Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Secretory immunoglobulin A and G antibodies prevent adhesion of Escherichia coli to human urinary tract epithelial cells

The adhesion of Escherichia coli to human urinary tract epithelial cells was inhibited by commercial gamma globulin, the total immunoglobulin fraction of human breast milk and urine, as well as the isolated immunoglobulin G and secretory immunoglobulin A fractions of urine from patients with acute pyelonephritis. Urinary anti-O6 antibodies reduced the adhesion of several O6 strains. Absorption of antibodies to the lipopolysaccharide of the adhering strain markedly decreased the antiadhesive capacity of all the immunoglobulin preparations, whereas elimination of antibodies to the capsular polysaccharide antigen consistently had a small but not significant effect. When urine was absorbed with whole, live bacteria of the patients' infecting strains, the antiadhesive effect completely disappeared. Absorption with bacteria lacking pili only partially reduced this effect.
Eocene El Niño: Evidence for Robust Tropical Dynamics in the "Hothouse"

Much uncertainty surrounds the interactions between the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and long-term global change. Past periods of extreme global warmth, exemplified by the Eocene (55 to 35 million years ago), provide a good testing ground for theories for this interaction. Here, we compare Eocene coupled climate model simulations with annually resolved variability records preserved in lake sediments. The simulations show Pacific deep-ocean and high-latitude surface warming of ∼10°C but little change in the tropical thermocline structure, atmosphere-ocean dynamics, and ENSO, in agreement with proxies. This result contrasts with theories linking past and future “hothouse” climates with a shift toward a permanent El Niño–like state.
Tackling the GNSS jamming problem using a particle filter algorithm

GNSS Jammers are devices that generate RF noise in the carrier frequency of the GNSS (e.g.,1.57GHz for L1 GPS). Jamming behavior can be characterized by a sharp degradation in the SNR of the GNSS satellites. In this paper we suggest a Bayesian particle filter approach for jamming detection and localization using crowd-sourcing of Smart-Phones GNSS data. The presented algorithm computes in real-time a probabilistic map of the jammers' positions. Since a 2D histogram distribution space is generated, multiple jammers can be detected simultaneously. The presented algorithm can cope with various types of jammers - no pre-assumptions are made regarding the propagation pattern of the jammer. Experimental results showed that in less than two minutes and using only 3 smart-phones, our algorithm correctly detected a GNSS jammer within a 2 meters range in a Region-of-Interest (ROI) of 5000 m2.
Excess volatility of real exchange rates in the EMS: some evidence from structural VARs

This paper argues that the effectiveness of the exchange rate mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System (EMS) should be gauged by its impact on the monetary component of real exchange rate variability. Nominal and real shocks are separated using a bivariate structural VAR applied to real exchange rate data of the six original member countries participating in the ERM and a control group consisting of Britain and the United States. The findings suggest that monetary shocks have been an important source of real exchange rate variability and that the ERM has been successful in reducing the incidence of monetary shocks across its member countries prior to the EMS currency crises of 1992–93, while being less successful thereafter.
Pulse modulated radiofrequency exposure influences cognitive performance

Abstract Purpose: To investigate whether exposure to pulse modulated radiofrequency (PM RF) influences human cognitive performance, and whether it does so in a dose-dependent manner. Materials and methods: Thirty-six healthy adults participated in a randomized, double-blind, counterbalanced provocation study. Cognitive performance was assessed using a visual discrimination task and a modified Sternberg working memory task, which were calibrated to individual performance levels in a preliminary testing session. An sXh920 planar exposure system was used to generate a 920 MHz GSM-like signal, providing three conditions (peak-spatial SAR averaged over 10 g) of 0 W/kg (sham), 1 W/kg (low RF) and 2 W/kg (high RF). Results: A significant decrease in reaction time (RT) in the Sternberg working memory task was found during exposure compared to sham. This effect was not dose-dependent. Conclusions: Cognitive performance was shown to be faster under PM RF conditions, relative to sham, in a working memory task. While the majority of the literature has not found effects of PM RF exposure on cognitive performance, it is possible that the methodological improvements employed in the present study increased sensitivity, and thus the ability to detect potential effects.
Protein Kinase A Site-specific Phosphorylation Regulates ATP-binding Cassette A1 (ABCA1)-mediated Phospholipid Efflux*

