Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nuclear F-actin Formation and Reorganization upon Cell Spreading*♦

Background: Nuclear actin dynamics may function during basic cellular processes such as adhesion, differentiation, cell shape, and motility. Results: Integrin signaling induces nuclear actin polymerization via the LINC complex in response to fibronectin stimulation or cell spreading. Conclusion: Nuclear actin reorganization occurs during cell spreading and fibronectin stimulation. Significance: This may have important implications for understanding mechanotransduction and nuclear plasticity for matrix-directed differentiation. We recently discovered signal-regulated nuclear actin network assembly. However, in contrast to cytoplasmic actin regulation, polymeric nuclear actin structures and functions remain only poorly understood. Here we describe a novel molecular tool to visualize real-time nuclear actin dynamics by targeting the Actin-Chromobody-TagGFP to the nucleus, thus establishing a nuclear Actin-Chromobody. Interestingly, we observe nuclear actin polymerization into dynamic filaments upon cell spreading and fibronectin stimulation, both of which appear to be triggered by integrin signaling. Furthermore, we show that nucleoskeletal proteins such as the LINC (linker of nucleoskeleton and cytoskeleton) complex and components of the nuclear lamina couple cell spreading or integrin activation by fibronectin to nuclear actin polymerization. Spreading-induced nuclear actin polymerization results in serum response factor (SRF)-mediated transcription through nuclear retention of myocardin-related transcription factor A (MRTF-A). Our results reveal a signaling pathway, which links integrin activation by extracellular matrix interaction to nuclear actin polymerization through the LINC complex, and therefore suggest a role for nuclear actin polymerization in the context of cellular adhesion and mechanosensing.
Generalization Error Analysis for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts: A Preliminary Study

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) represents an ensemble methodology that amalgamates predictions from several specialized sub-models (referred to as experts). This fusion is accomplished through a router mechanism, dynamically assigning weights to each expert's contribution based on the input data. Conventional MoE mechanisms select all available experts, incurring substantial computational costs. In contrast, Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (Sparse MoE) selectively engages only a limited number, or even just one expert, significantly reducing computation overhead while empirically preserving, and sometimes even enhancing, performance. Despite its wide-ranging applications and these advantageous characteristics, MoE's theoretical underpinnings have remained elusive. In this paper, we embark on an exploration of Sparse MoE's generalization error concerning various critical factors. Specifically, we investigate the impact of the number of data samples, the total number of experts, the sparsity in expert selection, the complexity of the routing mechanism, and the complexity of individual experts. Our analysis sheds light on \textit{how \textbf{sparsity} contributes to the MoE's generalization}, offering insights from the perspective of classical learning theory.
Voriconazole versus itraconazole for antifungal prophylaxis following allogeneic haematopoietic stem-cell transplantation

Antifungal prophylaxis for allogeneic haematopoietic stem‐cell transplant (alloHCT) recipients should prevent invasive mould and yeast infections (IFIs) and be well tolerated. This prospective, randomized, open‐label, multicentre study compared the efficacy and safety of voriconazole (234 patients) versus itraconazole (255 patients) in alloHCT recipients. The primary composite endpoint, success of prophylaxis, incorporated ability to tolerate study drug for ≥100 d (with ≤14 d interruption) with survival to day 180 without proven/probable IFI. Success of prophylaxis was significantly higher with voriconazole than itraconazole (48·7% vs. 33·2%, P < 0·01); more voriconazole patients tolerated prophylaxis for 100 d (53·6% vs. 39·0%, P < 0·01; median total duration 96 vs. 68 d). The most common (>10%) treatment‐related adverse events were vomiting (16·6%), nausea (15·8%) and diarrhoea (10·4%) for itraconazole, and hepatotoxicity/liver function abnormality (12·9%) for voriconazole. More itraconazole patients received other systemic antifungals (41·9% vs. 29·9%, P < 0·01). There was no difference in incidence of proven/probable IFI (1·3% vs. 2·1%) or survival to day 180 (81·9% vs. 80·9%) for voriconazole and itraconazole respectively. Voriconazole was superior to itraconazole as antifungal prophylaxis after alloHCT, based on differences in the primary composite endpoint. Voriconazole could be given for significantly longer durations, with less need for other systemic antifungals.
Lubrication and load-bearing properties of human salivary pellicles adsorbed ex vivo on molecularly smooth substrata

