Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Epstein-Barr Virus LMP2A Transforms Epithelial Cells, Inhibits Cell Differentiation, and Activates Akt

ABSTRACT The Epstein-Barr virus LMP2A protein was expressed in a human keratinocyte cell line, HaCaT, and effects on epithelial cell growth were detected in organotypic raft cultures and in vivo in nude mice. Raft cultures derived from LMP2A-expressing cells were hyperproliferative, and epithelial differentiation was inhibited. The LMP2A-expressing HaCaT cells were able to grow anchorage independently and formed colonies in soft agar. HaCaT cells expressing LMP2A were highly tumorigenic and formed aggressive tumors in nude mice. The LMP2A tumors were poorly differentiated and highly proliferative, in contrast to occasional tumors that arose from parental HaCaT cells and vector control cells, which grew slowly and remained highly differentiated. Animals injected with LMP2A-expressing cells developed frequent metastases, which predominantly involved lymphoid organs. Involucrin, a marker of epithelial differentiation, and E-cadherin, involved in the maintenance of intercellular contact, were downregulated in LMP2A tumors. Whereas activation of the mitogen-activated protein kinase pathway was not observed, phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3-kinase)-dependent activation of the serine-threonine kinase Akt was detected in LMP2A-expressing cells and LMP2A tumors. Inhibition of this pathway blocked growth in soft agar. These data indicate that LMP2A greatly affects cell growth and differentiation pathways in epithelial cells, in part through activation of the PI3-kinase–Akt pathway.
Functionally Guided Retinal Protective Therapy for Dry Age-Related Macular and Inherited Retinal Degenerations: A Pilot Study.

PURPOSE To review the results of retinal function testing in eyes undergoing panmacular subthreshold diode micropulse laser (SDM) prophylaxis for chronic progressive retinal disease. METHODS The records of all patients undergoing prophylactic panmacular SDM for high-risk age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and inherited photoreceptor degenerations (IRDs) examined by pattern electroretinography (PERG), automated microperimetry (AMP), and Central Vision Analyzer (CVA) testing before and after treatment were reviewed. RESULTS A total of 158 consecutive eyes of 108 patients with AMD and 10 consecutive eyes of 8 patients with IRDs, evaluated both before and after SDM by PERG, were eligible for study. The IRD diagnoses included rod-cone degeneration (four eyes), cone-rod degeneration (three eyes), and Stargardt's disease (three eyes). In AMD, AMP was performed in 40 consecutive eyes, and CVA in the subsequent 73 consecutive eyes concurrent with PERG. The SDM treatment consisted of 1800 to 3000 confluent spots throughout the retina circumscribed by the major vascular arcades, including the fovea ("panmacular"). Testing was performed 1 week before and by 1 month after treatment. Results indicated that 149/168 eyes were improved by primary PERG measures: 139/158 eyes with AMD by PERG low-contrast scan Magnitude D (MagD)(μV)/Magnitude (Mag)(μV) ratios (P = 0.0001) and 10/10 eyes with IRDs by 24⁰ concentric ring scan MagD(μV)/Mag(μV) ratios (P = 0.002). Snellen visual acuity (VA) was unchanged, but macular sensitivity by AMP (P = 0.0439) and mesopic contrast VA by CVA (P = 0.006) were improved. There were no adverse treatment effects. CONCLUSIONS Our findings suggest a role for SDM as retinal protective therapy in chronic progressive retinal diseases. Pattern electroretinography enables (early, preventive) functionally guided, rather than (late, therapeutic) image-guided, disease management.
Digitally controlled autonomous Li-ion active cell balancing, using isolated resonant reset forward converter, for space applications

