Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inactivation of the Mgat1 Gene in Oocytes Impairs Oogenesis, but Embryos Lacking Complex and Hybrid N-Glycans Develop and Implant

ABSTRACT Complex and hybrid N-glycans contain sugar residues that have been implicated in fertilization, compaction of the embryo, and implantation. Inactivation of the Mgat1 gene responsible for their synthesis is embryonic lethal, but homozygous mutant blastocysts are phenotypically normal due to the presence of maternal Mgat1 gene transcripts. To identify roles for complex and hybrid N-glycans in oogenesis and preimplantation development, the Mgat1 gene in oocytes was deleted by using a ZP3Cre recombinase transgene. All mutant oocytes had an altered zona pellucida (ZP) that was thinner than the control ZP, and they did not possess complex N-glycans but contained ZP1, ZP2, and ZP3 glycoproteins. Mutant eggs were fertilized, all embryos implanted, and heterozygotes developed to birth. However, mutant females had decreased fertility, yielded fewer eggs after stimulation with gonadotropins, and produced a reduced number of preimplantation embryos and less progeny than controls. About 25% of embryonic day 3.5 (E3.5) embryos derived from mutant eggs were severely retarded in development, even when they were heterozygous and expressed complex N-glycans. Thus, a proportion of Mgat1− / − oocytes were developmentally compromised. Surprisingly, mutant eggs also gave rise to Mgat1 − / − embryos that developed normally, implanted, and progressed to E9.5. Therefore, complex or hybrid N-glycans are required at some stage of oogenesis for the generation of a developmentally competent oocyte, but fertilization, blastogenesis, and implantation may proceed in their absence.
NetShield : Matching with a Large Vulnerability Signature R uleset for High Performance Network Defense

Accuracy and speed are the two most important metrics for Network Intrusion Detection or Prevention Systems (NIDS/NIPSes). Due to emerging polymorphic attacks and the fact that in many cases regular expressions (regexes) cannot capture the vulnerability conditions accurately, the accuracy of existing regexbased NIDS/NIPS systems has become a serious problem. In contrast, the recently-proposed vulnerability signatures [8, 29] (a.k.a. data patches) can exactly describe the vulnerability conditions and achieve better accuracy. However, when applying vulnerability signatures to high speed NIDS/NIPS with a large ruleset, how to efficiently match them is an untouched but challenging issue. This paper presents the design of NetShield, a vulnerability signature based NIDS/NIPS which achieves multigigabit throughput while offering much better accuracy. This is accomplished because of the following contributions: (i) we propose a candidate selection (CS) algorithm which efficiently matches thousands of vulnerability signatures simultaneously requiring a small amount of memory; (ii) we propose a automatic lightweight parsing transition state machine achieving fast protocol parsing; (iii) we implement the NetShield prototype. Experimental results show that the core engine of NetShield achieves at least 1.9+Gbps signature matching throughput on a 3.8GHz single-core PC, and can scale-up to at least 11+Gbps under a 8-core CPU for 794 HTTP vulnerability signatures.
Nouns, Adjectives, and the Acquisition of Meaning: New Evidence from Italian-Acquiring Children

Across languages, there is a tight coupling between nouns and object categories, but the coupling between adjectives and object properties reveals more variation. Previous work has established that the link between nouns and object categories is evident in preschool-aged children acquiring English, French, or Spanish but has revealed differences in how these children acquire adjectives across these languages. We pursue this work, adding new evidence from Italian-acquiring children and offering insights toward developing a fuller linguistic analysis of the phenomenon. We argue that there are strong universals in the treatment of adjectives across languages, but that there are also subtle cross-linguistic differences in adjectives that have developmental consequences.
Extraction and quantification of microphytobenthic Chl a within calcareous reef sands

