Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interleukin 1 beta, interleukin 6, tumor necrosis factor alpha, and interleukin 10 responses in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of cynomolgus macaques during acute infection with SIVmac251.

HIV infection ultimately leads to AIDS, despite the immune responses elicited soon after infection. In addition to the observed changes in lymphoid cell subsets, alteration of the cytokine network most likely accompanies and/or contributes to the lack of protective immune responses. In an attempt to delineate the early events in the immune response to lentivirus infection, we have sequentially monitored levels of proinflammatory (IL-1 beta, IL-6, and TNF-alpha) and antiinflammatory (IL-10) cytokine mRNAs in PBMCs of cynomolgus macaques during primary SIVmac infection. Eight monkeys were infected i.v. with 4 AID50 of cell-free SIVmac251. All monkeys seroconverted between days 16 and 21 postinfection (p.i.), and had detectable peripheral viremia. The viral load peaked between days 12 and 16 p.i. , and fell sharply thereafter. A marked increase in the expression of IL-6 mRNA was observed in all macaques during the first weeks following infection. An increase in the levels of expression of IL-1 beta, TNF-alpha, and IL-10 mRNA was also determined in six, six, and five of the eight monkeys, respectively. While IL-6, TNF-alpha, and IL-10 increased transiently, increased levels of IL-1 beta mRNA expression were sustained over 44 days in most monkeys.
Effects of selected fee schedule options on physicians' Medicare receipts

The Congress has indicated interest in modifying the system by which Medicare pays for physicians' services, and implementation of a Medicare fee schedule may be the most feasible change in the near term. In this article, the effects on physicians' Medicare receipts of a variety of fee schedules are simulated using 1984 Medicare claims data for a nationally representative sample of physician practices. The results show that reasonable choices concerning specialty and geographic differentials would shift payments away from surgical specialists and urban areas toward generalists (general practitioners, family practitioners, and internists) and less urban areas.
Crafting Bone Tools in Mesolithic Norway: A Regional Eastern-Related Know-How

This article focuses on the production of bone tools during the seventh millennium cal BC. A large number of fishhooks and waste from fishhook production have been found at the sites of Sævarhelleren and Viste cave, in western Norway. The data have been studied by means of the chaîne opératoire concept, meaning that the artefacts are described and analysed in order to identify the different steps in the production process and to characterize the technology in a comparative northern European perspective. The result shows that bone tools and fishhooks were crafted in a similar way at these two sites, with techniques that were mastered by all makers, and in close relation to stone tool production. When compared to other contemporaneous sites, the technology resembles the Mesolithic bone technology of north-eastern Europe. It thus contradicts the hypothesis of a strong connection between western Norway and the Maglemose cultural group in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany.
In vitro cytostatic activity and DNA-interaction of the new liver organotropic complex chloro-bis-cholylglycinate-platinum (II).

BACKGROUND The liver organotropic properties of the new bioinorganic complex of platinum (II) and glycocholic acid, Bamet-H2 have been reported previously. The aim of this work was to investigate the in vitro cytostatic activity of this compound. MATERIALS AND METHODS The inhibition of cell growth and DNA synthesis by mouse leukemia L-1210 (mL), mouse hepatoma Hepa 1-6 (mH), rat hepatoma McA-RH7777 (rH) and human colon adenocarcinoma LS-174T (hCC) cells were measured. The effects on the electrophoretic mobility of the pUC18 plasmid, the DNA denaturation temperature and ethidium bromide (EthBr) binding to DNA were studied. RESULTS A significant antiproliferative effect for Bamet-H2 was found (mH approximately hCC > mL approximately rH). DNA synthesis was also markedly inhibited (mH approximately hCC approximately mL approximately rH). Bamet-H2-induced a change in the electrophoretic mobility of pUC18 and the increase in DNA denaturation temperature suggested the existence of DNA-Bamet-H2 interactions. Scatchard plots obtained from EthBr displacement assays revealed that Bamet-H2 induces a reduction in both the number of DNA sites available and their ability to bind EthBr. CONCLUSION Bamet H2 is able to interact with DNA, inhibit DNA synthesis, and hence reduce cell proliferation.
Constraints faced by the farmers in commercial cultivation of vegetables

