Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Paradoxical Coupling of Triglyceride Synthesis and Fatty Acid Oxidation in Skeletal Muscle Overexpressing DGAT1

OBJECTIVE Transgenic expression of diacylglycerol acyltransferase-1 (DGAT1) in skeletal muscle leads to protection against fat-induced insulin resistance despite accumulation of intramuscular triglyceride, a phenomenon similar to what is known as the “athlete paradox. ” The primary objective of this study is to determine how DGAT1 affects muscle fatty acid oxidation in relation to whole-body energy metabolism and insulin sensitivity. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We first quantified insulin sensitivity and the relative tissue contributions to the improved whole-body insulin sensitivity in muscle creatine kisase (MCK)-DGAT1 transgenic mice by hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamps. Metabolic consequences of DGAT1 overexpression in skeletal muscles were determined by quantifying triglyceride synthesis/storage (anabolic) and fatty acid oxidation (catabolic), in conjunction with gene expression levels of representative marker genes in fatty acid metabolism. Whole-body energy metabolism including food consumption, body weights, oxygen consumption, locomotor activity, and respiration exchange ratios were determined at steady states. RESULTS MCK-DGAT1 mice were protected against muscle lipoptoxicity, although they remain susceptible to hepatic lipotoxicity. While augmenting triglyceride synthesis, DGAT1 overexpression also led to increased muscle mitochondrial fatty acid oxidation efficiency, as compared with wild-type muscles. On a high-fat diet, MCK-DGAT1 mice displayed higher basal metabolic rates and 5–10% lower body weights compared with wild-type littermates, whereas food consumption was not different. CONCLUSIONS DGAT1 overexpression in skeletal muscle led to parallel increases in triglyceride synthesis and fatty acid oxidation. Seemingly paradoxical, this phenomenon is characteristic of insulin-sensitive myofibers and suggests that DGAT1 plays an active role in metabolic “remodeling” of skeletal muscle coupled with insulin sensitization.
Invasiveness of human endometrial stromal cells is promoted by decidualization and by trophoblast-derived signals.

BACKGROUND Extensive invasion of the maternal decidua by extravillous trophoblast is considered of critical importance for implantation and placentation in humans, the decidua being viewed as a passively invaded tissue. In this study, we examined whether decidual cells might contribute to the highly dynamic processes at the fetal-maternal interface by active movement. METHODS Primary endometrial stromal cells (ESCs) or the telomerase-immortalized ESC line, St-T1b, was induced to decidualize or was left undifferentiated. The AC-1M88 cell line served as a model for extravillous trophoblast cells. Motility of ESCs and trophoblast cells was monitored in transwell invasion and migration assays under co-culture conditions. Secretion of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) was assessed by gelatin zymography. RESULTS AC-1M88 cell invasiveness was unaffected by the presence of ESCs, irrespective of their decidualization status. Surprisingly, decidualized ESCs were significantly more invasive than undifferentiated cells, and this invasive activity was strongly enhanced when cells were cultured in direct contact with AC-1M88 cells. Conditioned medium from AC-1M88 cells also stimulated migration and invasion of ESCs. Secretion of MMP-2 and -9 by ESCs was increased upon decidualization. CONCLUSIONS Enhanced motility and invasive capacity of decidualized ESCs in the presence of trophoblastic cells lead us to hypothesize a major contribution of the decidua in encapsulating the early conceptus and supporting subsequent trophoblast invasion. Our findings thus suggest a far more active role of the decidua in the implantation process than hitherto recognized.
On the role of long-range dependencies in learning protein secondary structure

Accuracy of protein secondary structure predictors has been slowly growing during the last decade. Although it is clear that a relatively large fraction of current errors is due to long-range interactions, current predictors are not able to exploit such information. We present a solution based on a generalized bidirectional neural network that learns from sequences and associated interaction graphs to improve secondary structure prediction.
Higher order clustering in the Durham/UKST and Stromlo–APM Galaxy Redshift Surveys

