Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Migration of Bone Marrow‐Derived Cells Into the Central Nervous System in Models of Neurodegeneration

Microglia are the brain‐resident macrophages tasked with the defense and maintenance of the central nervous system (CNS). The hematopoietic origin of microglia has warranted a therapeutic potential for the hematopoietic system in treating diseases of the CNS. However, migration of bone marrow‐derived cells (BMDC) into the CNS is a marginal event under normal, healthy conditions. A busulfan‐based chemotherapy regimen was used for bone marrow transplantation in wild‐type mice before subjecting them to a hypoxic–ischemic brain injury or in APP/PS1 mice prior to the formation of amyloid plaques. The cells were tracked and analyzed throughout the development of the pathology. The efficacy of a preventive macrophage colony‐stimulating factor (M‐CSF) treatment was also studied to highlight the effects of circulating monocytes in hypoxic–ischemic brain injury. Such an injury induces a strong migration of BMDC into the CNS, without the need for irradiation. These migrating cells do not replace the entire microglial pool but rather are confined to the sites of injury for several weeks, suggesting that they could perform specific functions. M‐CSF showed neuroprotective effects as a preventive treatment. In APP/PS1 mice, the formation of amyloid plaques was sufficient to induce the entry of cells into the parenchyma, though in low numbers. This study confirms that BMDC infiltrate the CNS in animal models for stroke and Alzheimer's disease and that peripheral cells can be targeted to treat affected regions of the CNS. J. Comp. Neurol. 521:3863–3876, 2013. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Framework for extending plagiarism detection in virtual worlds

The economies of virtual worlds are driven by the exchange of virtual good and services. These goods are available in the form of image textures, 3D objects, and scripts. The theft or unauthorized use of these goods was and still is a serious problem for virtual world users and content providers. In our work we try to point out various aspects of IPR violations in virtual worlds and suggest a platform for detection inspired by plagiarism detection services in real world.
Diet Segregation between Cohabiting Builder and Inquiline Termite Species

How do termite inquilines manage to cohabit termitaria along with the termite builder species? With this in mind, we analysed one of the several strategies that inquilines could use to circumvent conflicts with their hosts, namely, the use of distinct diets. We inspected overlapping patterns for the diets of several cohabiting Neotropical termite species, as inferred from carbon and nitrogen isotopic signatures for termite individuals. Cohabitant communities from distinct termitaria presented overlapping diet spaces, indicating that they exploited similar diets at the regional scale. When such communities were split into their components, full diet segregation could be observed between builders and inquilines, at regional (environment-wide) and local (termitarium) scales. Additionally, diet segregation among inquilines themselves was also observed in the vast majority of inspected termitaria. Inquiline species distribution among termitaria was not random. Environmental-wide diet similarity, coupled with local diet segregation and deterministic inquiline distribution, could denounce interactions for feeding resources. However, inquilines and builders not sharing the same termitarium, and thus not subject to potential conflicts, still exhibited distinct diets. Moreover, the areas of the builder’s diet space and that of its inquilines did not correlate negatively. Accordingly, the diet areas of builders which hosted inquilines were in average as large as the areas of builders hosting no inquilines. Such results indicate the possibility that dietary partitioning by these cohabiting termites was not majorly driven by current interactive constraints. Rather, it seems to be a result of traits previously fixed in the evolutionary past of cohabitants.
Characterization of Antibacterial and Hemolytic Activity of Synthetic Pandinin 2 Variants and Their Inhibition against Mycobacterium tuberculosis

The contention and treatment of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and other bacteria that cause infectious diseases require the use of new type of antibiotics. Pandinin 2 (Pin2) is a scorpion venom antimicrobial peptide highly hemolytic that has a central proline residue. This residue forms a structural “kink” linked to its pore-forming activity towards human erythrocytes. In this work, the residue Pro14 of Pin2 was both substituted and flanked using glycine residues (P14G and P14GPG) based on the low hemolytic activities of antimicrobial peptides with structural motifs Gly and GlyProGly such as magainin 2 and ponericin G1, respectively. The two Pin2 variants showed antimicrobial activity against E. coli, S. aureus, and M. tuberculosis. However, Pin2 [GPG] was less hemolytic (30%) than that of Pin2 [G] variant. In addition, based on the primary structure of Pin2 [G] and Pin2 [GPG], two short peptide variants were designed and chemically synthesized keeping attention to their physicochemical properties such as hydrophobicity and propensity to adopt alpha-helical conformations. The aim to design these two short antimicrobial peptides was to avoid the drawback cost associated to the synthesis of peptides with large sequences. The short Pin2 variants named Pin2 [14] and Pin2 [17] showed antibiotic activity against E. coli and M. tuberculosis. Besides, Pin2 [14] presented only 25% of hemolysis toward human erythrocytes at concentrations as high as 100 µM, while the peptide Pin2 [17] did not show any hemolytic effect at the same concentration. Furthermore, these short antimicrobial peptides had better activity at molar concentrations against multidrug resistance M. tuberculosis than that of the conventional antibiotics ethambutol, isoniazid and rifampicin. Therefore, Pin2 [14] and Pin2 [17] have the potential to be used as an alternative antibiotics and anti-tuberculosis agents with reduced hemolytic effects.
On the complexity of space bounded interactive proofs

