Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fatty acid composition and preclinical resarches on Anthemis wiedemanniana Fisch. & Mey.: Discovery of a new anti-inflammatory agent

Background: Anthemis species have been used for the treatment of gastrointestinal disorders, hemorrhoid, stomachache and inflammatory diseases in Turkish folk medicine. Anthemis wiedemanniana Fisch. And Mey. is an endemic plant used as painkiller, antispasmodic, sedative and for the treatment of urinary inflammations. Objective: The objective of the present study is to evaluate the anti-inflamatory activity of the extracts of A. wiedemanniana by using in vivo methods. Materials and Methods: Carrageenan-, PGE2- and serotonin-induced hind paw edema, 12-O-tetradecanoyl-13-acetate (TPA)-induced mouse ear edema and acetic acid-induced increase in capillary permeability models were used for the anti-inflammatory activity assessment. Moreover, the fatty acid composition of A. wiedemanniana was investigated by gas chromatography (GC). Results: n-Hexane, diethyl ether and total sesquiterpene lactone extracts exhibited significant inhibition in carrageenan-induced hind paw edema and acetic acid-induced increase in capillary permeability model. n-Hexane and total sesquiterperne lactone extracts showed anti-inflammatory activity in PGE2- and serotonin-induced hind paw edema model. However none of the extracts displayed significant activity in TPA-induced ear edema model in mice. C4:0 (Buthyric acid), C20:0 (Arachidic acid) and C16:1 (Palmitoleik acid) were found to be the major fatty acids in these species. Saturated fatty acids (SFA) were found in higher amounts than monounsaturated fatty acids and polyunsaturated fatty acids. SFAs were determined as 63.17%, UFAs as 20.89% and PuFAs as 15.95%. Conclusion: This study confirms the traditional usage of A. wiedemanniana for inflammatory diseases.
Area V5—a microcosm of the visual brain

Area V5 of the visual brain, first identified anatomically in 1969 as a separate visual area, is critical for the perception of visual motion. As one of the most intensively studied parts of the visual brain, it has yielded many insights into how the visual brain operates. Among these are: the diversity of signals that determine the functional capacities of a visual area; the relationship between single cell activity in a specialized visual area and perception of, and preference for, attributes of a visual stimulus; the multiple asynchronous inputs into, and outputs from, an area as well as the multiple operations that it undertakes asynchronously; the relationship between activity at given, specialized, areas of the visual brain and conscious awareness; and the mechanisms used to “bind” signals from one area with those from another, with a different specialization, to give us our unitary perception of the visual world. Hence V5 is, in a sense, a microcosm of the visual world and its study gives important insights into how the whole visual brain is organized—anatomically, functionally and perceptually.
Multispectral Imaging and Spectral Classification of Naj Tunich Pigments

Archaeologists frequently discover artifacts that contain a great deal more information than can be detected with the human eye. This is particularly true of contexts with inscriptions or paintings. Painted texts in Maya caves are among the rarest of these contexts with only five sites currently known. Naj Tunich is preeminent among these as its corpus of inscriptions exceeds that of the other four combined. Because caves were considered sacred features in the ancient Maya landscape, cave inscriptions may deal with esoteric beliefs and fundamental tenets of Maya religion that are not recorded elsewhere. The decipherment of these texts may, therefore, provide important insights into Maya culture. Visible and near-infrared multispectral images of the Naj Tunich inscriptions have been obtained. Selected images have been analyzed and differences in the spectral reflectance of the pigments noted. Spectral signatures were used to classify pigments and suggest that markedly different pigment compositions were used at Naj Tunich. At least three different pigments have been shown to be in use. Several drawings contain more than one pigment and show evidence of touch-up or over-painting. Pigment compositional differences have been used to reevaluate proposed artistic relations between drawings. Spectral classification has isolated unsuspected temporal and artistic complexity in the Naj Tunich inscriptions which have led to increased archaeological understanding of the production and significance of these works. Spectral classification results and implications for the Naj Tunich corpus are presented.
Current approaches toward production of secondary plant metabolites

Plants are the tremendous source for the discovery of new products with medicinal importance in drug development. Today several distinct chemicals derived from plants are important drugs, which are currently used in one or more countries in the world. Secondary metabolites are economically important as drugs, flavor and fragrances, dye and pigments, pesticides, and food additives. Many of the drugs sold today are simple synthetic modifications or copies of the naturally obtained substances. The evolving commercial importance of secondary metabolites has in recent years resulted in a great interest in secondary metabolism, particularly in the possibility of altering the production of bioactive plant metabolites by means of tissue culture technology. Plant cell and tissue culture technologies can be established routinely under sterile conditions from explants, such as plant leaves, stems, roots, and meristems for both the ways for multiplication and extraction of secondary metabolites. In vitro production of secondary metabolite in plant cell suspension cultures has been reported from various medicinal plants, and bioreactors are the key step for their commercial production. Based on this lime light, the present review is aimed to cover phytotherapeutic application and recent advancement for the production of some important plant pharmaceuticals.
Green Synthesis of Metallic Nanoparticles via Biological Entities

