Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fetuses from Preeclamptic Mothers Show Reduced Hepatic Erythropoiesis

The fetal liver is the main hematopoietic organ during intrauterine life. Morphometrical studies were performed on liver sections to detect changes occurring with intrauterine growth retardation and preeclampsia. Compared with the controls (n = 10), fetuses from preeclamptic mothers showed a severe reduction of erythroid cells by 60% on average (n = 18). Closer examination revealed that the erythroid cells at early stages of differentiation were more affected (80% reduction) than at later stages (55%). Seven out of 18 fetuses from preeclamptic mothers did not show growth retardation but exhibited severely reduced hepatic erythropoiesis. We suggest that the prime factor for impaired red blood cell production is preeclampsia itself rather than intrauterine growth retardation. Regulation of erythropoiesis in utero might depend on the interaction of many hematopoietic growth factors, and preeclampsia might alter the balance. To test this notion, we quantitated erythropoietin in fetal blood and various cytokines in the amniotic fluid. An elevation of erythropoietin and interleukin (IL)-3 levels was seen in babies born under the conditions of preeclampsia, whereas the concentrations of granulocyte/macrophage-colony-stimulating factor (CSF), granulocyte-CSF, and IL-1β were reduced, and the levels of IL-6 and IL-8 remained constant. With preeclampsia, a discrepancy between elevation of erythrocyte numbers in peripheral blood and depression of hematopoiesis at the main production site, the fetal liver, is seen. Concomitantly, there is elevation of some but reduction of other hematopoietic cytokines. We envision that during the course of preeclampsia quantitation of hematopoietic growth factors might allow to predict the deterioration of in utero life conditions.
Analysis and Modeling of Shear Waves Generated by Explosions at the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth

Abstract : Using multiple deployments of an 80-element, three-component borehole seismic array stretching from the surface to 2.3 km depth, we examine recordings of chemical explosions to better understand the generation of shear waves by explosive sources. The well is near vertical in the upper 1.5 km and gradually transitions to a dip of 38 degrees at the deepest recording location. The chemical shots are high-velocity chemical shots buried 3-4 m and fired electrically, ranging in size from 5 to 10 lb. The shotpoints are offset from the wellhead by approximately 40 m. Analysis of the recordings gives a velocity structure ranging from 1500 m/s in the upper 50 m to 5000 m/s at the bottom of the well. We also determine a Q structure using the spectral ratio method (e.g., Bath, 1974). Q(P) varies between 11 in the uppermost 50 m to 45 between 1000 m and 2350 m depth. The recordings have a strong impulsive P arrival on the vertical channels. Additional, coherent phases arrive later on the vertical channel propagating at the P velocity. At the very near surface, there is evidence for a weak S arrival on the horizontal channels. We also observe S in the form of P to S conversions at layer boundaries further downhole. layered transversely isotropic medium with anelasticity. We use the one-dimensional structure determined from the observations described above. For a zero-offset, shallow-burial purely explosive source the synthetics yield a highly impulsive P in addition to a small S, agreeing with our observations that the S is weak at vertical incidence, strengthening as the incidence angle decreases. The weak, near-surface S is generated from the surface reflection and subsequent conversion of the explosion generated P.
Dihydrolipoamide Dehydrogenase Mutation Alters the NADH Sensitivity of Pyruvate Dehydrogenase Complex of Escherichia coli K-12

