Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification of Atypical Peri-Nuclear Multivesicular Bodies in Oxidative and Glycolytic Skeletal Muscle of Aged and Pompe's Disease Mouse Models

Muscle wasting that occurs during aging or from disease pathology presents with an accumulation of lipid species termed ceroid or lipofuscin. This unique species of lipid has been characterized in various cell types but its properties and organization in skeletal muscle remains unclear. Using immunofluorescence and transmission electron microscopy, we were able to visualize and characterize an atypical lipid storing organelle in skeletal muscle. White myofibers contain two organelles at each pole of the myonuclei and red myofibers contain many of these structures in and around the perinuclear space. These organelles contain markers for late endosomes, are morphologically similar to multivesicular bodies, store lipid, and hypertrophy in aged muscle and a model of muscle wasting with an accumulation of large amounts of lipofuscin. Rapamycin treatment reduces the multivesicular body hypertrophy, restores late endosomal protein markers, and also increases the number and intensity of lipofuscin deposits. Together, these data demonstrate for the first time a perinuclear organelle in skeletal muscle that hypertrophies in muscle wasting phenotypes and is involved in endocytic lipid storage.
In vitro neutralization of hepatitis B virus by monoclonal antibodies against the viral surface antigen

In vitro HBV infection and neutralization were assayed using an anti‐preS1 murine monoclonal antibody (1B3) and anti‐preS2 (H69K) and anti‐S (CS131A) murine‐human chimeric antibodies. The 1B3 (lgG1) and H69K (lgG1) was constructed previously and the CS131A was constructed for this study by expressing stably the chimeric heavy and light chains in Chinese hamster ovary cells and purifying from the culture supernatant. Previous study showed that the H69K and CS131A recognize known virus‐neutralizing epitopes, while the 1B3 does not. For the assays, adult human hepatocyte primary culture was infected with the adr or ayw subtype of HBV, and the infectivity and subsequent replication was confirmed both by measuring the kinetics of HBsAg secretion by the infected cells and detecting the intermediate replicative form of HBV DNA in the cells. Next, the hepatocytes were infected with the adr or ayw subtype of the virus that had been preincubated with various concentrations of each of the antibodies and the neutralization of HBV was analyzed. The results showed that the anti‐preS2 and anti‐S chimeric antibodies exhibited neutralizing activity against both the adr and ayw subtypes of the virus, with approximately 1,000 and 2,000 times higher specific activity than polyclonal hepatitis B immune globulin, respectively, but the anti‐preS1 antibody scarcely neutralized the infection. The neutralizing activities of the antibodies were consistent with their epitope specificity and antigen‐binding affinity, suggesting that this neutralization assay is specific. The in vitro neutralization assay will be useful for evaluating the neutralizing activity of anti‐HBV antibodies before in vivo testing in chimpanzees. J. Med. Virol. 52:226–233, 1997. © 1997 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Long-Term Control of Legionella Species in Potable Water After a Nosocomial Legionellosis Outbreak in an Intensive Care Unit

Abstract Environmental and patient-care control measures were initiated in response to an outbreak of legionellosis in an intensive care unit in 1992. The measures included maintaining elevated potable hot-water temperatures following superheating and using sterile water for administrations through nasogastric tubes. Legionella species remained below detectable levels in the potable hot-water system upon reevaluation in 1999. Nosocomial cases of legionellosis have not been reported since the outbreak.
Eecient View Self-maintenance

We consider the problem of maintaining a materialized view without accessing the base relations. More speci cally, we would like to nd a maximal test that guarantees that a view is self-maintainable (abbrev SM) under a given update to the base relations, i.e., can be maintained using only the view de nition, its contents and the update. We observe that SM evaluation can be separated into a view-de nition-time portion where a maximal test is generated solely based on the view de nition, and an update-time portion where the test can be e ciently applied to the view and the update. We call such a maximal test a Complete Test for View Self-Maintainability (abbrev CTSM). This paper reports on some interesting new results for conjunctive-query views under insertion updates: 1) the CTSM's are extremely simple queries that look for certain tuples in the view to be maintained; 2) these CTSM's can be generated at view de nition time using a very simple algorithm based on the concept of Minimal Z-Partition; 3) view self-maintenance can also be expressed as simple update queries over the view itself.
Polarization-insensitive mechanically induced tunable long period holey fiber grating