ATP-binding cassette A1 (ABCA1) is a key mediator of cholesterol and phospholipid efflux to apolipoprotein particles. We show that ABCA1 is a constitutively phosphorylated protein in both RAW macrophages and in a human embryonic kidney cell line expressing ABCA1. Furthermore, we demonstrate that phosphorylation of ABCA1 is mediated by protein kinase A (PKA) or a PKA-like kinasein vivo. Through site-directed mutagenesis studies of consensus PKA phosphorylation sites and in vitro PKA kinase assays, we show that Ser-1042 and Ser-2054, located in the nucleotide binding domains of ABCA1, are major phosphorylation sites for PKA. ApoA-I-dependent phospholipid efflux was decreased significantly by mutation of Ser-2054 alone and Ser-1042/Ser-2054 but was not significantly impaired with Ser-1042 alone. The mechanism by which ABCA1 phosphorylation affected ApoA-I-dependent phospholipid efflux did not involve either alterations in ApoA-I binding or changes in ABCA1 protein stability. These studies demonstrate a novel serine (Ser-2054) on the ABCA1 protein crucial for PKA phosphorylation and for regulation of ABCA1 transporter activity.
No Middle Ground: How Informal Party Organizations Control Nominations and Polarize Legislatures

The new political machines fuel partisanship by supporting only candidates who follow the party's agenda. Despite concerns about the debilitating effects of partisanship on democratic government, in recent years political parties have gained strength in state governments as well as in Washington. In many cases these parties function as machines. Unlike machines of the past that manipulated votes, however, today's machines determine which candidates can credibly compete in a primary. Focusing on the history and politics of California, Seth E. Masket reveals how these machines evolved and how they stay in power by directing money, endorsements, and expertise to favored candidates, who often tend toward the ideological extreme. In a provocative conclusion, Masket argues that politicians are not inherently partisan. Instead, partisanship is thrust upon them by actors outside the government with the power to manipulate primary elections.
Complete removal of the spinal nerve sheath tumors. Surgical technics and results from a series of 30 patients.

OBJECTIVE Observe whether a microsurgical gross total removal (GTR) of a spinal nerve sheath tumors (SNSTs) is safe and decreases the tumor recurrence. METHOD We identify 30 patients with 44 SNSTs. RESULTS We operated upon 15 males and 15 females patients; mean age 40 years. GTR was achieved in 29 (96.6%) instances. Surgical mortality was 3.3% and the recurrence rate was 3.3%. The median follow-up time was 6.2 years. CONCLUSION The surgical approach used in this group of patients afford that the great majority of tumors could be totally removed with low mortality and low recurrence rates, proving to be safe and effective.
Teaching Business Strategy for an Emerging Economy

Abstract An Internet-based simulation about a business in an emerging economy is presented and described as a crucial ingredient for a business strategy course dealing with emerging economies. The development of the course took place in three separate classes where experiments were conducted regarding the key ingredients necessary for a course designed to teach Business Strategies for an Emerging Economy. The simulation, when coupled with today's dominant strategy paradigm, the Resource Based View, appears to yield a course design that attracts students while emphasizing the actual substance which is crucial in such a course.
Bismuth and Silver in Cosmetic Products: A Source of Environmental and Resource Concern?

