Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regulated Targeting of BAX to Mitochondria

The proapoptotic protein BAX contains a single predicted transmembrane domain at its COOH terminus. In unstimulated cells, BAX is located in the cytosol and in peripheral association with intracellular membranes including mitochondria, but inserts into mitochondrial membranes after a death signal. This failure to insert into mitochondrial membrane in the absence of a death signal correlates with repression of the transmembrane signal-anchor function of BAX by the NH2-terminal domain. Targeting can be instated by deleting the domain or by replacing the BAX transmembrane segment with that of BCL-2. In stimulated cells, the contribution of the NH2 terminus of BAX correlates with further exposure of this domain after membrane insertion of the protein. The peptidyl caspase inhibitor zVAD-fmk partly blocks the stimulated mitochondrial membrane insertion of BAX in vivo, which is consistent with the ability of apoptotic cell extracts to support mitochondrial targeting of BAX in vitro, dependent on activation of caspase(s). Taken together, our results suggest that regulated targeting of BAX to mitochondria in response to a death signal is mediated by discrete domains within the BAX polypeptide. The contribution of one or more caspases may reflect an initiation and/or amplification of this regulated targeting.
Improved Compact Visibility Representation of Planar Graph via Schnyder's Realizer

Let G be an n-node planar graph. In a visibility representation of G, each node of G is represented by a horizontal segment such that the segments representing any two adjacent nodes of G are vertically visible to each other. In this paper, we give the best known compact visibility representation of G. Given a canonical ordering of the triangulated G, our algorithm draws the graph incrementally in a greedy manner. We show that one of three canonical orderings obtained from Schnyder's realizer for the triangulated G yields a visibility representation of G no wider than ? 22n-42/15? Our easy-to-implement O(n)-time algorithm bypasses the complicated subroutines for four-connected components and four-block trees required by the best previously known algorithm of Kant. Our result provides a negative answer to Kant's open question about whether ? 3n-6/2? is a worst-case lower bound on the required width. Moreover, if G has no degree-5 node, then our output for G is no wider than ? 4n-7/3? Also, if G is four-connected, then our output for G is no wider than n-1, matching the best known result of Kant and He. As a by-product, we obtain a much simpler proof for a corollary of Wagner's Theorem on realizers, due to Bonichon, Saec, and Mosbah.
Source Code Plagiarism Detection using Multi Layered Approach for C Language Programs

Source code plagiarism is a growing concern in academia. Programming assignments are used to evaluate students in programming courses. Therefore, checking programming assignments for plagiarism is essential. If a course consists of a large number of students, it is impractical for a human inspector to check each assignment, and while automated tools are available, none is accurate, robust and fast enough to detect plagiarism in the programming assignments. Thus, there is a prominent need for automated and accurate plagiarism detection tool.
Social provisions in adulthood: concept and measurement in close relationships.

Social gerontologists are increasingly concerned about examining the nature of close relationships among the elderly. Theoretically grounded and empirically validated instruments are needed to advance research in this area. We analyzed the psychometric properties of the Social Provisions Scale using data from a probability sample of 494 community residents aged 65 or older. The theoretical foundation of this scale is Weiss's delineation of social support functions of close relationships. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed a pattern in the data that corresponds to the theoretical definition of relational provisions: Factor 1 was Intimacy; Factor 2 was Social Integration; Factor 3 was Reassurance of Worth; and Factor 4 was Opportunity for Nurturance. Alphas for the four scales ranged from . 83 to . 94. Convergent validity was supported by significant correlations between the Social Provisions Scale (SPS) and respondent's morale, frequency of contact with friends, feelings of closeness with an adult child, relationship control, and relationship conflict. Discriminant validity was supported by nonsignificant correlations between the SPS and the Eysenck Lie Scale.
A study of the structural properties and thermal stability of human Bcl-2 by molecular dynamics simulations

The anti-apoptotic B-cell lymphoma 2 (Bcl-2) protein interacts with several proteins that regulate the apoptotic properties of cells. In this research, we conduct several all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations under high-temperature unfolding conditions, from 400 to 800 K, for 25 ns. These simulations were performed using a model of an engineered Bcl-2 human protein (Bcl-2-Δ22Σ3), which lacks 22 C-terminal residues of the transmembrane domain. The aim of this study is to gain insight into the structural behavior of Bcl-2-Δ22Σ3 by mapping the conformational movements involved in Bcl-2 stability and its biological function. To build a Bcl-2-Δ22Σ3 three-dimensional model, the protein core was built by homology modeling and the flexible loop domain (FLD, residues 33-91) by ab initio methods. Further, the entire protein model was refined by MD simulations. Afterwards, the production MD simulations showed that the FLD at 400 and 500 K has several conformations reaching into the protein core, whereas at 600 K some of the alpha-helices were lost. At 800 K, the Bcl-2 core is destabilized suggesting a possible mechanism for protein unfolding, where the alpha helices 1 and 6 were the most stable, and a reduction in the number of hydrogen bonds initially occurs. In conclusion, the structural changes and the internal protein interactions suggest that the core and the FLD are crucial components of Bcl-2 in its function of regulate ng access to the recognition sites of kinases and caspases.
Machine Learning of Generic and User-Focused Summarization

