Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Polymer-functionalized Nanodiamond Platforms as Vehicles for Gene Delivery Keywords: Nanodiamonds · Gene Delivery · Nanocarrier · Transfection · Low Molecular Weight Polyethyleneimine (lmw Pei)

T he purpose of gene therapy is to introduce foreign genetic material into host cells to either supplement aberrant genes or endow additional biological functions. 1 To date, however, there has been only modest progress toward this goal, mainly due to the lack of safe, broadly applicable delivery methods. There are two main approaches to gene delivery: viral and nonviral. Viral delivery is the more conventional approach because viruses have evolved to infect cells with high efficacy. As of July 2007, there have been over 1300 gene therapy clinical trials, 70% of which have used viral vectors. 2 Despite some success with viral vectors, there are still no FDA-approved products. Moreover, clinical trials have highlighted the safety risks of gene therapy via viral vectors as cancer and death have resulted in some cases. 3,4 In contrast, synthetic nonviral gene delivery systems, such as liposomes and polymers, offer several advantages including ease of production and reduced risk of cytotoxicity and immunogenicity, 5,6 but their use has been challenged by relatively low transfection ef-ficiencies. This problem mainly stems from the difficulty in controlling their properties at the nanoscale, prompting the search for new modalities with better transfection effi-ciencies. Lately, nanocarriers have received attention in the gene therapy community including such notable examples as poly-ethyleneimine conjugated gold nanoparti-cles 7 and multifunctional nanorods. 1 Recent studies on diamond nanoparticles, also referred to as nanodiamonds (NDs), have revealed NDs as attractive platform nanocarri-ers due to their innate biocompatibility, 8 scalability, precise particle distribution, high surface area-to-volume ratio, near-spherical aspect ratio, and easily adaptable carbon surface for bioagent attachment. 9 NDs have been functionalized with a range of thera-peutics, proteins, antibodies, DNA, polymers , and other assorted biological agents. 10Ϫ14 Furthermore, NDs are stable and dispersible in water, making them a promising and clinically important modality in improving the efficacy of the treatment of diseases and even some cancers at the molecular level. Mitochondrial function (MTT) and luminescent ATP production assays have demonstrated that NDs are not toxic to a wide variety of cell types. 15 Compared to other carbon-based nanomaterials such as CNTs, which have been shown to be toxic in many studies and are naturally not water-soluble, it is envisaged that NDs can serve as enhanced, versatile nanocarri-ers to deliver genes of interest in biological systems. To rationally design a therapeutic gene delivery vector, important lessons may be learned from examining the mechanisms of …
Energy-efficient intrusion detection with a barrier of probabilistic sensors

Intrusion detection is a significant application in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). S. Kumar et al have introduced the concept of barrier coverage, which deploys sensors in a narrow belt region to guarantee that any intrusion across the region is to be detected. However, the practical issues have not been investigated such as scheduling sensors energy-efficiently while guaranteeing the detection probability of any intrusion across the region based on probabilistic sensing model, which is a more realistic sensing model. Besides, the intruders may be humans, animals, fighter planes or other things, which obviously have diverse moving speeds. In this paper, we analyze the detection probability of arbitrary path across the barrier of sensors theoretically and take the maximum speed of possible intruders into consideration since the sensor networks are designed for different intruders in different scenarios. Based on the theoretical analysis of detection probability, we formulate a Minimum Weight ∈-Barrier Problem about how to schedule sensors energy-efficiently. We show the problem NP-hard and propose a bounded approximation algorithm, called Minimum Weight Barrier Algorithm (MWBA) to schedule the activation of sensors. To evaluate our design, we analyze the performance of MWBA theoretically and also perform extensive simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.
Swimming gaits, passive drag and buoyancy of diving sperm whales Physeter macrocephalus

SUMMARY Drag and buoyancy are two primary external forces acting on diving marine mammals. The strength of these forces modulates the energetic cost of movement and may influence swimming style (gait). Here we use a high-resolution digital tag to record depth, 3-D orientation, and sounds heard and produced by 23 deep-diving sperm whales in the Ligurian Sea and Gulf of Mexico. Periods of active thrusting versus gliding were identified through analysis of oscillations measured by a 3-axis accelerometer. Accelerations during 382 ascent glides of five whales (which made two or more steep ascents and for which we obtained a measurement of length) were strongly affected by depth and speed at Reynold's numbers of 1.4–2.8×107. The accelerations fit a model of drag, air buoyancy and tissue buoyancy forces with an r2 of 99.1–99.8% for each whale. The model provided estimates (mean ± s.d.) of the drag coefficient (0.00306±0.00015), air carried from the surface (26.4±3.9 l kg-3 mass), and tissue density (1030±0.8 kg m-3) of these five animals. The model predicts strong positive buoyancy forces in the top 100 m of the water column, decreasing to near neutral buoyancy at 250–850 m. Mean descent speeds (1.45±0.19 m s-1) were slower than ascent speeds (1.63±0.22 m s-1), even though sperm whales stroked steadily (glides 5.3±6.3%) throughout descents and employed predominantly stroke-and-glide swimming (glides 37.7±16.4%) during ascents. Whales glided more during portions of dives when buoyancy aided their movement, and whales that glided more during ascent glided less during descent (and vice versa), supporting the hypothesis that buoyancy influences behavioural swimming decisions. One whale rested at∼ 10 m depth for more than 10 min without fluking, regulating its buoyancy by releasing air bubbles.
Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles: women’s writing of classical reception and feminism

Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles raises important questions about the relationship between the woman writer and the classical canon on account of her gender, as well as the way in which restrictive representations of gender can be subverted through classical reception. These concerns bring Cook’s novella in line with comparable feminist and gender theory and it is this relationship between theory and literary practice that my study addresses, with an eye to assessing the way in which Cook’s work could provide useful for feminist politics and activism. Undermining gender essentialism, wherein the type of body that you have dictates what you can do, Cook expands upon Statius’ account in the Achilleid of Achilles’ girlhood on Skiros. Then refusing to engage with literary narratives of Helen’s blame, Cook instead directs attention to an earlier episode in her biography, her rape by Theseus. This sickening tale of abuse lays the moral foundation on which the other episodes of sexual violence related by Cook can be read. Targets of contemporary feminist activism, so-called ‘rape myths’ are held up to scrutiny by Cook, validating the expectation of certain feminist theorists that mis-readings of rape will only be rectified via the female voice.
Standardizationof a Commercial ( BoehringerMannheim Diagnostics ) Enzymic Method for Cholesterol

The Laboratory Standardization Panel of the National Cholesterol Education Program recommends that cholesterol method accuracy ideally be within 3% of the true value determined by the Abell-Kendall Reference Method, a component of the National Reference System for Cholesterol. As one of the Abell-Kendall network laboratories established to facilitate cholesterol standardization, the approach we recommend for determining accuracy involves a comparison analysis on patients’ specimens by the method in question and by the Abell-Kendall method. Use of fresh specimens precludes matrix interactions that may influence enzymic measurement. Using this approach, we assessed an enzymic method for cholesterol with two instruments (Boehringer Mannheim/Hitachi 717 and 737), with BMD reagent, controls, and calibrator. Fresh and frozen sera were analyzed with both instruments over three days. The AbelkKendall method was used at the Northwest Lipid Research Center on frozen aliquots of the same sera. Both instruments demonstrated good agreement with the Reference Method, as determined by linear regression; overall bias averaged less than -2% for the Hitachi 717 and -1% for the Hitachi 737 at 2000 mgIL-. i.e., within the accuracy recommendation.We observed a difference in bias for fresh and frozen specimens; with the Hitachi 717, fresh specimens exhibited -3% bias at 2000 mg/L, but there was virtually no bias of determinations of frozen specimens.
Verifying and enforcing network paths with icing

We describe a new networking primitive, called a Path Verification Mechanism (pvm). There has been much recent work about how senders and receivers express policies about the paths that their packets take. For instance, a company might want fine-grained control over which providers carry which traffic between its branch offices, or a receiver may want traffic sent to it to travel through an intrusion detection service. While the ability to express policies has been well-studied, the ability to enforce policies has not. The core challenge is: if we assume an adversarial, decentralized, and high-speed environment, then when a packet arrives at a node, how can the node be sure that the packet followed an approved path? Our solution, icing, incorporates an optimized cryptographic construction that is compact, and requires negligible configuration state and no PKI. We demonstrate icing's plausibility with a NetFPGA hardware implementation. At 93% more costly than an IP router on the same platform, its cost is significant but affordable. Indeed, our evaluation suggests that icing can scale to backbone speeds.
Integrative Signaling Networks of Membrane Guanylate Cyclases: Biochemistry and Physiology

