Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Cochlear Implantation on Quality of Life in Adults with Unilateral Hearing Loss

Objective: Patients with moderate-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss in 1 ear and normal hearing in the contralateral ear, known as unilateral hearing loss (UHL) or single-sided deafness (SSD), may experience improved quality of life with the use of a cochlear implant (CI) in the affected ear. Quality of life assessment before and after implantation may reveal changes to aspects of hearing beyond those explicitly evaluated with behavioral measures. Methods: The present report completed 2 experiments investigating quality of life outcomes in CI recipients with UHL. The first experiment assessed quality of life during the 1st year of device use with 3 questionnaires: the Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ), the Abbreviated Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit (APHAB), and the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory. Twenty subjects were evaluated preoperatively and 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months post-activation. Quality of life results were compared over the study period using traditional scoring methods and the SSQ pragmatic subscales. Subscales specific to localization and speech perception in noise were compared to behavioral measures at the preoperative and 12-month intervals. The 2nd experiment evaluated quality of life preoperatively and at the 12-month interval for CI recipients with UHL and CI recipients with bilateral hearing loss, including conventional CI users and those listening with electric-acoustic stimulation (EAS). The 3 cohorts differed in CI candidacy criteria, including the amount of residual hearing in the contralateral ear. Results: For subjects with moderate-to-profound UHL, receipt of a CI significantly improved quality of life, with benefits noted as early as 1 month after initial activation. The UHL cohort reported less perceived difficulty at the pre- and postoperative intervals than the conventional CI and EAS cohorts, which may be due to the presence of the normal-hearing ear. Each group experienced a significant benefit in quality of life on the APHAB with CI use. Conclusions: Cochlear implantation in cases of substantial UHL may offer significant improvements in quality of life. Quality of life measures revealed a reduction in perceived tinnitus severity and subjective improvements in speech perception in noise, spatial hearing, and listening effort. While self-report of difficulties were lower for the UHL cohort than the conventional CI and EAS cohorts, subjects in all 3 groups reported an improvement in quality of life with CI use.
Crystal Structure of the ATPase Domain of the Human AAA+ Protein Paraplegin/SPG7

Paraplegin is an m-AAA protease of the mitochondrial inner membrane that is linked to hereditary spastic paraplegias. The gene encodes an FtsH-homology protease domain in tandem with an AAA+ homology ATPase domain. The protein is believed to form a hexamer that uses ATPase-driven conformational changes in its AAA-domain to deliver substrate peptides to its protease domain. We present the crystal structure of the AAA-domain of human paraplegin bound to ADP at 2.2 Å. This enables assignment of the roles of specific side chains within the catalytic cycle, and provides the structural basis for understanding the mechanism of disease mutations. Enhanced version This article can also be viewed as an enhanced version in which the text of the article is integrated with interactive 3D representations and animated transitions. Please note that a web plugin is required to access this enhanced functionality. Instructions for the installation and use of the web plugin are available in Text S1.
Complete mitochondrial genome of Triplophysa bleekeri (Cypriniformes: Balitoridae: Nemacheilinae), and analysis of mitochondrial genetic variability among Triplophysa species

Abstract The complete mitochondrial genome of the stone loach Triplophysa bleekeri collected from the Anning River, a tributary of the Yalong River, in Sichuan Province was sequenced. The genome is 16,573 bp in length, consisting of 13 protein-coding genes, 22 transfer RNA (tRNA) genes, two ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes, and a noncoding control region. Most of the genes are encoded on the heavy strand, except for ND6 and eight tRNAs. The overall base composition of T. bleekeri is 28.1% for A, 28.4% for T, 25.5% for C, 18.0% for G, with a slight A+T bias of 56.5%. The complete mitochondrial genetic variability is high among different Triplophysa species and between the two T. bleekeri individuals from different rivers.
Two competitive models and their identification problem: The ESTAR and TSTAR model

