Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In vivo therapeutic effect of combination treatment with metformin and Scutellaria baicalensis on maintaining bile acid homeostasis

The radix of Scutellaria baicalensis (SB) is a herb widely used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat metabolic diseases. Several main components, including baicalin and wogonoside, possess anti-dyslipidemia, anti-obesity and anti-diabetic effects. We hypothesized that co-administration of SB extract and metformin exerts a better effect on obesity-induced insulin resistance and lipid metabolism than treatment with metformin alone. We compared the effect of metformin (100 mg/10 mL/kg/day) alone with co-administration of metformin (100 mg/5 mL/kg/day) and SB extract (200 mg/5 mL/kg/day) on Otsuka Long Evans Tokushima Fatty rats, a useful model of type II diabetes with obesity, and used Long-Evans Tokushima Otsuka rats as a control. Weight, fasting glucose, oral glucose tolerance test, intraperitoneal insulin tolerance test, and serum total cholesterol were measured after 12 weeks of drug administration. We observed a synergetic effect of metformin and SB on lowering cholesterol level by excretion of bile acid through feces. We found that this accompanied activation of FXR, CYP7A1 and LDLR genes and repression of HMGCR in the liver. Although there were no significant changes in BSH-active gut microbiota due to high variability, functional prediction with 16S sequences showed increased primary and secondary bile acid biosynthesis in the combination treatment group. Further study is needed to find the specific strains of bacteria which contribute to FXR-related cholesterol and bile acid regulations.
Ribosomal Ribonucleic Acid Synthesis and Maturation in the Blue-Green Alga Anacystis nidulans

Methods are described for preparation of pulse-labeled ribonucleic acid (RNA) from the blue-green alga Anacystis nidulans. Synthesis of labeled RNA was found to be in part dependent on concurrent photosynthesis and was inhibited by the antibiotic streptolydigin. Mature 23S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) appeared before mature 16S rRNA. Formation of either molecule was inhibited by chloramphenicol, and RNA species of lesser mobility accumulated. These species may be precursors of the mature forms. Maturation of 16S rRNA was also inhibited by streptolydigin. (The effect of this antibiotic on 23S rRNA maturation was not examined). In many respects, ribosomal RNA synthesis and maturation in this blue-green alga appear to follow the pattern already established for bacteria.
Application of Fuzzy Relational Databases in medical informatics

Handling uncertainty in Relational Database Management System is tedious job. Many theoretical models have been presented and its applications have been shown. A new model called Fuzzy DB System has been proposed. The model comprises of four modules to handle Fuzzy RDBMS query. The application of the model in medical information system related heart diagnostics has been shown. The Fuzzy DB Model shows perspectives in medical information domain.
A Test Design for Quick Determination of Incoherency in Chip Multiprocessors' Cache Realizing MOESI Protocol

The data coherence in the cache systems of CMPs (Chip Multi-Processors) is to be more accurate and reliable. In this work, we propose an effective solution to the issue through introduction of highly efficient test logic (fault detection unit). The test design is based on the modular structure of Cellular Automata (CA). The SACA (single length single cycle attractor cellular automata) has been introduced to identify the inconsistencies in cache line states of processors' private caches realizing the MOESI protocol. The simple hardware implementation of the CA based design realizes quick decision on the cache coherency in CMPs with 100% accuracy.
Anti‐Inflammatory Drugs in the Fight against Alzheimer's Disease a

Lesions in Alzheimer disease are characterized by the assembly of a variety of cells and proteins associated with the immune system. Activated microglia express high levels of MHC glycoproteins and receptors for complement. Small numbers of T‐lymphocytes infiltrate tissue. Proteins of the classical complement pathway are closely connected with β‐amyloid deposits. Several materials associated with senile plaques, including β‐amyloid protein itself, bind C1q in vitro and activate the pathway. The membrane attack complex of complement, as well as proteins which defend against that complex, colocalize with dystrophic neurites. These data imply that an autodestructive process is occurring in Alzheimer's disease, and that anti‐inflammatory drugs might be an effective form of therapy. Some epidemiological evidence and results of a pilot clinical trial support this hypothesis.
THE INHIBITION OF INDUCIBLE NITRIC OXIDE SYNTHASE IN OVINE SEPSIS MODEL

