Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors that predict cognitive decline in patients with subjective cognitive impairment

ABSTRACT Background: Current evidence supports the concept of a preclinical phase of Alzheimer's disease (AD) where pathological and imaging changes are present in asymptomatic individuals. Subjective cognitive impairment (SCI) may represent the earliest point on the continuum of AD. A better understanding of the baseline characteristics of this group of patients that later decline in cognition will enhance our knowledge of the very early disease processes, facilitate preventive strategies, early diagnosis, timely follow-up and treatment. Methods: An observational exploratory study which followed up 62 consecutive patients with SCI presenting to a memory clinic and compared baseline characteristics of SCI patients who declined cognitively with those who did not. Cognitive decline was defined as a progression to a diagnosis of amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) or dementia at follow-up. Results: Patients were followed up for a mean of 44 months (range 12–112 months). At the time of follow up, 24% of patients had declined. Patients that declined were significantly older at onset of symptoms and first presentation to memory clinic, and took significantly more medications for physical illnesses. Patients that declined also performed significantly worse on Trail Making Test (TMT) B and Cambridge Cognitive Examination – Revised (CAMCOG-R) at baseline. Survival analysis identified key variables that predicted decline (later age of onset and later age at first assessment). Conclusions: Patients who present with subjective memory complaints and are over the age of 61 years are at high risk of cognitive decline and warrant an in-depth assessment and follow-up.
HMGN3a and HMGN3b, Two Protein Isoforms with a Tissue-specific Expression Pattern, Expand the Cellular Repertoire of Nucleosome-binding Proteins*

HMGN1 (HMG-14) and HMGN2 (HMG-17) are nuclear proteins that bind specifically to nucleosomes, reduce the compactness of the chromatin fiber, and enhance transcription from chromatin templates. Here we report that many vertebrates contain an additional type of HMGN protein named HMGN3 (Trip 7). The humanHMGN3 gene is located on chromosome 6 and spans 32 kilobase pairs, which is nearly 10-fold longer than the closely relatedHMGN2 gene. However, the intron/exon boundaries of theHMGN3 gene are identical to those of HMGN1 andHMGN2. Unique within the HMGN family, the HMGN3 transcript undergoes alternative splicing and generates two different variants, HMGN3a and HMGN3b. The shorter variant, HMGN3b, arises from an additional splice site that truncates exon V and causes a frameshift. The resulting HMGN3b protein lacks the majority of the C-terminal chromatin-unfolding domain. Both splice variants are found in many vertebrates from frogs to man and are expressed in many tissues. The pattern of tissue-specific expression differs considerably from those of HMGN1 and HMGN2 at both the mRNA and the protein level. Our results expand the multiplicity of the HMGN protein family and raise the possibility that these nucleosome-binding proteins function as co-activators in tissue-specific gene expression.
Exploiting the wisdom of the crowds for characterizing and connecting heterogeneous resources

Heterogeneous content is an inherent problem for cross-system search, recommendation and personalization. In this paper we investigate differences in topic coverage and the impact of topics in different kinds of Web services. We use entity extraction and categorization to create fingerprints that allow for meaningful comparison. As a basis taxonomy, we use the 23 main categories of Wikipedia Category Graph, which has been assembled over the years by the wisdom of the crowds. Following a proof of concept of our approach, we analyze differences in topic coverage and topic impact. The results show many differences between Web services like Twitter, Flickr and Delicious, which reflect users' behavior and the usage of each system. The paper concludes with a user study that demonstrates the benefits of fingerprints over traditional textual methods for recommendations of heterogeneous resources.
Information Theory-Based Scoring Function for the Structure-Based Prediction of Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity

