Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effectiveness of Early Laser Treatment in Surgical Scar Minimization: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND Studies investigating the efficacy of lasers to minimize early surgical scars are low powered and report variable results. To further examine the evidence, the authors performed a systemic review and meta-analysis. OBJECTIVE To present the evidence of randomized controlled trials investigating the efficacy of laser modalities in minimizing surgical scars when applied <1 month after operation. MATERIALS AND METHODS A literature search of PubMed, EMBASE, Northern Light Life Sciences Conference Abstracts, and Cochrane Library was performed between November 6, 2015, and November 20, 2015. After assessing for inclusion, data extraction used the PRISMA checklist. Assessment for quality, validity, and risk of bias applied a scale devised by Jadad and colleagues, the Oxford Pain Validity Scale, and the RevMan risk of bias assessment tool, respectively. The GRADEpro application graded overall quality, and statistical analysis was performed with RevMan. RESULTS Approximately 4,373/4,397 abstracts and 16/24 full articles were excluded using predefined criteria, leaving 8 articles in the systematic review and 4 in the meta-analysis. The primary outcome reached statistical significance favoring the intervention group with standardized mean difference 0.39 (95% confidence interval, 0.05-0.74) and p = . 03. CONCLUSION The outcome supports the efficacy of lasers in minimizing primarily closed surgical scars when treated <1 month after surgery.
Circulating cell-free DNA as a potential marker in smoke inhalation injury

Abstract Failure in evaluation of smoke inhalation injury (SII) is related to increased morbidity and mortality. Prognostic biomarkers that reflect the injury are undoubtedly needed. Cell-free DNA (CFD) concentrations are associated to the extent of tissue damage and inflammation in various pathologies. We have developed a simple assay for CFD quantification and previously found it prognostic in various pathologies including burns, lung disease, and sepsis. The aim of this study was to evaluate admission CFD as an injury severity marker in patients with SII. In a prospective study, we measured admission CFD levels in 18 SII patients and matched control subjects. Daily CFD levels were also performed in 4 hospitalized patients. Serum CFD levels were measured by our direct rapid fluorometric assay. Admission CFD levels of SII patients were significantly higher than those of healthy controls, 879 (236–3220) ng/mL vs. 339 (150–570) ng/mL, [median (range)], P < . 0001. Admission CFD levels of hospitalized patients were significantly higher than those of nonhospitalized patients, 1517 (655–3220) ng/mL vs. 675 (236–1581) ng/mL, P < . 05. Admission CFD positively correlated with hospitalization time (Rho = 0.578, P < .05) and was in linear correlation with CO poisoning (carboxyhemoglobin (COHb) levels, R2 = 0.621, P < . 0001). Additionally, along with the recovery of hospitalized patients, we observed a matched reduction of CFD levels. CFD appears to be a potentially valuable marker for severity and follow-up of SII. We believe this rapid assay can help introduce the routine use of CFD measurement into daily practice.
Does Psychological Maladjustment Mediate the Relationship Between Students’ Perception of Teacher Rejection and Educational Stress?

This study examined the mediating role of psychological maladjustment in the relationship between Turkish high school students’ perception of teacher rejection and educational stress levels. The study was based on a sample of 399 high school students located in Turkey (231 students were female; 168 students were male). The Teacher’s Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire: Child Version Short Form, the Personality Assessment Questionnaire: Child Version, Education Stress Scale, and Personal Information Form were used as measures. Result revealed that psychological maladjustment mediated the relationship between perception of teacher rejection and educational stress. Additionally, the results showed that female students’ educational stress levels, psychological maladjustment levels, and GPAs were significantly higher than male students. However, male students’ perception of teacher rejection levels was significantly higher than female students. Results also documented that younger female and male students tended to recall more educational stress than older female and male students. GPA was significantly and negatively correlated with psychological maladjustment for males. The results may help the expansion of the IPARTheory. At the practical level, school counselors may include individual or group counseling practices to increase students' psychological adjustment in intervention programs to prevent or eliminate educational stress.
Splicing and neurodegeneration: Insights and mechanisms