The study was conducted to determine the constraints faced by the farmers in commercial cultivation of vegetables and to explore relationship between the selected characteristics of the farmers and constraints faced by them. Data were collected through personal interview from 142 randomly selected respondents out of 1422 vegetable growers of the three villages viz. Panchpara, Bagan and Rampur, under Trishal Upazila of Mymensingh district during January to March 2011. In terms of overall constraints the highest portion (83.30%) of the respondents faced medium constraint. Based on constraint facing index (CEI), low price of vegetables during harvesting ranked first followed by lack of quality seed and high wages of labourer. Among the ten selected characteristics, level of education, family size, farm size, extension media contact, knowledge on vegetable production and cosmopoliteness showed significant negative correlation and family subsistence pressure showed significant positive correlation with farmers’ constraints in commercial cultivation of vegetables. Stepwise multiple regressions showed that extension media contact, cosmopoliteness and knowledge on vegetable production had greater influence on farmers’ constraints.
On guaranteed VoD services in next generation optical access networks

Video on demand (VoD) is one of the most important services for many network operators that deploy and operate optical access networks. It is crucial to design next generation optical access networks that can guarantee a high quality VoD service. In this paper, we address this challenging issue and focus on the worst-case playback delay (WPD), which cannot be guaranteed by Internet-based video streaming, and has not been well addressed previously in optical access networks. Specifically, we first propose an integrated Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) and Wavelength Division Multiplexing PON (WDM PON) architecture. With the proposed architecture, an optical line terminal (OLT) can broadcast popular videos through GPON and deliver other videos through WDM-PON, while the optical network units (ONUs) can conduct patching for their end users. We then elaborate on two minimum-WPD schemes. In the first one, we assume that the video broadcast schedule is fixed at the OLT and develop an optimal patching scheme at each ONU such that the WPD is minimized. In the second one, we consider coordinated OLT broadcast scheduling and ONU patching. A heuristic algorithm which can achieve near-optimal WPD is proposed for coordinated OLT broadcast scheduling and ONU patching. Simulation results confirm the superiority of the proposed schemes over the existing ones in terms of both worstcase and average delay performance.
Patient Understanding of Body Mass Index (BMI) in Primary Care Practices: A Two-State Practice-based Research (PBR) Collaboration

Background: The concept of body mass index (BMI) may not be well understood by patients. The purpose of this study was to evaluate patients' knowledge of BMI in the primary care setting. Methods: Adult patients seen in 18 practices in West Virginia and New Jersey were invited to complete a voluntary survey. The survey assessed the patient's baseline knowledge of BMI as well as demographic information and whether the patient had known chronic conditions associated with increased BMI, including hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes mellitus, and sleep apnea. Results: While the majority (59.9%) of primary care patients knew the meaning of BMI and that it is related to obesity, there was little knowledge of BMI cutoff values; more than 80% of responses were incorrect when asked to define specific BMI levels and their meaning. Self-awareness of obesity was limited as well, with only 16.4% aware of their own personal BMI. Furthermore, nearly 70% of patients could not recall having discussed BMI with their physician. Conclusion: Findings indicate low comprehension of the term BMI. Increasing awareness of BMI may help patients address this key risk factor and significantly affect public health.
Intracellular Delivery and Antibacterial Activity of Gentamicin Encapsulated in pH-Sensitive Liposomes