The Energy storage is required to support spacecraft loads during eclipse and also when the demand is more than power generation at any time. The most widely used energy storage technology is the battery, which stores energy in an electrochemical form. There is a need for highly efficient and long life battery systems for spacecrafts at various power levels. Li-ion based battery technology has better performance over traditional battery technologies. The battery system comprises of protection, management and balancing. Of these, balancing is most important that ensures the better performance and life of the battery system. A novel energy converter based active/non dissipative cell equalization method is implemented. This method comprises of digitally controlled resonant reset forward converter for individual Li-ion cells connected in series. This converter is used to transfer the energy from the higher voltage cell to the lower voltage cell. The main objective is to maintain cells in a battery at the same state of charge (SOC), and the voltage. The most innovative and attractive aspects of the system are efficient converter, filter and the discrete digital controller. This paper mainly concentrates on various control techniques that can be implemented to achieve effective cell balancing and to compensate the temperature, component aging and radiation effects for space applications. The performance of the system is inferred from the analysis of the simulation and experimental results.
Steroid Hormone Receptors in MCCLX, a Transplantable Lactogen-Dependent Mammary Tumor of the Rat

MCCLX is a transplantable rat mammary tumor which, for sustained growth, requires the elevated levels of circulating lactogen provided by pregnancy or the implantation of an estrogen pellet. High affinity receptors for estradiol, as well as for the glucocorticoids, dexamethasone and triamcinolone acetonide and the progestin R5020 were measured in the cytosols of these tumors. Estrogen binding capacities were significantly lower in the cytosols of tumors from estrogen pellet treated animals compared with tumors from pregnant animals. Ligand exchange assays demonstrated that nuclei of tumors from estrogen-treated rats contained 3-4 times the estrogen receptors but that there was a definite decrease in total estrogen binding capacity compared with tumors from pregnant rats. It was concluded that this lactogen-dependent tumor contains steroid receptors with molecular properties similar to those of normal target tissues, including estrogen receptors capable of nuclear translocation, the levels of which are modulated by the specific growth conditions.
Extended drill‐down operator: Digging into the structure of performance indicators

Performance measurement is the subject of interdisciplinary research on information systems, organizational modeling and decision support systems. The data cube model is usually adopted to represent performance indicators (PI) and enable flexible analysis, visualization and reporting. However, the major obstacles against effective design and management of PI monitoring systems are related to the facts that PIs are complex objects with an aggregate/compound nature. This often leads to unawareness of indicator semantics as well as of dependencies among indicators. In this work, we propose to enrich the data cube model with the formal description of the structure of an indicator given in terms of its algebraic formula and aggregation function. Such a model enables the definition of a novel operator, namely indicator drill‐down, which relies on formula manipulation functionalities and reasoning. Like the usual drill‐down, this operator increases the detail of a measure of the data cube by expanding an indicator into its components. Thus, the two notions of drill‐down are integrated, allowing a novel way of data exploration. As a proof‐of‐concept, an implementation of the approach is presented. The evaluation of the implementation on real and synthetic scenarios enlightens the effectiveness and the efficiency of the approach. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Study of interaction of cavitation zone with interphase boundary for the determination of efficient modes of ultrasonic intensification of physical-chemical processes

The article describes the model of the interaction of cavitation zone formed under the action of ultrasonic vibrations and interphase boundary of gas and liquid media, which spreads on solid surface in the form of liquid layer. It is shown that this interaction leads to the generation of capillary waves and consequently to the increase of efficiency of physical-chemical processes due to enlarged “liquid-gas” boundary. The analysis of the model allows determining square of interphase surface in dependence on amplitude, frequency of ultrasonic oscillations and liquid properties. It allows to determine the modes of ultrasonic action, which is necessary for maximum increase of contact surface area, in turn it leads to the growth of speed of the realization of physical-chemical processes based on surface interaction of dissimilar substances. As a result of the analysis it was determined that the most appropriate frequency of ultrasonic action is 60 kHz, at which increase of contact surface from 200 to 780 m2/m3 (at 5 mm thickness of liquid flm) can be achieved.
MUETSenses: A wireless sensor network based indoor environment monitoring system