Splicing is the global cellular process whereby intervening sequences (introns) in precursor messenger RNA (pre‐mRNA) are removed and expressed regions (exons) are ligated together, resulting in a mature mRNA transcript that is exported and translated in the cytoplasm. The tightly regulated splicing cycle is also flexible allowing for the inclusion or exclusion of some sequences depending on the specific cellular context. Alternative splicing allows for the generation of many transcripts from a single gene, thereby expanding the proteome. Although all cells require the function of the spliceosome, neurons are highly sensitive to splicing perturbations with numerous neurological diseases linked to splicing defects. The sensitivity of neurons to splicing alterations is largely due to the complex neuronal cell types and functions in the nervous system that require specific splice isoforms to maintain cellular homeostasis. In the past several years, the relationship between RNA splicing and the nervous system has been the source of significant investigation. Here, we review the current knowledge on RNA splicing in neurobiology and discuss its potential role and impact in neurodegenerative diseases. We will examine the impact of alternative splicing and the role of splicing regulatory proteins on neurodegeneration, highlighting novel animal models including mouse and zebrafish. We will also examine emerging technologies and therapeutic interventions that aim to “drug” the spliceosome.
Inhibitory effects of petasin on human colon carcinoma cells mediated by inactivation of Akt/mTOR pathway

Background: Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer worldwide and still lack of effective therapy so far. Petasin, a natural product found in plants of the genus Petasites, has been reported to possess anticancer activity. The present study aimed to investigate the anticolon cancer activity of petasin both in vitro and in vivo. The molecular mechanism of petasin was also further explored. Methods: Caco-2, LoVo, SW-620, and HT-29 cell lines were used to detect the inhibitory effect of petasin on colon cancer proliferation. Cell viability was determined using the MTT (3-[4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl]-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide) assay. Cell apoptosis was analyzed by flow cytometry. Hoechst 33258 staining was used to visualize morphological changes. Cell migration was assessed using a wound-healing migration assay, and cell invasion was investigated using Transwell chambers. Western blotting assays were employed to evaluate the expression levels of proteins in the protein kinase B/mammalian target of rapamycin (Akt/mTOR) signaling pathway. Finally, in vivo activity of petasin was evaluated using the SW-620 subcutaneous tumor model established in Balb/c nude mice. Twelve rats were randomly divided into control group and 10 mg/kg petasin group. The tumor volume was calculated every 7 days for 28 days. Terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) assay was performed to assess the apoptotic effect of petasin. Differences between two groups were assessed by analysis of independent-sample t tests. Results: Petasin significantly inhibited the proliferation of human colon carcinoma cell lines, induced apoptosis, and suppressed migration and invasion in SW-620 cells. Western blotting results showed that petasin decreased the phosphorylation of Akt (1.01 ± 0.16 vs. 0.74 ± 0.06, P = 0.042), mTOR (0.71 ± 0.12 vs. 0.32 ± 0.11, P = 0.013), and P70S6K (1.23 ± 0.21 vs. 0.85 ± 0.14, P = 0.008), elevated the expression of caspase-3 (0.41 ± 0.09 vs. 0.74 ± 0.12, P = 0.018) and caspase-9 (1.10 ± 0.27 vs. 1.98 ± 0.22, P = 0.009), decreased the Bcl-2 protein (2.75 ± 0.47 vs. 1.51 ± 0.36, P = 0.008), downregulated the expression of matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-3 (1.51 ± 0.31 vs. 0.82 ± 0.11, P = 0.021) and MMP-9 (1.56 ± 0.32 vs. 0.94 ± 0.15, P = 0.039) in SW-620 cell. In vivo, 10 mg/kg petasin inhibited tumor growth in Balb/c nude mice (924.18 ± 101.23 vs. 577.67 ± 75.12 mm3 at day 28, P = 0.001) and induced apoptosis (3.6 ± 0.7% vs. 36.0 ± 4.9%, P = 0.001) in tumor tissues. Conclusions: Petasin inhibits the proliferation of colon cancer SW-620 cells via inactivating the Akt/mTOR pathway. Our findings suggest petasin as a potential candidate for colon cancer therapy.
Cardiotoxicity evaluation and comparison of diterpene alkaloids on zebrafish