ABSTRACT Cell membranes are relatively impermeable to the antibiotic gentamicin, a factor that, along with the toxicity of gentamicin, precludes its use against many important intracellular bacterial infections. Liposomal encapsulation of this drug was used in order to achieve intracellular antibiotic delivery and therefore increase the drug’s therapeutic activity against intracellular pathogens. Gentamicin encapsulation in several dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) and pH-sensitive dioleoylphosphatidylethanolamine (DOPE)-based carrier systems was characterized. To systematically test the antibacterial efficacies of these formulations, a tissue culture assay system was developed wherein murine macrophage-like J774A.1 cells were infected with bacteria and were then treated with encapsulated drug. Of these formulations, DOPE–N-succinyl-DOPE and DOPE–N-glutaryl-DOPE (70:30;mol:mol) containing small amounts of polyethyleneglycol-ceramide showed appreciable antibacterial activities, killing greater than 75% of intracellular vacuole-resident wild-type Salmonella typhimurium compared to the level of killing of the control formulations. These formulations also efficiently eliminated intracellular infections caused by a recombinant hemolysin-expressing S. typhimurium strain and a Listeria monocytogenes strain, both of which escape the vacuole and reside in the cytoplasm. Control non-pH-sensitive liposomal formulations of gentamicin had poor antibacterial activities. A fluorescence resonance energy transfer assay indicated that the efficacious formulations undergo a pH-dependent lipid mixing and fusion event. Intracellular delivery of the fluorescent molecules encapsulated in these formulations was confirmed by confocal fluorescence microscopy and was shown to be dependent on endosomal acidification. This work shows that encapsulation of membrane-impermeative antibiotics in appropriately designed lipid-based delivery systems can enable their use in treating intracellular infections and details the development of a general assay for testing the intracellular delivery of encapsulated drug formulations.
Differing default mode network activities in men with homosexual or heterosexual preferences.

INTRODUCTION Neuroimaging studies have reported differences in brain structure and function between homosexual and heterosexual men. The neural basis for homosexual orientation, however, is still unknown. AIM This study characterized the association of homosexual preference with measures of fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (fALFF) and functional connectivity (FC) in the resting state. METHODS We collected echo planar magnetic resonance imaging data in 26 healthy homosexual men and 26 age-matched heterosexual men in the resting state. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Sexual orientation was evaluated using the Kinsey scale. We assessed group differences in fALFF and then, taking the identified group differences as seed regions, we compared groups on measures of FC from those seeds. The behavioral significance of the group differences in fALFF and FC was assessed by examining their associations with the Kinsey scores. RESULTS Compared with heterosexual participants, homosexual men showed significantly increased fALFF in the right middle frontal gyrus and right anterior cerebellum, and decreased fALFF in the left postcentral gyrus, left lingual gyrus, right pallidum, right postcentral gyrus, left interior parietal gyrus, right superior temporal gyrus, left cuneus, and left inferior frontal gyrus. Additionally, fALFF in the left postcentral gyrus and left cuneus correlated positively with Kinsey scores in the homosexual participants. When the seeds in the left cuneus, left cuneus, and left superior parietal gyrus also had reduced FC in homosexual participants, FC correlated positively with the Kinsey scores. CONCLUSIONS Differences in fALFF and FC suggest male sexual preference may influence the pattern activity in the default mode network.
Association of Melioidosis Incidence with Rainfall and Humidity, Singapore, 2003–2012

Soil has been considered the natural reservoir for the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei, which causes melioidosis. We examined 550 melioidosis cases that occurred during a 10-year period in the highly urbanized city of Singapore, where soil exposure is rare, and found that rainfall and humidity levels were associated with disease incidence.
An Empirical Approximation to the Null Unbounded Steady-State Distribution of the Cumulative Sum Statistic

