Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distinct Cortical Areas for Names of Numbers and Body Parts Independent of Language and Input Modality

Some models of word comprehension postulate that the processing of words presented in different modalities and languages ultimately converges toward common cerebral systems associated with semantic-level processing and that the localization of these systems may vary with the category of semantic knowledge being accessed. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate this hypothesis with two categories of words, numerals, and body parts, for which the existence of distinct category-specific areas is debated in neuropsychology. Across two experiments, one with a blocked design and the other with an event-related design, a reproducible set of left-hemispheric parietal and prefrontal areas showed greater activation during the manipulation of topographical knowledge about body parts and a right-hemispheric parietal network during the manipulation of numerical quantities. These results complement the existing neuropsychological and brain-imaging literature by suggesting that within the extensive network of bilateral parietal regions active during both number and body-part processing, a subset shows category-specific responses independent of the language and modality of presentation.
High-resolution helix orientation in actin-bound myosin determined with a bifunctional spin label

Significance The interaction between actin and myosin is responsible for driving a vast array of essential biological processes, including the production of force in contracting muscle. However, the structural behavior of the two proteins in complex is not well understood, because high-resolution atomic models are not yet available by traditional methods. We use a bifunctional spin label and site-directed electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy to determine orientations of individual α-helices within the complex. We thus quantify for the first time, to our knowledge, structural changes within the motor domain of actin-bound myosin on nucleotide binding and dissociation. Our results provide valuable insight into the mechanism of muscle contraction while showcasing a method with wide applicability to other oriented biological systems. Using electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) of a bifunctional spin label (BSL) bound stereospecifically to Dictyostelium myosin II, we determined with high resolution the orientation of individual structural elements in the catalytic domain while myosin is in complex with actin. BSL was attached to a pair of engineered cysteine side chains four residues apart on known α-helical segments, within a construct of the myosin catalytic domain that lacks other reactive cysteines. EPR spectra of BSL-myosin bound to actin in oriented muscle fibers showed sharp three-line spectra, indicating a well-defined orientation relative to the actin filament axis. Spectral analysis indicated that orientation of the spin label can be determined within <2.1° accuracy, and comparison with existing structural data in the absence of nucleotide indicates that helix orientation can also be determined with <4.2° accuracy. We used this approach to examine the crucial ADP release step in myosin’s catalytic cycle and detected reversible rotations of two helices in actin-bound myosin in response to ADP binding and dissociation. One of these rotations has not been observed in myosin-only crystal structures.
Fast extraction of tubular and tree 3D surfaces with front propagation methods

We present a new fast approach for surface segmentation of thin structures, like vessels and vascular trees, based on Fast Marching and Level Sets methods. Fast Marching allows segmentation of tubular structures inflating a "long balloon" from a user given single point. However, when the tubular shape is rather long, the front propagation may blow up through the boundary of the desired shape close to the starting point. Our contribution is focused on a way to go on front propagation only on the actually moving front and freezing other points. We demonstrate the ability to build a fast and accurate segmentation for those tubular and We structures. We also develop a useful stopping criterion for the causal front propagation. We illustrate our algorithms by applications on the segmentation of vessels in 3D medical images.
Dynamic Verification of SystemC with Statistical Model Checking

Many embedded and real-time systems have a inherent probabilistic behaviour (sensors data, unreliable hardware,.). In that context, it is crucial to evaluate system properties such as “the probability that a particular hardware fails”. Such properties can be evaluated by using probabilistic model checking. However, this technique fails on models representing realistic embedded and real-time systems because of the state space explosion. To overcome this problem, we propose a verification framework based on Statistical Model Checking. Our framework is able to evaluate probabilistic and temporal properties on large systems modelled in SystemC, a standard system-level modelling language. It is fully implemented as an extension of the Plasma-lab statistical model checker. We illustrate our approach on a multi-lift system case study.
List Detection for Overloaded Receivers with a Linear Array

We consider an overloaded wireless multiuser communication system where the number of transmitters exceeds the number of receive antennas. Each user transmits data through a single antenna to a receiver with an M-element uniform linear array. The received signals are combined using maximum ratio diversity combining. Severe co-channel interference (CCI) occurs in such a system due to multiple co-channel users. We present an iterative parallel multiuser detector with list feedback of the best estimates to separate and detect the user symbols. CCI is estimated in the detector using a novel list-based parallel interference cancellation scheme. Simulations show that our algorithm approximates joint-maximum likelihood detection at lower complexity and is well suited for practical application.
Addressing useless test data in core-based system-on-a-chip test

