Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spectrophotometric Determination of Phenolic Antioxidants in the Presence of Thiols and Proteins

Development of easy, practical, and low-cost spectrophotometric methods is required for the selective determination of phenolic antioxidants in the presence of other similar substances. As electron transfer (ET)-based total antioxidant capacity (TAC) assays generally measure the reducing ability of antioxidant compounds, thiols and phenols cannot be differentiated since they are both responsive to the probe reagent. In this study, three of the most common TAC determination methods, namely cupric ion reducing antioxidant capacity (CUPRAC), 2,2′-azinobis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) diammonium salt/trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity (ABTS/TEAC), and ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP), were tested for the assay of phenolics in the presence of selected thiol and protein compounds. Although the FRAP method is almost non-responsive to thiol compounds individually, surprising overoxidations with large positive deviations from additivity were observed when using this method for (phenols + thiols) mixtures. Among the tested TAC methods, CUPRAC gave the most additive results for all studied (phenol + thiol) and (phenol + protein) mixtures with minimal relative error. As ABTS/TEAC and FRAP methods gave small and large deviations, respectively, from additivity of absorbances arising from these components in mixtures, mercury(II) compounds were added to stabilize the thiol components in the form of Hg(II)-thiol complexes so as to enable selective spectrophotometric determination of phenolic components. This error compensation was most efficient for the FRAP method in testing (thiols + phenols) mixtures.
Chronic and Acute Effects of Dronedarone on the Action Potential of Rabbit Atrial Muscle Preparations: Comparison With Amiodarone

Dronedarone, a noniodinated derivative of amiodarone, is under evaluation as a potentially less toxic anti-arrhythmic alternative to amiodarone. The acute and chronic electrophysiologic effects of dronedarone and amiodarone were compared in isolated rabbit atrial muscle by microelectrode techniques. Four-week PO treatment with dronedarone or amiodarone increased action potential duration (APD90) (58 ± 4 ms control versus 69 ± 2 ms dronedarone, p < 0.01; 68 ± 3 ms amiodarone, p < 0.01 for a 100-mg/kg/d dose) and effective refractory period (49 ± 6 ms control versus 68 ± 4 ms dronedarone, p < 0.01; 63 ± 3 ms amiodarone, p < 0.01). The APD90 prolonged reverse rate-dependency. In contrast, acute superfusion with 10 &mgr;M dronedarone or amiodarone decreased APD90 (61 ± 6 ms control versus 53 ± 4 ms dronedarone, p < 0.05; 52 ± 6 ms amiodarone, p < 0.05), effective refractory period (50 ± 5 ms control versus 44 ± 4 ms dronedarone, p < 0.05; 43 ± 6 ms amiodarone, p < 0.05), and the maximum upstroke slope of the action potential (Vmax) (188 ± 9 V/s control versus 182 ± 11 V/s dronedarone p < 0.05; 182 ± 11 V/s amiodarone, p < 0.05). Thus, chronic and acute electrophysiologic effects of dronedarone on rabbit atrial muscle are similar to those of amiodarone, suggesting a similar potential against atrial arrhythmias.
Development of an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Workshop for Diabetes

This case describes the development of an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) workshop for people with diabetes, designed to help meet the acute need for quality psychological care for patients. There were multiple considerations in developing the quality improvement program: 1. The group nature of the program. Group environments enhance social modeling and provide support not possible in individual therapy. 2. Efficiency and resource management. This workshop does not duplicate resources already offered. 3. Time commitment of participants. The group consisted of four 90-minute sessions, which we believed would be an adequate amount of time to teach the desired ACT intervention based on previous work (1). 4. Reduction of stigmatization and increase in participation. We wanted to avoid the words “therapy,” “intervention,” and “group. ” The intervention was titled “Living a Vital Life with Diabetes” and was referred to as “A 4-Part Workshop Series. ” The program curriculum was adapted from a multitude of ACT sources (2–5). The ACT model has six core components that work together flexibly such that each core component is connected to the others. The six core components are 1 ) contact with the present moment, 2 ) values, 3 ) committed action, 4 ) self as context, 5 ) cognitive defusion, and 6 ) acceptance. The “acceptance” and “committed action” portions of ACT are often presented as follows: acceptance of the …
Current Technologies and Related Issues for Mushroom Transformation

Abstract Mushroom transformation requires a series of experimental steps, including generation of host strains with a desirable selective marker, design of vector DNA, removal of host cell wall, introduction of foreign DNA across the cell membrane, and integration into host genomic DNA or maintenance of an autonomous vector DNA inside the host cell. This review introduces limitations and obstacles related to transformation technologies along with possible solutions. Current methods for cell wall removal and cell membrane permeabilization are summarized together with details of two popular technologies, Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation and restriction enzyme-mediated integration.
Detailed Anatomy of the Cranial Cervical Ganglion in the Dromedary Camel (Camelus dromedarius)

