Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ghrelin Protection against Lipopolysaccharide-Induced Gastric Mucosal Cell Apoptosis Involves Constitutive Nitric Oxide Synthase-Mediated Caspase-3 S-Nitrosylation

Ghrelin, a peptide hormone produced mainly in the stomach, has emerged as an important modulator of the inflammatory responses that are of significance to the maintenance of gastric mucosal integrity. Here, we report on the role of ghrelin in controlling the apoptotic processes induced in gastric mucosal cells by H. pylori lipopolysaccharide (LPS). The countering effect of ghrelin on the LPS-induced mucosal cell apoptosis was associated with the increase in constitutive nitric oxide synthase (cNOS) activity, and the reduction in caspase-3 and inducible nitric oxide synthase (NOS-2). The loss in countering effect of ghrelin on the LPS-induced changes in apoptosis and caspase-3 activity was attained with Src kinase inhibitor, PP2, as well as Akt inhibitor, SH-5, and cNOS inhibitor, L-NAME. Moreover, the effect of ghrelin on the LPS-induced changes in cNOS activity was reflected in the increased cNOS phosphorylation that was sensitive to SH-5. Furthermore, the ghrelin-induced up-regulation in cNOS activity was associated with the increase in caspase-3 S-nitrosylation that was susceptible to the blockage by L-NAME. Therefore, ghrelin protection of gastric mucosal cells against H. pylori LPS-induced apoptosis involves Src/Akt-mediated up-regulation in cNOS activation that leads to the apoptotic signal inhibition through the NO-induced caspase-3 S-nitrosylation.
Effect of shampoo, conditioner and permanent waving on the molecular structure of human hair

The hair is a filamentous biomaterial consisting of the cuticle, the cortex and the medulla, all held together by the cell membrane complex. The cortex mostly consists of helical keratin proteins that spiral together to form coiled-coil dimers, intermediate filaments, micro-fibrils and macro-fibrils. We used X-ray diffraction to study hair structure on the molecular level, at length scales between ∼3–90 Å, in hopes of developing a diagnostic method for diseases affecting hair structure allowing for fast and noninvasive screening. However, such an approach can only be successful if common hair treatments do not affect molecular hair structure. We found that a single use of shampoo and conditioner has no effect on packing of keratin molecules, structure of the intermediate filaments or internal lipid composition of the membrane complex. Permanent waving treatments are known to break and reform disulfide linkages in the hair. Single application of a perming product was found to deeply penetrate the hair and reduce the number of keratin coiled-coils and change the structure of the intermediate filaments. Signals related to the coiled-coil structure of the α-keratin molecules at 5 and 9.5 Å were found to be decreased while a signal associated with the organization of the intermediate filaments at 47 Å was significantly elevated in permed hair. Both these observations are related to breaking of the bonds between two coiled-coil keratin dimers.
Unreliable CCSDS File Delivery Protocol (CFDP) over Cislunar Communication Links

The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) file delivery protocol, also known as CFDP, is a new standard protocol designed to meet a comprehensive set of file transfer requirements in space communications, especially deep space missions. There has been theoretical and experimental evaluation on the performance of CFDP operation in low Earth orbit (LEO) and geo-stationary Earth orbit (GEO) space environments. However, very few works have evaluated the performance of CFDP in cislunar space, even though the protocol has been particularly developed for deep space communications. In this work we discuss an experimental investigation of the core file-delivery operation of unreliable CFDP, operating with reliable transmission control protocol (TCP), over a simulated cislunar communication link under various channel conditions. Our intention is to evaluate the transmission effectiveness of the core file-delivery operation in unreliable CFDP running on top of a reliable TCP/IP stack over a long-delayed cislunar link, especially when accompanied by link disruptions and a high bit error rate (BER). The performance of unreliable-CFDP/TCP is also compared with other protocol options of CFDP, such as reliable-CFDP/TCP and reliable-CFDP/UDP. The experiment was carried out through realistic file transfers by running the CFDP protocol stack over a communication test-bed incorporating the qualities that define cislunar communication channel characteristics. The research results and discussions presented in this paper should work equally well in any space mission with a round-trip time (RTT) that is comparable to that of the cislunar space.
Tight conditions for consistent variable selection in high dimensional nonparametric regression

We address the issue of variable selection in the regression model with very high ambient dimension, \textit{i.e.}, when the number of covariates is very large. The main focus is on the situation where the number of relevant covariates, called intrinsic dimension, is much smaller than the ambient dimension. Without assuming any parametric form of the underlying regression function, we get tight conditions making it possible to consistently estimate the set of relevant variables. These conditions relate the intrinsic dimension to the ambient dimension and to the sample size. The procedure that is provably consistent under these tight conditions is simple and is based on comparing the empirical Fourier coefficients with an appropriately chosen threshold value.
Vertical Segregation and Phylogenetic Characterization of Ammonia-Oxidizing Bacteria and Archaea in the Sediment of a Freshwater Aquaculture Pond

