Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TRPC3 properties of a native constitutively active Ca2+‐permeable cation channel in rabbit ear artery myocytes

Previously we have described a constitutively active, Ca2+‐permeable, non‐selective cation channel in freshly dispersed rabbit ear artery myocytes which has similar properties to some of the canonical transient receptor potential (TRPC) channel proteins. In the present work we have compared the properties of constitutive channel activity with known properties of TRPC proteins by investigating the effect of selective anti‐TRPC antibodies and pharmacological agents on whole‐cell and single cation channel activity. Bath application of anti‐TRPC3 antibodies markedly reduced channel activity in inside‐out patches and also produced a pronounced reduction of both current amplitude and variance of constitutively active whole‐cell cation currents whereas anti‐TRPC1/4/5/6/7 antibodies had no effect on channel activity. In the presence of antigenic peptide, anti‐TRPC3 antibodies had no effect on whole‐cell or single cation channel activity. Bath application of flufenamic acid, Gd3+, La3+ and Ca2+ inhibited spontaneous channel activity in outside‐out patches with IC50 values of 6.8 μm, 25 nm, 1.5 μm and 0.124 mm, respectively, which are similar values to those against TRPC3 proteins. Immunocytochemical studies combined with confocal microscopy showed expression of TRPC3 proteins in ear artery myocytes, and these were predominately distributed at, or close to, the plasma membrane. These data provide strong evidence that native constitutively active cation channels in rabbit ear artery myocytes have similar properties to TRPC3 channel proteins and indicate that these proteins may have an important role in mediating this conductance.
Regression of a Plasmablastic Lymphoma in a Patient with HIV on Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy

We describe an HIV-infected 44-year-old man who presented 1 month after discontinuation of HAART therapy with a large mass extending from the mediastinum, enclosing the heart and extending through the diaphragm to the epigastric region. Biopsies subsequently revealed a highly aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) producing sheets of cells with an organoid distribution. The cells had abundant basophilic cytoplasm and a plasmacytic appearance. Although immunohistochemistry failed to show either B- or T-cell markers, antigens consistent with plasma cells were found. An immunoglobulin heavy chain clonal rearrangement was identified by PCR analysis. These studies were supportive of a diagnosis of a plasmablastic lymphoma. While awaiting the results of these tests, the patient was reinitiated on his HAART regimen. He was found on follow-up a month later to have complete resolution of his bulky mediastinal mass. He remained free of disease for 3 months with subsequent rectal and abdominal recurrence. Treatment with CHOP chemotherapy with filgrastim support was begun which resulted in another remission. Plasmablastic lymphoma is now reported in some studies to account for 2.6% of all HIV-related NHL. Originally described in 1997 in a series of 16 patients, this entity is highly associated with HIV infection in its later stages. Often, patients present with oral or jaw lesions with a rapidly progressive course. The tumors have the morphologic appearance of a plasmacytoid tumor with high proliferative index. Markers are positive mainly for LCA, CD79a, VS38C, and CD138. Co-infection with HHV-8 and EBV has not been consistently reported. Therapy with standard regimens has variable response. One case has been reported with a 3.5 year disease free survival. The regression of disease after resumption of HAART therapy alone in this patient suggests that HAART has an important role in the treatment of lymphoma in the HIV infected patient.
Test methods for crosstalk-induced delay and glitch faults in network-on-chip interconnects implementing asynchronous communication protocols