The detailed morphology and topography of the cranial cervical ganglion (CCG) with its surrounding structures were studied in 10 sides of five heads of adult one‐humped camel to determine its general arrangement as well as its differences and similarities to other animals. The following detailed descriptions were obtained: (1) the bilateral CCG was constantly present caudal to cranial base at the rostroventral border of the occipital condyle over the caudolateral part of nasopharynx; (2) the CCG was always in close relations medially with the longus capitis muscle, rostrolaterally with the internal carotid artery, and caudally with the vagus nerve; and (3) the branches of the CCG were the internal carotid and external carotid nerves, jugular nerve, cervical interganglionic branch, laryngopharyngeal branch, carotid sinus branch and communicating branches to the vagus, and first spinal nerves. In conclusion, there was no variation regarding topography of dromedary CCG among the specimens, in spite of typical variations in number, and mainly in origin of nerve branches ramifying from the CCG. In comparative anatomy aspect, the close constant relations, and presence of major nerves (internal/external carotid and jugular nerves) of dromedary CCG exhibited a typical reported animal's pattern. However, the shape, structures lateral to the CCG, the origin and course pattern of external carotid and jugular nerves, the number of the major nerves branches, the communicating branches of the CCG to the spinal and cranial nerves, and the separation of most rostral parts of vagosympathetic trunk of dromedary were different from those of most reported animals. Anat Rec, 298:1479–1491, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Forest fire monitoring with multiple small UAVs

Frequent updates concerning the progress of a forest fire are essential for effective and safe fire fighting. Since a forest fire is typically inaccessible by ground vehicles due to mountainous terrain, small unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as a promising means of monitoring large forest fires. We present an effective UAV path planning algorithm utilizing infrared images that are collected on-board in real-time. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our path planning algorithm in realistic scenarios, we simulated the propagation of a forest fire with the EMBYR model. A new cooperative control mission concept is introduced where multiple low-altitude, short-endurance (LASE) UAVs are used for fire monitoring. By employing multiple UAVs, the effectiveness of the mission in terms of information update rate can be improved dramatically.
The Impact of Social Structure on Economic Outcomes

S ocial structure, especially in the form of social networks, affects economic outcomes for three main reasons. First, social networks affect the flow and the quality of information. Much information is subtle, nuanced and difficult to verify, so actors do not believe impersonal sources and instead rely on people they know. Second, social networks are an important source of reward and punishment, since these are often magnified in their impact when coming from others personally known. Third, trust, by which I mean the confidence that others will do the “right” thing despite a clear balance of incentives to the contrary, emerges, if it does, in the context of a social network. Economists have recently devoted considerable attention to the impact of social structure and networks on the economy; for example, see the economists’ chapters in Rauch and Casella (2001) (and the illuminating review essay of this volume by Zuckerman, 2003), as well as Dutta and Jackson (2003) and CalvoArmengol (2004). However, I focus here on sociologists’ contributions. Sociologists have developed core principles about the interactions of social structure, information, ability to punish or reward, and trust that frequently recur in their analyses of political, economic and other institutions. I begin by reviewing some of these principles. Building on these, I then discuss how social structures and social networks can affect economic outcomes like hiring, price, productivity and innovation.
A Procedure for the Determination of High-Density Lipoprotein Choline-Containing Phospholipids

A procedure for the determination of serum high-density lipoprotein choline-containing phospholipids is described. The choline-containing phospholipids represent 91-97% of the total serum and high-density lipoprotein phospholipids, which have previously been determined in relation to liver disease, neoplastic disorders, diabetes mellitus and atherosclerosis. The enzymatic assay is quick, simple and precise. No interference was found from the precipitating agents used to isolate the high-density lipoprotein fraction. Several serum samples were assayed for high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and choline-containing phospholipids. From this preliminary data there would appear to be a correlation between these two lipid classes.
Early creativity as a constraint on future achievement

