Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Electrochemical Microbubble-Based MEMS Pressure Sensor

A novel pressure transducer concept is introduced in which external pressure variations induce changes in the volume of a trapped microbubble (μB) in an electrolyte solution. These volumetric changes are monitored by electrochemical impedance-based measurements and may be used for pressure tracking applications. Microbubbles are nucleated on-demand by electrolysis within a confinement chamber with high precision (measured size RSD ~1%). This pressure transducer concept was developed specifically for operation in liquid environments and features biocompatible construction, small footprint (<;0.1 mm2), and low power consumption (<;1 nW). This combination of features is ideal for in vivo pressure monitoring applications.
Multiple symbol differentially detected multilevel codes for the Rayleigh-fading channel

Conventional differential detection is known to perform poorly on the fast-fading Rayleigh-fading channel due to the rapid variation of the channel state. The technique of multiple symbol differential detection (MSDD) improves the error performance by detecting over a sequence of symbols and exploiting the inherent correlation of the fading process. To further reduce the error rate, we need to introduce some form of coding. Successful coding for the Rayleigh-fading channel requires interleaving to decorrelate the channel-a conflicting requirement to MSDD. We propose a solution consisting of interleaving blocks of L M-ary phase-shift keying (MPSK) symbols that are multiple symbol differentially detected. The blocks are treated as elements of an M/sup L/ symbol alphabet over which a multilevel code based on geometrically uniform partitions is defined.
A Hexagonal Cell Automaton Model to Imitate Physarum Polycephalum Competitive Behaviour

Slime mould (Physarum) may not have brains, but they are capable of solving many significant and challenging problems. Existing models for studying the intelligent behaviour of Physarum have overlooked its foraging behaviour under competitive settings. In this research, we propose a new model based on Cellular Automata (CA) and Reaction Diffusion (RD) system, where multiple Physarum interact with each other and with their environment. The novelty of our model is that the Physarum has six neighbours at equidistant (hexagonal CA), furthermore, we have extended the model to 3D and multi-dimensional CA grid. The growth of Physarum is determined by the balance between attraction force towards food resources (determined by mass and quality) and repulsion forces between competing Physarum according to their power (mass) and hunger motivation. To validate this model, numerical experiments were conducted. Physarum with more mass succeeded in engulfing a larger number of food resources with high quality in shorter time (number of iteration). It also occupied larger area of the grid (territory) and excluded its competitors. We also conducted empirical analysis to compare the time complexity between the hexagonal and Moore neighbourhood, and it showed that hexagonal neighbourhood is more efficient than Moore in terms of computational cost. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present Physarum in competition mathematical model and the algorithms inspired from such a model has demonstrated its promising performance in solving several real world problems such as mobile wireless sensor networks, and discrete multi objective optimization problems.
HEMATOPOIESIS AND STEM CELLS Distinct pathways regulated by menin and by MLL 1 in hematopoietic stem cells and developing B cells