A birefringence compensation method for a mechanically induced tunable long period holey fiber grating is proposed. With this method the tunable long period holey fiber grating becomes polarization-insensitive. A device with such characteristics is desirable in applications where filter tunability is used to reject (or simply attenuate) non desired optical bands. Characterizations with polarized and nonpolarized light are presented and the potential applications are discussed as well.
L-Carnitine attenuates ifosfamide-induced carnitine deficiency and decreased intramitochondrial CoA-SH in rat kidney tissues.

BACKGROUND The effects of L-carnitine on ifosfamide (IFO)-induced Fanconi syndrome have not been studied to date. This study aimed to investigate, on a mechanism basis, whether L-carnitine could prevent the development of IFO-induced Fanconi syndrome in rats. METHODS Adult male Wistar albino rats were assigned to 1 of 4 treatment groups: group 1 (control) rats were given daily intraperitoneal (i.p.) injections of normal saline for 10 consecutive days; group 2 (L-carnitine) rats were given L-carnitine (200 mg/kg per day, i.p.) for 10 consecutive days. Rats of group 3 (IFO) received normal saline for 5 days, followed by IFO (50 mg/kg per day, i.p.) for 5 consecutive days. Rats of group 4 (IFO plus L-carnitine) received L-carnitine for 5 days before and 5 days concomitant with IFO. RESULTS Administration of IFO for 5 consecutive days significantly increased serum creatinine, blood urea nitrogen (BUN), urinary carnitine excretion, intramitochondrial acetyl-CoA and thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS), and significantly decreased total carnitine, intramitochondrial CoA-SH, ATP and ATP/ADP ratio, and reduced glutathione (GSH) in kidney tissues. Administration of L-carnitine to IFO-treated rats resulted in a complete reversal of the increase in serum creatinine, BUN, urinary carnitine excretion and intramitochondrial acetyl-CoA, and of the decrease in total carnitine, intramitochondrial CoA-SH, ATP and GSH, induced by IFO, to the control values. CONCLUSIONS L-Carnitine prevents the development of IFO-induced Fanconi syndrome by increasing intracellular carnitine content and intramitochondrial CoA-SH, with the consequent improvement in mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation and energy production, as well as its ability to decrease oxidative stress.
REAL-WORLD ROBOT NAVIGATION USING FUZZY REACTION AND DELIBERATION

We report on the development of a fuzzy system providing a low-level obstacle-avoidance navigation for a robot in an office environment. The system employs reactive and deliberative rule-based behaviors in a unified manner, allowing them to compete and compromise in controlling the robot. The system is constructed hierarchically, and successfully employs less than 100 rules to control a 28-variable space. We show that the system acts distinctively different than crisp behavior arbitration approaches in that it allows for all behaviors to influence the control of the robot in parallel, each to degree to which it is appropriate. This approach is a step towards a unified view of reaction and deliberation as responses to an external and internal environments, respectively.
A Generic Motion Planner for Robot Multi-fingered Manipulation

This paper addresses the dexterous manipulation-planning problem, which deals with motion planning for multi-ﬁngered hand manipulating objects among static obstacles, under quasi-static movement assumption. We propose a general manipulation approach capable to compute object and ﬁnger trajectories as well as the ﬁnger relocation sequence, in order to link any two given conﬁg-urations of the composite system hand+object. It relies on a topological property that characterizes the existence of solutions in the subspace of conﬁgurations where the object is grasped by the n ﬁngers. This property leads to reduce the problem by structuring the search space. The developed planner captures in a probabilistic roadmap the connectivity of sub-manifolds of the composite con-ﬁguration space. The answer of the manipulation planning query is then given by searching a path in the computed graph. Simulation experiments are reported for diﬀerent multi-ﬁngered manipulation task examples showing the eﬃciency of the proposed method.
Syntactic Parsing and Compound Recognition via Dual Decomposition: Application to French

