Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nanobio silver: its interactions with peptides and bacteria, and its uses in medicine.

Silver, known in metallic form since antiquity, has very early been recognized by mankind for its antimicrobial properties, a phenomenon observed, for example, in the context of drinking water (a silver coin in a well), food (silver cutlery, water storage recipients), and medicine (silver skull plates, teeth). Silver compounds were also shown to be useful. For example, dilute solutions of silver nitrate served long, and still do in some countries, as antimicrobial ointment to be instilled into Published in " "
A representation result for nonlinear filter maps in a white noise framework

The authors consider the nonlinear filtering model with additive white noise to be the identity map on L/sub 2/[0,T] with standard Gauss measure thereon. Using a representation result for maps which are continuous in a locally convex topology generated by seminorms of Hilbert-Schmidt operators on the Hilbert space, the authors show that the filter map can be written as the composition of a continuous nonlinear map (which does not depend on the observation) with a linear Hilbert-Schmidt operator acting on the observation. In particular, this result gives a direct proof of existence of approximation of nonlinear filters in terms of Volterra polynomials.
Pancreaticoduodenal Preservation by Hypothermic Pulsatile Perfusion for Twenty‐four Hours

Pancreaticoduodenal grafts remained viable after transplantation only if a modified plasma perfusate with high osmolarity was used during the 24 hours of preservation. When regular plasma perfusate was used during the pancreaticoduodenal preservation, irreversible damage resulted, and all dogs died of ischemic or vascular changes in the first few days after transplantation.
Variable microwave time delay by utilizing optical approaches

A new method is presented for establishing variable microwave time delay utilizing optical approaches. In many applications there is a need for a significant time delay which cannot be established by microwave methods. The optical fiber can offer a substantial time delay which can be utilized by converting the microwave signal into the optical domain and after the proper delay it is converted back to microwave. By choosing the fiber length the necessary microwave delay can be adjusted. The main contribution is the variation of the delay. That is achieved by applying a dispersive fiber and a tunable laser. When the laser wavelength is changed the delay is varied due to the fiber dispersion. That new approach is very advantageous for beam steering of phased array antennas.
Fine mapping of murine asthma quantitative trait loci and analyses of Ptgs1 and Mrc1 as positional candidate genes

Asthma is a common respiratory disease that is driven by both genetic and environmental factors. Identification of the genes underlying asthma will provide insight into the mechanisms and treatment of this important disease. Previous studies in this laboratory identified two distinct quantitative trait loci for the asthma-related parameter, allergen-induced airway hyperresponsiveness, in a murine model by means of a genome-wide linkage analysis. The present study focuses and refines the map location of these two loci. Additionally, we explore prostaglandin-endoperoxide synthase-1 (Ptgs1) and mannose receptor C-type 1 (Mrc1) genes as two new positional candidate genes for allergen-induced airway hyperresponsiveness through comparative sequence analysis and mRNA expression studies of mouse strains with genetically mediated airway responsiveness.
SALT PRODUCTION IN THE COASTAL AREA OF MICHOACAN, MEXICO: An ethnoarchaeological study

This study of saltmaking in coastal Michoacan underscores the value of ethnoarchaeology as a tool for assessing ancient saltmaking activities. Common salt (sodium chloride) was a strategic resource of great importance for Mesoamerica during pre-Hispanic and Colonial times. This study deals with salt production in La Placita and neighboring areas of coastal Michoacan and Colima, in western Mexico. The primary goals are to document traditional saltmaking techniques—in particular, the material culture, organization of work, ecological setting, and levels of production observed in the study area, as well as the importance of salt manufacture and trade for the area's economy and culture over time. Ethnographic observations together with ethnohistorical and archaeological data shed light on the pre-Hispanic production, use, and commerce of salt in the coastal area of Michoacan, one of the least studied regions in Mesoamerica. There are three types of sites in the study area: (1) sites where salt is currently being produced; (2) abandoned sites where salt production was carried out until some fifty years ago; and (3) archaeological sites where salt may have been produced and/or distributed in ancient times. The material evidence of salt production consists of: (1) terreros, or mounds of leached soil; (2) eras, or solar evaporation pans; and (3) specialized pottery types. Finally, this paper uses archaeological and historical evidence, as well as oral traditions, to discuss ancient salt exchange and trade networks.
Quality assessment of postedited versus translated wildlife documentary films: a three-level approach