Two results on interactive proof systems with two-way probabilistic finite-state verifiers are proved. The first is a lower bound on the power of such proof systems if they are not required to halt with high probability on rejected inputs: it is shown that they can accept any recursively enumerable language. The second is an upper bound on the power of interactive proof systems that halt with high probability on all inputs. The proof method for the lower bound also shows that the emptiness problem for one-way probabilistic finite-state machines is undecidable. In the proof of the upper bound some results of independent interest on the rate of convergence of time-varying Markov chains to their halting states are obtained. <<ETX>>
Estimación de la concentración de clorofila mediante métodos no destructivos en vid (Vitis vinifera L.) cv. Riesling Becker

Pigment analysis is a laboratory procedure and is not an immediate measurement to be performed in situ. The SPAD 502 and CCM-200 are equipments used for non-destructive, fast, and indirect estimates of chlorophyll contents. The concentration of photosynthetic pigments is related to the foliar concentration of nitrogen, so indirectly, it is possible to observe the deficiency or excess of this element, providing a technical basis to suggest the proper management of the crop in order to potentiate the photosynthetic efficiency, quality and yield of a vineyard. This research sought to compare measurements between the portable chlorophyll meter SPAD-502 vs. CCM-200 in the Riesling Becker grape variety under cold tropical climate conditions to determine the behavior of chlorophyll during the growth of leaves 4, 5 and 6, from flowering to harvest. The relationship between the measurements with the SPAD-502 and the CCM-200 were fit to a second degree polynomial determined with the equation for the Chlorophyll Concentration Index: CCI = 0.014SPAD2-0.2396SPAD + 5.8021. With a value of R2=0.9343 (n=96; P≤0.0001), which indicates that there was a high correlation between the portable equipment used in the present study to determine chlorophyll with a non-destructive method. The evaluations carried out with the equipment obtained fast and reliable measurements, with the choice of the moment of measurement according to the phenological stage of the plant being important because of the high variability in chlorophyll contents that are presented in relation to the phylotaxy.
Long-term population dynamics of zooplankton in northern temperate lakes

Srudies of zooplankton communities that seek to characterize variability are most often conducted in o ne of rwo ways: a single lake is selected and sampled intensively for several years (variation in time) or several lakes are sampled but each on an infrequent basis (variation in space). Few studies have considered both long-term temporal dynamics and spatial variability among lakes in the same region. Exceptions to this have been a study of lakes in northern Wisconsin (KRATZ et al. 1987) and the work of ARNoTT e t al. ( 1999) in the Experimental Lakes Area of Canada. In both of rhese studies, however, variables used in analyses did nor characterize the nature of dynamics within each season (data from all sampling dates in a year were pooled or variables such as date and value of maximum abundance for rhe year were used). At the North Temperate Lakes Long Term Ecological Research Site (NTL-LTER), we have sampled a ser of six lakes providing us with records of zooplankton popularions extending from 4 to 15 years in duration. Using these data, we can address questions regarding the nature of zooplankton population dynamics in adjacent lakes rhrough time. Zooplankton are particularly well suited to studies of population dynamics because o f rheir relatively short generation times (in some cases, several generations p er year).
The effect of food environments on fruit and vegetable intake as modified by time spent at home: a cross-sectional study

Objective There is a growing body of research that investigates how the residential neighbourhood context relates to individual diet. However, previous studies ignore participants’ time spent in the residential environment and this may be a problem because time-use studies show that adults’ time-use pattern can significantly vary. To better understand the role of exposure duration, we designed a study to examine ‘time spent at home’ as a moderator to the residential food environment-diet association. Design Cross-sectional observational study. Settings City of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Participants 2411 adults aged 25–65. Primary outcome measure Frequency of vegetable and fruit intake (VFI) per day. Results To examine how time spent at home may moderate the relationship between residential food environment and VFI, the full sample was split into three equal subgroups—short, medium and long duration spent at home. We detected significant associations between density of food stores in the residential food environment and VFI for subgroups that spend medium and long durations at home (ie, spending a mean of 8.0 and 12.3 h at home, respectively—not including sleep time), but no associations exist for people who spend the lowest amount of time at home (mean=4.7 h). Also, no associations were detected in analyses using the full sample. Conclusions Our study is the first to demonstrate that time spent at home may be an important variable to identify hidden population patterns regarding VFI. Time spent at home can impact the association between the residential food environment and individual VFI.
Optimization-intensive watermarking techniques for decision problems

