Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Methotrexate Restores Regulatory T Cell Function Through Demethylation of the FoxP3 Upstream Enhancer in Patients With Rheumatoid Arthritis

We have previously shown, in a cohort of untreated rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients, that the suppressive function of Treg cells is defective. However, other studies in cohorts of patients with established RA have shown that Treg cell function is normal. We hypothesized that treatment may restore Treg cell function and lead to reduced disease activity. The aim of this study was to investigate whether treatment with methotrexate (MTX) can result in epigenetic changes that lead to restoration of the Treg cell suppressive function in RA.
Oxygen isotope enrichment (Δ18O) as a measure of time-averaged transpiration rate

Experimental evidence is presented to show that the 18 O enrichment in the leaf biomass and the mean (timeaveraged) transpiration rate are positively correlated in groundnut and rice genotypes. The relationship between oxygen isotope enrichment and stomatal conductance (gs) was determined by altering gs through ABA and subsequently using contrasting genotypes of cowpea and groundnut. The Peclet model for the 18 O enrichment of leaf water relative to the source water is able to predict the mean observed values well, while it cannot reproduce the full range of measured isotopic values. Further, it fails to explain the observed positive correlation between transpiration rate and 18 O enrichment in leaf biomass. Transpiration rate is influenced by the prevailing environmental conditions besides the intrinsic genetic variability. As all the genotypes of both species experienced similar environmental conditions, the differences in transpiration rate could mostly be dependent on intrinsic gs. Therefore, it appears that the D 18 O of leaf biomass can be used as an effective surrogate for mean transpiration rate. Further, at a given vapour pressure difference, D 18 O can serve as
Human–wildlife conflict, benefit sharing and the survival of lions in pastoralist community‐based conservancies

Summary Like many wildlife populations across Africa, recent analyses indicate that African lions are declining rapidly outside of small fenced areas. Community conservancies – privately protected areas that engage community members in conservation – may potentially maintain wildlife populations in unfenced pastoralist regions, but their effectiveness in conserving large carnivores has been largely unknown until now. We identify drivers of lion survival in community conservancies within the Masai Mara ecosystem, Kenya, applying mark–recapture analyses to continuous sight–resight surveys. We use the number of livestock and human settlements as proxies for potential human–lion conflict whilst controlling for environmental variables and lion socioecology. Average lion densities within the Mara conservancies between 2008 and 2013 (11·87 lions 100 km−2) were 2·6 times higher than those previously reported in 2003. Survival rates varied amongst prides and were highest for lions utilizing central regions of conservancies. The number of livestock settlements (bomas [corrals] and manyattas) that were not members of a conservancy, and that fell within a pride home-range, had a large negative effect on female survival and was the most influential external predictor in models. These non-conservancy settlements accounted for 37·2% of total observed variation in survival, whereas conservancy settlements, which benefit financially from wildlife through their membership, had no effect on lion survival. Internal drivers of survival agreed with known ecology and social behaviour including age plus a negative effect of male takeovers on cub survival <6 months. Vegetation cover, prey availability and the density of grazing livestock within a pride's range did not explain patterns in lion survival. Synthesis and applications. We show that lion densities have increased substantially within the Mara conservancies over the last decade and suggest that the creation of community conservancies has benefitted their survival. This suggests that lions can survive outside of fenced areas within pastoral regions if communities gain benefits from wildlife. We highlight the importance of expanding existing conservancies beyond their current geographical and political scope and forming buffer zones if wildlife ranges outside them. We suggest that changing attitudes to predators should be a key goal of community-based conservancies. Further work is recommended to identify what specific aspects of conservancy membership promote lion survival.
A method to estimate slew and delay in coupled digital circuits

