Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Vitamin D3 Supplementation on Mechanisms of Cell Calcium Signaling in Chronic Kidney Disease

Intracellular calcium concentration in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) is significantly increased, and the regulatory mechanisms maintaining cellular calcium homeostasis are impaired. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of vitamin D3 on predominant regulatory mechanisms of cell calcium homeostasis. The study involved 16 CKD stages 2-3 patients with vitamin D deficiency treated with cholecalciferol 7000–14000 IU/week for 6 months. The regulatory mechanisms of calcium signaling were studied in PBMCs and red blood cells. After vitamin D3 supplementation, serum concentration of 25(OH)D3 increased (P < 0.001) and [Ca2+]i decreased (P < 0.001). The differences in [Ca2+]i were inversely related to differences in 25(OH)D3 concentration (P < 0.01). Vitamin D3 supplementation decreased the calcium entry through calcium release activated calcium (CRAC) channels and purinergic P2X7 channels. The function of P2X7 receptors was changed in comparison with their baseline status, and the expression of these receptors was reduced. There was no effect of vitamin D3 on P2X7 pores and activity of plasma membrane Ca2+-ATPases. Vitamin D3 supplementation had a beneficial effect on [Ca2+]i decreasing calcium entry via CRAC and P2X7 channels and reducing P2X7 receptors expression.
The small RNA, DsrA, is essential for the low temperature expression of RpoS during exponential growth in Escherichia coli.

dsrA encodes a small, untranslated RNA. When over‐expressed, DsrA antagonizes the H‐NS‐mediated silencing of numerous promoters. Cells devoid of DsrA grow normally and show little change in the expression of a number of H‐NS‐silenced genes. Expression of a transcriptional fusion of lacZ to dsrB, the gene next to dsrA, is significantly lower in cells carrying mutations in dsrA. All expression of beta‐galactosidase from the dsrB::lacZ fusion is also dependent on the stationary phase sigma factor, RpoS. DsrA RNA was found to regulate dsrB::lacZ indirectly, by modulating RpoS synthesis. Levels of RpoS protein are substantially lower in a dsrA mutant, both in stationary and exponential phase cells. Mutations in dsrA decrease the expression of an RpoS::LacZ translational fusion, but not a transcriptional fusion, suggesting that DsrA is acting after transcription initiation. While RpoS expression is very low in exponential phase at temperatures of 30 degrees C and above, at 20 degrees C there is substantial synthesis of RpoS during exponential growth, all dependent on DsrA RNA. dsrA expression is also increased at low temperatures. These results suggest a new role for RpoS during exponential growth at low temperatures, mediated by DsrA.
Nanostructured 3D Constructs Based on Chitosan and Chondroitin Sulphate Multilayers for Cartilage Tissue Engineering

Nanostructured three-dimensional constructs combining layer-by-layer technology (LbL) and template leaching were processed and evaluated as possible support structures for cartilage tissue engineering. Multilayered constructs were formed by depositing the polyelectrolytes chitosan (CHT) and chondroitin sulphate (CS) on either bidimensional glass surfaces or 3D packet of paraffin spheres. 2D CHT/CS multi-layered constructs proved to support the attachment and proliferation of bovine chondrocytes (BCH). The technology was transposed to 3D level and CHT/CS multi-layered hierarchical scaffolds were retrieved after paraffin leaching. The obtained nanostructured 3D constructs had a high porosity and water uptake capacity of about 300%. Dynamical mechanical analysis (DMA) showed the viscoelastic nature of the scaffolds. Cellular tests were performed with the culture of BCH and multipotent bone marrow derived stromal cells (hMSCs) up to 21 days in chondrogenic differentiation media. Together with scanning electronic microscopy analysis, viability tests and DNA quantification, our results clearly showed that cells attached, proliferated and were metabolically active over the entire scaffold. Cartilaginous extracellular matrix (ECM) formation was further assessed and results showed that GAG secretion occurred indicating the maintenance of the chondrogenic phenotype and the chondrogenic differentiation of hMSCs.
3D Modeling Using Planar Segments and Mesh Elements