ABSTRACT Excessive NO has been shown to play a major role in the pathogenesis of multiple organ dysfunctions in septic condition. Burn injury, especially if it is associated with smoke inhalation, is often complicated by subsequent development of pneumonia or sepsis that determine the outcome. In the present study, we developed an ovine sepsis model, created by exposing sheep to smoke inhalation followed by instillation of bacteria into the airway, that closely mimics human sepsis and pneumonia. We hypothesized that the inhibition of iNOS-derived excessive NO might be beneficial in treating the cardiopulmonary derangement in this model. Female sheep (n = 18) were surgically prepared for the study and given a tracheostomy. This was followed by insufflation of 48 breaths of cotton smoke (<40°C) into the airway of each animal and subsequent instillation of live Pseudomonas aeruginosa (5 × 1011 colony forming units) into each sheep's lung. All sheep were mechanically ventilated using 100% O2. Continuous infusion of BBS-2 (100 &mgr;g/kg/h), an iNOS inhibitor, was started 1 h after insult. The administration of BBS-2 improved pulmonary gas exchange (PaO2/FiO2 and pulmonary shunt fraction) and partially reduced airway obstruction and an increase in ventilatory pressures. The lung water content was not affected by iNOS inhibition. The hypotension seen in nontreated animals was not ameliorated either. The increase in plasma concentration of nitrate and nitrite was inhibited by BBS-2. The results of present study show that iNOS may be partially involved in the pathogenesis of acute lung injury induced by smoke inhalation followed by bacterial instillation in the airway.
Wind generation forecasting of short and very short duration using Neuro-Fuzzy Networks: A case study

Wind energy has become a good alternative to diversification and expansion of the Brazilian electric matrix. However, the random nature of the wind speed makes its forecast complex, directly affecting the planning and operation of generation systems. For a proper integration, it is necessary to formulate the prediction of resources available through reliable methodologies. Currently, there are several techniques and models that predict wind speed, which are divided in: historical data series analysis and numerical weather prediction models. On prediction of wind power generation, which uses wind speed data converted into electrical energy, there are physical, statistical methods and models based on Computational Intelligence. On this basis, this study presents a prediction methodology based on Neuro-Fuzzy Networks, which are prevenient from the union between the learning resources present in Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) with the decision-making of human information processing, present in Fuzzy Logic. From the software Matlab®, the wind generation forecasting of short and very short duration is done to qualify and quantify its contribution in national energy outlook.
Automatically Discovering Surveillance Devices in the Cyberspace

Surveillance devices with IP addresses are accessible on the Internet and play a crucial role in monitoring physical worlds. Discovering surveillance devices is a prerequisite for ensuring high availability, reliability, and security of these devices. However, today's device search depends on keywords of packet head fields, and keyword collection is done manually, which requires enormous human efforts and induces inevitable human errors. The difficulty of keeping keywords complete and updated has severely impeded an accurate and large-scale device discovery. To address this problem, we propose to automatically generate device fingerprints based on webpages embedded in surveillance devices. We use natural language processing to extract the content of webpages and machine learning to build a classification model. We achieve real-time and non-intrusive web crawling by leveraging network scanning technology. We implement a prototype of our proposed discovery system and evaluate its effectiveness through real-world experiments. The experimental results show that those automatically generated fingerprints yield very high accuracy of 99% precision and 96% recall. We also deploy the prototype system on Amazon EC2 and search surveillance devices in the whole IPv4 space (nearly 4 billion). The number of devices we found is almost 1.6 million, about twice as many as those using commercial search engines.
Noise tracking for speech systems in adverse environments