Coupling capacitance has substantial impact on signal delays and arrival times. It is not always correct to de-couple them using the Miller factors of 0 or 2/spl times/. Towards this end, various de-coupling techniques have been studied in the literature. We extend them and suggest their use in static timing analysis. Our approach uses the switching factor based de-coupling approximation idea to compute the impact of coupling capacitors on signal slews and delays. We suggest an iterative table lookup scheme. The slew and delay tables for the library cell elements are looked up to compute slew and arrival times of signals in the presence of coupling capacitors. The method is easy to use with existing static timing analysis tools. It works with slew and delay tables, which are usually available with technology libraries. Other than table lookups, it requires minimal computation of two switching factors per coupling capacitor per iteration. Analysis and HSPICE simulation results are given to support the suggested method.
Real Time PCR for Viral Load Quantification of Hepatitis Virus B in Côte d ’ Ivoire , West Africa

Approximately 350 million people are chronically infected with Hepatitis B virus (HBV) worldwide. Detection and quantification of circulating HBV in plasma or serum play an important role in diagnosing and in monitoring of HBV infection as well as assessing response to therapy. Several in-house quantitative assays for HBV-DNA have been developed, based mostly on real-time PCR methodology, showing a remarkable sensitivity and a wide broad linear range for quantification. In Côte d’Ivoire, serological test were used as gold standard for the detection of Hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) and the viral load was not determine or unavailable for all patients. The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of real time PCR for quantification of viral load of HBV in clinical samples from Côte d’Ivoire. 80 clinical serum samples were tested by real time PCR assay to determine the viral load for HBV. The sensitivity and the specificity were determined by the use of HBV-DNA positive and non-specific DNA negative controls. 66.25 % (53/80) samples resulted positive for real time PCR for HBV-DNA. 50% (40/80) of the clinical samples have showed low titer, while 16.25% (13/80) of samples were detected with high titer and 33.75 % (27/80) were undetectable and negative. The real time PCR showed lower viral load of 5 IU/ml corresponding to 14 copies/ml in clinical samples. The molecular test was specific and reproducible for clinical tested samples. No specific amplification of other DNA pathogens was found positive for real time HBV PCR. This study was the first application of molecular quantification for viral load by using real time PCR method for HBV in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa. Keyswords: Hepatitis B Virus; real time PCR; quantification; viral load, West Africa
Context-Aware Proactive Personalization of Linear Audio Content

How many times did you wish the radio programming was more aligned with your interests or current situation? How many times did you feel the need to change the channel because of a non-interesting content on your favorite station? Did you ever feel distracted by the audio programming in your car at a busy intersection? We present a platform for proactive personalization of linear audio content within a hybrid content radio framework. Hybrid content radio programming aims at enhancing the traditional broadcast radio experience and augmenting it with audio content related to the listener’s context. It allows enrichment of the broadcaster’s program schedule with context-aware, personalized audio content, with the goal of improving the users’ listening experience, decreasing their propensity to channel-surf, and giving them more targeted content, such as local news, entertainment, music and also relevant advertisements. Differently from most of the popular commercial recommendationbased streaming music services, hybrid content radio systematically and automatically adds audio content to an existing, linear audio structure. More specifically, part of the linear content is replaced, in a proactive way, with content relevant to the user’s current context – i.e., profile, emotional state, activity, geographical position, weather, or other factors contributing to the state of the listener. In addition to enabling functional enhancement of the radio experience, the presented framework also supports network resource optimization, allowing effective use of the broadcast channel and the Internet.
Elastic electron scattering from the deuteron using the gross equation.