In a series of Surface Force Balance experiments, material from human whole saliva was adsorbed to molecularly smooth mica substrata (to form an ‘adsorbed salivary film’). Measurements were taken of normal (load bearing, F n) and shear (frictional, F s*) forces between two interacting surfaces. One investigation involved a salivary film formed by overnight adsorption from undiluted, centrifuged saliva, with the adsorbed film rinsed with pure water before measurement. Measurements were taken under pure water and 70 mM NaNO3. In a second investigation, a film was formed from and measured under a solution of 7% filtered saliva in 10 mM NaNO3. F n results for both systems showed purely repulsive layers, with an uncompressed thickness of 35–70 nm for the diluted saliva investigation and, prior to the application of shear, 11 nm for the rinsed system. F s* was essentially proportional to F n for all systems and independent of shear speed (in the range 100–2000 nm s−1), with coefficients of friction μ ∼ 0.24 and μ ∼ 0.46 for the unrinsed and rinsed systems, respectively. All properties of the rinsed system remained similar when the pure water measurement environment was changed to 70 mM NaNO3. For all systems studied, shear gave rise to an approximately threefold increase in the range of normal forces, attributed to the ploughing up of adsorbed material during shear to form debris that stood proud of the adsorbed layer. The results provide a microscopic demonstration of the wear process for a salivary film under shear and may be of particular interest for understanding the implications for in vivo oral lubrication under conditions such as rinsing of the mouth cavity. The work is interpreted in light of earlier studies that showed a structural collapse and increase in friction for an adsorbed salivary film in an environment of low ionic strength.
Evaluating cultural learning in an online virtual environment

How can we develop and evaluate contextual cultural learning through exploration and participation in a virtual heritage environment? This article discusses one way of evaluating cultural learning, through measuring the cultural understanding of participants who learn about the same environments but via different methods of interaction (observation, social instruction, and activity-based exploration). Task performance, understanding of local cultural practices, memory of what was written and memory of events and objects, were recorded. Issues arising from the chosen internet-based technology, and how these issues could have been avoided, will also be discussed.
The effect of the physical activity on polymorphic premature ventricular complexes in chronic kidney disease

Background Polymorphic premature ventricular complexes (PVCs) are very common, appearing most frequently in patients with hypertension, obesity, sleep apnea, and structural heart disease. Sympathetic hyperactivity plays a critical role in the development, maintenance, and aggravation of ventricular arrhythmias. Endurance exercise training clearly lowers sympathetic activity in sympatho-excitatory disease states and may be tolerated by patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). Methods We assessed 40 CKD patients with hypertension with polymorphic PVCs. Patients underwent a complete medical history and physical examination. We evaluated the effectiveness of β blocker only or β blocker + exercise during 12 months of follow-up regarding the changes of the numbers of PVCs and mean heart rate (HR) by 24-hour-Holter. Results We observed in the β blocker group a significant decrease in the number of polymorphic PVCs from baseline 36,515 ± 3,518 to 3, 6, 9 and 12 months of follow-up, 28,314 ± 2,938, 23,709 ± 1,846, 22,564 ± 1,673, and 22,725 ± 1,415, respectively (P < 0.001). In the β blocker + exercise group a significant decrease in the number of polymorphic PVCs also occurred from baseline 36,091 ± 3,327 to 3, 6, 9 and 12 months of follow-up, 29,252 ± 3,211, 20,948 ± 2,386, 14,238 ± 3,338, and 6,225 ± 2,319, respectively (P < 0.001). Comparisons between the two groups at the same time point showed differences from the sixth month onwards: the 6th (Δ = −2,761, P = 0.045), 9th (Δ = −8,325, P < 0.001) and 12th (Δ = −16,500, P < 0.001) months. There was an improvement during the 12 months of follow-up vs. baseline, after the β blocker or β blocker + exercise in mean 24-hour HR Holter monitoring, creatinine values, eGFR, and ACR. Conclusion Polymorphic PVCs may be modifiable by physical activity in CKD patients with hypertension without structural heart disease.
The Use of Diaries in Sociological Research on Health Experience

Diaries have been relatively neglected as a sociological research method. This paper highlights the value of diary research, drawing on the literature on auto/biographies and health service research as well as a qualitative study of need and demand for primary health care, which used diaries and linked in-depth interviews. In particular, data from the study are used to illustrate the role of the ‘diary-interview’ method in offering a means to ‘observe’ behaviour which is inaccessible to participant observation. Five key advantages of the diary-interview are discussed, namely the potential of the ‘diary-interview’ method to accommodate different response modes; the extent to which the method captured diarists’ own priorities; the importance of the research process in illuminating the contexts within which helpseeking took place; the role of diaries as both a record of and reflection on the experience of illness and the value of the diary-interview method as a means of understanding what is ‘taken for granted’ in accounts of health and illness.
Performance and Complexity Analysis of Eigencombining, Statistical Beamforming, and Maximal-Ratio Combining

