Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Challenges to the application of IPMC as actuators of planetary mechanisms

Ion-exchange polymer membrane metallic composites (IPMC) are one of the electroactive polymers (EAP) that were shown to have potential application as actuators. The recent introduction of perfluorocarboxylate-gold composite with tetra-n-butylammonium and lithium cations instead of sodium made the most significant improvement of the material's electroactivity. Under less than 3 volts, such IPMC material were shown to induce bending beyond a compete loop. The bending characteristics of IPMC offered an attractive actuation capability for a dust wiper in planetary applications and it was explored for the Nanorover's IR camera window of the MUSES-CN mission. This joint NASA and the Japanese space agency mission, is scheduled to be launched from Kagoshima, Japan, in January 2002, to explore the surface of a small near-Earth asteroid. The application of EAP at space conditions posed a great challenge due to the harsh operating conditions that are expected and the critical need for robustness and durability. Several issues that are critical to the application of IPMC were addressed including operation in vacuum and low temperatures, as well as the effect of the electromechanical characteristics of the IPMC on its actuation capability. Highly efficient IPMC materials, mechanical modeling, unique elements and protective coatings were introduced to enhance the applicability of this EAP material. However, critical issues were identified that hamper the transition of IPMC from being considered for practical applications at this stage.
Gene replacement in mice reveals that the heavily phosphorylated tail of neurofilament heavy subunit does not affect axonal caliber or the transit of cargoes in slow axonal transport

The COOH-terminal tail of mammalian neurofilament heavy subunit (NF-H), the largest neurofilament subunit, contains 44-51 lysine–serine–proline repeats that are nearly stoichiometrically phosphorylated after assembly into neurofilaments in axons. Phosphorylation of these repeats has been implicated in promotion of radial growth of axons, control of nearest neighbor distances between neurofilaments or from neurofilaments to other structural components in axons, and as a determinant of slow axonal transport. These roles have now been tested through analysis of mice in which the NF-H gene was replaced by one deleted in the NF-H tail. Loss of the NF-H tail and all of its phosphorylation sites does not affect the number of neurofilaments, alter the ratios of the three neurofilament subunits, or affect the number of microtubules in axons. Additionally, it does not reduce interfilament spacing of most neurofilaments, the speed of action potential propagation, or mature cross-sectional areas of large motor or sensory axons, although its absence slows the speed of acquisition of normal diameters. Most surprisingly, at least in optic nerve axons, loss of the NF-H tail does not affect the rate of transport of neurofilament subunits.
In the presence of danger: the extracellular matrix defensive response to central nervous system injury

Glial cells in the central nervous system (CNS) contribute to formation of the extracellular matrix, which provides adhesive sites, signaling molecules, and a diffusion barrier to enhance efficient neurotransmission and axon potential propagation. In the normal adult CNS, the extracellular matrix (ECM) is relatively stable except in selected regions characterized by dynamic remodeling. However, after trauma such as a spinal cord injury or cortical contusion, the lesion epicenter becomes a focus of acute neuroinflammation. The activation of the surrounding glial cells leads to a dramatic change in the composition of the ECM at the edges of the lesion, creating a perilesion environment dominated by growth inhibitory molecules and restoration of the peripheral/central nervous system border. An advantage of this response is to limit the invasion of damaging cells and diffusion of toxic molecules into the spared tissue regions, but this occurs at the cost of inhibiting migration of endogenous repair cells and preventing axonal regrowth. The following review was prepared by reading and discussing over 200 research articles in the field published in PubMed and selecting those with significant impact and/or controversial points. This article highlights structural and functional features of the normal adult CNS ECM and then focuses on the reactions of glial cells and changes in the perilesion border that occur following spinal cord or contusive brain injury. Current research strategies directed at modifying the inhibitory perilesion microenvironment without eliminating the protective functions of glial cell activation are discussed.
Bayesian nonparametric inference of latent topic hierarchies for multimodal data

Research on multimodal data analysis such as annotated image analysis is becoming more important than ever due to the increase in the amount of data. One of the approaches to this problem is multimodal topic models as an extension of latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). Symmetric correspondence topic models (SymCorrLDA) are state-of-the-art multimodal topic models that can appropriately model multimodal data considering inter-modal dependencies. Incidentally, hierarchically structured categories can help users find relevant data from a large amount of data collection. Hierarchical topic models such as hierarchical latent Dirichlet allocation (hLDA) can discover a tree-structured hierarchy of latent topics from a given unimodal data collection; however, no hierarchical topic models can appropriately handle multimodal data considering intermodal mutual dependencies. In this paper, we propose h-SymCorrLDA to discover latent topic hierarchies from multimodal data by combining the ideas of the two previously mentioned models: multimodal topic models and hierarchical topic models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model compared with several baseline models through experiments with two datasets of annotated images.
IMPLEMENTATION OF STRESS DEPENDENT BOUNDARY CONDITIONS IN FEM CODE FOR COUPLED PROBLEMS

