Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Caste totipotency and conflict in a large–colony social insect

In most social insects with large, complex colonies workers and queens are morphologically quite distinct. This means that caste determination must occur prior to adulthood. However workers and queens in the swarm-founding epiponine wasps are often morphologically indistinguishable, or nearly so, suggesting that caste determination in these wasps could be quite different. To determine the extent of caste lability in the epiponine, Parachartergus colobopterus, we removed all the queens from one colony and all but one from another colony. Worker aggression diminished after queen removal. A week later the colony with no queens had a new, young cohort of mated queens. These must have been either adults or pupae at the time of queen removal, and so could not have been fed any differently from workers. Relatedness patterns confirmed that these new queens would normally have been workers and not queens. A model of inclusive fitness interests shows that workers ought to suppress new queen production, except at low queen numbers, a prediction supported by our empirical results. The patterns of social conflict over queenship resulting from swarm founding in a many–queen society may help to explain the unusually weak caste differentiation in the epiponines.
High-Energy Contact Sports and Cervical Spine Neuropraxia Injuries: What Are the Criteria for Return to Participation?

Study Design. Clinically based systematic review. Objective. To define optimal clinical care for patients after sport-related neuropraxic injuries using a systematic review supported with expert opinion. Summary of Background Data. Athletes who participate in contact sports may experience cervical cord neuropraxia, with bilateral motor or sensory symptoms such as burning, numbness, or loss of sensation referable to the cervical spinal cord. The symptoms last from minutes to hours, but recovery is usually believed to be complete. The underlying condition is cervical spinal stenosis that predisposes the athlete to a transient compression or concussive injury to the spinal cord. Methods. Focused questions on the treatment of cervical spine sport-related injuries resulting in transient neuropraxia were refined by a panel of spine traumatology surgeons consisting of fellowship-trained neurologic and orthopedic surgeons. Medical subject heading keywords were searched through MEDLINE, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews to identify pertinent English-language abstracts and articles whose focus was human subjects. The quality of literature was rated as high, moderate, low, or very low. The proposed questions were answered using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation evidence-based review system. These treatment recommendations were rated as either strong or weak based on the quality of evidence and clinical expertise. Results. The literature searches revealed low and very low quality evidence with no prospective or randomized studies. One hundred fifty-three pertinent articles were identified; these were supplemented with additional articles to form an evidentiary table with 17 original articles containing unique patient data. Conclusion. Literature regarding the optimal treatment of patients with transient neuropraxia is of low quality. On the basis of expert opinion, there was a recommendation that a return to full participation in high-energy contact sports could be based on radiographic findings: patients with transient neuropraxia without stenosis could return as a strong recommendation, whereas stenotic patients could not return as a weak recommendation. Furthermore, a strong recommendation was made to permit players to return to full participation after decompression with a single-level anterior cervical fusion.
Smoking, Obesity, Alcohol Consumption, and the Risk of Rheumatoid Arthritis

There is some evidence that sex hormones may influence the incidence of rheumatoid arthritis. Obesity has been found to increase endogenous estrogens, particularly among postmenopausal women. Although the association of endogenous hormones with smoking and alcohol use is less clear, we examined the relation of these three factors with rheumatoid arthritis in women. We conducted a population-based case-control study of rheumatoid arthritis in King County, WA, and Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound. We compared 349 incident cases of rheumatoid arthritis with 1,457 controls selected by random digit dialing or by random selection from the enrollment files of Group Health Cooperative. We conducted personal interviews to collect data on weight, smoking, alcohol history, reproductive variables, and other demographic variables. Women with 20 or more pack-years of smoking had a relative risk of 1.5 [95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.0–2.0] compared with never-smokers. Post-menopausal women who averaged more than 14 alcoholic drinks per week had a reduced risk of rheumatoid arthritis (relative risk = 0.5; 95% CI = 0.2–1.7). Women in the highest quartile of body mass index had a risk of 1.4 (95% CI = 1.0–2.0) relative to women with lowest body mass index. (Epidemiology 1994;5:525–532)
Influence of punch edges on the self-sensing capabilities of permanent magnet synchronous machines with different rotor topologies