This paper analyzes the test memory requirements for core-based systems-on-a-chips and identifies useless test data as one of the contributors to the total amount of test data. The useless test data comprises the padding bits necessary to compensate for the difference between the lengths of different chains in multiple scan chain designs. Although useless test data does not represent any relevant test information, it is often unavoidable, and leads to the tradeoff between the test bus width and the volume of test data in multiple scan chain-based cores. Ultimately, this tradeoff influences the test access mechanism design algorithms leading to solutions that have either short test time or low volume of test data. Therefore, in this paper, a novel test methodology is proposed which, by dividing the wrapper scan chains (WSCs) into two or more partitions, and by exploiting automated test equipment memory management features, reduces the amount of useless test data. Extensive experimental results using ISCAS'89 and ITC'02 benchmark circuits are provided to analyze the implications of the number of WSCs in the partition, and the number of partitions on the proposed methodology.
Molecular Mechanisms Linking High Dose Medroxyprogesterone with HIV-1 Risk

Background Epidemiological studies suggest that medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA) may increase the risk of HIV-1. The current studies were designed to identify potential underlying biological mechanisms. Methods Human vaginal epithelial (VK2/E6E7), peripheral blood mononuclear (PBMC), and polarized endometrial (HEC-1-A) cells were treated with a range of concentrations of MPA (0.015-150 μg/ml) and the impact on gene expression, protein secretion, and HIV infection was evaluated. Results Treatment of VK2/E6E7 cells with high doses (>15μg/ml] of MPA significantly upregulated proinflammatory cytokines, which resulted in a significant increase in HIV p24 levels secreted by latently infected U1 cells following exposure to culture supernatants harvested from MPA compared to mock-treated cells. MPA also increased syndecan expression by VK2/E6E7 cells and cells treated with 15 μg/ml of MPA bound and transferred more HIV-1 to T cells compared to mock-treated cells. Moreover, MPA treatment of epithelial cells and PBMC significantly decreased cell proliferation resulting in disruption of the epithelial barrier and decreased cytokine responses to phytohaemagglutinin, respectively. Conclusion We identified several molecular mechanisms that could contribute to an association between DMPA and HIV including proinflammatory cytokine and chemokine responses that could activate the HIV promoter and recruit immune targets, increased expression of syndecans to facilitate the transfer of virus from epithelial to immune cells and decreased cell proliferation. The latter could impede the ability to maintain an effective epithelial barrier and adversely impact immune cell function. However, these responses were observed primarily following exposure to high (15-150 μg/ml) MPA concentrations. Clinical correlation is needed to determine whether the prolonged MPA exposure associated with contraception activates these mechanisms in vivo.
Bayesian Spatiotemporal Inference in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Summary. Mapping of the human brain by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is an emerging field in cognitive and clinical neuroscience. Current techniques to detect activated areas of the brain mostly proceed in two steps. First, conventional methods of correlation, regression, and time series analysis are used to assess activation by a separate, pixelwise comparison of the fMRI signal time courses to the reference function of a presented stimulus. Spatial aspects caused by correlations between neighboring pixels are considered in a separate second step, if at all. The aim of this article is to present hierarchical Bayesian approaches that allow one to simultaneously incorporate temporal and spatial dependencies between pixels directly in the model formulation. For reasons of computational feasibility, models have to be comparatively parsimonious, without oversimplifying. We introduce parametric and semiparametric spatial and spatiotemporal models that proved appropriate and illustrate their performance applied to visual fMRI data.
Gravimetric Determination of Amylase-Treated Neutral Detergent Fiber in Feeds with Refluxing in Beakers or Crucibles : Collaborative Study

As an important constituent of animal feeds, fiber represents the portion of feeds that is bulky and difficult to digest. The neutral detergent fiber (NDF) method, developed over 30 years ago, is the method of choice for measuring total fiber in forages and other feeds. Several modifications that were made to improve its general applicability to all feeds and others developed in individual laboratories often resulted in variability among laboratories in measuring NDF. The amylase-treated NDF (aNDF) method, therefore, was developed as an accurate and precise method of measuring total insoluble fiber in feeds. A collaborative study was conducted to evaluate the repeatability and reproducibility of the aNDF method over the full range of animal feed materials. Twelve laboratories representing research, feed company, regulatory, and commercial feed testing laboratories analyzed 11 materials as blind duplicates. The materials represented feed matrixes, including animal products; high-protein, high-fat, and high-pectin feeds; oil seeds; grains; heated by-product feeds; and legume and grass hays and silages. Materials selected varied in chemical composition and contained 0–90 % aNDF, 1–16% ash, 1–20% crude fat, 1–40% crude protein, and 0–50 % starch. Correcting results for changes in blanks and reporting results as ash-free aNDF organic matter (aNDFom) improved the repeatability and reproducibility of results when aNDF was <25 % . The within-laboratory repeatability standard deviation (s r) for percentage aNDFom in feeds varied from 0.21 to 1.82 and among-laboratory reproducibility standard deviation (s R) varied from 0.37 to 2.24. The HORRAT was <2 for all materials except feed materials containing >10 % fat. However, standard deviations of repeatability and reproducibility for feeds with >10% fat were similar to those of other materials. It is recommended that the aNDF method be accepted for Official First Action status.
A role for Sar1 and ARF1 GTPases during Golgi biogenesis in the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma brucei

