Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The association between Mediterranean Diet Score and glucokinase regulatory protein gene variation on the markers of cardiometabolic risk: an analysis in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer (EPIC)-Norfolk study

Consumption of a Mediterranean diet (MD) and genetic variation in the glucokinase regulatory protein (GCKR) gene have been reported to be associated with TAG and glucose metabolism. It is uncertain whether there is any interaction between these factors. Therefore, the aims of the present study were to test the association of adherence to a MD and rs780094 (G>A) SNP in the GCKR gene with the markers of cardiometabolic risk, and to investigate the interaction between genetic variation and MD adherence. We studied 20 986 individuals from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer (EPIC)-Norfolk study. The relative Mediterranean Diet Score (rMED: range 0–18) was used to assess MD adherence. Linear regression was used to estimate the association between the rMED, genotype and cardiometabolic continuous traits, adjusting for potential confounders. In adjusted analyses, we observed independent associations of MD adherence and genotype with cardiometabolic risk, with the highest risk group (AA genotype; lowest rMED) having higher concentrations of TAG, total cholesterol and apoB (12·5, 2·3 and 3·1 %, respectively) v. those at the lowest risk (GG genotype; highest rMED). However, the associations of MD adherence with metabolic markers did not differ by genotype, with no significant gene–diet interactions for lipids or for glycated Hb. In conclusion, we found independent associations of the rMED and of the GCKR genotype with cardiometabolic profile, but found no evidence of interaction between them.
Carbon balance as affected by biosolid application in reforestations

Soils of Mediterranean drylands are characterized by a low fertility and organic matter content because of past land use and disturbances regime. The restoration of these degraded lands faces at the same time problems related to water scarcity and the unpredictability of precipitations with problems with soil physical, chemical, and microbiological properties. Organic amendments may help to improve soil properties and, consequently, enhance planted seedling establishment and performance. In this study, we assessed the C balance of 3 Mediterranean areas planted with Pinus halepensis Mill. seedlings with different treatments of biosolid application. The assessment was conducted at different times after the establishment of treatments and the C dynamics are discussed. We considered 3 biosolid types (air‐dried, fresh sludge, and composted sludge) in application doses ranging from 10 to 320 Mg (d.w.) ha−1. We quantified basal area, pine biomass, biomass of spontaneous vegetation, litter, root density, and soil organic matter. All 3 experimental restoration studies improved restoration success in terms of basal area (ranging from 15% to 300%), especially in composted biosolid at 30 Mg (d.w.) ha−1, whereas litter and, especially, root biomass increased with all biosolid treatments and times since application. Soil organic C was higher in application doses above 30 Mg (dry weight) ha−1 due to the organic matter applied with the sludges. The increment in C sequestration rates associated to these restoration treatments ranged between 0.046 and 0.293 kg C m2 yr−1. These results confirm the suitability of organic amendments as restoration technique in Mediterranean degraded drylands.
Conditions for Correct Solvability of a Simplest Singular Boundary Value Problem

We consider the singular boundary value problem −r(x)y(x) + q(x)y(x) = f(x), x ∈ R lim |x|→∞ y(x) = 0, where f ∈ Lp(R), p ∈ [1,∞] (L∞(R) := C(R)), r is a continuous positive function for x ∈ R, q ∈ Lloc 1 (R), q ≥ 0. A solution of this problem is, by definition, any absolutely continuous function y satisfying the limit condition and almost everywhere the differential equation. This problem is called correctly solvable in a given space Lp(R) if for any function f ∈ Lp(R) it has a unique solution y ∈ Lp(R) and if the following inequality holds with an absolute constant cp ∈ (0,∞) : ‖y‖Lp(R) ≤ cp‖f‖Lp(R), f ∈ Lp(R). We find minimal requirements for r and q under which the above problem is correctly solvable in Lp(R).
Dynamics of Precise Spike Timing in Primary Auditory Cortex