We develop an empirical approximation to the null steady-state distribution of the cumulative sum (cusum) statistic, defined as the distribution of values obtained by running a cusum with no threshold under the null state for an indefinite period. The derivation is part theoretical and part empirical, and the approximation is valid for cusum’s applied to normal data with known variance (although the theoretical result is true in general for exponential family data). The result leads to a formula for steady-state p values corresponding to cusum values, where the steady-state p value is obtained as the tail area of the null steady-state distribution and represents the expected proportion of time, under repeated application of the cusum to null data, that the cusum statistic is greater than some particular value. When designing individual charts with fixed boundaries, this measure could be used alongside the average run length (ARL) value, which, as we show by way of examples may be approximately related to the steady-state p value. For multiple cusum schemes, using a p value enables application of a signaling procedure that adopts a false discovery rate approach to multiplicity control. Under this signaling procedure, boundaries on each individual chart change at every observation according to the ordering of cusum values across the group of charts. We demonstrate an application of the measure to a single chart in which the example data are number of earthquakes per year registering >7 on the Richter scale recorded between 1900 and 1998. Simulation results relating to the empirical approximation of the null steady-state distribution are summarized, and those relating to the statistical properties of the proposed signaling procedure for multiple cusum schemes are presented.
Active Grounding of Visual Situations

We address a key problem for computer vision: retrieving images that are instances of visual situations. Visual situations are concepts such as “a boxing match”, “a birthday party”, “walking the dog”, “a crowd waiting for a bus,” “a handshake”, or “a game of ping-pong,” whose instantiations in images are linked more by their common spatial and semantic structure than by low-level visual similarity. While computer vision has made remarkable progress on recognizing individual objects in images, the problem of visual situation recognition is much more difficult for many reasons, including the vast variability of possible instances of a given situation, as well as the combinatorics of evaluating possible pairwise or multiple-object relationships. In this paper we describe a novel architecture we have developed for visual situation retrieval. Given a situation description, our architecture—called Situate—learns models capturing the visual features of expected objects as well as probabilistic spatial models capturing the expected spatial configuration of relationships among objects. Given a new image, Situate uses these models in an attempt to ground (i.e., to create a bounding box representing) each expected component of the situation in the image via an active search procedure. Situate uses the resulting grounding to compute a score indicating the degree to which the new image is judged to contain an instance of the situation. Such scores can be used to rank images in a collection as part of a retrieval system. In the preliminary study described here, we demonstrate the promise of this system—and the importance of active grounding—by comparing Situate’s retrieval and grounding performance on one example situation category with that of two baseline methods, as well as with a related image-retrieval system based on “scene graphs”.
Demand Effects on Positive Response Distortion by Police Officer Applicants on the Revised NEO Personality Inventory

Understanding and detecting response distortion is important in the high-demand circumstances of personnel selection. In this article, we describe positive response distortion on the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI–R; Costa & McCrae, 1992) among police officer applicants under high and low demand conditions. Positive response distortion primarily reflected denial/minimization of Neuroticism and accentuation of traits associated with moralistic bias (Agreeableness and Conscientiousness). Validity of the NEO PI–R research validity scale, Positive Presentation Management, was weakly supported with respect to the Neuroticism domain only. Results will be useful in interpreting personality inventory results in the police personnel selection process.
Children with Language Impairment: Prevalence, Associated Difficulties, and Ethnic Disproportionality in an English Population

Language impairment (LI) is one of the most common types of special educational needs (SEN), not only as a child’s primary need but also as a secondary domain associated with other types of SEN. Language impairment is a risk factor for children’s later development, being associated with enhanced behavioural, emotional and social difficulties, in particular peer problems and emotional difficulties; literacy difficulties, including both reading and writing; and reduced levels of academic achievement. Risks arising from LI in early childhood may also have an impact through adolescence and into adult life. This study uses national data from the UK government’s annual census of all students aged 5-16 years attending state schools in England at four time periods between 2005-11, over 6 million students at each census. We analyse the data on students with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN), the Department for Education’s category for students with LI, to examine overall prevalence of SLCN, and the variations in prevalence associated with child factors namely, age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic disadvantage, and having English as an additional language, and with contextual factors, namely the school and local authority. We also examine disproportionality of identification of SLCN for different ethnic groups, compared with White British children. We discuss the implications of our findings with respect to the current debates regarding the varied terminology for LI, including SLCN, and of a needs compared with diagnosis based approach to assessing and making provision for children and young people with SEN.
Nonhuman primate models of transplant tolerance: closer to the holy grail