Variations in crosstalk is an added source of delay and glitch faults in System on Chips built with deep sub-micron technology, especially in chips using wide and long buses. Many of these faults, in such sub-micron chips, may only appear when the chip works at normal operating speed. These crosstalk-induced faults are more serious in systems built with Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous principles. The authors propose efficient methods for at-speed testing of such faults in asynchronous links connecting, for example, two switches/routers of an network-on-chip communication infrastructure. The proposed delay test method has the property that all faulty chips are identified but some good chips may also be characterised as faulty with a small probability. The authors give an analytical analysis regarding this probability as a function of probability of delay fault and number of applied test instances. A simple and pure digital BIST hardware is also proposed, which is represented at Register Transfer level to implement the delay test method. A method is also proposed for detecting glitches on control lines in a handshaking-based communication link; thereafter it is shown how the method can be extended for detecting glitch faults on data lines. The proposed test methods for detecting delays and glitches provide a complete scheme for detection of crosstalk-induced faults in links in an on-chip communication infrastructure using asynchronous handshaking communication protocols.
An Adaptive Overcurrent Protection Scheme for Distribution Networks

Distribution networks are evolving toward the vision of smart grids, with increasing penetration of distributed generation (DG), introduction of active network management (ANM), and potentially islanded modes of operation. These changes affect fault levels and fault current paths and have been demonstrated to compromise the correct operation of the overcurrent protection system. This paper presents an adaptive overcurrent protection system which automatically amends the protection settings of all overcurrent relays in response to the impact of DG, ANM, and islanding operation. The scheme has been developed using commercially available protection devices, employs IEC61850-based communications, and has been demonstrated and tested using a hardware-in-the-loop laboratory facility. A systematic comparison of the performance of the proposed adaptive scheme alongside that of a conventional overcurrent scheme is presented. This comparison quantifies the decrease in false operations and the reduction of mean operating time that the adaptive system offers.
Chlorogenic Compounds from Coffee Beans Exert Activity against Respiratory Viruses

Abstract Chlorogenic acids are secondary metabolites in diverse plants. Some chlorogenic acids extracted from traditional medicinal plants are known for their healing properties, e.g., against viral infections. Also, green coffee beans are a rich source of chlorogenic acids, with 5-O-caffeoylquinic acid being the most abundant chlorogenic acid in coffee. We previously reported the synthesis of the regioisomers of lactones, bearing different substituents on the quinidic core. Here, 3,4-O-dicaffeoyl-1,5-γ-quinide and three dimethoxycinnamoyl-γ-quinides were investigated for in vitro antiviral activities against a panel of 14 human viruses. Whereas the dimethoxycinnamoyl-γ-quinides did not show any antiviral potency in cytopathogenic effect reduction assays, 3,4-O-dicaffeoyl-1,5-γ-quinide exerted mild antiviral activity against herpes simplex viruses, adenovirus, and influenza virus. Interestingly, when the compounds were evaluated against respiratory syncytial virus, a potent antiviral effect of 3,4-O-dicaffeoyl-1,5-γ-quinide was observed against both subtypes of respiratory syncytial virus, with EC50 values in the submicromolar range. Time-of-addition experiments revealed that this compound acts on an intracellular post-entry replication step. Our data show that 3,4-O-dicaffeoyl-1,5-γ-quinide is a relevant candidate for lead optimization and further mechanistic studies, and warrants clinical development as a potential anti-respiratory syncytial virus drug.
Community interventions for reducing smoking among adults.

BACKGROUND Since smoking behaviour is determined by social context, the best way to reduce the prevalence of smoking may be to use community-wide programmes which use multiple channels to provide reinforcement, support and norms for not smoking. OBJECTIVES To assess the effectiveness of community interventions for reducing the prevalence of smoking. SEARCH STRATEGY We searched the Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group specialised register, MEDLINE (1966-August 2001) and EMBASE (1980-August 2001) and reference lists of articles. SELECTION CRITERIA Controlled trials of community interventions for reducing smoking prevalence in adult smokers. The primary outcome was smoking behaviour. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Data were extracted by one person and checked by a second. MAIN RESULTS Thirty two studies were included, of which seventeen included only one intervention and one comparison community. Only four studies used random assignment of communities to either the intervention or comparison group. The population size of the communities ranged from a few thousand to over 100,000 people. Change in smoking prevalence was measured using cross-sectional follow-up data in 27 studies. The estimated net decline ranged from -1.0% to 3.0% for men and women combined (10 studies). For women, the decline ranged from -0.2% to + 3.5% per year (n=11), and for men the decline ranged from -0.4% to +1.6% per year (n=12). Cigarette consumption and quit rates were only reported in a small number of studies. The two most rigorous studies showed limited evidence of an effect on prevalence. In the US COMMIT study there was no differential decline in prevalence between intervention and control communities, and there was no significant difference in the quit rates of heavier smokers who were the target intervention group. In the Australian CART study there was a significantly greater quit rate for men but not women. REVIEWER'S CONCLUSIONS The failure of the largest and best conducted studies to detect an effect on prevalence of smoking is disappointing. A community approach will remain an important part of health promotion activities, but designers of future programmes will need to take account of this limited effect in determining the scale of projects and the resources devoted to them.
Market Equilibrium of Multi-energy System with Power-to-gas Functions