Although single units in primary auditory cortex (A1) exhibit accurate timing in their phasic response to the onset of sound (precision of a few milliseconds), paradoxically, they are unable to sustain synchronized responses to repeated stimuli at rates much beyond 20 Hz. To explore the relationship between these two aspects of cortical response, we designed a broadband stimulus with a slowly modulated spectrotemporal envelope riding on top of a rapidly modulated waveform (or fine structure). Using this stimulus, we quantified the ability of cortical cells to encode independently and simultaneously the stimulus envelope and fine structure. Specifically, by reverse-correlating unit responses with these two stimulus dimensions, we measured the spectrotemporal response fields (STRFs) associated with the processing of the envelope, the fine structure, and the complete stimulus. A1 cells respond well to the slow spectrotemporal envelopes and produce a wide variety of STRFs. In over 70% of cases, A1 units also track the fine-structure modulations precisely, throughout the stimulus, and for frequencies up to several hundred Hertz. Such a dual response, however, is contingent on the cell being driven by both fast and slow modulations, in that the response to the slowly modulated envelope gates the expression of the fine structure. We also demonstrate that either a simplified model of synaptic depression and facilitation, and/or a cortical network of thalamic excitation and cortical inhibition can account for major trends in the observed findings. Finally, we discuss the potential functional significance and perceptual relevance of these coexistent, complementary dynamic response modes.
Sticky widgets: pseudo-haptic widget enhancements for multi-monitor displays

People use multiple monitors to increase their display surface and to facilitate multitasking. However, if windows are maximized to fill one screen, users may have difficulties accessing widgets and tools on the borders of the displays, accidentally crossing over to the other display. To assist users of multi monitor displays, we developed a pseudo-haptic approach to enhance boundary widgets. We compared our sticky widget to a standard widget for two multi monitor display configurations: two identical side-by-side monitors, and two separated monitors of different sizes. Our enhancement improved performance by significantly reducing errors for accessing a boundary widget, reducing the number of accidental crossovers to the wrong display and consequently decreasing selection time.
Investigating Different Term Weighting Functions for Browsing Artist-Related Web Pages by Means of Term Co-Occurrences

We present a user interface (UI) for browsing collections of web pages about music artists. Given such a collection, we use a term list to index its contents and to derive term co-occurrences. Based on these co-occurrences, we create a UI that employs a variant of the Sunburst visualization technique. The UI is embedded in CoMIRVA, our framework for music information retrieval and visualization. We use two dictionaries of musically relevant terms and derive information about which terms occur on which web pages. Based on this information, subsets of the web page collection are created according to the terms that occur most frequently in the collection. The generated UI, which we call the Co-Occurrence Browser (COB), thus allows for associating each artist with its most important (descriptive) terms and for browsing the respective web pages. To assess the usability of the COB, we carried out a small qualitative user study. Furthermore, different term weighting functions used to create the UI were tested and evaluated in a quantitative user study.
Priming of Wheat with the Green Leaf Volatile Z-3-Hexenyl Acetate Enhances Defense against Fusarium graminearum But Boosts Deoxynivalenol Production1