Translocations disrupting theMixed Lineage Leukemia (MLL1) gene occur frequently in infant and secondary acute leukemia as well as ;10% of de novo acute myelogenous leukemia. Because MLL1 translocations confer very poor prognosis and patients are often young, new strategies that selectively target the actions of oncogenic MLL1 fusion proteins (MLL1-FPs) have been intensively investigated. The most common result ofMLL1 translocation is the fusion of the MLL1 N terminus in-frame to a partner protein to produce MLL1FPs. The native MLL1 protein is a histone methyltransferase at the core of a chromatin-modifyingcomplex.This complex iswidelydistributed in most cell types and functions in hematopoietic, neural, and vascular development and homeostasis. Purification of native MLL1 complexes revealed thatmenin, a tumor suppressor protein,was a component of this and the related MLL2 chromatin-modifying complex. Several lines of evidence demonstrate that MLL1-FPs require menin interaction for leukemogenesis. First, mutations in the menin interaction motif of MLL1-ENL abolish its transforming activity in hematopoietic cells. Second,menin is required forMLL1-FPs to bind to LEDGF, a PWWP domain–containing protein that participates in targeting of the MLL complex to chromatin. Finally,Men1-deficient bone marrow (BM) progenitors cannot sustain leukemogenesis driven specifically by MLL1-FPs. These data prompted the development of menin-MLL1–disrupting peptides and small molecules as potential targeted therapeutic agents; however, it is unclear whether the normal functions of MLL1 similarly depend on menin interaction, because this domain is also present in the native protein. Menin is a predominantly nuclear protein encoded by theMultiple Endocrine Neoplasia type I (MEN1) gene, responsible for a familial syndrome in which a MEN1 mutation is accompanied by loss of the wild-type MEN1 allele in neuroendocrine tumors. Heterozygous Men1mice also exhibit a similar spectrum of neuroendocrine tumors with loss of the wild-type allele as in the human syndrome. Intriguingly, menin is unique in the genome, although the recently solved structure shows the presence of tetratricopeptide repeat motifs and a transglutaminase-like motif. The tumor-suppressive role of menin is cell type–specific; disruption of Men1 in the liver or hematopoietic system does not result in tumors. In addition to participation in MLL1/MLL2 complexes, menin interacts with and influences the activity of SMAD proteins, Runx2, JunD, and nuclear factor kB. Furthermore, Men1-deficient cells lack an S-phase checkpoint, possibly related to interaction with CHES1, a forkheadrelated protein. Thus, menin likely plays multiple roles even within a particular cell type. Men1 and Mll1 perform similar functions in several biological settings. Both are essential during embryo development, and loss of either gene in embryonic stem cells impairs hematopoietic
The Effects of Frequent Nonoxynol‐9 Use on the Vaginal and Cervical Mucosa

The authors conducted a single-dose phase I local toxicity study of the effects of frequent insertion of nonoxynol-9 (N-9) on the lower genital tract to determine whether a phase II dose-ranging study is warranted. Fourteen women used 150 mg of N-9 cumulatively four times a day for 14 days. Epithelial disruption of the cervix and vagina, the main outcome of interest, occurred in 43% (95% CI, 18-71%) of women on this high-frequency use schedule. None of the women experienced symptoms that prompted them to discontinue the study. This preliminary study indicates that a phase II study to examine the local toxicity of different use schedules is needed to provide further safety information about the use of N-9.
Design, Synthesis and Cytotoxicity Evaluation of Structural Analogues of Imatinib

Several novel imatinib structure analogues were synthesized. Antiproliferative activity testing on various leukemic cell lines showed 1-2 fold less activity against K562 cells compared to imatinib. Autodock Vina’s docking studies predicted no differences in binding affinity of the titled compounds while positive relationship between activity and calculated lipophilicity was found. Further imatinib structure optimization pathways were evaluated.
Biochemical Studies on the Thermal Dimorphism of Paracoccidioides brasiliensis

The biochemical and morphological changes of the yeastlike (Y) form to the mycelial (M) form of Paracoccidioides brasiliensis were examined. The main polysaccharide of hexoses of the Y-form cell wall was α-glucan, whereas the polysaccharides of the M-form cell wall were β-glucan and galactomannan. The α-glucan of the Y form contained mainly α-(1 → 3)-glycosidic linkage. The β-glucan of the M form contained mainly β-(1 → 3)-glycosidic linkage with a few branches at C-6 position. The incorporation of 14C-glucose into the cell wall glucans showed that synthesis of α-glucan decreased rapidly after the temperature of the culture was changed from 37 to 20 C. The synthesis of β-glucan was augmented at an early stage of the morphological change. The M-form cell wall contained 12 times more disulfide linkage than the Y form. The cell-free extracts of the whole cell of the Y form had five times more protein disulfide reductase activity than the M form, whereas extracts of the M form contained five to eight times more β-glucanase activity than the Y form. From these results, a hypothesis for the production of the M form from the Y form is proposed.
Brazilian Health-related Content Web Search Portal - Presentation on a Method for its Development and Preliminary Results

