Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Compartmentalized Production of Ceramide at the Cell Surface (*)

Ceramide produced by the hydrolysis of sphingomyelin is an important cellular intermediate in hormone action. Here, we present evidence that interleukin 1β (IL-1β) binding to normal human fibroblasts initiates a lipid messenger cascade that takes place in a sphingomyelin-rich plasma membrane domain with the characteristics of caveolae. Hormone binding first stimulated the appearance of diacylglycerol (DAG) in a caveolea-rich membrane fraction isolated from whole cells. This was immediately followed by the loss of a resident population of sphingomyelin from the fraction and the concomitant appearance of ceramide. The ceramide produced in response to IL-1β blocked platelet-derived growth factor-stimulated DNA synthesis. IL-1β stimulated the appearance of DAG in other fractions from the same cell, but this DAG was not coupled to ceramide production. This indicates that ceramide production is highly compartmentalized at the cell surface. Since caveolae are known to be involved in membrane internalization, they may be essential for the delivery of ceramide to a site of action within the cell.
A structural model of the anaphase promoting complex co-activator (Cdh1) and in silico design of inhibitory compounds

Anaphase promoting complex (APC) controls cell cycle and chromosome segregation. The APC activation occurs after binding of co-activators, cdh1 and cdc20. Cdh1 plays a role in cancer pathogenesis and is known as a potential drug target. The main aim of this study was prediction of 3D structure of cdh1 and designing the inhibitory compounds based on the structural model. First, 3D structure of cdh1 was predicted by means of homology modelling and molecular dynamics tools, MODELLER and Gromacs package, respectively. Then, inhibitory compounds were designed using virtual screening and molecular docking by means AutoDock package. The overall structure of cdh1 is propeller like and each DW40 repeat contains four anti-parallel beta-sheets. Moreover, binding pocket of the inhibitory compounds was determined. The results might be helpful in finding a suitable cdh1 inhibitor for the treatment of cancer.
Modeling and Prediction of Pedestrian Behavior based on the Sub-goal Concept

This study addresses a method to predict pedestrians' long term behavior in order to enable a robot to provide them services. In order to do that we want to be able to predict their final goal and the trajectory they will follow to reach it. We attain this task borrowing from human science studies the concept of sub-goals, defined as points and landmarks of the environment towards which pedestrians walk or where they take directional choices before reaching the final destination. We retrieve the position of these sub-goals from the analysis of a large set of pedestrian trajectories in a shopping mall, and model their global behavior through transition probabilities between sub-goals. The method allows us to predict the future position of pedestrians on the basis of the observation of their trajectory up to the moment. Keywords-component; pedestrian models; sub-goal retrieval; behavior anticipation
Extracting Geospatial Preferences Using Relational Neighbors

With the increasing popularity of location-based social media applications and devices that automatically tag generated content with locations, large repositories of collaborative geo-referenced data are appearing on-line. Efficiently extracting user preferences from these data to determine what information to recommend is challenging because of the sheer volume of data as well as the frequency of updates. Traditional recommender systems focus on the interplay between users and items, but ignore contextual parameters such as location. In this paper we take a geospatial approach to determine locational preferences and similarities between users. We propose to capture the geographic context of user preferences for items using a relational graph, through which we are able to derive many new and state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms, including combinations of them, requiring changes only in the definition of the edge weights. Furthermore, we discuss several solutions for cold-start scenarios. Finally, we conduct experiments on data collected from the Panoramio photo sharing site and provide empirical evidence that many of the proposed algorithms outperform existing location-aware recommender algorithms.
Wistar-Kyoto Female Rats Are More Susceptible to Develop Sugar Binging: A Comparison with Wistar Rats

The hedonic component of the feeding behavior involves the mesolimbic reward system and resembles addictions. Nowadays, the excessive consumption of sucrose is considered addictive. The Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rat strain is prone to develop anxiety and addiction-like behavior; nevertheless, a lack of information regarding their vulnerability to develop sugar binging-like behavior (SBLB) and how it affects the reward system persist. Therefore, the first aim of the present study was to compare the different predisposition of two rat strains, Wistar (W) and WKY to develop the SBLB in female and male rats. Also, we studied if the SBLB-inducing protocol produces changes in anxiety-like behavior using the plus-maze test (PMT) and, analyzed serotonin (5-HT) and noradrenaline (NA) concentrations in brain areas related to anxiety and ingestive behavior (brain stem, hypothalamus, nucleus accumbens, and amygdala). Finally, we evaluated whether fluoxetine, a drug that has been effective in reducing the binge-eating frequency, body weight, and severity of binge eating disorder, could also block this behavior. Briefly, WKY and W female rats were exposed to 30% sucrose solution (2 h, 3 days/week for 4 weeks), and fed up ad libitum. PMT was performed between the last two test periods. Immediately after the last test where sucrose access was available, rats were decapitated and brain areas extracted for high-performance liquid chromatography analysis. The results showed that both W and WKY female and male rats developed the SBLB. WKY rats consumed more calories and ingested a bigger amount of sucrose solution than their W counterpart. This behavior was reversed by using fluoxetine, rats exposed to the SBLB-inducing protocol presented a rebound effect during the washout period. On female rats, the SBLB-inducing protocol induced changes in NA concentrations on WKY, but not on W rats. No changes were found in 5-HT levels. Finally, animals that developed SBLB showed increased anxiety-like behavior in the PMT. In conclusion, WKY female rats can be considered as a more susceptible rat strain to develop SBLB.
Testing intermediate representations for binary analysis