The emergence and development of the power-to-gas(P2G)technique have made the bidirectional energy flow between power and natural gas systems possible.P2 G represents a key technique in the emerging energy internet,and promotes the integration of multi-energy systems.By transforming electricity to gas,existing gas storage facilities can be used to mitigate the volatility of renewable energy generation.The modeling of future complex multi-energy systems with P2 G functions is presented based on the"energy hub"framework,and a coordinated optimization model presented.A game-theorybased method is next proposed to attain market equilibrium in a multi-energy system.A 4-bus sample multi-energy system and a simplified Victoria gas-electricity combined network system in Australia are adopted for demonstrating the effectiveness of the presented optimization model and solving algorithm.
Using Posters to Recommend Anime and Mangas in a Cold-Start Scenario

Item cold-start is a classical issue in recommender systems that affects anime and manga recommendations as well. This problem can be framed as follows: how to predict whether a user will like a manga that received few ratings from the community? Content-based techniques can alleviate this issue but require extra information, that is usually expensive to gather. In this paper, we use a deep learning technique, Illustration2Vec, to easily extract tag information from the manga and anime posters (e.g., sword, or ponytail). We propose BALSE (Blended Alternate Least Squares with Explanation), a new model for collaborative filtering, that benefits from this extra information to recommend mangas. We show, using real data from an online manga recommender system called Mangaki, that our model improves substantially the quality of recommendations, especially for less-known manga, and is able to provide an interpretation of the taste of the users.
The association between violence against women and HIV: Evidence from a national population-based survey in Zimbabwe

Violence against women has been associated with increased risk of HIV infection among women. In Zimbabwe, both violence against women and HIV are widespread. Although Zimbabwe has been experiencing a significant decline of adult HIV prevalence in recent years, women remain disproportionately infected and affected by the epidemic. The 2005-06 Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey (ZDHS) provides the first national estimate of the prevalence of violence against women and also the first population-based estimates of HIV prevalence and patterns. These new data provide an opportunity to further understand the relationship between these two issues of public health concern. Our analysis first used descriptive statistics to examine the prevalence of emotional, physical, and sexual violence against women and differentials in spousal violence by socio-demographic characteristics, and also to compare spousal violence by womenâ€™s HIV status. We then used multivariate logistic regression to examine selected risk factors for spousal violence among currently married and ever-married women. Results confirm that violence against women is widespread in Zimbabwe. Among all respondents, including both married and unmarried, nearly 6 women in every 10 reported having experienced some type of violenceâ€”emotional, physical, or sexualâ€”in their lifetime. Among currently married women, 28% reported physical violence and 18 % reported sexual violence from their husband. Currently married women who had experienced physical violence only, or both physical and sexual violence, were significantly more likely to be HIV-positive than those who had not experienced any physical or sexual violence (OR 1.35, p=0.020 for physical violence only; and OR 1.38, p=0.029 for both physical and sexual violence). After controlling for other factors, the analysis found that number of children ever born, polygyny, and accepting attitudes toward violence were strongly associated with spousal violence among currently married women. Because the study is based on cross-sectional data, it cannot draw conclusions about the causal relationship between violence against women and HIV transmission. Despite this, the findings call for special attention to societal values and norms on gender equality in programming, both for prevention of violence against women and prevention of HIV. It is within marriage that womenâ€™s options for HIV prevention become limited. Increased attention to individual and collective responsibility for protecting against HIV and for preventing violence against women will sustainably reduce the incidence of both problems. This study also provides useful data for prioritizing geographical regions in Zimbabwe with higher prevalence of violence and HIV for focused interventions.
Exercise is the primary factor associated with Hsp70 induction in muscle of treadmill running rats