A key problem in text summarization is finding a salience function which determines what information in the source should be included in the summary. This paper describes the use of machine learning on a training corpus of documents and their abstracts to discover salience functions which describe what combination of features is optimal for a given summarization task. The method addresses both "generic" and user-focused summaries.
Sea Ice Retrievals from Windsat Data

This paper presents sea ice environmental parameter retrieval algorithms using data from WindSat, a fully polarimetric passive microwave radiometer. Sea ice concentration and age are retrieved from WindSat data by adapting NASA-TEAM (NT) algorithm, which has been operationally used for special sensor microwave/imager (SSM/I). The tie-points and weather filters are modified. The modified NT algorithm includes sea ice climatology and land contaminations. We develop an alternative algorithm to retrieve snow-layered sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere as a proxy to the enhanced NT (NT2) algorithm. We also develop algorithms using WindSat 10.7 GHz channels. Preliminary results show that modified NT and proxy NT2 algorithms work compatibly well with NT and NT2 algorithms, respectively.
RETOOLING OF COLOR IMAGING IN THE QUATERNION ALGEBRA

A novel quaternion color representation tool is proposed to the images and videos efficiently. In this work, we consider a full model for representation and processing color images in the quaternion algebra. Color images are presented in the threefold complex plane where each color component is described by a complex image. Our preliminary experimental results show significant performance improvements of the proposed approach over other well-known color image processing techniques. Moreover, we have shown how a particular image enhancement of the framework leads to excellent color enhancement (better than other algorithms tested). In the framework of the proposed model, many other color processing algorithms, including filtration and restoration, can be expressed.
The Cellular Basis for Enhanced Volume-modulated Cardiac Output in Fish Hearts

During vertebrate evolution there has been a shift in the way in which the heart varies cardiac output (the product of heart rate and stroke volume). While mammals, birds, and amphibians increase cardiac output through large increases in heart rate and only modest increases (∼30%) in stroke volume, fish and some reptiles use modest increases in heart rate and very large increases in stroke volume (up to 300%). The cellular mechanisms underlying these fundamentally different approaches to cardiac output modulation are unknown. We hypothesized that the divergence between volume modulation and frequency modulation lies in the response of different vertebrate myocardium to stretch. We tested this by progressively stretching individual cardiac myocytes from the fish heart while measuring sarcomere length (SL), developed tension, and intracellular Ca2+ ([Ca2+]i) transients. We show that in fish cardiac myocytes, active tension increases at SLs greater than those previously demonstrated for intact mammalian myocytes, representing a twofold increase in the functional ascending limb of the length–tension relationship. The mechanism of action is a length-dependent increase in myofilament Ca2+ sensitivity, rather than changes in the [Ca2+]i transient or actin filament length in the fish cell. The capacity for greater sarcomere extension in fish myocardium may be linked to the low resting tension that is developed during stretch. These adaptations allow the fish heart to volume modulate and thus underpin the fundamental difference between the way fish and higher vertebrates vary cardiac output.
Five Year Survival Analysis of Patients with Clinical Stages I and IIA Breast Cancer who

This study examines the impact of the three major breast cancer treatment types, age, and stage at diagnosis on the survival rates of breast cancer patients. Research indicates that the survival rates for patients treated with Breast Conserving Surgery (BCS) and radiation (when given together, these two treatments are known as Breast Conservation Treatment or BCT) are comparable to those undergoing mastectomy. In North Carolina, this finding has not been examined on a population level. North Carolina Cancer Registry data for all 3,059 stage I and IIA (earliest invasive) breast cancer cases treated at North Carolina hospitals in 1995 were used in this study. Of the 3,059 patients, 1,721 (59%) underwent mastectomy. The total numbers of patients who underwent BCT and BCS were 750 and 431, respectively. Five-year survival was evaluated using the Cox proportional hazards method. Although multivariate analyses demonstrated that the 5-year overall survival rates of patients treated with BCT was not significantly different from those who underwent mastectomy, the survival rate of BCT patients was significantly higher than that for BCS patients (P-value = 0.046). Survival differences between stages I and IIA were statistically significant (P-value = 0.0001). No significant survival difference was found according to age group. These data indicate that in a large population of breast cancer patients, survival rates are comparable among three standard treatments. There is also some evidence to indicate that Breast Conservation Treatment for stages I and IIA breast cancer patients is a safe alternative to mastectomy and preferable to BCS alone.
Fungal Diversity Associated with Hawaiian Drosophila Host Plants

