Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multi-color diffractive protein optics as a sensing platform

We report a new class of silk protein-based multi-color diffractive optical elements (DOEs) for sensing applications. The silk protein, known for its excellent biocompatibility, robust mechanical properties, high optical transmittance and controllable degradation, and ease of functionalization with biologically active components, providing a powerful pathway to integrate sensing and drug delivery into a single platform. The multi-color protein DOEs can generate a true color diffractive pattern when simultaneously illuminated by three laser pointers at proper wavelengths (650 nm, 532 nm, 405 nm). Compared with single-color DOEs, multi-color silk-DOEs carry out richer information and can be used in more complex situations, such as multi-level data concealment and drug release monitoring.
Liraglutide reduces hepatic glucolipotoxicity-induced liver cell apoptosis through NRF2 signaling in Zucker diabetic fatty rats

The primary aim of the present study was to evaluate the effects of liraglutide on glucolipotoxicity-induced liver cell apoptosis and the underlying mechanisms in Zucker diabetic fatty (ZDF) rats. The results revealed that liraglutide significantly decreased the body weight, hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia of ZDF rats relative to those of Zucker lean (ZL) rats (P<0.05). Furthermore, the reduced liver cell apoptosis was observed in the ZDF rats following 6 weeks of liraglutide therapy. These data validated the beneficial effects of liraglutide on diabetic and obese ZDF rats. In addition, novel data was obtained that demonstrated that liraglutide treatment increased the expression of the antioxidant transcription factor nuclear factor-erythroid 2-related factor 2 (NRF2), as well as the transcription of downstream target genes, including nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate quinone dehydrogenase 1 and heme oxygenase-1 (P<0.05). Additionally, serum and hepatic GSH and SOD levels increased following liraglutide therapy (P<0.05). Hence, it was proposed that liraglutide may enhance the antioxidant activity of liver cells by activating the NRF2 signaling pathway, thereby reducing liver cell apoptosis induced by glucolipotoxicity in ZDF rats, which may shed light on the application of liraglutide in the treatment of diabetes- and obesity-induced liver injury.
Molecular defects underlying Wolman disease appear to be more heterogeneous than those resulting in cholesteryl ester storage disease.

Human lysosomal acid lipase/cholesteryl ester hydrolase (hLAL) is essential for the intralysosomal metabolism of cholesteryl esters and triglycerides taken up by receptor-mediated endocytosis of lipoprotein particles. The key role of the enzyme in intracellular lipid homeostasis is illustrated by two lysosomal storage diseases inherited as autosomal recessive traits. Wolman disease, associated with deficient hLAL activity, leads to massive intracellular substrate accumulation and is always fatal in early infancy. Cholesteryl ester storage disease (CESD), in contrast, is characterized by very low levels of enzymic activity sufficient to allow survival of the affected patients into adulthood. In order to elucidate the underlying molecular defects in Wolman disease, we have characterized the hLAL gene in two female Wolman patients of German and Turkish origin by SSCP and DNA sequence analysis. Our results demonstrate that the German proband was compound heterozygous for an 8-bp deletion in exon 3 and a 2-bp deletion in exon 4 of the hLAL gene. These frameshift mutations lead to protein truncation at amino acid positions 24 and 116 and to complete loss of hydrolytic activity. The Turkish proband, in contrast, was homozygous for a G(1064)-->T substitution in exon 10 of the hLAL gene which converts the completely conserved glycine (GGG) residue at position 321 of the mature enzyme to tryptophan (TGG). In vitro expression of the hLAL(Gly(321)-->Trp) cDNA construct revealed that the amino acid replacement results in a more than 99% reduction of neutral lipid hydrolysis. The mutations provide new insights into the molecular basis of Wolman disease which is apparently more heterogeneous at the genetic level than cholesteryl ester storage disease. -Lohse, P., S. Maas, P. Lohse, A. C. Sewell, O. P. van Diggelen, and D. Seidel. Molecular defects underlying Wolman disease appear to be more heterogeneous than those resulting in cholesteryl ester storage disease.
Contribution of new technologies to interaction management in a class

This work presents how new technologies including wireless devices may improve the interaction management in face-to-face learning. The hardware and software required to implement new pedagogical functionalities are presented. We focus our study on different layers of annotation, aggregation of students responses and uses of collaborative learning tools. An experiment schedule and the first results are presented in order to study the feasibility and interest of our approach in higher education.
Evaluation of Quality of Life of Patients with Chronic Rhinosinusitis Before and After Endoscopic Sinus Surgery

