Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sodium fusidate and the cytokine response in an experimental model of acute pancreatitis

New therapies designed to downregulate the aberrant immune response associated with severe acute necrotizing pancreatitis (ANP) are being increasingly investigated in different experimental models of ANP. The aim of this study was to test the potential effects of sodium fusidate on the course of severe ANP in rabbits.
Implementing corporate sustainability

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to conduct an empirical analysis among large German companies to enhance the understanding of whether and which institutional factors influence the application of sustainability management tools. Stepping from corporate sustainability visions to implementation requires the application of management tools. A multitude of sustainability management tools have been proposed in literature. Research on their application in corporate practice is, however, scarce. Design/methodology/approach – Based on a survey of large German companies and publicly available data, this paper tests the influence of corporate sustainability networks, indices, standards and the awareness of sustainability management tools on their application in corporate practice. Findings – A particularly strong positive relation exists between awareness and application of sustainability management tools. Standards are also found to have a positive influence, while the influence of networks and indices is le.
Cochlear implantation in deaf children with associated disabilities: Challenges and outcomes

The issue of cochlear implantation in deaf children with associated disabilities is an emerging subject. Currently, there is no consensus on whether to implant children with multiple impairments; moreover, it may be difficult to evaluate these children with standard tests pre- or post-implantation. In addition, these children often have poor speech perception and language skills, making assessment more difficult. Despite these factors, these children often receive important benefits in daily life, with an overall improvement in quality of life. In the present study, post-implant outcomes of 23 profoundly deaf children with neuropsychiatric disorders were analysed, using objective measures of speech perception, and a questionnaire administered to the parents, aimed at evaluating the benefits in daily life after implantation. The results were quite variable, but overall positive, in terms of speech perception, communication abilities, and improvement in quality of life. The findings add an additional piece of evidence to support the effectiveness of cochlear implantation in these special cases.
Self-Reported Sexual, Bowel and Bladder Function in Cervical Cancer Patients Following Different Treatment Modalities: Longitudinal Prospective Cohort Study

Objective Conventional radical hysterectomy with pelvic lymphadenectomy (RHL) for early-stage cervical cancer is associated with significant bladder, anorectal, and sexual dysfunction. Nerve-sparing modification of RHL (NS-RHL) has been developed with the aim to reduce surgical treatment-related morbidity. Postoperative radiation therapy (RT) is offered to patients with unfavorable prognostic features to improve local control. The aim of the study was to assess self-reported morbidity of various types of treatment in cervical cancer patients. Methods Self-reported symptoms were prospectively assessed before and 1 and 2 years after treatment by the Dutch Gynaecologic Leiden Questionnaire. Results Included were 229 women (123 NS-RHL and 106 conventional RHL). Ninety-four (41%) received RT. Up to 2 years (response rate, 81%), women reported significantly more bowel, bladder, and sexual symptoms compared with the pretreatment situation. No significant difference was found between the conventional RHL and NS-RHL with the exception of the unexpected finding that a smaller percentage in the NS-RHL group (34% vs 68%) complained about numbness of the labia and/ or thigh. Radiation therapy had a negative impact on diarrhea, urine incontinence, lymphedema, and sexual symptoms (especially a narrow/short vagina). Conclusions In the current longitudinal cohort study, treatment for early-stage cervical cancer was associated with worse subjective bladder, anorectal, and sexual functioning, irrespective of the surgical procedure used. Postoperative RT resulted in a significant deterioration of these functions. The results have to be interpreted with caution in view of the study design and method used.
Plasma LH levels in the mare during the oestrous cycle.