In this paper, the sensitivity of the differential magnetic anisotropy in permanent magnet synchronous machines (PMSM) to deteriorated material properties at the punch edges of the rotor lamination is investigated. It is analysed whether this effect influences signal injection based methods for self-sensing control at low and zero speed. Different rotor topologies are compared at different load levels. The results achieved in this paper show that the effect of punch edges on the differential magnetic anisotropy is negligibly small. This simplifies the design process of PMSM.
Surveying the Effect of Quince seed Mucilage as a Fat Replacer on Texture and Physicochemical Properties of Semi Fat Set Yoghurt

Hydrocolloids or gums are used in the food industries to control and improve the functionality traits of food products such as bulking, gelling agent, syneresis control, and emulsion or suspension stability. Use of hydrocolloids such as guar, xanthan, carrageenan and pectin as fat mimetic in food products had been studied. Quince seed mucilage is a complex of a cellulosic fraction with accompanying with arabinose, a mixture of methylated and unmethylated aldobionic acids and xylose. After extraction, quince seed mucilage before incubation in amounts of 0.03%, 0.05% and 0.1% (w/w) were added to milk. Tests for measuring acidity, syneresis, color and the texture profile analysis test were done for semi fat samples containing quince seed mucilage and semi fat and full fat blank samples. The acidity, color and texture properties: cohesiveness, adhesiveness, stringiness, in semi fat yogurts containing quince seed mucilage had no significant difference with semi fat and full fat blank samples. The amounts of syneresis in samples containing quince seed hydrocolloid were decreased in comparison with semi fat blank samples. In texture properties, the amounts of hardness, gumminess and chewiness in yogurts containing quince seed hydrocolloid were lower than semi fat and full fat blank samples. It seems that negative charge of quince seed mucilage in interaction with positive charge of casein micelles leads to decrease the syneresis but this hydrocolloid did not make a gel to increase hardness, gumminess and springiness in yogurts containing quince seed mucilage.
Murine model of atopic dermatitis associated with food hypersensitivity.

BACKGROUND Atopic dermatitis (AD) is an eczematous skin eruption that generally begins in early infancy and affects up to 12% of the population. The cause of this disorder is not fully understood, although it is frequently the first sign of atopic disease and is characterized by an elevated serum IgE level, eosinophilia, and histologic tissue changes characterized early by spongiosis and a CD4(+) T(H)2 cellular infiltrate. Hypersensitivity to foods has been implicated as one causative factor in up to 40% of children with moderate-to-severe AD. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to establish a murine model of food-induced AD. METHODS Female C3H/HeJ mice were sensitized orally to cow's milk or peanut with a cholera toxin adjuvant and then subjected to low-grade allergen exposure. Histologic examination of skin lesions, allergen-specific serum Ig levels, and allergen-induced T-cell proliferation and cytokine production were examined. RESULTS An eczematous eruption developed in approximately one third of mice after low-grade exposure to milk or peanut proteins. Peripheral blood eosinophilia and elevated serum IgE levels were noted. Histologic examination of the lesional skin revealed spongiosis and a cellular infiltrate consisting of CD4(+) lymphocytes, eosinophils, and mast cells. IL-5 and IL-13 mRNA expression was elevated only in the skin of mice with the eczematous eruption. Treatment of the eruption with topical corticosteroids led to decreased pruritus and resolution of the cutaneous eruption. CONCLUSION This eczematous eruption resembles AD in human subjects and should provide a useful model for studying immunopathogenic mechanisms of food hypersensitivity in AD.
How a General-Purpose Commonsense Ontology can Improve Performance of Learning-Based Image Retrieval

