Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Serum Mac-2 binding protein glycosylation isomer level predicts hepatocellular carcinoma development in E-negative chronic hepatitis B patients

BACKGROUND Liver cirrhosis is a major risk factor for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) development in chronic hepatitis B (CHB). Serum Mac-2 binding protein glycosylation isomer (M2BPGi) is a novel serological marker for fibrosis. The role of M2BPGi in prediction of HCC is unknown. AIM To examine the role of serum M2BPGi in predicting HCC development in hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg)-negative patients. METHODS Treatment-naive CHB patients with documented spontaneous HBeAg seroconversion were recruited. Serum M2BPGi was measured at baseline (within 3 years from HBeAg seroconversion), at 5 years and 10 years after HBeAg seroconversion and expressed as cut-off index (COI). Multivariate cox regression was performed to identify predictors for HCC development. ROC analysis was used to determine the cut-off value of M2BPGi. RESULTS Among 207 patients (57% male, median age at HBeAg seroconversion 40 years old) with median follow-up of 13.1 (11.8-15.5) years, the cumulative incidence of HCC at 15 years was 7%. Median M2BPGi levels were significantly higher in patients with HCC compared to those without HCC (baseline: 1.39 COI vs 0.38 COI, P < 0.001; 5-year: 1.45 COI vs 0.47 COI, P < 0.001; 10-year: 1.20 COI vs 0.55 COI, P = 0.001). Multivariate analysis revealed age at HBeAg seroconversion [odds ratio (OR) = 1.196, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.034-1.382, P = 0.016] and baseline M2BPGi (OR = 4.666, 95%CI: 1.296-16.802, P = 0.018) were significant factors predictive of HCC. Using a cut-off value of 0.68 COI, baseline M2BPGi yielded AUROC of 0.883 with 91.7% sensitivity and 80.8% specificity. CONCLUSION High serum M2BPGi within 3 years after HBeAg seroconversion was a strong predictor for subsequent HCC development in treatment-naive HBeAg-negative CHB patients.
Association of Ulcerative Colitis with FOXP3 Gene Polymorphisms and Its Colonic Expression in Chinese Patients

Abnormalities of forkhead box P3 (FOXP3) are implicated in various autoimmune diseases. This study is aimed at investigating the association of ulcerative colitis (UC) with FOXP3 polymorphisms and its colonic expression in Chinese patients. Polymorphisms of rs3761548, rs2232365, rs2294021, and rs3761547 were examined in 472 UC patients and 525 healthy controls using the SNaPshot method. The colonic expression of FOXP3 mRNA and protein was assayed in inflammatory mucosa of 34 UC patients and normal mucosa of 36 patients with benign sigmoid polyps (normal controls) using real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction and immunohistochemical analysis. All data were handled separately for females and males. As a result, the carrier frequencies with at least one variant allele of rs3761548, rs2232365, and rs229402 increased in female and male UC patients compared with healthy controls. Significant differences in these carrier frequencies were also observed between patients with mild and moderate UC and patients with severe UC. The expression of FOXP3 was higher in UC patients (both males and females), especially those with severe UC, than in normal controls. The expression of FOXP3 was downregulated in UC patients having at least one variant allele compared with UC patients having no variant allele of rs3761548, rs2232365, and rs2294021. Male gender (β = −0.341), rs2294021 variation (β = −0.503), and severe UC (β = 0.361) were independently related to the mRNA expression of FOXP3 in UC patients. Together, our findings indicated that FOXP3 (rs3761548, rs2232365, and rs2294021) variations increased the risk of UC and were associated with the lower colonic expression of FOXP3 in UC patients.
Influence of soil contaminated with cadmium on cell death in the digestive epithelium of soil centipede Lithobius forficatus (Myriapoda, Chilopoda)

