrase-similarity judgements and semantic role labelling.
LEKTI, a physiological inhibitor of multiple serine proteinases, suppresses perineural and lymphovascular invasion of human head and neck cancer cells in a mouse orthotopic model

Serine Protease Inhibitor Kazal-type 5 (SPINK5) gene encodes 3 different LymphoEpithelial Kazal-Type-Inhibitor (LEKTI) isoforms. We identified and cloned LEKTI by its constitutive expression in normal oral mucosa and its loss of expression in matched tumor specimens of patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). Stable re-expression of LEKTI in HNSCC OSC19 cells resulted in reduced migration and invasionand enhanced adhesion on variety of ECM substrates in vitrowith a concomitant reduction inexpression of endogenous MMP-14, MMP-8, KLK5, and ADAM8. Here, we sought to determine the consequences of LEKTI re-expression on the in vivo changes in the tumor growth and invasion using an orthotopic model of tongue cancer. In the tongue tumors of mice, lymphovascular invasion or perineural spread was found in 100% of tumors derived from parental cell lines but was almost totally absent in all tumors derived from LEKTI-expressing clones. Our work suggests that loss of LEKTI expression in primary tumors might correlate with aggressive biologic behavior and restoration of LEKTI expression by pharmacologic means might be beneficial for patients with HNSCC.
Caregivers' burden experienced by relatives living with a person suffering from schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a complex chronic disease that turns the affected person into a dependent and disorganized patient. This pathology is responsible for a major burden on the family members who are in charge of taking care of that person. Analyze to what extant can socio-demographic, clinical and environmental variables interfere with the burden felt by family members who live with someone suffering from schizophrenia; to analyze the relationship between a depressive mood state and the burden on the family members who live with a person suffering from schizophrenia were our objectives. As a methodology, quantitative and non-experimental, cross-sectional, descriptive and correlational study. The data collection was done through socio-demographic questionnaires; Vaz Serra and Pio Abreu’s Portuguese version of Beck Depression Inventory (1973); Zarit Burden Interview adapted by Sequeira (2007). 95 informal caregivers taking care of schizophrenic patients were assessed. Participants are mainly female (66%), aged 40 or over (79%) and 36 % are the patients’ mothers. Gender, age and existing family ties variables interfered significantly with the impact caused on the caregiver’s burden. There was a statistically significant correlation between the depressive symptomatology and the burden experienced by the family caregivers. Family/ informal caregiver experience several difficulties when they have to go through a daily process of taking care of a family member suffering from schizophrenia. This situation may cause exhaustion, conflicts, emotional suffering and even depressive symptomatology. This burden of care grows stronger as the patients are older, when they are male and when there are no families ties binding patient and caregiver. These variables must be taken into account in these caregivers’ service plans. © 2016 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy. org.uk
Prevalence and intensity of infection with gastrointestinal nematodes in sheep in eastern Serbia

A coprological examination of 680 grazing sheep was performed in Eastern Serbia from March 2011 to November 2012 in order to determine the presence of gastrointestinal (GI) nematode parasites. Fecal samples were randomly collected and examined by using qualitative and quantitative coprological techniques. It was found that 74.56% sheep were infected. Samples that contained nematode eggs were processed for larval development and eleven nematode genera were identified: Haemonchus (46.91%), Ostertagia (25.88%), Marshallagia (21.91%), Cooperia (14.12%), Trichostrongylus (39.85%), Nematodirus (35.88%), Bunostomum (23.97%), Strongyloides (17.06%) Oesophagostomum (40.73%), Chabertia (32.79%) and Trichuris (10.88%). Higher prevalence of infection was observed in females (p<0.01), as well as in adults (p<0.001). Regarding the intensity of infection, in 40.63% sheep it was low, in 51.87% moderate and in 7.50% high. There was no difference in intensity of infection considering sex and age of animals. Moreover, simultaneous infection with different number of nematode genera was dependent on sheep’s age (p<0.001). These results suggest that GI nematodes are a conspicuous problem of grazing sheep in the study area. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. III 046002]
THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS OF EMPATHY, TRUST AND CONFLICT AND THEIR IMPACT ON SALES PERFORMANCE: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

There is a great deal of evidence in the general interpersonal behavior literature that an individual’s perceptions of another person’s trust, empathy and conflict impacts behaviors toward that individual. This has also been found to be true in the business-to-business sales literature. Moreover, it has been found that these perceptions affect various aspects of the organizational buying process. Consequently, knowledge of the relative importance of these perceptions on organizational choice processes needs to be taken into consideration in decisions on hiring, training, and even sales strategy. However, while these factors have been studied, their relative importance has not. This paper develops a model of these constructs and then tests that model empirically in a specific business-to-business selling context. The results demonstrate the primacy of trust and empathy as predictors of sales success while suggesting that social conflict plays a relatively insignificant but interesting role.
Audit Quality and Corporate Governance: Evidence from the Microfinance Industry

This study uses a unique, hand-collected sample of microfinance institutions from 73 countries that typically are not investigated in accounting research to analyze the relationships between audit quality and governance mechanisms. We examine two measures of audit quality, namely, the use of Big Four auditors and the presence of internal auditors who report to the boards of these institutions. The empirical analysis of this study reveals that these two quality metrics are highly related, although we also demonstrate that these metrics capture distinctive aspects of audit quality. In particular, the presence of internal auditors is related to other indicators of stricter governance, whereas the use of Big Four auditors is generally unrelated to other control mechanisms. This study illustrates that there is no single association between audit quality and governance; instead, the relationships between these two characteristics are dependent on the specific mechanism that is investigated. However, for situations in which a significant relationship between audit quality and governance does exist, the sign of this relationship is always positive. Thus, our data support the complementarity view of these two traits that is espoused by prior research. We find no support for the contention that these control mechanisms function as substitutes.
Assessing the Impact of Benchmarking Antecedents on Quality Improvement and its Financial Consequences

