Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Terrestrial Trophic Cascades: How Much Do They Trickle?

Although more consensus is now emerging on the magnitude and frequency of cascading trophic effects in aquatic communities, the debate over their terrestrial counterparts continues. We used meta‐analysis to analyze field experiments on trophic cascades in terrestrial arthropod‐dominated food webs to evaluate the overall magnitude of trophic cascades and conditions affecting their occurrence and strength. We found extensive support for the presence of trophic cascades in terrestrial communities. In the majority of experiments, predator removal led to increased densities of herbivorous insects and higher levels of plant damage. Cascades in which removing predators led to decreased herbivory also were detected but were less frequent and weaker, suggesting a predominantly three‐trophic‐level behavior of arthropod‐dominated terrestrial food webs. Despite the clear evidence that cascades often decreased plant damage, residual effects of predation produced either no or only minimal changes in overall plant biomass. Agricultural systems and natural communities exhibited similarly strong effects of predation on herbivore abundance. However, resulting effects on plant damage and community‐wide effects of trophic cascades on plant biomass usually were highly variable, and only in the managed agricultural systems did predators occasionally have strong indirect effects on plant biomass. Our meta‐analysis suggests that the effects of trophic cascades on the biomass of primary producers are weaker in terrestrial than aquatic food webs.
The Association Between Television Viewing and Irregular Sleep Schedules Among Children Less Than 3 Years of Age

Background. Regular sleep schedules are an important part of healthy sleep habits. Although television viewing is associated with altered sleep patterns and sleep disorders among children and adolescents, the effect of television viewing on the sleep patterns of infants and toddlers is not known. Objective. To test the hypothesis that television viewing by infants and toddlers is associated with having irregular naptime and bedtime schedules. Methods. We used data from the National Survey of Early Childhood Health, a nationally representative, cross-sectional study of the health and health care of children 4 to 35 months of age. Our main outcome measures were whether children had irregular naptime and bedtime schedules. Our main predictor was hours of television watched on a daily basis. We performed multivariate logistic regression analyses, adjusting for a variety of factors including demographic information, measures of maternal mental health, and measures of family interactions, to test the independent association of television viewing and irregular naptime and bedtime schedules. Results. Data were available for 2068 children. Thirty-four percent of all children had irregular naptime schedules, and 27% had irregular bedtime schedules. Mean hours of television viewing per day were as follows: 0.9 hours/day (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.8–1.0 hours/day) for children <12 months of age, 1.6 hours/day (95% CI: 1.4–1.8 hours/day) for children 12 to 23 months of age, and 2.3 hours/day (95% CI: 2.1–2.5 hours/day) for children 24 to 35 months of age. In our logistic regression model, the number of hours of television watched per day was associated with both an irregular naptime schedule (odds ratio: 1.09; 95% CI: 1.01–1.18) and an irregular bedtime schedule (odds ratio: 1.13; 95% CI: 1.04–1.24). Conclusions. Television viewing among infants and toddlers is associated with irregular sleep schedules. More research is warranted to determine whether this association is causal.
Double‐pulse fluorescence lifetime measurements

It is demonstrated that fluorescence lifetimes in the nanosecond and picosecond time‐scale range can be observed with the recently proposed double‐pulse fluorescence lifetime imaging technique (Müller et al., 1995, Double‐pulse fluorescence lifetime imaging in confocal microscopy. J. Microsc177, 171–179).
Administration of anti-IL-4 monoclonal antibody 11B11 increases the resistance of mice to Listeria monocytogenes infection.