Abstract Cadmium is a heavy metal that is treated as an environmental pollutant (air, water, soil). In order to understand the potential effects of cadmium in soil and soil invertebrates, it is important to describe all alterations which appear at different levels in organisms. The main aim of this study was to investigate, analyze and describe the alterations caused by cadmium short- and long-term intoxication at different levels in the organisms: from tissues to cells and organelles. In addition, the activation of cell death mechanisms that take part in homeostasis maintenance according to cadmium has been studied. Therefore, as the species for this project, a terrestrial and well-known widespread European species – the centipede Lithobius forficatus (Myriapoda, Chilopoda, Lithobiomorpha) – was chosen. This omnivorous species lives under upper layers of soil, under stones, litter, rocks, and leaves, and it is also commonly found in human habitats. The animals were divided into three groups: C – the control group, animals cultured in a horticultural soil; Cd1 – animals cultured in a horticultural soil supplemented with 80 mg/kg (dry weight) of CdCl2, 12 days – short-term exposure; Cd2 – animals cultured in a horticultural soil supplemented with 80 mg/kg (dry weight) of CdCl2, 45 days – long-term exposure. The midgut was isolated from each specimen and it was prepared for analysis using some histological, histochemical and immunohistochemical methods. Our studies showed that short-term intoxication causes intensification of autophagy and digestion of reserve material, while long-term exposure to this heavy metal causes activation of cell death processes together with inhibition of autophagy connected with the lack of reserve material. Additionally, we can infer that autophagy and cell death are nutrient deprivation-induced processes. Finally, we can conclude that short- and long-term exposure of soil centipede to cadmium affects different mechanisms and processes of cell death.
Cytokines and Chemokines in Pediatric Appendicitis: A Multiplex Analysis of Inflammatory Protein Mediators

Objectives We aimed to demonstrate the potential of precision medicine to describe the inflammatory landscape present in children with suspected appendicitis. Our primary objective was to determine levels of seven inflammatory protein mediators previously associated with intra-abdominal inflammation (C-reactive protein—CRP, procalcitonin—PCT, interleukin-6 (IL), IL-8, IL-10, monocyte chemoattractant protein-1—MCP-1, and serum amyloid A—SAA) in a cohort of children with suspected appendicitis. Subsequently, using a multiplex proteomics approach, we examined an expansive array of novel candidate cytokine and chemokines within this population. Methods We performed a secondary analysis of targeted proteomics data from Alberta Sepsis Network studies. Plasma mediator levels, analyzed by Luminex multiplex assays, were evaluated in children aged 5-17 years with nonappendicitis abdominal pain (NAAP), acute appendicitis (AA), and nonappendicitis sepsis (NAS). We used multivariate regression analysis to evaluate the seven target proteins, followed by decision tree and heat mapping analyses for all proteins evaluated. Results 185 children were included: 83 with NAAP, 79 AA, and 23 NAS. Plasma levels of IL-6, CRP, MCP-1, PCT, and SAA were significantly different in children with AA compared to those with NAAP (p < 0.001). Expansive proteomic analysis demonstrated 6 patterns in inflammatory mediator profiles based on severity of illness. A decision tree incorporating the proteins CRP, ferritin, SAA, regulated on activation normal T-cell expressed and secreted (RANTES), monokine induced by gamma interferon (MIG), and PCT demonstrated excellent specificity (0.920) and negative predictive value (0.882) for children with appendicitis. Conclusions Multiplex proteomic analyses described the inflammatory landscape of children presenting to the ED with suspected appendicitis. We have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach to identify potential novel candidate cytokines/chemokine patterns associated with a specific illness (appendicitis) amongst those with a broad ED presentation (abdominal pain). This approach can be modelled for future research initiatives in pediatric emergency medicine.
Sourcing Innovation: On Feedback in Contests