Chronic rhinosinusitis is a multi-factorial disease can significantly affect the patients’ life,. Along with several medicinal and surgical treatments, advancement of endoscopic surgery, in the last three decades, has led to acceptable results in the improvement of the treatment of these patients. This study aims for analyzing the effect of endoscopic sinus surgery on the quality of life (QoL) of patients with chronic rhinosinusitis, using SNOT-20 questionnaire. This is a prospective analytical epidemiological study conducted on 44 patients diagnosed with chronic rhinosinusitis underwent functional endoscopic sinus surgery (FESS) were included. Demographic data including age, gender, clinical symptoms, and type of rhinosinusitis were obtained, using SNOT-20 questionnaire, before and six months after the surgery. Then, the findings were compared to each other to investigate the effect of endoscopic surgery on the quality of life of the patients. In addition, findings of endoscopic surveillance and CT-scan were recorded before and six months after the surgery, based on Kennedy and Lund-Mackay classification. Descriptive statistics were used to calculate the mean and standard deviation of the data. Moreover, paired t-test was used for comparing the scores of the quality of life before and after the surgery. The study sample included 28 men (62.2%) and 17 women (37.8%), who received a six month follow-up. The mean age of the patients was 39 years. Based on SNOT-20, the mean score of the quality of life improvement was 67.26 before the surgery. In addition, the post-surgery mean of overall score was 4.82. Patients obtained the improvement score of 21.84, on average, in SNOT-20, indicating a statistically significant improvement in SNOT-20 (p<0.0000001). The greatest improvement was achieved in nasal and facial congestion. The mean score of CT-scan was 19.65 and 8.10, before and after the surgery, respectively, indicating a statistically significant improvement (p=0.000000536). There was not any statistically significant difference in the score of endoscopic findings after performing FESS (p=0.6137). Endoscopic sinus surgery significantly improved the symptoms of patients with chronic rhinosinusitis, reducing the need for antibiotics and antihistamines. We concluded that subjective results were more significant than CT-scan and endoscopic surveillance findings, after the surgery.
Glioblastoma-specific anti-TUFM nanobody for in-vitro immunoimaging and cancer stem cell targeting

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most common and lethal form of brain tumor. The prognosis for patients remains poor, despite the combination of new preoperative and intraoperative neuroimaging, radical surgery, and recent advances in radiotherapy and chemotherapy. To improve GBM therapy and patient outcome, sustained drug delivery to glioma cells is needed, while minimizing toxicity to adjacent neurons and glia cells. This might be achieved through an anti-proteomic approach based on nanobodies, the single-domain antigen-binding fragments of heavy-chain antibodies of the camelid adaptive immune system. We report here on the validation and quantification of a nanobody raised against mitochondrial translation elongation factor (TUFM). Differential expression of TUFM was examined in different GBM cell lines and GBM tissue at the protein and mRNA levels, as compared to their expression in neural stem cells and normal brain tissue. We further used in-silico modelling and immunocytochemistry to define the specificity of anti-TUFM nanobody (Nb206) towards GBM stem cells, as compared to GBM cell lines (U251MG and U87MG cells). Due to its specificity and pronounced inhibitory effect on GBM stem cell growth, we propose the use of this anti-TUFM nanobody for GBM in vitro immunoimaging and potentially also cancer stem cell targeting.
Characterization of the 3F4–3H6 Transition in Thulium-Doped Silica Fibres and Simulation of a 2μm Single Clad Amplifier

We report measurements of absorption, gain and lifetime for two commercially available Tm-doped single clad silica fibres for the transition <sup>3</sup>H<inf>6</inf>–<sup>3</sup>F<inf>4</inf>. Comparison of simulation and experimental results for a single stage amplifier at 1952 nm yields good agreement.
The Performance of CT versus MRI in the Differential Diagnosis of Cerebral Venous Thrombosis

Abstract Background Cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) is a rare disease, and with poor prognosis. Computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are the most commonly used image modalities for patients with non-specific neurologic symptoms. We present here a meta-analysis to assess the accuracy of CT and MRI in the differential diagnosis of CVT and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST). Materials and Methods A comprehensive search of the PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science, Cochrane Database and Chinese Biomedical (CBM) databases was conducted prior to March 20, 2017. In this report, we assess the methodological quality of each article individually and perform a meta-analysis to obtain the summary of the diagnostic accuracy of CT and MRI in correctly identifying CVT and CVST. Results Twenty-four eligible articles comprising 48 studies (4,595 cases) were included. The pooled sensitivity for CT–CVT/CT–CVST groups is 0.79 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.76, 0.82)/0.81(95% CI: 0.78, 0.84), and pooled specificity is 0.90 (95% CI: 0.89, 0.91)/0.89 (0.88, 0.91), with an area under the curve (AUC) for the summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) of 0.9314/0.9161, respectively. No significant heterogeneity and publication bias was observed across each study. For MRI–CVT/MRI–CVST, the pooled sensitivity is 0.82 (95% CI: 0.78, 0.85)/0.80 (95% CI: 0.76, 0.83), and pooled specificity is 0.92 (95% CI: 0.91, 0.94)/0.91(0.89, 0.92), with an AUC for the SROC of 0.9221/0.9273, respectively. Conclusion This meta-analysis indicates that both CT and MRI have a high level of diagnostic accuracy in the differential diagnosis of CVT and CVST, independent of stage, target for analysis or analysis methods. They could be chosen as alternative sub-optimal gold standards for diagnosing CVT and CVST, especially in emergency.
INTEGRATING ICT INTO TEACHING AND LEARNING AT THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF ISRAEL COURSE COORDINATORS ’ PERSPECTIVE

