Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dietary patterns and changes in body mass index and waist circumference in adults.

BACKGROUND Obesity has increased > 20% in the past decade in the United States, and more than one-half of US adults are overweight or obese. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to further elucidate the nutritional etiology of changes in body mass index (BMI; in kg/m(2)) and waist circumference by dietary intake pattern. We hypothesized that a healthy dietary pattern would lead to smaller changes in BMI and waist circumference than would other dietary patterns. DESIGN Subjects were 459 healthy men and women participating in the ongoing Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. Diet was assessed with the use of 7-d dietary records, from which 41 food groups were created and entered into a cluster analysis. RESULTS Five dietary patterns were derived (healthy, white bread, alcohol, sweets, and meat and potatoes). The mean annual change in BMI was 0.30 +/- 0.06 for subjects in the meat-and-potatoes cluster and 0.05 +/- 0.06 for those in the healthy cluster (P < 0.01). The mean annual change in waist circumference was more than 3 times as great for subjects in the white-bread cluster (1.32 +/- 0.29 cm) as for those in the healthy cluster (0.43 +/- 0.27 cm) (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS Consuming a diet high in fruit, vegetables, reduced-fat dairy, and whole grains and low in red and processed meat, fast food, and soda was associated with smaller gains in BMI and waist circumference. Because foods are not consumed in isolation, dietary pattern research based on natural eating behavior may be useful in understanding dietary causes of obesity and in helping individuals trying to control their weight.
Smart Synthetic Biomaterials for Therapeutic Applications

In the field of biomaterials, naturally-derived and synthetic polymers are utilized individually or in combination with each other, to create bio-inspired or biomimetic materials for various bioengineering applications, including drug delivery and tissue engineering. Natural polymers, such as proteins and polysaccharides, are advantageous due to low or non-toxicity, sustainable resources, innocuous byproducts, and cell-instructive properties. Synthetic polymers offer a variety of controlled chemical and physical characteristics, with enhanced mechanical properties. Together, natural and synthetic polymers provide an almost endless supply of possibilities for the development of novel, smart materials to resolve limitations of current materials, such as limited resources, toxic components and/or harsh chemical reactions. Herein is discussed the synthetic-biological material formation for cell-instructive tissue engineering and controlled drug delivery. We hypothesized that the combination of hydrogel-based scaffold and engineered nanomaterials would assist in the development or regeneration of tissue and disease treatment. Chemically-modified alginate was formed into alginate-based nanoparticles (ABNs) to direct the intracellular delivery of proteins (e.g., growth factors) and small molecular drugs (e.g., chemotherapeutics). The ABN surface was modified with celltargeting ligands to control drug delivery to specific cells. The ABN approach to controlled drug delivery provides a platform for studying and implementing nontraditional biological pathways for disease (e.g., osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis) and cancer treatment. Through traditional organic and polymer chemistry techniques, and materials engineering approaches, a stimuli-responsive alginate-based smart hydrogel (ASH) was developed. Physical crosslinks formed based on supramolecular networks consisting of β-cyclodextrin-alginate and a tri-block amphiphilic polymer, which also provided a reversible thermo-responsiveness to the hydrogel. The hydrogel was shear-thinning, and recovered physical crosslinks, i.e., self-healed, after un-loading. The ASH biomaterials provide a platform for injectable, therapeutics for tissue regeneration and disease treatment. Indeed, various hydrogel constituents and tunable mechanical properties created cell-instructive hydrogels which promoted tissue formation.
Interoceptive stress activates glucagon-like peptide-1 neurons that project to the hypothalamus.