We present a counts-in-cells analysis of clustering in the optically selected Durham/UKST and Stromlo–APM Galaxy Redshift Surveys. Minimum variance estimates of the second moment, skewness (S3) and kurtosis (S4) of the count probability distribution are extracted from a series of volume-limited samples of varying radial depth. The corresponding theoretical error calculation takes into account all sources of statistical error on the measurement of the moments, and is in good agreement with the dispersion over mock redshift catalogues. The errors that we find on S3 and S4 are larger than those quoted in previous studies, in spite of the fact that the surveys we consider cover larger volumes. S3 varies little with cell size, with values in the range 1.8–2.2 and errors ≲20 per cent, for cubical cells of side 3–20 h−1 Mpc. Direct measurements of S3 are possible out to ∼35 h−1 Mpc, though with larger errors. A significant determination of S4 is only possible for one scale, l∼6 h−1 Mpc, with S4≈5. We compare our results with theoretical predictions from N-body simulations of cold dark matter universes. Qualitatively, the skewness of the dark matter has the same form as that of the galaxies. However, the amplitude of the galaxy S3 is lower than that predicted for the dark matter. Our measurements of S3 are consistent with the predictions of a simple model in which initially Gaussian fluctuations in the dark matter evolve gravitationally, if a second-order bias term is specified, in addition to the traditional linear bias, in order to describe the relation between the distribution of galaxies and dark matter.
Strawbies: explorations in tangible programming

In this demo we present Strawbies, a realtime tangible programming game designed for children ages 5 to 10. Strawbies is played by constructing physical programs out of wooden tiles in front of an iPad. This interaction is made possible with the use of an Osmo play system that includes a mirror to reflect images in front of the iPad through the front-facing camera. We combined this system with the TopCodes computer vision library for fast and reliable image recognition. Here we describe a set of principles that guided our iterative design process along with an overview of testing sessions with children that informed our most recent instantiation of Strawbies.
The Legal Construction of Precarity: Lessons from the Construction Sectors in Beijing and Delhi

This article seeks to disentangle the concepts of “precarity” and “informality” to examine the role of the state in structuring and reproducing precarious labor conditions. Using two cases of labor disputes from the construction sectors in Beijing and Delhi, this article traces the ways through which precarity is structured and reproduced by the state through the law, and reflects on the implications for worker resistance and claim-making.
R-Cubes: OLAP Cubes Contextualized with Documents

Current data warehouse and OLAP (Kimball and Ross, 2002) technologies can be efficiently applied to analyze the huge amounts of structured data that companies produce. These organizations also produce many text documents and use the Web as their largest source of external information. Although these documents include highly valuable information that should also be exploited by companies, they cannot be analyzed by current OLAP technologies because they are unstructured and mainly contain text. The current trend is to find these documents available in XML-like formats. Our proposal is to build XML document warehouses that can be used by companies to store unstructured information coming from their internal and external sources. In (Perez et al., 2005) we proposed an architecture for the integration of a corporate warehouse of structured data with a warehouse of text-rich XML documents. We call the resulting warehouse a contextualized warehouse. Since the XML document warehouse may contain documents about many different topics, we apply well-known information retrieval (IR) (Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto, 1999) techniques to select the context of analysis from the document warehouse. First, the user specifies an analysis context by supplying a sequence of keywords (e.g., an IR condition like "financial crisis"). Then, the analysis is performed on a so-called R-cube (Relevance cube), which is materialized by retrieving the documents and facts related to the selected context. Each fact in the R-cube will be linked to the set of documents that describe its context, and will have assigned a numerical value representing its relevance with respect to the specified context (e.g., how important the fact is for a "financial crisis"). In (Perez et al., 2005) we provided R-cubes with a data model and an algebra. This paper presents a prototype R-cube system, and explains how to use it.
SmartWhisper: Automated collaborative authentication with minimal human intervention in secure wireless enterprise 802.11 networks