Most organizations, particularly those in volatile environments, recognize the need to stimulate creativity in their workforce because new and useful ideas can be highly profitable (Shalley & Perry-Smith, 2001). It is not surprising, then, that employees or teams that manage to develop a highly creative idea are rewarded with greater pay, recognition, and status (Merton, 1968). However, a highly successful creative idea also may lead to frustration, unmet expectations, and failed attempts to replicate success by producing poor imitations of one’s early work. In other words, early creativity may constrain future achievement as people buckle under the weight of their past success. There is abundant evidence that success can stifle creativity from biographies of eminent novelists. For instance, Ralph Ellison never produced another novel after the Invisible Man despite years of broken promises (and book contracts) that never materialized. It would appear that Harper Lee did not even make such an attempt; she retired shortly after writing her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. This decision may have been a rational one on her part because even prolific writers seem to have trouble replicating early career success. For example, there was a 32-year gap between Norman Mailer’s iconic first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), and his next critical and commercial hit, The Executioner’s Song (1980). Furthermore, the constraining effects of creativity are not restricted to writers but may be a consequence of success in many fields. For instance, Art Fry, the scientist who invented the Post-It Note, also has been constrained by early success because all his subsequent inventions, such as the Post-It Flag, are incrementally related to the original Post-It idea. Almost from the inception of research on creativity, there has been a focus on the highly creative individual and an attempt to identify the traits (Helson, 1996) and social contexts (Amabile, 1983a, 1996) that give
Reader-Reported Influences on a Fifth Grader's Transaction With Extended Text

This study was designed to investigate the question of what goes on in a reader's mind as she transacts with extended text. It was a case study with one respondent, a ten year old girl. She reported, in writing, her thoughts during teacher read aloud, subsequent silent reading of the same text, and group discussions about the text. The findings support and flesh out Rosenblatt.s transactional theory, Vygotsky.s Zone of Proximal Development theory, and Lipman.s Philosophy for Children theory. Conclusions were that there are numerous sociocultural influences on a reader's transaction with text and that these influences must be taken into account in the classroom.
Perfect Simulation from Non-neutral Population Genetic Models : Variable Population Size and Population sub-division

We show how the idea of monotone coupling from the past can produce simple algorithms for simulating samples at a non-neutral locus under a range of demographic models. We specifically consider a biallelic locus, and either a general variable population size mode, or a general migration model for population subdivision. We investigate the effect of demography on the efficacy of selection, and the effect of selection on genetic divergence between populations.
Spencer: Interactive Heap Analysis for the Masses

Programming language-design and run-time-implementation require detailed knowledge about the programs that users want to implement. Acquiring this knowledge is hard, and there is little tool support to effectively estimate whether a proposed tradeoff actually makes sense in the context of real world applications. Ideally, knowledge about behaviour of "typical" programs is 1) easily obtainable, 2) easily reproducible, and 3) easily sharable. We present Spencer, an open source web service and APIframework for dynamic analysis of a continuously growing set of traces of standard program corpora. Users do not obtain traces on their own, but can instead send queries to the web service that will be executed on a set of program traces. Queries are built in terms of a set of query combinators that present a high level interface for working with trace data. Since the framework is high level, and there is a hosted collection of recorded traces, queries are easy to implement. Since the data sets are shared by the research community, results are reproducible. Since the actual queries run on one (or many) servers that provide analysis as a service, obtaining results is possible on commodity hardware. Data in Spencer is meant to be obtained once, and analysed often, making the overhead of data collection mostly irrelevant. This allows Spencer to collect more data than traditional tracing tools can afford within their performance budget. Results in Spencer are cached, making complicated analyses that build on cached primitive queries speedy.
Design and control of a variable footprint mechanism for holonomic omnidirectional vehicles and its application to wheelchairs

A reconfigurable mechanism for varying the footprint of a four-wheeled omnidirectional vehicle is developed and applied to wheelchairs. The variable footprint mechanism consists of a pair of beams intersecting at a pivotal point in the middle. Two pairs of bad wheels at the diagonal positions of the vehicle chassis are mounted, respectively, on the two beams intersecting in the middle. The angle between the two beams varies actively so that the ratio of the wheel base to the tread may change. Four independent servo motors driving the four ball wheels allow the vehicle to move in an arbitrary direction from an arbitrary configuration as well as to change the angle between the two beams and thereby change the footprint. The objective of controlling the beam angle is threefold. One is to augment static stability by varying the footprint so that the mass centroid of the vehicle may be kept within the footprint at all times. The second is to reduce the width of the vehicle when going through a narrow doorway. The third is to apparently change the gear ratio relating the vehicle speed to individual actuator speeds. First the concept of the varying footprint mechanism is described, and its kinematic behavior is analyzed, followed by the three control algorithms for varying the footprint. A prototype vehicle for an application as a wheelchair platform is designed, built, and tested.
Artifact Removal in Physiological Signals—Practices and Possibilities