This study tested the hypothesis that systemic stressors in rats activate glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1)-immunoreactive neurons in the caudal brain stem, including those that project to the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN). Neural tracer was microinjected into the PVN to retrogradely label brain stem neurons. Seven to ten days later, rats were injected with lithium chloride (LiCl; 50 mg/kg). Additional non-tracer-injected rats were treated with lipopolysaccharide (LPS; 100 μg/kg) or CCK (100 μg/kg) or were allowed to consume a very large meal. Rats were killed 90-120 min after drug treatment or 30 min after the meal. Brains were processed for immunocytochemical localization of c-Fos (a marker of neuronal activation), GLP-1, and, when appropriate, neural tracer. The majority of GLP-1 neurons were activated to express c-Fos after LiCl, LPS, or CCK treatment, including (in LiCl-treated rats) those projecting to the PVN. In contrast, GLP-1 neurons rarely expressed c-Fos after ingestion of a large meal, despite prominent activation of other brain stem neurons. These results suggest that GLP-1 neurons are uniquely activated in situations of interoceptive stress, and may participate in adaptive hypothalamic stress responses.
Do patients and carers agree on symptom burden in advanced COPD?

Objective Accurate informal carer assessment of patient symptoms is likely to be valuable for decision making in managing the high symptom burden of COPD in the home setting. Few studies have investigated agreement between patients and carers in COPD. We aimed to assess agreement between patients and carers on symptoms, and factors associated with disagreement in a population-based sample of patients with advanced COPD. Patients and methods This was a prospective, cross-sectional analysis of data from 119 advanced COPD patients and their carers. Patients and carers separately rated symptoms on a 4-point scale. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests and weighted Cohen’s kappa determined differences in patient and carer scores and patient–carer agreement, respectively. We identified characteristics associated with incongruence using Spearman’s rank correlation and Mann–Whitney U tests. Results There were no significant differences between group-level patient and carer scores for any symptom. Patient–carer individual-level agreement was moderate for constipation (k=0.423), just below moderate for diarrhea (k=0.393) and fair for depression (k=0.341), fatigue (k=0.294), anxiety (k=0.289) and breathlessness (k=0.210). Estimation of greater patient symptom burden by carers relative to patients themselves was associated with non-spousal patient–carer relationship, non-cohabitating patients and carers, carer symptoms of anxiety and depression and more carer unmet support needs. Greater symptom burden estimation by the patient relative to the carer was associated with younger patients and longer duration of COPD. Conclusion Overall, agreement between patients and carers was fair to moderate and was poorer for more subjective symptoms. There is a need to encourage open dialogue between patients and carers to promote shared understanding, help patients express themselves and encourage carers to draw attention to symptoms that patients do not report. The findings suggest a need to screen for and address both the psychological morbidities in patients with advanced COPD and their carers and unmet support needs in carers.
Construction and Use of a Recyclable Marker To Examine the Role of Major Facilitator Superfamily Protein Members in Candida glabrata Drug Resistance Phenotypes

Export of drugs is a problem for chemotherapy of infectious organisms. A class of membrane proteins called the major facilitator superfamily contains a large number of proteins that often elevate drug resistance when overproduced but do not impact this phenotype when the gene is removed. We wondered if this absence of a phenotype for a disruption allele might be due to the redundancy of this group of membrane proteins. We describe the production of an easy-to-use recyclable marker cassette that will allow construction of strains lacking multiple members of the MFS family of transporter proteins. ABSTRACT Candida glabrata is the second most common species causing candidiasis. C. glabrata can also readily acquire resistance to azole drugs, complicating its treatment. Here we add to the collection of disruption markers to aid in genetic analysis of this yeast. This new construct is marked with a nourseothricin resistance cassette that produces an estrogen-activated form of Cre recombinase in a methionine-regulated manner. This allows eviction and reuse of this cassette in a facile manner. Using this new disruption marker, we have constructed a series of strains lacking different members of the major facilitator superfamily (MFS) of membrane transporter proteins. The presence of 15 MFS proteins that may contribute to drug resistance in C. glabrata placed a premium on development of a marker that could easily be reused to construct multiple gene-disrupted strains. Employing this recyclable marker, we found that loss of the MFS transporter-encoding gene FLR1 caused a dramatic increase in diamide resistance (as seen before), and deletion of two other MFS-encoding genes did not influence this phenotype. Interestingly, loss of FLR1 led to an increase in levels of oxidized glutathione, suggesting a possible molecular explanation for this enhanced oxidant sensitivity. We also found that while overproduction of the transcription factor Yap1 could suppress the fluconazole sensitivity caused by loss of the important ATP-binding cassette transporter protein Cdr1, this required the presence of FLR1. IMPORTANCE Export of drugs is a problem for chemotherapy of infectious organisms. A class of membrane proteins called the major facilitator superfamily contains a large number of proteins that often elevate drug resistance when overproduced but do not impact this phenotype when the gene is removed. We wondered if this absence of a phenotype for a disruption allele might be due to the redundancy of this group of membrane proteins. We describe the production of an easy-to-use recyclable marker cassette that will allow construction of strains lacking multiple members of the MFS family of transporter proteins.
Chinese Word Segmentation with Minimal Linguistic Knowledge: An Improved Conditional Random Fields Coupled with Character Clustering and Automatically Discovered Template Matching