The development and validation of a new knowledge based scoring function (SIScoreJE) to predict binding energy between proteins and ligands is presented. SIScoreJE efficiently predicts the binding energy between a small molecule and its protein receptor. Protein-ligand atomic contact information was derived from a Non-Redundant Data set (NRD) of over 3000 X-ray crystal structures of protein-ligand complexes. This information was classified for individual "atom contact pairs" (ACP) which is used to calculate the atomic contact preferences. In addition to the two schemes generated in this study we have assessed a number of other common atom-type classification schemes. The preferences were calculated using an information theoretic relationship of joint entropy. Among 18 different atom-type classification schemes "ScoreJE Atom Type set2" (SATs2) was found to be the most suitable for our approach. To test the sensitivity of the method to the inclusion of solvent, Single-body Solvation Potentials (SSP) were also derived from the atomic contacts between the protein atom types and water molecules modeled using AQUARIUS2. Validation was carried out using an evaluation data set of 100 protein-ligand complexes with known binding energies to test the ability of the scoring functions to reproduce known binding affinities. In summary, it was found that a combined SSP/ScoreJE (SIScoreJE) performed significantly better than ScoreJE alone, and SIScoreJE and ScoreJE performed better than GOLD::GoldScore, GOLD::ChemScore, and XScore.
Effect of Thermoultrasound on the Antioxidant Compounds and Fatty Acid Profile of Blackberry (Rubus fruticosus spp.) Juice

Blackberry (Rubus fruticosus spp.) fruit has high antioxidant activity due to its significant content of anthocyanins and antioxidant compounds. Among emerging technologies for food preservation, thermoultrasound is a technique that reduces microbial loads and releases compounds with antioxidant properties. The objective of this study was to determine the antioxidant content and fatty acid profile of blackberry juice subjected to thermoultrasound treatment in comparison to pasteurized juice. Blackberry juice and n-hexane extracts from a control (untreated juice), pasteurized, and thermoultrasonicated samples were evaluated for antioxidant activity, fatty acid profile, and antioxidant content. The juice treated with thermoultrasound exhibited significantly (p < 0.05) higher levels of total phenols (1011 mg GAE/L), anthocyanins (118 mg Cy-3-GlE/L); antioxidant activity by ABTS (44 mg VCEAC/L) and DPPH (2665 µmol TE/L) in comparison to the control and pasteurized samples. Oil extract from thermoultrasound juice also had the highest antioxidant activity (177.5 mg VCEAC/L and 1802.6 µmol TE/L). The fatty acid profile of the n-hexane extracts showed the presence of myristic, linolenic, stearic, oleic, and linoleic acids and was not affected by the treatments except for stearic acid, whose amount was particularly higher in the control. Our results demonstrated that thermoultrasound can be an alternative technology to pasteurization that maintains and releases antioxidant compounds and preserves the fatty acids of fruit juice.
Energy-efficiency optimization of the high Power Amplifier for multicarrier systems: Analytical EVM derivation

The high Power Amplifier (PA) dominates the power consumption in LTE transceiver systems in macro base stations and requests focusing the energy efficiency improvements on this device. In this paper, the impact of the nonlinearities on the amplified multicarrier signal is analyzed considering both linearization and Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) reduction techniques. Therefore, we provide the expression of the Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) of the amplified signal using polynomial predistortion and clipping techniques. The EVM expression is a series expansion that depends on the Power Amplifier (PA) and predistortion coefficients, as well as, the PAPR and the average power of both input and clipped signals. The simulation results show that the proposed expression presents perfect accuracy. Moreover, theoretical analysis of the trade-off between the power amplifier linearity and efficiency is investigated considering the performance of the clipping and predistortion techniques. Therefore, an analytical expression which gives the optimal Input Back-Off (IBO) maximizing the PA efficiency, with respect to an EVM constraint and a given predistortion complexity, is provided. Based on different application scenarios and using a real power amplifier characteristic, it is demonstrated that significant energy efficiency improvement can be achieved when the IBO is appropriately adjusted.
Semidiscrete Central-Upwind Schemes for Hyperbolic Conservation Laws and Hamilton-Jacobi Equations