Plasma levels of LH were determined by heterologous radioimmunoassay utilizing highly purified equine LH as standard. Samples were taken regularly from eleven mares for twenty-six oestrous cycles over a period of 10 weeks. The mean cycle length was 20-5 +/- 3-1 (S.D.) days, and ovulation occurred on average 4-3 +/- 1-6 (S.D.) days from the time heat was first detected. Levels of LH were persistently low from Days 5 to 16 of the cycle (ovulation = Day 0). They then increased slowly over a number of days and continued to rise beyond the levels observed at any time during the immediate preovulatory period or the day of ovulation. A significant decrease from peak levels was not observed until the 3rd day after ovaulation, from which time levels continued to decline toward dioestrous values by an apparent first-order decay process with a half-life of 1-8 days. The pattern of plasma LH in the mare differs from that reported for other species and it is suggested that persistance of high concentrations of LH results from a long half-life of the endogenous LH. This in turn may be responsible for the relatively large number of second ovulations detected in many oestrous cycles.
Effects of kirenol on bovine type II collagen-induced rat lymphocytes in vivo and in vitro.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the effect of kirenol on bovine type II collagen (CII)-specific lymphocytes in vivo and in vitro, and explore the mechanism of kirenol-induced immunosuppression in antigen-specific lymphocytes. METHODS Twenty-four Wistar rats were randomized into control group, collagen-induced arthritis (CIA) model group, kirenol group (2 mg/kg), and prednisolone group (2 mg/kg). After CII injection, the rats in the latter two groups received intragastric administration of kirenol and prednisolone for 30 days, and the spleens and draining lymph nodes of the rats were harvested to prepare single cell suspensions for measurement of the cytokine levels using ELISA. In the in vitro experiment, the lymphocytes from the control rats, with or without 20 µg/ml CII treatment in the presence of 0-80 µg/ml kirenol, were evaluated for cell proliferation and apoptosis using [(3)H]-thymidine incorporation and flow cytometry, respectively. RESULTS Compared with those in CIA group, IFN-γ and TNF-α production was significantly reduced in splenocyte culture supernatant of kirenol group (P<0.05 and P<0.01, respectively), and the level of IL-10 and IL-4 was up-regulated (P<0.05 and P<0.01, respectively); IFN-γ and TNF-α secretion by the cultured lymph node cells (LNCs) significantly decreased (P<0.05 and P<0.001, respectively) and IL-10 and IL-4 production increased (P<0.05, P<0.001) in kirenol group. In the in vitro experiment, kirenol treatment caused obvious suppression of CII-induced LNC proliferation and dose-dependently induced antigen-specific apoptosis of the splenocytes and LNCs. CONCLUSION Kirenol treatment reduces pro-inflammatory cytokine secretion, increases anti-inflammatory cytokine production, inhibits cell proliferation and induces apoptosis of CII-specific lymphocytes in vitro, suggesting the potential of kirenol as an immunosuppressant.
Estimation of forest height and forested area with polarimetric SAR interferometry

This paper describes mapping of forested area based on the height difference between effective phase scattering centers derived from polarimetric SAR interferometry. It is essential that each polarization should be transformed an elliptical polarization state, at which the best or optimized coherences can be obtained. This process has been performed before estimation of the height difference between effective phase scattering centers (or forested area). We also derived a tree height estimation model based on phase along with the vertical wavenumber of scattered wave. This suggests that tree height can be estimated using this model.
Design and Voluntary Motion Intention Estimation of a Novel Wearable Full-Body Flexible Exoskeleton Robot

The wearable full-body exoskeleton robot developed in this study is one application of mobile cyberphysical system (CPS), which is a complex mobile system integrating mechanics, electronics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. Steel wire was used as the flexible transmission medium and a group of special wire-locking structures was designed. Additionally, we designed passive joints for partial joints of the exoskeleton. Finally, we proposed a novel gait phase recognition method for full-body exoskeletons using only joint angular sensors, plantar pressure sensors, and inclination sensors. The method consists of four procedures. Firstly, we classified the three types of main motion patterns: normal walking on the ground, stair-climbing and stair-descending, and sit-to-stand movement. Secondly, we segregated the experimental data into one gait cycle. Thirdly, we divided one gait cycle into eight gait phases. Finally, we built a gait phase recognition model based on -Nearest Neighbor perception and trained it with the phase-labeled gait data. The experimental result shows that the model has a 98.52% average correct rate of classification of the main motion patterns on the testing set and a 95.32% average correct rate of phase recognition on the testing set. So the exoskeleton robot can achieve human motion intention in real time and coordinate its movement with the wearer.
The Price of Pain

The ship from Toldar was first sighted from earth by a Kenyan University observatory. The news travelled fast and soon the ship was being tracked from everywhere. There was a world-wide boom in telescope sales, UFO garbage, and doomsday proselytes. The shuttle program suddenly had funding, as did the worlds’ air forces, and weapons research centres. Even Russia kick-started their space program again, and goodness knows they could not afford it.
TRAF2-mediated activation of NF-kappa B by TNF receptor 2 and CD40

TNF receptor-associated factor (TRAF) proteins are candidate signal transducers that associate with the cytoplasmic domains of members of the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) receptor superfamily. The role of TRAFs in the TNF-R2 and CD40 signal transduction pathways, which result in the activation of transcription factor NF-kappa B, was investigated. Overexpression of TRAF2, but not TRAF1 or TRAF3, was sufficient to induce NF-kappa B activation. A truncated derivative of TRAF2 lacking an amino-terminal RING finger domain was a dominant-negative inhibitor of NF-kappa B activation mediated by TNF-R2 and CD40. Thus, TRAF2 is a common mediator of TNF-R2 and CD40 signaling.
Evaluating the Role of Labor Market Mismatch in Rising Unemployment