This paper addresses three major problems of closed task Chinese word segmentation (CWS): word overlap, tagging sentences interspersed with non-Chinese words, and long named entity (NE) identification. For the first, we use additional bigram features to approximate trigram and tetragram features. For the second, we first apply K-means clustering to identify non-Chinese characters. Then, we employ a two-tagger architecture: one for Chinese text and the other for non-Chinese text. Finally, we post-process our CWS output using automatically generated templates. Our results show that additional bigrams can effectively identify more unknown words. Secondly, using our two-tagger method, segmentation performance on sentences containing non-Chinese words is significantly improved when non-Chinese characters are sparse in the training corpus. Lastly, identification of long NEs and long words is also enhanced by template-based post-processing. Using corpora in closed task of SIGHAN CWS, our best system achieves F-scores of 0.956, 0.947, and 0.965 on the AS, HK, and MSR corpora respectively, compared to the best context scores of 0.952, 0.943, and 0.964 in SIGHAN Bakeoff 2005. In AS, this performance is comparable to the best result (F = 0.956) in the open task
Adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and risk of major chronic disease in women.

BACKGROUND Little is known about the overall health effects of adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The healthy eating index (HEI), developed at the US Department of Agriculture, measures how well Americans' diets conform to these guidelines. OBJECTIVE We tested whether the HEI (scores range from 0 to 100; 100 is best) calculated from food-frequency questionnaires (HEI-f) would predict risk of major chronic disease in women. DESIGN A total of 67272 US female nurses who were free of major disease completed detailed questionnaires on diet and chronic disease risk factors in 1984 and repeatedly over 12 y. Major chronic disease was defined as fatal or nonfatal cardiovascular disease (myocardial infarction or stroke, n = 1365), fatal or nonfatal cancer (n = 5216), or other nontraumatic deaths (n = 496), whichever came first. We also examined cardiovascular disease and cancer as separate outcomes. RESULTS After adjustment for smoking and other risk factors, the HEI-f score was not associated with risk of overall major chronic disease in women [relative risk (RR) = 0.97; 95% CI: 0.89, 1.06 comparing the highest with the lowest quintile of HEI-f score]. Being in the highest HEI-f quintile was associated with a 14% reduction in cardiovascular disease risk (RR = 0.86; 95% CI: 0.72, 1. 03) and was not associated with lower cancer risk (RR = 1.02; 95% CI: 0.93, 1.12). CONCLUSION These data suggest that adherence to the 1995 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, as measured by the HEI-f, will have limited benefit in preventing major chronic disease in women.
Validity and usefulness of the Line Drill test for adolescent basketball players: a Bayesian multilevel analysis

