Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tumor necrosis factor-alpha induces mechanical allodynia after spinal nerve ligation by activation of p38 MAPK in primary sensory neurons.

Tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF) is implicated in the initiation of neuropathic pain. In vitro, TNF activates p38 mitogen-activated kinase. Accordingly, we investigated whether TNF activates the p38 cascade in vivo to trigger pain behavior after spinal nerve ligation (SNL). Treatment starting 2 d before SNL with the TNF antagonist etanercept (1 mg, i.p., every third day) attenuated mechanical allodynia. Treatment starting 1 or 7 d after SNL was ineffective. Similarly, intrathecal infusion of a p38 inhibitor (SB203580, 4 mg/d) was effective only if it was started before but not 7 d after SNL. For both treatments, the cessation of therapy resulted in increased allodynia. In separate experiments using Western blots and immunohistochemistry, ipsilateral lumbar spinal cord and L5 and L6 DRG were analyzed for total and phosphorylated p38 after SNL alone or SNL combined with etanercept pretreatment. In DRG, activated p38 was transiently elevated 5 hr after SNL and returned to baseline by 1 d after SNL. Phosphorylated p38 was localized in small TNF-positive DRG neurons. In spinal cord, p38 was activated between 5 hr and 3 d after SNL and returned to baseline within 5 d. In DRG, but not spinal cord, etanercept pretreatment blocked p38 activation. These data indicate that after SNL treatment, phosphorylated p38 levels in spinal cord and DRG are transiently elevated. In DRG, p38 activation is blocked by systemic TNF inhibition. Parallel inhibition of p38 activation and allodynia may represent a clinically relevant therapeutic window. These data suggest a sequential role for TNF and p38 in the induction of neuropathic pain.
Emergence of Enteric Viruses in Production Chickens Is a Concern for Avian Health

Several viruses have been identified in recent years in the intestinal contents of chickens and turkeys with enteric problems, which have been observed in commercial farms worldwide, including Brazil. Molecular detection of these viruses in Brazil can transform to a big threat for poultry production due to risk for intestinal integrity. This disease is characterized by severely delayed growth, low uniformity, lethargy, watery diarrhea, delayed feed consumption, and a decreased conversion rate. Chicken astrovirus (CAstV), rotavirus, reovirus, chicken parvovirus (ChPV), fowl adenovirus of subgroup I (FAdV-1), and avian nephritis virus (ANV) were investigated using the conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). In addition, the infectious bronchitis virus (IBV), which may play a role in enteric disease, was included. The viruses most frequently detected, either alone or in concomitance with other viruses, were IBV, ANV, rotavirus, and CAstV followed by parvovirus, reovirus, and adenovirus. This study demonstrates the diversity of viruses in Brazilian chicken flocks presenting enteric problems characterized by diarrhea, growth retard, loss weight, and mortality, which reflects the multicausal etiology of this disease.
Depression, Acculturation, and Motivations for Alcohol Use among Young Colombian, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Men

Increasing numbers of young Hispanic men are being treated for alcohol abuse and its consequences. To provide culturally competent services, there must be an understanding of subcultural differences in the antecedents of alcohol abuse and drinking problems. The present study examined the impact of depression, acculturation, and motivations as antecedents for drinking and drinking-related problems among 288 Colombian, Dominican, and Puerto Rican men. Path analyses suggest that for all three groups, depression is associated with drinking for psychological motivational reasons. Psychological motivations, in turn, have a direct impact on heavy drinking and drinking problems. The model for Puerto Ricans suggests psychological motivations are the only direct predictor of drinking problems. For Dominicans, depression appears to be an important direct contributor to drinking problems, whereas for Colombians, acculturation seems to directly contribute to drinking problems. Implications for practice and research are discussed.
MAGNETIC HYSTERESIS MODELING AND VISUALIZATION FOR SPICE BASED ENVIRONMENTS

Today magnetic materials are employed in a truly wide range of applications, and have contributed materially to advances in electronics. On the other hand computer-based simulation tools are convenient for analyzing complex systems. Unfortunately there is insufficiency of models describing electrical behavior of such nonlinear devises. In order to simulate this devices with modern electronic design automation tools the implementation of SPICE oriented models, is imperative. In presented paper a survey of behavior modeling methods suited for visualization of hysteresis of various magnetic materials is given. In order to reduce the modeling time graphs for fitting the slope of the magnetization curve, histeresis’ area and shape are obtained and present in the paper. The appended simulated results pointed to ability of the presented approach for modeling and visualization of different magnetic histeresises.
Antioxidant and DNA protecting properties of anti‐fatigue herb Trichopus zeylanicus