Photoactivation and live-cell imaging experiments in the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma brucei reveal that the existing Golgi supplies components directly to the newly forming Golgi during Golgi biogenesis. This process requires the GTPases Sar1 and ARF1 and is sensitive to the GTP analogue GTPγS.
VISUALIZATION, RECONSTRUCTION, AND INTEGRATION OF NEURONAL STRUCTURES IN DIGITAL BRAIN ATLASES

Brain atlases are used in neuroanatomy to define the spatial layout of neuronal structures. Their digital variant can serve as a database and common reference frame for integrating data from different biological experiments. This article presents an overview of methods for three-dimensional visualization of neuroanatomical image data, reconstructing neuronal structures from image data, creating digital brain atlases, and registering data in an atlas. This enables analysis of spatial relations between individual structures imaged in different experiments as well as between these structures and the atlas.
ON THE ROLE OF TRAIT-RELATED CHARACTERISTICS IN INTERROGATIVE SUGGESTIBILITY: AN EXAMPLE FROM ESTONIA

The primary goal of this paper is to investigate whether interrogative sug- gestibility is related to certain personality traits in an Estonian sample of subjects (N = 61; 20 men and 41 women; mean age = 20.6 years; SD = 2.98). Results show that the means and standard deviations for different suggestibility scores in a sample of the Estonian population were all lower compared with those obtained in other European countries (UK, Poland, Iceland, Finland). No correlation of interrogative suggestibility with Big Five personality variables or state and trait anxiety was found. The only correlation that proved to be significant was between yield2 and shift of interrogative suggestibility and low self-esteem.
What Trends in Chinese Social Media

There has been a tremendous rise in the growth of online social networks all over the world in recent times. While some networks like Twitter and Facebook have been well documented, the popular Chinese microblogging social network Sina Weibo has not been studied. In this work, we examine the key topics that trend on Sina Weibo and contrast them with our observations on Twitter. We nd that there is a vast dierence in the content shared in China, when compared to a global social network such as Twitter. In China, the trends are created almost entirely due to retweets of media content such as jokes, images and videos, whereas on Twitter, the trends tend to have more to do with current global events and news stories.
Dynamic Revenue Management for Flows in Packet Networks

In a packet network with several classes of service (CoS), classes of packet flows are characterised by their quality of service (QoS) and their prices. Several studies exist where the QoS of the classes is studied when the prices are given, as well as studies where the QoS is given and the optimal prices are calculated. In this paper, we propose an approach where the prices and the QoS offered to each class depend on the current congestion level. We calculate the optimal decisions in terms of income maximisation using dynamic programming. Simulations results show that our approach has up to approximately 24% better results than the existing ones in terms of income for the provider.
A Novel Methodologyof Router-To-ASMapping inspired by Community Discovery

In the last decade many works has been done on the Internet topology at router or autonomous system (AS) level. As routers is the essential composition of ASes while ASes dominate the behavior of their routers. It is no doubt that identifying the affiliation between routers and ASes can let us gain a deeper understanding on the topology. However, the existing methods that assign a router to an AS just based on the origin ASes of its IP addresses, which does not make full use of information in our hand. In this paper, we propose a methodology to assign routers to their owner ASes based on community discovery tech. First, we use the origin ASes information along with router-pairs similarities to construct a weighted router level topology, secondly, for enormous topology data (more than 2M nodes and 19M edges) from CAIDA ITDK project, we propose a fast hierarchy clustering which time and space complex are both linear to do ASes community discovery, last we do router-to-AS mapping based on these ASes communities. Experiments show that combining with ASes communities our methodology discovers, the best accuracy rate of router-to-AS mapping can reach to 82.62%, which is drastically high comparing to prior works that stagnate on 65.44%.
Tracing disease gene(s) in non-syndromic clefts of orofacial region: HLA haplotypic linkage by analyzing the microsatellite markers: MIB, C1_2_5, C1_4_1, and C1_2_A