We introduce new Godunov-type semidiscrete central schemes for hyperbolic systems of conservation laws and Hamilton--Jacobi equations. The schemes are based on the use of more precise information about the local speeds of propagation and can be viewed as a generalization of the schemes from [A. Kurganov and E. Tadmor, J. Comput. Phys., 160 (2000), pp. 241--282; A. Kurganov and D. Levy, SIAM J. Sci. Comput. , 22 (2000), pp. 1461--1488; A. Kurganov and G. Petrova, A third-order semidiscrete genuinely multidimensional central scheme for hyperbolic conservation laws and related problems, Numer. Math., to appear] and [A. Kurganov and E. Tadmor, J. Comput. Phys., 160 (2000), pp. 720--742]. The main advantages of the proposed central schemes are the high resolution, due to the smaller amount of the numerical dissipation, and the simplicity. There are no Riemann solvers and characteristic decomposition involved, and this makes them a universal tool for a wide variety of applications. At the same time, the developed schemes have an upwind nature, since they respect the directions of wave propagation by measuring the one-sided local speeds. This is why we call them central-upwind schemes. The constructed schemes are applied to various problems, such as the Euler equations of gas dynamics, the Hamilton--Jacobi equations with convex and nonconvex Hamiltonians, and the incompressible Euler and Navier--Stokes equations. The incompressibility condition in the latter equations allows us to treat them both in their conservative and transport form. We apply to these problems the central-upwind schemes, developed separately for each of them, and compute the corresponding numerical solutions.
Melatonin protects against pressure ulcer‐induced oxidative injury of the skin and remote organs in rats

Abstract: Pressure ulcers (PU) cause morphological and functional alterations in the skin and visceral organs; the damage is believed to be due to ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury. In this study, we examined the role of oxidative damage in PU and the beneficial effect of treatment with the antioxidant melatonin. PU were induced by applying magnets over steel plates that were implanted under the skin of rats; this compressed the skin and caused ischemia. Within a 12‐hr period, rats were subjected to five cycles of I/R (2 and 0.5 hr respectively), followed by an additional 12 hr of ischemia (to simulate the period at sleep at night). This protocol was repeated for 3 days. In treatment groups, twice a day during reperfusion periods, melatonin (5 mg per rat) was either applied locally as an ointment on skin, or administered i.p. (10 mg/kg). At the end of the experimental period, blood and tissue (skin, liver, kidney, lung, stomach, and ileum) samples were taken for determination of biochemical parameters and for histological evaluation. Local treatment with melatonin inhibited the increase in malondialdehyde levels; an index of lipid peroxidation, myeloperoxidase activity; an indicator of tissue neutrophil infiltration, and the decrease in glutathione; a key antioxidant, in the skin induced by PU, but was less efficient in preventing the damage in visceral organs. However, systemic treatment prevented the damage in the visceral organs. Significant increases in creatinine, blood urea nitrogen, alanine aminotransferase, aspartate aminotransferase, lactate dehydrogenase and collagen levels in animals with PU were prevented by melatonin treatment. The light microscopic examination exhibited significant degenerative changes in dermis and epidermis in the PU rats. Tissue injury was decreased especially in the locally treated group. Findings of the present study suggest that local and/or systemic melatonin treatment may prove beneficial in the treatment of PU.
Ultra low power subthreshold MOS current mode logic circuits using a novel load device concept

This article presents a novel and robust approach for implementing ultra-low power MOS current mode logic (MCML) circuits. To operate at very low bias currents, a simple and compact high resistance load device has been introduced. Operating in subthreshold regime, the circuit can be used in a very wide frequency range by adjusting the bias current without any need for resizing the devices. Measurements in 0.18 mum CMOS technology show that the proposed MCML circuit can be operated reliably with bias currents as low as 1 nA offering a significant improvement of the power-delay product compared to conventional CMOS gates. Simulations show that the proposed circuit exhibits faster response compared to the conventional MCML circuits with triode-mode PMOS load devices at low bias currents.
Bootstrapping Open-Source English-Bulgarian Computational Dictionary

We present an open-source English-Bulgarian dictionary which is a unification and consolidation of existing and freely available resources for the two languages. The new resource can be used as either a pair of two monolingual morphological lexicons, or as a bidirectional translation dictionary between the languages. The structure of the resource is compatible with the existing synchronous English-Bulgarian grammar in Grammatical Framework (GF). This makes it possible to immediately plug it in as a component in a grammar-based translation system that is currently under development in the same framework. This also meant that we had to enrich the dictionary with additional syntactic and semantic information that was missing in the original resources.
Conformation of Multilevel Current Source Converter Topologies Using the Duality Principle

