Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Calcium and Cyclic AMP Promote Axonal Regeneration in Caenorhabditis elegans and Require DLK-1 Kinase

Axons of adult Caenorhabditis elegans neurons undergo robust regenerative growth after laser axotomy. Here we show that axotomy of PLM sensory neurons triggers axonal calcium waves whose amplitude correlates with the extent of regeneration. Genetic elevation of Ca2+ or cAMP accelerates formation of a growth cone from the injured axon. Elevated Ca2+ or cAMP also facilitates apparent fusion of axonal fragments and promotes branching to postsynaptic targets. Conversely, inhibition of voltage-gated calcium channels or calcium release from internal stores reduces regenerative growth. We identify the fusogen EFF-1 as critical for axon fragment fusion and the basic leucine zipper domain (bZip) protein CREB (cAMP response element-binding protein) as a key effector for branching. The effects of elevated Ca2+ or cAMP on regrowth require the MAPKKK (mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase kinase) DLK-1. Increased cAMP signaling can partly bypass the requirement for the bZip protein CEBP-1, a downstream factor of the DLK-1 kinase cascade. These findings reveal the relationship between Ca2+/cAMP signaling and the DLK-1 MAPK (mitogen-activated protein kinase) cascade in regeneration.
Comparison Between constant and decreasing rest intervals: influence on maximal strength and hypertrophy

de Souza Jr, TP, Fleck, SJ, Simão, R, Dubas, JP, Pereira, B, de Brito Pacheco, EM, da Silva, AC, and de Oliveira, PR. Comparison between constant and decreasing rest intervals: influence on maximal strength and hypertrophy. J Strength Cond Res 24(7): 1843-1850, 2010-Most resistance training programs use constant rest period lengths between sets and exercises, but some programs use decreasing rest period lengths as training progresses. The aim of this study was to compare the effect on strength and hypertrophy of 8 weeks of resistance training using constant rest intervals (CIs) and decreasing rest intervals (DIs) between sets and exercises. Twenty young men recreationally trained in strength training were randomly assigned to either a CI or DI training group. During the first 2 weeks of training, 3 sets of 10-12 repetition maximum (RM) with 2-minute rest intervals between sets and exercises were performed by both groups. During the next 6 weeks of training, the CI group trained using 2 minutes between sets and exercises (4 sets of 8-10RM), and the DI group trained with DIs (2 minutes decreasing to 30 seconds) as the 6 weeks of training progressed (4 sets of 8-10RM). Total training volume of the bench press and squat were significantly lower for the DI compared to the CI group (bench press 9.4%, squat 13.9%) and weekly training volume of these same exercises was lower in the DI group from weeks 6 to 8 of training. Strength (1RM) in the bench press and squat, knee extensor and flexor isokinetic measures of peak torque, and muscle cross-sectional area (CSA) using magnetic resonance imaging were assessed pretraining and posttraining. No significant differences (p ≤ 0.05) were shown between the CI and DI training protocols for CSA (arm 13.8 vs. 14.5%, thigh 16.6 vs. 16.3%), 1RM (bench press 28 vs. 37%, squat 34 vs. 34%), and isokinetic peak torque. In conclusion, the results indicate that a training protocol with DI is just as effective as a CI protocol over short training periods (6 weeks) for increasing maximal strength and muscle CSA; thus, either type of program can be used over a short training period to cause strength and hypertrophy.
A Synchronous Collaborative Environment for Engineering Design Education

A Web-based synchronous collaborative environment is presented, which facilitates the education of mechanical engineering design. With the system, participants at different physical locations gather online to discuss topics of interest. Members of the group can directly manipulate all entities in the engineering draft interactively on their browsers and updated results show on the partners' web pages synchronously. An entity-based access control mechanism resolves conflicts and maintains consistency of design data, so participants can co-operate efficiently. The system provides benefits for teachers as well as students. It runs in a self-developed Web-based CAD software environment.
Power, domination and stratification: Towards a conceptual synthesis

My aim in this paper is to propose a clarification of the ideas of domination and stratification, seeing both as rooted in the more fundamental concept of power. Where domination is the articulation of power into enduring relations of control over other people, stratification is the articulation of power into horizontal structures based in inequalities of resources. Such a clarification, it is argued, will help to re-orientate research programmes on the structure, background, and recruitment of elites in relation to the differentiation of class and status situations. A clear delineation of class, status, and elite concepts will help to ensure that researchers no longer talk past each other in their empirical work. The argument in this article draws on two earlier publications that need to be more closely integrated with each other. Stratification and Power (Scott, 1996) set out a general approach to issues of class and status, and suggested how the analysis of domination — then restricted to issues of “command” — could be combined within the same framework. Power (Scott, 2001) presented a more adequate view of domination, but presented a restricted view of elites and did not work through the relationship of this idea to the earlier view of stratification. In this paper I attempt to reconcile those two arguments and to draw on a broader view of “elite” (Scott, 2008) in order to suggest a viable research programme for elite studies.
Assessment of time-lapse in visible and thermal face recognition