The increase in the amount of available information on the world wide web is inexorable, which, on one hand, provides the web user with more information. On the other hand, however, web searches become increasingly more difficult to handle due to the increasing number of retrieved documents. The present study is a proposal of development for a Brazilian search portal specific for health-related content. The aim of such development is to provide web users, mainly the non-specialist ones, with the largest number possible of web pages relevant to their search terms and inferred search intentions. The proposed search portal integrates web mining-based filters and a decision-making support tool. The preliminary study results show that among the algorithms tested to incorporate a filter module specific for health-related content artificial neural networks, logistic regression and nearest neighbor clustering (NNC) -, the application of NNC resulted in the automated web health-related content classifier with the best performance for sensitivity and specificity 0.92 and 1.00 respectively.
TD-SCDMA Evolution

This article focuses on the evolutional strategies (which can be divided into four phases) from the current commercial time division-synchronous code division multiple access (TD-SCDMA) to the future International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT)Advanced systems. The first evolutional phase is to develop an N-frequency technology to improve capacity and ease network planning of the current TD-SCDMA system. Singleand multicarrier high-speed packet access (HSPA) is specified in the second phase for providing high-rate packet services. Long-term evolution (LTE) technology is introduced in the third phase to provide a similar performance of mobile worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX). Finally, the fourth phase is to implement time division duplex (TDD)-based IMTAdvanced system, which is one of the alternative standards beyond third-generation (3G) systems. The advanced technologies to enhance spectral efficiency are the critical issues emphasized in all the four phases. The challenges and open issues in the different evolutional phases are identified in this article as well.
Empirical Methods for Exploiting Parallel Texts

Parallel translations of written texts have long been useful tools for human students of language, and have begun to serve as an intriguing source of data for corpus-based approaches to natural language processing. A source text and its translation can be viewed as a coarse map between the two languages, and an industrious student or clever computer program may wish to refine that mapping so that it shows which sentences, phrases, and words are translations of one another. Humans are very adept at finding such relations in parallel text. This is true even when one or both of the languages is unfamiliar, as can be seen in a simple but convincing exercise in (Knight, 1997). While there was considerable early success in automatically identifying sentences in parallel text that are translations of each other (e.g., (Brown, Lai, and Mercer, 1991), (Gale and Church, 1993)), a variety of challenging problems has emerged since that time. Empirical Methods for Exploiting Parallel Texts is a revision of the author’s 1998 Ph.D. dissertation (University of Pennsylvania), and succeeds in capturing the range of problems inherent in parallel text. It presents a variety of techniques for finding translation equivalents and demonstrates that once these are available they can be used to align text segments, detect omissions in translations, identify non-compositional compounds, and discriminate among word senses.
Modeling of substrate contacts in TSV-based 3D ICs

This paper proposes closed-form expressions of parasitic parameters in a silicon substrate that consider substrate contacts. In general bulk CMOS technologies, the standard cells with bulk (substrate and well) contacts or tap cells for bulk contacts are used in physical layout designs. As tap cell placement methods, there are dense random placements and sparse regular placements in cell rows vertically. We call the former the fine-grained substrate contacts and the latter the coarse-grained ones. First, their structures are modeled for simplification, and then the equivalent circuit model is presented. Next, closed-form expressions of parasitic parameters for TSV-to-TSVs and TSV-to-contacts are proposed. Finally, validity of the proposed method is discussed. The proposed expressions agree with 3D electromagnetic field solvers with reasonable accuracy. When an enormous amount of TSVs are placed regularly, designers can extract parasitic parameters quickly.
The Importance of Teaching Reading Skills of English Language Using Variety of Techniques in Jordanian Curriculum