The elastic electromagnetic form factors for the deuteron are calculated in the context of a one-boson-exchange model using the Gross or Spectator equation. The formalism is manifestly covariant and gauge invariant, and provides a very good representation of the data. {copyright} {ital 1995 The American Physical Society. }
El impacto de la mensajería instantánea en los estudiantes en forma de estrés y ansiedad para el aprendizaje : análisis empírico

La relacion entre educacion y TIC es especialmente dinamica en el siglo XXI, sobre todo a raiz de la aparicion y popularizacion de las aplicaciones telefonicas moviles, encabezadas por la mensajeria instantanea (WhatsApp o BlackBerry Messenger). La difusion de estas aplicaciones entre los estudiantes puede generar conductas adictivas o causantes de estres. Ello puede afectar al aprendizaje. En este estudio se pretende detectar si existe adiccion a estas aplicaciones, y averiguar si provocan estres o ansiedad en los jovenes. Tras la encuesta realizada a 247 jovenes, se concluye que el uso de estas aplicaciones produce estres y ansiedad por la necesidad de recibir respuesta inmediata a los mensajes. Tambien se observa cierto grado de adiccion a estas aplicaciones.
Marked Point Process for Severity of Illness Assessment

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) consist of sparse, noisy, incomplete, heterogeneous and unevenly sampled clinical data of patients. They include physiological signals, lab test results, procedural events, clinical notes. Such data can be treated as a temporal stream of events of varied types occurring at irregularly spaced time points. We focus on modeling the temporal dependencies that arise due to the types, timings, and values of different events in such data. We model the event streams, including vital signs, laboratory results contained in two different datasets (MIMIC III — Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care clinical database — and data extracted from EHRs of patients in a tertiary pediatric intensive care unit) using a piecewise-constant conditional intensity model (PCIM), a type of marked point process. Our experiments capture meaningful temporal dependencies and show improvement in hospital mortality prediction over traditional ICU scoring systems.
The interactive autonomous mobile system RoboX

In this paper we present an autonomous mobile robot system allowing for complex collaborative interaction with non-experienced users while giving a preprogrammed tour of a public exposition. Several modalities of man-machine communication are used simultaneously. To ensure secure and reliable operation we present a layered development approach centered on the programming system SOUL. At the Swiss National Exhibition Expo.02, ten RoboX systems will interact with hundreds of visitors per day, during the 5-month period, seven days a week, ten hours per day. First tests in a real world environment and an analysis of its interaction with visitors enable us to judge the credibility of the tour-guide robot and the reliability of its operation for this outstanding event.
Sub‐seasonal variance of surface meteorological parameters in buoy observations and reanalyses

Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO)/Triangle Trans‐Ocean Buoy Network (TRITON) and Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate (EPIC) moorings across the equatorial Pacific are used to evaluate the mean climate and sub‐seasonal variance in surface meteorological variables in the NCEP/NCAR, NCEP/DOE, and ERA40 reanalyses. This study focuses on the June–November time period when tropical storms are most frequent in the region. For the mean fields, the reanalysis surface products compare better with the moorings than the 1000 hPa products. In contrast, the variance in the 1000 hPa ERA40 state variables is in best agreement with the mooring variance. As long as these disparities exist, air‐sea interaction studies and our ability to drive ocean models with observed fluxes will be limited.
Cochlear Dysfunction in “Normal‐Hearing” Patients with History of Noise Exposure

Cochlear integrity was assessed in patients with normal hearing but history of noise exposure by means of aural-overload measurements and discrimination of high-frequency words in noise. Results show that previously noise-exposed subjects exhibit statistically poorer discrimination than nonexposed subjects. Correlation studies between speech discrimination and aural-overload threshold were also indicative of cochlear damage in the noise-exposed subjects.
A Multi-Performance Processor for Reducing the Energy Consumption of Real-Time Embedded Systems

This paper proposes an energy efficient processor which can be used as a design alternative for the dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) processors in embedded system design. The processor consists of multiple PE (processing element) cores and a selective set-associative cache memory. The PE-cores have the same instruction set architecture but differ in their clock speeds and energy consumptions. Only a single PE-core is activated at a time and the other PE-cores are deactivated using clock gating and signal gating techniques. The major advantage over the DVS processors is a small overhead for changing its performance. The gate-level simulation demonstrates that our processor can change its performance within 1.5 microsecond and dissipates about 10 nano-joule while conventional DVS processors need hundreds of microseconds and dissipate a few micro-joule for the performance transition. This makes it possible to apply our multi-performance processor to many real-time systems and to perform finer grained and more sophisticated dynamic voltage control.
Three-Dimensional Reconstruction from Infrared Images