Although face recognition seems as an easy task for human, automatic face recognition is a much more challenging task due to variations in time, illumination and pose. In this paper, the influence of time-lapse on visible and thermal imag es is examined. Orthogonal moment invariants are used as a feature extractor to analyze the effect of time-lapse on thermal and vis ible images and the results are compared with conventional Principal Co mponent Analysis (PCA). A new triangle square ratio criteri on is employed instead of Euclidean distance to enhance the perfor mance of nearest neighbor classifier. The results of this study indi cate that the ideal feature vectors can be represented with high discri mination power due to the global characteristic of orthogonal mome nt invariants. Moreover, the effect of time-lapse has been decreas ing and enhancing the accuracy of face recognition considerably in co mparison with PCA. Furthermore, our experimental results based on moment invariant and triangle square ratio criterion show that the proposed approach achieves on average 13.6% higher in recognition rate than PCA. Keywords—Infrared Face recognition, Time-lapse, Zernike moment invariants I. INTRODUCTION UMAN face recognition is a biometric approach which is employed to recognize or verify the identity of a l iving person based on his/her physiological characteristi cs by means of automatic methods. It plays an important role in many application areas such as security systems, authent ication, intelligent machines and surveillance. Despite cons iderable progress and some practical successes, face recogni tion is still a challenging task in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition. The wide-range variations of human fac e, due to time-lapse, expression, pose and illumination, lead to highly complicated distribution which decreases the accura cy of recognition greatly. Face recognition based on visi ble spectrum is gaining acceptance as a superior biomet ric in face recognition systems due to high resolution of acqui red samples which are formed due to reflectance. Becaus e of three-dimensional structure of face, external light and angle of incident of light play a significant role in identi fying the face in different applications (1)-(2).
Hypermobility, Destination Effects, and Delinquency: Specifying the Link between Residential Mobility and Offending

Residential mobility is often implicated as a risk factor for delinquency. While many scholars attribute this to causal processes spurred by moving, recent research suggests that much of the relationship is due to differences between mobile and non-mobile adolescents. However, studies in this area often operationalize mobility as a single move, limiting researchers to comparing outcomes between mobile and non-mobile adolescents. This approach is rather broad, considering heterogeneity in mobility frequency as well as variation in sending and receiving neighborhood characteristics. We propose a more nuanced framework to help anticipate how characteristics of mobility experiences may mitigate, exacerbate, or fail to influence adolescent behavior. Drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) and the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), we demonstrate that “hypermobility” has detrimental behavioral consequences, increases in neighborhood disadvantage between sending and receiving neighborhoods are associated with reductions in self-reported offending, and long-distance moves reduce delinquency, but only among adolescents with prior behavioral problems. These results underscore the complex association between residential mobility and delinquency during adolescence.
Real-Time MultiView Face Detection , Tracking , Pose Estimation , Alignment , and Recognition ( Updated Dec 1 , 2001 )

We have developed a system based on technologies resulting from our recent research in multi-view face detection and tracking [1, 2], pose estimation [3], alignment [4, 5, 6], and recognition [7]; where multi-view means out-of-plane rotations in [0Æ; 180Æ] left-right (90 corresponding to the frontal view) and in 30Æ up-down. The system, whose structure is shown in Fig.1, takes gray level static images or video as the input, without using color or motion information, and finds the locations, sizes, poses, and identities of faces in the input. It also includes internal feedback mechanisms for collecting and adding to the training sets new face examples for re-training the performing modules. Our objective has been to make these components work practically, fast and robustly. The methodologies used to achieve this for multi-view faces have evolved from our previous expensive nonlinear models [8, 9] to the current efficient linear models for face detection and alignment [1, 5], and from the previous unsupervised learning [10, 11, 12] to current supervised learning [3] for pose estimation. The mpeg clips for these demos can be downloaded at http://research.microsoft. com/ szli/Demos/CVPR01.html.
Proposed use of a CDMA technique in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have become and interest research field over past years due to their wide range of usage. Military applications such as surveillance and battlefield monitoring, environment monitoring and industrial monitoring or actuating are just a few of the many potential fields in which sensor networks are used. Over the years many MAC protocols for WSN have been adopted, adjusted or developed. One of the primary objectives of WSN is low power consumption and because of this practically all WSN MAC protocols are based on power energy saving. Latency, accuracy, reliability and fault-tolerance were caste-aside. We believe that latency, accuracy, reliability and fault-tolerance can be achieved by adjusted CDMA technology. In this paper we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of CDMA over CSMA, FDMA or TDMA technology.
A New Approach for Overload Management in Content-based Publish/Subscribe