Calcareous reef sands are characterized by high concentrations of photosynthetic pigments that extend well below the sediment surface, as well as by high variability in concentrations between study sites. An important contributor to the observed variability may be differences in extraction protocols, further complicated by variability in calcareous sand characteristics. We tested the effects of freeze‐drying, grinding, sonication, extraction temperature, and extraction time on quantification of Chl a content within calcareous sands. The resulting optimized extraction protocol consists of freeze‐drying, grinding with a mortar and pestle for 30 s, and extracting with 100% acetone at −20°C for at least 20 h, yielding a 39% increase in Chl a content over frozen, unground samples. Using this protocol, we measured and compared ten sedimentary Chl a profiles taken in close proximity to test for relationships between surface and sub‐surface concentrations. Sedimentary Chl a content at a back‐reef location on the south shore of O'ahu varied between 4.33‐14.25 µg g−1 dw, with distinctly higher values occurring in a relatively enriched surface layer (0–1 cm). Surface Chl a concentrations varied between 86‐307 mg m−2, depending on the depth of integration (0.5–2 cm), with 73% of the full‐core (0‐8 cm) Chl a concentration occurring below 2 cm. The concentrations of surface and subsurface layers were significantly correlated between cores, allowing for the use of plug sampling when profile generation is not feasible or necessary to determine the magnitude of the subsurface microphytobenthic biomass and its variability over scales of meters.
Molecular characterization of enterohemorrhagic E. coli O157 and O153 isolated from tissue camel and human stool samples in Al-Diwaniyah, Iraq

The present study aimed to describe the genetic relationships of zoonotic characterization of Escherichia coli isolated from human and livestock camel clinical infection. The study includes collected (50) meat of camel and (50) stool human samples. These samples were foreword to traditional bacterial isolation and identification using enrichment culture method and biochemical tests, then confirmed by PCR technique based on Gyr B gene Escherichia coli and DNA sequencing was done on some positive isolates. The results show that Escherichia coli were isolated from animals at 42 (84%) and 39 (78%) from human infection. The PCR technique was show highly sensitive and specific confirmative detection of Escherichia coli the positive results into 40 (95%) meat sample of camel, and 35 (89.7%) stool sample of a human. To evaluate of Virulence E.coli,we used specific virulence hlyA gene from NCBI-GenBank, published sequence of E. coli hly A gene (Genbank code: X94129.1) and the results show high of presence of virulence gene hly A in camel in percentage (19) 45% than of virulence gene in human (15) 38%. DNA sequencing of a partial sequence of GyrB gene was shown highly homology sequence identity with NCBI-Blast Escherichia coli strain O157H7 isolates from human and O153H3 from the camel. The phylogenetic analysis was shown there is clear genetic similarity at between human and animal’s E. coli isolates and then the gene sequence deposited into NCBI-Genbank accession numbers (MG560867.1, MG560866.1). Also, study design for detection of some virulence gene hly A Escherichia coli. In conclusion, there prevalence E. coli in humans and camel. Therefore, it is essential to define the role of animals as an important source for the distribution of pathogen related to public health. Our study found gyrB gene sequence could be used for identification and making a phylogenetic analysis of gyrB nucleotide. Keyword: E. coli PCR O153H2, O157H7, gyr B, hly A, sequencing and phylogenetic tree Available online at http://www.vetmedmosul. com ةيفزنلا ةينولوقلا ايشيرشيلاا ايرتكبل يئيزجلا فيصوتلا O157 و O153 ةلوزعملا نم لامجلا موحل ةيناويدلا يف ناسنلإا زارب تانيعو ، قارعلا فيلك حلاف ابص ١ ، حلاص داؤف ةنيز ١ ، نيسح بلاط قاتشم ٢ ، كلا دبع ءلاع داوج مظا ١ و داوج يربص محمد ٣ ١ ةكرتشملا ضارملأاو ثوحبلا ةدحو ، ٢ ةيرطيبلا ةيرهجملا ءايحلأا عرف ، ٣ ةجسنلأاو حيرشتلا عرف ، يرطيبلا بطلا ةيلك ، ةيسداقلا ةعماج ، ةيناويدلا ، قارعلا
The determinants of the UK Big Six premium