The role of endogenous IL-4 in resistance to Listeria monocytogenes infection was investigated by in vivo administration of an anti-IL-4 mAb (11B11). Mice treated with 0.01 to 0.4 mg of anti-IL-4 mAb before L. monocytogenes challenge demonstrated a significantly reduced peak bacterial burden in their livers and spleens and accelerated bacterial clearance from these organs. In addition, histopathologic damage to the liver was reduced. Maximal protection was achieved by i.p. injection of 0.1 mg of anti-IL-4 mAb 2 or 24 h before L. monocytogenes challenge; treatment with anti-IL-4 mAb after injection of L. monocytogenes had no effect on antilisterial resistance. Anti-IL-4 mAb-treated and control Listeria-infected mice exhibited similar patterns of IFN-gamma, IL-2, and IL-4 mRNA, as determined by polymerase chain reaction amplification of RNA extracted from spleen cells. In both anti-IL-4 mAb-treated and control mice, IFN-gamma, IL-2, and IL-4 mRNA were produced within 4 h after challenge. Cytokine mRNA levels were similar for anti-IL-4 mAb-treated and control mice, except for the greater amount of IFN-gamma mRNA in the anti-IL-4 mAb-treated mice at 4 h after L. monocytogenes challenge. IFN-gamma and IL-2 mRNA levels were sustained for at least 5 days, whereas IL-4 mRNA was undetectable by 3 days after challenge. There were no significant differences in the amounts of IL-4 and IFN-gamma detected in culture supernatants of spleen cells from anti-IL-4 mAb-treated and control Listeria-infected mice. These results suggest that endogenous IL-4, a cytokine thought to be produced principally by Th2 cells, has a deleterious effect on host defense against the facultative intracellular pathogen L. monocytogenes. Administration of an anti-IL-4 mAb increases antilisterial resistance without causing a detectable shift to a Th1 type of cytokine response.
Hot pixel annealing behavior in CCDs irradiated at -84/spl deg/C

A Hubble space telescope wide field camera 3 e2v CCD was irradiated while operating at -84/spl deg/C and the dark current studied as a function of temperature while the charge coupled device was warmed to a sequence of temperatures up to a maximum of +30/spl deg/C. The device was then cooled back down to -84/spl deg/ and remeasured. Hot pixel populations were tracked during the warm up and cool down. Hot pixel annealing began below -40/spl deg/C and the anneal process was largely completed by the time the detector reached +20/spl deg/C. There was no apparent sharp annealing temperature. Although a large fraction of the hot pixels fell below the threshold to be counted as a hot pixel, they nevertheless sustained a higher leakage rate than the remaining population. The mechanism for hot pixel annealing is not presently understood. Room temperature irradiations do not adequately characterize the hot pixel distributions for cooled applications.
Spectral cues for understanding speech in quiet and in noise

thresholds observed at 0.25 and 0.50 peaks/octave (Saoji et al., 2009). The bandwidth and audio-frequency range of the noise band carrier has little effect on SMD thresholds of NH listeners. That is, sensitivity to 1cycle/octave modulation obtained to a four-octave noiseband is not likely different than that obtained to a one-octave noiseband tested at the upper or lower range of the original broadband stimulus. In the present study, SMD thresholds were obtained to noiseband stimuli of differentbandwidthsand audio-frequency regionsat different spectral modulation frequencies. The SMD thresholds were compared with the listener’s speech understanding scores to determine the relationship between SMD thresholds and performance. The goal was to determine the spectral cues (i.e. spectral modulation frequencies and audio-frequency ranges) required to model speech understanding in quiet and in noise.
Sinonasal Undifferentiated Carcinoma, Nasopharyngeal-Type Undifferentiated Carcinoma, and Keratinizing and Nonkeratinizing Squamous Cell Carcinoma Express Different Cytokeratin Patterns