Abstract Diterpene alkaloids (DAs) have a broad spectrum of pharmacological activities, but exhibiting extremely serious cardiotoxicity to induce arrhythmia, heart arrest, even death. This study aimed to evaluate the cardiotoxicity of three diester diterpene alkaloids (DDAs) including aconitine (AC), mesaconitine (MAC), hypaconitine (HAC) and three monoester diterpene alkaloids (MDAs) including 14-α-benzoylaconine (BAC), 14-α-benzoylmesaconine (BMAC), 14-α-benzoylhypaconine (BHAC) on zebrafish. Firstly, the zebrafish embryos after a 72-hour post fertilization were treated with different doses of AC, MAC, HAC, and BAC, BMAC and BHAC for 2, 10 and 24 h, respectively. The heart rates of the treated embryos were calculated and the morphological images of body, together with heart fluorescence were obtained. Results demonstrated that AC, MAC, and HAC at low doses (15.6 and 31.3 μM) decreased the heart rates and increased them at high doses (62.5, 125, and 250 μM), while BAC, BMAC, and BHAC decreased the heart rates in the dose range of 31.3–250 μM, but the highest dose (500 μM) of BAC and BMAC increased the heart rates. In addition, AC, MAC, and HAC exhibited serious organic and functional toxicities, while BAC, BMAC, and BHAC did not. It could be induced that DDAs expressed stronger cardiotoxicities than MDAs, which might be due to that they were known as the Na+ channel activators and K+ channel inhibitors, respectively. The β-acetate at C-8 position, along with the protonated nitrogen on ring A of their chemical structures contributed more for their different cardiotoxicities. This is the first study on cardiotoxicity comparison of DAs, providing references for the rational and safe application of these compounds and some plant species containing them to reduce side effects while retaining therapeutic efficacy.
RSVP-graphs: Fast High-dimensional Covariance Matrix Estimation under Latent Confounding

In this work we consider the problem of estimating a high-dimensional $p \times p$ covariance matrix $\Sigma$, given $n$ observations of confounded data with covariance $\Sigma + \Gamma \Gamma^T$, where $\Gamma$ is an unknown $p \times q$ matrix of latent factor loadings. We propose a simple and scalable estimator based on the projection on to the right singular vectors of the observed data matrix, which we call RSVP. Our theoretical analysis of this method reveals that in contrast to PCA-based approaches, RSVP is able to cope well with settings where the smallest eigenvalue of $\Gamma^T \Gamma$ is close to the largest eigenvalue of $\Sigma$, as well as settings where the eigenvalues of $\Gamma^T \Gamma$ are diverging fast. It is also able to handle data that may have heavy tails and only requires that the data has an elliptical distribution. RSVP does not require knowledge or estimation of the number of latent factors $q$, but only recovers $\Sigma$ up to an unknown positive scale factor. We argue this suffices in many applications, for example if an estimate of the correlation matrix is desired. We also show that by using subsampling, we can further improve the performance of the method. Numerical experiments support the conclusions of our theoretical analyses.
Excited-state band mapping and momentum-resolved ultrafast population dynamics in In/Si(111) nanowires investigated with XUV-based time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy

The electronic structure of a material can reveal a lot about its properties. Here, the authors map the electronic structure of the typically elusive excited states above the Fermi level throughout the full Brillouin zone in In/Si(111) nanowires. This allows for rigorous tests of current electronic structure calculation methods, and hints at a momentum-dependent excitonic coupling. In addition, extraction of the ultrafast population dynamics of these states and comparison with quasithermal modeling reveals a strongly nonequilibrium phonon distribution after photoexcitation.
Three kinds of competitive excellence