ABSTRACT Under anaerobic growth conditions, an active pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDH) is expected to create a redox imbalance in wild-type Escherichia coli due to increased production of NADH (>2 NADH molecules/glucose molecule) that could lead to growth inhibition. However, the additional NADH produced by PDH can be used for conversion of acetyl coenzyme A into reduced fermentation products, like alcohols, during metabolic engineering of the bacterium. E. coli mutants that produced ethanol as the main fermentation product were recently isolated as derivatives of an ldhA pflB double mutant. In all six mutants tested, the mutation was in the lpd gene encoding dihydrolipoamide dehydrogenase (LPD), a component of PDH. Three of the LPD mutants carried an H322Y mutation (lpd102), while the other mutants carried an E354K mutation (lpd101). Genetic and physiological analysis revealed that the mutation in either allele supported anaerobic growth and homoethanol fermentation in an ldhA pflB double mutant. Enzyme kinetic studies revealed that the LPD(E354K) enzyme was significantly less sensitive to NADH inhibition than the native LPD. This reduced NADH sensitivity of the mutated LPD was translated into lower sensitivity of the appropriate PDH complex to NADH inhibition. The mutated forms of the PDH had a 10-fold-higher Ki for NADH than the native PDH. The lower sensitivity of PDH to NADH inhibition apparently increased PDH activity in anaerobic E. coli cultures and created the new ethanologenic fermentation pathway in this bacterium. Analogous mutations in the LPD of other bacteria may also significantly influence the growth and physiology of the organisms in a similar fashion.
Perceived Exercise Benefits and Barriers of Non-Exercising Female University Students in the United Kingdom

Many individuals do not engage in sufficient physical activity due to low perceived benefits and high perceived barriers to exercise. Given the increasing incidence of obesity and obesity related health disorders, this topic requires further exploration. We used the Exercise Benefits/Barriers Scale to assess perceived benefit and barrier intensities to exercise in 200 non-exercising female university students (mean age 19.3 years, SD = 1.06) in the UK. Although our participants were selected because they self reported themselves to be non-exercising, however they reported significantly higher perceived benefits from exercise than perceived barriers to exercise [t(199) = 6.18, p < 0.001], and their perceived benefit/barrier ratio was 1.33. The greatest perceived benefit from exercise was physical performance followed by the benefits of psychological outlook, preventive health, life enhancement, and then social interaction. Physical performance was rated significantly higher than all other benefits. Psychological outlook and preventive health were not rated significantly different, although both were significantly higher than life enhancement and social interaction. Life enhancement was also rated significantly higher than social interaction. The greatest perceived barrier to exercise was physical exertion, which was rated significantly higher than time expenditure, exercise milieu, and family discouragement barriers. Implications from this investigation for the design of physical activity programmes include the importance, for females, of a perception of high benefit/barrier ratio that could be conducive to participation in exercise. Applied interventions need to assist female students to ‘disengage’ from or overcome any perceived ‘unpleasantness’ of physical exertion during physical activity (decrease their perceived barriers), and to further highlight the multiple health and other benefits of regular exercising (increase their perceived benefits).
A Neuro-Cognitive Theory of Deductive Relational Reasoning with Mental Models and Visual Images

Abstract Many neuro-imaging studies have provided evidence that the parietal cortex plays a key role in reasoning based on mental models, which are supposed to be of abstract spatial nature. However, these studies have also shown concurrent activation in vision-related cortical areas which have often been interpreted as evidence for the role of visual mental imagery in reasoning. The aim of the paper is to resolve the inconsistencies in the previous literature on reasoning and imagery and to develop a neurally and cognitively plausible theory of human relational reasoning. The main assumption is that visual brain areas are only involved if the problem information is easy to visualize and when this information must be processed and maintained in visual working memory. A regular reasoning process, however, does not involve visual images but more abstract spatial representations—spatial mental models—held in parietal cortices. Only these spatial representations are crucial for the genuine reasoning processes.
Carrier Distortion in Hysteretic Self-Oscillating Class-D Audio Power Amplifiers: Analysis and Optimization