Nanotechnology is the creation, manipulation and use of materials at the nanometre size scale (1 to 100 nm). At this size scale there are significant differences in many material properties that are normally not seen in the same materials at larger scales. Although nanoscale materials can be produced using a variety of traditional physical and chemical processes, it is now possible to biologically synthesize materials via environment-friendly green chemistry based techniques. In recent years, the convergence between nanotechnology and biology has created the new field of nanobiotechnology that incorporates the use of biological entities such as actinomycetes algae, bacteria, fungi, viruses, yeasts, and plants in a number of biochemical and biophysical processes. The biological synthesis via nanobiotechnology processes have a significant potential to boost nanoparticles production without the use of harsh, toxic, and expensive chemicals commonly used in conventional physical and chemical processes. The aim of this review is to provide an overview of recent trends in synthesizing nanoparticles via biological entities and their potential applications.
A Topological Paradigm for Hippocampal Spatial Map Formation Using Persistent Homology

An animal's ability to navigate through space rests on its ability to create a mental map of its environment. The hippocampus is the brain region centrally responsible for such maps, and it has been assumed to encode geometric information (distances, angles). Given, however, that hippocampal output consists of patterns of spiking across many neurons, and downstream regions must be able to translate those patterns into accurate information about an animal's spatial environment, we hypothesized that 1) the temporal pattern of neuronal firing, particularly co-firing, is key to decoding spatial information, and 2) since co-firing implies spatial overlap of place fields, a map encoded by co-firing will be based on connectivity and adjacency, i.e., it will be a topological map. Here we test this topological hypothesis with a simple model of hippocampal activity, varying three parameters (firing rate, place field size, and number of neurons) in computer simulations of rat trajectories in three topologically and geometrically distinct test environments. Using a computational algorithm based on recently developed tools from Persistent Homology theory in the field of algebraic topology, we find that the patterns of neuronal co-firing can, in fact, convey topological information about the environment in a biologically realistic length of time. Furthermore, our simulations reveal a “learning region” that highlights the interplay between the parameters in combining to produce hippocampal states that are more or less adept at map formation. For example, within the learning region a lower number of neurons firing can be compensated by adjustments in firing rate or place field size, but beyond a certain point map formation begins to fail. We propose that this learning region provides a coherent theoretical lens through which to view conditions that impair spatial learning by altering place cell firing rates or spatial specificity.
Prevaccination Rotavirus Serum IgG and IgA Are Associated With Lower Immunogenicity of Live, Oral Human Rotavirus Vaccine in South African Infants.

BACKGROUND Live oral rotavirus (RV) vaccines have shown modest efficacy among children in African countries for reasons that are not completely understood. We examined the possible inhibitory effect of preexisting antirotavirus antibodies on immunogenicity of monovalent RV vaccine (RV1). METHODS Mother-infant pairs were enrolled at presentation for their routine immunization visit in Soweto, South Africa, when infants were aged 5-8 weeks. Infant serum samples were obtained before the first and second doses of RV1 and 1 month after the second dose. Maternal serum and breast milk samples were obtained prior to administration of each dose of RV1 to infants. RV-specific immunoglobulin G (IgG), IgA, and neutralizing activity in sera of infants and serum or breast milk samples of mothers were measured using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays or a microneutralization test. RESULTS Of the 107 serum pairs from infants who were seronegative for RV IgA at enrollment, we observed a strong positive association between IgG titers in pre-dose 1 sera of infants and mothers and significant negative associations between IgG titers in pre-dose 1 sera of infants and seroconversion to RV1 post-dose 1. Similarly, mothers whose infants' IgA seroconverted after RV1 had significantly lower pre-dose 1 IgG titers in sera than those whose infants did not seroconvert. CONCLUSIONS High levels of preexisting serum IgG, including transplacentally acquired maternal IgG, appeared to have an inhibitory effect on the immunogenicity of RV1 among infants and may, in part, contribute to lower efficacy of RV vaccines in this and other low-income settings.
Shape Analysis and Applications