Sinonasal undifferentiated carcinoma (SNUC) is a highly aggressive malignant neoplasm that is often difficult to distinguish from other poorly differentiated carcinomas arising in the sinonasal tract. To search for a differential cytokeratin (CK) expression that could be useful for diagnostic purposes, we compared the expression of a large panel of CKs in a series of 6 SNUCs, 10 poorly differentiated squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs), 10 nonkeratinizing squamous cell carcinomas (NKSCCs), and 5 nasopharyngeal-type undifferentiated carcinomas (NPTCs). SCC, NKSCC, and NPTC frequently showed immunoreactivity for CK5/CK6, CK8, CK13, and CK19. In addition, SCC and NKSCC expressed CK14, which was not detected in NPTC, and SCC expressed CK7 (60% of cases) and CK4 (30% of cases), which were absent in NKSCC and NPTC. Three NKSCCs were associated with a Schneiderian papilloma, and the results of the immunostaining were similar in the two components, with the exception of CK4 and CK7, which were expressed by the papilloma and not by the carcinoma. In contrast to other carcinomas, SNUC was characterized by the exclusive expression of CKs of simple epithelia, such as CK8 (100% of cases), CK7 (50% of cases), and CK19 (50% of cases). Thus, there are significant differences in the pattern of CK expression between SNUC, SCC, NKSCC, and NPTC, which could be of diagnostic aid. Moreover, these findings support the hypothesis that SNUC is a separate entity from SCC and NPTC of the sinonasal tract.
From CNTNAP2 to Early Expressive Language in Infancy: The Mediation Role of Rapid Auditory Processing

Although it is clear that early language acquisition can be a target of CNTNAP2, the pathway between gene and language is still largely unknown. This research focused on the mediation role of rapid auditory processing (RAP). We tested RAP at 6 months of age by the use of event-related potentials, as a mediator between common variants of the CNTNAP2 gene (rs7794745 and rs2710102) and 20-month-old language outcome in a prospective longitudinal study of 96 Italian infants. The mediation model examines the hypothesis that language outcome is explained by a sequence of effects involving RAP and CNTNAP2. The ability to discriminate spectrotemporally complex auditory frequency changes at 6 months of age mediates the contribution of rs2710102 to expressive vocabulary at 20 months. The indirect effect revealed that rs2710102 C/C was associated with lower P3 amplitude in the right hemisphere, which, in turn, predicted poorer expressive vocabulary at 20 months of age. These findings add to a growing body of literature implicating RAP as a viable marker in genetic studies of language development. The results demonstrate a potential developmental cascade of effects, whereby CNTNAP2 drives RAP functioning that, in turn, contributes to early expressive outcome.
On The Integral Coding Advantage In Unit Combination Networks

Network coding is a networking paradigm which allows network nodes to combine different pieces of data at various steps in the transmission rather than simply copying and forwarding the data. Network coding has various applications, and can be used to increase throughput, routing efficiency, robustness, and security. The original benefit that was demonstrated was improving the allowable transmission rate for a multicast session, and this application has been the focus of much research. One important parameter, the coding advantage, is the ratio of throughput with network coding to that without. The multicast networks that have a nontrivial coding advantage (i.e., coding advantage greater than 1) all seem to contain a substructure called the combination network which has a source, n relay nodes, and ( n k ) receivers in which each receiver is adjacent to a unique subset of k relay nodes. The coding advantage in combination networks has previously been determined for networks with fractional routing. In this paper, we address integral routing, which is more appropriate for networks (like optical wavelength-division-multiplexing networks) which allow only coarse-grained subdivision of the available bandwidth on any given channel. We give exact formulas for the integral coding advantage in both directed and undirected networks. For directed networks, we show that the coding advantage is k/ ⌊ n n−k+1 ⌋ . For undirected networks, we show that the coding advantage is k/(k−1). The latter result fits with conjectures that the integral coding advantage in any undirected network is bounded above by 2.
Relationships between adenosine and coronary resistance in conscious exercising dogs.

The relation between myocardial adenosine content, coronary sinus plasma concentration, and coronary vascular resistance was studied in conscious dogs during rest or treadmill exercise. Exercise at 5 mi/h for 7 min on a 20% slope had a significant threefold increase in cardiac work over that of dogs at rest. Exercise increased myocardial adenosine content from 1.35 +/- 0.54 to 8.18 +/- 0.60 nmol/g and decreased coronary vascular resistance from 1.07 +/- 0.13 to 0.69 +/- 0.08 mmHg.ml-1.min.100 g; the former correlated negatively with the latter (r = -0.74, P less than 0.01). The adenosine concentration in coronary sinus plasma increased from 108 +/- 16 to 184 +/- 18 nmol/l plasma and correlated negatively with coronary vascular resistance (r = -0.83, P less than 0.01). Myocardial adenosine content correlated positively with coronary sinus plasma adenosine concentration (r = 0.77, P less than 0.05). Low myocardial lactate content, continued lactate uptake, lack of change in the lactate-pyruvate ratio, and stable coronary sinus oxygen tension values indicated no myocardial hypoxia. These findings demonstrate the release of adenosine into coronary sinus blood and show significant correlations between myocardial adenosine content, coronary sinus adenosine concentration, and coronary vascular resistance during physiological exercise in the dog. The results support the hypothesis that adenosine regulates coronary blood flow during increased metabolic activity.
The prevalence of sexual abuse in women with fibromyalgia.