Recently, a number of watermarking-based intellectual property protection techniques have been proposed. Although they have been applied to different stages in the design process and have a great variety of technical and theoretical features, all of them share two common properties: 1) they are applied solely to optimization problems and 2) do not involve any optimization during the watermarking process. In this paper, we propose the first set of optimization-intensive watermarking techniques for decision problems. In particular, we demonstrate, by example of the Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem, how one can select a subset of superimposed watermarking constraints so that the uniqueness of the signature and the likelihood of satisfying the satisfiability problem are simultaneously maximized. We have developed three SAT watermarking techniques: adding clauses, deleting literals, and push-out and pull-back. Each technique targets different types of signature-induced constraint superimposition on an instance of SAT problem. In addition to comprehensive experimental validation, we theoretically analyze the potentials and limitations of the proposed watermarking techniques. Furthermore, we analyze the three proposed optimization-intensive watermarking SAT techniques in terms of their suitability for copy detection.
Multidimensional Contexts for Data Quality Assessment

The notion of data quality cannot be separated from the context in which the data is produced or used. Recently, a conceptual framework for capturing context-dependent data quality assessment has been proposed. According to it, a database D is assessed wrt. a context which is modeled as an external system containing additional data, metadata, and definitions of quality predicates. The instance D is “put in context” via schema mappings; and after contextual processing of the data, a collection of alternative clean versions D′ of D is produced. The quality of D is measured in terms of its distance to this class. In this work we extend contexts for data quality assessment by including multidimensional data, which allows to analyze data from multiple perspectives and different degrees of granularity. It is possible to navigate through dimensional hierarchies in order to go for the data that is needed for quality assessment. More precisely, we introduce contextual hierarchies as components of contexts for data quality assessment. The resulting contexts are later represented as ontologies written in description logic.
Phase-Dependent Immune Evasion of Herpesviruses

ABSTRACT Viruses employ various modes to evade immune detection. Two possible evasion modes are a reduction of the number of epitopes presented and the mimicry of host epitopes. The immune evasion efforts are not uniform among viral proteins. The number of epitopes in a given viral protein and the similarity of the epitopes to host peptides can be used as a measure of the viral attempts to hide this protein. Using bioinformatics tools, we here present a genomic analysis of the attempts of four human herpesviruses (herpes simplex virus type 1-human herpesvirus 1, Epstein-Barr virus-human herpesvirus 4, human cytomegalovirus-human herpesvirus 5, and Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus-human herpesvirus 8) and one murine herpesvirus (murine herpesvirus 68) to escape from immune detection. We determined the full repertoire of CD8 T-lymphocyte epitopes presented by each viral protein and show that herpesvirus proteins present many fewer epitopes than expected. Furthermore, the epitopes that are presented are more similar to host epitopes than are random viral epitopes, minimizing the immune response. We defined a score for the size of the immune repertoire (the SIR score) based on the number of epitopes in a protein. The numbers of epitopes in proteins expressed in the latent and early phases of infection were significantly smaller than those in proteins expressed in the lytic phase in all tested viruses. The latent and immediate-early epitopes were also more similar to host epitopes than were lytic epitopes. A clear trend emerged from the analysis. In general, herpesviruses demonstrated an effort to evade immune detection. However, within a given herpesvirus, proteins expressed in phases critical to the fate of infection (e.g., early lytic and latent) evaded immune detection more than all others. The application of the SIR score to specific proteins allows us to quantify the importance of immune evasion and to detect optimal targets for immunotherapy and vaccine development.
Parsimonious Labeling

We propose a new family of discrete energy minimization problems, which we call parsimonious labeling. Our energy function consists of unary potentials and high-order clique potentials. While the unary potentials are arbitrary, the clique potentials are proportional to the diversity of the set of unique labels assigned to the clique. Intuitively, our energy function encourages the labeling to be parsimonious, that is, use as few labels as possible. This in turn allows us to capture useful cues for important computer vision applications such as stereo correspondence and image denoising. Furthermore, we propose an efficient graph-cuts based algorithm for the parsimonious labeling problem that provides strong theoretical guarantees on the quality of the solution. Our algorithm consists of three steps. First, we approximate a given diversity using a mixture of a novel hierarchical Pn Potts model. Second, we use a divide-and-conquer approach for each mixture component, where each subproblem is solved using an efficient alpha-expansion algorithm. This provides us with a small number of putative labelings, one for each mixture component. Third, we choose the best putative labeling in terms of the energy value. Using both synthetic and standard real datasets, we show that our algorithm significantly outperforms other graph-cuts based approaches.
Psychobiology of dissociation and its clinical assessment.