This paper explores the issue of constructing multilevel current source converter (MCSC) topologies using the duality principle. Three circuit cells for MCSCs are derived from the applications of the duality on the three common leg circuit cells of multilevel voltage source converters (MVSCs). Based on the presented three cells, three families of MCSC topologies, which are also corresponding to three families of MVSCs, are constructed. Analytical results show that these derived MCSCs and their corresponding MVSCs present analogous features such as the ac side currents/voltages and inductor/capacitor currents/voltages, though they are not direct dual structures. Some experimental results are given to verify the presented MCSC structures.
An Evolutionary Approach to Designing Autonomous Planetary Rovers

Current methods used to address the problem of autonomous navigation in planetary rovers rely on computationally expensive algorithms and elaborate 3D sensing strategies. This paper presents a low complexity alternative based on an evolved neural controller using continuous-value infrared sensors. A unified framework is presented for developing such controllers in virtual planetary rovers, utilising the latest advances in parallel optimisation by way of island model evolution. Preliminary results are presented demonstrating that this approach is capable of producing successful navigation and obstacle avoidance behaviours, showing that equivalent or better results can be achieved relative to traditional genetic algorithms.
A Fast Handover System Evaluation in an All-IPv6 Mobility Management - Wireless Broadband Access based Hotspot Network Environment

The ongoing convergence of wireless networking and IP networking more and more requires solutions for transporting realtime application data to IP enabled mobile devices and mobile networks. Even though the basic Mobile IPv6 protocol suite performs sufficient in macro environments with non realtime traffic, seamless mobility requires some more enhanced protocol procedures in between the mobile node and the involved network entities.Limiting the effect of handovers has the potential to considerably improve handover performance in terms of latency, packet loss, signaling overhead, and scalability. This contribution is going to present an extensive simulation study on the performance of the Fast Handovers for Mobile IPv6 approach. The demonstrated simulation scenario comprises 9 access router and up to 70 Mobile Nodes that communicate in accordance with the popular IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN standard.
Subcategorical mismatches and the time course of lexical access: Evidence for lexical competition

Participants' eye movements were monitored as they followed spoken instructions to click on a pictured object with a computer mouse (e.g., ''click on the net''). Participants were slower to fixate the target picture when the onset of the target word came from a competitor word (e.g., ne(ck)t) than from a nonword (e.g., ne(p)t), as predicted by models of spoken-word recognition that incorporate lexical competition. This was found whether the picture of the competitor word (e.g., the picture of a neck) was present on the display or not. Simulations with the TRACE model captured the major trends of fixations to the target and its competitor over time. We argue that eye movements provide a fine-grained measure of lexical activation over time, and thus reveal effects of lexical competition that are masked by response measures such as lexical decisions.
Wavelet Transform Based License Plate Detection for Cluttered Scene

This paper presents a wavelet transform based method for extracting license plates from cluttered images. The proposed system consists of three major stages. First, a wavelet transform based method is used for extracting important contrast features as guides to search for desired license plates. Then, finding a reference line in HL subimage plays an important role to locate the desired license plate region roughly. According to the reference line we can decrease the searching region of license plate and speed up the execution time. The last stage of the method is to locate the license plate accurately by license plate adjustment. More importantly, the proposed detection method can locate multiple plates with different orientations in one image. Since the feature extracted is robust to complex backgrounds, the proposed method works well in extracting differently illuminated and oriented license plates. The average accuracy of detection is 92.4%.
The Assembly Domain of the Small Capsid Protein of Kaposi's Sarcoma-Associated Herpesvirus

