Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Leflunomide Increases Hepatic Exposure to Methotrexate and Its Metabolite by Differentially Regulating Multidrug Resistance–Associated Protein Mrp2/3/4 Transporters via Peroxisome Proliferator–Activated Receptor α Activation

Methotrexate (MTX) is the gold standard drug for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and it is frequently combined with leflunomide (LEF) to enhance its clinical efficacy. However, this combination can exacerbate liver toxicity, and the underlying mechanism has not yet been clarified. We investigated whether LEF affects the pharmacokinetics of MTX and its primary toxic metabolite, 7-hydroxyl methotrexate (7OH MTX), in mice. LEF significantly increased the plasma concentration (area under the plasma concentration–time curve) of MTX and 7OH MTX (2.4 and 4.5 times, respectively), decreased their bile excretion, and increased their accumulation in the liver and kidneys. When we investigated the effect of LEF on the MTX absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion process, we found that LEF had little effect on liver aldehyde oxidase and 7OH MTX formation. However, LEF significantly decreased the expression of the apical efflux transporter multidrug resistance–associated protein 2 (Mrp2) and increased that of the basolateral efflux transporters Mrp3/4, except there was no significant change in Mrp4 protein expression. Mrp2/3/4 alteration changed the distribution of MTX and 7OH MTX in plasma and tissues. Further studies suggested that LEF indirectly activated peroxisome proliferator–activated receptor α (PPARα), which was likely responsible for the Mrp2/3/4 alteration in the liver. The MTX plasma concentration change induced by LEF was reversed by the PPARα-specific antagonist GW6471. These results may partially explain the exacerbated liver toxicity caused by combination treatment with MTX and LEF and may raise concerns regarding the risk of potential drug-drug interactions between PPARα agonists and Mrp substrates in the clinic.
Comparative Effects of Ingested PVC Micro Particles With and Without Adsorbed Benzo(a)pyrene vs. Spiked Sediments on the Cellular and Sub Cellular Processes of the Benthic Organism Hediste diversicolor

The plastic microliter represents an emerging contaminant as well as multiple stress agent in the aquatic environments. Microplastics are found even in the remote areas of the world. Together with their occurrence in all environmental compartments, there is a growing concern about their potential of adsorbing pollutants co-occurring in the environment. Currently, little is known about this source of exposure for aquatic organisms in the benthic environment. Exposure conditions were set up mimicking the contribution of microplastics in different exposure routes. The potential biological effects were investigated in the model organism: the annelid Hediste diversicolor. Cellular effects including alterations of immunological responses, lysosomal compartment, mitochondrial activity, oxyradical production and onset of genotoxicity were assessed in coelomocytes while temporary and permanent effects of oxidative stress were also performed at tissue level. In this study polyvinylchloride (PVC) microplastics were shown to adsorb benzo(a)pyrene with a time and dose-dependent relationship. Results also indicated a marked capability of contaminated microplastics to transfer the model organic chemical to exposed model organism under physiological gut conditions and concentrated in tissues. The elevated bioavailability of the model pollutant after the ingestion induced a clear pattern of biological responses. Toxicity mainly targeted impairment of cellular functioning and genotoxicity in ragworm’s coelomocytes, while permanent effects of oxidative stress were observed at tissue level. Coelomocytes responded faster and with a higher degree of sensitivity to the adverse stimuli when compared with responses observed in whole tissue samples. The results showed that microplastic particles in sediments may play a significant role as vectors for organic pollutants. The highest adverse responses were observed in those ragworms exposed to sediments spiked with PVC particles pre-incubated with B[a]P when compared against sediments spiked with B[a]P and microplastics separately.
The impact of nanotechnology on polyesters, polyamides and other textiles

Publisher Summary Nanotechnology is defined as the utilization of structures with at least one nano dimension for the construction of materials, devices or systems with novel or significantly improved properties due to their nano size. The fundamental of nanotechnology lies in the fact that properties of materials change dramatically when their size is reduced to the nanometer range. The textile industry is likely to be hugely impacted by nanotechnology, as research involving nanotechnology based finishes to improve performances or to create new functionality on textile materials has gained a big impetus/ momentum across the globe. Research in nanotechnology mainly focuses on creating unique properties in everyday fabrics such as self-cleaning, water and oil repellency, stain proof, antibacterial, UV protective, antistatic, improved moisture regain and comfort in synthetic based textiles but all without compromising the original hand, breathability or durability of the fabric. It also shows promising applications in developing advanced textile materials for applications in medical, defense, aerospace, and other technical textile applications. These developments can be broadly classified under four major areas: nanofinishing, nanocoatings, nanofibers, and nanocomposites. This chapter discusses the work being done under each of these domains and that is reviewed under two major headings: surface modification of textiles and fiber modifications.
Neural-Guided Deductive Search for Real-Time Program Synthesis from Examples

