Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does Aldosterone Upregulate the Brain Renin-Angiotensin System in Rats With Heart Failure?

The brain renin-angiotensin system (RAS) contributes to increased sympathetic drive in heart failure (HF). The factors upregulating the brain RAS in HF remain unknown. We hypothesized that aldosterone (ALDO), a downstream product of the systemic RAS that crosses the blood-brain barrier, signals the brain to increase RAS activity in HF. We examined the relationship between circulating and brain ALDO in normal intact rats, in adrenalectomized rats receiving subcutaneous infusions of ALDO, and in rats with ischemia-induced HF and sham-operated controls. Brain ALDO levels were proportional to plasma ALDO levels across the spectrum of rats studied. Compared with sham-operated controls rats, HF rats had higher plasma and hypothalamic tissue levels of ALDO. HF rats also had higher expression of mRNA and protein for angiotensin-converting enzyme and angiotensin type 1 receptors in the hypothalamus, increased reduced nicotinamide-adenine dinucleotide phosphate oxidase activity and superoxide generation in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus, increased excitation of paraventricular nucleus neurons, and increased plasma norepinephrine. HF rats treated for 4 weeks with intracerebroventricular RU28318 (1 &mgr;g/h), a selective mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist, had less hypothalamic angiotensin-converting enzyme and angiotensin type 1 receptor mRNA and protein, less reduced nicotinamide-adenine dinucleotide phosphate–induced superoxide in the paraventricular nucleus, fewer excited paraventricular nucleus neurons, and lower plasma norepinephrine. RU28318 had no effect on plasma ALDO or on angiotensin-converting enzyme or angiotensin type 1 receptor expression in brain cortex. The data demonstrate that ALDO of adrenal origin enters the hypothalamus in direct proportion to plasma levels and suggest that ALDO contributes to the upregulation of hypothalamic RAS activity and sympathetic drive in heart failure.
The Nuclear Factor of Activated T Cells (Nfat) Transcription Factor Nfatp (Nfatc2) Is a Repressor of Chondrogenesis

Nuclear factor of activated T cells (NFAT) transcription factors regulate gene expression in lymphocytes and control cardiac valve formation. Here, we report that NFATp regulates chondrogenesis in the adult animal. In mice lacking NFATp, resident cells in the extraarticular connective tissues spontaneously differentiate to cartilage. These cartilage cells progressively differentiate and the tissue undergoes endochondral ossification, recapitulating the development of endochondral bone. Proliferation of already existing articular cartilage cells also occurs in some older animals. At both sites, neoplastic changes in the cartilage cells occur. Consistent with these data, NFATp expression is regulated in mesenchymal stem cells induced to differentiate along a chondrogenic pathway. Lack of NFATp in articular cartilage cells results in increased expression of cartilage markers, whereas overexpression of NFATp in cartilage cell lines extinguishes the cartilage phenotype. Thus, NFATp is a repressor of cartilage cell growth and differentiation and also has the properties of a tumor suppressor.
Cytochemistry of pulmonary alveolar epithelial cells.

or Maraglas. In addition, 1-mm. blocks from some of the human biopsy specimens were fixed directly in 1% buffered osmium tetroxide without prebminary glutaraldehyde fixation. For light microscopy, 0.5- to 2.0-,u sections were mounted on glass slides, stained with paraphenylene diamine,19 and examined with a phase contrast microscope.
Integrated Microfluidic Devices for Cell Culture and Assay

This thesis presents the development of three-dimensional (3-D) microfluidic devices for cellular studies, with focus on applications for high-throughput cell culture and cell-based assay. Microfluidic devices provide potential inexpensive platforms for high-throughput screening with the advantages of precise liquid handling, ability to control cell culture microenvironment, and reduced reagents and cells. Because a mixture of drugs or chemical compounds can often treat diseases more effectively or act synergistically in certain cellular pathways, a device capable of screening the combinatorial effects of multiple compound exposures on cells is highly desirable. To this end, a novel method to monolithically fabricate 3-D microfluidic networks was developed, and based on this fabrication technology, the first cell culture device with an integrated combinatorial mixer was constructed. The proof-of-concept chip having a three-input combinatorial mixer and eight individually isolated micro culture chambers was fabricated on silicon utilizing the surface micromachining of Parylene C (poly(chloro-p-xylylene)). Unlike other 3-D microfluidic fabrications, multilayer bonding process was favorably obviated. By incorporating several microfluidic overpass structures to allow one microfluidic channel to cross over other microfluidic channels, the combinatorial mixer generated all the combinations of the input fluidic streams. Cell culturing on-chip was successful, and the ability to simultaneously treat arrays of cells with different combinations of compounds was demonstrated. To facilitate cell-based assay, another combinatorial cell array device was fabricated on glass with incorporated membrane. Characterization of the combined compound concentration profile at each chamber with a fluorescence method was developed. We demonstrated functionality of the quantitative cell-based assay by screening three different compounds’ ability to reduce cytotoxicity of hydrogen peroxide on neuron cells and also assaying combinatorial exposures of three chemotherapeutic agents on breast cancer cells. The 3-D microfluidic fabrication process was extended to construct multilayer microfluidic device with integrated membrane. Applications of microfluidic devices for marine microbiology were demonstrated. Based on the capabilities demonstrated in this work, devices with high-density cell array and integrated high-input combinatorial mixer can be constructed. At the same time, the technology has general applicability for building complex 3-D microfluidic devices, which can broaden the applications for current lab-on-a-chip systems.
A Scheme of Cyclic Delay Diversity Based Precoding for Downlink MIMO System