This study investigates the perspective of course coordinators regarding the implementation of ICT in instruction at the Open University of Israel, following ten years of experience. A survey of attitudes, beliefs and performance was sent electronically to all 285 course coordinators employed during the second semester of 2007. The results are based on a sample of 128 course coordinators who responded to the survey (45% response rate). The results show that the "belief index" in the potential of technology in teaching is higher than the "skepticism index". The enhancing internal and external factors for integrating technology in teaching outweigh the inhibiting aspects. The main changes in the teaching and learning environment are in communication and learning materials. In general – the scope of reported usage shows that the course website is an integral part of the teaching and learning environment. Usage of highly advanced technologies (e.g., VC, WIKI) is significantly lower than the usage of more familiar tools. Minimal changes were reported in core areas of teaching and learning process.
Real-time Event-based News Suggestion for Wikipedia Pages from News Streams

Wikipedia is one of the top visited resources on the Web, furthermore, it is used extensively as the main source of information for applications like Web search, question & answering etc. This is mostly attributed to Wikipedia's coverage in terms of topics and real-world entities and the fact that Wikipedia articles are constantly updated with new and emerging facts. However, only a small fraction of articles are considered to be of good quality. The large majority of articles are incomplete and have other quality issues. A strong quality indicator is the presence of external references from third-party sources (e.g. news sources) as suggested by the verifiability principle in Wikipedia. Even for the existing references in Wikipedia there is an inherent lag in terms of the publication time of cited resources and the time they are cited in Wikipedia articles. We propose a near real-time suggestion of news references for Wikipedia from a daily news stream. We model daily news into specific events, spanning from a day up to year. Thus, we construct an event-chain from which we determine when the information in an event has converged and consequentially based on a learning-to-rank approach suggest the most authoritative and complete news article to Wikipedia articles involved in a specific event. We evaluate our news suggestion approach on a set of 41 events extracted from Wikipedia currents event portal, and on new corpus consisting of daily news between the period of 2016-2017 with more than 14 million news articles. We are able to suggest news articles to Wikipedia pages with an overall accuracy of MAP=0.77 and with a minimal lag w.r. t the publication time of the news article.
Information Processing in Multiple Sclerosis: Accuracy versus Speed

Previous research has suggested that slowed speed of information processing is the primary cognitive impairment that occurs in multiple sclerosis (MS). The proposed study employed multiple cognitive measures to replicate these findings. Individuals with relapsing-remitting or secondary-progressive MS were compared to healthy controls in their performance on five cognitive measures. Three tests were covertlytimed and two were explicitly-timed to assess the impact of timing awareness on performance. It was hypothesized that MS patients would respond more slowly than controls and that accuracy of performance between the two groups would not differ. Results indicated that MS patients answered with significantly greater latency than controls. Accuracy of responding was similar between the groups on two of three measures. Overall, slowed information processing in MS patients was found across a range of cognitive measures. Combined with previous research, these findings suggest slowed information processing speed is a significant cognitive deficit in MS.
Exploiting New Sentiment-Based Meta-level Features for Effective Sentiment Analysis

In this paper we address the problem of automatically learning to classify the sentiment of short messages/reviews by exploiting information derived from meta-level features i.e., features derived primarily from the original bag-of-words representation. We propose new meta-level features especially designed for the sentiment analysis of short messages such as: (i) information derived from the sentiment distribution among the k nearest neighbors of a given short test document x, (ii) the distribution of distances of x to their neighbors and (iii) the document polarity of these neighbors given by unsupervised lexical-based methods. Our approach is also capable of exploiting information from the neighborhood of document x regarding (highly noisy) data obtained from 1.6 million Twitter messages with emoticons. The set of proposed features is capable of transforming the original feature space into a new one, potentially smaller and more informed. Experiments performed with a substantial number of datasets (nineteen) demonstrate that the effectiveness of the proposed sentiment-based meta-level features is not only superior to the traditional bag-of-word representation (by up to 16%) but is also superior in most cases to state-of-art meta-level features previously proposed in the literature for text classification tasks that do not take into account some idiosyncrasies of sentiment analysis. Our proposal is also largely superior to the best lexicon-based methods as well as to supervised combinations of them. In fact, the proposed approach is the only one to produce the best results in all tested datasets in all scenarios.
Student Perception of Academic Achievement Factors at High School.