OBJECTIVE To determine the prevalence of sexual abuse in women diagnosed as having fibromyalgia (FM) compared with controls. METHODS A self-administered questionnaire designed to obtain information regarding demographics, health care utilization, and history of sexual and physical abuse was completed by 40 women with FM and by 42 women who had no evidence of connective tissue disease or other major medical condition. RESULTS Women with FM reported more physical symptoms and were significantly different on multiple indices of health compared with controls. Twenty-six FM subjects (65%) reported sexual abuse, in comparison with 22 controls (52%). The prevalence and type of abuse were not significantly different between groups. Sexually abused FM subjects reported significantly more symptoms than did non-sexually abused FM women, but did not differ in the number of symptoms for which they sought medical treatment. CONCLUSION Sexual abuse does not appear to be a specific factor in the etiology of FM, but is correlated with the number and severity of associated symptoms.
Periodicity of sexual desire in relation time of ovulation in women

A review of several studies attempting to determine the existence of a period of increased sexual desire during the menstrual cycle and its relationship to ovulation indicates that peaks have been reported prior to menstruation and after menstruation; studies on sexually inactive women report peaks at midcycle. Terminological ambiguities regarding sexual desires are partly responsible for differences in the various studies reviewed. Psychological and social factors and physical factors (such as an increased amount of mucus in the vagina during the follicular phase increased congestion in pelvic tissues during the luteal phase and hormonal variations) and research methodology (some studies requiring sexual abstinence for certain lengths of time) are also responsible for variations in results. Coitus-induced ovulation has also been suggested by studies on rape victims and by rat experiments. Sexual desire may differ during the luteal and follicular phases preferences may differ among women regarding the phases and consequently what they experience (and define) as sexual desire may vary accordingly. Alterations in desire may be caused by contraceptive methods the rhythm method forcing suppression of desire during the follicular phase and the progesterone in oral pills causing enhancement in the luteal phase or suppression of desire because of the lack of follicular phase.
Joint Dimension Reduction and Metric Learning for Person Re-identification

Person re-identification is an important technique towards automatic search of a person’s presence in a surveillance video. Among various methods developed for person re-identification, the Mahalanobis metric learning approaches have attracted much attention due to their impressive performance. In practice, many previous papers have applied the Principle Component Analysis (PCA) for dimension reduction before metric learning. However, this may not be the optimal way for metric learning in low dimensional space. In this paper, we propose to jointly learn the discriminant low dimensional subspace and the distance metric. This is achieved by learning a projection matrix and a Restricted Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (RQDA) model. We show that the problem can be formulated as a Generalized Rayleigh Quotient, and a closed-form solution can be obtained by the generalized eigenvalue decomposition. We also present a practical computation method for RQDA, as well as its regularization. For the application of person re-identification, we propose a Retinex and maximum occurrence based feature representation method, which is robust to both illumination and viewpoint changes. Experiments on two challenging public databases, VIPeR and QMUL GRID, show that the performance of the proposed method is comparable to the state of the art.
Three‐dimensional organisation of mitochondrial clusters in regenerating dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons from neonatal rats: evidence for mobile mitochondrial pools