We report results consistent with the existence of a Big Six premium in the UK during the period 1985-1995. We find little evidence that this premium can be attributed to industry specialisation by auditors, no matter how this is specified. We find evidence to suggest that non-audit fees earned by auditors from their audit clients are positively related to the size of the audit fee and vice versa. However, when appropriate allowance is made for endogeneity, by modelling both sources of auditor revenue in a simultaneous equations framework, the Big Six premium is still present. All these results are generated using a conventional audit-pricing model that treats factors such as client size, complexity, risk and non-audit services as additive determinants of the audit fee. We find that when allowance is made for interactions between size, risk and non-audit services the Big Six premium disappears.
A local ensemble Kalman filter for atmospheric data assimilation

In this paper, we introduce a new, local formulation of the ensemble Kalman filter approach for atmospheric data assimilation. Our scheme is based on the hypothesis that, when the Earth’s surface is divided up into local regions of moderate size, vectors of the forecast uncertainties in such regions tend to lie in a subspace of much lower dimension than that of the full atmospheric state vector of such a region. Ensemble Kalman filters, in general, take the analysis resulting from the data assimilation to lie in the same subspace as the expected forecast error. Under our hypothesis the dimension of the subspace corresponding to local regions is low. This is used in our scheme to allow operations only on relatively low-dimensional matrices. The data assimilation analysis is performed locally in a manner allowing massively parallel computation to be exploited. The local analyses are then used to construct global states for advancement to the next forecast time. One advantage, which may take on more importance as ever-increasing amounts of remotely-sensed satellite data become available, is the favorable scaling of the computational cost of our method with increasing data size, as compared to other methods that assimilate data sequentially. The method, its potential advantages, properties, and implementation requirements are illustrated by numerical experiments on the Lorenz-96 model. It is found that accurate analysis can be achieved at a cost which is very modest compared to that of a full global ensemble Kalman filter.
Black Holes in Theories with Large Extra Dimensions

We start by reviewing the existing literature on the creation of black holes during high-energy particle collisions, both in the absence and in the presence of extra, compact, spacelike dimensions. Then, we discuss in detail the properties of the produced higher-dimensional black holes, namely the horizon radius, temperature and life-time, as well as the physics that governs the evaporation of these objects, through the emission of Hawking radiation. We first study the emission of visible Hawking radiation on the brane: we derive a master equation for the propagation of fields with arbitrary spin in the induced-on-the-brane black hole background, and we review all existing results in the literature for the emission of scalars, fermions and gauge bosons during the spin-down and Schwarzschild phases of the life of the black hole. Both analytical and numerical results for the graybody factors and radiation spectra are reviewed and exact results for the number and type of fields emitted on the brane as a function of the dimensionality of space–time are discussed. We finally study the emission of Hawking radiation in the bulk: graybody factors and radiation spectra are presented for the emission of scalar modes, and the ratio of the missing energy over the visible one is calculated for different values of the number of extra dimensions.
Thyroid-Disrupting Chemicals: Interpreting Upstream Biomarkers of Adverse Outcomes

Background There is increasing evidence in humans and in experimental animals for a relationship between exposure to specific environmental chemicals and perturbations in levels of critically important thyroid hormones (THs). Identification and proper interpretation of these relationships are required for accurate assessment of risk to public health. Objectives We review the role of TH in nervous system development and specific outcomes in adults, the impact of xenobiotics on thyroid signaling, the relationship between adverse outcomes of thyroid disruption and upstream causal biomarkers, and the societal implications of perturbations in thyroid signaling by xenobiotic chemicals. Data sources We drew on an extensive body of epidemiologic, toxicologic, and mechanistic studies. Data synthesis THs are critical for normal nervous system development, and decreased maternal TH levels are associated with adverse neuropsychological development in children. In adult humans, increased thyroid-stimulating hormone is associated with increased blood pressure and poorer blood lipid profiles, both risk factors for cardiovascular disease and death. These effects of thyroid suppression are observed even within the “normal” range for the population. Environmental chemicals may affect thyroid homeostasis by a number of mechanisms, and multiple chemicals have been identified that interfere with thyroid function by each of the identified mechanisms. Conclusions Individuals are potentially vulnerable to adverse effects as a consequence of exposure to thyroid-disrupting chemicals. Any degree of thyroid disruption that affects TH levels on a population basis should be considered a biomarker of adverse outcomes, which may have important societal outcomes.
DOMAIN ABSTRACTION OF HIGHLY CORRELATED PAIRS TO RECOMMEND IN THE LONG TAIL