This monograph presents a historical perspective of cornerstone developments on the biochemistry and physiology of mammalian membrane guanylate cyclases (MGCs), highlighting contributions made by the authors and their collaborators. Upon resolution of early contentious studies, cyclic GMP emerged alongside cyclic AMP, as an important intracellular second messenger for hormonal signaling. However, the two signaling pathways differ in significant ways. In the cyclic AMP pathway, hormone binding to a G protein coupled receptor leads to stimulation or inhibition of an adenylate cyclase, whereas the cyclic GMP pathway dispenses with intermediaries; hormone binds to an MGC to affect its activity. Although the cyclic GMP pathway is direct, it is by no means simple. The modular design of the molecule incorporates regulation by ATP binding and phosphorylation. MGCs can form complexes with Ca2+-sensing subunits that either increase or decrease cyclic GMP synthesis, depending on subunit identity. In some systems, co-expression of two Ca2+ sensors, GCAP1 and S100B with ROS-GC1 confers bimodal signaling marked by increases in cyclic GMP synthesis when intracellular Ca2+ concentration rises or falls. Some MGCs monitor or are modulated by carbon dioxide via its conversion to bicarbonate. One MGC even functions as a thermosensor as well as a chemosensor; activity reaches a maximum with a mild drop in temperature. The complexity afforded by these multiple limbs of operation enables MGC networks to perform transductions traditionally reserved for G protein coupled receptors and Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) ion channels and to serve a diverse array of functions, including control over cardiac vasculature, smooth muscle relaxation, blood pressure regulation, cellular growth, sensory transductions, neural plasticity and memory.
To Tell the Truth: The Polygraph Exam and the Marketing of American Expertise

An Introduction to Truth-Telling In his recent book, A Social History of Truth, historian of science Steven Shapin focused on the efforts of truth-telling English gentlemen of the seventeenth century to make recalcitrant nature speak.1 This paper will focus on the efforts of deceitful American experts of the twentieth century to make men and women speak the truth. How different are these two enterprises? When Einstein inscribed above his fireplace the motto, "Nature is subtle, but not malicious/' he surely acknowledged the possibility that people might be malicious, if not
Multiscale motion saliency for keyframe extraction from motion capture sequences

Motion capture is an increasingly popular animation technique; however data acquired by motion capture can become substantial. This makes it difficult to use motion capture data in a number of applications, such as motion editing, motion understanding, automatic motion summarization, motion thumbnail generation, or motion database search and retrieval. To overcome this limitation, we propose an automatic approach to extract keyframes from a motion capture sequence. We treat the input sequence as motion curves, and obtain the most salient parts of these curves using a new proposed metric, called 'motion saliency'. We select the curves to be analysed by a dimension reduction technique, Principal Component Analysis (PCA). We then apply frame reduction techniques to extract the most important frames as keyframes of the motion. With this approach, around 8% of the frames are selected to be keyframes for motion capture sequences. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A fused features approach on Content-Based Image Retrieval based on Fuzzy rule-set

Research in content-based image retrieval today is a lively discipline, expanding in breadth. Discovering new and innovative processes of locating a desired image from an expanding collection of images has been a major area of interest for many professional fields. This has led to the increasing use of a technique called Content Based Image Retrieval which is used to retrieve images based on low-level features which are automatically driven such as color, shape and texture. CBIR draws many of its methods from the field of image processing and computer vision and can be regarded as subset of that field. Using this technique, the entire database may be searched to find the most closely matching image. In this paper, color and texture features of an image have been used to retrieve all the similar images from the image database. For this purpose, Block Color Histogram as color feature and Gray-level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Gabor wavelets as texture features have been used. The proposed approach is very efficient since it uses the prominent and distinct features of an image useful for effective image retrieval using fuzzy heuristics according to human visual system.
High-Frequency Binaural Beats Increase Cognitive Flexibility: Evidence from Dual-Task Crosstalk

Increasing evidence suggests that cognitive-control processes can be configured to optimize either persistence of information processing (by amplifying competition between decision-making alternatives and top-down biasing of this competition) or flexibility (by dampening competition and biasing). We investigated whether high-frequency binaural beats, an auditory illusion suspected to act as a cognitive enhancer, have an impact on cognitive-control configuration. We hypothesized that binaural beats in the gamma range bias the cognitive-control style toward flexibility, which in turn should increase the crosstalk between tasks in a dual-task paradigm. We replicated earlier findings that the reaction time in the first-performed task is sensitive to the compatibility between the responses in the first and the second task—an indication of crosstalk. As predicted, exposing participants to binaural beats in the gamma range increased this effect as compared to a control condition in which participants were exposed to a continuous tone of 340 Hz. These findings provide converging evidence that the cognitive-control style can be systematically biased by inducing particular internal states; that high-frequency binaural beats bias the control style toward more flexibility; and that different styles are implemented by changing the strength of local competition and top-down bias.
Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence Through the German Dictatorships

1. Introduction: Violence and Generations 2. Violence Abroad: Aspects of Imperialism 3. Uncomfortable Compatriots: Societal Violence and the Crises of Weimar 4. Divided Generations: State Violence and the Formation of 'Two Worlds' in Nazi Germany 5. The Escalation of Violence: War and Genocide 6. Profiles: The Shifting Formation of Generations after 1945 7. Transitions from Nazism to Communism 8. Mobilization for the Future (Again) 9. The 'Iron Cage': Coming to Terms with the Present 10. Embodying the Past 11. Turning Points 12. Conclusions: Generations through an Age of Violence Bibliography Index
Early Evolution of Stellar Groups and Clusters: Environmental Effects on Forming Planetary Systems