ABSTRACT The study examined the validity of the Line Drill test (LD) in male adolescent basketball players (10–15 years). Sensitiveness of the LD to changes in performance across a training and competition season (4 months) was also considered. Age, maturation, body size and LD were measured (n = 57). Sensitiveness of the LD was examined pre- and post-competitive season in a sub-sample (n = 44). The time at each of the four shuttle sprints of the LD (i.e. four stages) was modelled with Bayesian multilevel models. We observed very large correlation of performance at stage 4 (full LD protocol) with stage 3, but lower correlations with the early LD stages. Players’ performance by somatic maturity differed substantially only when considering full LD protocol performance. Substantial improvements in all stages of the protocol were observed across the 4-month competitive season. The LD protocol should be shortened by the last full court shuttle sprint, remaining sensitive to training exposure, and independent of maturity status and body size.
Comment on “Enhanced water permeability and tunable ion selectivity in subnanometer carbon nanotube porins”

Tunuguntla et al. (Reports, 25 August 2017, p. 792) report that permeation of single-file water occurs faster through carbon nanotubes than through aquaporins. We show that this conclusion violates fundamental thermodynamic laws: Because of its much lower activation energy, aquaporin-mediated water transport must be orders of magnitude faster. Leakage at the nanotube-membrane interface may explain the discrepancy.
Multivariate Optimization of Fiber Reinforced Laminate Using Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

Fiber reinforced laminate design is a challenging problem in the field of composite laminates. It provides us a systematic way to design the laminates of desired properties while conveniently incorporating the thick-ness and mass constraints. In this paper, we pursue the multivariate graphite fiber reinforced laminate design problem using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm. Classical lamination theory is used to determine mid-plane strains, curvatures and stresses in individual lamina under applied biaxial loading conditions. The fiber orientations, lamina thickness, number of layers and fiber volume fractions of lamina are considered as the optimization variables. Failure of the lamina is analyzed by Tsai–Wu failure criterion. Objective of the study is to maximize the load carry capacity of the composite laminate structure and minimize the areal mass density under multivariate/multiobjective optimization.
Extraction of Address Data from Unstructured Text using Free Knowledge Resources

The Web is populated with many Web sites containing unstructured textual information. These Web sites are a source of knowledge for various interests. As semantic annotations are only rarely used on Web sites, an automated harvesting of the knowledge without additional effort is not possible. Thus, elaborated approaches for information extraction are required. In our work we face the challenge of identifying business address data on Web sites since we see the need for this data in various applications. In order to accomplish our aim, we have developed a hybrid approach combining patterns and gazetteers obtained from freely available knowledge resources such as OpenStreetMap. Experimental evaluation on a corpus of heterogeneous Web sites shows a high recall and precision. The approach can be adapted for identification of addresses considering the different formats in various countries.
Central mechanisms for the hypertensive effects of preproadrenomedullin-derived peptides in conscious rats.

Peptides derived from postranslational processing of preproadrenomedullin exert potent hypotensive effects in the periphery. One of those peptides, adrenomedullin (AM) also has been demonstrated to act centrally in conscious rats to inhibit water drinking and salt appetite and, in anesthetized rats, surprisingly to increase blood pressure. We examined the effects of AM and the other postranslational product, proadrenomedullin NH2-terminal 20 peptide (PAMP), on blood pressure in conscious rats. Both AM and PAMP elicited dose-related increases in mean arterial pressure after cerebroventricular administration. The hypertensive effects of both AM and PAMP and of ANG II were blocked by peripheral administration of phentolamine, indicating actions of the peptides in brain to stimulate sympathetic nervous system function. Blockade of central ANG II receptors with saralasin prevented the hypertensive effects of both ANG II and PAMP, suggesting recruitment of endogenous angiotensinergic systems by central PAMP. The structural homolog of AM, calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP), at similar doses did not significantly affect blood pressure. Furthermore, the hypertensive effects of ANG II, AM, and PAMP were not abrogated by prior administration of the CGRP antagonist. We hypothesize that AM and PAMP exert cardioprotective effects in brain, which may counterbalance the volume-unloading actions of the peptides in the periphery.
Photoelastic study of wound closure stresses in barbed versus traditional smooth-surface sutures

