Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Soft Total Artificial Heart—First Concept Evaluation on a Hybrid Mock Circulation

The technology of 3D-printing has allowed the production of entirely soft pumps with complex chamber geometries. We used this technique to develop a completely soft pneumatically driven total artificial heart from silicone elastomers and evaluated its performance on a hybrid mock circulation. The goal of this study is to present an innovative concept of a soft total artificial heart (sTAH). Using the form of a human heart, we designed a sTAH, which consists of only two ventricles and produced it using a 3D-printing, lost-wax casting technique. The diastolic properties of the sTAH were defined and the performance of the sTAH was evaluated on a hybrid mock circulation under various physiological conditions. The sTAH achieved a blood flow of 2.2 L/min against a systemic vascular resistance of 1.11 mm Hg s/mL (afterload), when operated at 80 bpm. At the same time, the mean pulmonary venous pressure (preload) was fixed at 10 mm Hg. Furthermore, an aortic pulse pressure of 35 mm Hg was measured, with a mean aortic pressure of 48 mm Hg. The sTAH generated physiologically shaped signals of blood flow and pressures by mimicking the movement of a real heart. The preliminary results of this study show a promising potential of the soft pumps in heart replacements. Further work, focused on increasing blood flow and in turn aortic pressure is required.
Accelerated statistical simulation via on-demand Hermite spline interpolations

We propose an efficient Hermite spline-based SPICE simulation methodology for accurate statistical yield analysis. Unlike conventional methods, the spline-based transistor tables are built on-demand specific to the transient simulation requirements of the statistical experiments. Compared with traditional MOSFET table models, on-demand spline table models use ∼500X less memory. This makes Hermite spline-based table models practical for use in simulations for process variation modeling. Furthermore, we propose an efficient gate voltage offset approach to model transistor threshold voltage variation. In this scenario, evaluations of the transistor model rely on a single reference table and require one set of spline function evaluations per VT sample point as opposed to two or more sets for VT interpolation. This method is comprehensive and the results are in excellent agreement with traditional BSIM-based simulations. Around 4X improvement in speed, which includes the table generation cost, could be further improved by employing other fast-SPICE techniques or parallelism. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such a methodology has been coupled with importance sampling techniques to study the yield of memory designs.
Characterizing leader sequences of CRISPR loci

MOTIVATION The CRISPR-Cas system is an adaptive immune system in many archaea and bacteria, which provides resistance against invading genetic elements. The first phase of CRISPR-Cas immunity is called adaptation, in which small DNA fragments are excised from genetic elements and are inserted into a CRISPR array generally adjacent to its so called leader sequence at one end of the array. It has been shown that transcription initiation and adaptation signals of the CRISPR array are located within the leader. However, apart from promoters, there is very little knowledge of sequence or structural motifs or their possible functions. Leader properties have mainly been characterized through transcriptional initiation data from single organisms but large-scale characterization of leaders has remained challenging due to their low level of sequence conservation. RESULTS We developed a method to successfully detect leader sequences by focusing on the consensus repeat of the adjacent CRISPR array and weak upstream conservation signals. We applied our tool to the analysis of a comprehensive genomic database and identified several characteristic properties of leader sequences specific to archaea and bacteria, ranging from distinctive sizes to preferential indel localization. CRISPRleader provides a full annotation of the CRISPR array, its strand orientation as well as conserved core leader boundaries that can be uploaded to any genome browser. In addition, it outputs reader-friendly HTML pages for conserved leader clusters from our database. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION CRISPRleader and multiple sequence alignments for all 195 leader clusters are available at http://www.bioinf. uni-freiburg.de/Software/CRISPRleader/ CONTACT costa@informatik.uni-freiburg.de or backofen@informatik.uni-freiburg.de SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Trends in Blood Pressure Among Adults With Hypertension: United States, 2003 to 2012

The aim of this study is to describe trends in the awareness, treatment, and control of hypertension; mean blood pressure; and the classification of blood pressure among US adults 2003 to 2012. Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2003 to 2012, a total of 9255 adult participants aged ≥18 years were identified as having hypertension, defined as measured blood pressure ≥140/90 mm Hg or taking prescription medication for hypertension. Awareness and treatment among hypertensive adults were ascertained via an interviewer administered questionnaire. Controlled hypertension among hypertensive adults was defined as systolic blood pressure <140 mm Hg and diastolic blood pressure <90 mm Hg. Blood pressure was categorized as optimal blood pressure, prehypertension, and stage I and stage II hypertension. Between 2003 and 2012, the percentage of adults with controlled hypertension increased (P-trend <0.01). Hypertensive adults with optimal blood pressure and with prehypertension increased from 13% to 19% and 27% to 33%, respectively (P-trend <0.01 for both groups). Among hypertensive adults who were taking antihypertensive medication, uncontrolled hypertension decreased from 38% to 30% (P-trend <0.01). Similarly, a decrease in mean systolic blood pressure was observed (P-trend <0.01); however, mean diastolic blood pressure remained unchanged. The trend in the control of blood pressure has improved among hypertensive adults resulting in a higher percentage with blood pressure at the optimal or prehypertension level and a lower percentage in stage I and stage II hypertension. Overall, mean systolic blood pressure decreased as did the prevalence of uncontrolled hypertension among the treated hypertensive population.
Modulation of Host Autophagy during Bacterial Infection: Sabotaging Host Munitions for Pathogen Nutrition