This paper studies the dynamical evolution of young groups/clusters, with N = 100-1000 members, from their embedded stage out to ages of ~10 Myr. We use N-body simulations to explore how their evolution depends on the system size N and the initial conditions. Motivated by recent observations suggesting that stellar groups begin their evolution with subvirial speeds, this study compares subvirial starting states with virial starting states. Multiple realizations of equivalent cases (100 simulations per initial condition) are used to build up a robust statistical description of these systems, e.g., the probability distribution of closest approaches, the mass profiles, and the probability distribution for the radial location of cluster members. These results provide a framework from which to assess the effects of groups/clusters on the processes of star and planet formation and to study cluster evolution. The distributions of radial positions are used in conjunction with the probability distributions of the expected far-ultraviolet (FUV) luminosities (calculated here as a function of cluster size N) to determine the radiation exposure of circumstellar disks. The distributions of closest approaches are used in conjunction with scattering cross sections (calculated here as a function of stellar mass using ~105 Monte Carlo scattering experiments) to determine the probability of disruption for newly formed solar systems. We use the nearby cluster NGC 1333 as a test case in this investigation. The main conclusion of this study is that clusters in this size range have only a modest effect on forming planetary systems. The interaction rates are low, so that the typical solar system experiences a single encounter with closest approach distance b ~ 1000 AU. The radiation exposure is also low, with median FUV flux G0 ~ 900 (1.4 ergs s-1 cm-2), so that photoevaporation of circumstellar disks is only important beyond 30 AU. Given the low interaction rates and modest radiation levels, we suggest that solar system disruption is a rare event in these clusters.
Distributed beamforming for randomly distributed sensors using bisection method and dynamic programming technique

Beamforming is being used in sensor networks to enhance its communication range.The sensors in networks use their own clock adjustment for distributed beamforming by coordinating with other sensors. For this, the Channel State Information(CSI) is required. Since the CSI is not available at the transmitter side, the Channel Phase tracking is used. A novel bisection based phase tracking method is proposed for compensation of channel propagation delay.This eliminates the probability based method which has more computational complexity. The problem of phase tracking is modeled as a minimization problem. The phase is adjusted iteratively similar to finding roots for an algebraic equation using bisection method. Further, the problem of phase adjustment is simplified by considering phase adjustment of single participating sensor in each time slot using Dynamic Programming Technique, instead of collectively adjusting the phase of all participating sensors. This technique is compared with bilateral uniform, Gaussian and Laplacian distribution function. The initial time delay is considered as bilateral uniform distributed and channel propagation delay is modeled as Rayleigh distributed variables. A computationally efficient algorithm is developed for distributed beamforming and results show 66% reduction in computation complexity.
Population Coding of Reward Magnitude in the Orbitofrontal Cortex of the Rat

Although single-cell coding of reward-related information in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) has been characterized to some extent, much less is known about the coding properties of orbitofrontal ensembles. We examined population coding of reward magnitude by performing ensemble recordings in rat OFC while animals learned an olfactory discrimination task in which various reinforcers were associated with predictive odor stimuli. Ensemble activity was found to represent information about reward magnitude during several trial phases, namely when animals moved to the reward site, anticipated reward during an immobile period, and received it. During the anticipation phase, Bayesian and template-matching reconstruction algorithms decoded reward size correctly from the population activity significantly above chance level (highest value of 43 and 48%, respectively; chance level, 33.3%), whereas decoding performance for the reward delivery phase was 76 and 79%, respectively. In the anticipation phase, the decoding score was only weakly dependent on the size of the neuronal group participating in reconstruction, consistent with a redundant, distributed representation of reward information. In contrast, decoding was specific for temporal segments within the structure of a trial. Decoding performance steeply increased across the first few trials for every rewarded odor, an effect that could not be explained by a nonspecific drift in response strength across trials. Finally, when population responses to a negative reinforcer (quinine) were compared with sucrose reinforcement, coding in the delivery phase appeared to be related to reward quality, and thus was not based on ingested liquid volume.
Eye Tracking in Multimodal Comprehension of Graphs

Eye tracking methodology has been a major empirical research approach for the study of online comprehension processes in reading and scene viewing. The use of eye tracking methodology for the study of diagrammatic representations, however, has been relatively limited so far. The investigation of specific types of diagrammatic representations, such as statistical graphs is even scarce. In this study, we propose eye tracking as an empirical research approach for a systematic analysis of multimodal comprehension of line graphs. Based on a framework of multimodal comprehension of graphs and texts, which focuses on the role of spatial concepts, we present an experimental investigation of linguistic guidance and eye movement control in comprehension of time-domain line graphs with a particular focus on the analysis of gaze patterns in graph in-