Range sensing technology allows the photorealistic modeling of large-scale scenes, such as urban structures. The generated 3D representations, after automated registration, are useful for urban planning, historical preservation, or virtual reality applications. One major issue in 3D modeling of complex large-scale scenes is that the final result is a dense complicated mesh. Significant, in some cases manual, postprocessing (mesh simplification, hole filling) is required to make this representation usable by graphics or CAD applications. This paper presents a 3D modeling approach that models large planar scene areas of the scene with planar primitives (extracted via a segmentation pre-process), and non-planar areas with mesh primitives. In that respect, the final model is significantly compressed. Also, lines of intersection between neighboring planes are modeled as such. These steps bring the model closer to graphics/CAD applications. We present results from experiments with complex range scans from urban structures and from the interior of a large-scale landmark urban building (Grand Central Terminal, NYC).
Thixotropy and Rheopexy of Muscle Fibers Probed Using Sinusoidal Oscillations

Length changes of muscle fibers have previously been shown to result in a temporary reduction in fiber stiffness that is referred to as thixotropy. Understanding the mechanism of this thixotropy is important to our understanding of muscle function since there are many instances in which muscle is subjected to repeated patterns of lengthening and shortening. By applying sinusoidal length changes to one end of single permeabilized muscle fibers and measuring the force response at the opposite end, we studied the history-dependent stiffness of both relaxed and activated muscle fibers. For length change oscillations greater than 1 Hz, we observed thixotropic behavior of activated fibers. Treatment of these fibers with EDTA and blebbistatin, which inhibits myosin-actin interactions, quashed this effect, suggesting that the mechanism of muscle fiber thixotropy is cross-bridge dependent. We modeled a half-sarcomere experiencing sinusoidal length changes, and our simulations suggest that thixotropy could arise from force-dependent cross-bridge kinetics. Surprisingly, we also observed that, for length change oscillations less than 1 Hz, the muscle fiber exhibited rheopexy. In other words, the stiffness of the fiber increased in response to the length changes. Blebbistatin and EDTA did not disrupt the rheopectic behavior, suggesting that a non-cross-bridge mechanism contributes to this phenomenon.
Formal specification for role based access control user/role and role/role relationship management

Role Based Access Control (RBAC), an access control mechanism, reduces the cost of administering access control policies as well as making the process less error-prone. The Admin Tool developed for the NIST RBAC Model manages user/role and role/role relationships stored in the RBAC Database. This paper presents a formal specification of the RBAC Database and Admin Tool operations. Consistency requirements for the RBAC Database are defined as a set of properties. Alternative properties, substantially simpler to verify in an implementation, are shown to be equivalent. In addition, the paper defines the semantics of Admin Tool operations, and shows that, given a consistent RBAC Database and an operation which meets specified conditions, the RBAC Database remains consistent after the operation is performed.
Tracking in atomic detail the functional specializations in viral RecA helicases that occur during evolution

Many complex viruses package their genomes into empty protein shells and bacteriophages of the Cystoviridae family provide some of the simplest models for this. The cystoviral hexameric NTPase, P4, uses chemical energy to translocate single-stranded RNA genomic precursors into the procapsid. We previously dissected the mechanism of RNA translocation for one such phage, ɸ12, and have now investigated three further highly divergent, cystoviral P4 NTPases (from ɸ6, ɸ8 and ɸ13). High-resolution crystal structures of the set of P4s allow a structure-based phylogenetic analysis, which reveals that these proteins form a distinct subfamily of the RecA-type ATPases. Although the proteins share a common catalytic core, they have different specificities and control mechanisms, which we map onto divergent N- and C-terminal domains. Thus, the RNA loading and tight coupling of NTPase activity with RNA translocation in ɸ8 P4 is due to a remarkable C-terminal structure, which wraps right around the outside of the molecule to insert into the central hole where RNA binds to coupled L1 and L2 loops, whereas in ɸ12 P4, a C-terminal residue, serine 282, forms a specific hydrogen bond to the N7 of purines ring to confer purine specificity for the ɸ12 enzyme.
Associations among depression, suicidal behavior, and quality of life in patients with human immunodeficiency virus.