Binary lifting, which is to translate a binary executable to a high-level intermediate representation, is a primary step in binary analysis. Despite its importance, there are only few existing approaches to testing the correctness of binary lifters. Furthermore, the existing approaches suffer from low test coverage, because they largely depend on random test case generation. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of the first systematic approach to testing binary lifters. We have evaluated the proposed system on 3 state-of-the-art binary lifters, and found 24 previously unknown semantic bugs. Our result demonstrates that writing a precise binary lifter is extremely difficult even for those heavily tested projects.
Timing of breast milk HIV-1 transmission: a meta-analysis.

OBJECTIVE To define the frequency and timing of breast milk transmission of HIV-1. DESIGN Meta-analysis of data abstracted from published literature. SUBJECTS Participants in prospective cohort studies of MTCT of HIV-1. Cohorts were separated on the basis of breast feeding duration. INTERVENTIONS None. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES HIV-1 transmission rates. RESULTS Two thousand three hundred and seventy five HIV-1 infected women and their infants, 499 of whom breast fed, the estimated risk of breast milk HIV-1 transmission was 16% (95% CI: 9, 22%). Among breastfeeding infants, forty seven per cent of HIV-1 infections were attributable to breast feeding. Breast milk transmission risk was 21% (95% CI: 10, 33%) in cohorts with mean/median duration of breast feeding > or = 3 months and 13% (95% CI: 4, 21%) in cohorts with median duration of breast feeding < 2 months. In a separate analysis of 702 infants with prolonged duration of breast feeding, the risk of late postnatal transmission (infection occurring later than three to six months of age) was four per cent (95% CI 2, 5%). CONCLUSIONS This analysis suggests that breast milk transmission of HIV-1 is substantial and continues throughout the postnatal period. Early cessation of breast feeding at six months would avert some but not most infant HIV-1 infections due to breast feeding. While recently published studies showing some effectiveness of antiretrovirals early during the breast feeding period are encouraging, prevention of breast milk HIV-1 transmission needs to remain a high research priority.
A model-based approach to prognostics and health management for flight control actuators

Impact technologies have developed a robust modeling paradigm for actuator fault detection and failure prediction. This model-based approach to prognostics and health management (PHM) applies physical modeling and advanced parametric identification techniques, along with fault detection and failure prediction algorithms, in order to predict the time-to-failure for each of the critical, competitive failure modes within the system. Advanced probabilistic fusion strategies are also leveraged to combine both collaborative and competitive sources of evidence, thus producing more reliable health state information. These algorithms operate only on flight control command/response data. This approach for condition-based maintenance provides reliable early detection of developing faults. As an advantage over 'black-box' health-monitoring schemes, faults and failure modes are traced back to physically meaningful system parameters, providing the maintainer with invaluable diagnostic and prognostic information. The developed model-based reasoner was validated and demonstrated on an electromechanical actuator (EMA) provided by Moog, Inc.
Hidden Markov Model Based Word Recognition and Its Application to Legal Amount Reading on French Checks

A hidden Markov model (HMM) based word recognition algorithm for the recognition of legal amounts from French bank checks is presented. This algorithm is part of the A2iA INTERCHEQUE recognition system. The algorithm starts from images of handwritten words which have been automatically segmented from binary check images. After finding the lower-case zone on the complete amount, words are slant corrected and then segmented into graphemes. Then, features are extracted from the graphemes, and the feature vectors are vector quantized resulting in a sequence of symbols for each word. Likelihoods of all word classes are computed by a set of HMMs, which have been previously trained using either the Viterbi algorithm or the Baum? Welch algorithm. The various parameters of the system have been identified and their importance evaluated. Results have been obtained on large real-life data bases of French handwritten checks. The HMM-based system has been shown to outperform a holistic word recognizer and another HMM-type word recognizer from the A2iA INTERCHEQUE recognition system. Word recognition rates of about 89% for the 26-word vocabulary relevant for legal amount recognition on French bank checks have been obtained. More recently, a Neural Network? HMM hybrid has been designed, which produces even better recognition rates.
ELF-Murphy data on defects and tests sets