In this paper we show how the task of syntactic parsing of non-segmented texts, including compound recognition, can be represented as constraints between phrase-structure parsers and CRF sequence labellers. In order to build a joint system we use dual decomposition, a way to combine several elementary systems which has proven successful in various NLP tasks. We evaluate this proposition on the French SPMRL corpus. This method compares favorably with pipeline architectures and improves state-of-the-art results.
Overlapping Community Detection in Temporal Text Networks

Network is a powerful language to represent relational data. One way to understand network is to analyze groups of nodes which share same properties or functions. The task of discovering such groups is known as community detection. Generally, there are two types of information that can be utilized to fulfill this task, i.e., the link structures and the node attributes. The temporal text network is a special kind of network that contains both sources of information. Typical representatives include online blog networks, the World Wide Web (WWW) and academic citation networks. In this paper, we study the problem of overlapping community detection in temporal text network. We gather a large set of 32 temporal text networks with reliable groundtruth communities. By examining such networks, we find that a large proportion of edges connect two nodes which share no community in common. This scenario cannot be modeled by practically all existing community detection methods. Besides, we quantitatively analyze how node attributes help to improve the quality of detected communities and discover that nodes in the same community share similar textual contents. Motivated by these empirical observations, we propose MAGIC (Model Affiliation Graph with Interacting Communities), a generative model which captures community interactions and considers the information from both link structures and node attributes. Experimental results show that MAGIC achieves at least 40% relative improvements over 5 state-of-the-art methods in terms of 4 widelyused metrics. CCS Concepts •Data Mining → Graph Mining; •Networks → Network Clustering;
On the Robustness of BitTorrent Swarms to Greedy Peers

The success of BitTorrent has fostered the development of variants to its basic components. Some of the variants adopt greedy approaches aiming at exploiting the intrinsic altruism of the original version of BitTorrent in order to maximize the benefit of participating to a torrent. In this work, we study BitTyrant, a recently proposed strategic client. BitTyrant tries to determine the exact amount of contribution necessary to maximize its download rate by dynamically adapting and shaping the upload rate allocated to its neighbors. We evaluate in detail the various mechanisms used by BitTyrant to identify their contribution to the performance of the client. Our findings indicate that the performance gain is due to the increased number of connections established by a BitTyrant client, rather than to its subtle uplink allocation algorithm; surprisingly, BitTyrant reveals to be altruistic and particularly efficient in disseminating the content, especially during the initial phase of the distribution process. The possible gain of a single BitTyrant client, however, disappears in the case of a widespread adoption: our results indicate a severe loss of efficiency that we analyze in detail.
Adapting Remote Sensing to New Domain With ELM Parameter Transfer

It is time consuming to annotate unlabeled remote sensing images. One strategy is taking the labeled remote sensing images from another domain as training samples, and the target remote sensing labels are predicted by supervised classification. However, this may lead to negative transfer due to the distribution difference between the two domains. To address this issue, we propose a novel domain adaptation method through transferring the parameters of extreme learning machine (ELM). The core of this method is learning a transformation to map the target ELM parameters to the source, making the classifier parameters of the target domain maximally aligned with the source. Our method has several advantages which was previously unavailable within a single method: multiclass adaptation through parameter transferring, learning the final classifier and transformation simultaneously, and avoiding negative transfer. We perform experiments on three data sets that indicate improved accuracy and computational advantages compared to baseline approaches.
Use of Transposon-Transposase Complexes To Create Stable Insertion Mutant Strains of Francisella tularensis LVS

