Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Red Blood Cells Preconditioned with Hemin Are Less Permissive to Plasmodium Invasion In Vivo and In Vitro

Malaria is a parasitic disease that causes severe hemolytic anemia in Plasmodium-infected hosts, which results in the release and accumulation of oxidized heme (hemin). Although hemin impairs the establishment of Plasmodium immunity in vitro and in vivo, mice preconditioned with hemin develop lower parasitemia when challenged with Plasmodium chabaudi adami blood stage parasites. In order to understand the mechanism accounting for this resistance as well as the impact of hemin on eryptosis and plasma levels of scavenging hemopexin, red blood cells were labeled with biotin prior to hemin treatment and P. c. adami infection. This strategy allowed discriminating hemin-treated from de novo generated red blood cells and to follow the infection within these two populations of cells. Fluorescence microscopy analysis of biotinylated-red blood cells revealed increased P. c. adami red blood cells selectivity and a decreased permissibility of hemin-conditioned red blood cells for parasite invasion. These effects were also apparent in in vitro P. falciparum cultures using hemin-preconditioned human red blood cells. Interestingly, hemin did not alter the turnover of red blood cells nor their replenishment during in vivo infection. Our results assign a function for hemin as a protective agent against high parasitemia, and suggest that the hemolytic nature of blood stage human malaria may be beneficial for the infected host.
Getting Your Sea Legs

Sea travel mandates changes in the control of the body. The process by which we adapt bodily control to life at sea is known as getting one's sea legs. We conducted the first experimental study of bodily control as maritime novices adapted to motion of a ship at sea. We evaluated postural activity (stance width, stance angle, and the kinematics of body sway) before and during a sea voyage. In addition, we evaluated the role of the visible horizon in the control of body sway. Finally, we related data on postural activity to two subjective experiences that are associated with sea travel; seasickness, and mal de debarquement. Our results revealed rapid changes in postural activity among novices at sea. Before the beginning of the voyage, the temporal dynamics of body sway differed among participants as a function of their (subsequent) severity of seasickness. Body sway measured at sea differed among participants as a function of their (subsequent) experience of mal de debarquement. We discuss implications of these results for general theories of the perception and control of bodily orientation, for the etiology of motion sickness, and for general phenomena of perceptual-motor adaptation and learning.
Observational evidence that agricultural intensification and land use change may be reducing the Indian summer monsoon rainfall

Using gridded daily rainfall observations, and monthly satellite land surface data sets, the connection between land use change and monsoonal rainfall climatology is analyzed. A combination of statistical analysis involving genetic algorithm (GA), empirical orthogonal function (EOF), and causal discovery algorithms (CDA) are used. Study objectives are (1) to identify regional trends in the observed precipitation data over the Indian summer monsoon region, (2) to investigate the relation between land use change/agriculture intensification and changes in rainfall, and (3) to explore whether land use change and agricultural intensification have caused change in the rainfall climatology. The satellite‐based vegetation data set shows significant agricultural intensification over northern India. For the period just before start of the summer monsoon season (April and May), the normalized differential vegetation index (NDVI) shows an increase only over Peninsular India. The EOF‐ and GA‐based analysis identified the strongest climatic signal for monsoon rainfall with an increasing trend over the east central regions of India and a decreasing trend in monsoon seasonal precipitation over north/northwest India. The areas of decreasing rainfall coincided with regions of agricultural intensive land use and are analyzed further. The correlation and the causal data analysis suggest that premonsoon (March–April) vegetation affects July month precipitation over peninsular India. In particular, a negative relationship exists between them. The results are more robust over peninsular and northern India indicating that an increase in NDVI has possibly weakened the early monsoon rainfall in this region. The results of this study suggest that land use change associated with agricultural intensification could be reducing the summer monsoon rainfall over certain regions of India.
COMPENSATORY LENGTHENING: IN DEFENSE OF THE CONCEPT 'MORA'

1. In a 1979 paper on compensatory lengthening (CL), DE CHENE and ANDERSON (D & A) make two major claims: (a) CL is one of the many terms of traditional historical linguistics which label diachronic correspondences without explaining them; (b) the correct phonetic explanation is that 'such changes always involve the loss of a consonant immediately adjacent to the vowel in which length subsequently appears, and . the change can be analysed quite generally into the two independently-motivated processes of weakening of a consonant to a glide (either semivocalic or laryngeal) and subsequent monophthongization of a complex syllable nucleus. (505) That is, CL is a misnomer. A first step toward a rebuttal of this position is found in CLEMENTS (1982; cf. also 1984). While more or less sharing D & A's negative evaluation of traditional linguistics (3), he proposes a phonological explanation of CL äs serving to 'maintain the quantitative integrity of the syllable. ' (6) Unfortunately, however, most of CLEMENTS' examples are of doubtful cogency: A fair number involve consonant gemination which, äs shown in HOCK (1976a) and MTJKRAY and VENNEMAN (1983), may result from a variety of other, non-CL developments. The Bantu example of mun$tu to munSntn (my notation), with CL aUegedly resulting from the shift of n from the first to the second syllable, can be attributed also to lengthening before sonorant + consonant which, äs OE cild > clld, NE child shows, may take place without a shift in syllable boundary. The dialectal American English Variation between [kamt] and [kse:t] is of doubtful usefulness, since äs far äs I can teil, the vowel is long not only in the n-less form, but also in the form with n. The regional American English Variation between forms like [ka:t] and [kart] is
Working with Ethical Symmetry in Social Research with Children