The knowledge representation community has built general-purpose ontologies which contain large amounts of commonsense knowledge over relevant aspects of the world, including useful visual information, e.g.: "a ball is used by a football player", "a tennis player is located at a tennis court". Current state-of-the-art approaches for visual recognition do not exploit these rule-based knowledge sources. Instead, they learn recognition models directly from training examples. In this paper, we study how general-purpose ontologies---specifically, MIT's ConceptNet ontology---can improve the performance of state-of-the-art vision systems. As a testbed, we tackle the problem of sentence-based image retrieval. Our retrieval approach incorporates knowledge from ConceptNet on top of a large pool of object detectors derived from a deep learning technique. In our experiments, we show that ConceptNet can improve performance on a common benchmark dataset. Key to our performance is the use of the ESPGAME dataset to select visually relevant relations from ConceptNet. Consequently, a main conclusion of this work is that general-purpose commonsense ontologies improve performance on visual reasoning tasks when properly filtered to select meaningful visual relations.
Higher coated-platelet levels are associated with chronic hypertension in patients with transient ischemic attack

Coated-platelets are procoagulant platelets observed upon dual stimulation with collagen and thrombin. We previously reported that coated-platelet levels are elevated in patients with transient ischemic attack (TIA) compared to controls and that these levels correlate with ABCD2 scores, a validated tool for identifying the short-term risk for stroke occurrence in TIA patients. We now investigate the effect of individual elements of the ABCD2 score on coated-platelet levels in TIA. Coated-platelet levels were measured in 124 TIA patients. A nine-way ANOVA evaluated the impact of components of the ABCD2 score (age, blood pressure (BP), clinical features, symptom duration, and diabetes), smoking, pertinent medications, race, and gender on coated-platelet levels. In the initial model, the only significant main effect was for BP; patients with BP ≥ 140/90 had higher coated-platelet levels than those without (mean ± SEM; 44.0 ± 2.1% vs. 35.4 ± 2.3%, p = 0.0007). Because the diagnosis of hypertension (HTN) requires multiple readings of elevated BP, we re-analyzed the data by replacing BP with HTN. In the second model, there were two significant main effects: HTN – with higher coated-platelet levels in patients with vs. those without HTN (46.3 ± 2.1% vs. 33.6 ± 2.1%, p < 0.0001), and symptom duration – with higher coated-platelet levels in patients with duration ≥60 minutes vs. those with duration <60 minutes (42.5 ± 2.0% vs. 37.4 ± 2.1%, p = 0.031). These data suggest a link between chronic HTN and platelet thrombotic potential.
Construction of an artificial tandem protein of the c-Myb DNA-binding domain and analysis of its DNA binding specificity.

An artificial tandem protein was generated using the third repeat of the c-Myb DNA-binding domain, and its DNA binding affinity and specificity were analyzed by a filter binding assay, isothermal titration calorimetry, and surface plasmon resonance. Although this artificial protein had the proper secondary structure, which is similar to the third repeat by itself, it could not bind to the expected base sequences specifically. Compared with the successful results of the zinc finger fusion proteins with novel sequence specificities, the cooperativity between the adjacent repeats, observed in the c-Myb-DNA complex, should also be required for the DNA recognition by the artificial tandem protein. Using the previous analyses of the DNA binding specificities by Myb homologous proteins, the differences in the DNA recognition mechanisms between the animal and plant Myb domains are also discussed.
Clinical and EEG Studies of Zotepine, a Thiepine Neuroleptic, on Schizophrenic Patients