Bismuth (Bi) and silver (Ag) are used in increasing amounts and are consequently being emitted from various sources and showing high accumulation rates in soils when sewage sludge is applied on arable land. This study aimed to analyze the amounts of Bi and Ag in three cosmetic products (foundation, powder, and eye shadow) in order to study the flows in urban wastewater in Stockholm, Sweden. Analyses showed that Bi was present in very high concentrations (7,000 to 360,000 milligrams per kilogram) in one third of the analyzed foundation and powder samples, whereas Ag concentrations all were below the detection limit. These cosmetic products explained approximately 24% of the measured total Bi amounts per year reaching the WWTP (wastewater treatment plant), making cosmetics a major Bi source, whereas for Ag the corresponding contribution was <0.1% of the measured annual Ag amounts. The results were roughly adapted for Europe and the United States, estimating the Bi flows from cosmetics to WWTPs. On a global scale, these flows correspond to a non‐negligible part of the world Bi production that, every year, ends up in sewage sludge, limiting the reuse of a valuable metal resource. From an environmental and resource perspective, foundations and powder products should be considered as significant sources of measured Bi amounts in sludge. This large Bi flow must be considered as unsustainable. For Ag, however, the three analyzed cosmetic products are not a significant source of the total Ag load to WWTPs.
Theorising Chinese urbanisation: A multi-layered perspective

Urbanisation in China and its rapid increase in recent decades as a result of industrialisation and globalisation are often conceived as a simplified process. Moreover, the speed of the present day process yields the impression that the traces of previous forms of urbanisation are erased for good. Both of these assumptions are challenged in this paper. The built environment resulting from this urbanisation process is to be conceived as a series of layers that reflect different modes of productions and related logics of production of space. Hence, we try to comprehend the spatial arrangement of the city, which can be thought of as a geological metaphor. The social groups that have to be sheltered in urban residential space also radically change in each of these periods. We proceed to analyse these layers and how they combine and interact over time with the concept of socio-spatial configuration, which denotes a precise type of residential environment related to a specific social group in the city. Chinese cities are made up of five types of urbanisation, reflected in five layers and their related socio-spatial configurations: the traditional, proto-globalisation, socialist, market-led and globalisation layers.
Classification and Experimental Analysis for Clone Detection Approaches in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of tiny sensor nodes that communicate with each other over wireless channels, often in a hostile environment where nodes can be captured and compromised. Consequently, an adversary may launch a clone attack by replicating the captured nodes to enlarge the compromised areas employing clones. Thus, it is critical to detect clone nodes promptly for minimizing their damage to WSNs. Recently, various clone detection schemes were proposed for WSNs, considering different types of network configurations, such as device types and deployment strategies. In order to choose an effective clone detection scheme for a given sensor network, the selection criteria play an important role. In this paper, we first investigate the selection criteria of clone detection schemes with regard to device types, detection methodologies, deployment strategies, and detection ranges. We then classify the existing schemes according to the proposed criteria. Simulation experiments are conducted to compare their performances. It is concluded that it is beneficial to utilize the grid deployment knowledge for static sensor networks; the scheme using the grid deployment knowledge can save energy by up to 94.44% in comparable performance (specifically in terms of clone detection ratio and the completion time), as compared to others. On the other hand, for mobile sensor networks, no existing approach works efficiently in reducing detection error rate.
Reconstruction of Binary Matrices Satisfying Neighborhood Constraints by Simulated Annealing

This paper considers the NP-hard problem of reconstructing binary matrices satisfying exactly-1-4-adjacency constraint from its row and column projections. This problem is formulated into a maximization problem. The objective function gives a measure of adjacency constraint for the binary matrices. The maximization problem is solved by the simulated annealing algorithm and experimental results are presented. Keywords—Discrete Tomography, exactly-1-4-adjacency, simulated annealing.
Frailty Transitions in Community Dwelling Older People.