AIM To investigate the potential associations among major depression, quality of life, and suicidal behavior in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) patients. METHODS A detailed MEDLINE search was carried out to identify all articles and book chapters in English published from January 1995 to January 2015. RESULTS Based on the main findings, the prevalence of major depressive disorder (MDD) ranged from 14.0% to 27.2%. Furthermore, the prevalence of suicidal ideation varied from 13.6% to 31.0% whereas, attempted suicides were reported to range from 3.9% to 32.7%. Interestingly, various associated risk factors for both depression and suicide were identified in HIV patients. Finally, consistent associations were reported among MDD, suicidal ideation, and poor quality of life in individuals living with HIV. CONCLUSION Although additional studies are needed to elucidate this complex association, our results suggest the importance of early detection of both MDD and suicidality in patients living with HIV.
Fabrication of a three-dimensional insect-wing model by micromolding of thermosetting resin with a thin elastmeric mold

For investigating insect flight, a low-cost micromolding technique using a thin polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) mold to fabricate an artificial insect wing with a three-dimensional (3D) shape was developed. The wing consists of 3D polyurethane (PU) frames and a Parylene-C membrane. Using a low-viscosity thermosetting PU resin, this method can fabricate a wing frame with a thickness of 200 µm and a length of more than 100 mm. To create a 3D mold channel for the PU resin, a thin PDMS mold was pressed along the curved surface of a rigid bottom mold. Depositing Parylene-C on the bottom mold made it possible to integrate the molded product with a Parylene film. To estimate the deformation rate of the PDMS mold during the pressing process, the height and width of the molded PU frames were compared with those of the original channels of the PDMS molds. It was found that both the height and width of the PU frame were more than 85% of those of the original channel when the aspect ratio of the channel ranged from 0.5 to 2.0. The length of the PU frame was also found to be related to the aspect ratio. Moreover, the maximum length was over 500 times bigger than the cross-sectional width.
Generalization of spoofing countermeasures: A case study with ASVspoof 2015 and BTAS 2016 corpora

Voice-based biometric systems are highly prone to spoofing attacks. Recently, various countermeasures have been developed for detecting different kinds of attacks such as replay, speech synthesis (SS) and voice conversion (VC). Most of the existing studies are conducted with a specific training set defined by the evaluation protocol. However, for realistic scenarios, selecting appropriate training data is an open challenge for the system administrator. Motivated by this practical concern, this work investigates the generalization capability of spoofing countermeasures in restricted training conditions where speech from a broad attack types are left out in the training database. We demonstrate that different spoofing types have considerably different generalization capabilities. For this study, we analyze the performance using two kinds of features, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) which are considered as baseline and recently proposed constant Q cepstral coefficients (CQCCs). The experiments are conducted with standard Gaussian mixture model - maximum likelihood (GMM-ML) classifier on two recently released spoofing corpora: ASVspoof 2015 and BTAS 2016 that includes cross-corpora performance analysis. Feature-level analysis suggests that static and dynamic coefficients of spectral features, both are important for detecting spoofing attacks in the real-life condition.
Repairing reed-solomon codes with two erasures

Despite their exceptional error-correcting properties, Reed-Solomon (RS) codes have been overlooked in distributed storage applications due to the common belief that they have poor repair bandwidth: A naive repair approach would require the whole file to be reconstructed in order to recover a single erased codeword symbol. In a recent work, Guruswami and Wootters (STOC'16) proposed a single-erasure repair method for RS codes that achieves the optimal repair bandwidth amongst all linear encoding schemes. We extend their trace collection technique to cope with two erasures.
Tamoxifen enhances the anticancer effect of cantharidin and norcantharidin in pancreatic cancer cell lines through inhibition of the protein kinase C signaling pathway