Pond aquaculture is the major freshwater aquaculture method in China. Ammonia-oxidizing communities inhabiting pond sediments play an important role in controlling culture water quality. However, the distribution and activities of ammonia-oxidizing microbial communities along sediment profiles are poorly understood in this specific environment. Vertical variations in the abundance, transcription, potential ammonia oxidizing rate, and community composition of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) in sediment samples (0–50 cm depth) collected from a freshwater aquaculture pond were investigated. The concentrations of the AOA amoA gene were higher than those of the AOB by an order of magnitude, which suggested that AOA, as opposed to AOB, were the numerically predominant ammonia-oxidizing organisms in the surface sediment. This could be attributed to the fact that AOA are more resistant to low levels of dissolved oxygen. However, the concentrations of the AOB amoA mRNA were higher than those of the AOA by 2.5- to 39.9-fold in surface sediments (0–10 cm depth), which suggests that the oxidation of ammonia was mainly performed by AOB in the surface sediments, and by AOA in the deeper sediments, where only AOA could be detected. Clone libraries of AOA and AOB amoA sequences indicated that the diversity of AOA and AOB decreased with increasing depth. The AOB community consisted of two groups: the Nitrosospira and Nitrosomonas clusters, and Nitrosomonas were predominant in the freshwater pond sediment. All AOA amoA gene sequences in the 0–2 cm deep sediment were grouped into the Nitrososphaera cluster, while other AOA sequences in deeper sediments (10–15 and 20–25 cm depths) were grouped into the Nitrosopumilus cluster.
The Accuracy of the Life Orientation Test–Revised (LOT–R) in Measuring Dispositional Optimism: Evidence From Item Response Theory Analyses

The accuracy of the Life Orientation Test–Revised (LOT–R) in measuring dispositional optimism was investigated applying item response theory (IRT). The study was conducted on a sample of 484 university students (62% males, M age = 22.79 years, SD = 5.63). After testing the 1-factor structure of the scale, IRT was applied to evaluate the functioning of the LOT–R along the pessimism–optimism continuum. Item parameter estimates and the test information function showed that each item and the global scale satisfactorily measured the latent trait. Referring to the IRT estimated trait levels, the validity of the LOT–R was studied examining the relationships between dispositional optimism and psychological well-being, sense of mastery, and sense of coherence. Overall findings based on IRT analyses provide evidence of the accuracy of the LOT–R and suggest possible modifications of the scale to improve the assessment of dispositional optimism.
A new algorithm for distorted fingerprints matching based on normalized fuzzy similarity measure

Coping with nonlinear distortions in fingerprint matching is a challenging task. This paper proposes a novel algorithm, normalized fuzzy similarity measure (NFSM), to deal with the nonlinear distortions. The proposed algorithm has two main steps. First, the template and input fingerprints were aligned. In this process, the local topological structure matching was introduced to improve the robustness of global alignment. Second, the method NFSM was introduced to compute the similarity between the template and input fingerprints. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on fingerprints databases of FVC2004. Experimental results confirm that NFSM is a reliable and effective algorithm for fingerprint matching with nonliner distortions. The algorithm gives considerably higher matching scores compared to conventional matching algorithms for the deformed fingerprints.
An Improved Identity-Based Society Oriented Signature Scheme

In a society oriented signature scheme, a signature is produced by several co-signers simultaneously in a group. Saeednia proposed an identity-based society oriented signature scheme. However, there are some security weaknesses in the scheme. Zhu and Wang et al. showed two different attacks against the identity-based society oriented signature scheme respectively. In this paper, we proposed an improved identity-based society signature scheme with anonymous signers. The proposed identity-based society signature scheme removed the weaknesses of Saeednia's signature scheme. A detailed analysis demonstrated that the improved scheme is secure against all the attacks above-mentioned. In addition, when the structure of a group changes or a group represents different organizations to sign messages at the same time, the improved scheme won't reveal the secret key of any entity or even the value of the ratio of two secret keys. Our scheme doesn't require that the clerk must be a trusted and online party.
Demographic Dialectal Variation in Social Media: A Case Study of African-American English

Though dialectal language is increasingly abundant on social media, few resources exist for developing NLP tools to handle such language. We conduct a case study of dialectal language in online conversational text by investigating African-American English (AAE) on Twitter. We propose a distantly supervised model to identify AAE-like language from demographics associated with geo-located messages, and we verify that this language follows well-known AAE linguistic phenomena. In addition, we analyze the quality of existing language identification and dependency parsing tools on AAE-like text, demonstrating that they perform poorly on such text compared to text associated with white speakers. We also provide an ensemble classifier for language identification which eliminates this disparity and release a new corpus of tweets containing AAE-like language.
Occultation Mapping of the Central Engine in the Active Galaxy MCG –6-30-15