The paper describes the implementation of stress dependent boundary conditions in the FEMTOOL code developed for numerical solution of coupled problems. Moving interface flows including breaking waves are considered. The performance of the numerical technique is validated by solving the dam break problem in the confined domain. The code development issues and the detailed investigation of parameters governing water separation from walls are presented.
Lipopolysaccharide structure required for in vitro trimerization of Escherichia coli OmpF porin

Deep rought mutants, which produce very defective lipopolysaccharides, are unable to export normal levels of porins into the outer membrane. In this study, we showed that lipopolysaccharides from such mutants were also unable to facilitate the trimerization, in vitro, of monomeric OmpF porin secreted by spheroplasts of Escherichia coli B/r. In contrast, lipopolysaccharides containing most or all of the core oligosaccharides were able to facilitate trimerization.
Evaluation of HBV DNA decay kinetics in patients containing both rtM204V/I mutant and wild‐type HBV subpopulations during tenofovir DF (TDF) monotherapy or combination therapy with emtricitabine (FTC)/TDF

Tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF) is recommended as treatment for chronic hepatitis B patients harboring lamivudine‐associated resistance mutations (LAM‐R, rtM204V/I ± rtL180M). This study evaluated the clinical response of rtM204V and rtM204I subpopulations to TDF by comparing their early viral load decay kinetics to wild‐type (WT) subpopulations in chronic hepatitis B patients harboring rtM204V/I prior to initiating TDF or emtricitabine (FTC)/TDF therapy. Allele‐specific PCR assays capable of detecting rtM204V or rtM204I subpopulations as low as 0.5% were developed and used to assess patient samples from a Phase 3b study evaluating TDF and FTC/TDF treatment in LAM‐R patients. Baseline samples (n = 280) were quantified for rtM204V/I subpopulations and rtM204V or rtM204I subpopulations were detected in 269/273 (98.5%) baseline samples with a range of 0.7% to >95%. On‐treatment analyses were conducted for seventeen patients (TDF, n = 8; FTC/TDF, n = 9) that harbored baseline WT and either rtM204V or rtM204I (no rtM204V/I mixtures) and HBV DNA ≥1,000 copies/ml at/after week 4. The median change in HBV DNA through week 12 for WT and rtM204V/I subpopulations was similar, −2.64 and −3.30 log10 copies/ml, respectively, with no significant difference between TDF and FTC/TDF treatment. In conclusion, rtM204V/I subpopulations demonstrate similar early HBV DNA decline kinetics to WT subpopulations during treatment with either TDF or FTC/TDF. These results demonstrate that TDF is similarly active against both WT and rtM204V/I subpopulations in vivo. J. Med. Virol. 86:1473–1481, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Spline-Kernelled Chirplet Transform for the Analysis of Signals With Time-Varying Frequency and Its Application

The conventional time-frequency analysis (TFA) methods, including continuous wavelet transform, short-time Fourier transform, and Wigner-Ville distribution, have played important roles in analyzing nonstationary signals. However, they often show less capability in dealing with nonstationary signals with time-varying frequency due to the bad energy concentration in the time-frequency plane. On the other hand, by introducing an extra transform kernel that matches the instantaneous frequency of the signal, parameterized TFA methods show powerful ability in characterizing time-frequency patterns of nonstationary signals with time-varying frequency. In this paper, a novel time-frequency transform, called spline-kernelled chirplet transform (SCT), is proposed. By introducing a frequency-rotate operator and a frequency-shift operator constructed with spline kernel function, the SCT is particularly powerful for the strongly nonlinear frequency-modulated signals. In addition, an effective algorithm is developed to estimate the parameters of transform kernel in the SCT. The capabilities of the SCT and parameter estimation algorithm are validated by their applications for numerical signals and a set of vibration signal collected from a rotor test rig.
Monolithic silicon bolometers.