Cantharidin is an active constituent of mylabris, a traditional Chinese therapeutic agent. Cantharidin is a potent and selective inhibitor of protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A). Cantharidin has been previously reported to efficiently repress the growth of pancreatic cancer cells. However, excessively activated protein kinase C (PKC) has been shown to improve cell survival following the adminstration of cantharidin. Tamoxifen is widely used in the treatment of estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer. In addition, an increasing number of studies have found that tamoxifen selectively inhibits PKC and represses growth in estrogen receptor-negative cancer cells. Administration of a combination of PKC inhibitor and PP2A inhibitors has been demonstrated to exert a synergistic anticancer effect. The proliferation of pancreatic cancer cells was analyzed by 3-(4,5-dimethyltiazol-2-yl]2, 5-diphenyltetrazo-lium bromide assay. The expression levels of ERα and ERβ in various pancreatic cancer cell lines were determined by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. In addition, the protein levels of PKCα and phosphorylated PKCα in pancreatic cell lines were analyzed by western blot analysis. In the present study, tamoxifen was found to exert a cytotoxic effect against pancreatic cancer cells independent of the hormone receptor status. Tamoxifen repressed the phosphorylation of PKC, and amplified the anticancer effect induced by cantharidin and norcantharidin. The findings reveal a novel potential strategy against pancreatic cancer using co-treatment with tamoxifen plus cantharidin or cantharidin derivatives.
Probabilistic congestion control for non-adaptable flows

In this paper we present a TCP-friendly congestion control scheme for non-adaptable flows. The main characteristic of these flows is that their data rate is determined by an application and cannot be adapted to the current congestion situation of the network. Typical examples of non-adaptable flows are those produced by networked computer games or live audio and video transmissions where adaptation of the quality is not possible (e.g., since it is already at the lowest possible quality level). We propose to perform congestion control for non-adaptable flows by suspending them at appropriate times so that the aggregation of multiple non-adaptable flows behaves in a TCP-friendly manner. The decision whether or not a flow is to be suspended is based on random experiments. In order to allocate probabilities for these experiments, the data rate of the non-adaptable flow is compared to the rate that a TCP flow would achieve under the same conditions. We present a detailed discussion of the proposed scheme and evaluate it through extensive simulation with the network simulator ns-2.
A Lockdown Technique to Prevent Machine Learning on PUFs for Lightweight Authentication

We present a lightweight PUF-based authentication approach that is practical in settings where a server authenticates a device, and for use cases where the number of authentications is limited over a device's lifetime. Our scheme uses a server-managed challenge/response pair (CRP) lockdown protocol: unlike prior approaches, an adaptive chosen-challenge adversary with machine learning capabilities cannot obtain new CRPs without the server's implicit permission. The adversary is faced with the problem of deriving a PUF model with a limited amount of machine learning training data. Our system-level approach allows a so-called strong PUF to be used for lightweight authentication in a manner that is heuristically secure against today's best machine learning methods through a worst-case CRP exposure algorithmic validation. We also present a degenerate instantiation using a weak PUF that is secure against computationally unrestricted adversaries, which includes any learning adversary, for practical device lifetimes and read-out rates. We validate our approach using silicon PUF data, and demonstrate the feasibility of supporting 10, 1,000, and 1M authentications, including practical configurations that are not learnable with polynomial resources, e.g., the number of CRPs and the attack runtime, using recent results based on the probably-approximately-correct (PAC) complexity-theoretic framework.
PROGRESS IN PLASTIC ELECTRONICS DEVICES