A shape-analysis algorithm statically analyzes a program to determine information about the heapallocated data structures that the programmanipulates. The results can be used to understand programs or to verify properties of programs. Shape analysis also recovers information that is valuable for debugging, compile-time garbage collection, instruction scheduling, and parallelization. 1Portions of this paper were adapted from [65] (©Springer-Verlag) and excerpted from [58] (©ACM). 2Supported inpartbyNSFGrantsCCR-9619219,CCR-9986308,CCF-0540955,andCCF-0524051;byONRGrantsN0001401-1-0796 andN00014-01-1-0708; by the Alexander vonHumboldt Foundation; and by the John SimonGuggenheimMemorial Foundation. Address: Comp. Sci. Dept.; Univ. of Wisconsin; 1210 W. Dayton St.; Madison, WI 53706. 3Address: School of Comp. Sci.; Tel Aviv Univ.; Tel Aviv 69978; Israel. 4Address: Fachrichtung Informatik, Univ. des Saarlandes; 66123 Saarbrücken; Germany.
Flatness-Based Feedback Control of an Automotive Solenoid Valve

This brief considers the control of solenoid valve actuators used for gas exchange in internal combustion engines. Although solenoid valves offer performance benefits over traditional camshaft-based valve systems, maintaining low impact velocity is a critical performance requirement. Flatness provides a convenient framework for meeting a number of performance specifications on the valve's end motion. The proposed control design incorporates voltage constraints, nonlinear magnetic effects, and various motion planning requirements. A flat output acts as a design parameter and is parameterized with a spline basis. A nonlinear feasibility problem is solved to obtain optimal spline coefficients such that performance requirements are met. The resulting flat output provides an open-loop control which is augmented with feedback so that a linear stable tracking error system results. The proposed control scheme is demonstrated in simulation and on an experimental testbed. The performance of a proportional-integral controller is compared experimentally to the flatness-based method
ENERGY MINIMIZATION-BASED SPATIALLY CONSTRAINED MIXTURE MODEL AND ITS APPLICATION TO IMAGE SEGMENTATION

A novel method is proposed for image segmentation based on probabilistic field theory. This model assumes that the whole pixels of an image and some unknown parameters form a field. According to this model, the pixel labels are generated by a compound function of the field. The main novelty of this model is it consider the features of the pixels and the interdependent among the pixels. The parameters are generated by a novel spatially variant mixture model and estimated by expectation-maximization (EM)based algorithm. Thus, we simultaneously impose the spatial smoothness on the prior knowledge. Numerical experiments are presented where the proposed method and other mixture model-based methods were tested on synthetic and real world images. These experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves competitive performance compared to other methods.
Environmental cadmium and breast cancer risk

Breast cancer is the most prevalent women's cancer, with an age-adjusted incidence of 122.9 per 100,000 US women. Cadmium, a ubiquitous carcinogenic pollutant with multiple biological effects, has been reported to be associated with breast cancer in one US regional case-control study. We examined the association of breast cancer with urinary cadmium (UCd), in a case-control sample of women living on Long Island (LI), NY (100 with breast cancer and 98 without), a region with an especially high rate of breast cancer (142.7 per 100,000 in Suffolk County) and in a representative sample of US women (NHANES 1999-2008, 92 with breast cancer and 2,884 without). In a multivariable logistic model, both samples showed a significant trend for increased odds of breast cancer across increasing UCd quartiles (NHANES, p=0.039 and LI, p=0.023). Compared to those in the lowest quartile, LI women in the highest quartile had increased risk for breast cancer (OR=2.69; 95% CI=1.07, 6.78) and US women in the two highest quartiles had increased risk (OR=2.50; 95% CI=1.11, 5.63 and OR=2.22; 95% CI=.89, 5.52, respectively). Further research is warranted on the impact of environmental cadmium on breast cancer risk in specific populations and on identifying the underlying molecular mechanisms.
Optimal parameter regions for particle swarm optimization algorithms

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a stochastic search algorithm based on the social dynamics of a flock of birds. The performance of the PSO algorithm is known to be sensitive to the values assigned to its control parameters. While many studies have provided reasonable ranges in which to initialize the parameters based on their long-term behaviours, such previous studies fail to quantify the empirical performance of parameter configurations across a wide variety of benchmark problems. This paper specifically address this issue by examining the performance of a set of 1012 parameter configurations of the PSO algorithm over a set of 22 benchmark problems using both the global-best and local-best topologies. Results indicate that, in general, parameter configurations which are within close proximity to the boundaries of the best-known theoretically-defined convergent region lead to better performance than configurations which are further away. Moreover, results indicate that neighbourhood topology plays a far more significant role than modality and separability when determining the regions in parameter space which perform well.
Biased and unbiased random-key genetic algorithms : An experimental analysis ⋆

We study the runtime performance of three types of randomkey genetic algorithms: the unbiased algorithm of Bean (1994); the biased algorithm of Gonçalves and Resende (2011); and a greedy version of Bean’s algorithm on 12 instances from four types of covering problems: general-cost set covering, Steiner triple covering, general-cost set k-covering, and unit-cost covering by pairs. The experiments show that, in 11 of the 12 instances, the greedy version of Bean’s algorithm is faster than Bean’s original method and that the biased variant is faster than both variants of Bean’s algorithm.
Querying the Web with FLORID.