Chronic fatigue is considered a complex symptom for which currently there is no curative treatment available. Oxidative stress plays an important role in the etiology of fatigue and antioxidant treatment might be a valuable therapeutic approach. The Kani, a tribal high altitude living population in southern India, traditionally use the seeds of Trichopus zeylanicus to combat fatigue. In this study, the antioxidant properties of Trichopus zeylanicus were established on free radicals (DPPH and ABTS), its ability to reduce iron, lipoxygenase activity and hydrogen peroxide‐induced lipid peroxidation. The effects of Trichopus zeylanicus on reactive oxygen species induced plasmid DNA (pBR322) cleavage were also investigated. Trichopus zeylanicus significantly scavenged free radicals, reduced lipid peroxidation and inhibited lipoxygenase activity. Trichopus zeylanicus also exhibited iron‐chelating activity and inhibited reactive oxygen species induced DNA damage. Trichopus zeylanicus contains NADH, polyphenols and sulfhydryl compounds, which have the ability to scavenge reactive oxygen species suggesting that the antioxidant activity may be an important mechanism of action of Trichopus zeylanicus to combat fatigue. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A distortion-based metric for location privacy

We propose a novel framework for measuring and evaluating location privacy preserving mechanisms in mobile wireless networks. Within this framework, we first present a formal model of the system, which provides an efficient representation of the network users, the adversaries, the location privacy preserving mechanisms and the resulting location privacy of the users. This model is general enough to accurately express and analyze a variety of location privacy metrics that were proposed earlier. By using the proposed model, we provide formal representations of four metrics among the most relevant categories of location privacy metrics. We also present a detailed comparative analysis of these metrics based on a set of criteria for location privacy measurement. Finally, we propose a novel and effective metric for measuring location privacy, called the distortion-based metric, which satisfies these criteria for privacy measurement and is capable of capturing the mobile users' location privacy more precisely than the existing metrics. Our metric estimates location privacy as the expected distortion in the reconstructed users' trajectories by an adversary.
Fault Detection for Two-Dimensional Roesser Systems With Sensor Faults

This paper investigates the problem of fault detection for 2-D systems with lock-in-place sensor faults. Our attention is focused on detecting sensor faults in the presence of disturbances. To this end, a fault detection filter is designed, through which a residual signal is generated for both the fault-free and faulty cases. In light of the generalized Kalman-Yakubovich-Popov lemma for 2-D systems and matrix inequality techniques, convex filter design conditions are derived. Based on these conditions, an algorithm is proposed to calculate the parameters of a desired fault detection filter. Moreover, a residual evaluation function and a threshold are proposed for 2-D systems. Finally, an example is employed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed fault detection method.
The Effects of Opportunism and Trust on Buyer-Supplier Relationship: Do Commitment Types Matter?

Based on the notion that relational motives have some complicated and multi-directional interactions, this study aims to investigate direct and indirect influences among the main drivers of buyer-supplier relationship strength (RS). Data were collected from 104 buyer firms via e-mail survey. Results show that, in addition to direct effect of opportunism on trust and RS; honesty and benevolence dimensions of trust mediate the opportunism-RS relation. With the notion that different commitment types may have different buffering effects against opportunistic behavior, the study also proposes the moderating roles of affective and calculative commitment. Results reveal that while affective commitment has a moderating effect between opportunism and trust relationship; calculative commitment does not have a significant affect. The business-to-business relationship literature is advanced by a joint investigation of moderated role of two types of commitment and the mediation effects of honesty and benevolence for RS context.
Temporary Exchange-Rate-Based Stabilization Plans: An analysis of the effects on output, consumption, and welfare when money serves a productive role

Thermal triggering apparatus, for a protection device featuring an electrically conductive bimetallic strip and a plate of thickness (e) which supports the bimetallic strip. The bimetallic strip has a first end free that is capable of deforming and a second end or foot which is fitted into a cavity in the plate characterised in that the foot of the bimetallic strip passes through the cavity so that it protrudes below the bottom face of the plate by a length (a) that easily exceeds the thickness (e) of the plate, and the protruding part of the foot has an electrical connection point linked to a conductive part so as to form the direct heating element of the bimetallic strip.
Shaping Adolescents' Attitudes towards Science and Religion in Northern Ireland: The role of scientism, creationism and denominational schools