▪ Abstract Organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) based on solution-processible polymeric as well as small molecular semiconductors have shown impressive improvements in their performance during recent years. These devices have been developed to realize low-cost, large-area electronic products. This review gives an overview of the materials’ aspect, charge-transport, and device physics of OFETs, focusing mainly on the organic semiconductor and organic dielectric materials and their mutual interface. Recent developments in the understanding of the relationship between microstructure and charge transport, the influence of processing techniques, and gate dielectric are reviewed. Comparative data of charge-carrier mobility of most organic semiconductors have been compiled. Ambipolar charge transport in OFETs and its applications to integrated circuits as well as ambipolar light-emitting transistors are also reviewed. Many interesting questions regarding how the molecular and electronic structures at the int.
An Adoptive Mother Who Became a Human Milk Donor

Inducing lactation in the absence of pregnancy (nonpuerperal lactation) is not always successful and, in many cases, only partial breastfeeding is achieved. Different protocols have been described, but scientific evidence and research are lacking in this area. The authors describe the case of a woman with a history of a miscarriage, for whom the lactation induction process was so effective that she became a milk donor even before she received her adopted child. She had not previously used hormone treatment. She was given domperidone as a galactogogue for 1 month. The pumping protocol began with a double electric breast pump combined with manual pumping 6 months before her child was delivered, and 3 months later, she was accepted as a donor by our milk bank. This highlights the importance of regular stimulation as a milk production mechanism. This is the first case of human milk donation in an adoptive mother described in the literature.
Influence of heterogeneous plastic strain fields on the corrosion susceptibility of duplex stainless steels at the microscale

In the present paper, grid points coupled with an image analysis method are used to map strain gradients within grains and across interfaces of duplex stainless steels at the microand nanoscale under straining conditions (4.5% plastic strain). Highly heterogeneous strain field are obtained and sites where high strain gradients exist are identified. Local electrochemical measurements are then performed in NaCl-based media within these sites by means of the electrochemical microcell technique and 20 μm microcapillaries in order to propose new mechanical-electrochemical criteria leading to a significant enhancement of anodic and/or cathodic reactions and pitting susceptibility of deformed materials.
CCNrel: Leveraging relations among objects to improve the performance of CCN

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a promising architectural approach that focuses on the efficient distribution of uniquely named data objects. A piece of content is represented by a single object in the network and is divided into multiple chunks which can be uniquely named and cached by network nodes. However, in its current form, the potential of CCN is not fully exploited due to the lack of common means to express and take advantage from possible relations that may exist among different objects. Our work explores the simple yet effective idea of supporting and exploiting such relations in CCN. In this paper, we present CCNrel as a backward-compatible mechanism for CCN that enables publishers to distribute contents as related objects. Differently from existing relation mechanisms, which focus on one type of content and are application-specific, CCNrel is generic and enables the use of relations in both current and novel application domains. First, we discuss CCNrel fundamental concepts and main design aspects. Next, we use CCNrel as foundation for a case study of data redundancy elimination in multimedia content distribution. Through extensive simulation work we evaluate the potential benefits of leveraging relations measured by the clients experience and overall network efficiency. Results of the presented use case show that, on average and when compared to default CCN operations, content download times are improved in 34%, publishers load in 56%, and the network bandwidth usage in 43%.
Financial performance analysis of European banks using a fuzzified Self-Organizing Map

Due to the recent wave of bank failures, stress tests have been conducted on banks within the European Union. The stress tests, however, only consider the adequacy of a bank's capital ratios, whereas the general financial performance of individual banks is disregarded. In this paper, we use the Self-Organizing Map SOM to perform a visual multidimensional and temporal financial performance analysis of European banks. We address several problems concerning financial performance analysis. We deal with the problem of selecting suitable financial ratios by performing dimensionality reduction using Principal Component Analysis. We also deal with difficult data using outlier trimming and normalization techniques, and use the SOM for imputing missing values. We use a decision-framework for choosing the final model, based upon a set of map and clustering quality measures. In addition, we implement a second-level fuzzified Ward clustering for visualization purposes and for assessing the crispness of the solution. The result is a visual SOM model for financial performance analysis of European banks.