For receive-side maximal-ratio combining (MRC) and maximum-average-SNR beamforming (BF), the wireless-channel fading correlation impacts the symbol-detection performance-decreasing correlation improves/degrades MRC/BF performance-whereas the numerical complexity of these methods is fixed-high/low for MRC/BF. Matching signal processing complexity to the actual correlation conditions and, thus, to the achievable performance is possible with a superset of MRC and BF known as maximal-ratio eigencombining (MREC). For imperfectly known and correlated fading gains, new closed-form expressions are derived for the probability density function of the MREC-output SNR, as well as for the outage probability (OP) and the average error probability. These new expressions permit seamless evaluation for any correlation value of MREC, MRC, and BF performance measures, such as the amount of fading, the deep-fade probability, diversity and array gains, and the OP. Our results confirm that, in realistic scenarios, adaptive MREC can achieve MRC-like performance for BF-like complexity.
App Planner: Utilizing Generative AI in K-12 Mobile App Development Education

App Planner is an interactive support tool for K-12 students, designed to assist in creating mobile applications. By utilizing generative AI, App Planner helps students articulate the problem and solution through guided conversations via a chat-based interface. It assists them in brainstorming and formulating new ideas for applications, provides feedback on those ideas, and stimulates creative thinking. Here we report usability tests from our preliminary study with high-school students who appreciated App Planner for aiding the app design process and providing new viewpoints on human aspects especially the potential negative impact of their creation.
A simple GPU implementation of spectral-element methods for solving 3D Poisson type equations on rectangular domains and its applications

It is well known since 1960s that by exploring the tensor product structure of the discrete Laplacian on Cartesian meshes, one can develop a simple direct Poisson solver with an $\mathcal O(N^{\frac{d+1}d})$ complexity in d-dimension, where N is the number of the total unknowns. The GPU acceleration of numerically solving PDEs has been explored successfully around fifteen years ago and become more and more popular in the past decade, driven by significant advancement in both hardware and software technologies, especially in the recent few years. We present in this paper a simple but extremely fast MATLAB implementation on a modern GPU, which can be easily reproduced, for solving 3D Poisson type equations using a spectral-element method. In particular, it costs less than one second on a Nvidia A100 for solving a Poisson equation with one billion degree of freedoms. We also present applications of this fast solver to solve a linear (time-independent) Schr\"odinger equation and a nonlinear (time-dependent) Cahn-Hilliard equation.
Study on Pyrolytic Characteristics of Dead Yeast Powder and Biosorption Mechanism on Cu²+

Pyrolysis process of dead beer yeast powder was studied through thermogravimetric analyzer. Cu2+ adsorption mechanism was analysed by SEM and FTIR. The results showed: in thermogravimetric test, TG and DTG figures indicated five pyrolytic stages, weight losting in the third(247degC- 309degC) and fourth(309degC-420degC) stages, most important stages, accounted for 68.3% of total weight losting and 50.5% of total sample weight. SEM figures indicated that before adsorption on Cu2+, the cell surface of yeast powder and immobilized yeast were smooth, but after adsorption, many "spots" and something like spininess deposition appeared on cell surface, inorganic- precipitation mechanism and redox mechanism might work in the process. After adsorption, FTIR figures changed little, the main structure and components of yeast kept unchanged, -OH -. -CONH2 and -COOH all played an important role in adsorption process.
Energy and delay optimal epidemic relaying in delay tolerant networks

In this paper we introduce a novel framework for the distributed control of DTNs in order to support message replication the devices acting as relays need to sacrifice part of their batteries. Due to the fact that feedback messages in DTNs cannot be used, the knowledge of the delivery status is unknown for the source. We model the problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) and we derive an optimal policy for forwarding messages in the network; in fact the source node uses a belief to decide either to continue forwarding a message or not. We provide extensive numerical results to validate the proposed scheme in which our mechanism exchanges less messages than epidemic routing, hence, less energy is consumed.
Multi-Task Dense Prediction via Mixture of Low-Rank Experts

Previous multi-task dense prediction methods based on the Mixture of Experts (MoE) have received great performance but they neglect the importance of explicitly modeling the global relations among all tasks. In this paper, we present a novel decoder-focused method for multi-task dense prediction, called Mixture-of-Low-Rank-Experts (MLoRE). To model the global task relationships, MLoRE adds a generic convolution path to the original MoE structure, where each task feature can go through this path for explicit parameter sharing. Furthermore, to control the parameters and computational cost brought by the increase in the number of experts, we take inspiration from LoRA and propose to leverage the low-rank format of a vanilla convolution in the expert network. Since the low-rank experts have fewer parameters and can be dynamically parameterized into the generic convolution, the parameters and computational cost do not change much with the increase of experts. Benefiting from this design, we increase the number of experts and its reception field to enlarge the representation capacity, facilitating multiple dense tasks learning in a unified network. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL-Context and NYUD-v2 benchmarks show that our MLoRE achieves superior performance compared to previous state-of-the-art methods on all metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/YuqiYang213/MLoRE.
Incidence of childhood leukemia in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 1998–2009