An important distortion mechanism in hysteretic self-oscillating (SO) class-D (switch mode) power amplifiers-carrier distortion-is analyzed and an optimization method is proposed. This mechanism is an issue in any power amplifier application where a high degree of proportionality between input and output is required, such as in audio power amplifiers or xDSL drivers. From an average-mode point of view, carrier distortion is shown to be caused by nonlinear variation of the hysteretic comparator input average voltage with the output average voltage. This easily causes total harmonic distortion figures in excess of 0.1-0.2%, inadequate for high-quality audio applications. Carrier distortion is shown to be minimized when the feedback system is designed to provide a triangular carrier (sliding) signal at the input of a hysteretic comparator. The proposed optimization method is experimentally proven in an audio power amplifier leading to THD figures that are comparable to the state of the art. Experimental hardware is a hysteretic SO bandpass current-mode-controlled single-ended audio power amplifier capable of 45 W into 8 Omega or 80 W into 4Omega from a plusmn34 V supply with less than 0.03% THD from 100 Hz to 6.7 kHz. Carrier distortion is shown to account for this limitation in THD performance.
HISTOGRAM OF EDGE SEGMENT CURVATURES FOR TEXTURE RECOGNITION

Texture recognition is one of the active fields in pattern recognition. Researchers have been searching for the best representation of a texture image for decades. The majority of methods use appearance-based properties of texture images to generate a feature descriptor. In this paper, we propose novel feature descriptor, namely histogram of edge segment curvatures (HESC) which extracts edge segments of an input image and construct a histogram from quantized curvature values of them. Therefore, HESC unveils geometric information of texture images by utilizing curve strengths for each pixel along the edge segments. We show that the proposed feature descriptor is robust against rotation and translation. We also extend HESC descriptor to emphasis the contribution of small curvature values. We carry out several experiments in UIUC texture dataset and compare the performance of the proposed HESC descriptor to well-known Local Binary Pattern (LBP). The proposed texture descriptor outperforms LBP in terms of recognition accuracy.
Bi-2DPCA: A Fast Face Coding Method for Recognition

Face recognition has received significant attention in the past decades due to its potential applications in biometrics, information security, law enforcement, etc. Numerous methods have been suggested to address this problem [1]. Among appearance-based holistic approaches, principal component analysis (PCA) turns out to be very effective. As a classical unsupervised learning and data analysis technique, PCA was first used to represent images of human faces by Sirovich and Kirby in 1987 [2, 3]. Subsequently, Turk and Pentland [4, 5] applied PCA to face recognition and presented the well-known Eigenfaces method in 1991. Since then, PCA has been widely investigated and has become one of the most successful approaches to face recognition [6-15]. PCA-based image representation and analysis technique is based on image vectors. That is, before applying PCA, the given 2D image matrices must be mapped into 1D image vectors by stacking their columns (or rows). The resulting image vectors generally lead to a highdimensional image vector space. In such a space, calculating the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix is a critical problem deserving consideration. When the number of training samples is smaller than the dimension of images, the singular value decomposition (SVD) technique is useful for reducing the computational complexity [1-4]. However, when the training sample size becomes large, the SVD technique is helpless. To deal with this problem, an incremental principal component analysis (IPCA) technique has been proposed recently [16]. But, the efficiency of this algorithm still depends on the distribution of data. Over the last few years, two PCA-related methods, independent component analysis (ICA) [17] and kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) [18, 19] have been of wide concern. Bartlett [20], Yuen [21], Liu [22], and Draper [23] proposed using ICA for face representation and found that it was better than PCA when cosine was used as the similarity measure (however, the performance difference between ICA and PCA was not significant if the Euclidean distance is used [23]). Yang [24] and Liu [25] used KPCA for face feature extraction and recognition and showed that KPCA outperforms the classical PCA. Like PCA, ICA and KPCA both follow the matrix-to-vector mapping strategy when they are used for image analysis and, their algorithms are more complex than PCA. So, ICA and KPCA are considered to be computationally more expensive than PCA. The experimental results in 16
An optical CDMA system based on spectral encoding of LED

A optical code-division multiple access (CDMA) system based on amplitude spectral encoding of low-cost broadband sources such as light-emitting diodes is presented. The proposed system uses a standard nondispersive lens-grating apparatus and simple direct-detection receivers. It is shown that by assigning to N subscribers the N cycles shifts of a single unipolar m-sequence of period N, complete orthogonality between the users can be achieved, provided that the spectrum is properly equalized. It is also shown that without any equalization, and for N=511, up to 200 users can transmit asynchronously with an average error probability equal to 10/sup -9/, depending on the received power level. An aggregate network throughput of 100 Gb/s can therefore be obtained. <<ETX>>
Hyperspectral digital holographic microscopy approach for reduction of coherence induced disturbances in quantitative phase imaging of biological specimens