Synthesizing user-intended programs from a small number of input-output examples is a challenging problem with several important applications like spreadsheet manipulation, data wrangling and code refactoring. Existing synthesis systems either completely rely on deductive logic techniques that are extensively hand-engineered or on purely statistical models that need massive amounts of data, and in general fail to provide real-time synthesis on challenging benchmarks. In this work, we propose Neural Guided Deductive Search (NGDS), a hybrid synthesis technique that combines the best of both symbolic logic techniques and statistical models. Thus, it produces programs that satisfy the provided specifications by construction and generalize well on unseen examples, similar to data-driven systems. Our technique effectively utilizes the deductive search framework to reduce the learning problem of the neural component to a simple supervised learning setup. Further, this allows us to both train on sparingly available real-world data and still leverage powerful recurrent neural network encoders. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by evaluating on real-world customer scenarios by synthesizing accurate programs with up to 12x speed-up compared to state-of-the-art systems.
User Interface Design for Voice Control Systems

A voice control system converts spoken commands into control actions, a process which is always imperfect due to errors of the speech recognizer. Most speech recognition research is focused on decreasing the recognizers’ error rates; comparatively little effort was spent to find interface designs that optimize the overall system, given a fixed speech recognizer performance. In order to evaluate such designs prior to their implementation and test, three components are required: 1) an appropriate set of performance figures of the speech recognizer, 2) suitable performance criteria for the user interface, and 3) a mathematical framework for estimating the interface performance from that of the speech recognizer. In this paper, we will identify four basic interface designs and propose an analytical approach for predicting their respective performance.
Magnetic work environments: Patient experience outcomes in Magnet versus non-Magnet hospitals.

BACKGROUND The term Magnet hospital is an official designation ascribed by the American Nurses Credentialing Center for hospitals that meet specific criteria indicating they have a "magnetic work environment" for nurses. The objective of the Magnet designation is to encourage hospitals to design work in such a way as to attract and retain high-quality nurses and thus improve the quality of patient care. Empirical research has demonstrated that hospitals who earn a Magnet designation appear to have nurses who are more satisfied and committed to their work environments. Although research on whether patients are more satisfied with their care in these hospitals is still in its infancy, preliminary studies suggest that patients receiving care at Magnet-designated hospitals report more positive care experiences. PURPOSE This study used a large secondary survey data set to explore the extent to which inpatient perceptions differed between Magnet and non-Magnet hospitals. METHODOLOGY Ordinal logistic and multinomial logistic regression analyses were used to examine whether Magnet hospital status and positive nurse communication are related to overall hospital rating and willingness of patients to recommend the hospital. RESULTS Results indicated that patients treated at a Magnet hospital and patients who rated nurses' communication highly were significantly more satisfied and more likely to say they would recommend the hospital. CONCLUSIONS Evidence from this study suggests that it would be worthwhile for hospital leaders to consider organizational policies and practices consistent with the criteria put forth for Magnet hospital designation.
Numerical Study of Polynomial Feedback Laws for a Bilinear Control Problem

An infinite-dimensional bilinear optimal control problem with infinite-time horizon is considered. The associated value function can be expanded in a Taylor series around the equilibrium, the Taylor series involving multilinear forms which are uniquely characterized by generalized Lyapunov equations. A numerical method for solving these equations is proposed. It is based on a generalization of the balanced truncation model reduction method and some techniques of tensor calculus, in order to attenuate the curse of dimensionality. Polynomial feedback laws are derived from the Taylor expansion and are numerically investigated for a control problem of the Fokker-Planck equation. Their efficiency is demonstrated for initial values which are sufficiently close to the equilibrium.
Combined fuzzy and nonlinear dynamic observer for vehicle longitudinal velocity and side-slip angle

The knowledge of vehicle's speed at the center of gravity, as well as the vehicle sideslip angle is of high importance. These dynamic variables along with several others play a vital role in active safety systems and advanced chassis control applications. However, they are not readily measured on production automobiles via standard and inexpensive sensors. In this work, the estimation of these critical vehicle states was addressed in a newly proposed scheme that requires no incremental hardware, and is of reduced complexity compared with existing work in literature since the need of large matrices inversion is omitted as well as the need for re-tuning the observer parameters in accordance with the driving situation. A combined fuzzy logic estimator is elaborated for the longitudinal speed and a nonlinear 3 degrees of freedom dynamic model is used in the design of the sideslip observer. The proposed estimation approach is implemented in MATLAB/Simulink ® and the predicted variables are compared to the outputs of CarSim ®. A dual lane change maneuver was conducted at varying longitudinal speeds, the estimator demonstrated accuracy and rapidly traced the true values of the vehicle states.
Adaptive Graph Matching