In most developing countries, incidence data for childhood cancers are less reliable, because very few population‐based registries exist. The aim of this study was to present the epidemiology of childhood leukemia in the Dr. Sardjito Hospital (DSH) region, which catchment area extends beyond the boundaries of the Yogyakarta Special Province (YSP).
Cluster analysis using the GSOM: Patterns in epidemiology

The growing self organizing map (GSOM) has proven Itself as an adaptive and robust knowledge discovery algorithm with applications in diverse disciplines. The unrestricted network topology of the learning phase of GSOM enables clustering of data vectors based on the notion of similarity. The hierarchical clustering capability of the GSOM allows drill down examination of clusters at different levels of correlation. In addition to static patterns in the form of cluster groups, the feature map can also contain dynamic information of the dataset. There is continuous experimenting on enhancing the functionality of GSOM as a comprehensive data analysis and knowledge discovery application. This paper documents such extensions along with their application in knowledge discovery. The extensions were applied to a population based sample of children born to families in which either parents or/and siblings have had asthma, eczema or hay fever. The dataset contained time variant information on rash development and allergy diagnosis by skin prick testing to different allergens.
Circuit and Numerical Modeling of Electrostatic Discharge Generators

This paper provides two accurate and efficient models of electrostatic discharge generators which permit to reproduce the discharge current in the contact mode, taking into account the load effect. The first model is based on a circuit approach and is suitable to be implemented in any commercial circuit simulator. The second model is based on the numerical solution of the field equations by using the commercial numerical-code microwave studio based on the finite-integration technique. The validation of the proposed circuit and numerical models is carried out by comparison with measurements
Seaport infrastructure investment and economic growth in Korea

A seaport plays an important role in the sector of sea transportations, exports, imports, tourism, and travel, and thus is an important ingredient of economic growth. This paper investigates the causality issues between seaport infrastructure investment and economic growth in Korea by applying modern time-series techniques. It employs annual data covering the period 1970â€“2002. Tests for unit roots, cointegration, and Granger-causality based on error correction models are presented. The results show that unidirectional causality runs from seaport infrastructure investment to economic growth without any feedback effect. This means that increase in seaport infrastructure investment directly affects economic growth. In order not to adversely affect economic growth, the Korean government and industry should endeavour to overcome the constraints on seaport infrastructure investment.
Percentage of hypochromic erythrocytes and reticulocyte hemoglobin equivalent predictors of response to intravenous iron in hemodialysis patients

Reticulocyte hemoglobin content and percentage of hypochromic red cells are incorporated into the European best practice guidelines on anemia management in chronic kidney disease. Sysmex XN analyzer (Sysmex Corporation, Kobe, Japan) reports reticulocyte hemoglobin equivalent (Ret‐He) and the hypochromic fraction of erythrocytes (%Hypo‐He). Our aim was to assess the value of these parameters, in terms of the sensitivity and specificity for detecting functional iron deficiency, in hemodialysis (HD) patients.
Dissecting human T cell responses against Bordetella species

To identify the minimal structures that may be important for the creation of a synthetic and/or recombinant vaccine against whooping cough, human T cell clones were obtained against Bordetella antigens. Cloned peripheral blood T lymphocytes from an immune donor were grown in IL-2 and tested for proliferation in response to inactivated Bordetella species (B. pertussis, B. parapertussis, and B. bronchiseptica) and mutants deficient for the expression of virulence- associated antigens. All the T cell clones obtained were CD4+8- and recognized specifically the Bordetella antigens when presented by autologous B cells. On the basis of the responsiveness to the whole inactivated bacteria, it was possible to cluster the 12 clones obtained into four groups with the following specificity: (1) filamentous hemagglutinin (FHA); (2) B. pertussis-specific antigens; (3) virulence- associated Bordetella-specific antigens; and (4) nonvirulence- associated Bordetella-specific antigens. Using two new B. pertussis deletion mutants, clone 6 (representative of cluster 1) was found to recognize the COOH terminus of FHA. Furthermore, three out of four clones of cluster 3 were specifically stimulated by the soluble 69-kD protein from the outer membrane of B. pertussis. Surprisingly, none of the twelve clones obtained by stimulation in vitro with whole inactivated bacteria recognized pertussis toxin (PT), which is believed to be the most important protein to be included in an acellular vaccine. However, when a new generation of clones was obtained using soluble PT as the in vitro stimulus, it was observed that 11 clones of this group recognized this antigen. Thus, PT does not seem to be the most representative antigen on the whole inactivated bacteria, although T cell memory against PT exists in a donor who had the disease several years ago.