OBJECTIVE Dissociation is often defined as partial or total disconnection between memories of the past, awareness of identity and of immediate sensations, and control of bodily movements, often resulting from traumatic experiences, intolerable problems, or disturbed relationships. This type of reaction to a psychological and/or physical trauma has often various neurobiological consequences and its clinical assessment has received enormous interest in recent psychological and neuroscience research. METHODS Psychometric parameters of the Czech version of the Dissociative Experiences Scale were tested from the viewpoints of internal consistency, validity and factor structure, using data from a sample of n=783 adults, divided into three groups (epilepsy n=243, depression n=357, norm n=183), average age 39 years, SD=13.5. RESULTS Findings of this study demonstrated that reliability, validity and factor structure of the Czech version of the Dissociative Experiences Scale correspond to those of the original English version. CONCLUSIONS The Czech version of the questionnaire may be considered a suitable tool for estimating subjectively experienced dissociative symptoms.
Z ' boson detection in the minimal quiver standard model

We undertake a phenomenological study of the extra neutral Z' boson in the minimal quiver standard model and discuss limits on the model's parameters from previous precision electroweak experiments, as well as detection prospects at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. We find that masses lower than around 700 GeV are excluded by the Z-pole data from the CERN LEP collider, and below 620 GeV by experimental data from di-electron events at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. We also find that at a mass of 1 TeV the LHC cross section would show a small peak in the di-lepton and top pair channel.
Toolforthoughts: Reexamining Thinking in the Digital Age

In this article we argue that new computational tools problematize the concept of thought within current sociocultural theories of technology and cognition by challenging the traditional position of privilege that humans occupy in sociocultural analyses. We draw on work by Shaffer and Kaput (1999) and Latour (1996a, 1996b, 1996c) to extend the analytical reach of "activity theory" (Engestrom, Miettinen, & Punamaki, 1999; Nardi, 1996b), "mediated action" (Wertsch, 1998) and "distributed cognition" (Hutchins, 1995; Pea, 1993; Salomon, 1993) by adopting a stronger form of the concepts of distribution and mediation in the context of cognitive activity. For rhetorical purposes, we posit this stronger form of the distribution of intelligence across persons and objects as a theory of distributed mind. Previous theories of cognition and technology show that persons and artifacts both contribute to meaningful activity. Here we explore how understanding the pedagogical implications of new media may require creating a new analytic category of "toolforthoughts". The result of such a shift in thinking provides a view of the relationship between technology and cognitive activity appropriate to the emerging virtual culture of the digital age. We suggest that this may provide a useful perspective from which to analyze pedagogical choices in the context of rapid expansion of powerful cognitive technologies. Theorizing the cognitive agency of tools provides a means to evaluate (in the fullest sense of the word) the educational consequences of new technologies.
Rapid Visuomotor Corrective Responses during Transport of Hand-Held Objects Incorporate Novel Object Dynamics

Numerous studies have shown that people are adept at learning novel object dynamics, linking applied force and motion, when performing reaching movements with hand-held objects. Here we investigated whether the control of rapid corrective arm responses, elicited in response to visual perturbations, has access to such newly acquired knowledge of object dynamics. Participants first learned to make reaching movements while grasping an object subjected to complex load forces that depended on the distance and angle of the hand from the start position. During a subsequent test phase, we examined grip and load force coordination during corrective arm movements elicited (within ∼150 ms) in response to viewed sudden lateral shifts (1.5 cm) in target or object position. We hypothesized that, if knowledge of object dynamics is incorporated in the control of the corrective responses, grip force changes would anticipate the unusual load force changes associated with the corrective arm movements so as to support grasp stability. Indeed, we found that the participants generated grip force adjustments tightly coupled, both spatially and temporally, to the load force changes associated with the arm movement corrections. We submit that recently learned novel object dynamics are effectively integrated into sensorimotor control policies that support rapid visually driven arm corrective actions during transport of hand held objects. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Previous studies have demonstrated that the motor system can learn, and make use of, internal models of object dynamics to generate feedforward motor commands. However, it is not known whether such internal models are incorporated into rapid, automatic arm movement corrections that compensate for errors that arise during movement. Here we demonstrate, for the first time, that internal models of novel object dynamics are integrated into rapid corrective arm movements made in response to visuomotor perturbations that, importantly, do not directly perturb the object.
Treatment of sprained tendons in horses with carbon fibre implants

A technique for implanting carbon fibre into sprained flexor tendons in horses is described. Insertion of the fibres through paravertebral needles which passed through the affected region of the tendon was considered to be preferable to direct implantation into the surgically opened tendon. The results of the eight cases treated to date are dealt with briefly, together with a discussion as to how this form of treatment could be further evaluated.