Cellular homeostasis requires the balanced regulation of anabolic and catabolic processes. While anabolic metabolism consumes energy to build up cellular components, catabolic processes break down organic matters in order to provide energy for the cell and its anabolic processes. Autophagy is a highly conserved and regulated catabolic process by which the eukaryotic cell degrades unnecessary, undesirable, or dysfunctional cellular components, including organelles (1–3). Autophagy is induced by a variety of extra-and intracellular stress stimuli, such as nutrient starvation, oxidative stress, or accumulation of damaged organelles or toxic protein aggregates. Initiation of autophagy first leads to the formation of cup-shaped structures known as phagophores that engulf the undesirable or damaged cellular components. Subsequent elongation of phagophores form double-membrane vesicles called autophagosomes, which deliver their cargo to lysosomes where the content is degraded and recycled (1–3). Autophagy plays a central role in quality control of organelles and proteins, and additionally is a key mechanism to maintain cellular energy levels and nutrient homeostasis during starvation, promoting the recycling and salvage of cellular nutrients. Furthermore, the cellular autophagic machinery is also used to remove invading intracellular pathogens, a process called xenophagy (1, 2). In this case, phagophores engulf invading microbes forming autophagosomes and steering them toward lysosomal degradation. Thus, xenophagy is an innate immune mechanism against bacterial infection that has been shown to be essential to restrict intracellular growth of many bacteria such as Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (4), Mycobacterium tuberculosis (5, 6), Listeria monocytogenes (7), or Group A Streptococcus (8).
Relational type-checking for MELL proof-structures. Part 1: Multiplicatives

Relational semantics for linear logic is a form of non-idempotent intersection type system, from which several informations on the execution of a proof-structure can be recovered. An element of the relational interpretation of a proof-structure R with conclusion $\Gamma$ acts thus as a type (refining $\Gamma$) having R as an inhabitant. We are interested in the following type-checking question: given a proof-structure R, a list of formulae $\Gamma$, and a point x in the relational interpretation of $\Gamma$, is x in the interpretation of R? This question is decidable. We present here an algorithm that decides it in time linear in the size of R, if R is a proof-structure in the multiplicative fragment of linear logic. This algorithm can be extended to larger fragments of multiplicative-exponential linear logic containing $\lambda$-calculus.
An Approximate Minimum Degree Ordering Algorithm

An approximate minimum degree (AMD) ordering algorithm for preordering a symmetric sparse matrix prior to numerical factorization is presented. We use techniques based on the quotient graph for matrix factorization that allow us to obtain computationally cheap bounds for the minimum degree. We show that these bounds are often equal to the actual degree. The resulting algorithm is typically much faster than previous minimum degree ordering algorithms and produces results that are comparable in quality with the best orderings from other minimum degree algorithms.
Attribute-based collaborative filtering using genetic algorithm and weighted C-means algorithm

Recommender system technology can assist customers of a company to choose an appropriate product or service after learning their preferences. But this technology suffers from some problems such as scalability and sparsity. Since users express their opinions implicitly based on some specific attributes of items, this paper proposes a collaborative filtering algorithm based on attributes of items to address these problems. Attributes weight vector for each user is considered as a chromosome in genetic algorithm. This algorithm optimises the weights according to historical rating. A weighted C-means algorithm also is introduced to cluster users based on the optimised attributes weight vector. Finally, recommendation is generated by a user based similarity in each cluster. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms current algorithms and can perform superiorly and alleviates problems such as sparsity and precision quality. The main contribution of this paper is addressing sparsity problem using attribute weighting and scalability problem using weighted C-means algorithm.
Draft Genome Sequence of Bacillus pumilus 7P, Isolated from the Soil of the Tatarstan Republic, Russia