A sample of 1584 pupils between the ages of 14 and 16 years, attending Year 9, Year 10 and Year 11 classes within Protestant and Catholic grammar schools in Northern Ireland completed indices of attitude towards Christianity, attitude towards science, creationism and scientism. The data demonstrate that the apparent independence of attitude towards science and attitude towards Christianity is transformed into a positive relationship after taking into account individual differences in scientism and creationism.
Lucy in the sky without diamonds: Stealing confidential data in the cloud

Cloud Computing is a recent paradigm that is creating high expectations about benefits such as the pay-per-use model and elasticity of resources. However, with this optimism come also concerns about security. In a public cloud, the user's data storage and processing is no longer done inside its premises, but in data centers owned and administrated by the cloud provider. This may be a concern for organizations that deal with critical data, such as medical records. We show that a malicious insider can steal confidential data of the cloud user, so the user is mostly left with trusting the cloud provider. The paper achieves this goal by showing a set of attacks that demonstrate how a malicious insider can easily obtain passwords, cryptographic keys, files and other confidential data. Additionally, the paper shows that recent research results that might be useful to protect data in the cloud, are still not enough to deal with the problem. The paper is a call to arms for research in the topic.
Proceedings of the 2012 National Toxicology Program Satellite Symposium

The 2012 annual National Toxicology Program (NTP) Satellite Symposium, entitled “Pathology Potpourri,” was held in Boston in advance of the Society of Toxicologic Pathology's 31st annual meeting. The goal of the NTP Symposium is to present current diagnostic pathology or nomenclature issues to the toxicologic pathology community. This article presents summaries of the speakers’ presentations, including diagnostic or nomenclature issues that were presented, along with select images that were used for audience voting or discussion. Some lesions and topics covered during the symposium include eosinophilic crystalline pneumonia in a transgenic mouse model; differentiating adrenal cortical cystic degeneration from adenoma; atypical eosinophilic foci of altered hepatocytes; differentiating cardiac schwannoma from cardiomyopathy; diagnosis of cardiac papillary muscle lesions; intrahepatocytic erythrocytes and venous subendothelial hepatocytes; lesions in Rathke’s cleft and pars distalis; pernicious anemia and megaloblastic disorders; embryonic neuroepithelial dysplasia, holoprosencephaly and exencephaly; and INHAND nomenclature for select cardiovascular lesions.
Biphasic intracellular expression of Staphylococcus aureus virulence factors and evidence for Agr‐mediated diffusion sensing

Staphylococcus aureus invades a variety of mammalian cells and escapes from the endosome to multiply in the cytoplasm. We had previously hypothesized that the molecular events leading to escape of S. aureus from the endosome involved the Agr virulence factor regulatory system. In this report we demonstrate that temporal changes in intracellular activation of the Agr regulon correlates with expression of membrane active toxins. Also, the initial expression of Agr by even small numbers of staphylococci resulted in the permeabilization of the endosomal membrane and the eventual escape of bacteria into the cytoplasm by 3 h post invasion. After Agr downregulation, a second peak of expression coincided with increased permeability of the host cell membrane. In contrast to the parental strain, an Agr‐mutant was unable to escape into the cytoplasm and was observed in intact endosomes as late as 5 h post invasion. These data provide evidence that staphylococcal virulence factor production during invasion of host cells is mediated by an Agr‐dependent process that is most accurately described in the context of diffusion sensing.
Construction of a eukaryotic expression plasmid for human retina-derived neurotrophin-3

Neurotrophin-3 (NT-3) can promote the repair of central nervous system and retinal damage. In previous reports, NT-3 has been expressed by viral vectors. However, plasmid vectors have a safer profile compared with viral vectors in clinical studies. This study recombined amplified human retinal NT-3 with a eukaryotic expression plasmid containing green fluorescent protein (GFP) to construct an NT-3 expression plasmid, pEGFP-N1-NT-3. The transfection efficiency 48 hours after pEGFP-N1-NT-3 transfection to 293T cells was 50.06 ± 2.78%. Abundant NT-3-GFP was expressed in 293T cells as observed by fluorescence microscopy, suggesting the construct pEGFP-N1-NT-3 effectively expressed and secreted NT-3-GFP. Secretory vesicles containing NT-3-GFP were observed in a constant location in cells by laser scan confocal microscopy, indicating the expression and secretion processes of NT-3 in eukaryotic cells were in accordance with the physical synthesis processes of secreted proteins. Western blot assay showed that pro-NT-3-GFP had a molecular weight of 56 kDa, further confirming NT-3-GFP expression. At 48 hours after transfection, the concentration of NT-3 in culture medium was 22.3 ng/mL, suggesting NT-3 produced by pEGFP-N1-NT-3 was efficiently secreted. This study constructed a human retinal-derived NT-3 eukaryotic expression plasmid that efficiently expressed and secreted NT-3.
Structural and Functional Elucidation of Yeast Lanosterol 14α-Demethylase in Complex with Agrochemical Antifungals