Determining good parameter estimates in ESTAR models is known to be diffcult. We show that the phenomena of getting strongly biased estimators is a consequence of the so-called identifcation problem, the problem of properly distinguishing the transition function in relation to extreme parameter combinations. This happens in particular for either very small or very large values of the error term variance. Furthermore, we introduce a new alternative model -the TSTAR model- which has similar properties as the ESTAR model but reduces the effects of the identifcation problem. We also derive a linearity and a unit root test for this model.
Salt tolerance of Arabidopsis thaliana requires maturation of N-glycosylated proteins in the Golgi apparatus

Protein N-glycosylation in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and in the Golgi apparatus is an essential process in eukaryotic cells. Although the N-glycosylation pathway in the ER has been shown to regulate protein quality control, salt tolerance, and cellulose biosynthesis in plants, no biological roles have been linked functionally to N-glycan modifications that occur in the Golgi apparatus. Herein, we provide evidence that mutants defective in N-glycan maturation, such as complex glycan 1 (cgl1), are more salt-sensitive than wild type. Salt stress caused growth inhibition, aberrant root-tip morphology, and callose accumulation in cgl1, which were also observed in an ER oligosaccharyltransferase mutant, staurosporin and temperature sensitive 3a (stt3a). Unlike stt3a, cgl1 did not cause constitutive activation of the unfolded protein response. Instead, aberrant modification of the plasma membrane glycoprotein KORRIGAN 1/RADIALLY SWOLLEN 2 (KOR1/RSW2) that is necessary for cellulose biosynthesis occurred in cgl1 and stt3a. Genetic analyses identified specific interactions among rsw2, stt3a, and cgl1 mutations, indicating that the function of KOR1/RSW2 protein depends on complex N-glycans. Furthermore, cellulose deficient rsw1-1 and rsw2-1 plants were also salt-sensitive. These results establish that plant protein N-glycosylation functions beyond protein folding in the ER and is necessary for sufficient cell-wall formation under salt stress.
Effects of prenatal exposure to ambient air pollutant PM10 on ultrasound-measured fetal growth.

Background Limited epidemiological studies have investigated the relationship between prenatal exposure to ambient particulate matter and risk of abnormal fetal growth, and have reached inconclusive results. No study has been conducted in areas with very high air pollution levels. We investigated the hypothesis that exposure to high levels of particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter no larger than 10 µm (PM10) during pregnancy increases the risk of abnormal fetal growth. Methods A birth cohort study was performed in Lanzhou, China, 2010-12, including 8877 pregnant women with 18 583 ultrasound measurements of four fetal growth parameters during pregnancy, including biparietal diameter (BPD), femur length (FL), head circumference (HC) and abdominal circumference (AC). Mixed-effects modelling was used to examine the associations between PM10 exposure and risk of abnormal fetal growth. Results When average PM10 exposure from conception until the ultrasound examination exceeded 150 µg/m3, there were significant increases in standardized FL (β = 0.095, P = 0.0012) and HC (β = 0.090, P = 0.0078) measures. When average PM10 exposure was treated as continuous variable, we found a significant decrease in standardized BPD (β = -0.018, P = 0.0016) as per 10 µg/m3 increase in PM10. After examining the associations by various exposure windows, positive associations between higher levels of PM10 and fetal overgrowth were consistently seen for HC measures. Conclusions Our study suggested that prenatal exposure to high levels of ambient PM10 increased the risk of abnormal fetal growth. The findings from our study have important public health implications and also call for future studies to explore the underlying mechanisms and post-natal consequences of these findings.
On the energy efficiency of the adaptive algorithm in hybrid uplink cellular networks