The objective of this study is to assess whether firms involved in quality benchmarking projects achieve greater actual quality improvements if they have in place the benchmarking antecedents identified by Elnathan et al. (1996). To show the financial impact of these results, we further assess the effect of quality improvement on profitability, both through relative cost improvement and through other means. To this end, we collected data from 457 manufacturing business units with qualitybenchmarking projects and analyzed the variable relationships using structural equation modeling. The results indicate a strong positive relationship between benchmarking antecedents and quality improvement and a significant impact of quality improvement on relative costs improvement, which in turn is significantly associated with profitability. However, the direct relationship between benchmarking antecedents and relative costs improvement or profitability is not significant, nor is the direct relationship between quality.
CHANGES IN POSTURAL CONTROL POST AN 8-WEEK DANCE PROGRAM IN FEMALE ELDERLY

This study investigated the effect of an 8wk dance program on orthostatic postural control in elderly. Thirty-four elderly participants were randomly assigned to dance group (DG: n=19; 69.1 ± 6.57 years, 72.5 ± 11.7kg) and control group (CG: n=15; 71.5 ± 7.45 years; 70.9 ± 9.3kg). A force plate was used to measure three dimensional ground reaction force data in three conditions: narrow stance position eyes open and closed and tandem position eyes open, randomly registered over a period of 60 seconds pre and post the intervention. The mean velocity sway and the COP path area were calculated. The results showed that the ballroom dancing program with low/moderate intensity significantly improved balance. Dance would be an optimal activity for an elderly population since it can improve postural control and thus prevent fall incidence.
Interactions between monetary policy and exchange rate in inflation targeting emerging countries: the case of three East Asian countries

This paper investigates empirically how the reaction of monetary policy to exchange rate has changed after the adoption of inflation targeting regime in three East Asian countries. Using a structural VAR and single equation methods, this study shows that the reactions of monetary policy to exchange rate shocks as well as CPI (demand shocks) and output (supply shocks) have declined under the inflation targeting environment. The policy function reacts weakly to the exchange rate movements before and after the financial crisis of 1997 in two out of the three countries.
Evolution of the baryon fraction in the Local Group: accretion versus feedback at low and high z

Using hydrodynamical zoom simulations in the standard Λ cold dark matter cosmology, we investigate the evolution of the distribution of baryons (gas and stars) in a Local Group-type universe. First, with standard star formation and supernova feedback prescriptions, we find that the mean baryonic fraction value estimated at the virial radius of the two main central objects (i.e. the Milky Way and Andromeda) is decreasing over time and is 10–15 per cent lower than the universal value 0.166, at z = 0. This decrease is mainly due to the fact that the amount of accretion of dissipative gas on to the halo, especially at low redshift, is in general much lower than that of the dissipationless dark matter. Indeed, a significant part of the baryons does not collapse on to the haloes and remains in their outskirts, mainly in the form of warm hot intergalactic medium (WHIM). Moreover, during the formation of each object, some dark matter and baryons are also expelled through merger events via tidal disruption. In contrast to baryons, expelled dark matter can be more efficiently re-accreted on to the halo, enhancing both the reduction of fb inside Rv and the increase of the mass of WHIM outside Rv. Varying the efficiency of supernova feedback at low redshift does not seem to significantly affect these trends. Alternatively, when a significant fraction of the initial gas in the main objects is released at high redshifts by more powerful sources of feedback, such as active galactic nuclei from intermediate-mass black holes in lower mass galaxies, the baryonic fraction at the virial radius can have a lower value () at low redshift. Hence, physical mechanisms able to drive the gas out of the virial radius at high redshifts will have a stronger impact on the deficit of baryons in the mass budget of Milky Way-type galaxies at present times than those that expel the gas in the longer, late phases of galaxy formation.
ATTITUDES TO GENE TECHNOLOGY: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TRUST IN INSTITUTIONS

ABSTRACT This is a study of the relationship between trust in institutions and attitudes to gene technology in general, and GM food and stem cell research in particular. The role of so-called active trust is emphasised, meaning that trust is neither conceived as a trait nor a one-dimensional concept. The study uses data from a Eurobarometer survey of gene technology in Europe, conducted in 2002. People's attitudes in five European counties, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and United Kingdom are compared, and the significance of trust in institutions in these countries is investigated. The results show that trust in institutions has an impact on attitudes to gene technology. Trust in experts, stakeholders and official bodies are associated with positive attitudes to GM food and stem cell research, whereas trust in Non-Governmental Organisations is associated with negative perceptions of these technologies. This confirms the significant role of active trust.
How Finite Element Analysis Revolutionized a 100-Year Old Equation

In 1901 Weiss proposed an equation predicting activation of nerve fibers by electrical stimulation, used for a century in neuroscience and 30 years in neuromodulation, which applies electric fields to modify nerve behavior in neurological disorders. Since it is difficult to measure electric potential along a nerve fiber, Weiss’ equation instead relates voltage or current applied at the electrode to action potential thresholds at the nerve, and thus thresholds are relative to the model’s geometry, electrode array configuration, tissue conductivities, and waveform. We replicated a leading calibrated nerve model in COMSOL and with it, examined the predicted electric potential gradient seen by the axon. This made it possible to convert a subjective equation predicting nerve thresholds to an absolute equation. We use the new method in our analyses of neuromodulation, e.g. of the spinal cord for chronic pain and vagus nerve for treatment of epilepsy.