Establishing correspondence between point sets lays the foundation for many computer vision and pattern recognition tasks. It can be well defined and solved by graph matching. However, outliers may significantly deteriorate its performance, especially when outliers exist in both point sets and meanwhile the inlier number is unknown. In this paper, we propose an adaptive graph matching algorithm to tackle this problem. Specifically, a novel formulation is proposed to make the graph matching model adaptively determine the number of inliers and match them, then by relaxing the discrete domain to its convex hull the discrete optimization problem is relaxed to be a continuous one, and finally a graduated projection scheme is used to get a discrete matching solution. Consequently, the proposed algorithm could realize inlier number estimation, inlier selection, and inlier matching in one optimization framework. Experiments on both synthetic data and real world images witness the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
ANTIOXIDANT POTENTIAL AND RADICAL SCAVENGING ACTIVITY OF DIFFERENT FERMENTATION DEGREE TEA LEAVES EXTRACTS

Today's world needs a super antioxidant. Researches mainly aim to find new sources of plant world polyphenols, which accessible from everyday food could influence unfavorable aging processes in human body. There are many studies providing evidence that tea bioactive compounds (Camellia sinensis L.) possess antioxidant capacity, profitably influencing human health, by degenerative diseases morbidity decrease. The scope of present research was to answer the question if there are any correlations between polyphenol content in processed tea leaves extracts and its antiradical and antioxidant activity. Evaluations were carried on leaves differentiated by the fermentation process degree -white, green, yellow, red and black tea, with use of DPPH, ABTS, FRAP, reducing power and chelating activity evaluation methods.
Morphological method for surface metrology and dimensional metrology based on the alpha shape

Morphological filters are useful tools as they are commonly employed in surface metrology and dimensional metrology, serving for surface texture analysis and data smoothing, respectively. Compared to the mean-line filtering techniques, such as the Gaussian filter, morphological filters have the merits of compact support, no need to remove form and being relevant to geometrical properties of surfaces. This paper proposes a novel morphological method based on the alpha shape. The proposed method has the advantages over the traditional methods that it runs relatively fast, enables arbitrary large ball radii and applies to freeform surfaces and nonuniformly sampled surfaces. The theory of basic morphological operations and the alpha shape is introduced and the theoretical link between the alpha hull and the morphological closing and opening operation is presented. A practical algorithm is developed that corrects possible singularities caused by data spikes and reduces the amount of calculation for open profiles/surfaces. Computer simulation is used to compare the results from the traditional algorithm and the proposed one. Experimental studies are conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of using the proposed method.
Retinal Oxygen Delivery and Metabolism in Healthy and Sickle Cell Retinopathy Subjects

Purpose Reduction in inner retinal oxygen delivery (DO2) can cause retinal hypoxia and impair inner retinal oxygen metabolism (MO2), leading to vision loss. The purpose of the current study was to establish measurements of DO2 and MO2 in healthy subjects and test the hypothesis that DO2 and MO2 are reduced in sickle cell retinopathy (SCR) subjects. Methods Dual wavelength retinal oximetry and Doppler optical coherence tomography were performed in 12 healthy control and 12 SCR subjects. Images were analyzed to measure retinal arterial and venous oxygen content (O2A and O2V), venous diameter (DV), and total retinal blood flow (TRBF). Retinal arteriovenous oxygen content difference (O2AV), DO2, MO2, and oxygen extraction fraction (OEF) were calculated according to the following equations: O2AV = O2A − O2V; DO2 = TRBF * O2A; MO2 = TRBF * O2AV; OEF = MO2/DO2. Results Retinal DV and TRBF were higher in the SCR group as compared to the control group, whereas, O2A, O2V, and O2AV were lower in SCR group as compared to the control group. DO2, MO2, and OEF were not significantly different between control and SCR groups. MO2 and DO2 were linearly related, such that higher MO2 was associated with higher DO2. There was an inverse relationship between TRBF and OEF, such that lower TRBF was associated with higher OEF. Conclusions Increased blood flow compensated for decreased oxygen content, thereby maintaining DO2, MO2, and OEF at predominately lower stages of SCR. Quantitative assessment of these parameters has the potential to advance knowledge and improve diagnostic evaluation of retinal ischemic conditions.
Meta-heuristic Approach to Design Controller for AVR System