BACKGROUND: Cleft lip with or without cleft palate (CL/P) is the most frequent craniofacial malformation seen in man. The etiology of CL/P is complex involving both genetic and epigenetic (environmental) factors, and the genes play an almost deterministic role in the normal development of craniofacial structures. This study was aimed at ascertaining the association of HLA microsatellites in CL/P patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Case DNA was obtained from 76 patients (40M and 36 F, average age 7.8 years, range 1-16 years). Unaffected individuals from the same geographical area without population mixing included as controls (n=154, 76 M and 78 F, average age 8.2 years, range 2-17 years). All DNA samples were purified from peripheral blood by standard techniques. RESULTS: Four microsatellites were compared in this case-control study. C1_2_5 locus was the most polymorphic marker with 15 observed alleles while C1_4_1 had the least number of alleles. Three of the four markers viz MIB,C1_4_1 and C1_2_5 showed a significant association of microsatellite alleles with CL/P. Five alleles (MIB_326,332,350; C1_4_1 – 213 and C1_2_5-204) were seen with an increased frequency among the test samples, whereas two alleles (C1-4_1_217, and C1_2_5_196) had an increased frequency among the control samples. One allele (C1-4-1-209) had an increased frequency in patient group but was not observed in the controls. CONCLUSION: The role of HLA complex in the pathogenesis of CL/P is speculative and has not been established so far. The result of this study shows that a few alleles have an increased frequency of expression in the diseased group which suggests that these alleles may predispose the individuals to clefting. This finding may be beneficial to aid in early diagnosis and plan intervention strategies.
Introducing a Design of a Product Creation System for IPTV Systems

It is well known that the content management system (CMS) and the broadcast management system (BMS) are the most essential components of an IPTV system. An IPTV system retrieves container files from the CMS and delivers them to the end users through the BMS. Therefore, most of research works about IPTV systems handle container files. However, a container is a mix of video, audio, computer graphic, text and metadata. A container that is created for sale is a product. In this paper, we design and implement a product creation component for IPTV systems.
A randomized sorting algorithm on the BSP model

The authors present a new randomized sorting algorithm on the bulk-synchronous parallel (BSP) model. The algorithm improves upon the parallel slack of previous algorithms to achieve optimality. Tighter probabilistic bounds are also established. It uses sample sorting and utilizes recently introduced search algorithms for a class of data structures on the BSP model. Moreover the methods are within a 1+o(1) multiplicative factor of the respective sequential methods in terms of speedup for a wide range of the BSP parameters.
Community detection in opportunistic networks using memory-based cognitive heuristics

In a pervasive networking scenario like the Cyber-Physical World convergence, personal mobile devices must assist their users in analysing data available in both the physical and the virtual world, to help them discovering the features of the environment where they move. Mobile Social Networking applications are an example of Cyber-Physical applications, supporting users in their interactions in both worlds (e.g., during physical encounters, as well as during online interactions). It is very important, therefore, that nodes autonomously detect latent and dynamically changing social structures, resulting from common mobility patterns of users and physical co-location events. To this end, in this paper we propose a novel dynamic and decentralised community detection approach, whereby the nodes' behaviour is inspired by that of their human users, if they were exposed to the about physical encounters with other users, and would have to perform the same detection task. Specifically, we use cognitive heuristics, which are simple, low resource-demanding, yet effective, models of the human brain cognitive processes. At each node, the approach proposed in this paper, starting from the observed contact patterns with other nodes, estimates the strength of social relationships and detects social communities accordingly. An initial simulation evaluation shows that nodes are able to correctly identify the social communities that exist in their environment and to efficiently track change of membership due to modifications of the users' movement patterns.
Activation of the renal Na+:Cl− cotransporter by angiotensin II is a WNK4-dependent process

Pseudohypoaldosteronism type II is a salt-sensitive form of hypertension with hyperkalemia in humans caused by mutations in the with-no-lysine kinase 4 (WNK4). Several studies have shown that WNK4 modulates the activity of the renal Na+Cl− cotransporter, NCC. Because the renal consequences of WNK4 carrying pseudoaldosteronism type II mutations resemble the response to intravascular volume depletion (promotion of salt reabsorption without K+ secretion), a condition that is associated with high angiotensin II (AngII) levels, it has been proposed that AngII signaling might affect WNK4 modulation of the NCC. In Xenopus laevis oocytes, WNK4 is required for modulation of NCC activity by AngII. To demonstrate that WNK4 is required in the AngII-mediated regulation of NCC in vivo, we used a total WNK4-knockout mouse strain (WNK4−/−). WNK4 mRNA and protein expression were absent in WNK4−/− mice, which exhibited a mild Gitelman-like syndrome, with normal blood pressure, increased plasma renin activity, and reduced NCC expression and phosphorylation at T-58. Immunohistochemistry revealed normal morphology of the distal convoluted tubule with reduced NCC expression. Low-salt diet or infusion of AngII for 4 d induced phosphorylation of STE20/SPS1-related proline/alanine-rich kinase (SPAK) and of NCC at S-383 and T-58, respectively, in WNK4+/+ but not WNK4−/− mice. Thus, the absence of WNK4 in vivo precludes NCC and SPAK phosphorylation promoted by a low-salt diet or AngII infusion, suggesting that AngII action on the NCC occurs via a WNK4-SPAK–dependent signaling pathway. Additionally, stimulation of aldosterone secretion by AngII, but not by a high-K+ diet, was impaired in WNK4−/− mice.