Aim: The cytoprotective, inducible stress protein, Hsp70, increases in muscles of rodents subjected to strenuous treadmill running. Most treadmill running protocols employ negative reinforcement to encourage animals to exercise. As these stimuli may themselves activate stress responses, the present investigation was conducted to determine their contribution to the exercise‐induced expression of Hsp70.
Diet Modification as a Mitigation Tool for Swine Production

A series of experiments were conducted to evaluate air emission reductions from swine following implementation of diet strategies. In each study, the impact of these feeding strategies on pig performance and air emissions were compared to those of animals fed commercial diets. Groups of pigs were housed in environmental rooms (experimental unit; 6 pigs per room) from 24 kg to 120 kg in body weight. Ammonia and hydrogen sulfide concentrations in exhaust air and airflow were measured continuously in each experiment. Overall, diet had no effect on pig performance in any experiment (P > 0.05). As a result of feeding reduced protein diets with increasing amounts of synthetic amino acids (AA), however, NH3 concentrations were reduced 24% (2.93 ppm) and 36% in a 5-AA and 3-AA diet, respectively, compared to the 1 AA control diet containing only 1 AA. Ammonia emissions for the 5-, 3-, and 1-AA diets, corresponded to a daily mass of NH3 emitted of 88.0, 68.9, and 46.0 mg/kg BW, respectively. No diet effects were observed for H2S. When corn co-products were fed (distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGs), corn germ meal (CGM), and dehulled, degermed corn (DDC), and compared to emissions resulting from a corn diet, NH3 and H2S emissions were increased as a result of DDGs inclusion in the diet. The DDGs treatment produced less methane than the other treatments. Corn diets were intermediate in methane production and the CGM and DDC diets resulted in the greatest methane production (P<0.05). Our results demonstrate that diet modification is a powerful mitigation strategy.
Caveolae and Lipid Rafts: G Protein‐Coupled Receptor Signaling Microdomains in Cardiac Myocytes

Abstract: A growing body of data indicates that multiple signal transduction events in the heart occur via plasma membrane receptors located in signaling microdomains. Lipid rafts, enriched in cholesterol and sphingolipids, form one such microdomain along with a subset of lipid rafts, caveolae, enriched in the protein caveolin. In the heart, a key caveolin is caveolin‐3, whose scaffolding domain is thought to serve as an anchor for other proteins. In spite of the original morphologic definition of caveolae (“little caves”), most work related to their role in compartmenting signal transduction molecules has involved subcellular fractionation or immunoprecipitation with anti‐caveolin antibodies. Use of such approaches has documented that several G protein‐coupled receptors (GPCR), and their cognate heterotrimeric G proteins and effectors, localize to lipid rafts/caveolae in neonatal cardiac myocytes. Our recent findings support the view that adult cardiac myocytes appear to have different patterns of localization of such components compared to neonatal myocytes and cardiac fibroblasts. Such results imply the existence of multiple subcellular microdomains for GPCR‐mediated signal transduction in cardiac myocytes, in particular adult myocytes, and raise a major unanswered question: what are the precise mechanism(s) that determine co‐localization of GPCR and post‐receptor components with lipid rafts/caveolae in cardiac myocytes and other cell types?
Autophagy is dispensable to overcome ER stress in the filamentous fungus Aspergillus niger