A green leaf volatile primes wheat for enhanced defense against the hemibiotrophic fungus F. graminearum by boosting jasmonate-related defenses. Priming refers to a mechanism whereby plants are sensitized to respond faster and/or more strongly to future pathogen attack. Here, we demonstrate that preexposure to the green leaf volatile Z-3-hexenyl acetate (Z-3-HAC) primed wheat (Triticum aestivum) for enhanced defense against subsequent infection with the hemibiotrophic fungus Fusarium graminearum. Bioassays showed that, after priming with Z-3-HAC, wheat ears accumulated up to 40% fewer necrotic spikelets. Furthermore, leaves of seedlings showed significantly smaller necrotic lesions compared with nonprimed plants, coinciding with strongly reduced fungal growth in planta. Additionally, we found that F. graminearum produced more deoxynivalenol, a mycotoxin, in the primed treatment. Expression analysis of salicylic acid (SA) and jasmonic acid (JA) biosynthesis genes and exogenous methyl salicylate and methyl jasmonate applications showed that plant defense against F. graminearum is sequentially regulated by SA and JA during the early and later stages of infection, respectively. Interestingly, analysis of the effect of Z-3-HAC pretreatment on SA- and JA-responsive gene expression in hormone-treated and pathogen-inoculated seedlings revealed that Z-3-HAC boosts JA-dependent defenses during the necrotrophic infection stage of F. graminearum but suppresses SA-regulated defense during its biotrophic phase. Together, these findings highlight the importance of temporally separated hormone changes in molding plant health and disease and support a scenario whereby the green leaf volatile Z-3-HAC protects wheat against Fusarium head blight by priming for enhanced JA-dependent defenses during the necrotrophic stages of infection.
When is a maximal invariant hypothesis test better than the GLRT?

There has been considerable interest in applying maximal invariant (MI) hypothesis testing as an alternative to the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT). This interest has been motivated by several attractive theoretical properties of MI tests including: exact robustness to variation of nuisance parameters, finite-sample min-max optimality (in some cases), and distributional robustness, i.e. insensitivity to changes in the underlying probability distribution over a particular class. Furthermore, in some important cases the M test gives a reasonable test while the GLRT has worse performance than the trivial coin dip decision rule. However, in other cases, like the deep hide target detection problem, there are regimes (SNR, number of wireless users, coherence bandwidth) for which either of the MI and the GLRT can outperform the other. We discuss conditions under which the MI tests can be expected to outperform the GLRT in the context of a radar imaging and target detection application.
Outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy‐treated bone and joint infections in a tropical setting

Background: Osteoarticular infections are a primary indication for outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy (OPAT). The climate and geographical diversity of tropical Australia, together with the prevalence of melioidosis, disseminated gonococcal disease and community‐acquired methicillin‐resistant Staphylococcus aureus renders this a challenging environment in which to manage such infections. We evaluated patients managed by the Royal Darwin Hospital Hospital in the Home service for bone and joint infections.
Inhibition of ERβ Induces Resistance to Cisplatin by Enhancing Rad51–Mediated DNA Repair in Human Medulloblastoma Cell Lines

Cisplatin is one of the most widely used and effective anticancer drugs against solid tumors including cerebellar tumor of the childhood, Medulloblastoma. However, cancer cells often develop resistance to cisplatin, which limits therapeutic effectiveness of this otherwise effective genotoxic drug. In this study, we demonstrate that human medulloblastoma cell lines develop acute resistance to cisplatin in the presence of estrogen receptor (ER) antagonist, ICI182,780. This unexpected finding involves a switch from the G2/M to G1 checkpoint accompanied by decrease in ATM/Chk2 and increase in ATR/Chk1 phosphorylation. We have previously reported that ERβ, which is highly expressed in medulloblastomas, translocates insulin receptor substrate 1 (IRS-1) to the nucleus, and that nuclear IRS-1 binds to Rad51 and attenuates homologous recombination directed DNA repair (HRR). Here, we demonstrate that in the presence of ICI182,780, cisplatin-treated medulloblastoma cells show recruitment of Rad51 to the sites of damaged DNA and increase in HRR activity. This enhanced DNA repair during the S phase preserved also clonogenic potential of medulloblastoma cells treated with cisplatin. In conclusion, inhibition of ERβ considered as a supplemental anticancer therapy, has been found to interfere with cisplatin–induced cytotoxicity in human medulloblastoma cell lines.
Nurse practitioner education: learning from students.