The study aims at shedding light on the application and impacts of the importance of teaching reading skills in English language using variety of techniques in Jordanian curriculum. These techniques of reading skills simplify the reading English text and help students in doing tasks that are presented by English teachers in Jordanian public schools, who teach Action Pack pupil’s book. In order to achieve the objectives of this study, the researcher followed the analytical descriptive method in terms of applying the study tool, data collection and analysis. The study sample consisted of a group of seventh grade students from the Al-Aghware Directorate of Education, at two schools for girls of (128) students. The study found that there is an effect of the strategy of reading skill in simplifying reading texts and article, as the researcher recommended the need to work on these techniques to be used within the classroom language.
Significance of Retinoblastoma Protein in Survival and Differentiation of Cerebellar Neurons

During development of the nervous system an excess number of neural progenitor cells are generated and approximately half of these cells are eliminated by programmed cell death (PCD) or apoptosis (Farinelli and Greene, 1996; Jacobson et al., 1997; Oppenheim, 1991; Raff, 1992; Raff et al., 1993). The apoptosis and elimination of the excess number of precursor cells enable the proper synaptic integration of the surviving cells and development of the central nervous system (CNS). Survival of the neurons in the CNS requires trophic support and electrical activity and upon withdrawal or depletion of these factors the neurons undergo apoptosis (Barde et al., 1987; Biffo et al., 1994; D'Mello et al., 1997; D'Mello et al., 1993; D'Mello et al., 2000; Galli et al., 1995; Levi-Montalcini, 1987; Miller and Johnson, 1996). Among the growth factors that support neuronal survival and differentiation are neurotrophic growth factor (NGF), brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), neurotrophin 3 and 4 (NT3 and NT4), insulin and insulin like growth factors (IGF), glial derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF), basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF), and ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) (Ardelt et al., 1994; Barde, 1994; de Pablo et al., 1990a; de Pablo et al., 1990b; Ferrari et al., 1989; Ferrer et al., 1998; Hynes et al., 1994; Kalcheim et al., 1987; Knusel et al., 1990; Levi-Montalcini, 1987; Lindholm et al., 1993; Magal et al., 1993; Rabacchi et al., 1999; Rakowicz et al., 2002; Serrano et al., 1990; Tuttle et al., 1994; Zhang et al., 1997).
Fluctuation conductivity in disordered superconducting films

We study the effect of superconducting fluctuations on the longitudinal and the transverse (Hall) conductivity in homogeneously disordered films. Our calculation is based on the Usadel equation in the real-time formulation. We adjust this approach to derive analytic expressions for the fluctuation corrections in the entire metallic part of the temperature-magnetic field phase diagram, including the effects of both classical and quantum fluctuations. This method allows us to obtain fluctuation corrections in a compact and effective way, establishing a direct connection between phenomenological and microscopic calculations.
Secondary prevention of myocardial infarction: a survey in primary care

Objective To collect information on the major risk factors and secondary prevention among patients with myocardial infarction in Italy. Methods Data were obtained from the database of the Italian College of General Practitioners; 3588 patients (mean age 68.7 ± 11.3 years; 2698 men, 888 women; two unrecorded gender), with an average time from event of 6 ± 5.7 years, were identified. Results Among the major risk factors, data entry ranged from 50.3% for physical activity to 74.9% for blood pressure. Inadequate blood pressure control was present in 49.2% and elevated plasma cholesterol levels (> 5.2 mmol/l) in 57.3%; among the latter group, 65% were on lipid-lowering therapy. Only 47.2% of the treated patients achieved a total cholesterol level of < 5.2 mmol/l. Antiplatelet or anticoagulant drugs, β-blockers, and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors were prescribed to 43%, 10.3%, and 57.9% of patients, respectively. Conclusions The preventive attitude of Italian general practitioners is similar to that reported in other European countries with two noticeable exceptions: under-prescription of β-blockers and of antiplatelet drugs. Clearly, secondary prevention requires major improvement.
Medicago truncatula Ferroportin2 mediates iron import into nodule symbiosomes