The colossal power output of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is believed to be fueled by the accretion of matter onto a supermassive black hole. This central accreting region of AGNs has hitherto been spatially unresolved, and its structure therefore unknown. Here we propose that a previously reported "deep minimum" in the X-ray intensity of the AGN MCG -6-30-15 was due to a unique X-ray occultation event and that it probes structure of the central engine on scales smaller than 1014 cm, or 1.4×10−7 arcsec. This resolution is more than a factor of ~3×106 greater than is possible with current X-ray optics. The data are consistent with a bright central source surrounded by a less intense ring, which we identify with the inner edge of an accretion disk. These may be the first direct measurements of the spatial structure and geometry of the accreting black hole system in an active galaxy. We estimate a mass lower limit for sub-Eddington accretion of 3.1×105 M☉. If the ring of X-ray emission is identified with the inner edge of an accretion disk, we get mass upper limits of 1.9×108 and 9.1×108 M☉ for a nonrotating and maximally rotating black hole, respectively. We point out that our occultation interpretation is controversial in the sense that X-ray variability in AGNs is normally attributed to intrinsic physical changes in the X-ray emission region, such as disk or coronal instabilities.
Cognitive Fit in Requirements Modeling: A Study of Object and Process Methodologies

Requirements modeling constitutes one of the most important phases of the systems development life cycle. Despite the proliferation of methodologies and models for requirements analysis, empirical work examining their relative efficacy is limited. This paper presents an empirical examination of object-oriented and process-oriented methodologies as applied to object-oriented and process-oriented tasks. The conceptual basis of the research model is derived from the theory of cognitive fit, which posits that superior problem-solving performance will result when the problem-solving task and the problem-solving tool emphasize the same type of information. Two groups of subjects participated in an experiment that required them to construct solutions to two requirements-modeling tasks, one process-oriented and the other object-oriented. One group employed the object-oriented tool while the other used the process-oriented tool. As predicted by the theory of cognitive fit, superior performance was observed when the process-oriented tool was applied to the process-oriented task. For the object-oriented task, however, the performance effects of cognitive fit require further investigation since there was no difference in subject performance across the two tools.
Identification of a Gene Cluster for Biosynthesis of Mannosylerythritol Lipids in the Basidiomycetous Fungus Ustilago maydis

ABSTRACT Many microorganisms produce surface-active substances that enhance the availability of water-insoluble substrates. Although many of these biosurfactants have interesting potential applications, very little is known about their biosynthesis. The basidiomycetous fungus Ustilago maydis secretes large amounts of mannosylerythritol lipids (MELs) under conditions of nitrogen starvation. We recently described a putative glycosyltransferase, Emt1, which is essential for MEL biosynthesis and whose expression is strongly induced by nitrogen limitation. We used DNA microarray analysis to identify additional genes involved in MEL biosynthesis. Here we show that emt1 is part of a gene cluster which comprises five open reading frames. Three of the newly identified proteins, Mac1, Mac2, and Mat1, contain short sequence motifs characteristic for acyl- and acetyltransferases. Mutational analysis revealed that Mac1 and Mac2 are essential for MEL production, which suggests that they are involved in the acylation of mannosylerythritol. Deletion of mat1 resulted in the secretion of completely deacetylated MELs, as determined by mass spectrometry. We overexpressed Mat1 in Escherichia coli and demonstrated that this enzyme acts as an acetyl coenzyme A-dependent acetyltransferase. Remarkably, Mat1 displays relaxed regioselectivity and is able to acetylate mannosylerythritol at both the C-4 and C-6 hydroxyl groups. Based on these results, we propose a biosynthesis pathway for the generation of mannosylerythritol lipids in U. maydis.
Fingertip skin–inspired microstructured ferroelectric skins discriminate static/dynamic pressure and temperature stimuli

Fingertip skin-mimicking ferroelectric skins sensitively detect and discriminate static/dynamic pressure and temperature. In human fingertips, the fingerprint patterns and interlocked epidermal-dermal microridges play a critical role in amplifying and transferring tactile signals to various mechanoreceptors, enabling spatiotemporal perception of various static and dynamic tactile signals. Inspired by the structure and functions of the human fingertip, we fabricated fingerprint-like patterns and interlocked microstructures in ferroelectric films, which can enhance the piezoelectric, pyroelectric, and piezoresistive sensing of static and dynamic mechanothermal signals. Our flexible and microstructured ferroelectric skins can detect and discriminate between multiple spatiotemporal tactile stimuli including static and dynamic pressure, vibration, and temperature with high sensitivities. As proof-of-concept demonstration, the sensors have been used for the simultaneous monitoring of pulse pressure and temperature of artery vessels, precise detection of acoustic sounds, and discrimination of various surface textures. Our microstructured ferroelectric skins may find applications in robotic skins, wearable sensors, and medical diagnostic devices.
Characterizing the Smell of Marijuana by Odor Impact of Volatile Compounds: An Application of Simultaneous Chemical and Sensory Analysis