A new type of bolometer detector for the millimeter and submillimeter spectral range is described. The bolometer is constructed of silicon using integrated circuit fabrication techniques. Ion implantation is used to give controlled resistance vs temperature properties as well as extremely low 1/f noise contacts. The devices have been tested between 4.2 and 0.3 K. The best electrical NEP measured is 4 × 10 - 1 6 W/Hz at 0.35 K between 1- and 10-Hz modulation frequency. This device had a detecting area of 0.25 cm2 and a time constant of 20 msec at a bath temperature of 0.35 K.
Iodine Concentration in Spectral CT: Assessment of Prognostic Determinants in Patients With Gastric Adenocarcinoma.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to use virtual monochromatic spectral CT to investigate the usefulness of iodine concentration (IC) and its correlation with clinicopathologically determined prognostic factors in gastric adenocarcinoma. SUBJECTS AND METHODS From June 2012 to March 2015, 34 patients with gastric adenocarcinoma underwent arterial and portal venous phase spectral CT. The ICs in the arterial and portal venous phases were calculated and then normalized with the aorta as normalized IC (NIC). The surgical specimen was evaluated with CD34 staining to determine microvessel density (MVD). The correlation between imaging results and clinicopathologic findings was investigated for histologic grading, lymph node metastasis, serosal involvement, distant metastasis, pathologic TNM stage, and MVD. RESULTS The mean arterial phase NIC value of tumors was 0.12 ± 0.03, portal venous phase NIC value was 0.39 ± 0.06, and MVD was 26.94 ± 7.87 vessels per high-power field (×400). Both arterial phase and portal venous phase NIC values were significantly higher in poorly differentiated gastric adenocarcinomas (p = 0.005) than in moderately differentiated tumors (p = 0.013). There was no significant correlation between NIC and serosal involvement or distant metastasis. There was significant correlation between the NIC and MVD in gastric adenocarcinoma (arterial phase NIC, p = 0.013; portal venous phase NIC, p = 0.001). However, neither the arterial nor the portal venous phase NIC of gastric adenocarcinoma had a significant relation to lymphatic metastasis or pathologic TNM stage. There was a significant difference between the high and low MVD groups with respect to portal venous phase NIC (p = 0.045). CONCLUSION NIC can serve as a useful predictor of angiogenesis and degree of differentiation of moderately and poorly differentiated gastric adenocarcinomas.
Animal models of ischemic stroke and their application in clinical research

This review outlines the most frequently used rodent stroke models and discusses their strengths and shortcomings. Mimicking all aspects of human stroke in one animal model is not feasible because ischemic stroke in humans is a heterogeneous disorder with a complex pathophysiology. The transient or permanent middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAo) model is one of the models that most closely simulate human ischemic stroke. Furthermore, this model is characterized by reliable and well-reproducible infarcts. Therefore, the MCAo model has been involved in the majority of studies that address pathophysiological processes or neuroprotective agents. Another model uses thromboembolic clots and thus is more convenient for investigating thrombolytic agents and pathophysiological processes after thrombolysis. However, for many reasons, preclinical stroke research has a low translational success rate. One factor might be the choice of stroke model. Whereas the therapeutic responsiveness of permanent focal stroke in humans declines significantly within 3 hours after stroke onset, the therapeutic window in animal models with prompt reperfusion is up to 12 hours, resulting in a much longer action time of the investigated agent. Another major problem of animal stroke models is that studies are mostly conducted in young animals without any comorbidity. These models differ from human stroke, which particularly affects elderly people who have various cerebrovascular risk factors. Choosing the most appropriate stroke model and optimizing the study design of preclinical trials might increase the translational potential of animal stroke models.
Nanocolloids : A Meeting Point for Scientists and Technologists

Nanocolloids: A Meeting Point for Scientists and Technologists presents an easy-to-read approach to current trends in nanoscale colloid chemistry, which offers relatively simple and economically feasible ways to produce nanomaterials. Nanocolloids have been the subjects of major development in modern technology, with many current and future applications. The book helps scientists and technologists to understand the different aspects of modern nanocolloid science. It outlines the underlying fundamental principles of nanocolloid science and covers applications ranging from emulsions to dispersions and suspensions. You will find details on experimental techniques and methods for the synthesis and characterization of nanocolloids, including the latest developments in nanoemulsions and nanoparticles. Edited by leading academics with over 10 years' experience in the field of colloid and surfactant science. Each chapter is authored by recognized experts in the field. Outlines the underlying fundamental science behind nanocolloids. Provides comprehensive coverage of current topics and potential applications in nanocolloid science. Presents a multidisciplinary approach to help chemical engineers, chemists, physicists, materials scientists and pharmacologists, form an in-depth understanding of nanocolloid science.
Durability of pulverised fuel ash (PFA) concrete exposed to acidic and alkali conditions

Pulverised Fuel Ash (PFA) is becoming an important component in concrete due to potentially improved properties such as workability, later age strength and durability. Concrete structures may be susceptible to acid attack due to exposure to acid rain, acidic soil or polluted water. Concrete structures exposed to high alkaline environments, in addition to the alkalinity level of the cement and aggregates, may promote alkali-silica reaction (ASR) leading to swelling and reduction in durability. This study looks into the durability properties of PFA incorporated concrete at various replacement levels when exposed to highly acidic and alkali conditions. Compressive strengths and water absorption tests were compared between concrete cured under normal conditions with concrete exposed to highly acidic and highly alkali conditions. All specimens exposed to acidic conditions showed significant decreases in mass and compressive strengths compared to specimens cured normally. Higher PFA replacement resulted in improved resistance to acid attack. All specimens exposed to alkali conditions showed minor increases in mass suggesting ASR occurring. Reductions in compressive strengths were found at lower replacement levels. At higher replacement levels, increases in compressive strengths were found, suggesting the possibility of increased pozzolanic reaction of the PFA due to the high alkalinity.
The Potential and Limitations of Automatic Sentence Extraction for Summarization