This article presents the results of a study designed to evaluate the quality of post-edited wildlife documentary films (in comparison to translated) which are delivered using voiceover and off-screen dubbing. The study proposes a quality assessment at three levels: experts' assessment, dubbing studio's assessment and end-users' assessment. The main contribution of this quality assessment proposal is the inclusion of end-users in the process of assessing the quality of post-edited and translated audiovisual texts. Results show that there is no meaningful difference between the quality of post-edited and translated wildlife documentary films, although translations perform better in certain aspects
The National Birth Defects Prevention Study: A review of the methods.

BACKGROUND The National Birth Defects Prevention Study (NBDPS) is a large population-based multicenter case-control study of major birth defects in the United States. METHODS Data collection took place from 1998 through 2013 on pregnancies ending between October 1997 and December 2011. Cases could be live born, stillborn, or induced terminations, and were identified from birth defects surveillance programs in Arkansas, California, Georgia, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Texas, and Utah. Controls were live born infants without major birth defects identified from the same geographical regions and time periods as cases by means of either vital records or birth hospitals. Computer-assisted telephone interviews were completed with women between 6 weeks and 24 months after the estimated date of delivery. After completion of interviews, families received buccal cell collection kits for the mother, father, and infant (if living). RESULTS There were 47,832 eligible cases and 18,272 eligible controls. Among these, 32,187 (67%) and 11,814 (65%), respectively, provided interview information about their pregnancies. Buccal cell collection kits with a cytobrush for at least one family member were returned by 19,065 case and 6,211 control families (65% and 59% of those who were sent a kit). More than 500 projects have been proposed by the collaborators and over 200 manuscripts published using data from the NBDPS through December 2014. CONCLUSION The NBDPS has made substantial contributions to the field of birth defects epidemiology through its rigorous design, including case classification, detailed questionnaire and specimen collection, large study population, and collaborative activities across Centers.
Transcriptional activity and developmental expression of liver X receptor (lxr) in Zebrafish

Mammalian liver‐X‐receptors (LXRs) are transcription factors activated by oxysterols. They play an essential role in lipid and glucose metabolism. We have cloned the open reading frame of zebrafish lxr and describe its genomic organization. Zebrafish lxr encodes a 50‐kDa protein with high sequence similarity to mammalian LXRα. In transfection assays, the encoded protein showed transcriptional activity in response to LXR‐ligands. Treatment of adult zebrafish with the synthetic LXR ligand, GW3965, induced expression of genes involved in hepatic cholesterol and lipid pathways. Using qPCR and in situ hybridization, we found ubiquitous expression of lxr mRNA during the first 24 hr of development, followed by more restricted expression, particularly to the liver at 3dpf and the liver and intestine at 4dpf. In adult fish, all examined organs expressed lxr. In addition to a metabolic role of lxr, the temporal expression pattern suggests a developmental role in, e.g., the liver and CNS. Developmental Dynamics 237:1090–1098, 2008. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
ECG analysis in the Time-Frequency domain