Contests, in which contestants compete for a prize offered by a contest holder, have become a popular way to source innovation. Despite great interest from the academic community, many important managerial aspects of contests have received very little formal inquiry. The most important of these is feedback from the contest holder to the contestants while the contest unfolds. This paper sets out to establish a comprehensive understanding of how to give feedback in a contest by answering the questions of when to give feedback and when not to give feedback and which type of feedback to give, public (which all solvers can observe) or private (which only the concerned party can observe). We find that feedback will not affect the behavior of competing problem solvers unless the contest holder credibly precommits to a truthful feedback policy. We then set up a framework that reduces the feedback decision to a pair of conceptual questions. First: Is the contest's ultimate objective to increase average quality or to find the best solution? Second: How uncertain are outcomes for the solvers? We show that no feedback or public feedback generally dominate private feedback. However, if the host is interested exclusively in the best performance and if the contest displays large uncertainties, private feedback is optimal.
Empirical Investigation of an Equity Pairs Trading Strategy

We show that an equity pairs trading strategy generates large and significant abnormal returns. We find that this return is not driven purely by the short-term reversal of returns. The evidence related to the cross-sectional variation, the time-series variation, and the persistence of the pairs trading profits, and the determinants of return correlations is consistent with the delay in information diffusion as the driver for the pairs trading strategy. Evidence from the liquidity factor and the recent financial crisis suggests that the short-term liquidity provision is not the main cause of the pairs trading strategy.
Analyzing Efficient Stream Processing on Modern Hardware

Modern Stream Processing Engines (SPEs) process large data volumes under tight latency constraints. Many SPEs execute processing pipelines using message passing on shared-nothing architectures and apply a partition-based scale-out strategy to handle high-velocity input streams. Furthermore, many state-of-the-art SPEs rely on a Java Virtual Machine to achieve platform independence and speed up system development by abstracting from the underlying hardware. In this paper, we show that taking the underlying hardware into account is essential to exploit modern hardware efficiently. To this end, we conduct an extensive experimental analysis of current SPEs and SPE design alternatives optimized for modern hardware. Our analysis highlights potential bottlenecks and reveals that state-of-the-art SPEs are not capable of fully exploiting current and emerging hardware trends, such as multi-core processors and high-speed networks. Based on our analysis, we describe a set of design changes to the common architecture of SPEs to scale-up on modern hardware. We show that the single-node throughput can be increased by up to two orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art SPEs by applying specialized code generation, fusing operators, batch-style parallelization strategies, and optimized windowing. This speedup allows for deploying typical streaming applications on a single or a few nodes instead of large clusters.
Starches of two water yam (Dioscorea alata) varieties used as congeals in yogurt production

Abstract The physicochemical properties of water yam (Dioscorea alata var. Akaba and Matches) starches were determined prior to their use as congeals for yogurt production. The moisture content ranged from 9.34% to 15.8% for A100 (100% Akaba) and M100 (100% Matches), respectively, indicating lower moisture content in the Akaba variety compared to Matches variety. Similar trend was observed for their water activity. The pH ranged from 5.88 to 6.93 indicating low acidity of the water yam starches. The water absorption capacity (WAC) ranged from 4.10 to 4.89 g/g, seemingly restricted reflecting protein–moisture interaction of the starches. Although the swelling power did not differ significantly (p > 0.05) ranging from 10% to 14%, they were quite restrictive as the WAC. The L* values of the starches were predominantly lightness in color, highest for A100 sample. The pasting temperatures of Akaba (A100), Matches (M100), and A50:M50 were not significantly different (p > 0.05). Peak viscosity of the water yam starches was in a range of 509–528 BU. The highest attributes were for taste (6.4), mouthfeel (5.4), flavor (5.4) sourness (4.6) and consistency (5.9), which were obtained from 1.5 % Matches, 0.5 % Akaba + 0.5 % Matches, 1.0 % Akaba + 1.0 % Matches samples. The overall acceptability (5.8) was higher than the control yogurt (4.7), indicating sample 0.5% Akaba + 0.5% Matches as the best‐bet yogurt.
Effects of high school students’ noncognitive factors on their success at college