In this paper we present an empirical study of the potential and limitation of sentence extraction in text summarization. Our results show that the single document generic summarization task as defined in DUC 2001 needs to be carefully refocused as reflected in the low inter-human agreement at 100-word1 (0.40 score) and high upper bound at full text2 (0.88) summaries. For 100-word summaries, the performance upper bound, 0.65, achieved oracle extracts3. Such oracle extracts show the promise of sentence extraction algorithms; however, we first need to raise inter-human agreement to be able to achieve this performance level. We show that compression is a promising direction and that the compression ratio of summaries affects average human and system performance.
DNA methylation array analysis identifies profiles of blood-derived DNA methylation associated with bladder cancer.

PURPOSE Epigenetic alterations in tissues targeted for cancer play a causal role in carcinogenesis. Changes in DNA methylation in nontarget tissues, specifically peripheral blood, can also affect risk of malignant disease. We sought to identify specific profiles of DNA methylation in peripheral blood that are associated with bladder cancer risk and therefore serve as an epigenetic marker of disease susceptibility. METHODS We performed genome-wide DNA methylation profiling on participants involved in a population-based incident case-control study of bladder cancer. RESULTS In a training set of 112 cases and 118 controls, we identified a panel of 9 CpG loci whose profile of DNA methylation was significantly associated with bladder cancer in a masked, independent testing series of 111 cases and 119 controls (P < .0001). Membership in three of the most methylated classes was associated with a 5.2-fold increased risk of bladder cancer (95% CI, 2.8 to 9.7), and a model that included the methylation classification, participant age, sex, smoking status, and family history of bladder cancer was a significant predictor of bladder cancer (area under the curve, 0.76; 95% CI, 0.70 to 0.82). CpG loci associated with bladder cancer and aging had neighboring sequences enriched for transcription-factor binding sites related to immune modulation and forkhead family members. CONCLUSION These results indicate that profiles of epigenetic states in blood are associated with risk of bladder cancer and signal the potential utility of epigenetic profiles in peripheral blood as novel markers of susceptibility to this and other malignancies.
Patterns of quick retrieval and adaptive storage in semantic memory: evidences from complex word association networks

Feng Lin† Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing 210029, China and Key Research Institute of Philosophy and Social Science in Jiangsu Province, Institute of Linguistic Science and Technology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province 210097, China †Corresponding author. E-mail: peterduus_lin@hotmail.com; peterduuslin@gmail.com
Comparison between 3D-IR-BTFE Method and Conventional Method in Contrast Head MRI Examination

MRI using gadolinium contrast media is useful in diagnosis; however, nephrogenic systemic fibrosis is a serious side effect of gadolinium exposure. Moreover, it turns out that gadolinium deposits in the brain. This has escalated the necessity for a suitable method to use gadolinium contrast media. I developed a new imaging method that had excellent contrast. This study examined the usefulness of that new imaging method and found the method is highly effective.
How patients with long-term experience of living with irritable bowel syndrome manage illness in daily life: a qualitative study

Objectives Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a chronic, disabling and functional gastrointestinal disorder. Effective treatments are lacking. Self-care and coping with symptoms are considered important but little is known about what patients with IBS actually do to manage their illness. The aim of this study was to explore how patients with long-term experience of living with IBS perceive their situation and manage illness in daily life. Patients and methods The study adopted a qualitative approach – an interpretative phenomenological analysis. Twenty patients with IBS (16 women) with a mean age of 46 (27–74) years were interviewed. The mean IBS duration was 24 (7–65) years. Results Two themes emerged from the analysis: Healed but not cured and Take control of daily life. Healed but not cured is about mastering IBS. Even though the patients feel there has been an improvement, their abdomen is constantly present. The patients live with intermittent interaction between well-being and illness and construct explanations for the cause of the IBS symptoms. Taking control of daily life is about the activities the patients perform to master IBS symptoms: self-centredness, disciplined self-care, control over daily routines and finding social support. Conclusion These results suggest that the negative impact of IBS on daily life can be reduced. Over time, the patients had found effective strategies for symptom improvement, although this is a long-term learning process. The healthcare system could be more effective in supporting patients to find solutions to problems caused by IBS that are consistent with person-centred care and could be adopted as part of different supportive/educational interventions.