Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
PCR-SSCP Variation of IGF1 and PIT1 Genes and Their Association with Estimated Breeding Values of Growth Traits in Makooei Sheep

Molecular biology techniques genetic improvement by facilitating identification, mapping and analysis of polymorphism of genes by encoding proteins that act on metabolic pathways involved in economically interesting traits. This use of genetic markers can aid identification of those animals with the highest breeding values in sheep. On the basis of sheep genome mapping, information was examined on the ovine IGF1 and PIT1 genes as a possible genetic marker for growth traits in sheep. The current study was designed to estimate the frequencies of putative IGF-1 and PIT-1 genes SNPs and investigate associations with calculated EBVs of growth traits in Makooei sheep. PCR-SSCP analysis of the exon1 of IGF-I gene and include a part of intron2, exon3 and a part of intron3 and PIT-1 gene revealed the following banding patterns; three (AA, AG, GG) and four AA (p1), AB (p2), CC (p3), CD (p4), banding patterns respectively. Results from this study demonstrated higher performance of AA animals in BW and GBW, and AG animal in WW and W6 that may be related to the role of IGF-1 at the pre-puberty and puberty stages. Also higher performance of p3 animals in W9, YW and GSN, and p1 animal in GNY may be related to the PIT-1 role in post-puberty.
The role of automaticity and attention in neural processes underlying empathy for happiness, sadness, and anxiety

Although many studies have examined the neural basis of empathy, relatively little is known about how empathic processes are affected by different attentional conditions. Thus, we examined whether instructions to empathize might amplify responses in empathy-related regions and whether cognitive load would diminish the involvement of these regions. Thirty-two participants completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging session assessing empathic responses to individuals experiencing happy, sad, and anxious events. Stimuli were presented under three conditions: watching naturally, actively empathizing, and under cognitive load. Across analyses, we found evidence for a core set of neural regions that support empathic processes (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, DMPFC; medial prefrontal cortex, MPFC; temporoparietal junction, TPJ; amygdala; ventral anterior insula, AI; and septal area, SA). Two key regions—the ventral AI and SA—were consistently active across all attentional conditions, suggesting that they are automatically engaged during empathy. In addition, watching vs. empathizing with targets was not markedly different and instead led to similar subjective and neural responses to others' emotional experiences. In contrast, cognitive load reduced the subjective experience of empathy and diminished neural responses in several regions related to empathy and social cognition (DMPFC, MPFC, TPJ, and amygdala). The results reveal how attention impacts empathic processes and provides insight into how empathy may unfold in everyday interactions.
Benzethonium Chloride: A Novel Anticancer Agent Identified by Using a Cell-Based Small-Molecule Screen

Purpose: This study aims to identify a novel therapeutic agent for head and neck cancer and to evaluate its antitumor efficacy. Experimental Design: A cell-based and phenotype-driven high-throughput screening of ∼2,400 biologically active or clinically used compounds was done using a tetrazolium-based assay on FaDu (hypopharyngeal squamous cancer) and NIH 3T3 (untransformed mouse embryonic fibroblast) cells, with secondary screening done on C666-1 (nasopharyngeal cancer) and GM05757 (primary normal human fibroblast) lines. The “hit” compound was assayed for efficacy in combination with standard therapeutics on a panel of human cancer cell lines. Furthermore, its mode of action (using transmission electron microscopy and flow cytometry) and its in vivo efficacy (using xenograft models) were evaluated. Results: Benzethonium chloride was identified as a novel cancer-specific compound. For benzethonium (48-hour incubation), the dose required to reduce cell viability by 50% was 3.8 μmol/L in FaDu, 42.2 μmol/L in NIH 3T3, 5.3 μmol/L in C666-1, and 17.0 μmol/L in GM05757. In vitro, this compound did not interfere with the effects of cisplatin, 5-fluorouracil, or γ-irradiation. Benzethonium chloride induced apoptosis and activated caspases after 12 hours. Loss of mitochondrial membrane potential (ΔΨM) preceded cytosolic Ca2+ increase and cell death. In vivo, benzethonium chloride ablated the tumor-forming ability of FaDu cells, delayed the growth of xenograft tumors, and combined additively with local tumor radiation therapy. Evaluation of benzethonium chloride on the National Cancer Institute/NIH Developmental Therapeutics Program 60 human cancer cell lines revealed broad-range antitumor activity. Conclusions: This high-throughput screening identified a novel antimicrobial compound with significant broad-spectrum anticancer activity.
Elderly at Greater Risk for Root Caries: A Look at the Multifactorial Risks with Emphasis on Genetics Susceptibility