The Electrocardiogram (ECG) has been established as a powerful diagnostic tool in medicine which provides important information about the patient's heart condition. The correct identification of the QRS complexes is a fundamental step in every automated or semi-automated ECG analysis method. A major problem that is often encountered in automatic QRS detection is the presence of artifacts in the ECG data, which cause considerable alterations to the signal. In this work, the objective was to develop a method, based on Time-Frequency Analysis (TFA), which would be able to automatically detect and remove artifacts in order to increase the reliability of automatic QRS detection. The TFA method used for the analysis of the ECG data, was based on a time-varying Autoregressive (AR) model whose solutions were obtained using Burg's method. The algorithm could detect and remove 95.6% of the artifact areas and correctly identify 92.0% of QRS complexes (322 out of 335 annotated QRS complexes). The proposed method was compared with one of the most commonly used methods in ECG analysis, which is based on the use of wavelets. The wavelet-based method resulted in an accuracy of QRS detection of 65.3% mainly due to the large number of false positive detections in the regions of artifact.
Transmission of bovine spongiform encephalopathy to sheep and goats

Spongiform encephalopathy has been confirmed in both 'positive' and 'negative' lines of Cheviot sheep (selected for their differential response on experimental exposure to scrapie) after intracerebral injection or oral dosing with brain homogenate derived from cattle with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). With either challenge the incubation period of the disease ranged from 440 to 994 days in both lines of sheep. In a similar experiment, three Anglo-Nubian goats developed the disease 506 to 570 days after intracerebral infection with the same BSE homogenate, and two of three goats developed the disease 941 and 1501 days after oral dosing; the other goat and some sheep from each of the experimental groups remain alive 1720 days after exposure. This is the first report of the experimental transmission of BSE to sheep and goats.
The Reasons Young Children Give to Peers When Explaining Their Judgments of Moral and Conventional Rules

Moral justifications work, when they do, by invoking values that are shared in the common ground of the interlocutors. We asked 3- and 5-year-old peer dyads (N = 144) to identify and punish norm transgressors. In the moral condition, the transgressor violated a moral norm (e.g., by stealing); in the social rules condition, she/he violated a context-specific rule (e.g., by placing a yellow toy in a green box, instead of a yellow box). Children in both age groups justified their punishment in the social rules condition mostly by referring to the rule (e.g., “He must put yellow toys in the yellow box”). In contrast, in the moral condition they mostly justified their punishment by simply referring to the observed fact (e.g., “He stole”), seeing no need to state the norm involved (e.g., “He must not steal”), presumably because they assumed this as part of their moral common ground with their partner. These results suggest that preschoolers assume certain common ground moral values with their peers and use these in formulating explicit moral judgments and justifications.
Enhanced tissue adhesiveness of injectable gelatin hydrogels through dual catalytic activity of horseradish peroxidase

Development of bioadhesives with tunable mechanical strength, high adhesiveness, biocompatibility, and injectability is greatly desirable in all surgeries to replace or complement the sutures and staples. Herein, the dual catalytic activity of horseradish peroxidase is exploited to in situ form the hydroxyphenyl propionic acid‐gelatin/thiolated gelatin (GH/GS) adhesive hydrogels including two alternative crosslinks (phenol‐phenol and disulfide bonds) with fast gelation (few seconds – several minutes) and improved physicochemical properties. Their elastic moduli increase from 6.7 to 10.3 kPa by adding GS polymer that leads to the better stability of GH/GS hydrogels than GH ones. GH/GS adhesive strength is respectively 6.5‐fold and 15.8‐fold higher than GH‐only and fibrin glue that is due to additional disulfide linkages between hydrogels and tissues. Moreover, in vitro cell study with human dermal fibroblast showed the cell‐compatibility of GH/GS hydrogels. Taken together, GH/GS hydrogels can be considered as promising potential adhesive materials for various biomedical applications.
SEABIRD: Scalable search for systematic biologically inspired design