The perspective of `children as social actors' has created a field with new ethical dilemmas and responsibilities for researchers within the social study of childhood. These concern, for example, the greater potential for conflicts of interest, often hitherto unrecognized, between children and other actors. It is suggested to work from a perspective of `ethical symmetry' in research relationships with children while taking into account the social and cultural positioning of children in their particular circumstances. An illustrative example is given of the ethical issues that can arise when children are seen as social actors. It is argued that codes of ethics, reflexivity and collective professional responsibility are all required in order to meet the ethical demands that flow from these newer perspectives on children. It is proposed, therefore, that researchers develop a set of strategic values within which individual researchers can anchor the tactics required in their everyday practice in order to work reflexively. Finally, it is suggested that, in order to develop ethical practice for the future, dialogue is required on two levels: between researchers as a means of collectively sharing experience; and between researchers and children as participants in the ongoing research process.
Subjective Attributes of Depression, Part 1: The Subjective Disability Depression Questionnaire, a New Measure for assessing Reactive Depression Following Stroke

This study aimed to assess the psychometric characteristics of the Subjective Disability Depression Questionnaire (SDDQ) as a measure of the influences of self-perceived disability on depression. Method: Twenty-seven stroke patients and partners, and a comparison group of 28 amputees and partners from a rehabilitation centre completed the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, General Health Questionnaire-28, and Emotional and Social Dysfunction Questionnaire. Results: The SDDQ was found to have a nine-factor structure that explained 88.09% of the variance in depression. The construct validity and high split half reliability and internal consistency provided satisfactory test characteristics. Conclusions: The present study presents initial evidence that the SDDQ is a reliable and valid measure of the impact of self-perceived disability on depression, and suggests it will be useful in providing a focus for individually tailored psychological therapies.
Plasma Instability and Terahertz Oscillations in Resonant-Tunneling Transistors

Abstract : The self-excitation of plasma oscillations in a resonant-tunneling transistor structure is studied. It is demonstrated that it can give rise to the generation of transient current at frequencies in the terahertz range. The amplitudes and the frequencies of different modes of the generated oscillations are voltage-tuned.
Melatonin protects the integrity of granulosa cells by reducing oxidative stress in nuclei, mitochondria, and plasma membranes in mice

Melatonin protects luteinized granulosa cells (GCs) from oxidative stress in the follicle during ovulation. However, it is unclear in which cellular components (e.g., nuclei, mitochondria, or plasma membranes) melatonin works as an antioxidant. GCs from immature (3 wks) ICR mice were incubated with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2; 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10 mM) in the presence or absence of melatonin (100 μg/ml) for 2 h. DNA damage was assessed by fluorescence-based immunocytochemistry using specific antibodies for 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine (8-OHdG), an indicator of oxidative guanine base damage in DNA, and for histone H2AX phosphorylation (γH2AX), a marker of double-strand breaks of DNA. Mitochondrial function was assessed by the fluorescence intensity of MitoTracker Red probes, which diffuse across the membrane and accumulate in mitochondria with active membrane potentials. Lipid peroxidation of plasma membranes was analyzed by measuring hexanoyl-lysine (HEL), a oxidative stress marker for lipid peroxidation. Apoptosis of GCs was assessed by nuclear fragmentation using DAPI staining, and apoptotic activities were evaluated by caspase-3/7 activities. H2O2 treatment significantly increased the fluorescence intensities of 8-OHdG and γH2AX, reduced the intensity of MitoTracker Red in the mitochondria, increased HEL concentrations in GCs, and enhanced the number of apoptotic cells and caspase-3/7 activities. All these changes were significantly decreased by melatonin treatment. Melatonin reduced oxidative stress-induced DNA damage, mitochondrial dysfunction, lipid peroxidation, and apoptosis in GCs, suggesting that melatonin protects GCs by reducing oxidative stress of cellular components including nuclei, mitochondria, and plasma membranes. Melatonin helps to maintain the integrity of GCs as an antioxidant in the preovulatory follicle.
Methods for the Recognition and Understanding of Speech