Root caries is one of the most significant dental problems among older adults today. Many studies have demonstrated that older adults are at greater risk for developing root caries. Here we examine what risk factors older adults are prone to and explain how they contribute to higher rates of oral disease, in particular root caries. The elderly are at risk for root caries due to dentures, lack of dexterity, a shift from complex to simple sugars, and poor oral hygiene. Decreased salivary flow and its manifestations with other social/behavioral and medical factors may provide a more comprehensive explanation to a higher frequency of root caries in older adults.
A Hybrid Multiobjective Differential Evolution Algorithm Based on Improved e-Dominance

Differential Evolution(DE) is a kind of simple but powerful evolutionary optimization algorithm with many successful applications. However, it has some weaknesses, especially the slow convergence speed because of weak local search ability in its stochastic search. To overcome the drawback, we first employ the orthogonal design method with quantization technique to generate the initial population, and then incorporate descent direction search of traditional optimization method into DE algorithm to improve the ability of DE in the process of solving multiobjective optimization problems(MOPs), where the descent direction can be found by using the dominance relationship among individuals. On the other hand, to obtain uniformly spread nondominated solutions and avoid deleting the extreme points, an improved $\epsilon$-dominance strategy is proposed to update the external nondominated archive. Finally, experiment results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Systematic and integrative reviews of the literature: how are they changing our thoughts about practice?

S earching the literature and synthesizing research findings have always been an aspect of bringing knowledge and science to the bedside for integration into practice. Moreover, the evidencebased practice movement has brought even greater attention to the need to bridge the gap between the science and practice arenas. Yet, at the same time, the amount of information and the number of medical and nursing journals and articles have increased exponentially, and it has become more difficult for the bedside clinician to synthesize all the available literature. As a result, the best evidence may not be guiding care at the bedside even when that is the intent of caregivers using an evidence-based practice framework. Combined, these issues increase the importance of the availability of rigorous literature reviews to those in the practice arena. However, the traditional literature reviews of yesterday are not sufficient for guiding practice today. Traditional literature reviews are limited by unsystematic searching techniques that are not often reported and as such not easily replicated. In addition, there is the potential for author biases in how the search was conducted and how the research findings were synthesized since no systematic process was used to guide the process.1−3 In the past, authors could choose to include a study or not in the review on the basis of the outcome they intended. Finally, contradictory research results may or may not have been included in the discussion of research findings within traditional literature reviews, thus limiting the accuracy of recommendations made for clinical practice changes.1−3
Non-Invertible Online Signature Biometric Template Protection via Shuffling and Trigonometry Transformation

This paper describes a novel approach to a cancelable template protection scheme that secures online handwritten signature samples in the reference database of a biometric verification system. We propose a renewable-noninvertible transformation process named Bio-Trigono comprising two consecutive steps. First, a shuffling scheme is applied to a signature sample to attain the renewability property for template protection. This is followed by the deployment of a cosine function for which its periodic characteristic is exploited to achieve a much desired non-invertible property for additional security. The overall template protection scheme was tested rigorously on signature samples of a SIGMA database through an online signature verification system. Its verification utilized the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for features' extraction and the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for user reference modeling and classification processes. Results demonstrated an effective cancelable template protection scheme whereby the best averaged error rates were 10. 3, 10. 5 and 14. 1% for un-transformed first and second transformed signature templates, respectively.
Correct blame for contracts: no more scapegoating