The combination of reducing birth rate and increasing life expectancy continues to drive the demographic shift toward an aging population. This, in turn, places an ever-increasing burden on healthcare due to the increasing prevalence of patients with chronic illnesses and the reducing income-generating population base needed to sustain them. The need to urgently address this healthcare “time bomb” has accelerated the growth in ubiquitous, pervasive, distributed healthcare technologies. The current move from hospital-centric healthcare toward in-home health assessment is aimed at alleviating the burden on healthcare professionals, the health care system and caregivers. This shift will also further increase the comfort for the patient. Advances in signal acquisition, data storage and communication provide for the collection of reliable and useful in-home physiological data. Artifacts, arising from environmental, experimental and physiological factors, degrade signal quality and render the affected part of the signal useless. The magnitude and frequency of these artifacts significantly increases when data collection is moved from the clinic into the home. Signal processing advances have brought about significant improvement in artifact removal over the past few years. This paper reviews the physiological signals most likely to be recorded in the home, documenting the artifacts which occur most frequently and which have the largest degrading effect. A detailed analysis of current artifact removal techniques will then be presented. An evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of each of the proposed artifact detection and removal techniques, with particular application to the personal healthcare domain, is provided.
Integrating disparity and edge detection algorithms to autonomously follow linear-shaped structures at low altitude

One of the main requirements in enabling autonomous flight of Micro Aerial Vehicles is the ability of autonomous navigation. One possible solution to solve this navigation problem is to use vision-based line-following algorithms. Such vision-based algorithm could rely on the various linear structures, which are present in the human constructed environment. Edge detection and disparity estimation have proven to be strong algorithms for the detection of nearby objects. However, these detection algorithms have their weaknesses. The candidate lines found by both algorithms are input for the Probabilistic Hough Transform, which is used to select the best candidate and to determine a directional vector from this line. This paper is a survey for the experimental circumstances to fairly test both algorithms for a line-following task, which is one of the challenges of the Indoor Micro Aerial Vehicle competition.
Detection of [Ne II] Emission from Young Circumstellar Disks

We report the detection of [Ne II] emission at 12.81 μm in four out of the six optically thick dust disks observed as part of the FEPS Spitzer Legacy program. In addition, we detect a H I (7-6) emission line at 12.37 μm from the source RX J1852.3-3700. Detections of [Ne II] lines are favored by low mid-infrared excess emission. Both stellar X-rays and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) photons can sufficiently ionize the disk surface to reproduce the observed line fluxes, suggesting that emission from Ne+ originates in the hot disk atmosphere. On the other hand, the H I (7-6) line is not associated with the gas in the disk surface, and magnetospheric accretion flows can account for at most ~30% of the observed flux. We conclude that accretion shock regions and/or the stellar corona could contribute to most of the H I (7-6) emission. Finally, we discuss the observations necessary to identify whether stellar X-rays or EUV photons are the dominant ionization mechanism for Ne atoms. Because the observed [Ne II] emission probes very small amounts of gas in the disk surface (~10-6 MJ) we suggest using this gas line to determine the presence or absence of gas in more evolved circumstellar disks.
Iodine Intake of Slovenian Adolescents

Background: Slovenia is classified as being iodine-deficient. We recently found that Slovenian adolescents are iodine-sufficient (median urinary iodine concentration of the population 140 µg/l) and the prevalence of goiter is low (0.9%). The objective of this study was to evaluate iodine intake, the prevalence of marginal, low and excessive intake (<50, 50–100 and ≧300 µg/day), as well as the main sources of iodine in the diet of Slovenian adolescents. Methods: A cross-sectional study included 2,581 adolescents (1,415 girls, 1,166 boys, mean age ± SD 15.6 ± 0.5 years) representing 10% of 15-year-old Slovenian adolescents. Iodine intake was determined using a food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) in the whole population studied (n = 2,485) and weighted 3-day dietary protocols (3DPs) in a subgroup of participants (n = 191). Results: Median iodine intake determined from FFQ was 155.8 µg/day. There was no significant difference between genders. Marginal, low and excessive iodine intake was observed in 3.3, 20.3 and 11.3% of the adolescents, respectively. The major food sources of dietary iodine included table salt (39 % of the mean daily iodine intake), beverages (22%) and milk/milk products (19%). Conclusions: Dietary iodine intake in Slovenian adolescents is adequate, illustrating the effective salt iodization program.
Searching RNA motifs and their intermolecular contacts with constraint networks

MOTIVATION Searching RNA gene occurrences in genomic sequences is a task whose importance has been renewed by the recent discovery of numerous functional RNA, often interacting with other ligands. Even if several programs exist for RNA motif search, none exists that can represent and solve the problem of searching for occurrences of RNA motifs in interaction with other molecules. RESULTS We present a constraint network formulation of this problem. RNA are represented as structured motifs that can occur on more than one sequence and which are related together by possible hybridization. The implemented tool MilPat is used to search for several sRNA families in genomic sequences. Results show that MilPat allows to efficiently search for interacting motifs in large genomic sequences and offers a simple and extensible framework to solve such problems. New and known sRNA are identified as H/ACA candidates in Methanocaldococcus jannaschii. AVAILABILITY http://carlit.toulouse. inra.fr/MilPaT/MilPat.pl.