ABSTRACT Here, we present a draft genome sequence of Bacillus pumilus strain 7P. This strain was isolated from soil as an extracellular RNase-producing microorganism. The RNase of B. pumilus 7P is considered to be a potential antiviral and therapeutic antitumor agent, and it might be appropriate for agriculture and academic synthesis of oligoribonucleotides.
Periodic Finite State Controllers for Efficient POMDP and DEC-POMDP Planning

Applications such as robot control and wireless communication require planning under uncertainty. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) plan policies for single agents under uncertainty and their decentralized versions (DEC-POMDPs) find a policy for multiple agents. The policy in infinite-horizon POMDP and DEC-POMDP problems has been represented as finite state controllers (FSCs). We introduce a novel class of periodic FSCs, composed of layers connected only to the previous and next layer. Our periodic FSC method finds a deterministic finite-horizon policy and converts it to an initial periodic infinite-horizon policy. This policy is optimized by a new infinite-horizon algorithm to yield deterministic periodic policies, and by a new expectation maximization algorithm to yield stochastic periodic policies. Our method yields better results than earlier planning methods and can compute larger solutions than with regular FSCs.
Feedback Stabilization of a Fluid-Structure Model

We study a system coupling the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in a 2D rectangular-type domain with a damped Euler-Bernoulli beam equation, where the beam is a part of the upper boundary of the domain occupied by the fluid. Due to the deformation of the beam, the fluid domain depends on time. We prove that this system is exponentially stabilizable, locally about the null solution, with any prescribed decay rate, by a feedback control corresponding to a force term in the beam equation. The feedback is applied on the whole structure, and it is determined, via a Riccati equation, by solving an infinite time horizon control problem for the linearized model. A crucial step in this analysis consists of showing that this linearized system can be rewritten thanks to an analytic semigroup of which the infinitesimal generator has a compact resolvent.
Locality of wh-movement and the individuation of events

I propose a novel characterisation of the counterexamples to the generalisation that wh-movement out of an adjunct is impossible. The thesis discusses three classes of exceptions, namely extraction from in order clauses (la), prepositional participial adjuncts (lb), and bare present participial adjuncts (lc). (1) a. What are you working so hard in order to achieve? / b. Who did John go home after talking to? f c. What did John drive Mary crazy whistling? r These contrast with cases where extraction is impossible (2). (2) a. * What did you get upset because Mary said? r b. * Who have you been really happy since talking to? / c. * What does John work whistling? / These two groups do not form natural syntactic classes, but are distinguishable in event-structural terms. The minimal constituent containing the head and foot of the chain in (1) describes a single event, on an appropriate definition of event, but does not in (2). Accordingly, I propose the following condition: (3) W/z-questions carry a presupposition that the minimal constituent containing the head and the foot of the chain describes a single event. Wz-movement is permitted only if the denotation of that minimal constituent can be construed accordingly. Chapter 2 of the thesis develops a formal and cognitively well-motivated model of the internal structure of events. Key to this model is the recursively defined notion of extended events, corresponding to plan formation. This recursion crucially allows (3) to capture long-distance A'-dependencies. Chapter 3 applies this model, assuming (3), to locality data, deriving the contrast be tween (1) and (2), as well as other data such as the absolute prohibition on extraction from tensed adjuncts (2a), and the distinction between bridge verbs and factive islands (4). (4) a. What did John think that Mary did? r b. * What did John regret that Mary did? t l.
Quantum Algorithms and Mathematical Formulations of Biomolecular Solutions of the Vertex Cover Problem in the Finite-Dimensional Hilbert Space

In this paper, it is shown that the proposed quantum algorithm for implementing Boolean circuits generated from the DNA-based algorithm solving the vertex-cover problem of any graph G with m edges and n vertices is the optimal quantum algorithm. Next, it is also demonstrated that mathematical solutions of the same biomolecular solutions are represented in terms of a unit vector in the finite-dimensional Hilbert space. Furthermore, for testing our theory, a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiment of three quantum bits to solve the simplest vertex-cover problem is completed.
T cell priming versus T cell tolerance induced by synthetic peptides

It is well known that synthetic peptides are able to both induce and tolerize T cells. We have examined the parameters leading either to priming or tolerance of CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) in vivo with a major histocompatibility complex class I (H-2 Db) binding peptide derived from the glycoprotein (GP aa33-41) of lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV). By varying dose, route, and frequency of LCMV GP peptide application, we found that a single local subcutaneous injection of 50-500 micrograms peptide emulsified in incomplete Freund's adjuvant protected mice against LCMV infection, whereas repetitive and systemic intraperitoneal application of the same dose caused tolerance of LCMV-specific CTL. The peptide-induced tolerance was transient in euthymic mice but permanent in thymectomized mice. These findings are relevant for a selective use of peptides as a therapeutic approach: peptide-induced priming of T cells for vaccination and peptide-mediated T cell tolerance for intervention in immunopathologies and autoimmune diseases.
What does visual agnosia tell us about perceptual organization and its relationship to object perception?