ABSTRACT Among difficulties encountered by modern shopping recommenders is the long tail shape of sold items also related to cold-start issues. Various approaches including content-based recommendations attempt to overcome this problem that has serious impact on the accuracy of recommendations especially when new products are continuously added to the catalogue. This paper investigates the use of an algorithm to search for highly correlated pairs between abstractions of items. The advantage of this approach is evaluated on the basis of real data showing better results compared to an approach onlybased on the concrete pairs of items. Using rigorous protocols such as Given-n, experimental results show significant improvement in both the recommendation accuracy and the recommendation of products in the long tail. Keywords. Knowledge Discovery, Mining Correlated Pairs, Recommender Systems.
Maternal genomic neutrophil FcRIII deficiency leading to neonatal isoimmune neutropenia.

The healthy mother of a child with transient immune neutropenia was found to be "NA-null. " The mother's neutrophils did not react with anti-NA1 and anti-NA2 antibodies (polyclonal human alloantibodies and mouse monoclonal antibodies). A healthy donor was discovered during routine neutrophil antigen typing whose neutrophils were also "NA-null. " This NA-phenotype was due to the absence of FcRIII (CD16 antigen) on neutrophils as demonstrated with anti-FcRIII monoclonal antibodies. The neutrophils of these two individuals were not able to bind dimeric immunoglobulin G. However, their cells had a normal expression of other phosphatidylinositol (PI)-linked membrane glycoprotein (CD24, CD67, and CLB gran/5 antigens), ruling out the existence of a PI-linkage defect, such as paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria. The mother (propsitus) had isoantibodies in her blood against neutrophil-FcRIII without allospecificity, apparently produced during pregnancy and responsible for the neutropenia of her child. The expression of FcRIII on natural killer lymphocytes of both individuals was normal. FcRIII is encoded by two separate genes, one (FcRIII-1) for the neutrophil-PI-linked receptor, another (FcRIII-2) for the natural killer cell and macrophage-transmembrane receptor. By messenger RNA and DNA analysis (with an FcRIII-cDNA probe and restriction endonucleases) the neutrophil-FcRIII deficiency appeared to be due to deletion of the FcRIII-1 gene in both individuals, while the FcRIII-2 gene was normally present. The parents of the propositus were found to be heterozygous for this defect. Thus, FcRIII-1 gene deficiency of the mother may be a cause of (iso)immune neutropenia of the newborn. Whether this deficiency may have other clinical consequences has to be studied.
Online control of signalized networks using the Cell Transmission Model

Adaptive Traffic Control Systems (ATCS) aim at the improvement of traffic flow in terms of delay, number of stops, travel time etc. in urban networks under the regime of traffic signal control. Well known ATCS are SCOOT, SCATS, BALANCE and MOTION to name only a few. Lately the Cell Transmission Model (CTM) attracted some attention in the context of traffic signal control. It can be used to model the effects of different signal settings. Based on the CTM a prototype of a new ATCS has been developed. It can handle urban sub-networks with several interconnected signalized intersections. Every 15 minutes it adapts and optimizes signal plans and coordination patterns to the currently estimated traffic demand in the network. In a first step the upcoming traffic demand is forecasted and estimated. Based on this demand cycle length and green splits are adjusted. Finally, offsets are optimized by using the CTM in combination with Genetic Algorithms and a second alternative approach named Sequential Enumeration. The emphasis of this paper is on the offset optimization and the performance of the new ATCS which has been investigated in a microsimulation study.
Performance and Cramer–Rao Bounds for DoA/RSS Estimation and Transmitter Localization Using Sectorized Antennas