In the design of speech systems, the primary focus is the speech oriented task with the secondary emphasis on sustaining performance under varying operating conditions. Variation in environmental conditions is one of the most important factors that impact speech system performance. In this study, we propose a frame-workfornoisetracking. Theproposednoisetrackingalgorithmis compared with Martin’s [1] and Cohen’s [2] estimation scheme’s for speech enhancment in non-stationary noise conditions. The noise tracking scheme is evaluated over a corpus of three noise typesincludingBabble(BAB),LargeCrowd(LCR),andMachine Gun (MGN). The noise modeling scheme for tracking results in a measureable level of improvement for all the noise types (e.g., a 13.7% average relative improvement in Itakura-Saito(IS) measure over 9 noise conditions). This framework is therefore useful for speech applications requiring effective performance for non-stationary environments.
The effects of financing constraints on firms' use of trade credit and other alternative financing sources

Cette these se compose de quatre essais portant sur les effets des contraintes de financement sur l'utilisation du credit commercial (TC) et d'autres sources alternatives de financement des entreprises. Dans le premier essai, nous etudions les effets des contraintes sur l'emprunt bancaire (BL) sur l'utilisation du TC par les entreprises vietnamiennes. Nous etudions plus particulierement l’effet de la taille sur le choix entre les deux types de financement. Nous constatons que les grandes entreprises lorsqu’elles sont rationnees sur les BL comptent plus sur le TC que les petites et moyennes entreprises (PME). En particulier, nous constatons que les grandes entreprises dont la demande de credit a ete refusee utilisent plus de TC tandis que les PME dans la meme situation en utilisent moins. Dans le deuxieme essai, nous etudions les effets des contraintes sur les BL sur l’utilisation du TC en fonction de la taille et de l'âge des entreprises ainsi que du developpement institutionnel des differents pays. Nos resultats suggerent que le TC et le BL ont tendance a etre des substituts pour les entreprises les plus grandes, les plus âges et lesquelles situees dans les pays developpes (developpement institutionnel plus fort). En revanche, le TC et le BL sont complementaires pour les entreprises les plus jeunes, les plus petites et lesquelles situees dans les pays en developpement (developpement institutionnel faible). Ce resultat est particulierement net dans le cas ou la demande de credit est refusee. Dans notre troisieme essai, nous etudions les effets des contraintes sur les BL sur l'utilisation de six sources alternatives de financement par les PME dans le monde entier. Les formes de financement etudiees sont: le TC, le credit-bail, les cartes de credit, la finance informelle, les fonds provenant de la famille et des amis et les capitaux propres. Nos resultats suggerent generalement que les PME rationnees par les banques ont tendance a compter davantage sur les fonds de la famille et des amis et sur les prets des usuriers. Nous trouvons aussi qu'elles utilisent les modes de financement alternatifs plutot pour financer le fonds de roulement que pour financer de nouveaux investissements. Dans le dernier essai, a partir d’un echantillon d'entreprises non financieres du S&P 500, nous examinons l'interaction entre l'utilisation du papier commercial (CP), des lignes de credit bancaire (CL) et du TC sur la periode 2003 a 2014. Nos resultats suggerent que les entreprises avec le risque de refinancement le plus eleve empruntent plus sous la forme de CL et de TC que sous la forme de CP. Cet effet est plus fort pour les CL. Nous constatons egalement que plus le niveau d'asymetrie d’information est fort, plus les entreprises utilisent les CL et le TC par rapport a CP. En revanche, plus les problemes d'alea moral sont graves, plus les entreprises favorisent les CP par rapport aux CL et TC.
A C OMPREHENSIVE S URVEY OF L INK M INING AND A NOMALIES D ETECTION

Link mining is a newly developed research area, bringing together research insights from the fields of web mining, graph theory and machine learning. Link mining applications have been shown to be highly effective in addressing many important business issues such as telephone fraud detection (Fawcett & Provost, 1999), crime detection (Sparrow, 1991), money laundering (Kirkland et al., 1999), terrorism (Badia & Kantardzic, 2005; Skillicorn, 2004), financial applications (Creamer & Stolfo, 2009), social networks and health care problems (Provana et al., 2010; Wadhah et al., 2012). The trend in the building and use of link mining models for critical business, law enforcement and scientific decision support applications are expected to grow. An important issue will be building models and techniques that are scalable and reliable.
A Reliable Broadcast Communication Mechanism