LSI logic has designed and manufactured two test chips at CRC. These test chips were used to investigate the characteristics of actual production defects and the effectiveness of various test techniques in detecting their presence. This paper presents a characterization of the defects that shows that very few defective chips act as if they had a single-stuck fault present and that most of the defects cause sequence-dependent behavior. A variety of techniques are used to reduce the size of test sets for digital chips. They typically rely on preserving the single-stuck-fault coverage of the test set. This strategy doesn't guarantee that the defect coverage is retained. This paper presents data obtained from applying a variety of test sets on two chips (Murphy and ELF35) and recording the test escapes. The reductions in test size can thus be compared with the increases in test escapes. The data shows that, even when the fault coverage is preserved, there is a penalty in test quality. Also presented is the data showing the effect of reducing the fault coverage. Techniques studied include various single-stuck-fault models including inserting faults at the inputs of complex gates such as adders, multiplexers, etc. This technique is compatible with the use of structural RTL netlists. Other techniques presented include compaction techniques and don't care bit assignment strategies.
An approach to genomewide screens of expressed small interfering RNAs in mammalian cells

To facilitate the construction of large genomewide libraries of small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), we have developed a dual promoter system (pDual) in which a synthetic DNA encoding a gene-specific siRNA sequence is inserted between two different opposing polymerase III promoters, the mouse U6 and human H1 promoters. Upon transfection into mammalian cells, the sense and antisense strands of the duplex are transcribed by these two opposing promoters from the same template, resulting in a siRNA duplex with a uridine overhang on each 3′ terminus. A single-step PCR protocol has been developed by using this dual promoter system that allows the production of siRNA expression cassettes in a high-throughput manner. We have shown that siRNAs transcribed by either the dual promoter vector or siRNA expression cassettes can induce strong and gene-specific suppression of both endogenous genes and ectopically expressed genes in mammalian cells. Furthermore, we have constructed an arrayed siRNA expression cassette library that targets >8,000 genes with two siRNA sequences per gene. A high-throughput screen of this library has revealed both known and unique genes involved in the NF-κB signaling pathway.
Agent-based homeostatic control for green energy in the smart grid

With dwindling nonrenewable energy reserves and the adverse effects of climate change, the development of the smart electricity grid is seen as key to solving global energy security issues and to reducing carbon emissions. In this respect, there is a growing need to integrate renewable (or green) energy sources in the grid. However, the intermittency of these energy sources requires that demand must also be made more responsive to changes in supply, and a number of smart grid technologies are being developed, such as high-capacity batteries and smart meters for the home, to enable consumers to be more responsive to conditions on the grid in real time. Traditional solutions based on these technologies, however, tend to ignore the fact that individual consumers will behave in such a way that best satisfies their own preferences to use or store energy (as opposed to that of the supplier or the grid operator). Hence, in practice, it is unclear how these solutions will cope with large numbers of consumers using their devices in this way. Against this background, in this article, we develop novel control mechanisms based on the use of autonomous agents to better incorporate consumer preferences in managing demand. These agents, residing on consumers' smart meters, can both communicate with the grid and optimize their owner's energy consumption to satisfy their preferences. More specifically, we provide a novel control mechanism that models and controls a system comprising of a green energy supplier operating within the grid and a number of individual homes (each possibly owning a storage device). This control mechanism is based on the concept of homeostasis whereby control signals are sent to individual components of a system, based on their continuous feedback, in order to change their state so that the system may reach a stable equilibrium. Thus, we define a new carbon-based pricing mechanism for this green energy supplier that takes advantage of carbon-intensity signals available on the Internet in order to provide real-time pricing. The pricing scheme is designed in such a way that it can be readily implemented using existing communication technologies and is easily understandable by consumers. Building upon this, we develop new control signals that the supplier can use to incentivize agents to shift demand (using their storage device) to times when green energy is available. Moreover, we show how these signals can be adapted according to changes in supply and to various degrees of penetration of storage in the system. We empirically evaluate our system and show that, when all homes are equipped with storage devices, the supplier can significantly reduce its reliance on other carbon-emitting power sources to cater for its own shortfalls. By so doing, the supplier reduces the carbon emission of the system by up to 25% while the consumer reduces its costs by up to 14.5%. Finally, we demonstrate that our homeostatic control mechanism is not sensitive to small prediction errors and the supplier is incentivized to accurately predict its green production to minimize costs.
IdentifyingWeb Spam by Densely Connected Sites and its Statistics in a JapaneseWeb Snapshot