BACKGROUND Frailty is a dynamic process with transitions over time. OBJECTIVES To examine frailty transitions and their relationship to utilization of health services. METHODS Frailty status using the Vulnerable Elders Survey (VES-13) was determined for 608 community-dwelling older people interviewed in a 2008 national survey and for 281 re-interviewed in 2014. The effect of frailty on death 6 years later was assessed using Cox proportional hazards analysis. Participants were divided into four groups based on their frailty transition. Demographic, functional and health characteristics were compared between the four groups using the Kruskal-Wallis and paired t-test. The independent association between the four frailty groups and health services utilization was assessed using logistic regression. RESULTS Between 2008 and 2014, 24% of 608 participants were lost to follow-up, 9% were non- frail, 37% were frail, and 30% died. The Cox ratio showed that 86% of the non-frail in 2008 were alive 6 years later vs. 52% of the frail (hazard ratio 3.5, confidence interval 2.2-5.4). Frailty transitions in the 281 participants interviewed at both time points revealed that 19% stayed non-frail, 22% became frail, 22% stayed frail and 37% became more frail. Becoming frail, staying frail or becoming more frail compared to staying non-frail was independently associated with a greater risk for requiring help on a regular basis, having a formal caregiver, and requiring home care. CONCLUSIONS Any transition away from the non-frail state increased the use of health care services. Interventions to target early transition to frailty should be encouraged.
Contribution of net hepatic glycogenolysis to glucose production during the early postprandial period.

Relative contributions of net hepatic glycogenolysis and gluconeogenesis to glucose production during the first 12 h of a fast were studied in 13 healthy volunteers by noninvasively measuring hepatic glycogen content using 13C nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Rates of net hepatic glycogenolysis were calculated by multiplying the change in liver glycogen content with liver volume determined by magnetic resonance imaging. Rates of gluconeogenesis were calculated as the difference between rates of glucose production determined with an infusion of [6,6-2H]-glucose and net hepatic glycogenolysis. At 6 P.M. a liquid mixed meal (1,000 kcal; 60% as glucose) was given, to which [2-2H]glucose was added to trace glucose absorption. Hepatic glycogen content was measured between 11 P.M. and 1 A.M. and between 3 and 6 A.M. At 11 P.M. the concentration was 470 mM and it decreased linearly during the night. The mean liver volume was 1.47 +/- 0.06 liters. Net hepatic glycogenolysis (5.8 +/- 0.8 mumol.kg body wt-1.min-1) accounted for, on average, 45 +/- 6% and gluconeogenesis for 55 +/- 6% of the rate of whole body glucose production (12.6 +/- 0.6 mumol.kg body wt-1.min-1). In conclusion, this study shows that, even early in the phase of the postabsorptive period when liver glycogen stores are maximal, gluconeogenesis contributes approximately 50% to hepatic glucose production.
Reciprocal Regulation of Anaerobic and Aerobic Cell Wall Mannoprotein Gene Expression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

ABSTRACT The DAN/TIR genes encode nine cell wall mannoproteins in Saccharomyces cerevisiae which are expressed during anaerobiosis (DAN1,DAN2, DAN3, DAN4,TIR1, TIR2, TIR3,TIR4, and TIP1). Most are expressed within an hour of an anaerobic shift, but DAN2 andDAN3 are expressed after about 3 h. At the same time, CWP1 and CWP2, the genes encoding the major mannoproteins, are down-regulated, suggesting that there is a programmed remodeling of the cell wall in which Cwp1 and Cwp2 are replaced by nine anaerobic counterparts. TIP1,TIR1, TIR2, and TIR4 are also induced during cold shock. Correspondingly, CWP1 is down-regulated during cold shock. As reported elsewhere, Mox4 is a heme-inhibited activator, and Mot3 is a heme-induced repressor of theDAN/TIR genes (but not of TIP1). We show that CWP2 (but not CWP1) is controlled by the same factors, but in reverse fashion—primarily by Mot3 (which can function as either an activator or repressor) but also by Mox4, accounting for the reciprocal regulation of the two groups of genes. Disruptions of TIR1, TIR3, orTIR4 prevent anaerobic growth, indicating that each protein is essential for anaerobic adaptation. The Dan/Tir and Cwp proteins are homologous, with the greatest similarities shown within three subgroups: the Dan proteins, the Tip and Tir proteins, and, more distantly, the Cwp proteins. The clustering of homology corresponds to differences in expression: the Tip and Tir proteins are expressed during hypoxia and cold shock, the Dan proteins are more stringently repressed by oxygen and insensitive to cold shock, and the Cwp proteins are oppositely regulated by oxygen and temperature.
Deterministic CTL query solving