Overload management is of vital importance in wide-area publish/subscribe systems, yet current solutions are best-effort. In this paper, we present an admission control scheme for overload management in large-scale and scalable content-based publish/subscribe systems. We analyze the stumbling block for implementing admission control in publish/subscribe systems, and point out how it differs from admission control schemes in other research areas. We propose a cover relation based algorithm to compute subscription resource requirements and an admission control algorithm based on subscription routing. The scheme ensures time, space and flows decoupling without sacrificing scalability of publish/subscribe systems. Finally, we conduct experiments to verify the effectiveness of the scheme.
Lipid deposition in intestine as a possible cause of malabsorption of nutrients in zinc-deficient common carp (Cyprinus carpio)

An experiment was performed to examine the interaction between Zn deficiency and lipid intake in carp. The carp were given a high-lipid diet that was either Zn-deficient (ZD) or Zn-supplemented (ZS), or were pair-fed (PF) the ZS diet to the intake of the ZD group. After 8 weeks the carp were killed and measurements were made of intestinal glucose uptake, levels of DNA, RNA and triacylglycerol, and alkaline phosphatase (EC 3.1.3.1) activity in liver and intestine samples. A further group of similar carp were given the same diets but at week 8 were transferred to low-lipid diets, with the exception of half the ZD group. After a further 8 weeks of treatment, carps were killed for biochemical studies. Intestinal [14C]glucose uptake, levels of DNA, RNA and alkaline phosphatase activity in intestine and liver were significantly (P < 0·05) lower in the high-lipid ZD group than in the high-lipid ZS and PF diet groups. The triacylglycerol concentration in the intestine was higher in the high-lipid ZD group than in the other two groups. When the carp were given the corresponding low-lipid diets, the variables measured in intestine and liver of the ZD group were close to those of the other groups. The results of this study demonstrate that lipid, when present in excess in the diet, accumulates in the intestine under Zn-deficient conditions and may reduce the absorption of glucose in carp. The reduced RNA and DNA levels and alkaline phosphatase activity in liver and intestine of ZD fish compared with those of ZS fish given high- lipid diets is proposed to be due to the malabsorption of nutrients linked with lipid deposition in the intestine, rather than their dependence on the level of Zn in the diet.
Restoration of CFTR function in patients with cystic fibrosis carrying the F508del-CFTR mutation

Restoration of BECN1/Beclin 1-dependent autophagy and depletion of SQSTM1/p62 by genetic manipulation or autophagy-stimulatory proteostasis regulators, such as cystamine, have positive effects on mouse models of human cystic fibrosis (CF). These measures rescue the functional expression of the most frequent pathogenic CFTR mutant, F508del, at the respiratory epithelial surface and reduce lung inflammation in CftrF508del homozygous mice. Cysteamine, the reduced form of cystamine, is an FDA-approved drug. Here, we report that oral treatment with cysteamine greatly reduces the mortality rate and improves the phenotype of newborn mice bearing the F508del-CFTR mutation. Cysteamine was also able to increase the plasma membrane expression of the F508del-CFTR protein in nasal epithelial cells from F508del homozygous CF patients, and these effects persisted for 24 h after cysteamine withdrawal. Importantly, this cysteamine effect after washout was further sustained by the sequential administration of epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), a green tea flavonoid, both in vivo, in mice, and in vitro, in primary epithelial cells from CF patients. In a pilot clinical trial involving 10 F508del-CFTR homozygous CF patients, the combination of cysteamine and EGCG restored BECN1, reduced SQSTM1 levels and improved CFTR function from nasal epithelial cells in vivo, correlating with a decrease of chloride concentrations in sweat, as well as with a reduction of the abundance of TNF/TNF-alpha (tumor necrosis factor) and CXCL8 (chemokine [C-X-C motif] ligand 8) transcripts in nasal brushing and TNF and CXCL8 protein levels in the sputum. Altogether, these results suggest that optimal schedules of cysteamine plus EGCG might be used for the treatment of CF caused by the F508del-CFTR mutation.
Bacterial Inclusion Bodies Contain Amyloid-Like Structure

Protein aggregation is a process in which identical proteins self-associate into imperfectly ordered macroscopic entities. Such aggregates are generally classified as amorphous, lacking any long-range order, or highly ordered fibrils. Protein fibrils can be composed of native globular molecules, such as the hemoglobin molecules in sickle-cell fibrils, or can be reorganized β-sheet–rich aggregates, termed amyloid-like fibrils. Amyloid fibrils are associated with several pathological conditions in humans, including Alzheimer disease and diabetes type II. We studied the structure of bacterial inclusion bodies, which have been believed to belong to the amorphous class of aggregates. We demonstrate that all three in vivo-derived inclusion bodies studied are amyloid-like and comprised of amino-acid sequence-specific cross-β structure. These findings suggest that inclusion bodies are structured, that amyloid formation is an omnipresent process both in eukaryotes and prokaryotes, and that amino acid sequences evolve to avoid the amyloid conformation.
Enhanced pathogenicity of Candida albicans pre-treated with subinhibitory concentrations of fluconazole in a mouse model of disseminated candidiasis.