Behavioral software contracts supplement interface information with logical assertions. A rigorous enforcement of contracts provides useful feedback to developers if it signals contract violations as soon as they occur and if it assigns blame to violators with preciseexplanations. Correct blame assignment gets programmers started with the debugging process and can significantly decrease the time needed to discover and fix bugs. Sadly the literature on contracts lacks a framework for making statements about the correctness of blame assignment and for validating such statements. This paper fills the gap and uses the framework to demonstrate how one of the proposed semantics for higher-order contracts satisfies this criteria and another semantics occasionally assigns blame to the wrong module. Concretely, the paper applies the framework to the lax enforcement of dependent higher-order contracts and the picky one. A higher-order dependent contract specifies constraints for the domain and range of higher-order functions and also relates arguments and results in auxiliary assertions. The picky semantics ensures that the use of arguments in the auxiliary assertion satisfies the domain contracts and the lax one does not. While the picky semantics discovers more contract violations than the lax one, it occasionally blames the wrong module. Hence the paper also introduces a third semantics, dubbed indy, which fixes the problems of the picky semantics without giving up its advantages.
Q-Learning Based Co-Operative Spectrum Mobility in Cognitive Radio Networks

In cognitive radio systems, fast and efficient spectrum selection is a vital task to minimize the overhead of spectrum scanning, and hence to improve the response time of the system. So, the choice of channel sensing sequence plays an important role for better performance of the system. This paper proposes a co-operative Q-learning based spectrum sensing technique for the secondary users of an ad hoc network to access the primary channels. By the proposed technique, every secondary user (SU) maintains a dynamic priority list of channels based on Q-learning from its own action-observation history, as well as from spatial channel information exchange among its local neighbors. Whenever there is a demand an SU scans the spectrum according to the order in the priority list until there is a success. Simulation studies show that with significantly less computing and scanning overhead, our proposed Q-learning based approach improves the response time and call block / drop rate to offer better performance compared to other contemporary reinforcement learning based approaches.
Recovery–stress balance and injury risk in professional football players: a prospective study

Abstract Professional football is a contact sport with a high risk of injury. This study was designed to examine the contribution of stress and recovery variables as assessed with the Recovery-Stress Questionnaire for Athletes (RESTQ-Sport) to the risk of injury in professional football players. In a prospective, non-experimental cohort design, 22 professional football players in the highest German football league were observed over the course of 16 months. From January 2010 until April 2011, the players completed the RESTQ-Sport a total of 222 times in monthly intervals. In addition, injury data were assessed by the medical staff of the club. Overall, 34 traumatic injuries and 10 overuse injuries occurred. Most of the injuries were located in the lower limb (79.5%), and muscle and tendon injuries (43.2%) were the most frequently occurring injury type. In a generalised linear model, the stress-related scales Fatigue (OR 1.70, P = 0.007), Disturbed Breaks (OR 1.84, P = 0.047) and Injury (OR 1.77, P < 0.001) and the recovery-related scale Sleep Quality (OR 0.53, P = 0.010) significantly predicted injuries in the month after the assessment. These results support the importance of frequent monitoring of recovery and stress parameters to lower the risk of injuries in professional football.
DISTRIBUTION OF PEROXISOMES (MICROBODIES) IN THE NEPHRON OF THE RAT