Recent labor market trends have raised concerns that the unemployment rate is high not because employers are reluctant to hire but because they are unable to hire. These concerns, if true, would cast doubt on using monetary policy to stimulate the labor market, since it works by encouraging firms to hire more. Using a matching function approach, the author finds that a shock that makes it more difficult for firms to hire qualified applicants would by itself imply an unemployment rate of no more than 7.1 percent, much below the actual unemployment rate during the past two years. Hence, the recent patterns in unemployment and vacancy data do not necessarily rule out a role for monetary policy.
Third molar agenesis in Down syndrome

The frequency, gender, and maxillary/mandibular occurrences of third molar agenesis have been studied in a Danish population of Down syndrome individuals (39 F and 51 M). The study was based on radiological examination and compared with 2 control groups of normal Caucasian populations. We found that the occurrence of third molar agenesis in Down syndrome individuals was around 4 times greater than in a normal population and higher than in corresponding previous studies. The agenesis occurred more often in the maxilla than in the mandible, and the frequency was not significantly higher in females than in males. The present study stresses the importance of focusing on the dental germs in the phenotypic discussion, as different genes are involved in tooth formation. The absence of teeth can contribute to an understanding of the interaction between genotype and phenotype.
Coronary Serum Exosomes Derived from Patients with Myocardial Ischemia Regulate Angiogenesis through the miR-939-mediated Nitric Oxide Signaling Pathway

Rationale: Angiogenesis is a crucial step towards tissue repair and regeneration after ischemia. The role of circulating exosomes in angiogenic signal transduction has not been well elucidated. Thus, this study aims to investigate the effects of coronary serum exosomes from patients with myocardial ischemia on angiogenesis and to elucidate the underlying mechanisms. Methods and Results: The patients were enrolled according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Coronary blood was obtained from the angiography catheter. Serum exosomes were purified and characterized by their specific morphology and surface markers. In vitro analysis showed that compared to exosomes from healthy controls (con-Exo), exosomes from patients with myocardial ischemia (isc-Exo) enhanced endothelial cell proliferation, migration and tube formation. In a mouse hind-limb ischemia model, blood perfusion and histological staining demonstrated that isc-Exo significantly promoted blood flow recovery and enhanced neovascularization compared to con-Exo. Further, we revealed that cardiomyocytes, but not cardiac fibroblasts or endothelial cells, were initiated to release exosomes under ischemic stress; cardiomyocytes might be the source of bioactive exosomes in coronary serum. In addition, microarray analysis indicated that miR-939-5p was significantly down-regulated in isc-Exo. By knockdown and overexpression analyses, we found that miR-939-5p regulated angiogenesis by targeting iNOS. miR-939-5p inhibited both iNOS's expression and its activity, attenuated endothelial NO production, and eventually impaired angiogenesis. Conclusions: Exosomes derived from patients with myocardial ischemia promote angiogenesis via the miR-939-iNOS-NO pathway. Our study highlights that coronary serum exosomes serve as an important angiogenic messenger in patients suffering from myocardial ischemia.
Evaluating Deep Learning Approaches for Character Identification in Multiparty Dialogues

Character identification is an entity linking task that identifies each mention as a certain character in multiparty dialogue where mentions are typically nominals referring to a person and entities maybe speakers themselves or even external characters. Identifying such mentions as real characters requires cross-document entity resolution, which makes this task challenging. This task involves coreference resolution which clusters together the mentions corresponding to the same referent followed by an entity linking stage where the clusters of mentions are mapped to their corresponding entities. Historically, coreference models have been trained on the NewsWire dataset which is not as rich in terms of the complexity of the coreferences as those in multiparty dialogues. As has been the norm on various natural language processing tasks, deep-learning models are the state-of-the-art in coreference resolution as well. However, coreference resolution systems have been shown not to handle dialogues as well ([2],[3]). This motivates us to extend and evaluate the existing coreference systems including rule-based, statistical and deep-learning based models, for the annotated TV Show transcripts dataset released as part of SemEval 2018 Task-4 .
Growth of medical knowledge

Background Knowledge is an essential component of medical competence and a major objective of medical education. Thus, the degree of acquisition of knowledge by students is one of the measures of the effectiveness of a medical curriculum. We studied the growth in student knowledge over the course of Maastricht Medical School's 6‐year problem‐based curriculum.
Design and evaluation of a memristor-based look-up table for non-volatile field programmable gate arrays

This study presents the detailed design and analysis of a new memristor-based look-up table (LUT) for field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The proposed memory utilises memristors as storage elements with N-type metal-oxide-semiconductor transistors for row access. New WRITE and READ operations are proposed; the proposed LUT requires no additional circuit to handle the WRITE 1 (0) operation. The proposed method requires a RESTORE pulse only for the READ 0 operation. Moreover, the WRITE operation of the proposed method requires three power lines and a RESTORE pulse only for the READ 0 operation, thus saving 25% READ time when compared with previous methods. In addition, the proposed method does not require the REFRESH pulse and does not dissipate power during stand-by mode. Extensive simulation results are presented with respect to different operational features such as normalised state parameter, pulse width and LUT size. In addition to a circuit-level evaluation, the proposed LUT scheme has also been assessed with respect to FPGA implementation. Simulation results using sequential benchmarks mapped on Spartan 4 and 5 FPGAs show that the proposed non-volatile LUT outperforms existing static random access memory cell-based LUTs in terms of performance.
The kinetics of yeast hexokinase in the light of the induced fit involved in the binding of its sugar substrate.