Statistical methods for speech processing refer to a general methodology in which knowledge about both a speech signal and the language that it expresses, along with practical uses of that knowledge for specific tasks or services, is developed from actual realizations of speech data through a well-defined mathematical and statistical formalism. For more than 20 years, this basic methodology has produced many advances and new results, particularly for recognizing and understanding speech and natural language by machine. In this article, we focus on several important statistical methods, e.g., one based primarily on the hidden Markov model (HMM) formulation that has gained widespread acceptance as the dominant technique and one related to use of statistics for characterizing word co-occurrences. In order to recognize and understand speech, the speech signal is first processed by an acoustic processor, which converts the waveform to a set of spectral feature vectors which characterize the time-varying properties of the speech sounds, and then by a linguistic decoder, which decodes the feature vectors into a word sequence which is valid according to the word lexicon and task grammar associated with the speech recognition or understanding task. The hidden Markov model approach is mainly used for acoustic modeling, that is assigning probabilities to acoustic realizations of a sequence of sounds or words, and a statistical language model is used to assign probabilities to sequences of words in the language. A Bayesian approach is used to find the word sequence with the maximum a posteriori probability over all possible sentences in the task language. This search problem is often astronomically large for large vocabulary speech understanding problems, and thus the speech-to-text decoding process often requires inordinate amounts of computing power to solve by heuristic methods. Fortunately, using results from the field of Finite State Automata Theory, we can reduce the computational burden of the search by orders of magnitude, thereby enabling exact solutions in computationally feasible times for large speech recognition problems. 1 This article is based on a series of lectures on Challenges in Speech Recognition by one of the authors (LRR) and his many colleagues at AT&T Labs Research, most especially Dr. Mazin Rahim who contributed to the presentation and figures used throughout this article. We thank Dr. Rahim for his help and support.
The control data STAR-100: performance measurements

The CONTROL DATA STAR-100 (STring-ARray) Computer is a very large, general purpose, high speed computing system. The STAR-100 computer utilizes integrated circuitry, ferrite core memory, 400 hz power and freon cooling in the hardware implementation. The logical design of the computer combines stream processing, virtual addressing, hardware macro instructions, segmented (pipeline) arithmetic units and a 256-word high speed register file to perform arithmetic and logical operation on discrete or structured data elements (Figure 1).
Construct Validity of Kolb's Learning Style Inventory, Using Factor Analysis and Guttman's Smallest Space Analysis

The Learning Style Inventory developed by David Kolb assesses learners' preferences for specific phases of a model of an experiential learning cycle. A Hebrew version of Kolb's inventory was administered to 739 undergraduate students from nine major study areas, after investigating the instrument's cross-cultural equivalence. In accordance with hypothesized underlying structure, two-factor solutions corresponding to the experiential model's two dimensions, clearly emerged in the factor analysis. While the over-all circular structure of the model is presented strongly using Guttman's SSA procedure, both findings provide construct validity for the inventory and support the generalizability to a different culture of the learning process proposed by Kolb.
RNA-seq Analysis of Overexpressing Ovine AANAT Gene of Melatonin Biosynthesis in Switchgrass

Melatonin serves important functions in the promotion of growth and anti-stress regulation by efficient radical scavenging and regulation of antioxidant enzyme activity in various plants. To investigate its regulatory roles and metabolism pathways, the transcriptomic profile of overexpressing the ovine arylalkylamine N-acetyltransferase (oAANAT) gene, encoding the penultimate enzyme in melatonin biosynthesis, was compared with empty vector control using RNA-seq in switchgrass, a model plant of cellulosic ethanol conversion. The 85.22 million high quality reads that were assembled into 135,684 unigenes were generated by Illumina sequencing for transgenic oAANAT switchgrass with an average sequence length of 716 bp. A total of 946 differentially expression genes in transgenic line comparing to control switchgrass, including 737 up-regulated and 209 down-regulated genes, were mainly enriched with two main functional patterns of melatonin identifying by gene ontology analysis: the growth regulator and stress tolerance. Furthermore, KEGG maps indicated that the biosynthetic pathways of secondary metabolite (phenylpropanoids, flavonoids, steroids, stilbenoid, diarylheptanoid, and gingerol) and signaling pathways (MAPK signaling pathway, estrogen signaling pathway) were involved in melatonin metabolism. This study substantially expands the transcriptome information for switchgrass and provides valuable clues for identifying candidate genes involved in melatonin biosynthesis and elucidating the mechanism of melatonin metabolism.
Propagation data and prediction methods required for the design of terrestrial broadband radio access systems operating in a frequency range from 3 to 60 GHz

Broadband wireless access is an important method of providing broadband to individual households as well as small business enterprises. This Recommendation addresses systems in a frequency range from 3 to 60 GHz and gives guidance for line-of-sight (LoS) coverage and non-LoS propagation mechanisms of importance. For affected systems, rain methods are given to estimate diversity improvement by selecting the best base station from two and the coverage reduction under rainfall. Guidance is given regarding wideband distortion.
Consensus Problems of Multiagent Systems under Discrete Communication Structure