Hawaiian Drosophila depend primarily, sometimes exclusively, on specific host plants for oviposition and larval development, and most specialize further on a particular decomposing part of that plant. Differences in fungal community between host plants and substrate types may establish the basis for host specificity in Hawaiian Drosophila. Fungi mediate decomposition, releasing plant micronutrients and volatiles that can indicate high quality substrates and serve as cues to stimulate oviposition. This study addresses major gaps in our knowledge by providing the first culture-free, DNA-based survey of fungal diversity associated with four ecologically important tree genera in the Hawaiian Islands. Three genera, Cheirodendron, Clermontia, and Pisonia, are important host plants for Drosophila. The fourth, Acacia, is not an important drosophilid host but is a dominant forest tree. We sampled fresh and rotting leaves from all four taxa, plus rotting stems from Clermontia and Pisonia. Based on sequences from the D1/D2 domain of the 26S rDNA gene, we identified by BLAST search representatives from 113 genera in 13 fungal classes. A total of 160 operational taxonomic units, defined on the basis of ≥97% genetic similarity, were identified in these samples, but sampling curves show this is an underestimate of the total fungal diversity present on these substrates. Shannon diversity indices ranged from 2.0 to 3.5 among the Hawaiian samples, a slight reduction compared to continental surveys. We detected very little sharing of fungal taxa among the substrates, and tests of community composition confirmed that the structure of the fungal community differed significantly among the substrates and host plants. Based on these results, we hypothesize that fungal community structure plays a central role in the establishment of host preference in the Hawaiian Drosophila radiation.
Trust-Based Energy Efficient Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

An energy efficient collaborative spectrum sensing (EE-CSS) protocol, based on trust management, is proposed. The protocol reduces the total number of sensing reports exchanged between the secondary users (SUs) and the secondary user base station (SUBS) when compared to a traditional collaborative spectrum sensing (T-CSS) protocol in which each SU transmits a sensing report to the SUBS. In addition, the minimum total number of sensing reports required to satisfy a target global false alarm and miss detection probabilities in T-CSS is shown to be higher than that in EE-CSS. Expressions for the average steady-state trust values of SUs and the average total number of sensing reports transmitted by the SUs to the SUBS in EE-CSS are derived. The global false alarm (FA) and miss detection (MD) probabilities are analyzed for a commonly used decision fusion technique.
Identification of Stellar Population in Galactic Spectra Using the Hierarchical Desicion Ensemble

In order to understand the process of formation and evolution of a galaxy, it is very important to identify the ages of stellar populations that make it up. The main contribution of this work is an efficient machine learning method, insensitive to emission lines and robust in the presence of noise, to determine the age of stellar populations in observational galactic spectra. It is a novel method for constructing ensembles where the decision in the prediction is done subdividing the data and organizing them in a tree structure. Experimental results show that our method yields a better accuracy than the traditional feed-forward Neural Network Ensemble.
Optimization of Standard 24-Locus Variable-Number Tandem-Repeat Typing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Isolates: a Multicenter Perspective

De Beer et al. ([1][1]) report that the percentages of instantly complete 24-locus variable-number tandem-repeat (VNTR) genotypes obtained in their hands rose from 72.3% when using the triplex-based Genoscreen kit until November 2011 to 84.7% afterwards using a modified version of our original
Pathophysiology of Langerhans cells

Langerhans cells (LCs) were first described by Paul Langerhans, in 1868, as dendritically shaped cells, which were located in the squamous epithelia of epidermis. Later on, these cells were identified in all stratified squamous epithelium of mammals. Dendritic cells (DCs) play an important role in local defense mechanisms in the epithelium. LCs are situated usually in the suprabasal layer of stratified squamous epithelia of oral mucosa and epidermis of skin. They constitute 3% of the cell population in epidermis. LCs are thought to act as antigen presenting cells (APCs) during initiation of immune responses. With the help of APCs, the lymphocytes are able to recognize and respond to specific microbes. In this paper we have reviewed the origin, distribution, demonstration and mechanism of action of LCs and their role in different pathological conditions.
Human Activity Recognition Using Body Joint‐Angle Features and Hidden Markov Model

This paper presents a novel approach for human activity recognition (HAR) using the joint angles from a 3D model of a human body. Unlike conventional approaches in which the joint angles are computed from inverse kinematic analysis of the optical marker positions captured with multiple cameras, our approach utilizes the body joint angles estimated directly from time‐series activity images acquired with a single stereo camera by co‐registering a 3D body model to the stereo information. The estimated joint‐angle features are then mapped into codewords to generate discrete symbols for a hidden Markov model (HMM) of each activity. With these symbols, each activity is trained through the HMM, and later, all the trained HMMs are used for activity recognition. The performance of our joint‐angle–based HAR has been compared to that of a conventional binary and depth silhouette‐based HAR, producing significantly better results in the recognition rate, especially for the activities that are not discernible with the conventional approaches.
Liquid SIMD: Abstracting SIMD Hardware using Lightweight Dynamic Mapping