Abstract As more and more people are increasingly turning to nature for design inspiration, tools and methodologies are developed to support the systematic bioideation process. State-of-the-art approaches struggle with expanding their knowledge bases because of interactive work required by humans per biological strategy. As an answer to this persistent challenge, a scalable search for systematic biologically inspired design (SEABIRD) system is proposed. This system leverages experience from the product aspects in design by analogy tool that identifies candidate products for between-domain design by analogy. SEABIRD is based on two conceptual representations, product and organism aspects, extracted from, respectively, a patent and a biological database, that enable leveraging the ever growing body of natural-language biological texts in the systematic bioinspired design process by eliminating interactive work by humans during corpus expansion. SEABIRD's search is illustrated and validated with three well-known biologically inspired design cases.
Influencia de las parasitosis intestinales y otros antecedentes infecciosos sobre el estado nutricional antropométrico de niños en situación de pobreza

LISETI SOLANO*, IRAIMA ACUNA**, MARIA A. BARON*,ALBA MORON DE SALIM* y ARMANDO SANCHEZ** Centro de Investigaciones en Nutricion «Eleazar Lara Pantin» (CEINUT). Facultad de Ciencias de la Salud.Universidad de Carabobo. Sede Valencia. ** Departamento de Ciencias Morfologicas. Escuela de Ciencias Biomedicas y Tecnologicas. Facultad Ciencias de laSalud. Universidad de Carabobo. Sede Valencia.
AAPL: assessing association between p‐value lists

Joint analyses of high‐throughput datasets generate the need to assess the association between two long lists of p‐values. In such p‐value lists, the vast majority of the features are insignificant. Ideally contributions of features that are null in both tests should be minimized. However, by random chance their p‐values are uniformly distributed between 0 and 1, and weak correlations of the p‐values may exist due to inherent biases in the high‐throughput technology used to generate the multiple datasets. Rank‐based agreement test may capture such unwanted effects. Testing contingency tables generated using hard cutoffs may be sensitive to arbitrary threshold choice. We develop a novel method on the basis of feature‐level concordance using local false discovery rate. The association score enjoys straight‐forward interpretation. The method shows higher statistical power to detect the association between p‐value lists in simulation. We demonstrate its utility using real data analysis. The R implementation of the method is available at http://userwww.service. emory.edu/∼tyu8/AAPL/. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining 6: 144–155, 2013
Sensor location in water distribution networks to detect contamination events — A multiobjective approach based on NSGA-II

The distribution network is the most exposed part of water supply systems due to the large number and geographical dispersion of derivation nodes and access points. Therefore, a reliable monitoring and surveillance system based on a sensor network is necessary to timely detect contamination events. The sensor location problem in water distribution networks to detect (accidental or intentional) contamination events has been tackled by optimization approaches aimed to determine the best location for a set of sensors, thus allowing the management entity to detect those events in a short period of time and be able to minimize their impact on the population served. This paper presents a multiobjective evolutionary approach to determine the location of sensors in a water distribution network to detect a contamination event and minimize its potential consequences according to multiple, incommensurate and conflicting evaluation aspects of the merits of each solution. The objective functions are the expected time of detection, the expected population affected prior to detection, the expected consumption of contaminated water prior to detection, and the detection likelihood. A set of nondominated solutions representing the Pareto front is obtained, which have been validated with known solutions for the case studies. Further, this information enables to exploit tradeoffs and identify good compromise solutions according to the decision maker's preferences.
Defining obesity risk status in the general childhood population: which cut-offs should we use?

Fo r pe rs on al u se o nl y. During the past two decades, the prevalence of overweight and obesity in children has increased worldwide. Excess fat in childhood is a risk factor for later adult disease and is associated with impaired health during childhood itself, including increased risk of hypertension, insulin resistance, fatty liver disease, orthopaedic dysfunction and psycho-social distress, which may continue untreated for many years. Once established, obesity in children (as in adults) is hard to reverse. Monitoring the prevalence of obesity in order to plan services for the provision of care and to assess the impact of policy initiatives is essential. Although there is agreement on the importance of using standard recommendations to determine obesity risk status in the general childhood population, definitions of overweight and obesity often differ across studies, and comparisons of cross-sectional prevalence data are difficult to make. The classification of overweight and obesity relies on three prior selections: an anthropometric indicator, a reference population with which to compare the index child or community, and cut-off points that best identify individuals and populations at risk of overweight/ obesity-related morbidity and mortality.
Evaluation of the DiversiNews diversified news service