A novel approach to the design of a Wireless Sensor network (WSN) based indoor environment monitoring system, which parses data in real time, on demand and periodically is presented. The aim of this system is to monitor indoor environment remotely, through an android application. The system comprises of Crossbow Iris motes, MTS 400 Sensor board, MIB 520 data accusation board designed by UC Berkley and Intel, and a base station to monitor environmental parameters such as light, pressure humidity and temperature. The system exploits mote view software to acquire data from the wireless sensors network. At the back-end, a database has been developed to load the data from mote view and the system pushes data from the database to an android application designed for the system. The system enables users to monitor the indoor environment parameters on their android smartphones.
800V lateral IGBT in bulk Si for low power compact SMPS applications

An 800V rated lateral IGBT for high frequency, low-cost off-line applications has been developed. The LIGBT features a new method of adjusting the bipolar gain, based on a floating N+ stripe in front of the P+ anode/drain region. The floating N+ layer enhances the carrier recombination at the anode/drain side of the drift region resulting in a very significant decrease in the turn-off speed and substantially lower overall losses. Switching speeds as low as 140ns at 25oC and 300ns at 125oC have been achieved with corresponding equivalent Rdson at 125oC below 90mΩ. cm2. A fully operational AC-DC converter using a controller with an integrated LIGBT+depletion mode MOSFET chip has been designed and qualified in plastic SOP8 packages and used in 5W, 65kHz SMPS applications. The device is fabricated in 0. 6μm bulk silicon CMOS technology without any additional masking steps.
Genetic alteration of the hepatitis C virus hypervariable region obtained from an asymptomatic carrier

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) genome shows extensive sequence diversity at 2 hypervariable regions (HVR1 and HVR2) of the putative envelope glycoprotein (gp70). We recently reported that the amino‐acid sequence of HVR1, but not of HVR2, underwent a striking mutation or mutated sequentially over a period of several months in patients with chronic hepatitis (CH). Here, we examined whether these genetic alterations in HVR1 occurred in an asymptomatic HCV carrier. The level of HCV RNA in serum was almost the same throughout the 4 time points sampled over 16 months. However, we found that the amino‐acid sequence of the HCV HVR1 from this asymptomatic carrier altered with time, as seen in patients with CH. Alterations of amino acids in the HVR1 were correlated with persistent HCV infection rather than with clinical symptoms. Sequence heterogeneity of HVR1 was not correlated with alanine aminotransferase (ALT) values or liver histological findings. The necessity of clinical follow‐up of HCV asymptomatic carriers is discussed.
Can Squat Jump Performance Differentiate Starters vs. Nonstarters in Division I Female Soccer Players?

Abstract Magrini, MA, Colquhoun, RJ, Sellers, JH, Conchola, EC, Hester, GM, Thiele, RM, Pope, ZK, and Smith, DB. Can squat jump performance differentiate starters vs. nonstarters in division I female soccer players? J Strength Cond Res 32(8): 2348–2355, 2018—Although soccer is predominately an endurance sport, high velocity movements may be an important indicator of athletic success. The purpose of this investigation was to establish whether squat jumps (SJs) can differentiate starters from nonstarters with a female collegiate division I soccer team. Eighteen female division I soccer athletes were separated into 2 groups: 9 starters (age: 19.5 ± 1.0; mass = 64.8 ± 11.5 kg; height = 167.5 ± 7.7 cm; games started = 18.2 ± 4.7; and minutes played = 1633.8 ± 478.2 minutes) and 9 nonstarters (age: 19.4 ± 1.4 years; mass = 63.3 ± 4.2 kg; height = 164.7 ± 6.8 cm; games started 0.7 ± 1.3; and minutes played 158.2 ± 269.3 minutes). Each athlete performed 3 maximal SJs at a starting knee angle of 110° without arm swing. Each participant's SJ height, mean power (MP), peak power (PP), mean velocity (MV), and peak velocity (PV) were measured during each attempt by a linear position transducer. No statistically significant differences (p ≥ 0.05) in MP and PP between the starters and nonstarters were observed. However, starters performed significantly better than nonstarters in SJ height (p = 0.002), MV (p = 0.025), and PV (p = 0.015). In addition, SJ height was strongly correlated with MV (r = 0.628) and PV (r = 0.647). These findings suggest that SJ height, MV, and PV may be important variables for discriminating differences between starters and nonstarters in division I female soccer athletes and a strong indicator of explosive performance.
Reversible Phosphorylation of Bcl2 following Interleukin 3 or Bryostatin 1 Is Mediated by Direct Interaction with Protein Phosphatase 2A*