The overall effect of zotepine was a "slightly improved" or better response in 20 patients (64.5%), "unchanged" in 10 (32.3%) and "worsened" in 1 (3.2%). Zotepine exhibited some degree of improvement in 54.5% of patients unresponsive to prior drugs. The onset of effect of zotepine was within one month in 19 patients. The improvement rate in the hebephrenic type (66.7%) was almost the same as in the paranoid type. The improvement rate classified by psychopathology was highest for hypobulia, followed by restlessness-excitement and hallucination, depressive mood, hypochondria and delusion. The side-effects were subjective complaints, such as general fatigue, dryness of mouth, sleepiness or fainting in a small number of cases. There was a slight increase in S-GPT in one patient and a slightly increased blood platelet count, also in one patient. Serial EEG changes associated with zotepine studied in another 17 chronic schizophrenics could be classified into three groups: those with increased slow waves, those with enhanced alpha waves and those with unchanged EEGs. There was a positive correlation between the incidence of slow waves and higher plasma levels of zotepine.
Transferable atomistic model to describe the energetics of zirconia.

We have investigated the energies of a number of phases of ${\mathrm{ZrO}}_{2}$ using models of an increasing degree of sophistication: the simple ionic model, the polarizable ion model, the compressible ion model, and finally a model including quadrupole polarizability of the oxygen ions. The three structures which are observed with increasing temperatures are monoclinic, tetragonal, and cubic (fluorite). Besides these we have studied some hypothetical structures which certain potentials erroneously predict or which occur in other oxides with this stoichiometry, e.g., the \ensuremath{\alpha}-${\mathrm{PbO}}_{2}$ structure and rutile. We have also performed ab initio density functional calculations with the full-potential linear combination of muffin-tin orbitals method to investigate the cubic-tetragonal distortion. A detailed comparison is made between the results using classical potentials, the experimental data, and our own and other ab initio results. The factors which stabilize the various structure are analyzed. We find the only genuinely transferable model is the one including compressible ions and anion polarizability to the quadrupole level. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
Agitation in Acquired Brain Injury: Impact on Acute Rehabilitation Therapies

ObjectiveTo examine the nature of agitation in patients with brain injury and quantify the relation between agitation and patient progress in rehabilitation. DesignCross-sectional, correlational. SettingUrban, inpatient rehabilitation facility in the midwestern United States. ParticipantsSixty-nine patients with acquired brain injury admitted to an acute rehabilitation hospital. Main Outcome MeasuresTherapy Engagement using the Rehabilitation Therapy Engagement Scale; Functional Status using the Functional Independence Measure. ResultsAgitated behavior was inversely associated with engagement in rehabilitation therapy even after controlling for injury severity. Engagement in therapy mediated the relation between agitated behavior and progress in rehabilitation as assessed using a Functional Independence Measure efficiency ratio. ConclusionsProgress in acute brain injury rehabilitation appears to be meaningfully influenced by the complex interplay among injury severity, agitation, and engagement. The findings are consistent with a theoretical model, suggesting that agitated patients make less progress in rehabilitation not only because of greater injury severity but also because agitation disrupts engagement in rehabilitation therapies. Multiple clinical purposes may be better served by measuring behavioral excess on a continuum than in a dichotomous fashion.
The diagnosis of Marburg Disease is course-dependent

Marburg Disease, the fulminant form of multiple sclerosis, is a rare disease that typically kills within a year. We had a 38-year-old African American male who presented with right footdrop and was pathologically diagnosed with Marburg Disease. The patient recovered clinically after surgery and stayed stable for more than a year. The diagnosis of Marburg Disease was thus degraded.
Dose-dependent effect of thalidomide on overall survival in relapsed multiple myeloma.