In this report we present the outcome of an extensive evaluation of the DiversiNews platform [8, 10] for diversified browsing of news, developed in the scope of the RENDER project. The evaluation was carried out along two main directions: a component evaluation, in which we assessed the maturity of the components underlying DiversiNews, and a user experience (UX) evaluation involving users of online news services. The results of the evaluation confirm the high value of DiversiNews as a novel paradigm for diversity-aware news browsing.
Grey sentiment analysis using SentiWordNet

Sentiment analysis is one of the most important topics in the Natural Language Processing field, aiming to determine whether a text expresses a positive, negative or neutral perception. In most sentiment analysis applications, a central role is played by the sentiment lexicons, which are lexical resources that include lists of tokens, together with the associated polarity score for each token or term. However, such approaches do not take into consideration the fact that a term might have distinct and sometimes even opposite sentiment polarities in different contexts. The present paper uses the grey system theory in order to associate terms with the most likely intervals of polarity, in order to enable a more accurate sentiment understanding, through grey sentiment analysis, even in limited information contexts, such as social media analysis.
Inference attacks based on neural networks in social networks

In modern society, social networks play an important role for online users. However, one unignorable problem behind the booming of the services is privacy issues. At the same time, neural networks have been swiftly developed in recent years, and are proved to be very effective in inference attack. This paper conducts an extensive study to infer sensitive personal information from public insensitive attributes in social networks by deploying fully connected neural networks. Correlation matrices and the details of constructing neural networks for social networks are elaborated. To show the advantages of neural networks on inference attack, different traditional machine learning algorithms are also studied. The results show that neural networks can achieve about 4 times of the baseline accuracy to classify low-correlation, high-noise dataset to infer sensitive users' attributes. In addition, neural networks outperform all the selected traditional algorithms. Outcomes from the study are deliberately discussed, and the limitations of both neural networks and traditional machine learning algorithms are also illustrated.
Variations in labeling protocol influence incorporation, distribution and retention of iron oxide nanoparticles into human umbilical vein endothelial cells.

Various studies have shown that various cell types can be labeled with iron oxide particles and visualized by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, reported protocols for cell labeling show a large variation in terms of labeling dose and incubation time. It is therefore not clear how different labeling protocols may influence labeling efficiency. Systematic assessment of the effects of various labeling protocols on labeling efficiency of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) using two different types of iron oxide nanoparticles, i.e. super paramagnetic iron oxide particles (SPIOs) and microparticles of iron oxide (MPIOs), demonstrated that probe concentration, incubation time and particle characteristics all influence the efficiency of label incorporation, label distribution, label retention and cell behavior. For SPIO the optimal labeling protocol consisted of a dose of 12.5 µg iron/2 ml/9.5 cm(2) and an incubation time of 24 h, resulting in an average iron load of 12.0 pg iron/per cell (uptake efficiency of 9.6%). At 4 h many SPIOs are seen sticking to the outside of the cell instead of being taken up by the cell. For MPIO optimal labeling was obtained with a dose of 50 µg iron/2 ml/9.5 cm(2). Incubation time was of less importance since most of the particles were already incorporated within 4 h with a 100% labeling efficiency, resulting in an intracellular iron load of 626 pg/cell. MPIO were taken up more efficiently than SPIO and were also better tolerated. HUVEC could be exposed to and contain higher amounts of iron without causing significant cell death, even though MPIO had a much more pronounced effect on cell appearance. Using optimal labeling conditions as found for HUVEC on other cell lines, we observed that different cell types react differently to identical labeling conditions. Consequently, for each cell type separately an optimal protocol has to be established.