Web spamming refers to actions intended to mislead search engines into ranking certain pages higher than they deserve. Recently, the amount of web spam has increased dramatically, leading to a degradation of search results. One of the most effective spamming techniques is link spamming. This is done by setting up an interconnected structure of pages for deceiving link-based ranking methods, such as PageRank. In this paper, we analyze distributions of link spam in our archive of Japanese web pages using link analysis techniques.
Secure Isolation and Migration of Untrusted Legacy Applications

Existing applications often contain security holes that are not patched until after the system has already been compromised. Even when software updates are applied to address security issues, they often result in system services being unavailable for some time. To address these system security and availability issues, we have developed peas and pods. A pea provides a least privilege environment that can restrict processes to the minimal subset of system resources needed to run. This mechanism enables the creation of environments for privileged program execution that can help with intrusion prevention and containment. A pod provides a group of processes and associated users with a consistent, machine-independent virtualized environment. Pods are coupled with a novel checkpoint-restart mechanism which allows processes to be migrated across minor operating system kernel versions with different security patches. This mechanism allows system administrators the flexibility to patch their operating systems immediately without worrying over potential loss of data or needing to schedule system downtime. We have implemented peas and pods in Linux without requiring any application or operating system kernel changes. Our measurements on real world desktop and server applications demonstrate that peas and pods impose little overhead and enable secure isolation and migration of untrusted applications.
Nothing by Mere Authority: Evidence that in an Experimental Analogue of the Milgram Paradigm Participants are Motivated not by Orders but by Appeals to Science

Milgram's classic studies are widely understood to demonstrate people's natural inclination to obey the orders of those in authority. However, of the prods that Milgram's Experimenter employed to encourage participants to continue the one most resembling an order was least successful. This study examines the impact of prods more closely by manipulating them between-participants within an analogue paradigm in which participants are instructed to use negative adjectives to describe increasingly pleasant groups. Across all conditions, continuation and completion were positively predicted by the extent to which prods appealed to scientific goals but negatively predicted by the degree to which a prod constituted an order. These results provide no support for the traditional obedience account of Milgram's findings but are consistent with an engaged followership model which argues that participants’ willingness to continue with an objectionable task is predicated upon active identification with the scientific project and those leading it.
White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory

Most of us think of memory as a fixed, unchanging substance that exists permanently in our mind and can be called upon at will. But research shows that this conception is far from the truth. We are constantly rewriting our memories and, in the process, creating ever new personal histories, illustrating that our memory operates in very complex and sometimes puzzling ways. This work explains why some memories can only be recalled in certain physiological states; why seemingly unimportant, small moments lurk in our memory for years for no apparent reason; and why some people have total recall of all that they read and see. It also shows how and why people who witness the same event recall it so differently and how we can often have vivid and detailed memories of events that never occurred.
The feasibility study of high temperature superconducting cable for congestion relaxation regarding quench effect

This paper presents the basic application idea of HTS (high-temperature superconducting) cable to solve the congestion problem of transmission line limited by voltage stability. In Korea power system, the capability of transmission system is limited by the voltage stability, and the HTS cable could be one of the countermeasures to enhance the transfer limit as its higher current capacity and lower impedance. However, the quench characteristic of HTS cable not only makes HTS cable to lose its superconductivity, but also change the line impedance and power system operating condition dramatically. This phenomenon threats the HTS cable safety as well as power system security, therefore a proper protection scheme and security control countermeasures have to be established before HTS cable implementation. In this paper, the quench characteristics of HTS cable for the fault current based on heat balance equation was established and a proper protection method by FCL (fault current limiter) was suggested.
A Simple Method for Estimating the Strength of Natural Selection on Overlapping Genes

Overlapping genes, where one DNA sequence codes for two proteins with different reading frames, are not uncommon in viruses and cellular organisms. Estimating the direction and strength of natural selection acting on overlapping genes is important for understanding their functionality, origin, evolution, maintenance, and potential interaction. However, the standard methods for estimating synonymous (dS) and nonsynonymous (dN) nucleotide substitution rates are inapplicable here because a nucleotide change can be simultaneously synonymous and nonsynonymous when both reading frames involved are considered. We have developed a simple method that can estimate dN/dS and test for the action of natural selection in each relevant reading frame of the overlapping genes. Our method is an extension of the modified Nei-Gojobori method previously developed for nonoverlapping genes. We confirmed the reliability of our method using extensive computer simulation. Applying this method, we studied the longest human sense–antisense overlapping gene pair, LRRC8E and ENSG00000214248. Although LRRC8E (leucine-rich repeat containing eight family, member E) is known to regulate cell size, the function of ENSG00000214248 is unknown. Our analysis revealed purifying selection on ENSG00000214248 and suggested that it originated in the common ancestor of bony vertebrates.