ABSTRACT Francisella tularensis is a highly virulent zoonotic bacterial pathogen capable of infecting numerous different mammalian species, including humans. Elucidation of the pathogenic mechanisms of F. tularensis has been hampered by a lack of tools to genetically manipulate this organism. Herein we describe the use of transposome complexes to create insertion mutations in the chromosome of the F. tularensis live vaccine strain (LVS). A Tn5-derived transposon encoding kanamycin resistance and lacking a transposase gene was complexed with transposase enzyme and transformed directly into F. tularensis LVS by electroporation. An insertion frequency of 2.6 × 10−8 ± 0.87 × 10−8 per cell was consistently achieved using this method. There are 178 described Tn5 consensus target sites distributed throughout the F. tularensis genome. Twenty-two of 26 transposon insertions analyzed were within known or predicted open reading frames, but none of these insertions was associated with the Tn5 target site. Analysis of the insertions of sequentially passed strains indicated that the transposons were maintained stably at the initial insertion site after more than 270 generations. Therefore, transformation by electroporation of Tn5-based transposon-transposase complexes provided an efficient mechanism for generating random, stable chromosomal insertion mutations in F. tularensis.
Computed Tomography Angiography in Hyperacute Ischemic Stroke: Prognostic Implications and Role in Decision-Making

Computed tomography (CT) remains the initial imaging modality of choice in hyperacute stroke (HIS). CT scanners are more widely available than MRI scanners and are often located in emergency departments of district hospitals. Noncontrast CT (NCCT) excludes intracranial hemorrhage and tumor and detects early signs of infarction. Inclusion of arterial and parenchymal imaging with CT angiography (CTA) can rapidly provide useful information that may influence management and may indicate infarct size, location, and extent of vessel occlusion and collateral integrity, all of which can influence clinical outcome and recanalization in HIS.1 We will discuss the impact of these findings on prognosis and clinical decision-making, as well as practicalities of CTA in the HIS setting. CTA accurately localizes thrombus and quantifies clot burden. Both provide prognostic information in HIS and may guide management. In the late 1990s, several relatively small trials demonstrated that CTA had excellent correlation with digital subtraction angiography (DSA), magnetic resonance angiography, and transcranial Doppler ultrasound.2–4 Using DSA as a reference standard, Lev et al5 directly compared CTA and DSA findings in 224 vessel segments (divided into internal carotid artery [ICA], middle cerebral artery [M1 and M2-MCA], anterior cerebral artery [A1-ACA],posterior cerebral artery [P1 and P2-PCA], basilar artery [BA], and vertebral artery) in 44 patients with acute stroke. Sensitivity and specificity for the detection of large-vessel occlusion was 98.4% and 98.1%, respectively. More recently, Bash et al6 assessed 672 vessel segments in 28 patients who underwent CTA and magnetic resonance angiography, using DSA as a reference standard. CTA had sensitivity and positive predictive value for occlusion of 100%, significantly better than magnetic resonance angiography (87% and 59%, respectively). 6 When maximum intensity projection images have been compared with CTA source images (CTA-SI) for identification of occlusion, the latter seems slightly more sensitive. …
Solid Modeling and Finite Element Analysis of Diaphragm Spring Clutch

Taking a kind diaphragm spring of automobile clutch as an example, a finite element analysis based on ANSYS WORKBENCH was studied and explained in this paper. Stress and strain variation of diaphragm spring was obtained by using static analysis, and each modal, frequency and amplitude was all achieved by applying modal analysis. And the results may provide a theoretical reference to improving structure design of automotive diaphragm spring clutch
Numerical Analysis of Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer in the Parallel Type Mold of a Thin Slab Caster

The surface and internal defects in the continuously cast slab are closely related to the fluid flow conditions of the liquid steel in the continuous casting mold. Therefore, the control of the steel flow for example, by proper design of submerged entry nozzle and by optimum operating conditions, has become an important area for quality and productivity improvement. In this study, a three-dimensional numerical model for fluid flow and heat transfer analysis was employed and flow pattern and related phenomena in the parallel type thin slab mold were simulated together with a comparison with our previous study on the funnel type mold. The dependence of the flow on the shape of the SEN was illustrated for both straight and bifurcated nozzles. The bifurcated nozzle creates streamlines of two counter-rotating loops at each half of the mold similar to that of the funnel type mold with a bifurcated nozzle and produces a stabilized meniscus with a low surface velocity. The design of the nozzle port affects the velocity profile at the meniscus, heat transfer and accordingly the solidification process. An inclined bifurcated nozzle with a jet angle of 60° shows more stable velocity profile in the meniscus and more uniform distribution of solidified shell than the other port.
Graph Convolutional Networks based Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Identification using RNA-seq Data from Blood Samples