The distribution of peroxisomes (microbodies) in the rat nephron was studied cytochemically, using glutaraldehyde- or formaldehyde-fixed tissue, by means of α-hydroxy acid oxidase activity in light microscopy or oxidation of 3,3'-diaminobenzidine (DAB) at pH 9 in both light and electron microscopy.The two cytochemical methods show peroxisomes to be nearly sperical particles found only in cells of the proximal convoluted tubule. Lysosomes were identified in the same or parallel sections, with β-glycerophosphate or 5'-cytidylic acid as substrate. They are found in all cells of the nephron. These cytochemical methods visualize the two organelles for light microscopy; they also permit unequivocal differentiation of all kidney peroxisomes from lysosomes in electron micrographs. Peroxisomes are larger and more reactive in the cells of the pars descendens (P3 segment) of the proximal convolution, located in the outer medulla and medullary rays, than in the cells of the pars convoluta (P1 and P2 segments), situated in the cortex. In contrast, lysosomes are much smaller in the P3 segment and larger and more reactive in the P1 and P2 segments. In all cells of the proximal convolution, peroxisomes tend to be concentrated nearer the base of the cells than do lysosomes. Mitochondria in P3 cells also show low levels of DAB oxidation at pH 6, in contrast to those in P1 and P2 cells. The possibility is discussed that P3 cells possess an extramitochondrial means of oxidation in which peroxisome oxidases play an important role.
Specific Recognition of Influenza A/H1N1/2009 Antibodies in Human Serum: A Simple Virus-Free ELISA Method

Background Although it has been estimated that pandemic Influenza A H1N1/2009 has infected millions of people from April to October 2009, a more precise figure requires a worldwide large-scale diagnosis of the presence of Influenza A/H1N1/2009 antibodies within the population. Assays typically used to estimate antibody titers (hemagglutination inhibition and microneutralization) would require the use of the virus, which would seriously limit broad implementation. Methodology/Principal Findings An ELISA method to evaluate the presence and relative concentration of specific Influenza A/H1N1/2009 antibodies in human serum samples is presented. The method is based on the use of a histidine-tagged recombinant fragment of the globular region of the hemagglutinin (HA) of the Influenza A H1N1/2009 virus expressed in E. coli. Conclusions/Significance The ELISA method consistently discerns between Inf A H1N1 infected and non-infected subjects, particularly after the third week of infection/exposure. Since it does not require the use of viral particles, it can be easily and quickly implemented in any basic laboratory. In addition, in a scenario of insufficient vaccine availability, the use of this ELISA could be useful to determine if a person has some level of specific antibodies against the virus and presumably at least partial protection.
Receivers for Faster-than-Nyquist signaling with and without turbo equalization

Faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling is a trellis coding method that maintains the error rate while reducing signal bandwidth. The combined effect is to move closer to capacity. We study some basic receiver issues: How to model the signaling efficiently in discrete time, how much the Viterbi receiver can be truncated, and how to combine the method with an outer code. The methods are modeling for minimum phase, minimum distance calculation and receiver tests. Concatenated FTN in a turbo equalization scenario proves to be a strong coding method.
Fixed-order H∞ controller design via HIFOO, a specialized nonsmooth optimization package

We report on our experience with fixed-order Hfrinfin controller design using the HIFOO toolbox. We applied HIFOO to various benchmark fixed (or reduced) order Hfrinfin controller design problems in the literature, comparing the results with those published for other methods. The results show that HIFOO can be used as an effective alternative to existing methods for fixed-order Hfrinfin controller design.
Identification of Phosphopeptides by MALDI Q-TOF MS in Positive and Negative Ion Modes after Methyl Esterification*S

We have developed an efficient, sensitive, and specific method for the detection of phosphopeptides present in peptide mixtures by MALDI Q-TOF mass spectrometry. Use of the MALDI Q-TOF enables selection of phosphopeptides and characterization by CID of the phosphopeptides performed on the same sample spot. However, this type of experiment has been limited by low ionization efficiency of phosphopeptides in positive ion mode while selecting precursor ions of phosphopeptides. Our method entails neutralizing negative charges on acidic groups of nonphosphorylated peptides by methyl esterification before mass spectrometry in positive and negative ion modes. Methyl esterification significantly increases the relative signal intensity generated by phosphopeptides in negative ion mode compared with positive ion mode and greatly increases selectivity for phosphopeptides by suppressing the signal intensity generated by acidic peptides in negative ion mode. We used the method to identify 12 phosphopeptides containing 22 phosphorylation sites from low femtomolar amounts of a tryptic digest of β-casein and α-s-casein. We also identified 10 phosphopeptides containing five phosphorylation sites from an in-gel tryptic digest of 100 fmol of an in vitro autophosphorylated fibroblast growth factor receptor kinase domain and an additional phosphopeptide containing another phosphorylation site when 500 fmol of the digest was examined. The results demonstrate that the method is a fast, robust, and sensitive means of characterizing phosphopeptides present in low abundance mixtures of phosphorylated and nonphosphorylated peptides.
Maximally informative surface reconstruction from lines