Coherence induced noise and parasitic reflections in the experimental setup are main restrictions that limit the resolution and measurement accuracy in laser light-based digital holographic microscopy (DHM). We explored, if coherence properties of partial coherent light sources can be mimicked by utilizing spectrally tunable lasers. Moreover, the performance for label-free quantitative phase imaging of biological specimens is illustrated utilizing an experimental configuration including a commercial microscope and tunable super continuum laser sources with a wavelength range of up to 230 nm.
Can creatinine clearance be accurately predicted by formulae in octogenarian in-patients?

BACKGROUND As serum creatinine is relatively inaccurate for estimating renal function, prediction formulae are commonly used for more precise renal function estimation. However, these equations have not been studied in acutely hospitalized octogenarian patients. AIM To compare three commonly used formulae for estimating GFR to measured creatinine clearance (CCR) in patients aged >/=80 years admitted to an acute geriatric department. DESIGN Prospective, observational study. METHODS Consecutive patients aged >/=80 years with urinary catheters, admitted over a 12-month period to the acute geriatric ward of a 600-bed university hospital, were enrolled in the study. All had an accurate 24-h urinary collection, as well as serum and urinary urea and creatinine determinations. CCR was calculated and compared with GFRs derived from the three formulae. RESULTS Of the 154 patients enrolled in the study, 107 (69.5%) had normal serum creatinine (</=1.4 mg/dl), but 77/107 (50.0%) of these had measured CCR </=60 ml/min/1.73 m(2). Mean CCR was 45.1 ml/min/1.73 m(2) declining at the rate of 1.1 ml/min/1.73 m(2) each year. Only 9% of patients according to the Cockcroft and Jelliffe formulae, and 17% by the MDRD formula, fell within -10% and +10% of the measured CCR, which were the limits of agreement decided prior to the initiation of the study. DISCUSSION Many elderly in-patients with moderate renal dysfunction will remain misidentified by relying on serum creatinine or commonly used prediction equations. The best practical approach in these patients is to avoid potentially nephrotoxic drugs and drugs excreted mainly through the kidneys.
Considerations on Automatic Mapping Large-Scale Heterogeneous Language Resources: Sejong Semantic Classes and KorLex

This paper presents an automatic mapping method among large-scale heterogeneous language resources: Sejong Semantic Classes (SJSC) and KorLex. KorLex is a large-scale Korean WordNet, but it lacks specific syntactic & semantic information. Sejong Electronic Dictionary (SJD), of which semantic segmentation depends on SJSC, has much lower lexical coverage than KorLex, but shows refined syntactic & semantic information. The goal of this study is to build a rich language resource for improving Korean semantico-syntactic parsing technology. Therefore, we consider integration of them and propose automatic mapping method with three approaches: 1) Information of Monosemy/Polysemy of Word senses (IMPW), 2) Instances between Nouns of SJD and Word senses of KorLex (INW), and 3) Semantically Related words between Nouns of SJD and Synsets of KorLex (SRNS). We obtain good performance using combined three approaches: recall 0.837, precision 0.717, and F1 0.773.
An Architecture for Rating and Controlling Text Readability

In the so-called information society with its strong tendency towards individualization, it becomes more and more important to have all sorts of textual information available in a simple and easy to understand language. We present an approach that allows to automatically rate the readability of German texts and also provides suggestions how to make a given text more readable. Our system, called DeLite, employs a powerful NLP component that supports the syntactic and semantic analysis of German texts.
Fungal Mineralization Processes in Rio Tinto