The objective of this paper is to research and analyse the scheme of Cyclic Delay Diversity (CDD) based precoding with two and four transmit antenna on MIMO systems operating in flat and multi-path channel. MIMO precoding is an effective MIMO multiplex mode to improve throughput, and CDD is an efficient transmit diversity scheme suitable for OFDM radio access. In this contribution the principle and system structure of MIMO precoding based on CDD is introduced. The system throughput of the CDD-based precoding with codebook-based precoding according to delay sample, codebook size and RB size for PMI and CQI feedback is evaluated. By choosing a proper cyclic delay between a zero delay (e.g., τ=0) and a small delay(e.g., τ=2), we can efficiently adapt to the proper MIMO mode with a single unified precoding structure.
A method of weather recognition based on outdoor images

To improve the quality of video surveillance in outdoor and automatic acquire of the weather situations, a method to recognize weather phenomenon based on outdoor images is presented. There are three features of our method: firstly, the features, such as the power spectrum slope, contrast, noise and saturation and so on are extracted, after analysing the effect of weather situations on image; secondly, a decision tree is constructed in accordance with the distance between the features; thirdly, when every SVM classifier on the non-leaf node of the decision tree is constructed, some features are selected by assigning the weight. The experiment results prove that the proposed method can effectively recognize the weather situations in outdoor.
A Two-Stage Interpolation Time-to-Digital Converter Implemented in 20 and 28 N·m FGPAs

—This article presents a two-stage interpolation time-to-digital converter (TDC), combining a Vernier gray code oscillator TDC (VGCO-TDC) and a tapped-delay line TDC (TDL-TDC). The proposed TDC uses the Nutt method to achieve a broad, high-resolution measurement range. It utilizes look-up tables (LUTs)-based gray code oscillators (GCOs) to build a VGCO-TDC as the first-stage interpolation for fine-time measurements. Then the overtaking residual from the VGCO-TDC is measured by a TDL-TDC to achieve the second-stage interpolation. Due to the two-stage interpolation architecture, the carry-chain-based delay line only needs to cover the resolution of the VGCO-TDC. Hence, we can reduce the delay-line length and related hardware resource utilization. We implemented and evaluated a 16-channel TDC system in Xilinx 20-nm Kintex-UltraScale and 28-nm Virtex-7 field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The Kintex-UltraScale version achieves an average resolution (least significant bit, LSB) of 4.57 picoseconds (ps) with 4.36 LSB average peak-to-peak differential nonlinearity (DNL pk-pk ). The Virtex-7 version achieves an average resolution of 10.05 ps with 2.85 LSB average DNL pk-pk .
PADS: Privacy-Preserving Auction Design for Allocating Dynamically Priced Cloud Resources

With the rapid growth of Cloud Computing technologies, enterprises are increasingly deploying their services in the Cloud. Dynamically priced cloud resources such as the Amazon EC2 Spot Instance provides an efficient mechanism for cloud service providers to trade resources with potential buyers using an auction mechanism. With the dynamically priced cloud resource markets, cloud consumers can buy resources at a significantly lower cost than statically priced cloud resources such as the on-demand instances in Amazon EC2. While dynamically priced cloud resources enable to maximize datacenter resource utilization and minimize cost for the consumers, unfortunately, such auction mechanisms achieve these benefits only at a cost significant of private information leakage. In an auction-based mechanism, the private information includes information on the demands of the consumers that can lead an attacker to understand the current computing requirements of the consumers and perhaps even allow the inference of the workload patterns of the consumers. In this paper, we propose PADS, a strategy-proof differentially private auction mechanism that allows cloud providers to privately trade resources with cloud consumers in such a way that individual bidding information of the cloud consumers is not exposed by the auction mechanism. We demonstrate that PADS achieves differential privacy and approximate truthfulness guarantees while maintaining good performance in terms of revenue gains and allocation efficiency. We evaluate PADS through extensive simulation experiments that demonstrate that in comparison to traditional auction mechanisms, PADS achieves relatively high revenues for cloud providers while guaranteeing the privacy of the participating consumers.
The role played by high-performance work systems in reducing turnover intention in the Kuala Lumpur tourism sector: The role played by job embeddedness and organisational justice