In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view method for surface reconstruction from matched line segments with applications to robotic mapping and image-based rendering. Starting from 3D line segments, plane hypotheses are formed for all non-collinear and sufficiently coplanar segment pairs. The surface that is spanned by two segments is used to immediately prune hypotheses that do not pass a sight line occlusion check to keep the initial plane number tractable. After further merging, exhaustive intersections are computed in an efficient way to yield a maximally informative surface representation. Finally, robustified visibility constraints are used to recover a dense surface mesh that is a pessimistic representation of the free space, which is desirable for path planning applications. The presented system is a complete and automatic solution suitable for mapping an environment in realtime scenarios like robotic exploration. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on several indoor scenes with varying complexity.
Magic Ring: a self-contained gesture input device on finger

Control and Communication in the computing environment with diverse equipment could be clumsy, obtrusive, and frustrating even just for finding the right input device or getting familiar with the input interface. In this paper, we present Magic Ring (MR), a finger ring shape input device using inertial sensor to detect the subtle finger gestures and routine daily activities. As a self-contained, always-available, and hands-free input device, we believe that MR will enable diverse applications in the intelligent computing environment. In this demonstration, we will show a prototype design of MR and three proof-of-concept application systems: a remote controller to control the electrical appliance like TV, radio, and lamp using simple finger gestures; a natural communication tools to chat using the simplified sign languages; a daily activity tracker to record daily activities such as room cleaning, eating, cooking, writing with only one MR on the index finger.
Eradicating Malaria

The renewed interest in malaria research and control is based on the intolerable toll this disease takes on young children and pregnant women in Africa and other vulnerable populations; 150 to 300 children die each hour from malaria amounting to 1 to 2 million deaths yearly. Malaria-induced neurologic impairment, anemia, hypoglycemia, and low birth weight imperil normal development and survival. Resistance of Plasmodium falciparum to drugs and Anopheles mosquitoes to insecticides has stimulated discovery and development of artemisinin-based combination treatments (ACTs) and other drugs, long-lasting insecticide-treated bednets (with synthetic pyrethroids) and a search for non-toxic, long-lasting, affordable insecticides for indoor residual spraying (IRS). Malaria vaccine development and testing are progressing rapidly and a recombinant protein (RTS,S/AS02A) directed against the circumsporozoite protein is soon to be in Phase 3 trials. Support for malaria control, research, and advocacy through the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the U.S. President's Malaria Initiative, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, WHO and other organizations is resulting in decreasing morbidity and mortality in many malarious countries. Sustainability of effective programs through training and institution strengthening will be the key to malaria elimination coupled with improved surveillance and targeted research.
Resilience and longevity: expert survivorship of centenarians

Centenarians are survivors, and many among them exemplify sustained competence into very old age. This paper highlights three important resilience domains among centenarians: personal resilience (e.g., personality), cognitive resilience (e.g., intellectual functioning), and social and economic resilience (e.g., social support and economic resources). Disciplines Gerontology Comments This chapter is published as Martin, P., MacDonald, M. , Margrett, J. A. , & Poon, L. W. (2010). Resilience among the oldest-old. In P. S. Fry & C. L. M. Keyes (Eds.), Frontiers of Resilient Aging, 213-238. Cambridge University Press. Posted with permission. This book chapter is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/hdfs_pubs/65 8 Resilience and longevity: expert survivorship