Energy harvesting is an increasingly attractive source of power for wireless communications devices. Microwave power transfer (MPT) delivers energy from power stations (PSs) to mobile users by microwave radiation. In this paper, we consider a network architecture where PSs are distributed in an uplink cellular network for powering mobile users. MPT transmits power to mobile devices adaptively. Transmission time is divided into cycles. One cycle consists of two parts: the charge period and the communication period. We find that the ratio of charge period and cycle χ influences the throughput of the network directly. No matter what the densities of PSs and base stations (BSs) are, there exists an optimal ratio. To maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the network, we propose an adaptive algorithm. In the algorithm, we adjust the transmission power of PSs based on the distance between the PS and its target mobile user. Comparing with the non-adaptive one, the simulation results show that the adaptive algorithm improves the EE of network and saves a significant amount of power. When the reference distance d0 equals to 1/3 R, the adaptive algorithm saves at least 70% energy consumption of the system, and improves the EE almost 10 times than the non-adaptive one.
We Know Too Little about Parasitoid Wasp Distributions to Draw Any Conclusions about Latitudinal Trends in Species Richness, Body Size and Biology

Much has been written about latitudinal trends in parasitoid diversity and biology, though it is widely recognised that they are a comparatively poorly known group. Here I show that for both braconid and ichneumonid wasps there are highly significant relationships between body size and the mean recorded latitude of species. Numbers of species per genus (surrogates of clades) peaks in the temperate zone for both families contrasting with data from the virtually complete inventories for mammals, birds and monocot plants, suggesting massive under-description of tropical parasitoid faunas. If the ichneumonoids may be expected to show similar trends to mammals, birds and other groups, the implication is that taxonomic work both in terms of active generic revisions, but also likely, the collecting and processing of museum specimens, and selection of taxa for revision, is woefully inadequate to allow latitudinal patterns in biology to be analysed.
Vertical interconnects squeezing in symmetric 3D mesh Network-on-Chip

Three-dimensional (3D) integration and Network-on-Chip (NoC) are both proposed to tackle the on-chip interconnect scaling problems, and extensive research efforts have been devoted to the design challenges of combining both. Through-silicon via (TSV) is considered to be the most promising technology for 3D integration, however, TSV pads distributed across planar layers occupy significant chip area and result in routing congestions. In addition, the yield of 3D integrated circuits decreased dramatically as the number of TSVs increases. For symmetric 3D mesh NoC, we observe that the TSVs' utilization is pretty low and adjacent routers rarely transmit packets via their vertical channels (i.e. TSVs) at the same time. Based on this observation, we propose a novel TSV squeezing scheme to share TSVs among neighboring router in a time division multiplex mode, which greatly improves the utilization of TSVs. Experimental results show that the proposed method can save significant TSV footprint with negligible performance overhead.
A Simple Effective Scheme to Enhance the Capability of Web Servers Using P2P Networks

Nowadays, web servers are suffering from flash crowds and application layer DDoS attacks that can severely degrade the availability of services. It is difficult to prevent them because they comply with the communication protocol. Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have been exploited to amplify DDoS attacks, but we believe their available resource, such as distributed storage and network bandwidth, can be used to mitigate both flash crowds and DDoS attacks. In this paper, we propose a server initiated approach to employ deployed P2P networks as distributed web caches, so that the workload directed to web servers can be reduced. In experiments, we use Kad as the particular P2P network for the realization of a large-scale distributed web cache. We performed comprehensive evaluation on the feasibility, efficiency and robustness of our scheme, through experiments and simulations on the prototype we implemented. The evaluation results show that our scheme can increase the capacity of the protected web servers at least 10 times at the same cost of connection and bandwidth consumption. The web contents cached in Kad remain reachable even under churn of peers and targeted DoS attack, and the access latency is comparable to normal direct access to web servers. It also achieves good load balancing under the heavy-tailed distribution of object popularity.
An Energy Conserving Routing Scheme for Wireless Body Sensor Nanonetwork Communication