Azole antifungals, known as demethylase inhibitors (DMIs), target sterol 14α-demethylase (CYP51) in the ergosterol biosynthetic pathway of fungal pathogens of both plants and humans. DMIs remain the treatment of choice in crop protection against a wide range of fungal phytopathogens that have the potential to reduce crop yields and threaten food security. We used a yeast membrane protein expression system to overexpress recombinant hexahistidine-tagged S. cerevisiae lanosterol 14α-demethylase and the Y140F or Y140H mutants of this enzyme as surrogates in order characterize interactions with DMIs. The whole-cell antifungal activity (MIC50 values) of both the R- and S-enantiomers of tebuconazole, prothioconazole (PTZ), prothioconazole-desthio, and oxo-prothioconazole (oxo-PTZ) as well as for fluquinconazole, prochloraz and a racemic mixture of difenoconazole were determined. In vitro binding studies with the affinity purified enzyme were used to show tight type II binding to the yeast enzyme for all compounds tested except PTZ and oxo-PTZ. High resolution X-ray crystal structures of ScErg11p6×His in complex with seven DMIs, including four enantiomers, reveal triazole-mediated coordination of all compounds and the specific orientation of compounds within the relatively hydrophobic binding site. Comparison with CYP51 structures from fungal pathogens including Candida albicans, Candida glabrata and Aspergillus fumigatus provides strong evidence for a highly conserved CYP51 structure including the drug binding site. The structures obtained using S. cerevisiae lanosterol 14α-demethylase in complex with these agrochemicals provide the basis for understanding the impact of mutations on azole susceptibility and a platform for the structure-directed design of the next-generation of DMIs.
Intelligibility Measurement of Processed Reverberant Speech

Speech intelligibility is reduced by reverberation, and this is a topic of interest in several disciplines. The literature generally falls into three categories linguistic analysis of the effect of reverberation on speech perception, acoustical aspects of auditorium design for better speech delivery, and signal processing techniques for reducing reverberation of recorded speech. Just as each of these research areas has quite different aims, each generally uses a different method of quantifying the effects of reverberation. Linguistic analysis for speech pathology uses subject response based intelligibility tests with diagnostic analysis of the results. The preference for acoustics design is for an objective measure which predicts intelligibility well, preferably one which can be applied theoretically before construction. Signal processing researchers, when dealing with dereverberation, have rarely quantified the effect of processing on reverberant speech, probably due to the difficulty both of improving the characteristics of reverberant speech, and of the administration of intelligibility tests. This study evaluates alternative methods of intelligibility measurement for application to processed reverberant speech. For this purpose, an objective measure (similar to the predictors often used in acoustics) would be ideal because of their ease of implementation; however the results of this study show that these are of limited use. 2. PROCEDURE
Can Quality Improvement System Improve Childcare Site Performance in School Readiness?

ABSTRACT The authors evaluated the effectiveness of the Quality Improvement System (QIS) developed and implemented by Children's Services Council of Palm Beach County (Florida) as a voluntary initiative to improve the quality of childcare and education. They adopted a growth model approach to investigate whether childcare sites that participated in QIS showed greater growth in school readiness of their children than childcare sites that did not participate in QIS over a period of 3 years. After control for site characteristics, the authors found that (a) QIS sites grew significantly faster than non-QIS sites in initial sound fluency and (b) non-QIS sites grew significantly faster than QIS sites in terms of the probability of becoming a low-performing provider.
The antecedents of complaint behaviour for Brazilian and French consumers of services

Using a cross-cultural approach, this study investigates customer satisfaction after a service failure and recovery experience, considering (i) the influence of perceived justice on satisfaction; (ii) the impact of satisfaction on consumer repurchasing and complaint intentions; (iii) the moderating role of the customer cultural orientation; and (iv) the relevance of contextual variables. Based on a survey of 298 consumers from Brazil and France, the results indicated that (i) distributive and interactional justice influenced satisfaction; (ii) satisfaction was a significant predictor of repurchase intentions; (iii) satisfaction influenced third-party, private and voice responses; and (iv) the level of the customer relationship, the severity of the failure and the responsiveness of the firm were significant contextual variables. Moreover, the individual-level analysis suggested that only power distance cultural orientation was a significant moderator.