Purpose of reviewTransplantation tolerance, successful acceptance of an organ without the perils of immunosuppression, has been a central goal of transplant research. Many strategies to achieve this tolerance have been examined over the past three decades, culminating in several human trials of transplant tolerance. This progression from the ‘benchtop to the clinic’ has depended on the successful implementation of these tolerance strategies in nonhuman primates. This review will examine the described methods of transplant tolerance induction in nonhuman primates. Recent findingsAlthough costimulatory blockade and mixed chimerism have an established record of achieving transplant tolerance in nonhuman primates, some of the most innovative recent techniques of tolerance induction have relied on cellular transfer. This review will fully examine the role of regulatory T-cell transfer and the use of mesenchymal stem/stromal cells to promote tolerance of organ allografts in nonhuman primates. SummaryUse of translational nonhuman primate transplant models is a vital intermediate step to advance new approaches of transplant tolerance induction from the lab to the clinic. This review will explore numerous techniques of tolerance induction that have been piloted in primates, including depletional techniques, induction of mixed hematopoietic chimerism, costimulation blockade, and adoptive transfer of tolerogenic cell populations.
Dementia with Lewy bodies versus Alzheimer's disease: Role of dopamine transporter imaging

Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) are the common forms of dementia at post‐mortem, but distinguishing between these two types of dementia is often very difficult during life. Ioflupane significantly improves the differentiation during life between DLB and AD patients. However, there is a trend for lower caudate uptake in DLB than PD and lower posterior/caudal putamen uptake in PD than in DLB. Further research is needed to test the hypothesis that dopaminergic degeneration may be different, at least regarding anatomical distribution, in DLB and PD. Furthermore, it is important to consider and discuss the potential for ioflupane in the diagnostic workup of patients with DLB. © 2003 Movement Disorder Society
CD 47 Enhances In Vivo Functionality of Arti fi cial Antigen-Presenting Cells

Purpose: Artificial antigen-presenting cells, aAPC, have successfully been used to stimulate antigen-specific T-cell responses in vitro as well as in vivo. Although aAPC compare favorably with autologous dendritic cells in vitro, their effect in vivo might be diminished through rapid clearance by macrophages. Therefore, to prevent uptake and minimize clearance of aAPC by macrophages, thereby increasing in vivo functionality, we investigated the efficiency of "don't eat me" three-signal aAPC compared with classical two-signal aAPC. Experimental Design: To generate "don't eat me" aAPC, CD47 was additionally immobilized onto classical aAPC (aAPCCD47þ). aAPC and aAPCCD47þ were analyzed in in vitro human primary T-cell andmacrophage cocultures. In vivo efficiency was compared in a NOD/SCID T-cell proliferation and a B16-SIY melanoma model. Results: This study demonstrates that aAPCCD47þ in coculture with human macrophages show a CD47 concentration–dependent inhibition of phagocytosis, whereas their ability to generate and expand antigen-specific T cells was not affected. Furthermore, aAPCCD47þ-generated T cells displayed equivalent killing abilities and polyfunctionality when compared with aAPC-generated T cells. In addition, in vivo studies demonstrated an enhanced stimulatory capacity and tumor inhibition of aAPCCD47þ over normal aAPC in conjunction with diverging biodistribution in different organs. Conclusions: Our data for the first time show that aAPC functionalized with CD47 maintain their stimulatory capacity in vitro anddemonstrate enhanced in vivo efficiency. Thus, these nextgeneration aAPCCD47þ have a unique potential to enhance the application of the aAPC technology for future immunotherapy approaches. Clin Cancer Res; 21(9); 2075–83. 2015 AACR.