ABSTRACT I call the trait that makes for a good or great competitor, the trait that makes its possessor compete well, ‘competitive excellence’. We seem to be of two minds about this trait: on the one hand, we often admire great competitors, but on the other hand, we sometimes identify their competitive drive as ‘pathological’, recognizing something unhealthy in it. Why are we so ambivalent? The answer I will defend is that there are at least three distinct traits, each of which satisfies the definition of competitive excellence and so has something of a claim to be the trait we admire in great competitors. One of these traits is a virtue, one a vice, and one can be either a virtue or a vice depending on what other traits accompany it. This accounts for our deep ambivalence about great competitors and implies that we should only seek to be great competitors in a qualified sense.
Best-fitting growth curves of the von Bertalanffy-Pütter type

ABSTRACT Introduction: A large body of literature aims at identifying growth models that fit best to given mass-at-age data. The von Bertalanffy-Pütter differential equation is a unifying framework for the study of growth models. Problem: The most common growth models used in poultry science literature fit into this framework, as these models correspond to different exponent-pairs (e.g., Brody, Gompertz, logistic, Richards, and von Bertalanffy models). Here, we search for the optimal exponent-pairs (a and b) amongst all possible exponent-pairs and expect a significantly better fit of the growth curve to concrete mass-at-age data. Method: Data fitting becomes more difficult, as there is a large region of nearly optimal exponent-pairs. We therefore develop a fully automated optimization method, with computation time of about 1 to 2 wk per data-set. For the proof of principle, we applied it to literature data about 217 male meat-type chickens, Athens Canadian Random Bred, that were reared under controlled conditions and weighed 28 times during a time span of 170 D. Results: We compared 2 methods of data fitting, least squares using the sum of squared errors (SSE), which is common in literature, and a variant using the sum of squared log-errors SSElog. For these data, the optimal exponent-pairs were (0.43, 4.06) for SSE = 2,208.6 (31% improvement over literature values for the residual standard deviation) and (0.89, 0.93) for SSElog = 0.04599. Both optimal exponents were clearly distinct from the exponent-pairs of the common models in literature. This finding was reinforced by considering the region of nearly optimal exponents. Discussion: We explain, why we recommend using SSElog for data fitting and we discuss prognosis, where data from the first 8 wk of growth would not be enough.
Long‐term impact of diabetes in patients with ST‐segment elevation myocardial infarction: Insights from the EXAMINATION randomized trial

Long‐term outcomes of diabetic patients suffering from ST‐segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) and treated with second‐generation drug‐eluting stent have been scarcely evaluated. The aim of this posthoc subanalysis of the EXAMINATION trial was to compare 5‐year outcomes according to the presence of diabetes mellitus.
Im2Pencil: Controllable Pencil Illustration From Photographs

We propose a high-quality photo-to-pencil translation method with fine-grained control over the drawing style. This is a challenging task due to multiple stroke types (e.g., outline and shading), structural complexity of pencil shading (e.g., hatching), and the lack of aligned training data pairs. To address these challenges, we develop a two-branch model that learns separate filters for generating sketchy outlines and tonal shading from a collection of pencil drawings. We create training data pairs by extracting clean outlines and tonal illustrations from original pencil drawings using image filtering techniques, and we manually label the drawing styles. In addition, our model creates different pencil styles (e.g., line sketchiness and shading style) in a user-controllable manner. Experimental results on different types of pencil drawings show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against existing methods in terms of quality, diversity and user evaluations.
Linguistic Knowledge and Transferability of Contextual Representations