Temporal logic queries provide a natural framework to extend the realm of model checking from mere verification of engineers' specifications to computing previously unknown temporal properties of a system. Formally, temporal logic queries are patterns of temporal logic specifications which contain placeholders for subformulas; a solution to a temporal logic query is an instantiation which renders the specification true. In this paper, we investigate temporal logic queries that can be solved deterministically, i.e., solving such queries can be reduced in a deterministic manner to solving their subqueries at appropriate system states. We show that this kind of determinism is intimately related to the notion of intermediate collecting queries studied by the authors in previous work. We describe a large class of deterministically solvable CTL queries and devise a BDD-based symbolic algorithm for this class.
Post–Glucose Load Measures of Insulin Resistance and Prognosis of Nondiabetic Patients With Ischemic Stroke

Background Insulin resistance is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular events in the general population. This study aimed to estimate the association between post–glucose load measures of insulin resistance and prognosis of nondiabetic patients with ischemic stroke. Methods and Results Data were derived from the ACROSS‐China (Abnormal Glucose Regulation in Patients with Acute Stroke across China) registry. Patients with ischemic stroke without a history of diabetes mellitus were included. Two post–glucose load measures of insulin sensitivity, the insulin sensitivity indices ISI(composite) and the ISI 0,120, were calculated. Outcomes included stroke recurrence, all‐cause death, and poor functional outcome at 12 months. Among 1203 patients, 63.3% were male with an average age of 62.1 years. At 12 months, 168 (14.4%) patients had recurrent stroke, 111 (9.2%) had died, and 288 (24.4%) had poor outcome. After adjustment for potential covariates, the first quartile of the ISI(composite) was associated with increased 12‐month stroke recurrence (adjusted hazard ratio 2.02, 95% CI 1.28–3.18, P=0.003), death (adjusted hazard ratio 2.78, 95% CI 1.59–4.86, P<0.001), and poor outcome (adjusted odds ratio 2.67, 95% CI 1.69–4.21, P<0.001) compared with the fourth quartile. Similar results were observed for the ISI 0,120 but with a larger magnitude of association. Using a multivariable regression model with restricted cubic spline, we found an L‐shaped association between the insulin sensitivity indices and the risk of each end point. Conclusions In this large‐scale registry, post–glucose load measures of insulin resistance with the ISI(composite) and the ISI 0,120 were associated with 12‐month poor outcomes of nondiabetic patients with ischemic stroke.
Environmental effects evaluation of urban distribution network planning based on a comprehensive model

Based on the in-depth analysis of urban network's characteristics, a comprehensive model composed of an evaluation index system and a novel evaluation methodology is described for studying environmental effects that planning schemes might cause if they were implemented. The novel model focuses on various typical perspectives, such as pollution emissions, carbon emissions and environmental coordination into consideration in a quantitative way. Unlike traditional evaluation approaches which largely depend on the preference of decision makers, the proposed decision-making approach integrates multiple attribute tradeoff analysis with fuzzy satisfying analysis. In this way, it is capable of determining the most robust plan in an objective sense. The simulation results of a real urban network in China are presented and discussed, illustrating the suitability of the proposed model to the urban power grid planning evaluation and its superiority in operation. The model provides useful guidance for the urban power grid going towards an eco-friendly condition in the future.