Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dogs as sentinels for Lyme disease in Massachusetts.

BACKGROUND An investigation of the relationship between incident human cases of Lyme disease and seroprevalence of antibodies to B. burgdorferi in dogs was undertaken in order to determine whether dogs might serve as sentinels for Lyme disease. METHODS 3011 canine serum samples were analyzed by ELISA for antibody to B. burgdorferi. Records of incident human cases of Lyme disease were obtained from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. RESULTS Regression analyses of the relationship between the log10 (mean incidence in people 1985-1989) and canine seroprevalence from July 1988-August 1989 revealed that canine seroprevalence was highly predictive of incidence (R2 = 0.86, p less than .0001). A logistic regression model that incorporates the altitude of the town where each dog was resident, the date of sampling, and information on each dog's age, sex, and breed adequately explained the risk of canine seropositivity. Dogs resident at altitudes less than 200 feet, of sporting or large mixed breeds, and greater than two years of age were five times, four times, and almost three times more likely, respectively, to exhibit seropositivity than were other dogs. CONCLUSIONS Estimates of the prevalence of antibody to B. burgdorferi in dog populations offers a sensitive, reliable, and convenient measure of the potential risk to people of B. burgdorferi in the environment. Risk factors for canine seropositivity may directly or indirectly illuminate certain aspects of the epidemiology of human Lyme disease.
The Remodeling of the Cytoplasm by Dengue Virus

Infection with Dengue Virus (DENV) causes the most prevalent arthropodborne viral disease worldwide. Since there are no antivirals available, there is an urgent medical need to discover novel therapeutic targets, implying a better understanding of the cellular and molecular events governing DENV life cycle. Following infection, DENV induces a massive remodeling of the cytoplasm including the endoplasmic reticulum from which DENV replication factories are formed. In addition, DENV alters the morphology of other organelles such as mitochondria to hijack their functions and to create a cellular environment favorable to viral replication. This review summarizes our current knowledge about the cytoplasmic remodeling activities of DENV.
Isolation Methods and Culture Conditions of Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cells from Malaysian Women

Human umbilical vein endothelial cell (HUVEC) isolated from umbilical cord is widely used as endothelial cell model. However, HUVEC has been characteristically hard to maintain and showed molecular heterogeneity depending on the umbilical cord donors. Commercial HUVEC is commonly derived from European and Caucasian population which have different molecular characteristics from Asian women. This study aimed to optimize the isolation and culture condition of HUVEC using combinations of growth factors and extracellular matrix components so that the isolated HUVEC will purely represent the population under study. Umbilical cords were obtained from women post-labour. Different incubation times and digestive enzymes were used during endothelial cells isolation process. The culture conditions were optimized based on the coating materials and the media supplements. The results showed that 0.1% collagenase for 40 min incubation was the optimal isolation condition of HUVEC. HUVEC grown in 0.2% gelatin coated plate with 10% heat-inactivated fetal calf serum showed higher proliferative capacity and reduced cell death compared to other conditions (p<0.05). The results generated from this study provide a basic protocol of HUVEC isolation and culture conditions in order to generate working endothelial cell populations purely represent the Malaysian population.
Hippocampal pathology in refractory temporal lobe epilepsy

Background: The MR and pathologic features of hippocampal sclerosis (HS) are well described and include volume decrease and T2-weighted signal increase for MRI, and neuron cell loss and gliosis for pathology. Objective: To confirm the established correlation between hippocampal volumes and neuron cell counts, and to study the still controversial association between signal change and gliosis. Methods: The authors studied 44 patients (22 men and 22 women; mean age at surgery, 37 years) with refractory temporal lobe epilepsy. Quantitative assessment of hippocampal volumes and T2 relaxometry, and neuron and glial cell count in the region CA1 and molecular layer of the dentate gyrus was performed. The proportion of glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP)-positive glial cells (reactive astrocytes) was indicated. Results: In a stepwise regression, the ipsilateral hippocampal volume was predicted best by the neuron cell count in the dentate gyrus (p = 0.005, r = 0.4). Hippocampal T2 time, however, was predicted best by the glial cell count in the dentate gyrus (p = 0.01, r = 0.4). None of the other cell counts contributed to either model. In the dentate, 31% of the glial cells were reactive astrocytes, whereas in CA1, 5% were reactive. Conclusion: The results confirmed the correlation between hippocampal volumes and neuron cell counts. T2-weighted signal increase in the hippocampus was mainly influenced by gliosis in the dentate gyrus, where a high proportion of glial cells show abnormal activity. This activity may reflect changes important in the development of hippocampal epileptogenicity.
Control of Integrin Expression by Extracellular Matrix (*)