Contextual word representations derived from large-scale neural language models are successful across a diverse set of NLP tasks, suggesting that they encode useful and transferable features of language. To shed light on the linguistic knowledge they capture, we study the representations produced by several recent pretrained contextualizers (variants of ELMo, the OpenAI transformer language model, and BERT) with a suite of sixteen diverse probing tasks. We find that linear models trained on top of frozen contextual representations are competitive with state-of-the-art task-specific models in many cases, but fail on tasks requiring fine-grained linguistic knowledge (e.g., conjunct identification). To investigate the transferability of contextual word representations, we quantify differences in the transferability of individual layers within contextualizers, especially between recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and transformers. For instance, higher layers of RNNs are more task-specific, while transformer layers do not exhibit the same monotonic trend. In addition, to better understand what makes contextual word representations transferable, we compare language model pretraining with eleven supervised pretraining tasks. For any given task, pretraining on a closely related task yields better performance than language model pretraining (which is better on average) when the pretraining dataset is fixed. However, language model pretraining on more data gives the best results.
A large-scale study of how districts’ curriculum policies and practices shape teachers’ mathematics lesson planning

ABSTRACT Early career teachers (ECTs) face unprecedented pressure to fulfill expectations of ‘highly effective’ teachers within their first few years of teaching. Lesson planning is an important precursor to effective instruction, yet little is known about how the social and institutional contexts where ECTs work influences their planning. In this paper, we report findings from a large-scale study of elementary ECTs’ mathematics lesson planning practice to shed light upon the nature of ECTs’ lesson planning and factors influencing their lesson planning practice. Informed by the conceptualization of the curriculum enactment process, we present our findings of 67 ECTs’ planning practices across four school districts, with distinct profiles for each district as defined by districts’ official curriculum and the instructional materials available for teachers and students to use. We found that differences in the designated curriculum in each district corresponded with differences in how groups of ECTs utilize curricular objectives and instructional materials, and how they engage with colleagues during the lesson planning process. Implications for the preparation and induction of ECTs are discussed.
Revisiting the Kepler non-Blazhko RR Lyrae sample: cycle-to-cyle variations and additional modes

We analyzed the long and short cadence light curves of the Kepler non-Blazhko RRab stars. We prepared the Fourier spectra, the Fourier amplitude and phase variation functions, time-frequency representation, the O-C diagrams and their Fourier contents. Our main findings are: (i) All stars which are brighter a certain magnitude limit show significant cycle-to-cycle light curve variations. (ii) We found permanently excited additional modes for at least one third of the sample and some other stars show temporarily excited additional modes. (iii) The presence of the Blazhko effect was carefully checked and identified one new Blazhko candidate but for at least 16 stars the effect can be excluded. This fact has important consequences. Either the cycle-to-cycle variation phenomenon is independent from the Blazhko effect and the Blazhko incidence ratio is still much lower (51%-55%) than the extremely large (>90%) ratio published recently. The connection between the extra modes and the cycle-to-cycle variations is marginal.
A Drug Is not an Outcome: Extending Translation Through Implementation Using Real‐World Data

Our quest for impact requires us to extend the translational vision and drive innovation not only from lab to clinical study but from trial patients to realworld populations. Closing this implementation gap requires imaginative research, robust realworld data, and an impassioned cadre of champions—patients, regulators, frontline practitioners—keen to see the promise of basic science and the labors of translational research find effective, consistent expression in the practice of medicine.
Black Carbon Particles Do Not Matter for Immersion Mode Ice Nucleation

The role of black carbon (BC) in ice crystal formation via immersion freezing relevant for mixed‐phase cloud formation is uncertain. Previous studies report either negligible or significant contributions of BC particles to cloud glaciation via immersion freezing. Despite conflicting evidence, immersion freezing by BC particles is included in several cloud models. Here we show that fossil fuel soot and commercially available hydrocarbon BC is inactive as immersion freezing nuclei for atmospherically relevant particle sizes and surface areas. Instead, temperatures <235 K are necessary for freezing droplets with immersed soot particles, implying homogeneous freezing, rather than immersion freezing by soot. A comparison of the results to previous studies using larger soot aggregates and dust reveals the ineffectiveness of soot as immersion ice nucleating particles. We conclude that soot particles with properties like those investigated here can be neglected for simulating ice nucleation in mixed‐phase clouds.