Measuring the quality of the ‘product’ is elemental in education, and most studies depend on observational data about student achievement factors, focusing overwhelmingly on quantitative data namely achievement scores, school data like attendance, facilities, expenditure class size etc. But there is little evidence of learner perceptions. 553 students from two different universities, who graduated from 3 high school types, were asked to respond to two fundamental questions to reflect on school and classroom level achievement factors. 2294 responses produced eight categories in question one, teacher factors being the most preferred (n=424), followed by individual factors (n=404) and then family factors (n=395). As for liking towards a course, 1362 responses were produced, most frequent one being teacher’s attitude (n=205). Results indicate student perspective of causes of achievement is somewhat different from those expressed in quantitative studies. Girls attributed more achievement to study habits, family support whereas boys attributed more to school and technology. More emphasis is needed on perceived achievement factors for a sound evaluation of effectiveness in school.
Preliminary analysis of the protein profile in saliva during physiological term and preterm delivery

From a clinical point of view, easily obtainable and useful markers of a particular pathological status are required for appropriate diagnosis and treatment. Analysis of the proteomic profile of saliva may allow for the selection of potential marker of preterm delivery in humans. Saliva samples were collected from 12 patients diagnosed with threatened preterm delivery and 10 controls with uncomplicated pregnancies at the same gestational age. Samples were analysed using 2D electrophoresis. Based on statistical analysis, spots of interest were selected and collected from gels. Subsequently, spots were decoloured and proteins were identified by mass spectrometry using the matrix assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight technique. The results of identification were compared with the Swiss-Prot database. A total of 1,393 spots were detected in the present study with 59 significantly different between control and preterm samples. Increased intensity of staining of 32 spots was observed in the premature delivery group compared with control patients and 27 spots were stained more intensely in the control group compared with the premature delivery group. A total of nine spots, which were significantly different between examined samples were identified and three of them exhibited increased intensity of staining in premature delivery group compared with controls, including dedicator of cytokinesis protein 1, metallothionein-2, guanylyl cyclase-activating protein 1. The six remaining spots included, epithelial-stromal interaction protein 1, serum albumin, tyrosine-tRNA ligase, cytoplasmic, protein chibby homolog 3, leukemia inhibitory factor receptor and adenosylhomocysteinase 3, and exhibited increased intensity of staining in healthy controls compared with premature delivery group. Further studies with an increased number of patients and identification of the complete protein profile are required to confirm the results of the present study and applicability of saliva as a source of disease biomarkers.
The attribution of blame for criminal acts: Relationship with personality disorders and mood.

Attribution of blame for criminal acts and its relationship to DSM-IIIR (APA, 1987) personality disorder diagnosis and psychological variables was investigated in 52 men referred to an intensive probation programme. Self-report questionnaires revealed a high rate of personality disorder psychopathology in the subjects with 73% meeting criteria for one personality disorder and 63.5% meeting criteria for anti-social personality disorder. However, there was high multiple morbidity of personality disorder diagnosis with an average of 3.6 diagnoses for each subject. Blame attribution was measured with the Gudjonsson Blame Attribution Inventory (Gudjonsson & Singh, 1989) . External attribution of blame was found to correlate significantly positively with scores for five personality disorder categories (schizoid, avoidant, obsessive compulsive, passive-aggressive and borderline), whilst mental element attribution was associated with avoidant personality disorder, high depression, anxiety and inward direction of irritability. Guilt feelings were positively associated with scores for schizotypal, avoidant and dependent personality disorder categories and with irritability directed inwards.
Reducing explicit and implicit prejudice toward disabled colleagues: effects of contact and membership salience in the workplace

In the present study, membership salience was tested as a moderator of the effects of contact on emotions and explicit and implicit attitudes toward the disabled. Participants were non-disabled employees of firms and cooperative societies; they worked in contact with colleagues with psychiatric problems. Results indicated that quantity and quality of contact improved outgroup evaluations, both within and outside the contact situation. Consistent with intergroup contact theory (Brown & Hewstone, 2005), the positive effects of contact on anxiety and empathy toward disabled colleagues generalized to the whole category of the disabled when group distinctions were salient within the contact setting. Notably, frequent and cooperative contact also reduced implicit prejudice toward the general disabled category. Theoretical and practical implications of findings are discussed.