Integrin-mediated interactions between cells and the extracellular matrix play a fundamental role in the development and function of a variety of tissues by triggering intracellular signals that regulate gene expression. In this study, mouse mammary epithelial cells plated on tissue culture plastic were shown to dramatically up-regulate the steady state levels of mRNA encoding the α1, α2, α3, α5, α6, α7, αv, and β1 integrin subunits, in contrast to cells cultured on a basement membrane matrix or cells in vivo. This pattern of expression was also observed in a mouse mammary epithelial strain, CID-9 and in other mouse cell lines such as MMTE cells and K1735-M2 melanoma cells. The control of integrin expression was mediated at different levels in different cell types. In K1735-M2 cells, transcription of the β1 integrin gene was influenced by the substratum, although the levels of integrin protein remained similar. In mammary epithelial cells, the rates of β1 integrin gene transcription were similar, but mRNA and protein levels were higher in cells cultured on plastic than those on basement membrane. For both cell types, the rate of integrin protein turnover was nearly identical in cells cultured on either substratum. Our results demonstrate that extracellular matrix controls the expression of β1 integrin subunits and that this regulation is exerted at both transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels.
Trends in incidence of testicular cancer in boys and adolescent men

Several epidemiological studies have described increasing trends over time in the incidence of testicular cancer in adult men. Less attention has been given to the trends in young boys, adolescents and old men. This paper describes the incidence of testicular cancer in young boys (0–4 years) and adolescents (15–19 years) in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and compares these trends with the corresponding data on adults. Although only small numbers were available, the data suggest that the incidence of testicular cancer in young boys has been constant, at a level around 0.5 per 100,000. This observation lends support to the idea that testicular cancer in young boys is aetiologically distinct from testicular cancer in adults. In all three populations we found a particularly high average annual increase in the incidence of testicular cancer in adolescents (around 6% per year). It is proposed that this increase is mainly caused by a secular trend towards earlier age at puberty. © 1995 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Bio-Inspired Networks of Visual Sensors, Neurons, and Oscillators

Animals routinely rely on their eyes to localize fixed and moving targets. Such a localization process might include prediction of future target location, recalling a sequence of previously visited places or, for the motor control circuit, actuating a successful movement. Typically, target localization is carried out by fusing images from two eyes, in the case of binocular vision, wherein the challenge is to have the images calibrated before fusion. In the field of machine vision, a typical problem of interest is to localize the position and orientation of a network of mobile cameras (sensor network) that are distributed in space and are simultaneously tracking a target. Inspired by the animal visual circuit, we study the problem of binocular image fusion for the purpose of localizing an unknown target in space. Guided by the dynamics of "eye rotation", we introduce control strategies that could be used to build machines with multiple sensors. In particular, we address the problem of how a group of visual sensors can be optimally controlled in a formation. We also address how images from multiple sensors are encoded using a set of basis functions, choosing a "larger than minimum" number of basis functions so that the resulting code that represents the image is sparse. We address the problem of how a sparsely encoded visual data stream is internally represented by a pattern of neural activity. In addition to the control mechanism, the synaptic interaction between cells is also subjected to "adaptation" that enables the activity waves to respond with greater sensitivity to visual input. We study how the rat hippocampal place cells are used to form a cognitive map of the environment so that the animal's location can be determined from its place cell activity. Finally, we study the problem of "decoding" location of moving targets from the neural activity wave in the cortex
The mechanism of the excretion of ammonia in the dog.