AIM To describe the experiences of nurse practitioner (NP) students at Bournemouth University. METHOD Grounded theory methodology guided the data collection and analysis. A theoretical model was constructed that represented 'role transition' for NP students. RESULTS The social environment of the participants affected role transition and learning and two major categories were evident: experience in the workplace and experience in the academic environment. A third category, 'pioneering spirit', described the participants' personal attributes that influenced their transformation. CONCLUSION The results have prompted a review of the current curriculum, mode of delivery and teaching resources. The findings have implications for current and future courses and demonstrate the value of eliciting the students' view.
Anisomycin downregulates gap-junctional intercellular communication via the p38 MAP-kinase pathway

Phosphorylation of connexin 43 (Cx43) molecules (e.g. by extracellular signal-regulated kinase) leads to reductions in gap-junctional intercellular communication (GJIC). GJIC levels also appear to be lower in the presence of p38 mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase, for unknown reasons. In this study, we used assays of the recovery of fluorescence by photobleached WB-F344 cells to demonstrate that GJIC levels are decreased by anisomycin [a protein synthesis inhibitor as well as an activator of p38 MAP kinase and c-Jun N-terminal kinases (JNK)] as a result of time-dependent depletion of the phosphorylated forms of Cx43. Using immunohistochemistry, we also detected far less of the Cx43 proteins at cell borders. These findings agree with the photobleaching assay results. Moreover, prior treatment with SB203580 (a specific inhibitor of p38 MAP kinase) appeared to be effective in preventing the loss of phosphorylated forms of Cx43 and the loss of Cx43 proteins at cell borders. Total protein labelling with [35S]-methionine and [32P]-orthophosphates labelling of Cx43 showed that anisomycin enhanced the phosphorylation level of Cx43 along with inhibition of protein synthesis. SB203580 prevented the former but not the latter. The effect of anisomycin on GJIC was not dependent on the inhibition of protein synthesis because the addition of SB203580 completely maintained the level of GJIC without restoring protein synthesis. The Cx43 phosphorylation level increased by anisomycin treatment, whereas the amount of phosphorylated forms of Cx43 decreased, suggesting that activation of Cx43 phosphorylation might lead to the loss of Cx43. These results suggest that activation of p38 MAP kinase leads to reduction in the levels of phosphorylated forms of Cx43, possibly owing to accelerated degradation, and that these losses might be responsible for the reduction in numbers of gap junctions and in GJIC.
Inter-domain requirements and their future realisability: The ARAMiS cyber-physical systems scenario

Systems whose functionality and services span over multiple, interconnected application domains have become known as cyber-physical system (CPS) and currently receive much attention in research and practice. So far, CPS still come with a variety of development-process-related and technical challenges. These challenges include the interaction between the different domain-specific systems and possible conflicts between their requirements, as well as the choice of appropriate modelling concepts. This paper makes two main contributions: First, we show how such an inter-domain development-process can be structured, beginning with a a model-based requirements engineering approach. In order to illustrate the concepts, this paper provides a continuous example scenario, developed within a group of the respective domain experts, that outlines the future of mobility using technologies currently under development in the ARAMiS project. The intention is to allow for an analysis of interaction and possible interference between domain-specific scenarios as well as the analysis of the relation between derived domain specific scenarios and the global, cross-domain scenario. Second, we provide an analysis of the realisability of the scenario steps according to a set of quality criteria and estimate the respective time horizon, derived from interviews with experts from different domains. The described scenario allows the reification of goals and requirements of CPS for the mobility domain. Moreover, it makes apparent the need for connecting CPS of different domains. Our validation research provides an accompanying resource for future analysis of the interaction between domains and the relation between their requirements as well as teaching requirements engineering in the domain of CPS.
Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience Computational Neuroscience