Sutures are used widely in the medical community for wound closure. Traditional sutures have a smooth surface and secure a wound by means of a knot tied at either end, which tensions the suture and holds the wound closed. However, biomechanical testing of traditional sutures has demonstrated that the knot is the most common site of failure due to a decrease in the tensile strength. In an effort to minimize knot failure of monofilament sutures, barbed sutures have been developed that obviate the need for knots during wound closure. In this study, the photoelastic coating method was employed to perform a comparative measurement of the stresses induced in the wound region for barbed versus monofilament sutures under wound flexure. Because of the difficulty in using actual sutured wounds, a wound analog model was employed made of a special foam material commonly used by surgeons for practicing wound closure skills. An examination of the changes that occurred in the incision line fringe numbers during flexure of the wound analog model was then used as an in vitro measurement of the effectiveness of barbed versus monofilament sutures in retaining simulated wound closure stress magnitude and distribution.
Systemic resistance to the antilipolytic effect of insulin in black and white women with visceral obesity.

This study was designed to determine the role of visceral adipose tissue (VAT) accumulation in systemic fat metabolism and to compare this in black and white women who differ in their manifestations of upper body obesity. Systemic glycerol and free fatty acid (FFA) turnover rates (rates of appearance, Ra) were measured in the basal state and during a pancreatic euglycemic clamp in nondiabetic, premenopausal, obese black and white women with a wide range of VAT accumulation. The slopes of the regression equations predicting basal and insulin-suppressed RaGlycerol and RaFFA from VAT area, age, and fat mass or fat-free mass did not significantly differ between black and white women. VAT area was the best predictor of the %-suppressed RaGlycerol and RaFFA during the pancreatic clamp (partial r = 0.76, P < 0.0001 and partial r = 0.60, P < 0.05, respectively). Basal RaGlycerol, but not RaFFA, was lower in black than in white women ( P < 0.05). During the clamp, black women showed greater insulin suppression of RaGlycerol than of RaFFA ( P < 0.0001) and greater insulin suppression of RaGlycerol ( P < 0.05) but similar suppression of RaFFA compared with white women. These differences were independent of age, fat mass, or fat-free mass and were partly explained by a lower VAT in black women. Thus, in both races, VAT accumulation was associated with systemic resistance to the antilipolytic effect of insulin and, in obese black women, systemic lipolysis measured as glycerol turnover rate was more responsive to insulin suppression than were systemic FFA turnover rates.
Mixing by microorganisms in stratified fluids

We examine the vertical mixing induced by the swimming of microorganisms at low Reynolds and Peclet numbers in a stably stratified ocean, and show that the global contribution of oceanic microswimmers to vertical mixing is negligible. We propose two approaches to estimating the mixing efficiency, η, or the ratio of the rate of potential energy creation to the total rate-of-working on the ocean by microswimmers. The first is based on scaling arguments and estimates η in terms of the ratio between the typical organism size, a, and an intrinsic length scale for the stratified flow, � = νκ/N 2 1/4 , where ν is the kinematic viscosity, κ the diffusivity, and N the buoyancy frequency. In particular, for small organisms in the relevant oceanic limit, a/� � 1, we predict the scaling η ∼ (a/�) 3 . The second estimate of η is formed by solving the full coupled flow-stratification problem by modeling the swimmer as a regularized force dipole, and computing the efficiency numerically. Our computational results, which are examined for all ratios a/� , validate the scaling arguments in the limit a/� � 1 and further predict η ≈ 1.2 (a/� ) 3 for vertical swimming and η ≈ 0.15 (a/� ) 3 for horizontal swimming. These results, relevant for any stratified fluid rich in biological activity, imply that the mixing efficiency of swimming microorganisms in the ocean is at very most 8% and is likely smaller by at least two orders of magnitude.