The excretion of ammonia is dependent upon several factors: the amount and duration of acid intake, presumably affecting variations in intracellular enzyme activity (1-3), the availability of precursors from which ammonia can be formed (4-6), and the pH of the urine (7-9). With respect to the effect of urine pH, the excretion of ammonia resembles that of a number of organic bases, such as quinine (10), nicotine (11), procaine (12), Atabrine@ (13), and certain derivatives of 4-aminoquinoline (13), all of which appear in the urine at a rate inversely related to urine pH. The experiments to be reported were designed to reexamine this phenomenon and to compare ammonia excretion with that of selected organic bases in order to provide information concerning 1) the nature of the process by which ammonia enters the urine, 2) the production of ammonia by the cells of the renal tubules, 3) the mechanism of excretion of other weak electrolytes, the output of which is dependent upon urine pH, and 4) to yield an interpretation of the quantitative relations between ammonia excretion and urine pH. Since the factors which affect the transport of the organic bases are similar to those affecting the movement of ammonia into the urine, it was anticipated that the excretion of these bases might be used as a means of independently evaluating the factors affecting the transport of ammonia as contrasted with those affecting intracellular production. In acute experiments the clearance of quinine was found to serve this purpose since it was influenced by pH only and the excretion of ammonia by both urine pH and by circumstances which might be presumed to influence rate of production. However, it was not possible to extend these principles to chronic experiments since the absolute level of quinine clearance varied at the same pH in different experiments in an unpredictable fashion. The results of the studies are in accord with the view (9, 14) that ammonia formed in the tubule cell enters the urine almost exclusively in the uncharged state, i.e., as the free base NH3, and accumulates as NH,+. The extent of accumulation is probably limited in the acid range of urine pH by the rate of ammonia production. At higher pH's, production of ammonia is non-limiting and the rate of excretion is dependent upon equilibration of ammonia in the tubule urine with that in tubule cell. Similar considerations also apply to the urinary loss of other weak electrolytes whose excretion is modified by changes in urine pH except insofar as rate of diffusion, rather than rate of production, is presumably the limiting factor in the acid range. The data have further been interpreted to indicate that final changes in urine volume are effected by abstraction of water in the tubule at a site beyond which final ammonia content is achieved.
An Examination of the Interrater Reliability Between Practitioners and Researchers on the Static-99

Many studies have validated the psychometric properties of the Static-99, the most widely used measure of sexual offender recidivism risk. However much of this research relied on instrument coding completed by well-trained researchers. This study is the first to examine the interrater reliability (IRR) of the Static-99 between practitioners in the field and researchers. Using archival data from a sample of 1,973 formerly incarcerated sex offenders, field raters’ scores on the Static-99 were compared with those of researchers. Overall, clinicians and researchers had excellent IRR on Static-99 total scores, with IRR coefficients ranging from “substantial” to “outstanding” for the individual 10 items of the scale. The most common causes of discrepancies were coding manual errors, followed by item subjectivity, inaccurate item scoring, and calculation errors. These results offer important data with regard to the frequency and perceived nature of scoring errors.
Event-Related Potentials During the Transition to Sleep for Individuals With Sleep-Onset Insomnia

Event-related potentials may be applied to directly measure information-processing deficits associated with the problem of insomnia. This study is a systematic investigation of cortical hyperarousal during the sleep-onset period in participants with sleep-onset insomnia complaints. Thirteen poor sleepers and twelve good sleepers (GS) were administered an oddball task while awake in the morning and evening and during repeated sleep-onset attempts. Participants signaled detection of a higher pitch target tone as they fell asleep. P2 amplitude was significantly smaller for poor sleepers compared to GS, following standard stimuli at all fronto-central sites, in the pre-sleep waking period at sleep onset. Groups did not differ for N1, N350, or P300 in wake, Stage 1, or Stage 2. The smaller P2 indicates that poor sleepers failed to inhibit the irrelevant standard stimuli. This hyper-attentiveness may explain chronic problems with sleep initiation and could be the target of behavioral and pharmaceutical treatment strategies.
Extracting LPV and qLPV Structures From State-Space Functions: A TP Model Transformation Based Framework

This paper proposes a tensor product (TP) model transformation-based framework requiring minimal human intuition to numerically reconstruct linear time invariant, Takagi–Sugeno (T–S) fuzzy model-based linear parameter varying and quasi-linear parameter varying representations of state-space models. The proposed framework facilitates the manipulation of the structure of the system matrix, the parameter vector—including state elements—and the vertex systems. The motivation behind this capability is that all of these structural components strongly influence the control design and the resulting control performance. An important feature of the framework is that it is agnostic towards the formulation of the state-space model, i.e., whether it is given using soft-computing-based techniques or closed formulae. The proposed approach is an extension of the TP model-based control design framework and inherits all of its advantageous properties, e.g., it can be easily used to find minimal representations, including the higher order singular value-based canonical form, and it supports the clear formulation of complexity/accuracy tradeoffs and allows for conversions to various types of convex representations, making for a flexible way to manipulate the weighting and antecedent functions. This paper gives examples to show how the framework can be used in a routine-like fashion and to highlight how it can be applied to the problem of finding useful T–S fuzzy model variations of a given model.
Incidence of colorectal cancer following adenomatous polyps of the large intestine