PURPOSE Although thalidomide (Thal) was introduced successfully in the treatment of multiple myeloma (MM), the optimal Thal dosage and schedule are still controversial. The aim of this study was to analyze whether the effect of Thal in MM is dose dependent and whether the outcome might be improved when the Thal dosage is adjusted to parameters reflecting body size. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN From December 1998 to March 2001, 83 patients with relapsed MM were enrolled in a clinical Phase II trial and treated with a maximum Thal dosage of 400 mg daily. We performed a retrospective analysis and studied the effect of the cumulative 3-month Thal dosage on progression-free survival and overall survival (OS) together with age and the pretreatment levels of beta2-microglobulin, C-reactive protein, albumin, and hemoglobin in a Cox regression model. RESULTS After a median follow-up time of 17 months (range, 1-30 months), the estimated 12-month progression-free survival and OS were 45% (SE = 6%) and 86% (SE = 4%) for the whole patient group. After backward selection, hemoglobin (P = 0.002) and the cumulative 3-month Thal dosage (P = 0.002) were the remaining factors for OS. The effect on OS could not be improved when the cumulative 3-month Thal dosage was adjusted to parameters reflecting body size such as height, weight, body surface area, or body mass index in comparison with Thal alone. CONCLUSIONS Our retrospective analysis demonstrates that the cumulative 3-month Thal dosage is one of the major prognostic factors for OS, supporting the hypothesis of a dose-dependent effect of Thal in relapsed MM.
Sex-related differences in patients undergoing percutaneous unprotected left main stenting.

AIMS Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is increasingly being used for unprotected left main (ULM) disease. Limited data are available on sex-related differences in this setting. We investigated gender-associated differences in patients undergoing stent-based PCI for ULM. METHODS AND RESULTS We analysed baseline, procedural and long-term data of patients with ULM undergoing stent-based PCI at participating centres. The primary end-point was the long-term rate of major cardiovascular events rate (MACE, i.e., the composite of death, myocardial infarction, or target lesion revascularisation). The study population included 1,452 cases, with 27.8% females and 72.2% males. Women were older, more frequently diabetic, hypertensive or presenting with an acute coronary syndrome, and thus with a higher EuroSCORE, but were less commonly treated with drug-eluting stents (DES), in comparison to men (all p<0.01). After a median follow-up of 18 months, women showed an unadjusted higher risk of death (p=0.040), cardiac death (p=0.033), and the death/myocardial infarction (p=0.012). However, after multivariable adjustment, gender was no longer an independent predictor of death (hazard ratio=1.119 [0.804-1.558]), cardiac death (hazard ratio=1.045 [0.697-1.567]), or death/myocardial infarction (hazard ratio=0.531 [0.192-1.465]), given the predominant role of age, diabetes and EuroSCORE as independent predictors and confounders of the gender-based comparison. CONCLUSIONS Women undergoing PCI for ULM present more often with an acute coronary syndrome, are treated less frequently with DES, and have more adverse events, but these gender biases are not confirmed after adjusting for confounders. Thus, stent-based PCI for ULM offers similarly favourable clinical results in women as well as in men.
Immunostimulatory oligodeoxynucleotides induce apoptosis of B cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia cells

Immunostimulatory oligodeoxynucleotides (IS ODN) can mediate a number of immunologic effects. We previously demonstrated that treatment of B cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (B‐CLL) cells with one class of IS ODN, CpG ODN, alters their phenotype and increases their immunogenicity. Here, we demonstrate that in contrast to the classic understanding of CpG ODN as inhibitors of B cell apoptosis, IS ODN including CpG ODN induce apoptosis in B‐CLL cells. It is important that these changes are seen not only with CpG ODN but with ODN that lack the classical CpG motif. B‐CLL cells from 20 subjects were treated in vitro with IS ODN for up to 7 days. IS ODN treatment resulted in increased numbers of apoptotic cells in 13 out of 20 B‐CLL samples. IS ODN enhanced apoptosis in samples with 13q deletion as a single aberration and had a heterogeneous effect on apoptosis in samples with other aberrations including 17p deletion, 11q deletion, or trisomy 12. Induction of apoptosis did not correlate with expression of the CpG ODN receptor Toll‐like receptor 9. Apoptosis was dependent on the activation of caspases and was accompanied by up‐regulation of CD95/Fas and its ligand. We conclude that IS ODN including CpG ODN can induce apoptosis of most B‐CLL samples. The ability of IS ODN to induce apoptosis differs based on cytogenetic status. Up‐regulation of CD95/Fas may play a role in IS ODN‐induced apoptosis of B‐CLL.