In the study of consensus problems of continuous-time multiagent systems, continuous communication of state information among agents is rather a restrictive assumption. In this paper, we propose a discrete communication structure of multiagent systems, which allows for bounded time-varying communication delays, and derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the possession of consensus property. Examples are provided that demonstrate the effectiveness of our theoretical results
A family with hereditary hyperferritinaemia cataract syndrome: evidence of incomplete penetrance and clinical heterogeneity

Ferritin, the major intracellular iron store protein, consists of 24 subunits of two types, H (heavy) and L (light) encoded in chromosomes 11 and 19, respectively (Worwood, 1982). Ferritin synthesis is regulated by iron intracellular levels; when the supply of iron to the cell is limited, ferritin translation is inhibited, conversely, when cellular iron is abundant ferritin synthesis takes place. The binding of the 5¢ untranslated region (5¢-UTR) of FTL mRNA to trans-acting iron regulatory proteins (IRPs) prevents the binding of the translation initiation complex and thus blocks translation of the ferritin protein (Muckenthaler et al, 1998). Mutations in the 5¢UTR of the FTL gene produce elevated serum ferritin and clinically result in hereditary hyperferritinaemia cataract syndrome (HHCS), an autosomal dominant disease characterized by early onset bilateral cataract. The present study analyzed a family with bilateral cataract and marked hyperferritinaemia. Genomic DNA was isolated from peripheral blood with conventional methods and the FTL gene, including IRE (Iron Regulatory Element) region, was amplified as described elsewhere (Allerson et al, 1999). DNA sequencing analysis was performed in ABI PRISM 310 genetic analyzer (Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA) according supplier’s conditions. The family with hyperferitinaemia was detected through a oneyear screening programme of patients with early onset cataract (50 non-related patients or families). All assays were performed two times with a normal control included. Clinical characteristics of lens opacities were analyzed through slitlamp. The affected family was referred to the General Hospital of Mexico. The protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee and patients gave informed consent to the study. We analyzed a three-generation Mexican family segregating autosomal
JellyLens: content-aware adaptive lenses

Focus+context lens-based techniques smoothly integrate two levels of detail using spatial distortion to connect the magnified region and the context. Distortion guarantees visual continuity, but causes problems of interpretation and focus targeting, partly due to the fact that most techniques are based on statically-defined, regular lens shapes, that result in far-from-optimal magnification and distortion. JellyLenses dynamically adapt to the shape of the objects of interest, providing detail-in-context visualizations of higher relevance by optimizing what regions fall into the focus, context and spatially-distorted transition regions. This both improves the visibility of content in the focus region and preserves a larger part of the context region. We describe the approach and its implementation, and report on a controlled experiment that evaluates the usability of JellyLenses compared to regular fisheye lenses, showing clear performance improvements with the new technique for a multi-scale visual search task.
Orientation and size-dependent mechanical modulation within individual secondary osteons in cortical bone tissue

Anisotropy is one of the most peculiar aspects of cortical bone mechanics; however, its anisotropic mechanical behaviour should be treated only with strict relationship to the length scale of investigation. In this study, we focus on quantifying the orientation and size dependence of the spatial mechanical modulation in individual secondary osteons of bovine cortical bone using nanoindentation. Tests were performed on the same osteonal structure in the axial (along the long bone axis) and transverse (normal to the long bone axis) directions along arrays going radially out from the Haversian canal at four different maximum depths on three secondary osteons. Results clearly show a periodic pattern of stiffness with spatial distance across the osteon. The effect of length scale on lamellar bone anisotropy and the critical length at which homogenization of the mechanical properties occurs were determined. Further, a laminate-composite-based analytical model was applied to the stiffness trends obtained at the highest spatial resolution to evaluate the elastic constants for a sub-layer of mineralized collagen fibrils within an osteonal lamella on the basis of the spatial arrangement of the fibrils. The hierarchical arrangement of lamellar bone is found to be a major determinant for modulation of mechanical properties and anisotropic mechanical behaviour of the tissue.
Accurate Object Localization with Shape Masks

This paper proposes an approach for object class localization which goes beyond bounding boxes, as it also determines the outline of the object. Unlike most current localization methods, our approach does not require any hypothesis parameter space to be defined. Instead, it directly generates, evaluates and clusters shape masks. Thus, the presented framework produces more informative results for object class localization. For example, it easily learns and detects possible object viewpoints and articulations, which are often well characterized by the object outline. We evaluate the proposed approach on the challenging natural-scene Graz-02 object classes dataset. The results demonstrate the extended localization capabilities of our method.