Recent US legislation permitting recreational use of marijuana in certain states brings the use of marijuana odor as probable cause for search and seizure to the forefront of forensic science, once again. This study showed the use of solid-phase microextraction with multidimensional gas chromatography—mass spectrometry and simultaneous human olfaction to characterize the total aroma of marijuana. The application of odor activity analysis offers an explanation as to why high volatile chemical concentration does not equate to most potent odor impact of a certain compound. This suggests that more attention should be focused on highly odorous compounds typically present in low concentrations, such as nonanal, decanol, o-cymene, benzaldehyde, which have more potent odor impact than previously reported marijuana headspace volatiles.
Exploring personality-targeted UI design in online social participation systems

We present a theoretical foundation and empirical findings demonstrating the effectiveness of personality-targeted design. Much like a medical treatment applied to a person based on his specific genetic profile, we argue that theory-driven, personality-targeted UI design can be more effective than design applied to the entire population. The empirical exploration focused on two settings, two populations and two personality traits: Study 1 shows that users' extraversion level moderates the relationship between the UI cue of audience size and users' contribution. Study 2 demonstrates that the effectiveness of social anchors in encouraging online contributions depends on users' level of emotional stability. Taken together, the findings demonstrate the potential and robustness of the interactionist approach to UI design. The findings contribute to the HCI community, and in particular to designers of social systems, by providing guidelines to targeted design that can increase online participation.
Mitigating the effect of jamming signals in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks

In an infrastructure-less wireless ad hoc or sensor network, communication may be achieved between mobile nodes without a central entity (base station) using a half-duplex Slotted ALOHA protocol. The probability of success and the throughput per mobile node can be reduced significantly, if the network is attacked by jamming signals. Mitigating the effect of jamming signals using multi-packet transmission (MPT) and/or multi-packet reception (MPR) capabilities of each mobile node is studied. The effect of the probability of success reduction due to jamming signals can be mitigated by using the MPT and the MPR capabilities of each mobile node. Similarly, reduced throughput can be increased using the same techniques. The maximum throughput per mobile node can be obtained by the proper adjustment of the transmitting probability of each mobile node and the receiving probability of each mobile node. A lower mitigation of the maximum throughput reduction can be obtained by using only the MPT, if the jamming signal rate is very low. On the other hand, only the MPR capability can provide a lower mitigation of the maximum throughput reduction. The effect of jamming signals on the maximum throughput can be mitigated successfully at all traffic load conditions, if the MPT and the MPR capabilities work together.
Influence of physicochemical properties of polylactic acid on the characteristics and in vitro release patterns of polylactic acid microspheres containing local anesthetics.

DL-Polylactic acid (PLA) microspheres were prepared from three lots of PLA by a solvent-evaporation process and release patterns of butamben, tetracaine and dibucaine from these microspheres were examined. As a first step, the physicochemical characteristics of three lots of PLA were examined. The release mechanism was examined by scanning electron microscopy. Microsphere characteristics and release patterns from the microspheres were dependent on both PLA characteristics and the local anesthetics used for the preparation.
An information system and medical record to support HIV treatment in rural Haiti

Lack of infrastructure, including information and communication systems, is considered a barrier to successful HIV treatment programmes in resource poor areas. The authors describe how they set up a web based medical record system linking remote areas in rural Haiti and how it is used to track clinical outcomes, laboratory tests, and drug supplies and to create reports for funding agencies
Opportunistic system for collaborative traffic monitoring using existing IEEE 802.11 networks

Traffic monitoring and control is getting more and more important as the number of vehicles and traffic jams steadily grow. Nevertheless, traffic control is still predominantly done by visual means using strategically placed video cameras. To be more effective, proposals to improve the traffic conditions should consider automated monitoring systems. This work proposes an opportunistic system for collaborative traffic monitoring using available IEEE 802.11 networks. Based on the information received by 802.11 beacon frames, vehicles provide the data needed by a central entity to handle and disseminate information about traffic conditions on urban roads, exploiting readily available network resources. Experiments performed with data from a real public wireless network, in Rio de Janeiro, demonstrate the possibility of obtaining traffic conditions with our proposed traffic monitoring method. The system results are close to GPS traces. Moreover, the proposed system facilitates large-scale adoption since it does not require specific hardware.