OBJECTIVES To investigate the relative pathogenicity of Candida albicans treated with subinhibitory concentrations of fluconazole in a mouse model of disseminated candidiasis. Previous studies indicate that these cells secrete 10 times more farnesol than do untreated cells. In our usage, subinhibitory means a concentration which causes a prominent decrease in turbidity but still allows some cell growth. METHODS C. albicans A72 cells were grown overnight in 0-5.0 microM fluconazole, washed, and inoculated in mice by tail vein injection. Groups of 15 or 16 mice were injected with 1.3 x 10(6) cells and mortality was recorded for 7 days post-inoculation. The levels of farnesol in control and treated C. albicans were determined by GC/MS. RESULTS The MIC50 for strain A72 was 0.125 mg/L (0.4 microM). Mice administered C. albicans pre-treated with 0.5 to 1.0 microM fluconazole died 2.5 to 4 days earlier and had 2 to 4 times higher mortality rates than mice given untreated C. albicans. Fluconazole (0.5 to 1.0 microM) pre-treated cells were 4.2 to 8.5 times more lethal (P < 0.001) than untreated cells. The extracellular, membrane bound, and intracellular farnesol concentrations of cells pre-treated with 1.0 muM fluconazole were 12-, 2- and 6-times those of untreated cells. CONCLUSIONS The effects of fluconazole on C. albicans are very concentration-dependent. The enhanced pathogenicity of fluconazole pre-treated C. albicans in mice should be relevant to the therapeutic and prophylactic use of fluconazole. Further research is needed to explore whether farnesol production by C. albicans is a virulence factor.
Wide range depth estimation from two blurred images with tilted lens optics

It is possible to make depth measurements with comparative ease using the stereo camera method. However, because a lengthy baseline is required, this technique is not readily applicable to in-vehicle tasks, which need to be robust to accommodate various disturbances. Also, it is impossible to use conventional monocular-camera methods over a wide visible range in real-time. Therefore, this paper proposes a wide-range depth estimation method based on blurred images from a monocular imaging device. Our proposed method obtains two separately focused images for one scene spectroscopically. Our method inclines the plane of sharp focus (POF) and the depth of field (DOF) in the desired direction of depth measurement using tilted lens optics. Then, a depth estimation can be obtained from the blur rate between two pixels at the position of interest in each image. Our method does not require a long baseline, yet offers a wide detectable range in real-time, making it viable for in-vehicle tasks. Then, by comparing the estimation accuracy of our method to the simple stereo method, this paper demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.
Biologically Inspired Particle Filter for Robust Visual Tracking1

Although particle filter and its variants like KPF and UPF achieve great success in many visual tracking applications, they depend on local proposal distributions and hence always fall flat in cases of global object shift and large-scale object movement. To address this issue, we present the concept of global proposal distribution for particle filter with the inspiration from biological vision examples and term their combination as biologically inspired particle filter (BI-PF). Three types of global proposal distributions are proposed based on biological vision inspired saliency maps, including motion, color, and contrast saliency map. In order for BI-PF to mimic the way human’s eye tracks object, local and global proposal distribution are dynamically integrated through a threshold determining when to switch between them. Experimental results demonstrate the outperformance of our BI-PFs over particle filter, KPF, and UPF. Keywards: Visual Tracking, Particle Filter, Proposal Distribution, Biological Vision, Saliency Map
Quantitative human and robot motion comparison for enabling assistive device evaluation

A promising new application area for humanoid robots is in the area of assistive device testing. Humanoid robots can facilitate the experimental evaluation of assistive devices by providing repeatable, measurable, human-like motion while removing the difficulties and potential safety hazards associated with human trials. To ensure that the humanoid robot is providing a valid test platform, the robot must move in a similar way as a human while wearing the assistive device. This challenge is made difficult due to the inherent variability in human motion. In this paper, we propose an approach for a quantitative comparison between human and robot motion that identifies both the difference magnitude and the difference location, and explicitly handles both spatial and temporal variability of human motion. The proposed approach is demonstrated on data from robot gait and sagittal plane lifting.