Providing a usable and secure mechanism for admitting guest devices into enterprise 802.11 WLANs with minimal human intervention is a challenging problem. Several collaborative mechanisms that may be applied to this problem have been proposed in the past. However none of the existing mechanisms can be made to work in an enterprise environment without either human assistance or online presence of a trusted third-party. Some of these mechanisms depend on human-assisted aural or visual verification and therefore are less desirable from the point of view of security as well as usability. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism called SmartWhisper for permitting guest-devices into secure 802.11 Enterprise Wireless LANs (WLANs). We extend the standard 802.11i architecture with an Access Control Server (ACS) for supporting decentralized authorization, and Trust-Bootstrap Gateways for fully automated collaborative authentication between new guest-devices and ACS. The 802.11i Authentication Server is integrated with the ACS to support secure wireless access for guest-devices. The SmartWhisper system successfully addresses most of the security and usability issues which earlier mechanisms have not been able to address, while still being scalable and lightweight. We also report the initial set of performance results of our system prototype implementation.
A novel gated scan-cell scheme for low Capture Power (LCP) in at-speed testing

In recent years, power dissipation is a large challenge for IC design. Furthermore, the capacitance excessive transition may lead to circuit reliable reduction and heat problem. In this paper, we proposed a new algorithm to reduce the transition count of scan cell during capture operation. The clock gating technique, fault diagnosis, and fault dropping are used to decrease the capture power dissipation. The control logic is required in our architecture, and we considered the complexity of circuit, simultaneously. Experimental results for ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits show that the proposed technique effectively reduces the average capture power by 39.81% and the area of decoding logic is approximately 6%.
Physiological Adaptation of a Nitrate-Storing Beggiatoa sp. to Diel Cycling in a Phototrophic Hypersaline Mat

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to investigate the supposed vertical diel migration and the accompanying physiology of Beggiatoa bacteria from hypersaline microbial mats. We combined microsensor, stable-isotope, and molecular techniques to clarify the phylogeny and physiology of the most dominant species inhabiting mats of the natural hypersaline Lake Chiprana, Spain. The most dominant morphotype had a filament diameter of 6 to 8 μm and a length varying from 1 to >10 mm. Phylogenetic analysis by 16S rRNA gene comparison revealed that this type appeared to be most closely related (91% sequence identity) to the narrow (4-μm diameter) nonvacuolated marine strain MS-81-6. Stable-isotope analysis showed that the Lake Chiprana species could store nitrate intracellularly to 40 mM. The presence of large intracellular vacuoles was confirmed by fluorescein isothiocyanate staining and subsequent confocal microscopy. In illuminated mats, their highest abundance was found at a depth of 8 mm, where oxygen and sulfide co-occurred. However, in the dark, the highest Beggiatoa densities occurred at 7 mm, and the whole population was present in the anoxic zone of the mat. Our findings suggest that hypersaline Beggiatoa bacteria oxidize sulfide with oxygen under light conditions and with internally stored nitrate under dark conditions. It was concluded that nitrate storage by Beggiatoa is an optimal strategy to both occupy the suboxic zones in sulfidic sediments and survive the dark periods in phototrophic mats.
Hermitian based Hidden Activation Functions for Adaptation of Hybrid HMM/ANN Models

This work is concerned with speaker adaptation techniques for artificial neural network (ANN) implemented as feed-forward multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) in the context of large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR). Most successful speaker adaptation techniques for MLPs consist of augmenting the neural architecture with a linear transformation network connected to either the input or the output layer. The weights of this additional linear layer are learned during the adaptation phase while all of the other weights are kept frozen in order to avoid over-fitting. In doing so, the structure of the speakerdependent (SD) and speaker-independent (SI) architecture differs and the number of adaptation parameters depends upon the dimension of either the input or output layers. We propose an alternative neural architecture for speaker-adaptation to overcome the limits of current approaches. This neural architecture adopts hidden activation functions that can be learned directly from the adaptation data. This adaptive capability of the hidden activation function is achieved through the use of orthonormal Hermite polynomials. Experimental evidence gathered on the Wall Street Journal Nov92 task demonstrates the viability of the proposed technique.
Research of routing optimization based on improved PSO algorithm in power communication network