An association between adenomatous polyps of the large bowel and colorectal cancer has been reported, in the absence, however, of population‐based estimates of risk. Subjects with histologically confirmed first diagnosis of large‐bowel polyps notified to the population‐based Cancer Registry of the Swiss Canton of Vaud (about 600,000 inhabitants) during the calendar period 1979‐1990 were actively followed up to the end of 1990 for the subsequent occurrence of malignant neoplasms. Among 2,496 individuals with intestinal polyps, followed for a total of 10,310 person‐years at risk (6,201 among males and 4,109 among females), 150 malignant neoplasms were registered versus 152 expected. Thus, the standardized incidence ratio (SIR) for all cancers combined was 0.99. A significant excess was observed for colorectal cancer, with 35 cases observed (19 males, 16 females) versus 17.0 expected (SIR = 2.1; 95% CI: 1.5–3.0). There was also an excess, although not significant, for small‐bowel cancer (2 cases observed vs. 0.4 expected; SIR = 5.4). In none of the other cancer sites was SIR significantly or appreciably elevated: in subjects with colorectal polyps the SIR was 1.6 for stomach, 1.0 for lung, 0.9 for breast and 1.2 for prostate. The SIR of colorectal cancer was 3.1 in the first year since polyp registration, and declined thereafter to 1.8, in the absence, however, of any further trend with time since diagnosis. The cumulative risk of colorectal cancer in subjects with colorectal polyps was 2% at 5 years and 3% at 10 years. The quantitative estimates of this study are of interest for their population‐based nature, and are potentially useful for defining and targeting screening colonoscopy programmes.
Letter String Processing and Visual Short-Term Memory

The present study investigated whether expertise with letter string processing influences visual short-term memory capacity. Specifically, we examined whether performance in a change-detection task would vary as a function of stimulus type (letters vs. symbols) and type of display (horizontal, vertical, and circular). Participants were asked to detect a one-character change in a briefly presented character array following a delay of 900 ms. Concurrent articulation was used to limit effects of rehearsal. Type of display significantly affected performance with letters, but not with symbols, with a selective increase in change-detection accuracy for horizontally presented letter arrays compared with vertical and circular arrays. These findings confirm the standard limits of storage in visual short-term memory, but critically reveal a selective advantage for letter arrays over symbol arrays when presented horizontally. Such an advantage is probably due to the utilization of a specialized encoding mechanism built up over years of reading experience.
Leaf Color Used by Cabbage Root Flies to Distinguish Among Host Plants

In experiments in which spectrophotometric reflectance patterns of real leaves were mimicked with mixtures of artists' pigments, leaf color was shown to be a character used by cabbage root flies, before landing on leaves, to discriminate among the host plant cultivars radish, green cabbage, and red cabbage. It may be possible to take advantage of factors that affect leaf color, such as epicuticular bloom, pubescence, and masking of chlorophyll by other pigments, to decrease the attraction of certain pest insects to plants.
LAP2 binds to BAF·DNA complexes: requirement for the LEM domain and modulation by variable regions

LAP2 belongs to a family of nuclear membrane proteins sharing a 43 residue LEM domain. All LAP2 isoforms have the same N‐terminal ‘constant’ region (LAP2‐c), which includes the LEM domain, plus a C‐terminal ‘variable’ region. LAP2‐c polypeptide inhibits nuclear assembly in Xenopus extracts, and binds in vitro to barrier‐to‐autointegration factor (BAF), a DNA‐bridging protein. We tested 17 Xenopus LAP2‐c mutants for nuclear assembly inhibition, and binding to BAF and BAF·DNA complexes. LEM domain mutations disrupted all activities tested. Some mutations outside the LEM domain had no effect on binding to BAF, but disrupted activity in Xenopus extracts, suggesting that LAP2‐c has an additional unknown function required to inhibit nuclear assembly. Mutagenesis results suggest that BAF changes conformation when complexed with DNA. The binding affinity of LAP2 was higher for BAF·DNA complexes than for BAF, suggesting that these interactions are physiologically relevant. Nucleoplasmic domains of Xenopus LAP2 isoforms varied 9‐fold in their affinities for BAF, but all isoforms supershifted BAF·DNA complexes. We propose that the LEM domain is a core BAF‐binding domain that can be modulated by the variable regions of LAP2 isoforms.
Snow covered area estimation using satellite radar wide swath images

The feasibility of HUT snow covered area (SCA) method for operational snow melt monitoring, using large area satellite images has been determined. Previously the feasibility of the method has been proven for snow melt monitoring using spatially limited ERS-2 data. However, the spatial coverage of the data is an essential factor determining the operative usability of the method. Thus the adaptation of the method for Radarsat ScanSAR Wide (SCW) and Envisat ASAR wide swath medium resolution (WSM) data has been carried out, and the feasibility of the method using these data products has been studied. The analysis of the method was conducted by comparing the SCA estimates acquired from WSM and SCW data to reference data derived by optical remote sensing means. The analysis showed that the HUT SCA method is suitable for operational use with large area satellite radar images.