2008). We found that a Gaussian degree distribution gives a good quantitative description for statistical properties of the network such as the appearance of the giant m-connected component and its size as a function of connectivity. The inhibitory component was found to be about 30% in hippocampal cultures, and about 20% in cortex. We furthermore observed that the appearance of a fully connected network coincides precisely with the time of birth (Soriano et al., 2008). In this paper we apply our graph theoretic approach to the intriguing process of the initiation of a spontaneous population spike. On the one hand, a perturbation needs to be created that pushes a number of neurons to begin firing. On the other hand, the initial firing pattern must propagate to the rest of the neurons in the culture. Understanding this recruitment process will give insight on the structure of the network, on the interrelation of activation in neurons, and on the dynamics of neuronal firing in such a complex culture. A simple scenario for initiation that one might conceive of is wave-front propagation, in which a localized and limited area of initiation is ignited first, and from there sets up a spherical traveling front of excitation. However, as we shall see, the initiation is a more intricate process. The experimental situation regarding initiation of activity is complex. In quasi one-dimensional (1D) networks we have been able to show that activity originates in a single " Burst Initiation
Impact of a Pay‐for‐Performance Program on Low Performing Physicians

&NA; Studies have shown that the lowest performing physicians in pay‐for‐performance (P4P) programs improved the most; however, it is unclear whether this would occur without the P4P program or be sustained. The objective of this study is to investigate the impact of P4P in a Preferred Provider Organization (PPO) on low performing physicians over a 4‐year period. We used administrative claims data from a PPO health plan in Hawaii, which implemented a P4P program, and a PPO plan in the South, which did not implement a P4P program. The difference‐in‐difference model was used to compare the quality scores between the two physician groups in preventive measures, a heart failure measure, and an HbA1c testing measure. We found that P4P programs may be effective in incentivizing low performing physicians to improvement quality of care and sustain improvement, and the positive benefit of the P4P program may not be realized until the 3rd or 4th year of the program.
Cytokine stimulation of aerobic glycolysis in hematopoietic cells exceeds proliferative demand

The relationship between growth factor‐dependent cell growth and proliferation and the up‐ regulation of cellular metabolism required to support these processes remains poorly defined. Here, we demonstrate that cell growth, proliferation, and glucose metabolism are coordinately regulated by interleukin‐3 (IL‐3) in cytokine‐dependent cells. Surprisingly, glycolytic activity is stimulated to a greater extent than would be expected based on the rate of cell growth or proliferation. IL‐3 signaling exerts a direct effect on glycolytic commitment independent of cell growth control. These results are not restricted to IL‐3 as the cytokines IL‐7 and IL‐2 have similar effects on glucose metabolism when assayed in factor‐dependent cell lines or primary lymphocytes, respectively. Growth factor stimulation leads cells to consume less oxygen and produce more lactate per glucose, indicative of conversion from oxidative to glycolytic metabolism. The enforced rate of glucose metabolism is in excess of that required to support cell growth; accordingly, if extracellular glucose is reduced, cells retain the ability to grow and proliferate by derepressing oxidative metabolism. These data suggest that the high rate of glycolysis observed in response to growth factor stimulation is a primary effect rather than a homeostatic response to increased cell growth.
Modelling of a Bioretention Cell Soil Moisture Regime in Southern Ontario

MODELING OF A BIORETENTION CELL SOIL MOISTURE REGIME IN SOUTHERN ONTARIO Samantha Paquette Advisor: Karen Landman University of Guelph, 2012 Current stormwater management practices (SMP) are not sufficient for maintaining predevelopment runoff volumes. Low impact development (LID) uses site scale SMP to reduce runoff. Bioretention cells, one practice within LID, are small planting beds designed to filter and infiltrate runoff using amended soil and vegetation. The bioretention cell can create a harsh soil moisture regime for plants that has not been adequately characterized. Bioretention cell construction, meteorological, and soil science data were built into the Happy Plant Model to determine how often bioretention plants were saturated and experienced water stress over a thirty year period. The model takes into account eight design factors: soil media depth and texture, gravel storage, ponding depth, drainage area, in situ soil infiltration rate, the landscape coefficient, and root zone depth. The Happy Plant model will aid future studies and landscape architecture practitioners with bioretention plant selection.