Using collaborative sensors or other observing devices equipped with sectorized antennas provides a practical and low-cost solution to direction-of-arrival (DoA) and received signal strength (RSS) estimation, as well as noncooperative transmitter (TX) localization. In this paper, we study the performance and theoretical bounds of DoA/RSS estimation and localization using sectorized antennas. We first show that the sector-power measurements at an individual sensor form a sufficient statistic for DoA/RSS estimation and TX localization. Motivated by that, we then derive the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) on DoA/RSS estimation based on sector-powers and study its asymptotic behavior. Moreover, we derive an analytical expression for the mean square error (MSE) of a practical sectorized-antenna-based DoA estimator, compare its performance to the derived CRB, and study its asymptotic properties. Next, we derive the CRB for localization based on sector-powers. The resulting CRB is a lower bound for a localization system where the DoA/RSS estimates, obtained from sector-powers at individual sensors, are fused together into a location estimate. Moreover, the CRB also covers the more general case of a localization system where the sector-powers from individual nodes are directly fused together, without an intermediate DoA/RSS estimation step. We compare the obtained CRB to a localization approach employing an intermediate DoA/RSS estimation step and observe that skipping this intermediate processing step may result in a substantially improved localization performance. Finally, we study the influence of various important system parameters, such as the number of sensors, sectors, and measurement samples, on the achievable estimation and localization performance. Overall, this paper demonstrates and quantifies the achievable DoA/RSS estimation and localization performance of sectorized antennas and provides comprehensive design guidelines for sector-power based low-complexity localization systems.
International Conference on Parallel Processing PARALLEL IMPLEMENTATION OF CONE BEAM TOMOGRAPHY

Three dimensional computed tomography is a computationally intensive procedure, requiring large amounts of R A M and processing power. Parallel methods for two dimensional computed tomography have been studied, but not edended or applied to 3D cone beam tomography. A discussion on how the 3D cone beam tomography problem can be implemented in parallel using MPI is given. W e show an improvement in performance from 58.2% to 81.8% processor utilization in a heterogeneous cluster of workstations by load balancing. A 96.8% efficiency was seen using a 2 processor SMP.
Salient Findings: Pivotal Reviews and Research on Hypnosis, Soma, and Cognition

Recently, 9 especially important critical reviews and research studies have appeared in the general scientific and medical literatures pertaining to 4 areas of applied and scientific hypnosis: management of pain, treatment of gastrointestinal disorders, adjunctive hypnosis in outpatient surgery, and error in memory. Together, these articles examine matters of soma and cognition that are at once core to scientific hypnosis but also of keen interest to clinicians. The studies and reviews are conceptually ambitious and methodologically sophisticated. The findings enlighten medical and scientific readers about what hypnosis is and what it is not.
Loading a Cache with Query Results

Data intensive applications today usually run in either a clientserver or a middleware environment. In either case, they must efficiently handle both database queries, which process large numbers of data objects, and application logic, which involves fine-grained object accesses (e.g., method calls). Sophisticated optimization techniques speed up query processing, while caching is used to reduce the cost of the application logic. Query processing and caching decisions are typically made in isolation, though often in applications queries are used to identify those objects the application will further process. We propose a wholistic approach to speeding up such applications: we load the cache of a system with relevant objects as a byproduct of query processing. This can potentially improve the performance of the application, by eliminating the need to fault in objects. However, it can also increase the cost of queries by forcing them to handle more data, thus potentially reducing the performance of the application. In this paper, we examine both heuristic and cost-based strategies for deciding what to cache, and when to do so. We show how these strategies can be integrated into the query optimizer of an existing system, and how the caching architecture is affected. We present the results of experiments using the Garlic database middleware system; the experiments demonstrate the usefulness of loading a cache with query results and illustrate the tradeoffs between the cost-based and heuristic optimization methods.
Information Theoretic Distance Measures in Phylogenomics

A variety of distance measures has been developed in information theory, proven useful in the application to digital information systems. According to the fact, that the information for a living organism is stored digitally on the information carrier DNA, it seems intuitive to apply these methods to genome analysis. We present two applications to genetics: a compression based distance measure can be used to compute pairwise distances between genomic sequences of unequal lengths and thus recognize the content of a DNA region. The Kullback-Leibler distance will serve as basis for the estimation of evolutionary conservation across the genomes of different species in order to identify regions with potential important functionality. Moreover, we show that we can draw conclusions about the biological properties of the such analyzed sequences.