Publishing is a model and mechanism for crash recovery in a distributed computing environment. Published communication works for systems connected via a broadcast medium by recording messages transmitted over the network. The recovery mechanism can be completely transparent to the failed process and all processes interacting with it. Although published communication is intended for a broadcast network such as a bus, a ring, or an Ethernet, it can be used in other environments. A recorder reliably stores all messages that are transmitted, as well as checkpoint and recovery information. When it detects a failure, the recorder may restart affected processes from checkpoints. The recorder may restart affected processes from checkpoints. The recorder subsequently resends to each process all messages which were sent to it since the time its checkpoint was taken, while ignoring duplicate messages sent by it. Message-based systems without shared memory can use published communications to recover groups of processes. Simulations show that at least 5 multi-user minicomputers can be supported on a standard Ethernet using a single recorder. The prototype version implemented in DEMOS/MP demonstrates that an error recovery can be transparent to user processes and can be centralized in the network.
Spatially Modulated Diagonal Space Time Codes

A spatially modulated Diagonal Space Time Coding (SM-DC) scheme for four transmit antennas is presented in this letter. In the proposed SM-DC scheme, the diagonal code is employed as the core space-time block code (STBC), and the spatial constellation (SC) matrices designed by Le et al. are used to activate the transmit antennas. The SM-DC scheme can achieve the transmit diversity order of two by designing a proper precoding matrix. Moreover, it supports any number of activated transmit antennas from 1 to 4. Simulation results show that, at the cost of increased decoding complexity, the proposed SM-DC scheme outperforms several existing STBC-SM schemes with four transmit antennas.
Glial GABA, synthesized by monoamine oxidase B, mediates tonic inhibition

Here we show that glial gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA) is produced by monoamine oxidase B (MAOB), utilizing a polyamine, putrescine. The concentration of GABA in Bergmann glial cells is estimated to be around 5–10 mM. General gene silencing of MAOB resulted in elimination of tonic GABA currents recorded from granule cells in the cerebellum and medium spiny neurons (MSN) in the striatum. Glial‐specific rescue of MAOB resulted in complete restoration of tonic GABA currents. Our results identify MAOB as a synthesizing enzyme of glial GABA, which is released to mediate tonic inhibition in the cerebellum and striatum.
CALHM1 P86L Polymorphism Modulates CSF Aβ Levels in Cognitively Healthy Individuals at Risk for Alzheimer’s Disease

The calcium homeostasis modulator 1 (CALHM1) gene codes for a novel cerebral calcium channel controlling Intracellular calcium homeostasis and amyloid-β (Aβ) peptide metabolism, a key event in the etiology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The P86L polymorphism in CALHM1 (rs2986017) initially was proposed to impair CALHM1 functionally and to lead to an increase in Aβ accumulation in vitro in cell lines. Recently, it was reported that CALHM1 P86L also may influence Aβ metabolism in vivo by increasing Aβ levels in human cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Although the role of CALHM1 in AD risk remains uncertain, concordant data have now emerged showing that CALHM1 P86L is associated with an earlier age at onset of AD. Here, we have analyzed the association of CALHM1 P86L with CSF Aβ in samples from 203 AD cases and 46 young cognitively healthy individuals with a positive family history of AD. We failed to detect an association between the CALHM1 polymorphism and CSF Aβ levels in AD patients. Our data, however, revealed a significant association of CALHM1 P86L with elevated CSF Aβ42 and Aβ40 in the normal cohort at risk for AD. This work shows that CALHM1 modulates CSF Aβ levels in presymptomatic individuals, strengthening the notion that CALHM1 is involved in AD pathogenesis. These data further demonstrate the utility of endophenotype-based approaches focusing on CSF biomarkers for the identification or validation of risk factors for AD.
Detection of copy number changes at the NF1 locus with improved high‐resolution array CGH

Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) is a common autosomal dominant disease caused by various types of mutations in the NF1 gene. We have previously developed a locus‐specific DNA microarray for detection of copy number changes at the NF1 locus by comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) analysis. The original array contains 183 probes pooled from 444 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) products. In the current work, we have used 493 probes derived from single PCR products (200–998 bp in size) to construct a higher resolution array with a smaller average probe size for molecular diagnosis of NF1. This has improved the average resolution from 12.6 kb in the previous array to 4.5 kb in the current version. The performance of the newly constructed microarray was validated with 14 well‐characterized NF1 mutations for CGH analysis. These mutations represent deletions from ∼7 kb to over 2 Mb in size. Using this array, we examined a total of 55 NF1 patients for copy number changes at the NF1 locus, detecting deletions in four of them. These results demonstrate that a locus‐specific microarray constructed from single PCR products can efficiently detect copy number changes at the NF1 locus, providing a simple method for the molecular diagnosis of NF1.
Clustering Methodologies for Software Engineering

The size and complexity of industrial strength software systems are constantly increasing. This means that the task of managing a large software project is becoming even more challenging, especially in light of high turnover of experienced personnel. Software clustering approaches can help with the task of understanding large, complex software systems by automatically decomposing them into smaller, easier-to-manage subsystems. The main objective of this paper is to identify important research directions in the area of software clustering that require further attention in order to develop more effective and efficient clustering methodologies for software engineering. To that end, we first present the state of the art in software clustering research. We discuss the clustering methods that have received the most attention from the research community and outline their strengths and weaknesses. Our paper describes each phase of a clustering algorithm separately. We also present the most important approaches for evaluating the effectiveness of software clustering.
On the quality and magnitude of mechanical stresses in the locomotor system during rapid movements.

There is a remarkable coincidence between the form of skeletal elements and the internal forces to which these elements are subject. In movements, the internal forces vary to some extent. The question is raised, to which of the various stresses the shapes of the skeletal elements are adapted. To answer this question, two other problems must be solved: ? At which occasions may the highest internal forces occur? Which sorts of stress patterns are created by them within the bones?
Identification and Characterization of Two Isoenzymes of Methionine γ-Lyase from Entamoeba histolytica

To better understand the metabolism of sulfur-containing amino acids, which likely plays a key role in a variety of cell functions, in Entamoeba histolytica, we searched the genome data base for genes encoding putative orthologs of enzymes known to be involved in the metabolism. The search revealed that E. histolytica possesses only incomplete cysteine-methionine conversion pathways in both directions. Instead, this parasite possesses genes encoding two isoenzymes of methionine γ-lyase (EC 4.4.1.11, EhMGL1/2), which has been implicated in the degradation of sulfur-containing amino acids. The two amebic MGL isoenzymes, showing 69% identity to each other, encode 389- and 392-amino acid polypeptides with predicted molecular masses of 42.3 and 42.7 kDa and pIs of 6.01 and 6.63, respectively. Amino acid comparison and phylogenetic analysis suggested that these amebic MGLs are likely to have been horizontally transferred from the Archaea, whereas an MGL from another anaerobic protist Trichomonas vaginalis has MGL isotypes that share a common ancestor with bacteria. Enzymological and immunoblot analyses of the partially purified native amebic MGL confirmed that both of the MGL isotypes are expressed in a comparable amount predominantly in the cytosol and form a homotetramer. Recombinant EhMGL1 and 2 proteins catalyzed degradation of l-methionine, dl-homocysteine, l-cysteine, and O-acetyl-l-serine to form α-keto acid, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide or methanethiol, whereas activity toward cystathionine was negligible. These two isoenzymes showed notable differences in substrate specificity and pH optimum. In addition, we showed that EhMGL is an ideal target for the development of new chemotherapeutic agents against amebiasis by demonstrating an amebicidal effect of the methionine analog trifluoromethionine on trophozoites in culture (IC50 18 μm) and that this effect of trifluoromethionine was completely abolished by the addition of the MGL-specific inhibitor dl-propargylglycine.