Interleukin 3 (IL-3) stimulates the net growth of murine factor-dependent NSF/N1.H7 and FDC-P1/ER myeloid cells by stimulating proliferation and suppressing apoptosis. Recently, we discovered that Bcl2 is phosphorylated at an evolutionarily conserved serine residue (Ser70) after treatment with the survival agonists IL-3 or bryostatin 1, a potent activator of protein kinase (Ito, T., Deng, X., Carr, B., and May, W. S. (1997)J. Biol. Chem. 272, 11671–11673). In addition, an intact Ser70 was found to be required for Bcl2’s ability to suppress apoptosis after IL-3 withdrawal or toxic chemotherapy. We now show that phosphorylation of Bcl2 occurs rapidly after the addition of agonist to IL-3-deprived cells and can be reversed by the action of an okadaic acid (OA)-sensitive phosphatase. A role for protein phosphatase (PP) 2A as the Bcl2 regulatory phosphatase is supported by several observations: 1) dephosphorylation of Bcl2 is blocked by OA, a potent PP1 and PP2A inhibitor; 2) intracellular PP2A, but not PP1, co-localizes with Bcl2; 3) the purified PP2Ac catalytic subunit directly dephosphorylates Bcl2 in vitro in an OA-sensitive manner; 4) the purified PP2Ac catalytic subunit preferentially dephosphorylates Bcl2 in vitro compared with PP1 and PP2B; 5) reciprocal immunoprecipitation studies indicate a direct interaction between PP2A and hemagglutinin (HA)-Bcl2; and 6) treatment of factor-deprived cells with bryostatin 1 dramatically increases the association between PP2A and Bcl2. Increased association between Bcl2 and PP2A occurs 15 min after agonist stimulation when Bcl2 phosphorylation has peaked and immediately before dephosphorylation. An agonist-induced increased association of PP2A and Bcl2 fails to occur in cells expressing the inactive, phosphorylation-negative S70A Bcl2 mutant, which indicates that an intact Ser70 site is necessary and sufficient for the interaction to occur. Functional phosphorylation of Bcl2 at Ser70 is proposed to be a dynamic process regulated by the sequential action of an agonist-activated Bcl2 kinase and PP2A.
Latent Structure Discriminative Learning for Natural Language Processing

Natural language is rich with layers of implicit structure, and previous research has shown that we can take advantage of this structure to make more accurate models. Most attempts to utilize forms of implicit natural language structure for natural language processing tasks have assumed a pre-defined structural analysis before training the task-specific model. However, rather than fixing the latent structure, we may wish to discover the latent structure that is most useful via feedback from an extrinsic task. The focus of this thesis is on jointly learning the best latent analysis along with the model for the NLP task we are interested in. In this work, we present a generalized learning framework for discriminative training over jointly learned latent structures, and apply this to several NLP tasks. We develop a highaccuracy discriminative language model over shallow parse structures. We demonstrate an efficient algorithm for learning this grammaticality classifier by combining the input of multiple representations of the latent structures. Next, we set forth a framework for latent structure learning for statistical machine translation (SMT), in which the latent segmentation and alignment of the parallel training data inform the translation model. This model jointly optimizes segmentation and alignment for the translation task, novelly learning over latent representations of the input. We also propose a discriminative bilingual topic model over hierarchically structured latent topics, which allows for weighted contributions from more informative inputs and can be optimized for SMT. We apply this model to morphological disambiguation and domain adaptation for SMT. Finally, we give an investigation of large-scale distributed training for structured discriminative models and propose recommendations for distributed computational topologies.
Mutual coupling between longitudinal slots in cylindrical structures