There are prepared compounds of the formula where R1 is hydrogen or hydroxy, R2 is hydrogen or R1 and R2 together represent a second bond between the carbon atoms carrying R1 and R2, Alk is a C2-C6 alkylene group, R3 is a C3-C8-cycloalkyl group, a C1-C6-alkyl group, a C1-C6-hydroxyalkyl group or a C2-C6-hydroxyalkoxy-C1-C6-alkyl group and the groups R4, R5, R6 and R7 are the same or different and are hydrogen, C1-C6-alkyl group or halogen atoms, their N-oxides, their quaternary salts and their acid addition salts. There are also described processes for their production. The compounds have a strong bronchospasmolytic activity, antianaphylactic activity and an antihistamine-antiserotonine activity.
Mood aspects of rapid weight loss in adolescent wrestlers

The aims of this paper were: a) to present weight reduction habits of adolescent wrestlers; b) to establish differences in mood states between weight groups; and c) to determine relations between weight loss and indicators of hydration with mood states. Adolescent wrestlers do resort to rapid weight loss (RWL) regimens in their training process and competition – 70.1% of the subjects reduced their body mass and the reduction regime usually lasted one week. Similar habits have been reported in other studies despite the well evidenced detrimental effects of RWL. Urine specific gravity (USG) values suggest that all the subjects were in the state of dehydration ranging from a mild to a high one. The groups of low weight (LW) and middle weight (MW) wrestlers reduced their body mass significantly more than others (BM; p<.05) and their sensation of fatigue was significantly higher (p<.05). The variables body mass reduction and %BM reduction were correlated with negative mood states, whereas the indicators of hydration in one of the groups (MW) established ambiguous relations with dehydration and positive mood states.
Active identification for discrete-time nonlinear control. I. Output-feedback systems

The problem of controlling nonlinear systems with unknown parameters has received a great deal of attention in the continuous-time case. In contrast, its discrete-time counterpart remains largely unexplored, primarily due to the difficulties associated with utilizing Lyapunov design techniques in a discrete-time framework. Existing results impose restrictive growth conditions on the nonlinearities to yield global stability. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, which removes this obstacle and yields global stability and tracking for systems that can be transformed into an output-feedback canonical form, in which the nonlinearities depend only on the measured output, but are otherwise arbitrary. The main novelties of our design are: i) the temporal and algorithmic separation of the parameter estimation task from the control task, and ii) the development of anactive identification procedure, which uses the control input to actively drive the system state to points in the state space that allow the orthogonalized projection estimator to acquire all the necessary information about the unknown parameters. We prove that our algorithm guarantees complete (for control purposes) identification in a finite time interval, whose maximum length we compute. Thus, the traditional structure of concurrent on-line estimation and control is replaced by a two-phase control strategy: first use active identification, and then utilize the acquired parameter information to implement anycontrol strategy as if the parameters were known.
The structural relationships between organizational commitment, global job satisfaction, developmental experiences, work values, organizational support, and person-organization fit among nursing faculty.

UNLABELLED GUTIERAIM: The aim of this correlational study was to examine the relations between organizational commitment, perceived organizational support, work values, person-organization fit, developmental experiences, and global job satisfaction among nursing faculty. BACKGROUND The global nursing shortage is well documented. At least 57 countries have reported critical shortages. The lack of faculty is finally being recognized as a major issue directly influencing the ability to admit and graduate adequate numbers of nurses. As efforts increase to both recruit and retain faculty, the concept of organizational commitment and what it means to them is important to consider. DESIGN A cross-sectional correlational design was used. METHODS The present study investigated the underlying structure of various organizational factors using structural equation modelling. Data were collected from a stratified random sample of nurse faculty during the academic year 2006-2007. RESULTS The final model demonstrated that perceived organizational support, developmental experiences, person-organization fit, and global job satisfaction positively predicted nurse faculty's organizational commitment to the academic organization. Cross-validation results indicated that the final full SEM is valid and reliable. CONCLUSIONS Nursing faculty administrators able to use mentoring skills are well equipped to build positive relationships with nursing faculty, which in turn, can lead to increased organizational commitment, productivity, job satisfaction, and perceived organizational support, among others.
Reducing auto moiré in discrete line juxtaposed halftoning

Discrete line juxtaposed halftoning creates color halftones with discrete colorant lines of freely selectable rational thicknesses laid-out side by side. Screen elements are made of parallelogram screen tiles incorporating the discrete colorant lines. The repetition of discrete colorant lines from one screen element to the next may create auto moiré artifacts. By decomposing each supertile into screen element tiles having slightly different rational thicknesses, we ensure that successive discrete colorant lines have different phases in respect to the underlying pixel grid. The resulting repetition vector is different from one discrete line to the next discrete line of the same colorant. This strongly reduces the original auto moiré artifacts.