The study examined the role of high-performance work systems in reducing turnover intention within the tourism sector of Kuala Lumpur and the mediation effect of organisational justice and job embeddedness. A quantitative design was applied to the data collected from 112 rank-and-file employees of Kuala Lumpur restaurants. The findings revealed that employee relations, performance management, and appraisal reduced employee turnover intention. The findings contributed to the literature by highlighting the mediation effects of job embeddedness and organisational justice. Moreover, the current study emphasised the importance of promoting employee workplace practices that foster high-performance work systems to retain talented employees. The findings also provide implications for the tourism sector and organisations and reveal the significance of policies and practices to ensure high-performance work systems, organisational justice, and job embeddedness in increasing employee retention and reducing turnover intention.
The Effect of Vocational Training on Visually Impaired People’s Quality of Life

Background: Quality of life (QOL) is frequently utilized in clinical medicine and research to assess a patient’s health status and treatment effectiveness. Objectives: This study investigates the impact of vocational training on the QOL of visually impaired individuals. Methods: We employed the brief Taiwan version of the World Health Organization QOL Questionnaire (WHOQOL-BREFTW) to assess four domains: physical, psychological, social, and environmental, using a nonequivalent pretest–posttest control group design. The experimental group participated in 6 months of vocational training, including life and career reconstruction. After completing the vocational training, the average QOL score for the experimental group was 3.34 ± 0.18, while the control group had a score of 3.10 ± 0.85. The generalized estimating equation (GEE) results revealed a notable improvement of 10.81 (1.10) in the posttest overall QOL scores compared to the pretest scores in the control group. Conclusion: Vocational training significantly improves the overall QOL for visually impaired individuals. It is noteworthy that the psychological, social relationship, and physical health domains of WHOQOL-BREF TW exhibited the most significant improvements. This emphasizes the following: 1. professional knowledge and technical learning can enhance the abilities of the visually impaired. 2. The improvement in QOL occurs primarily at physical, psychological, and social levels. These levels involve maintaining physical health, reducing dependence on medical care, and enhancing self-care abilities for life reconstruction. 3. Integrating electronics with directional action can help to mitigate the risks associated with outdoor activities.
Sampling from Social Networks with Attributes

Sampling from large networks represents a fundamental challenge for social network research. In this paper, we explore the sensitivity of different sampling techniques (node sampling, edge sampling, random walk sampling, and snowball sampling) on social networks with attributes. We consider the special case of networks (i) where we have one attribute with two values (e.g., male and female in the case of gender), (ii) where the size of the two groups is unequal (e.g., a male majority and a female minority), and (iii) where nodes with the same or different attribute value attract or repel each other (i.e., homophilic or heterophilic behavior). We evaluate the different sampling techniques with respect to conserving the position of nodes and the visibility of groups in such networks. Experiments are conducted both on synthetic and empirical social networks. Our results provide evidence that different network sampling techniques are highly sensitive with regard to capturing the expected centrality of nodes, and that their accuracy depends on relative group size differences and on the level of homophily that can be observed in the network. We conclude that uninformed sampling from social networks with attributes thus can significantly impair the ability of researchers to draw valid conclusions about the centrality of nodes and the visibility or invisibility of groups in social networks.
Devito: Automated Fast Finite Difference Computation

Domain specific languages have successfully been used in a variety of fields to cleanly express scientific problems as well as to simplify implementation and performance optimization on different computer architectures. Although a large number of stencil languages are available, finite difference domain specific languages have proved challenging to design because most practical use cases require additional features that fall outside the finite difference abstraction. Inspired by the complexity of real-world seismic imaging problems, we introduce Devito, a domain specific language in which high level equations are expressed using symbolic expressions from the SymPy package. Complex equations are automatically manipulated, optimized, and translated into highly optimized C code that aims to perform comparably or better than hand-tuned code. All this is transparent to users, who only see concise symbolic mathematical expressions.
Integrated Approach in the Design of Car Park Occupancy Information System (COINS)