Three-dimensional reconstruction from infrared images In this report a system for three-dimensional reconstruction from infrared images is presented. Such system would mainly be used to reconstruct buildings from infrared images in order to ease the process of inspection and to serve as a demonstration tool. Flir systems aim at creating a fully automatic system for threedimensional reconstruction from infrared images. The thermographer would only have to capture infrared images from a few different directions around the building. These images would then be uploaded to Flir’s Researcher software which automatically would reconstruct a three-dimensional model of the building. The purpose of this report is to investigate and evaluate existing methods for three-dimensional reconstruction from infrared images. The focus lies on an overview of the complete process and not on the individual parts.
Toll-Like Receptor 4 Genetic Variation and Advanced Prostate Cancer Risk

Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) is a key innate immunity receptor that initiates an inflammatory response primarily against Gram-negative bacteria. Two recent publications reported that variants in TLR4 were associated with risk of prostate cancer. To further investigate the role of TLR4 in prostate cancer susceptibility, we identified six tagging single-nucleotide polymorphisms that comprehensively captured the common genetic variation of the locus and tested these polymorphisms in our case-control study of 1,012 men. Two single-nucleotide polymorphisms showed nominally statistically significant associations with prostate cancer risk, with the strongest (rs10759932) associated with a 4-fold increased risk of disease (P = 0.006). We estimated through permutation analysis that a similarly strong result would occur by chance 2.5% of the time. Our findings support previous studies and suggest that inherited differences in TLR4 influence prostate cancer risk. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2007;16(2):352–40)
Evaluation of genetic status of HER-2/neu and aneusomy 17 by fluorescence in situ hybridization and comparison with immunohistochemistry assay from Indian breast cancer patients.

AIMS The HER-2/neu proto-oncogene is amplified in 15%-25% of breast cancers. In the current study, we evaluated HER-2/neu status of 396 cases of breast cancer by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), and the results were correlated with immunohistochemistry (IHC) for HER-2/neu protein expression. RESULTS Overall, HER-2/neu amplification was observed in 38.4% of cases. Concordance between IHC and FISH was 90.4% considering only IHC score 0, 1 (negative), and 3 (positive). However, only 37.3% of the IHC score 2 (equivocal) cases showed HER-2/neu gene amplification. A majority of the discordant cases within the IHC negative (score 0 and 1) and IHC positive (score 3) were high-grade tumors. Polysomy 17 and monosomy 17 was seen in 7.3% of the total cases of each. Furthermore, a majority of FISH positive cases were noted in Intraductal Carcinoma grade III and cases with regional lymph nodal metastasis. Polysomy 17 was seen in 7.9% of the FISH positive cases and in 6.3% of the FISH negative cases. Monosomy 17, however was more preponderant in FISH negative cases. CONCLUSION We believe that the FISH test should be considered as the gold standard in the estimation of the HER-2/neu status due to its increased sensitivity and better appreciation of aneusomy 17.
A fast autofocus algorithm for synthetic aperture radar processing

High-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging requires the motion of the radar platform to be known very accurately. Otherwise, phase errors are induced in the processing of the raw SAR data, and bad focusing results. In particular, a constant error in the measured along-track velocity or the cross-track acceleration leads to a phase error that varies quadratically over the synthetic aperture. The process of estimating this quadratic phase error directly from the radar data is termed autofocus. A novel autofocus algorithm with a computational complexity which is at least an order of magnitude lower than that of other algorithms providing comparable accuracies is presented. The algorithm has been tested on data from the Danish Airborne SAR, and the performance is compared with that of the traditional map drift algorithm. <<ETX>>
Balancing gravimetric and volumetric hydrogen density in MOFs

Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) are promising materials for the storage of hydrogen fuel due to their high surface areas, tunable properties, and reversible gas adsorption. Although several MOFs are known to exhibit high hydrogen densities on a gravimetric basis, realizing high volumetric capacities – a critical attribute for maximizing the driving range of fuel cell vehicles – remains a challenge. Here, MOFs that achieve high gravimetric and volumetric H2 densities simultaneously are identified computationally, and demonstrated experimentally. The hydrogen capacities of 5309 MOFs drawn from databases of known compounds were predicted using empirical (Chahine rule) correlations and direct atomistic simulations. A critical assessment of correlations between these methods, and with experimental data, identified pseudo-Feynman–Hibbs-based grand canonical Monte Carlo calculations as the most accurate predictive method. Based on these predictions, promising MOF candidates were synthesized and evaluated with respect to their usable H2 capacities. Several MOFs predicted to exhibit high capacities displayed low surface areas upon activation, highlighting the need to understand the factors that control stability. Consistent with the computational predictions, IRMOF-20 was experimentally demonstrated to exhibit an uncommon combination of high usable volumetric and gravimetric capacities. Importantly, the measured capacities exceed those of the benchmark compound MOF-5, the record-holder for combined volumetric/gravimetric performance. Our study illustrates the value of computational screening in pinpointing materials that optimize overall storage performance.
Deep semantic classification for 3D LiDAR data

Robots are expected to operate autonomously in dynamic environments. Understanding the underlying dynamic characteristics of objects is a key enabler for achieving this goal. In this paper, we propose a method for pointwise semantic classification of 3D LiDAR data into three classes: non-movable, movable and dynamic. We concentrate on understanding these specific semantics because they characterize important information required for an autonomous system. To learn the distinction between movable and non-movable points in the environment, we introduce an approach based on deep neural network and for detecting the dynamic points, we estimate pointwise motion. We propose a Bayes filter framework for combining the learned semantic cues with the motion cues to infer the required semantic classification. In extensive experiments, we compare our approach with other methods on a standard benchmark dataset and report competitive results in comparison to the existing state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we show an improvement in the classification of points by combining the semantic cues retrieved from the neural network with the motion cues.
Inactivation of the cyclin-dependent kinase Cdc28 abrogates cell cycle arrest induced by DNA damage and disassembly of mitotic spindles in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Eukaryotic cells may halt cell cycle progression following exposure to certain exogenous agents that damage cellular structures such as DNA or microtubules. This phenomenon has been attributed to functions of cellular control mechanisms termed checkpoints. Studies with the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe and mammalian cells have led to the conclusion that cell cycle arrest in response to inhibition of DNA replication or DNA damage is a result of down-regulation of the cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs). Based on these studies, it has been proposed that inhibition of the CDK activity may constitute a general mechanism for checkpoint controls. Observations made with the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, however, appear to disagree with this model. It has been shown that high levels of mitotic CDK activity are present in the budding yeast cells arrested in G2/mitosis as the result of DNA damage or replication inhibition. In this report, we show that a novel mutant allele of the CDC28 gene, encoding the budding yeast CDK, allowed cell cycle passage through mitosis and nuclear division in the presence of DNA damage and the microtubule toxin nocodazole at a restrictive temperature. Unlike the checkpoint-defective mutations in CDKs of fission yeast and mammalian cells, the cdc28 mutation that we identified was recessive and resulted in a loss of the CDK activity, including the Clb2-, Clb5-, and Clb6-associated, but not the Clb3-associated, CDK activities. Examination of several known alleles of cdc28 revealed that they were also, albeit partially, defective in cell cycle arrest in response to UV-generated DNA damage. These findings suggest that Cdc28 kinase in budding yeast may be required for cell cycle arrest resulting from DNA damage and disassembly of mitotic spindles.