Current developments in nanotechnology make electromagnetic communication possible at the nanoscale for applications involving body sensor networks (BSNs). This specialized branch of wireless sensor networks, drawing attention from diverse fields, such as engineering, medicine, biology, physics, and computer science, has emerged as an important research area contributing to medical treatment, social welfare, and sports. The concept is based on the interaction of integrated nanoscale machines by means of wireless communications. One key hurdle for advancing nanocommunications is the lack of an apposite networking protocol to address the upcoming needs of the nanonetworks. Recently, some key challenges have been identified, such as nanonodes with extreme energy constraints, limited computational capabilities, terahertz frequency bands with limited transmission range, and so on, in designing protocols for wireless nanosensor networks. This work proposes an improved performance scheme of nanocommunication over terahertz bands for wireless BSNs making it suitable for smart e-health applications. The scheme contains – a new energy-efficient forwarding routine for electromagnetic communication in wireless nanonetworks consisting of hybrid clusters with centralized scheduling; a model designed for channel behavior taking into account the aggregated impact of molecular absorption, spreading loss, and shadowing; and an energy model for energy harvesting and consumption. The outage probability is derived for both single and multilinks and extended to determine the outage capacity. The outage probability for a multilink is derived using a cooperative fusion technique at a predefined fusion node. Simulated using a nano-sim simulator, performance of the proposed model has been evaluated for energy efficiency, outage capacity, and outage probability. The results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme through maximized energy utilization in both single and multihop communications; multisensor fusion at the fusion node enhances the link quality of the transmission.
HipH Catalyzes the Hydroxylation of 4-Hydroxyisophthalate to Protocatechuate in 2,4-Xylenol Catabolism by Pseudomonas putida NCIMB 9866

ABSTRACT In addition to growing on p-cresol, Pseudomonas putida NCIMB 9866 is the only reported strain capable of aerobically growing on 2,4-xylenol, which is listed as a priority pollutant by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Several enzymes involved in the oxidation of the para-methyl group, as well as the corresponding genes, have previously been reported. The enzyme catalyzing oxidation of the catabolic intermediate 4-hydroxyisophthalate to the ring cleavage substrate protocatechuate was also purified from strain NCIMB 9866, but its genetic determinant is still unavailable. In this study, the gene hipH, encoding 4-hydroxyisophthalate hydroxylase, from strain NCIMB 9866 was cloned by transposon mutagenesis. Purified recombinant HipH-His6 was found to be a dimer protein with a molecular mass of approximately 110 kDa. HipH-His6 catalyzed the hydroxylation of 4-hydroxyisophthalate to protocatechuate with a specific activity of 1.54 U mg−1 and showed apparent Km values of 11.40 ± 3.05 μM for 4-hydroxyisophthalate with NADPH and 11.23 ± 2.43 μM with NADH and similar Km values for NADPH and NADH (64.31 ± 13.16 and 72.76 ± 12.06 μM, respectively). The identity of protocatechuate generated from 4-hydroxyisophthalate hydroxylation by HipH-His6 has also been confirmed by high-performance liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. Gene transcriptional analysis, gene knockout, and complementation indicated that hipH is essential for 2,4-xylenol catabolism but not for p-cresol catabolism in this strain. This fills a gap in our understanding of the gene that encodes a critical step in 2,4-xylenol catabolism and also provides another example of biochemical and genetic diversity of microbial catabolism of structurally similar compounds.
Human skin detection in digital images using multi colour scheme system

A new combinational and Multi-Colour Scheme System for the digital images is presented in this paper. This preprocessing algorithm finds application in human face detection as well as in recognition. The Multi-Colour Scheme System (MCSS) for Human Skin Detection in digital images aims at object localization, based on principle of neighborhood pixel processing. This technique due to its computational accuracy and performance is proved to have an edge over the competitive methods. It also assures pay-off on reduced computational complexity, compared to facial textures/ geometrics-based skin detection methods. A thorough comparative analysis is carried out to evaluate the effect and influence of different multi-colour bands for the human skin classification. MCSS primarily uses different combinations of multi-colour space namely, RGB (Red, Blue and Green), H (H component of HSV), CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) and a∗b∗ (CIE-Lab, Commission internationale de l'éclairage). This multi-colour scheme based skin detection technique is tested on the real-time dataset and it is proved to produce more accurate results on skin detection than those competitive methods which employ single colour space. Due to its computational advantages, this method is confirmed to be superior to the recently reported competitive methods. The performance of MCSS is validated by Human Visual Perception.
Pacing Hippocampal Sharp-Wave Ripples With Weak Electric Stimulation