ABSTRACT Self-assembly of Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus capsids occurs when six proteins are coexpressed in insect cells using recombinant baculoviruses; however, if the small capsid protein (SCP) is omitted from the coinfection, assembly does not occur. Herein we delineate and identify precisely the assembly domain and the residues of SCP required for assembly. Hence, six residues, R14, D18, V25, R46, G66, and R70 in the assembly domain, when changed to alanine, completely abolish or reduce capsid assembly.
A Critique of a New Analysis Proposed for Functional Neuroimaging

Methods for analysing functional imaging data have evolved rapidly over the last ten years. Standardized techniques based on formal mathematical and statistical theory and rigorous empirical validation have been proposed to facilitate comparisons of biological results between laboratories. This paper examines an image analysis technique that appears to identify unexpectedly large numbers of activated brain areas for the data collected. It concludes that the method may not adequately control for false positives, rendering interpretation of the functional anatomy difficult.
Interference between Host Resistance toListeria monocytogenes Infection and Ovalbumin-Induced Allergic Responses in Mice

ABSTRACT Listeria monocytogenes promotes the induction of the T-helper 1 (Th1) cell response, while ovalbumin (OVA) induces a Th2 cell response and allergic reactions, such as airway hyperreactivity and immunoglobulin E (IgE) production. When mice were immunized with OVA on day 7 after L. monocytogenes infection, eosinophilia in bronchoalveolar lavage and the production of total IgE, OVA-specific IgE, interleukin-4 (IL-4), and IL-5 in the circulation were markedly suppressed. Cytokine responses, including IL-4, IL-5, IL-10, IL-13, and gamma interferon, to OVA were decreased in the spleen cell cultures obtained from OVA-immunized mice that had been infected with L. monocytogenes. Conversely, when OVA-immunized mice were infected with L. monocytogenes, conversion from the nonlethal infection to the lethal infection occurred. Host resistance to L. monocytogenes infection in OVA-immunized mice was enhanced by the administration of anti–IL-10 monoclonal antibody. The present study indicates that striking interference is observed between Th1-inducingL. monocytogenes infection and Th2-driven OVA-induced airway hyperreactivity.
Effects of Drought, Heat and Their Interaction on the Growth, Yield and Photosynthetic Function of Lentil (Lens culinaris Medikus) Genotypes Varying in Heat and Drought Sensitivity

Rising temperatures and drought stress limit the growth and production potential of lentil (Lens culinaris Medikus), particularly during reproductive growth and seed filling. The present study aimed to (i) investigate the individual and combined effects of heat and drought stress during seed filling, (ii) determine the response of lentil genotypes with contrasting heat and drought sensitivity, and (iii) assess any cross tolerance in contrasting genotypes. For this purpose, eight lentil genotypes (two drought-tolerant, two drought-sensitive, two heat-tolerant, two heat-sensitive) were either sown at the normal time (second week of November 2014), when the temperatures at the time of seed filling were below 30/20°C (day/night), or sown late (second week of February 2015) to impose heat stress (temperatures > 30/20°C (day/night) during reproducive growth and seed filling. Half of the pots in each sowing environment were fully watered throughout (100% field capacity) while the others had water withheld (50% of field capacity) from the start of seed filling to maturity. Both heat and drought, individually or in combination, damaged cell membranes, photosynthetic traits and water relations; the effects were more severe with the combined stress. RuBisCo and stomatal conductance increased with heat stress but decreased with drought and the combined stress. Leaf and seed sucrose decreased with each stress in conjunction with its biosynthetic enzyme, while its (sucrose) hydrolysis increased under heat and drought stress, but was inhibited due to combination of stresses. Starch increased under heat stress in leaves but decreased in seeds, but drastically declined in seeds under drought alone or in combination with heat stress. At the same time, starch hydrolysis in leaves and seeds increased resulting in an accumulation of reducing sugars. Heat stress inhibited yield traits (seed number and seed weight per plant) more than drought stress, while drought stress reduced individual seed weights more than heat stress. The combined stress severely inhibited yield traits with less effect on the drought- and heat-tolerant genotypes. Drought stress inhibited the biochemical processes of seed filling more than heat stress, and the combined stress had a highly detrimental effect. A partial cross tolerance was noticed in drought and heat-tolerant lentil genotypes against the two stresses.