Abstract We report for the first time the rearrangement of mitochondrial arrays in developing dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons isolated from neonatal rats in culture. Neurons were loaded with the mitochondria‐specific fluorescent dye JC‐1, and three‐dimensional (3D) reconstruction of mitochondrial fluorescence was performed by confocal laser sectioning in fresh neurons and neurons kept in culture up to a week. We found that after 24 hours the mitochondria become reorganised to form clusters in the axonal hillocks. Axonal extension and neuronal network formation coincided with a redistribution of the mitochondrial clusters. In the extended axons the mitochondria become spaced along the axonal length; however, they formed clusters in the branch points and growth cones. We conclude that the initial clusters of mitochondria may be storage pools of mobile mitochondria able to be mobilised to provide energy for axonal transport during neuronal regeneration and neuronal outgrowth. These findings may have relevance to the rate of axonal regeneration and axonal transport in adult DRG neurons, and neuronal polarisation and axonal outgrowth regulation in developing DRG neurons.
Magnitude and variability of benthic and pelagic metabolism in a temperate coastal lagoon

In shallow coastal systems where most of the seafloor lies within the photic zone, ben- thic photoautotrophy is likely to play a key role in regulating carbon and nitrogen cycling. We mea- sured dissolved inorganic carbon exchanges in seasonal microcosm incubations to determine the rel- ative importance of benthic (with and without macroalgae) and water column metabolism at 3 sites located along a nutrient gradient in a coastal barrier-island lagoon on the eastern shore of Virginia. When coupled with data on in situ biomass, the incubations clearly indicated a seasonality in the dominance of primary producers at the sites, with benthic primary producers being the most impor- tant early and late in the growing season and phytoplankton dominating following a mid-summer period of macroalgal decay and the release of algal-bound nutrients to the water column. The ben- thos was always net autotrophic, and differences in community metabolism at the 3 sites appeared to be largely due to variation in macroalgal biomass. Macroalgae accumulated to a greater extent in the mid-lagoon and accounted for up to 96% of benthic production. The water column was net hetero- trophic throughout the lagoon except following the mid-summer macroalgal collapse, when phyto- plankton biomass was highest at the 2 sites closest to the mainland. Benthic microalgal production also increased in importance following the macroalgal decline, suggesting that competition for light and possibly nutrients limited benthic microalgal production when macroalgal densities were high. Overall, there was a distinct seasonality in patterns of total metabolism within the bay, where all sites were net autotrophic in the spring and summer and net heterotrophic in the fall. Up to 8 g N m -2 accu- mulated in macroalgal biomass throughout spring and early summer at the mid-lagoon shoal site, slowing nutrient transport through the lagoon. Nutrient turnover rates were higher during the period when phytoplankton and benthic microalgae were the dominant primary producers. This study illus- trates the functional importance of different primary producer communities to carbon metabolism and to the temporary retention of nutrients in lagoonal land-margin ecosystems.
CRBP-1 expression in ovarian cancer: a potential therapeutic target.

BACKGROUND/AIM Cellular retinol binding protein-1 regulates retinol bioavailability and contributes to cell differentiation maintenance, but its role in ovarian carcinogenesis remains uncertain. We investigated CRBP-1 expression in ovarian tumors and CRBP-1 signaling-regulated pathways. MATERIALS AND METHODS We performed immunohistochemistry, methylation-specific PCR, gene copy number analysis in ovarian tumors and proliferation/apoptosis evaluation, gene array, blot and real-time PCR in CRBP-1-transfected A2780 ovarian cancer cells. RESULTS CRBP-1 expression was reduced or absent in G2 and G3 ovarian carcinomas. CRBP-1 silencing in 60% of G2 and 66.7% of G3 carcinomas was due to CRBP-1 promoter methylation. A2780 CRBP-1-transfected cells showed increased retinol-induced apoptosis, retinoid-induced reduced clonogenicity and down-regulation of proliferation and transcription genes, including AKT1, AKT3, EGFR, FOS, JUN, STAT1 and STAT5A. CONCLUSION CRBP-1 loss in G2/G3 ovarian carcinomas and increased apoptotic susceptibility to retinoids in CRBP-1-transfected-A2780 cells suggest CRBP-1 screening as a target to ensure efficacy of an adjuvant retinoid therapy.