The kinetics of the initial reaction rates of yeast hexokinase, both in the forward and in the backward direction, have been re-examined in the light of recent findings concerning the properties of the ATPase activity of hexokinase and its modification by certain non-phosphorylable analogues of the sugar substrates. A single pattern has been found in the double reciprocal plots even if the concentrations of both the acceptor and the donor substrates are varied over a wide range, with ITP as well as with ATP as donor substrates. A similar pattern has been found for the backward reaction. These results are interpreted as indicative that in the forward as well as in the backward reaction, the interconversion of the ternary complex of the enzyme with both substrates is the limiting step. This fact and the complex effect of glucose 6-phosphate as an initially-added product, prevents in principle the distinction between the possible kinetic mechanisms leading to the ternary complex. Nevertheless, taking into account the change in affinities for the nucleotide substrates specifically induced by certain sugars, it becomes possible to formulate a plausible hypothesis. It is postulated that binding of a sugar to an enzyme-nucleotide complex results in an abortive ternary complex. Accordingly, formation of active ternary complexes in the hexokinase reaction requires the sequential addition of a nucleotide substrate to a binary complex of the enzyme with a sugar substrate.
Origins of individual differences in infancy : the Colorado Adoption Project

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Debe cuidarse en la calle: normative influences on condom use among the steady male partners of female sex workers in the Dominican Republic

Encouragement to use condoms reflects the injunctive norm, or idea that you should use condoms. In our previous research with the regular male partners of female sex workers, in the Dominican Republic, we found that encouragement to use condoms with female sex workers from individuals in their personal social networks was not directly associated with condom use. In the current study, we used qualitative interviews to further explore the influence of social network norms on men’s sexual-risk behaviours. We interviewed 11 steady male partners of female sex workers, with participants completing two interviews to achieve greater depth. We analysed data using analytic summaries and systematic thematic coding. All men perceived that the prevailing injunctive norm was that they should use condoms with sex workers. Men received encouragement to use condoms but did not articulate a link between this encouragement and condom use. Additionally, men who did not use condoms lied to their friends to avoid social sanction. Findings highlight that the influence of a pro-condom injunctive norm is not always health promoting and can even be negative. HIV-prevention efforts seeking to promote condom use should address the alignment between injunctive and descriptive norms to strengthen their collective influence on behaviour.
Topiramate blocks perinatal hypoxia‐induced seizures in rat pups

Neonatal seizures caused by hypoxia can be refractory to conventional anticonvulsants. Currently, there is no effective postnatal intervention for newborn infants with hypoxic encephalopathy to prevent brain injury and long‐term neurologic sequelae. We previously developed a rat model of perinatal hypoxia‐induced seizures with subsequent long‐term increases in seizure susceptibility and showed that these epileptogenic effects are selectively blocked by the α‐amino‐3‐hydoxy‐5‐methyl‐4‐isoxazole propionic acid (AMPA) receptor antagonist 6‐nitro‐7‐sulfamoylbenzo(f)quinoxaline‐2,3‐dione. Using this model of perinatal seizures, we evaluated the efficacy of topiramate, a structurally novel anticonvulsant drug recently shown to attenuate AMPA/kainate currents. Topiramate effectively suppressed acute seizures induced by perinatal hypoxia in a dose‐related manner with a calculated ED50 of 2.1mg/kg, i.p. Furthermore, in animals that had seizures suppressed by topiramate during acute hypoxia, there were no long‐term increases in susceptibility to kainate‐induced seizures and seizure‐induced neuronal injury. Our results suggest that topiramate may have clinical potential as a therapeutic agent for refractory seizures in human neonates.
Supervised and Unsupervised Approaches to the Ontology-Based Disambiguation of JSON Documents

This paper proposes and evaluates certain supervised and unsupervised approaches to Named Entity Disambiguation in JSON documents, for linking of all ambiguous JSON objects to their most appropriate candidate DBpedia ontology classes. We achieve this by taking into account knowledge about the hierarchal structure of the document and two kinds of scores, namely Sibling Relatedness and Parental Relatedness, along with textual similarity between a class and the object indicated by the Textual Similarity score.