Eukaryotic diversity in Río Tinto turns out to be unexpectedly high when compared to the prokaryotic one. Unlike the prokaryotic community, little is known about the role of the most abundant eukaryotes, mainly algae and fungi, in this ecosystem. Previous studies using acidophilic fungi isolated from the Tinto basin have shown their ability to specifically sequester toxic metals. We have also been able to demonstrate their direct implication in the geochemical cycles through biomineralization processes. Although the role that fungi may play in the Tinto basin is still poorly understood, is becoming clear that they participate very actively in the geological conformation of the environment, generating minerals of possible economical interest.
T cells control the generation of nanomolar-affinity anti-glycan antibodies

Vaccines targeting glycan structures at the surface of pathogenic microbes must overcome the inherent T cell–independent nature of immune responses against glycans. Carbohydrate conjugate vaccines achieve this by coupling bacterial polysaccharides to a carrier protein that recruits heterologous CD4 T cells to help B cell maturation. Yet they most often produce low- to medium-affinity immune responses of limited duration in immunologically fit individuals and disappointing results in the elderly and immunocompromised patients. Here, we hypothesized that these limitations result from suboptimal T cell help. To produce the next generation of more efficacious conjugate vaccines, we have explored a synthetic design aimed at focusing both B cell and T cell recognition to a single short glycan displayed at the surface of a virus-like particle. We tested and established the proof of concept of this approach for 2 serotypes of Streptococcus pneumoniae. In both cases, these vaccines elicited serotype-specific, protective, and long-lasting IgG antibodies of nanomolar affinity against the target glycans in mice. We further identified a requirement for CD4 T cells in the anti-glycan antibody response. Our findings establish the design principles for improved glycan conjugate vaccines. We surmise that the same approach can be used for any microbial glycan of interest.
Generalized Poland–Scheraga model for DNA hybridization

The Poland–Scheraga (PS) model for the helix–coil transition of DNA considers the statistical mechanics of the binding (or hybridization) of two complementary strands of DNA of equal length, with the restriction that only bases with the same index along the strands are allowed to bind. In this article, we extend this model by relaxing these constraints: We propose a generalization of the PS model that allows for the binding of two strands of unequal lengths N1 and N2 with unrelated sequences. We study in particular (i) the effect of mismatches on the hybridization of complementary strands, (ii) the hybridization of noncomplementary strands (as resulting from point mutations) of unequal lengths N1 and N2. The use of a Fixman–Freire scheme scales down the computational complexity of our algorithm from O(N 12N 22 ) to O(N1N2). The simulation of complementary strands of a few kilo base pairs yields results almost identical to the PS model. For short strands of equal or unequal lengths, the binding displays a strong sensitivity to mutations. This model may be relevant to the experimental protocol in DNA microarrays, and more generally to the molecular recognition of DNA fragments. It also provides a physical implementation of sequence alignments. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Biopolymers, 2004
DOCW: Dynamic overlapping contention window algorithm of wireless sensor networks

Flooding is often used by routing protocol to establish a routing tree. However, the effect of backoff mechanism on routing tree topology is ignored by most of researchers on designing their routing protocols. In addition, the collision is much more fiercely in a flooding procedure. In this paper, The influence of backoff mechanism on establishing routing tree topology and the message collision in flooding are analyzed. Based on the shortest path and congestion degree, a new method to estimate routing tree is developed. Furthermore, The DOCW (Dynamic Overlapping Contention Window) algorithm which used in the procedure of establishing routing tree is proposed. By hearing the activity of neighbors, each node can adjust its activity automatically. Simulation results demonstrate that the DOCW performs better than IEEE802.11 and IEEE802.15. 4 in message flooding, congestion avoidance and topology control.
Towards Parallel Classification of TBoxes

One of the most frequently used inference services of description logic reasoners is the classification of TBoxes with a subsumption hierarchy of all named concepts as the result. In response to (i) emerging TBoxes from the semantic web community consisting of up to hundreds of thousand of named concepts and (ii) the increasing availability of multi-processor and multior many-core computers, we propose a parallel approach for TBox classification. First experiments on parallelizing well-known algorithms for TBox classification were conducted to study the trade-off between incompleteness and speed improvement.