Secretory proteins are subjected to stringent quality control systems in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) which include the targeting of misfolded proteins for proteasomal destruction via the ER‐associated degradation (ERAD) pathway. Since deletion of ERAD genes in the filamentous fungus Aspergillus niger had hardly any effect on growth, this study investigates whether autophagy might function as an alternative process to eliminate misfolded proteins from the ER. We generated A. niger double mutants by deleting genes essential for ERAD (derA) and autophagy (atg1 or atg8), and assessed their growth both under normal and ER stress conditions. Sensitivity toward ER stress was examined by treatment with dithiothreitol (DTT) and by expressing a mutant form of glucoamylase (mtGlaA::GFP) in which disulfide bond sites in GlaA were mutated. Misfolding of mtGlaA::GFP was confirmed, as mtGlaA::GFP accumulated in the ER. Expression of mtGlaA::GFP in ERAD and autophagy mutants resulted in a twofold higher accumulation in ΔderA and ΔderAΔatg1 strains compared to Δatg1 and wild type. As ΔderAΔatg1 mutants did not show increased sensitivity toward DTT, not even when mtGlaA::GFP was expressed, the results indicate that autophagy does not act as an alternative pathway in addition to ERAD for removing misfolded proteins from the ER in A. niger.
Control of distributed energy resources under switching transient between grid-connected and Islanded operation modes

This paper presents control strategies that enable stable operation of electronically coupled distributed energy resources (DERs) that switch between grid-connected and islanded operation modes. First, it is shown that stability of islanded and grid-connected systems, individually, is not a sufficient condition for stability of the switched system. Then controller design problem, for grid-connected and islanded systems, is formulated as controller design for a switched system. Furthermore, robustness and desired transient behavior of the system in the two modes of operation are taken into account. This allows the controller to accurately generates pulse width modulation (PWM) signals so that the real and reactive powers output of the DER track their corresponding references in grid-connected mode. Moreover the control design allows voltages to track their references in islanded operation mode. It is shown that the control scheme ensures system stability during transition between the two modes of operation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, the control scheme is applied to a detailed nonlinear model of a converter-based DER.
Application-set driven exploration for custom processor architectures

Custom architectures are often adopted as more efficient alternatives to general purpose processors in terms of performance and power. However, the design of such architectures requires experts both in hardware and the application domain. In this paper we propose a method for speeding up the design space exploration. Our method, based on Pareto points, identifies sets of solutions in terms of scalar units and vector units of certain length, fulfilling the throughput constraints for each application in a given set. Architectures can then be selected by combining these solutions, as starting points for a more thorough, model-based evaluation.
The role of betweenness relations, monometrics and penalty functions in data aggregation

Penalty functions have been used for data aggregation since Yager introduced his “general theory of information aggregation” back in 1993. Obviously, the ideas of Yager have long time been surpassed. However, over the years, the use of penalty functions has shifted towards the aggregation of values in a closed interval. Here, we propose to return to the origin of penalty-based data aggregation and to expand the current definition of penalty functions beyond the confinement to closed intervals. We do this by bringing to the field of data aggregation an old acquaintance of the early scholars of geometry: betweenness relations.
The Relationship of Empathy to Moral Reasoning in First-Year Medical Students

The Norman Rockwell image of the American physician who fixed the broken arm of a child, treated the father for hypertension, and brought an unborn child into this world is now almost nonexistent. Since the time of the Rockwell portrait, a highly technical medical industry has evolved. Now two-thirds of physicians are board certified in subspecialties, and patients visit an average of 3–4 different physicians per year. Today's physicians see themselves less as “benevolent and wise counselors overseeing the patient's welfare and more as objective scientists applying the latest technical methods to bring about the desired end. ” The intimate patient-physician relationship that was once the norm in our society is rapidly disappearing.