The authors studied 2 patients, S.M. and R.N. , to examine perceptual organization and its relationship to object recognition. Both patients had normal, low-level vision and performed simple grouping operations normally but were unable to apprehend a multielement stimulus as a whole. R.N. failed to derive global structure even under optimal stimulus conditions, was less sensitive to grouping by closure, and was more impaired in object recognition than S.M. These findings suggest that perceptual organization involves a multiplicity of processes, some of which are simpler and are instantiated in lower order areas of visual cortex (e.g., collinearity). Other processes are more complex and rely on higher order visual areas (e.g., closure and shape formation). The failure to exploit these latter configural processes adversely affects object recognition.
A fast algorithm for sparse generalized eigenvalue problem

In this paper, we consider an ℓ0-norm penalized formulation of the generalized eigenvalue problem, aimed at extracting the leading sparse generalized eigenvector of a matrix pair. The formulation involves maximization of a discontinuous nonconcave objective function over a nonconvex constraint set, and is therefore computationally intractable. To tackle the problem, we first approximate the ℓ0-norm by a continuous and differentiable surrogate function. Then an algorithm is developed via iteratively majorizing the surrogate function by a separable quadratic function, which at each iteration reduces then to a regular generalized eigenvalue problem. The convergence of the proposed algorithm to a stationary point of an equivalent problem is proved. Numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing algorithms in terms of both computational complexity and support recovery.
LOW POWER DIGITAL PULSE CONTROLLER BY PULSE WIDTH MODULATOR

A digitally controlled current starved pulse width modulator (PWM) is described in this paper. The current from the power grid to the ring oscillator is controlled by a header circuit. By changing the header current, the pulse width of the switching signal generated at the output of the ring oscillator is dynamically controlled, permitting the duty cycle to vary between 25% and 90%. This low-power embedded microprocessor, fabricated with 0.18- m CMOS embedded DRAM technology, enables high-performance operations such as audio and video application.
Conceptions of Giftedness: Youths Who Reason Exceptionally Well Mathematically and/or Verbally: Using the MVT:D4 Model to Develop Their Talents

The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) was established at Johns Hopkins University in 1971 by Professor Julian Stanley to help youths who reason extremely well mathematically find the educational resources they need to achieve their full potential (Benbow & Stanley, 1983; Keating, 1976; Stanley, 1977; Stanley, Keating, & Fox, 1974). After administering above-grade-level tests to identify students with advanced mathematical reasoning abilities, SMPY provided counseling and created programs to meet their academic needs. Eventually, university-based talent centers were established around the country to continue the practices SMPY pioneered. Because SMPY’s methods for developing talent evolved over time in a very pragmatic way, that is, in response to the needs of individual students, the psychological and conceptual bases for this approach have not been especially emphasized in the literature. In the first edition of this book, for example, Stanley and Benbow (1986) suggested that SMPY was “not concerned much with conceptualizing giftedness” and had “not spent much time contemplating the psychological underpinnings of giftedness” (p. 361). However, Duke University psychologist Michael Wallach, in a review of one of SMPY’s early books (Stanley, George, & Solano, 1977), observed that:
Rapid Porcine Lung Decellularization Using a Novel Organ Regenerative Control Acquisition Bioreactor

To regenerate discarded lungs that would not normally be used for transplant, ex vivo reseeding after decellularization may produce organs suitable for clinical transplantation and therefore close the donor gap. Organ regenerative control acquisition (Harvard Biosciences, Holliston, MA), a novel bioreactor system that simulates physiological conditions, was used to evaluate a method of rapid decellularization. Although most current decellularization methods are 24–72 hours, we hypothesized that perfusing porcine lungs with detergents at higher pressures for less time would yield comparable bioscaffolds suitable for future experimentation. Methods involved perfusion of 1% Triton X-100 (Triton) and 0.1% sodium dodecyl sulfate at varied physiological flow rates. Architecture of native and decellularized lungs was analyzed with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Dry gas and liquid ventilation techniques were introduced. Our 7 hour decellularization procedure removes nuclear material while maintaining architecture. Bioscaffolds have the microarchitecture for reseeding of stem cells. Hematoxylin and eosin staining suggested removal of nuclear material, whereas SEM and TEM imaging demonstrated total removal of cells with structural architecture preserved. This process can lead to clinical implementation, thereby increasing the availability of human lungs for transplantation.