In large parking areas such as those at mega shopping malls or stadiums, drivers always have difficulty to find vacant car- park lots especially during peak periods or when the parking lots are almost full. A solution to reduce the drivers' searching time for vacant car-park lots will greatly save time, reduce cost and improve the traffic flow in the car park areas. In this paper, a research project which was developed to acquire car-park occupancy information using integrated approach of image processing algorithms is presented. Motivation for developing this system came from the fact that minimum cost is involved because image processing technique is used rather than sensor-based techniques. Security surveillance cameras which are readily available in most car parks can be used to acquire the images of the car park. This solution is much cost effective than installing sensor on each parking lot. This project is called as Car-Park Occupancy Information System (COINS), and it was tested using simulation model and also in real-case scenarios.
Boost K-Means

Due to its simplicity and versatility, k-means remains popular since it was proposed three decades ago. The performance of k-means has been enhanced from different perspectives over the years. Unfortunately, a good trade-off between quality and efficiency is hardly reached. In this paper, a novel k-means variant is presented. Different from most of k-means variants, the clustering procedure is driven by an explicit objective function, which is feasible for the whole l2-space. The classic egg-chicken loop in k-means has been simplified to a pure stochastic optimization procedure. The procedure of k-means becomes simpler and converges to a considerably better local optima. The effectiveness of this new variant has been studied extensively in different contexts, such as document clustering, nearest neighbor search and image clustering. Superior performance is observed across different scenarios.
RELATED PACKET PADDING FOR ANONYMOUS WEB BROWSING IN MOBILE DEVICES AGAINST TRAFFIC ANALYSIS ATTACK

Anonymous web browsing is becoming more popular to meet web privacy protection. To meet anonymity, we propose related packet padding strategy in which web page related to user request is selected as cover page based on the popularity for anonymous web browsing systems. Earlier predicted packet strategy was used for anonymous web browsing systems in which web page based on popularity is selected as cover page. In related packet padding strategy the probability of reusing cover page is relatively increased. Usage of mobile devices for web browsing is currently being increased. One of the major disadvantages of web browsing using mobile device is the limited availability of computational power and memory space. The increase in the data due to the cover page is offset by the improvement in the caching technique. We propose LFU-LS (Least frequently used -Local statistics) algorithm to use the small size cache memory devices effectively for storing web pages by calculating Local statistics for a file. If a new file is downloaded into cache initial read hits is calculated by using statistics from the server. When a user reads a cached file, the local read-hits-counter is increased. To prevent ageing of a file in cache, a threshold value is assigned. Whenever read-hits-counter attains a threshold value, that value is halved to prevent the aging file to reside in the cache memory. By using LFU-LS algorithm we can efficiently utilize the memory
Sliding mode mean-module filtering for linear stochastic systems

This paper addresses the mean-module filtering problem for a linear system with Gaussian white noises. The obtained solution contains a sliding mode term, signum of the innovations process. It is shown that the designed sliding mode filter generates the mean-module estimate, which yields a better value of the mean-module criterion in comparison to the mean-square Kalman-Bucy filter. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first designed sliding mode filter that is optimal with respect to the mean-module criterion. The theoretical result is complemented with an illustrative example verifying performance of the designed filter, which is compared to the conventional Kalman-Bucy filter. The simulation results confirm an advantage in favor of the designed sliding mode filter.
Transcriptome and Metabolome Profiling Provide New Insights into Disuse Muscle Atrophy in Chicken: The Potential Role of Fast-Twitch Muscle Fibers

Disuse muscle atrophy is a disease caused by restricted activity, affecting human health and animal protein quality. While extensive research on its mechanism has been studied in mammals, comparatively little is known about this process in chickens, which are a significant source of protein for human consumption worldwide. Understanding the mechanisms underlying skeletal muscle atrophy in chickens is crucial for improving poultry health and productivity, as well as for developing strategies to mitigate muscle loss. In this study, two groups of chickens were subjected to limb immobilization for two and four weeks, respectively, in order to induce disuse muscle atrophy and uniformly sampled gastrocnemius muscle at the fourth week. A combined analysis of the transcriptome and metabolome was conducted to investigate the mechanisms of disuse-induced muscle atrophy. Through H&E staining and immunofluorescence, we found that, compared to slow-twitch muscle fibers, the fast-twitch muscle fibers showed a greater reduction in cross-sectional area in the immobilized leg, and were also the main driver of changes in cross-sectional area observed in the non-immobilized leg. Integrated analysis revealed that differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and differentially accumulated metabolites (DAMs) were mainly enriched in pathways related to energy metabolism, such as fatty acid metabolism, oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS), and glycolysis. These results provide important insights for further research on disuse muscle atrophy.