Iron is an essential cofactor for symbiotic nitrogen fixation. It is required by many of the enzymes facilitating the conversion of N2 into NH4+ by endosymbiotic bacteria living within root nodule cells, including signal transduction proteins, O2 homeostasis systems, and nitrogenase itself. Consequently, host plants have developed a transport network to deliver essential iron to nitrogen-fixing nodule cells. Model legume Medicago truncatula Ferroportin2 (MtFPN2) is a nodule-specific gene that encodes an iron-efflux protein. MtFPN2 is located in intracellular membranes in the nodule vasculature, and in the symbiosome membranes that contain the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the differentiation and early-fixation zones of the nodules. Loss-of-function of MtFPN2 leads to altered iron distribution and speciation in nodules, which causes a reduction in nitrogenase activity and in biomass production. Using promoters with different tissular activity to drive MtFPN2 expression in MtFPN2 mutants, we determined that MtFPN2-facilitated iron delivery across symbiosomes is essential for symbiotic nitrogen fixation, while its presence in the vasculature does not seem to play a major role in in the conditions tested.
Effectiveness of PBL curricula

Ninety-nine percent of delegates had e-mail addresses, so it was possible to accept abstracts as e-mail attachments only. Fonts and font sizes were stipulated, as was the length. The ability to electronically alter non-conforming abstracts was a bonus, as was correspondence about changes. In all, 495 abstracts were received and forwarded to peer reviewers in eight different academic institutions within South Africa.
A multiple valued logic approach for the synthesis of garbled circuits

Secure Multi-party Computation (SMC) protocols enable two or more parties to compute collaboratively generic functions while keeping secret their inputs, sharing only the final result. To achieve this goal, a technique relying on the design of Garbled Circuits (GC) has been firstly proposed by Yao. Garbled circuits are Boolean circuits that can be evaluated using a distributed protocol for computing the result for each gate, till computing the output values. To improve the efficiency of this technique and exploit SMC protocols in practical applications, such as computation outsourcing in untrusted environments, a number of optimizations have been introduced. In this paper we analyze the deployment of Multiple Valued Logic techniques for the design of GC, discussing their impact on the overall computation and communication costs.
Understanding Member Characteristics and Cooperative Price Effects: The Case of the Argentinean Dairy Sector

Since the 1990s, Argentinean dairy&#8208;processing cooperatives have lost considerable amounts of members and market share. We analyse their current role by investigating the characteristics of farmers who continue delivering to them and price differentials between cooperatives and investor&#8208;oriented firms (IOFs). A probit regression model applied to 917 farmers suggests that cooperative farmers are more disadvantaged than farmers delivering to IOFs in terms of education, farm size and productive technology. Moreover, t&#8208;tests applied to data representing 70 per cent of national volume indicate that farmers delivering to cooperatives are between 11 per cent and 29 per cent smaller than those delivering to IOFs, depending on province. A hierarchical multilevel regression model applied to 9,720 transactions among farmers and processors shows that, after controlling for quantity and quality, cooperatives pay lower (3.5%) but more stable prices than IOFs. In a context of rapid structural change, we observe a market in which larger farmers deliver to IOFs and smaller farmers deliver to cooperatives and conclude that, at the expense of paying lower prices, cooperatives may act as buyers of last resort for otherwise disadvantaged farmers.
Psychosomatic symptoms in human service work

This study reports on subjective health of personnel in human services and other occupations. A mail questionnaire was sent to 8296 employees in the Social Insurance Organization (SIO) and the Individual and Family Care (IFC) in social welfare agencies. The response rate was 69.1% or 5730 persons. Perceived health was measured by a standard form widely used in occupational health services, FHV004D, here split into four principal components, indicating psycho-vegetative, musculo-sceletal, immunological, and gastro-intestinal health. In relation to reference data on other human service personnel (nurses, teachers) and white collar workers (bank and insurance personnel), the studied groups scored much higher on psycho-vegetative symptoms (OR:s about 3), higher on musculo-sceletal symptoms (OR:s about 1.7), but had equal scores on the other symptom types. It is concluded that self-reported psychove-getative and musculosceletal health is especially problematic in SIO and IFC, indicating stress in human service work. It is hypothesized that an adversary relation to clients can be an aggravating factor in that context.