We analyze coupling between longitudinal slots in general cylindrical structures. This is an extension of the normal procedure, to assume that waveguide slots are radiating into an infinite ground plane. The extended theory takes advantage of a Fourier transform along the cylindrical structure. We solve for the slot fields in the spectral domain by means of the moment method. The spectral admittance is inverse Fourier transformed and the reflection and transmission coefficients of the slotted waveguides are calculated. The analysis shows very good agreement with measurements.
Significant increase in young adults' snacking between 1977-1978 and 1994-1996 represents a cause for concern!

BACKGROUND Studies on children and adolescents suggest a large increase in the role of snacking; however, little is know about changes in the snacking behavior of young adults. METHODS USDA's nationally representative surveys from 1977-1978 to 1994-1996 are used to study snacking trends among 8,493 persons 19-29 years old. RESULTS Snacking prevalence increased from 77 to 84% between 1977-1978 and 1994-1996. The nutritional contribution of snacks to total daily energy intake went from 20 to 23%, primarily because energy consumed per snacking occasion increased by 26% and the number of snacks per day increased 14%. The mean daily caloric density (calorie per gram of food) of snacks increased from 1.05 to 1.32 calories. The energy contribution of high-fat desserts to the total calories from snacking decreased (22 to 14%), however, this food group remained the most important source of energy. The energy contribution of high-fat salty snacks doubled. Sweetened and alcoholic beverages remained important energy contributors. CONCLUSION This large increase in total energy and energy density of snacks among young adults in the United States may be contributing to our obesity epidemic.
Does the simultaneous tumor necrosis factor receptor 2, tumor necrosis factor promoter gene polymorphism represent a higher risk for alcoholic liver disease?

Background and aim Tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-&agr;) is a proinflammatory cytokine that seems to play a crucial role in the pathogenesis of alcoholic liver disease (ALD). TNF-&agr; exerts its effects by binding to specific receptors (TNFR); the polymorphism of TNFRII T587G has been associated with increased TNF apoptotic response and its presence may increase the risk to develop liver disease. The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of the TNF-&agr; G238A promoter and TNFRII polymorphisms, individually or simultaneously, in ALD. Methods TNF-&agr; G238A and TNFRII T587G polymorphisms were studied in 103 unrelated patients with ALD (biopsy confirmed or clinical evidence) and in 76 heavy drinkers without liver disease (NLD). Single nucleotide polymorphism gene was detected by a polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphisms method. All patients had, at least, a 5 year history of alcohol consumption greater than 80 g/day. Results TNF-&agr; G238A allele frequency was similar in both groups. TNFRII T587G allele frequency was slightly higher in the ALD group than in the NLD group (21 vs. 18%, P=NS). TNF-&agr; G238A and TNFRII T587G were simultaneously present in six ALD patients and in none of NLD patients (P=0.04). Conclusion Although individually there was no association between TNFRII T587G or TNF-&agr; G238A polymorphisms and ALD, this study suggests that the presence of both polymorphisms may enhance the susceptibility for ALD. TNF-&agr; G238A may increase TNF-&agr; production, which when associated with TNFRII T587G, can further exacerbate TNF-&agr; response leading to a greater risk of ALD.
Diagnosing Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease with Artificial Neural Networks using Health Expert Guidelines

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is characterized by airflow limitation and the spirometry is one of the tests that can be used to detect such disease. However there is a great problem related to the different ways of interpreting the values provided by spirometric devices, regarding different guidelines and reference values. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) can be used to help with tasks of diagnosis as that. This work presents the modeling and analysis of three ANN models to classify subjects with COPD, based on different sets of variables: a set of observed measures from spirometry and a set of interpreted values according to the guideline proposed by the American Thoracic Society. The results shown that it is possible to achieve a good accuracy in the diagnosis of COPD using ANNs, besides these features set conducted the COPD identification problem to a nearly linearly separable classification problem.