Microprocessor designers commonly utilize SIMD accelerators and their associated instruction set extensions to provide substantial performance gains at a relatively low cost for media applications. One of the most difficult problems with using SIMD accelerators is forward migration to newer generations. With larger hardware budgets and more demands for performance, SIMD accelerators evolve with both larger data widths and increased functionality with each new generation. However, this causes difficult problems in terms of binary compatibility, software migration costs, and expensive redesign of the instruction set architecture. In this work, we propose Liquid SIMD to decouple the instruction set architecture from the SIMD accelerator. SIMD instructions are expressed using a processor's baseline scalar instruction set, and light-weight dynamic translation maps the representation onto a broad family of SIMD accelerators. Liquid SIMD effectively bypasses the problems inherent to instruction set modification and binary compatibility across accelerator generations. We provide a detailed description of changes to a compilation framework and processor pipeline needed to support this abstraction. Additionally, we show that the hardware overhead of dynamic optimization is modest, hardware changes do not affect cycle time of the processor, and the performance impact of abstracting the SIMD accelerator is negligible. We conclude that using dynamic techniques to map instructions onto SIMD accelerators is an effective way to improve computation efficiency, without the overhead associated with modifying the instruction set
Integrated Direct/Indirect Adaptive Robust Posture Trajectory Tracking Control of a Parallel Manipulator Driven by Pneumatic Muscles

An integrated direct/indirect adaptive robust controller (DIARC) is proposed to further improve the achievable posture trajectory tracking control performance of a parallel manipulator driven by pneumatic muscles. Due to the model errors of the static forces and friction forces of pneumatic muscles, the simplified average flow rate characteristics of valves, and the unknown disturbances of entire system, there exist large extent of parametric uncertainties and rather severe uncertain nonlinearities in the modeling of the parallel manipulator. To address these problems, in this paper, an indirect type parameter estimation is used to obtain reliable estimates of effective model parameters for reducing the parametric uncertainties while an integrated direct/indirect ARC with dynamic compensation type fast adaptation is utilized to further attenuate the influences of uncertain nonlinearities for better tracking performance. Considering that the conventional parameter estimation algorithm based on single error minimizing criterion normally fails to provide reliable parameter estimation for the parallel manipulator with symmetric structure due to the difficulty in satisfying the persistent exciting conditions all the time-the theoretical requirement for the convergence of online parameter estimation, additional practical constraints are imposed to further condition the parameter estimation process and a new parameter estimation algorithm based on composite error minimizing criterion in task-space is developed. Experimental results demonstrate that the parallel manipulator under the control of the proposed integrated DIARC has strong self-adaptability and robustness with the steady-state posture tracking error being less than 0.01deg, average tracking error less than 0.1deg, and maximum tracking error less than 0.3deg, which are significantly better than those of the direct ARC.
C5a Receptor Deficiency Alters Energy Utilization and Fat Storage

Objective To investigate the impact of whole body C5a receptor (C5aR) deficiency on energy metabolism and fat storage. Design Male wildtype (WT) and C5aR knockout (C5aRKO) mice were fed a low fat (CHOW) or a high fat high sucrose diet-induced obesity (DIO) diet for 14 weeks. Body weight and food intake were measured weekly. Indirect calorimetry, dietary fatload clearance, insulin and glucose tolerance tests were also evaluated. Liver, muscle and adipose tissue mRNA gene expression were measured by RT-PCR. Results At week one and 12, C5aRKO mice on DIO had increased oxygen consumption. After 12 weeks, although food intake was comparable, C5aRKO mice had lower body weight (−7% CHOW, −12% DIO) as well as smaller gonadal (−38% CHOW, −36% DIO) and inguinal (−29% CHOW, −30% DIO) fat pads than their WT counterparts. Conversely, in WT mice, C5aR was upregulated in DIO vs CHOW diets in gonadal adipose tissue, muscle and liver, while C5L2 mRNA expression was lower in C5aRKO on both diet. Furthermore, blood analysis showed lower plasma triglyceride and non-esterified fatty acid levels in both C5aRKO groups, with faster postprandial triglyceride clearance after a fatload. Additionally, C5aRKO mice showed lower CD36 expression in gonadal and muscle on both diets, while DGAT1 expression was higher in gonadal (CHOW) and liver (CHOW and DIO) and PPARγ was increased in muscle and liver. Conclusion These observations point towards a role (either direct or indirect) for C5aR in energy expenditure and fat storage, suggesting a dual role for C5aR in metabolism as well as in immunity.