This paper introduces an improved PSO algorithm for power communication network routing, which minimizes the cost of communication and improves the Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper, PSO algorithm is improved in two parts of the parameter inertia weight and the discrete idea is added to, so that it can easily run out the local optimum and provide high speed of convergence as well as for the proposed application. An example shows the feasibleness and effectiveness of the algorithm. And it is easier to get an optimal or nearly optimal solution in power communication network routing by using the presented algorithm.
Sampling based scene-space video processing

Many compelling video processing effects can be achieved if per-pixel depth information and 3D camera calibrations are known. However, the success of such methods is highly dependent on the accuracy of this "scene-space" information. We present a novel, sampling-based framework for processing video that enables high-quality scene-space video effects in the presence of inevitable errors in depth and camera pose estimation. Instead of trying to improve the explicit 3D scene representation, the key idea of our method is to exploit the high redundancy of approximate scene information that arises due to most scene points being visible multiple times across many frames of video. Based on this observation, we propose a novel pixel gathering and filtering approach. The gathering step is general and collects pixel samples in scene-space, while the filtering step is application-specific and computes a desired output video from the gathered sample sets. Our approach is easily parallelizable and has been implemented on GPU, allowing us to take full advantage of large volumes of video data and facilitating practical runtimes on HD video using a standard desktop computer. Our generic scene-space formulation is able to comprehensively describe a multitude of video processing applications such as denoising, deblurring, super resolution, object removal, computational shutter functions, and other scene-space camera effects. We present results for various casually captured, hand-held, moving, compressed, monocular videos depicting challenging scenes recorded in uncontrolled environments.
Unveiling the nature of INTEGRAL sources through optical spectroscopy

Since its launch on October 2002 the INTEGRAL satellite is performing an deep survey of the hard X-ray sky with unprecedented sensitivity and positional accuracy. This allowed pinpointing, through positional cross-correlation with catalogs at longer wavelengths, possible optical/near-infrared candidates for the hard X-ray sources of still unknown nature. In this presentation I will describe this work as well as the observational activities aimed at determining, through optical spectroscopy, the nature of the unknown INTEGRAL sources, along with the main results of this search. Future prospects about this identification program will also be illustrated.
Anthropometry, Carbohydrate and Lipid Metabolism in the East Flanders Prospective Twin Survey: Linkage of Candidate Genes Using Two Sib-Pair Based Variance Components Analyses

Abstract Insulin resistance and obesity are underlying causes of type 2 diabetes and therefore much interest is focused on the potential genes involved. A series of anthropometric and metabolic characteristic were measured in 240 MZ and 112 DZ twin pairs recruited from the East Flanders Prospective Twin Survey. Microsatellite markers located close to ABCC8, ADIPOQ, GCK, IGF1, IGFBP1, INSR, LEP, LEPR, PPARγ and the RETN gene were genotyped. Univariate single point variance components linkage analyses were performed using two methods: (1) the standard method, only comprising the phenotypic and genotypic data of the DZ twin pairs and (2) the extended method, also incorporating the phenotypic data of the MZ twin pairs. Suggestive linkages (LOD > 1) were observed between the ABCC8 marker and waist-to-hip ratio and HDL-cholesterol levels. Both markers flanking ADIPOQ showed suggestive linkage with triglycerides levels, the upstream marker also with body mass and HDL-cholesterol levels. The IGFBP1 marker showed suggestive linkage with fat mass, fasting insulin and leptin levels and the LEP marker showed suggestive linkage with birth weight. This study suggests that DNA variants in ABCC8, ADIPOQ, IGFBP1 and LEP gene region may predispose to type 2 diabetes. In addition, the two methods used to perform linkage analyses yielded similar results. This was however not the case for birth weight where chorionicity seems to be an important confounder.
Verb Predicates, Meaning and Multilinguality