Sharp-wave ripples (SWRs) are spontaneous neuronal population events that occur in the hippocampus during sleep and quiet restfulness, and are thought to play a critical role in the consolidation of episodic memory. SWRs occur at a rate of 30–200 events per minute. Their overall abundance may, however, be reduced with aging and neurodegenerative disease. Here we report that the abundance of SWR within murine hippocampal slices can be increased by paced administration of a weak electrical stimulus, especially when the spontaneously occurring rate is low or compromised. Resultant SWRs have large variations in amplitude and ripple patterns, which are morphologically indistinguishable from those of spontaneous SWRs, despite identical stimulus parameters which presumably activate the same CA3 neurons surrounding the electrode. The stimulus intensity for reliably pacing SWRs is weaker than that required for inducing detectable evoked field potentials in CA1. Moreover, repetitive ~1 Hz stimuli with low intensity can reliably evoke thousands of SWRs without detectable LTD or “habituation. ” Our results suggest that weak stimuli may facilitate the spontaneous emergence of SWRs without significantly altering their characteristics. Pacing SWRs with weak electric stimuli could potentially be useful for restoring their abundance in the damaged hippocampus.
Impartial Third-Party Interventions in Captive Chimpanzees: A Reflection of Community Concern

Because conflicts among social group members are inevitable, their management is crucial for group stability. The rarest and most interesting form of conflict management is policing, i.e., impartial interventions by bystanders, which is of considerable interest due to its potentially moral nature. Here, we provide descriptive and quantitative data on policing in captive chimpanzees. First, we report on a high rate of policing in one captive group characterized by recently introduced females and a rank reversal between two males. We explored the influence of various factors on the occurrence of policing. The results show that only the alpha and beta males acted as arbitrators using manifold tactics to control conflicts, and that their interventions strongly depended on conflict complexity. Secondly, we compared the policing patterns in three other captive chimpanzee groups. We found that although rare, policing was more prevalent at times of increased social instability, both high-ranking males and females performed policing, and conflicts of all sex-dyad combinations were policed. These results suggest that the primary function of policing is to increase group stability. It may thus reflect prosocial behaviour based upon “community concern. ” However, policing remains a rare behaviour and more data are needed to test the generality of this hypothesis.
Indirect Methods Produce Higher Estimates of Fine Root Production and Turnover Rates than Direct Methods

The production and turnover of fine roots play substantial roles in the biogeochemical cycles of terrestrial ecosystems. However, the disparity among the estimates of both production and turnover, particularly due to technical limitations, has been debated for several decades. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis to compare published estimates of fine root production and turnover rates derived from different methods at the same sites and at the same sampling time. On average, the estimates of fine root production and turnover rates were 87% and 124% higher, respectively, by indirect methods than by direct methods. The substantially higher fine root production and turnover estimated by indirect methods, on which most global carbon models are based, indicate the necessity of re-assessing the global carbon model predictions for atmospheric carbon sequestration in soils as a result of the production and turnover of fine roots.
The complete chloroplast genome of Anoectochilus roxburghii

Abstract We determined the complete chloroplast (cp) genome of Anoectochilus roxburghii, a well-known medicinal orchid. The total genome size was 156,252 bp in length, containing a pair of inverted repeats (IRs) of 26,591 bp, a large single copy (LSC) of 84,665 bp and a small single copy (SSC) of 18,405 bp. The overall GC content of the genome was 37.71%. The cp genome of A. roxburghii contained 87 protein-coding genes, 38 tRNA genes, and eight rRNA genes. Of these 18 genes, one or two contained introns. A maximum parsimony phylogenetic tree revealed that the cp genome of A. roxburghii was closely related to that of the orchid within the Orchidoideae subfamily.