A methodology for the identification of non-small cell lung cancer from blood samples, combining feature selection methods followed by Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) with Genetic Algorithm (GA) optimization is presented. The methodology was tested on RNA-seq data from the GSE207586 dataset. The evaluation results showed that mixing the top 100 features from different feature selections and modeling with GCN offered the highest identification performance among all evaluated setups.Clinical Relevance: Ability to diagnose and correctly classify lung cancer subtypes non-invasively have been elusive up until recently. However, current solutions often rely on combination of imaging (chest X-ray, low dose CT scan) with blood sample and clinical data. While this could push the boundary in the non-invasive screening, diagnosis, and classification of lung cancers, it would be challenging to deploy in the primary care or in remote secondary care settings. This current research has demonstrated the combination of gene feature selection techniques and graph convolution network approaches could lead to the detection and subclassification of lung cancers with a very high diagnostic accuracy just from a single blood draw.
Recombinant interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1ra): effective therapy against gram-negative sepsis in rats.

BACKGROUND Morbidity and mortality from bacterial sepsis remain high despite aggressive diagnostic and therapeutic intervention. Interleukin-1 has been implicated as mediator of the lethal effects of endotoxemia or bacterial sepsis. The current experiments were designed to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of a human recombinant interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1ra) against polymicrobial gram-negative septicemia in rats. METHODS Male rats underwent placement of indwelling carotid arterial and superior vena caval catheters followed by cecal ligation and puncture (CLP). After 3 hours rats received either IL-1ra (10 mg/kg intravenous bolus followed by 5 mg/kg/hr) or an equal volume of vehicle intravenously for 24 hours. Heart rate, respirations, mean arterial blood pressure, and temperature were recorded at frequent intervals, and survival was assessed for 30 hours after CLP. RESULTS There were no differences in vital signs between groups at baseline or before treatment, and all animals appeared ill with huddled posture, piloerection, and hyperventilation. Twenty-four hours after CLP, IL-1ra significantly ameliorated bradycardia (p = 0.01), hypothermia (p = 0.001), and hypotension (p = 0.05), and 30-hour survival was significantly improved (71% vs 20%, p less than 0.05). CONCLUSIONS IL-1ra lessens the acute hemodynamic, hypothermic, and mortal effects of gram-negative sepsis induced by CLP in rats. These data suggest that IL-1 receptor blockade may be an important new treatment strategy against overwhelming bacterial sepsis.
A high-resolution DCO with MOS capacitors

A digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) that achieves a minimum frequency tuning step of 20 kHz without any dithering is presented. Three tuning stages are employed to obtain a wide frequency range of 1 GHz in the classical LC tank. The fine tuning bank is realized by inverse connection of two pairs of pMOS transistors and a tiny unit capacitance of 0.47 fF is achieved. A prototype integrated in 130nm CMOS technology exhibits a phase noise of -118.7 dBc/Hz @1MHz offset and a power dissipation of 2 mW under a supply of 1.2 V. The core area size is 330um×480um.
Business Process Management: The Third Wave

From the Publisher: The first limited distribution edition of this groundbreaking book was published in September 2002, and subsequently designed for "fast track" reads by either business or technology readers. The business impact is covered in the first 197 pages. Ten years ago, Computer Sciences Corporation's James Champy co-authored the New York Times best seller, Reengineering the Corporation, that set the world alight with over 2,000,000 copies in print. But that was last decade. Ten years on, Computer Sciences Corporation's Howard Smith, has co-authored the book that reinvents reengineering and sets the business agenda for the decade ahead.