This paper summarizes some of the research on verb predicates that has taken place at the University of Central Florida during the last few years. It also describes how this research may be related to the MEANING project. The point is made that the de nition of predicates linked to a general ontology, such as that of WordNet, and to grammatical relations can solve the crucial issues of verb and prepositional meaning and thematic roles. Also, it is suggested that a broad ontology of predicates, which would be language-free as far as ontological categories is concerned, could be extended relatively easy to other languages, resulting into ontologies of predicates similar to the di erent \wordnets" that have emerged from WordNet. This ontology of predicates could facilitate multilingual tasks such as information retrieval and machine translation, as well as deeper monolingual natural language processing tasks, such as under-
Fourier transform mid infrared spectroscopy applications for monitoring the structural plasticity of plant cell walls

Fourier transform mid-infrared (FT-MIR) spectroscopy has been extensively used as a potent, fast and non-destructive procedure for analyzing cell wall architectures, with the capacity to provide abundant information about their polymers, functional groups, and in muro entanglement. In conjunction with multivariate analyses, this method has proved to be a valuable tool for tracking alterations in cell walls. The present review examines recent progress in the use of FT-MIR spectroscopy to monitor cell wall changes occurring in muro as a result of various factors, such as growth and development processes, genetic modifications, exposition or habituation to cellulose biosynthesis inhibitors and responses to other abiotic or biotic stresses, as well as its biotechnological applications.
Grammatical Gender in German Influences How Role-Nouns Are Interpreted: Evidence from ERPs

ABSTRACT Grammatically masculine role-nouns (e.g., Studentenmasc.‘students’) can refer to men and women but may favor an interpretation where only men are considered the referent. If true, this has implications for a society aiming to achieve equal representation in the workplace since, for example, job adverts use such role descriptions. To investigate the interpretation of role-nouns, the present ERP study assessed grammatical gender processing in German. Twenty participants read sentences where a role-noun (masculine or feminine) introduced a group of people, followed by a congruent (masculine–men, feminine–women) or incongruent (masculine–women, feminine–men) continuation. Both for feminine-men and masculine-women continuations a P600 (500 to 800 ms) was observed; another positivity was already present from 300 to 500 ms for feminine-men continuations but critically not for masculine-women continuations. The results imply a male-biased rather than gender-neutral interpretation of the masculine—despite widespread usage of the masculine as a gender-neutral form—suggesting that masculine forms are inadequate for representing genders equally.
Influences of Rhythm- and Timbre-Related Musical Features on Characteristics of Music-Induced Movement

Music makes us move. Several factors can affect the characteristics of such movements, including individual factors or musical features. For this study, we investigated the effect of rhythm- and timbre-related musical features as well as tempo on movement characteristics. Sixty participants were presented with 30 musical stimuli representing different styles of popular music, and instructed to move along with the music. Optical motion capture was used to record participants’ movements. Subsequently, eight movement features and four rhythm- and timbre-related musical features were computationally extracted from the data, while the tempo was assessed in a perceptual experiment. A subsequent correlational analysis revealed that, for instance, clear pulses seemed to be embodied with the whole body, i.e., by using various movement types of different body parts, whereas spectral flux and percussiveness were found to be more distinctly related to certain body parts, such as head and hand movement. A series of ANOVAs with the stimuli being divided into three groups of five stimuli each based on the tempo revealed no significant differences between the groups, suggesting that the tempo of our stimuli set failed to have an effect on the movement features. In general, the results can be linked to the framework of embodied music cognition, as they show that body movements are used to reflect, imitate, and predict musical characteristics.