ABSTRACT High school students’ academic preparation (e.g. high school GPA, ACT composite score, AP credits earned) predicts and helps explain their academic performance at college. However, the effects of noncognitive factors on college success is less clear. This study examined the effects of adding high school students’ (N = 2279) self-efficacy, motivation, sense of belonging and academic goal engagement to academic preparation, on academic success in college using structural equation modeling. Two models were compared: the basic model which included only academic preparation and the enhanced model which included both academic preparation and noncognitive factors. Results indicated that the enhanced model that included noncognitive factors provided a stronger explanation for college students’ success. Further, academic goal engagement was more closely associated with performance whereas belonging was more closely associated with retention. The results of the current study have important implications for college administrators and future research.
Controls of the transient climate response to emissions by physical feedbacks, heat uptake and carbon cycling

The surface warming response to carbon emissions is diagnosed using a suite of Earth system models, 9 CMIP6 and 7 CMIP5, following an annual 1% rise in atmospheric CO2 over 140 years. This surface warming response defines a climate metric, the Transient Climate Response to cumulative carbon Emissions (TCRE), which is important in estimating how much carbon may be emitted to avoid dangerous climate. The processes controlling these intermodel differences in the TCRE are revealed by defining the TCRE in terms of a product of three dependences: the surface warming dependence on radiative forcing (including the effects of physical climate feedbacks and planetary heat uptake), the radiative forcing dependence on changes in atmospheric carbon and the airborne fraction. Intermodel differences in the TCRE are mainly controlled by the thermal response involving the surface warming dependence on radiative forcing, which arise through large differences in physical climate feedbacks that are only partly compensated by smaller differences in ocean heat uptake. The other contributions to the TCRE from the radiative forcing and carbon responses are of comparable importance to the contribution from the thermal response on timescales of 50 years and longer for our subset of CMIP5 models and 100 years and longer for our subset of CMIP6 models. Hence, providing tighter constraints on how much carbon may be emitted based on the TCRE requires providing tighter bounds for estimates of the physical climate feedbacks, particularly from clouds, as well as to a lesser extent for the other contributions from the rate of ocean heat uptake, and the terrestrial and ocean cycling of carbon.
Development of a Within-Subject, Repeated-Measures Ego-Depletion Paradigm: Inconsistent Results and Future Recommendations

Ego depletion is under scrutiny for low replicability, possibly reflecting the limited statistical power available in between-subject designs. In response, we created a within-subject, repeated-measures ego-depletion paradigm that repeatedly alternated depletion and recovery manipulations. Each manipulation was followed by measuring subjective fatigue, mood, and self-control performance. Across 12 studies (N = 754), participants reliably reported having lower energy and mood after depleting manipulations compared to after recovery manipulations. Depletion manipulations did not consistently affect behavioral self-control, although the depletion effect was meta-analytically significant (d = .045). Furthermore, unintended fatigue and practice effects occurred over the course of the paradigm, systematically interfering with the intended depletion effects. We recommend that depletion research takes advantage of within-subject designs across multiple sessions to avoid spillover effects between measurements.
Constraining physical conditions for the PDR of Trumpler 14 in the Carina Nebula

We investigate the physical conditions of the CO gas, based on the submillimeter imaging spectroscopy from a 2′ × 7′ (1.5 × 5 pc2) area near the young star cluster, Trumpler 14 of the Carina Nebula. The observations presented in this work are taken with the Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS) of the Spectral and Photometric Imaging REceiver (SPIRE) onboard the Herschel Space Observatory. The newly observed spectral lines include [CI] 370 μm [CI] 609 μm, and CO transitions from J = 4−3 to J = 13−12. Our field of view covers the edge of a cavity carved by Trumpler 14 about 1 Myr ago and marks the transition from H ii regions to photo-dissociation regions. The observed CO intensities are the most prominent at the northwest region, Car I-E. With the state-of-the-art Meudon PDR code, we successfully derive the physical conditions, which include the thermal pressure (P) and the scaling factor of radiation fields (GUV), from the observed CO spectral line energy distributions (SLEDs) in the observed region. The derived GUV values generally show excellent agreement with the UV radiation fields created by nearby OB-stars and thus confirm that the main excitation source of the observed CO emission is the UV-photons provided by the massive stars. The derived thermal pressure is in the range 0.5−3 × 108 K cm-3 with the highest values found along the ionization front in Car I-E region facing Trumpler 14, hinting that the cloud structure is similar to the recent observations of the Orion Bar. We also note a discrepancy at a local position (<0.17 × 0.17 pc2) between the photo-dissociation region (PDR) modeling result and the UV radiation fields estimated from nearby massive stars, which requires further investigation on nearby objects that could contribute to local heating, including outflow. Comparing the derived thermal pressure with the radiation fields, we report the first observationally derived and spatially resolved P ~ 2 × 104 GUV relationship. As direct comparisons of the modeling results to the observed 13CO, [O I] 63 μm, and [C II] 158 μm intensities are not straightforward, we urge the reader to be cautious when constraining the physical conditions of PDRs with combinations of 12CO, 13CO, [C I], [O I] 63 μm, and [C II] 158 μm observations.
X-RAY STUDY ON THE ^|^alpha;-^|^beta; TRANSITION OF Ag2S