In this paper, Firefly Algorithm (FA) based design of the optimal PID controller is proposed for the benchmark Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR) system. The best possible solution (Kp, Ki, Kd) for the PID controller is obtained by minimizing the multi-objective cost function. In this work, the FA explores the three dimensional search space, till it discovers the optimal PID parameters. This paper also presents a comprehensive study various search assisted FA, such as Brownian, Levy and chaotic exploration. The simulation work is implemented using the traditional and modified form of PID controllers. The performance of PID is computed based on the time domain values and the error values. The performances of chosen FA are also assessed based on its run time. From this research work, it can be observed that, all the search techniques tender similar time domain and error values. The iteration time taken for the Chaotic FA is relatively lesser than other FAs. Proposed approach is also authenticated against the other related works existing in the literature and it is noted that, FA based PID controller offers better result. KeywordPID Controller; AVR; Firefly Algorithm; Performance Analysis __________________________________________________________________________________________________
A self-watching model of analogy-making and perception

This paper describes Metacat, an extension of the Copycat model of analogy-making. The development of Copycat focused on modelling context-sensitive concepts and the ways in which they interact with perception within an abstract microworld of analogy problems. This approach differs from most other models of analogy in its insistence that concepts acquire their semantics from within the system itself, through perception, rather than being imposed from the outside. The present work extends these ideas by incorporating self-perception, episodic memory, and reminding into the model. These mechanisms enable Metacat to explain the similarities and differences that it perceives between analogies, and to monitor and respond to patterns that occur in its own behaviour as it works on analogy problems. This introspective capacity overcomes several limitations inherent in the earlier model, and affords the program a powerful degree of self-control. Metacat's architecture includes aspects of both symbolic and connectionist systems. The paper outlines the principal components of the architecture, analyses several sample runs and examples of program-generated commentary about analogies, and discusses Metacat's relation to some other well-known models of analogy.
Enhanced Vascular Biocompatibility and Remodeling of Decellularized and Secured Xenogeneic/Allogeneic Matrices in a Porcine Model

Background/Purpose: Calcifications and absence of growth potential are the major drawbacks of glutaraldehyde-treated prosthesis. Decellularized and secured xeno-/allogeneic matrices were assessed in a preclinical porcine model for biocompatibility and vascular remodeling in comparison to glutaraldehyde-fixed bovine pericardium (GBP; control). Methods: Native human (fascia lata, pericardium) and porcine tissues (peritoneum) were used and treated. In vitro, biopsies were performed before and after treatment to assess decellularization (hematoxylin and eosin/DAPI). In vivo, each decellularized and control tissue sample was implanted subcutaneously in 4 mini-pigs. In addition, 9 mini-pigs received a patch or a tubularized prosthesis interposition on the carotid artery or abdominal aorta of decellularized (D) human fascia lata (DHFL; n = 4), human pericardium (DHP; n = 9), porcine peritoneum (DPPt; n = 7), and control tissue (GBP: n = 3). Arteries were harvested after 1 month and subcutaneous samples after 15–30 days. Tissues were processed for hematoxylin and eosin/von Kossa staining and immunohistochemistry for CD31, alpha-smooth muscle actin, CD3, and CD68. Histomorphometry was achieved by point counting. Results: A 95% decellularization was confirmed for DHP and DPPt, and to a lower degree for DHFL. In the subcutaneous protocol, CD3 infiltration was significantly higher at day 30 in GBP and DHFL, and CD68 infiltration was significantly higher for GBP (p < 0.05). In intravascular study, no deaths, aneurysms, or pseudoaneurysms were observed. Inflammatory reaction was significantly higher for DHFL and GBP (p < 0.05), while it was lower and comparable for DHP/DPPt. DHP and DPPt showed deeper recellularization, and a new arterial wall was characterized. Conclusions: In a preclinical model, DPPt and DHP offered better results than conventional commercialized GBP for biocompatibility and vascular remodeling.
CHAPTER 3 PLASTICS AND RUBBER

Plastics represent a large and growing fraction of the fire load in public and residential environments, yet relatively little is known about the factors that govern their fire behavior. This is due in large part to the variety of plastics in use, the large number of flammability tests, and the lack of a consensus opinion on what standardized fire test method(s) of fire response best describes the fire hazard. Moreover, the most widely used plastics are those that are least expensive and these tend to be the most flammable. Fig. 3.1 shows the fire hazard (see heat release capacity, Sec. 3.3) versus the truckload price of commercial plastics and elastomers. It is seen that fire hazard and cost span over two orders of magnitude, but the commodity and engineering plastics costing less than $10 per pound comprise over 95 percent of plastics in use and these vary by about a factor of 10 in flammability and price. Specialty plastics costing over $10 per pound are typically heat and chemical resistant (e.g., polymers with aromatic backbones and fluoroplastics) and these tend to also be of low flammability. This chapter examines passive fire protection from a materials engineering perspective. The goal is to develop an understanding of the relationship between the fire behavior of plastics and their properties and identify flammability parameters that can be measured, tabulated, and used to predict fire hazard. Several books have reviewed the flammability parameters of solids [1–17], liquids, and gases [18–20] in relation to their fire behavior.