The refinement of the structure of a-Ag2S was undertaken together with an accurate determination of the lattice constants. The final structure gave the R-factor of 16.8% including unobservable reflections. The crystals found in nature are almost invariably twinned, and a theoretical consideration on the modes of twinning led to the conclusion that twenty-eight twin laws are possible. Heat treatments of the specimens were carried out in order to know the details of the progress of twin formation premonitory to the a-9 transition. The specimens remain substantially unaltered up to 152-156•Ž, the only change being observed in the ƒÀ-angle. Above this temperature range, individuals of twins in various orientations appear, and the X-ray reflections take an appearance of trains of spots. At about 165•Ž these spots along each line fuse into one another, giving an arc-like intensity distribution. Some nodes of strong intensities along these arcs are converted into sharp reflections of the high-temperature form at the transition temperature, 173•Ž. As the rise of temperature, therefore, the structure of Ag2S makes the first approach to the ƒÀ-form by giving itself more maked cubicity through the change in the ƒÀ-angle, at the next step simulates the symmetry of the high-temperature form by twinning, and finally at the transition temperature rearranges into parallel orientation the twin individuals which have been deranged owing to their obliquity.
Southern and Eastern Europe in the Eurozone: convergence or divergence?

ABSTRACT A number of studies have concluded that, contrary to expectations, European monetary union has not reduced income disparities among the 12 Western European member countries. In fact, incomes per capita between Southern and Northern Eurozone members have diverged since the Eurozone was created, in contrast to earlier trends which had seen rapid convergence in living standards across Western Europe. The paper revisits this issue and investigates whether something similar occurred in the five Eastern European countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia) which joined the Eurozone between 2007 and 2015. The conclusion is that, despite similarities with Southern Europe in some areas, overall developments in Eastern Europe were different and led to convergence rather than divergence. Important reasons for this were Eastern Europe's relatively high levels of institutional quality, a politically motivated determination to anchor these countries to the West and, possibly, the legacy of pre-war history.
Physicochemical properties of tropical forest top soil in relation to depth in western Nepal

Soil fertility, an important factor which determines the growth of plants depends on the concentration of N, P, and K organic and inorganic materials, micronutrients and water. Lack of nutrient inputs is a major factor in soil degradation. Understanding of soil chemical reaction and processes is essential for developing innovative resource management strategies, and understanding and regulating the behaviour of the terrestrial ecosystem at regional and global scale (Tale and Ingole, 2015). Information on soil properties with regards to forest soil-depth are important for sustainable management of forest. Soil productivity, health, sustainability, sequestration and emission potentials can be assessed by quantifying SOC (Vashum et al., 2016). Vertical distribution of SOC in relation to vegetation and land use is less understood (Jabbagy and Jackson, 2000). The soil carbon studies conducted in Nepal mainly focused on its relation with land use (Awasthi et al., 2005; Bajracharya et al., 2004, 2015; Dahal and Bajracharya, 2012). The tropical forest soils of western Nepal are less studied. Hence, the present study aims to investigate the top soil physiochemical properties in the tropical forests of western Terai region of Nepal in relation to depth. Physicochemical properties of tropical forest top soil in relation to depth in western Nepal